Patrick King wrote:
But seriously, Spillane is escapist literature. Mike Hammer
does the things we can't do and we live for a couple of hours
vicariously in a world where we do what we want and can't
lose. I think the modern
"hard-boiled" genre suffers because most modern writers lose
sight of this. Robert B. Parker's detectives are all in AA.
Who wants a hero who's trying to work through his problems?
That's not what this type of story is about.
***************** All literature, including the classics, can
be called escapist. Beowulf and Gilgamesh, The Iliad and
Odyssey, Le Morte de Arthur, and nearly all of Shakespeare.
They take you away to somewhere else for a while. It takes a
little thought to wrap their messages back to the reader's
life.
As far as who wants a hero who is working through his
problems, I'd say that's just about everyone. The theme of
the tough guy fighting both the world and his inner demons
goes back to Gilgamesh, but I see Hemingway as setting the
standard for contemporary writing, with The Sun Also Rises as
the cornerstone. These inner demons are at least one of the
elements that separates Hammett's Con Op from Chandler's
Marlowe.
miker
__________________________________________________ Do You
Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam
protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 03 Nov 2007 EDT