In a message dated 29/04/02 22:01:23 GMT Daylight Time,
BaxDeal@aol.com writes:
<< and lead to a great barroom brawl.
>>
Which would be uncompromisingly, irevocably, and downright
hotdamn on the money hardboiled. Apart from myself, I am a
coward and would slink off into the noir shadows while you
hardboiled heads belaboured one another with broken bottles
and pool cues. I must, however, agree that hardboiled is a
literary style rather than a character trait. Most characters
(good characters) are interesting because they are more than
one-dimensional, there are exceptions I suppose, Dudley Smith
= evil, has been one suggested here, but even ol Dud shows
different facets to different folks being both evil and very
very clever. I have to go back to Chandler saying of Hammet,
that he took murder out of the drawing room and back onto the
streets, or words to that effect. If there was that straight
hb/cosy dichotomy, hb seems to have won out. How many new
crime novels do you see with "The new Agatha Christie",
or
"Following in the Lord Peter Wimsey's aristocratic foot
prints", emblazoned across their covers? Maybe Marx was right
(after Hegel) and the hb/cosy dialectic has produced a
synthesis - hard cozy, or perhaps soft boiled. Can I have the
cigar award now please.
"I may goddamn despise your vision of hardboiled but I'll
slug any mother to within an inch of the boneyard who tries
to stop you spieling it" as Voltaire once said (I think.)
Cheers Colin
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 29 Apr 2002 EDT