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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