Jack,
Re your comments below:
> Good post. I like your idea of "most
realistically
> hardboiled." By that caviat, Spillane comes out of
the
> picture.
True, but I still love him. As a side note, some of his cops
stories, apparently based on his own short stint in law
enforcement, have a realistic bite lacking in the more
fantasy-driven Hammers.
> But when we dig futher, even when we deal with what
seem
> like "real" cases, isn't all fiction, not just
crime
> fiction, just a fantasy about "what it might be
really
> like?"
Sure, and, by the same token, all fiction, no matter how
fantastic, is a distillation, to one degree or another, of
real life.
Nevertheless, there's a significant difference, I think
you'll agree with Tolkien's LORD OF THE RINGS, for all that
some of the characters are reputedly based on people he knew,
and the fairy princess in particular based (so they say) on
his wife, and, say, Harper Lee's TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, which
depicts th author's Deep South childhood at several fewer
removes than Tolkien depicts his wife.
Similarly, the stage that characters like Mike Hammer or Race
Williams strut and fret their hour upon is more fantastic,
for all its familiarity, than the stage that, say, Joe
Gores's DKA operatives or Rex Burns's Devlin Kirk tread. The
former depict private eyes doing things no private eyes
really do; the latter depict private eyes doing things like
car repos, background checks, security surveys, industrial
investigations, the nuts and bolts of real-life private
detective work depicted as authentically as the authors can
make it.
In other words, while all writing has its elements of bias,
and all fiction writing its elements of fantasy, there's a
difference between the deliberate fantasy of a Tolkien, or
even the deliberate fantasy of the more apparently realistic
Spillane, and the sincere attempt to depict a profession or
an era or a childhood, in the context of fiction, as
authentically as possible.
JIM DOHERTY
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