Mario wrote:
>The fattened up and softened up PI novel has done
little to
>further the genre. It has gained it some readers, but
at
>what price?
The genre's continued existence and vitality?
And what would furthering the genre entail exactly, then?
Surely fencing it in with some iron-bound definition that
allows no deviation is not furthering the genre, but locking
it in place (and, unfortunately, throwing away the
key...)
You see the fattening and softening up of the genre; I see a
genre expanding its territory culturally, geographically and
socially to cover a far wider range of topics than people
like Chandler or Hammett or most of its early practitioners
could likely have imagined, yet with the best of it still
heeding to the basic tenets Chandler's own "down these mean
streets" manifesto.
Sure, a lot of so-called modern "P.I." fiction fails to make
the grade, and much of it is -- surprise, surprise, I agree
-- is too soft, too fat. And some of it's been too
cartoonishly, self-consciously hard. But that's the way it's
always been.
The good old days is a lie. Always has been. Anyone who's
bothered to go back and actually read copies of the sacred
Black Mask or beloved Gold Medals knows that many of those
stories were actually disappointingly sub-par. And that was
the cream of the crop. There's a danger in using the past as
a yardstick for everything, or of looking at it through
rose-coloured shot glasses. Which is how powerful but
woefully uneven pulp writers can go from under-rated
obscurities to over-rated demigods in less than twenty
years.
I guess it depends on what you want from the genre. Some
people want books written in 2003 to read like it's 1959. Or
1939. Others want more modern detectives. I think any genre
that doesn't evolve eventually becomes a museum piece.
Which is fine for some folks -- I like visiting museums
myself, but I wouldn't want to live in one. So I also enjoy
books that reflect their times.
What I don't always enjoy are modern novels that
self-consciously ape the past, without any real understanding
of what made those books kick. Rubbing the reader's face in
excrement or tossing in every single politically incorrect
phrase or tasteless scenario their little, repressed
peabrains can think of doesn't make these faux-retro
hard-boiled novels tough or authentic -- just sort of
pathetic, like a short man trying to start a bar brawl to
prove his masculinity.
>I was thinking about this while picking up
Block's_Hope to
>Die_ and reading a couple more chapters. Technically
good
>writing, but with a clear tendency to the
common
>denominator, to a comfortable composite of (what I
assume
>are) generic reader preferences. I mention Block
because he
>is one of the best current PI writers. If the best
are
>doing this, what can we expect from the genre as a
whole?
Hmmm... I thought HOPE TO DIE was probably the weakest of the
series. On the other hand, I found its predecessor EVERYBODY
DIES was neither soft nor fat. It could have been a little
leaner, perhaps, but I feel that way about a lot of books.
And while I share your apparently high opinion of Block, I
think of him as more of a great writer who also does a P.I.
series, as opposed to a great P.I. writer. So I'm not sure if
he's a good example to use. In fact, I'm not sure if any one
writer's a good example to represent a whole genre -- we're
too close to them right now, and we lack the perspective of
time.
--
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