William
Re your response to my message:
> THE MALTESE FALCON, THE BIG
> > SLEEP,
>
> They created the genre. And everybody has
been
> imitating them ever since.
The genre is "mystery fiction," or, if you prefer, "crime
fiction," and Hammett and Chandler didn't even come close to
inventing it. Poe beat 'em by eighty or ninety years.
At best, you could assert, with a degree of credibility, that
Hammett and Chandler invented the SUB-genre of the
hard-boiled private eye, and even that's not the case.
Carroll John Daly beat Hammett by only a few months, but he
DID beat him. He had two PI stories, "Three-Gun Terry" and
"Knights of the Open Palm," in print months before Hammett's
"Arson Plus" was published. Daly also wrote the first
full-length PI novel, THE SNARL OF THE BEAST, which was
appeared between boards about a year before Hammett's first
novel, BLOOD MONEY, was even serialized, and about three
years before RED HARVEST came out in hard covers.
Now, had Daly never existed, and his detective-hero, Race
Williams, never appeared in a story, it's quite likely that
Hammett would have created the Continental Op anyway. I've
often argued that myself. But first is first, and Daly WAS
first. Moreover, a lot of the tropes we now associate with
the hard-boiled private eye were Daly created. Daly's
influence on later writers like Spillane, Prather, Avallone,
etc, is undeniable. One could make a case that his influence
has been at least as far-reaching as Chandler's and farther
reaching than Hammett's.
But even allowing that Hammett and Chandler DID invent the
hard- boiled PI, that wasn't inventing a new genre, that was
introducing a change into a genre that already existed.
> > and THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD
didn't
> > convince
> > you?
>
> I don't think it's a genre book. That's what you
don't
> get.
Which just goes to show that anytime a genre book impresses
the intellectual elite with its literary excellence, they
immediately conclude that it must not have really been a
genre book at all. It must have "transcended the genre,"
because no genre book could be THAT good.
Thanks for proving my point.
> > How
> > about Meyer Levin's COMPULSION?
>
> That's bogus. It's a great subject but not a
great
> book. It's indicative of squat in this
conversation.
> And it's also true of others that you mention.
If
> can't make a compelling argument, then dazzle
them
> with pointless details.
Translation: I really can't knock down any of the other
examples with solid arguments, so I'll just dismiss them as
"pointless details," and suggest that Doherty's doing a
rhetorical sleight of hand. That way it will look like he's
the one who can't come up with a compelling argument instead
of me.
> Yes. But since you never actually read what I
write,
> I'm not surprised.
Translation: Once it becomes clear that I've lost the
argument, accuse my opponent of not clearly understanding
what I was saying in the first place.
JIM DOHERTY
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 07 Nov 2007 EST