In a message dated 4/29/02 12:08:10 AM,
dlochte@adelphia.net writes:
<< Philip Marlowe is not a working class hero. His
previous employment (cop, DA's man, whatever), and his humble
origins, if they were humble, have nothing to do with it.
He's an intellectual. A social critic. A snob. He replays
classic chess games. He recognizes paintings and he knows
poetry and authors. He can name every flower on a Southern
California hillside. He finds an eager naked babe in his bed
and tosses her out, then tears up the linen. He's not an
average Joe. He's a white knight. A hard-boiled white knight.
>>
This is the area that has had me
chewing at the edges of Jim's definition. Like most others
here, I'm okay with "tough," but unlike Jack and several
others I think there is more to hard-boiled than that one
word equivalency.
Marlowe was an intellectual and a
snob and I don't think colloquial fits him comfortably. His
martini drinking, pipe smoking persona didn't cast much of a
common man shadow.
My problem is that I have not come up
with a better term to fill out the meaning of the term
hard-boiled, and I haven't heard a better one from anyone
else. Is it enough to say that a hard-boiled character is
"street wise" or an "outsider?" I don't know, but I'm having
fun chewing on this with everyone else.
Jim
Blue
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 29 Apr 2002 EDT