--- JIM DOHERTY <
jimdohertyjr@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> A lot of hard-boiled stuff is about behaving
morally
> and honorably. Certainly that's true of
Chandler.
> But a lot isn't. Do you really regard that
towering
> testament to violence and selfishness,
Richard
> Stark's
> Parker, to be a paragon of moral virtue?
>
> By the same token, to say that the Parker novels
are
> not hard-boiled would be as absurd as saying
that
> Parker is a moral role model.
>
> That's just one example. How about Lou Ford in
Jim
> Thompson's novels, or Keller in Lawrence
Block's
> short
> stories? They're fundamentally immoral men
who
> perform fundamentally immoral acts, but they're
no
> less hard-boiled for their lack of
morality.
>
> Behaving honorably and making moral choices is not
a
> required ingredient of hard-boiled crime
fiction,
> nor,
> for that matter, is it limited to hard-boiled
crime
> fiction.
>
> JIM DOHERTY
This is true. It's also true, though, that the moral aspect
to hardboiled fiction is predominate.
Of the examples you cite, Parker and Keller aren't characters
so much as ideas. (Keller's from HIT MAN, right?) "Write the
ultimate hardboiled story featuring a stone cold criminal and
see how it turns out" in Westlake's case, for instance.
Essentially the Stark books are high-end variants of stuff
like THE EXECUTIONER, which functions along much the same
way
("Killer kills killers".) (I respect the Stark books, but
have never been able to warm to them, mainly for this reason,
I think. They feel stagey to me.)
It's been a long time since I read HIT MAN, but I seem to
remember a similar overt conceptualization here, too.
The hard boiled strain featuring Lou Ford and some of
Willeford's happy psychos is very moralistic, only in
reverse. Their amorality is meant to be an indirect criticism
of life, showing it by way of contrast or reflection. Look at
Ford's final speech, Willeford's THE WOMAN CHASER, etc.
So yes, I agree with you, hard-boiled needn't be moralistic.
But it's also true that a hell of a lot of it is.
doug
===== Doug Bassett
dj_bassett@yahoo.com
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