----- Original Message ----- From: "Mark Sullivan" <
DJ-Anonyme@webtv.net> To: <
rara-avis@icomm.ca> Sent: Saturday, February 22, 2003
2:23 PM Subject: Re: RARA-AVIS: Re: RARA-AVIS Digest V5 #33 -
Noir
>
> Okay, I know this is the party line of hardboiled.
I've said it enough
> times myself. But I have to wonder if the cozy
really is any more
> "artificial" than most hardboiled?
Yes, whatever the genre, writing for it is imitative to some
degree, which could be said to be "artificial. Raymond
Chandler certainly was one who consciously cobbled hardboiled
stories together by matching the style of the pulp magazines
he wrote for at the beginning of his career. Of a
middle-class Chicago family, he was raised in England, where
he recived a classical education at Dulwich private school,
then returned to the States as a young man. He had none of
the working-class upbringing that someone here suggested was
a requirement for success as a hardboiled writer. However,
Chandler did serve with the Canadian army in France, where he
experienced first-hand the brutalities of trench warfare and
killing up close. That would be more than enough to acquaint
him with authentic hard-boiled attitudes. Nonetheless, when
he lost his executive job and turned his hand to writing
about tough-guy private eyes for the pulps, Chandler at first
consciously imitated other writers of the genre. He used such
tricks as writing out lists of gangster jargon words for
inclusion in his stories. Not that there's anything wrong
with that, of course. He was just learning craftsmanship and
finding his own style, which evolved into his later
novels.
-- Sidney.
-- # 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 : 22 Feb 2003 EST