Jack,
Re your comments below:
> Just to pose a question: do we really want to
get
> into the childhood of characters?
It depends. But as Miker points out, though with humor,
childhood memories aren't all that new in hardboiled. In THE
MALTESE FALCON, Spade briefly recalls his schooldays. In an
early Mike Shayne novel, Shayne recalls going to church with
his mother as a child (something, it's implied, he hasn't
done much since reaching adulthood).
Joe Friday lived with his mother in the earliest days of
DRAGNET, and occasionally, when he'd bring a girl home to
meet Mom, Joe'd be embarassed by some childhood antic Mrs.
Friday would recount.
More recently, in what may be Bill Pronzini's best
"Nameless" novel, the PI hero recalls growing up in San
Francisco and how his father abused his mom. Gabe Wager
recalls what it was like growing up hafl-Latino and
half-Anglo in a predominantly Mexican neighborhood in one of
Rex Burns's cop novels. James Bond recalls growing up without
parents when he decides to personally avenge the murder of
his surrogate parent in one of the short stories collected in
OCTOPUSSY. Matt Helm recalls hunting trips with his father
and grandfather in one of Donald Hamilton's later entries in
that series.
It's not just a recent "touchy-feely" trend introduced to
make mysteries seem more mainstream. The child is the father
of the man as they say (although if they wanted to be
politically correct, they'd probably say that the child is
the parent of the adult), and insights into a character's
early background help illuminate the person he is now.
> Do we care about the childhood of Phillp
Marlowe,
> Sam Spade, Lew Archer, Travis McGee or even
Mike
> Hammer?
Every one of those characters has alluded to, if not their
childhood, per se, at least events in their lives prior to
the commencement of the series they star in. And I doubt if
there were many objections. Because such allusion give
readers an insight into these character's
personalities.
> Isn't childhood the inclusion of a
character's
> childhood the publisher's, author's, or
agent's
> way of getting into mainstream?
Less that than, as I said, a method of giving readers
insights into the characters.
> As much as I think *Mystic River* was a
great
> book, was it really a great mystery? Or was
it
> mainstream with a crime element?
Yes, it was a mystery. No, it wasn't a mainstream novel with
a crime element.
JIM DOHERTY
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The New
Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo. http://search.yahoo.com
-- # 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 : 12 May 2003 EDT