RARA-AVIS: Re: corpses

From: JIM DOHERTY ( jimdohertyjr@yahoo.com)
Date: 02 Sep 2006


Kerry,

Re your points below:

"The puzzle and other traditional Brit mysteries usually involved the upper classes in some way. They were the important folks, and essential to make the yarn credible in a class society."

I would argue that it wasn't the upper class stature of the characters that made them hard to believe, but the skill of the writers in making them believable.

The Sternwoods in THE BIG SLEEP and the Dains and Leggets in THE DAIN CURSE, after all, were just as upper class as anyone in Agatha Christie or S.S. Van Dine. What Hammett and Chandler did that Christie and Van Dine did not is create characters you could believe in regardless of the class of either the reader or the character.

JIM DOHERTY

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