Anthony,
Re your comment below:
> I'm going to be pig headed and stick with
my
> assertion since he wasn't a
> cop first. You haven't disproved it, only shown
that
> it's not black and
> white any how.
What I set out to demonstrate was that DA's investigators are
not likely to have been born to the purple. DA's
investigators are cops, pure and simple.
Whether or not Marlowe was a cop before joining the
DA's office, he was a cop when he was SERVING with the DA's
office.
As for his life prior to his pinning on a DA's badge,
Chandler states that he worked as an investigator for an
insurance company. Again, this part of Marlowe's past is
never referred to in any of the books or stories but is
mentioned in a letter by Chandler to a friend.
As for his never having been a cop, I'll leave the final word
on that to Marlowe. In THE BIG SLEEP, he tells General
Sternwood that he's never been married because, "I don't like
policemen's wives."
> My overall point still stands
> regardless of whether or
> not Marlowe is a true example. Being rich
doesn't
> preclude one from
> being hardboiled. You either have the 'tude or
you
> don't. The events in
> one's life that could lead to developing such
an
> attitude are not
> delegated to any specific socioeconomic level.
One
> might have more than
> the other, but there will always be
exceptions.
I didn't say it was ABSOLUTELY disqualifying. I said that
such a background was CLOSE to being absolutely
disqualifying. I still think that "the events in one's life
that could lead to developing such an attitude" are a lot
more likely to occur in what might be called, for lack of a
better term, the "working" class than in the "privileged"
class.
However, you're quite right that, whatever a given
character's background, it's his attitude that defines his
being hard-boiled or not.
JIM DOHERTY
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