Kev,
Re your response to my comments below:
"Hmmm.... 'as many?' That's three. And two of them belong
mostly to another, definitely more conservative era (and is
Murphy ever going to really write again?). It's hard to
think, off the top of my head, of any current extreme-right
HB guys."
"As many" may have been statistically dubious. Or it may even
be that, over time, there have been far more conservative PI
writers than liberal/left ones. I didn't do a case-by-case
analysis of everyone who ever wrote a PI story. My point was
that it wasn't hard to think of conservative PI writers.
Spillane, Prather, and Murphy were the ones who came to mind
right off the top of my head.
I could also have added Cleve Adams (though, no doubt, you'd
dismiss him as being from "a more conservative era").
Sticking strictly to PI and strictly to contemporary writers,
than a few who, at least to me, seem to bat right-handed (and
I haven't really discussed politics with any of them) are
Jerry Kenneally, C.J. Henderson, Wayne Dundee, Gary Lovisi,
and W. Glenn Duncan.
Does two short stories qualify me? If so, I'm a current
conservative PI guy, and compared to you, I probably qualify
as "extreme-right."
My point, though, wasn't really that there was an equal
amount of right-wingers and left-wingers. It was that there
are enough hard-boiled (even limiting it to PI) writers who
have a conservative bent, that it really can't be said that
the hard-boiled (or hard-boiled PI) story is inherently
left-wings, or inherently a vehicle for leftist
commentary.
Some are left. Some are right. Some are apolitical.
"And how political was their work, exactly? Shell Scott
seemed more concerned with boinking bimbos and Trace/Digger
with illegal wiretapping, ice-cold vodka and padding expense
accounts than expounding on any political viewpoint."
Read Prather's PATTERN FOR PANIC, THE TROJAN HEARSE, or his
short story "Code 197," and you'll get a sense of where he's
coming from politically. Or at least where Shell is coming
from (because, really, Al Guthrie has a point; we can't
necessarily assume that a character's opinions are also those
of his creator).
Murphy's rants against political correctness, big government,
affirmative action, etc, are sprinkled all through the
Trace/Digger books, and in what is arguably his best PI
novel, the stand-alone THE CEILING OF HELL, we get a very
conservative hero
(notwithstanding that the villain is a right-wing
whacko).
"Granted, Spillane himself was a conservative, a God-fearing
(but beer-plugging) Jehovah's Witness. But a lot of the
politics in his books is more of the hyper-ventilated rant
variety, fed more out of rage than any rational thought. It
played well at the time
-- and still does when you're ankle-deep in one of his books
and caught up in his rage -- but it was hardly a sustained
political platform. Even for the 'good old days' of the
fifties."
The point here isn't how well-thought out Spillane's
political perspective was or was not. The point is he, and
others, wrote, and write, from a conservative perspective. So
it's simply wrong to conclude that the genre he, and others
who tended the same way politically, is inherently
left-wing.
"And hardly one most 'compassionate' conservatives today
would adapt. I mean, would Jesus belly shoot a suspect?
Compassion and painting the steps red with blood just don't
seem all that compatible.. ."
You seem to be assuming that, because I object to the notion
that hard-boiled or PI stories have an inherent political
bias, that I'm arguing in favor of a particular polticial
opinion. I certainly have a political opinion, but I'm not
arguing in favor of it here. I'm merely pointing out that
there have been, and are, hard-boiled PI writers whose
political opinions tended to be conservative.
If someone suggested that the hard-boiled PI story is
inherently right-wing (and it seems to me there was a book
about the genre that did just that) because of writers like
Spillane, Prather, Adams, Dundee, etc, would you conclude
that I was waving the flag for liberalism if I pointed out
that Dennis Lynds, Sara Paretsky, and Roger L. Simon were
anything BUT right-wing?
My point is not that the hard-boiled PI story is
conservative, but that it's a framework that conservatives
can work within just as easily as liberals. Or those who are
apolitical, for that matter.
"Whereas it's not too hard to see where the political
sympathies of Lehane or Paretsky or Shannon or Block or
Doolittle or Phillips or Crais or Connelly or Parker or
Pelecanos or Lippman or Mosley or a slew of more recent
writers lay."
I never said there weren't left-wing PI writers. I said that
neither hard-boiled crime stories in general, nor the PI
story in particular, were inherently leftist, and that there
are enough conservative hard-boiled writers generally, and PI
writers specifically, to disprove such a notion.
JIM DOHERTY
__________________________________________________ Do You
Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam
protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
RARA-AVIS home page: http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rara-avis-l/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email
to:
rara-avis-l-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 05 Sep 2006 EDT