Man, I should have known those words would come back to haunt
me. That quote got pulled from a panal I was on many years
ago with Woody Haut and a bunch of crime writers, including
Scott Phillips. Some wiseacre in the audience asked me to try
to define the difference between HB and noir and I pulled
those lines out of my you-know-where. I didn't think Phillips
would be quoting it years later. Now I've got the experts
burning me at the stake. I know I was over-generalizing. And
I know there are tons of exceptions to that rule, but I was
probably drinking a bit that day. (It sounded good at the
time.)
If only I could have had the old: HB = Tough, Noir = screwed
definition at hand....
Alas, that technology was not available at that time.
I won't make the same mistake in the future. I promise.
I've never been much good at this definitions
thing.....
TL
-----Original Message----- From: Michael Robison <
miker_zspider@yahoo.com> Sent: Aug 23, 2004 9:52 AM
To:
rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com Subject: RARA-AVIS: Noir
definition
Jacques Debierue wrote, noting Terrill Lankford's quote:
"hard-boiled is about tough guys who win, and noir is about
tough guys who lose."
This does not suffice to cover a lot of noir classics.
Willeford's Figueras was not tough: he was obsessed and he
slowly went crazy. The same goes for the protagonist of
Harrington's Dark Ride...
************* Huh? You didn't think the protagonist in DARK
RIDE was tough? Don't you remember that scene where he's
beating hell out of a punching bag? What about that scene
where he steps into the drug house? The protagonist is a
tough guy who loses. It fits the Lankford criteria perfectly,
doesn't it?
miker
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