Juri wrote:
"I can see, though, what he's getting at: that these lunatics
in Murphy's, Pendleton's, Messmann's and others' books stem
from the line of Hammett, Chandler and Macdonald. I don't
know if he's right, but it's a thought-provoking book."
It's been a very, very long time since I've read the book,
but doesn't he actually put the various "-Er" (ExecutionER,
DestroyER, etc) books in the Spillane lineage (which, of
course, follows in Hammett and Chandler's footsteps, but not
Macdonald's), which is even easier to see?
As for the whole fading PI assertion, he wasn't wrong for
when he was writing. Although authors like Spillane and
Macdonald continued to write popular PI books, very few new
series started during the Vietnam War period.
After reading Saint with a Gun, I charted out a bunch of PI
writers and found that, in general, very few PI series start
during US involvement in foreign wars and clusters of new PI
activity seem to follow those wars. The '70s certainly bore
that out. I'd hazard a guess that spy fiction also follows a
(possibly complementary) pattern based on socio-political
trends.
Mark
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