Miker,
Re your comment below:
> i agree that both work, but it would seem to
me
> that first person would be a far greater
challenge
> to a writer. iirc, hemingway avoided first
person
> (most of the time) because of the
difficulties.
As a writer, I have to disagree with this. I find that first
person is a much more natural way to write for me. Getting
into a single character's head and seeing everything from his
point of view just comes very easily.
Conversely, I find writing in third person much more
difficult. There are advantages, of course (being able to
take the reader places where the main character isn't
present; concealing information without appearing to be
cheating; etc.), but it's not as natural a way of expressing
myself.
FWIW, my cop stories have, to this point, been written in the
first person, although it's far more common for police
procedurals to be written in the third, while my PI stories,
thus far, have been written in the third, while the more
common convention is for PI stories to be written in the
first.
My own theory as to the persistence of first person in the PI
genre is the influence of Chandler. Before THE BIG SLEEP, PI
stories were probably about evenly divided between 1st and
3rd. Afterwards, it became far more common for PI stories to
be first person narratives because so many writers were
emulating Chandler.
I think Chandler's also the root source of such
well-recognized PI conventions as the one-man agency
(in contrast to the big-agency operative, a much more common
device pre-Chandler), the PI's background as an ex-cop (often
one whose law enforcement career ended badly, as opposed to
detectives who apprenticed on big agencies which, again, was
a much more common device pre-Chandler), and the PI's
tendency to philosophize
(as opposed to the more "matter-of-fact" approach taken even
by pre-Chandler 1st person heroes).
I don't claim that Chandler was the originator of ANY of
those conventions. He may not have even been the first to put
them all together. But his synthesis of those elements into
the Marlowe character did result in a paradigm from which PI
fiction has seldom shifted since.
JIM DOHERTY
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