Speaking of Robert E. Howard, I worked my way through his
entire canon as a teen-ager. The Arnold Schwarzenegger film
adaptations of some of his work notwithstanding, I'd say that
*all* of Howard's protagonists (Conan, Kull, Cormac MacArt,
Bran MakMorn, Solomon Kane, El Borak, et. al.) were
proto-typical noir heroes in an heroic fantasy setting.
And talk about a noir ending: Howard died a suicide (shot
himself in his car) at 30 when his beloved mother slipped
into a coma on the doorstep of her own impending death.
Brian
----- Original Message -----
From: Mark Finn
To:
rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Thursday, February 15, 2007 6:54 AM
Subject: RARA-AVIS: Re: Sports Noir
--- In
rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com, "Terrill Lankford"
<lankford2000@...> wrote:
>
> Don't know if anyone has mentioned this one yet,
but Joe Lansdale's
short novel THE BIG BLOW mixes boxing with the
great hurricane of 1900
that leveled Galveston. Jack Johnson is one of
the main characters.
>
> TL
>
Boxing does seem naturally inclined to Noir
writing, doesn't it? After
all, it's been alleged for the past hundred years
that boxing was
crooked, fixed, or otherwise shady-the perfect
breeding ground for
gangsters and related types. And then there's the
aspect of
punishment-two guys beating the crap out of each
other. Getting
knocked to the canvas is a perfect metaphor,
especially considering
that up until the middle of the 20th century, the
three biggest sports
in America were, in no particular order,
baseball, horseracing, and
boxing.
To this I'll add another boxing tale: "Iron-Jaw"
by Robert E. Howard.
If you have either The Iron Man or Boxing
Stories, it appears in those
books as "Fists of the Desert." I would call it
proto-noir, and
certainly, it would seem that REH was headed in
this direction at the
end of his career. This was written and sold just
a few months before
he died.
Mark Finn
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 15 Feb 2007 EST