I wanted to add my two cents now that the working class has
raised its head. First, as to cats ... My hero--such as he
is--McNulty the bartender acquires a cat in the book I'm
working on now ...but fear not, it's an alley cat.
As for the discussion of working class tragedy, the topic is
fascinating for me. The route I traveled as a reader and
writer was from proletarian fiction of the '20s '30s, '40's,
even into the '50s to noir writers like David Goodis, Jim
Thompson, Derek Raymond and some others. What really appeals
to me about them--and about some of Dennis's Writing and
George Pelecanos's and others--is a kind of non-ideological
working class sensibility in their writing. What this has to
do with whether noir is working class tragedy, I dare not
venture a guess--for fear of getting my ears boxed. Back in
the
'30s the proletarian writers, Mike Gold in particular, argued
that workers should be the subjects of great literature ...
the sense being that they weren't before that time (which may
not be true) and would be ever after. In some ways, this--the
working class as subject and setting-- has happened in crime
fiction and to some extent comes from what Hammett did---in
the sense that Sam Spade was on the clock. So, to make a long
story short, what attracts me to both hard-boiled and noir is
their working class aspects. McNulty carries a union
book.
Con Lehane
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