At 07:44 AM 6/7/2002 -0700, Dick Lochte wrote:
>BobT wrote:
>
><Heck, that half broke neon Miller Beer sign
buzzing in the front window
>of my
>corner bar is a more interesting character than Pat
Chambers.>
>
>Not having seen the broken sign, I'm willing to take
your word for it.
>But let us not forget that prior to old Pat most cops
in hardboiled
>novels were dumb antagonists. And those that weren't
were not brimming
>over with personality. Think about Marlowe's pal,
Bernie Ohls. Today,
>mirroring real life, just about every PI has a pal on
the Force. Most of
>these are used primarily for exposition. If they have
any more dimension
>than Pat, it's probably because today's PI novels are
nearly double the
>size of Spillane's.
He's not hard-boiled, but there was always Inspector Cramer,
Nero Wolfe's antagonist and sometime ally. While the
individual Wolfe novels were short, the sheer volume allowed
Cramer to become a more fully realized character.
ray
-- # 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 : 07 Jun 2002 EDT