----- Original Message ----- From: "Randy Schultz" <
randy.schultz@juno.com>
> I have always felt there are two types of stories in
the 'thriller' genre
> (which, to me, includes HB crime fiction, spy
fiction, and the like).
> 1. The type of mystery where the plot is the star,
and the characters are
> merely ways of moving the plot along (Many Christie
novels fall into this
> category -- they are more like puzzles, rather than
stories).
> 2. The type of mystery where the protagonist is the
star and the plot is
> merely a way to show the protagonist expressing
his/her rather unique
> viewpoint/language/thoughts/feelings. I would put
Hammer in this
> category, as I would Chandler, Hammet, Jim Thompson.
The fun of the story
> is in the telling, not in the plotting.
Russell James pointed out something in an interview a few
years ago and I've never been able to look at crime fiction
the same way since. Like yourself, he stated that there are
two categories. He called them "crime" and
"anti-crime". And there's some crossover between his
classification and yours. Basically, his theory goes, most
so-called crime novels are
"anti-crime" novels. In other words, solving the crime is
paramount (police procedurals and PI novels, for example).
"Crime" novels, on the other hand, are written from the
viewpoint of the criminal or victim (gangster novels,
Woolrich, Cain, Goodis, Thompson, Brewer, Russell James),
whose plight is paramount. In this category, policemen or
detectives only feature as peripheral figures, if they
feature at all.
What intrigued me about this was that, although I read both
types, I immediately realised I had a preference towards the
"crime" category, and that these were almost all what I
thought of as "noir". The "anti-crime" category, on the other
hand, was almost all what I considered hardboiled. I'd always
suspected a preference for something that I loosely defined
as noir without being able to be precise as to what that
meant. "Dark and sinister" didn't work. For example, Stark's
Parker novels, which I like a lot, aren't "dark and sinister"
(to my mind they're "tough and colloquial"). But they fit in
the "crime" category. So, for me, whether a book is
hardboiled or noir tells me less than if it's "crime" or
"anti-crime".
Sorry if this is totally transparent to everybody else, but
it was one of those revelations to me where I just went, "Of
course. Duh!"
Al Guthrie
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 25 May 2002 EDT