To me the provocative point made by the review dealt more
with the PI genre and the changing times. Rafferty's point
seems to be that the Marlowe kind of PI character was, as the
article's title puts it, "A Gumshoe Adrift, Lost in the
'70s." If the gumshoe did not fit into the 70s what about the
2000 plus time period? Of course the easy answer is to point
to the success of some PI writers today. One example would be
Bob Crais whose "The Watchman" has been on the best seller
list for several weeks now. The closest thing to a popular TV
PI show is Raines who is a quirky cop. And there seems to be
a tendency for the best contemporary noir writers to set
their stories back into more classic noir times, e.g. Megan
Abbott. It's like the Western in a way. Even at its height
Westerns tended to be set back in time. And today they have
largely disappeared. Is the hardboiled PI an endangered
species? If so I would suggest that both noir writing and the
hardboiled kind of character will survive but perhaps as
maverick cops (Bosch, Rebus) or in shapes yet to be invented,
because the existentialist outlook of such characters
continue to touch readers and writers. I say this as someone
who loves hardboiled, noir, and who writes novels and short
stories featuring the traditional PI as well as other kinds
of characters who take a similar stance re: the world.
Tim
On Apr 15, 2007, at 4:48 PM, Dave Zeltserman wrote:
>
> That's not the point at all. The article makes what
I consider a
> coherent and valid argument that movie was made very
much in the
> spirit of the book, and this was both an argument
and background
> information about what Chandler was going through
when he wrote The
> Long Goodbye that was not discussed previously. My
suggestion,
> regardless of your thoughts on the movie, read the
article. I have no
> intention of repeating all the rhetoric from before,
but I personally
> found the article interesting, and definitely
provided a different
> spin on things.
>
> --Dave Z.
>
>
>
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