Mario wrote in response to Kerry
Kerry, I am sorry to see you bring up the old "relevance"
thing, a war-horse of the sixties (though perhaps you give it
a new sense).
Surely the relevance thing is essentially the old
Hammett/Chandler divide. That's to say that Hammett's crimes
occur in a political world in a context of organised
corruption - and ultimately offer at least an implicit
critique of American/western/capitalist society, while
Chandler locates corruption in individuals and is much less
interested in political context. It's not necessarily a
politics good / no politics bad split (or vice versa) but it
does seem to me that following the Chandler route can lead to
well-crafted but fundamentally complacent fiction - Robert
Crais would be a classic example here - while following the
Hammett model can lead to more cutting edge work i.e. Jack
O'Connell. Conversely there are many very fine writers in the
Chandler tradition and plenty of hopeless leftist hacks
trying to reinvent Hammett. But if you take the notion that
noir/hardboiled is something to do with feeling that the
world is not OK, then it is depressing if the genre is more
and more oriented to the good story well told school of
Connolly / Coben et al.
Whether the cutting edge needs to be formally experimental is
another question. I'm not particularly enthralled by formal
experimentation per se - though I think Ellroy and David
Peace have both done great experimental work. Personally
though I see the cutting edge as crime fiction that refuses
to take easy genre options but really does attempt to offer a
true picture of the way we live now. The recent work of
Richard Price would definitely be a case in point.
That said if you want a crime novel that is formally
inventive and very funny and very dark I really do have to
commend (and as his commissioning editor of course I'm
biased) Charlie Williams' Deadfolk.
john
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