Since this is the last day of Joe Gores month, I felt at
least one more post (and perhaps a thread, if this post
generates one) was called for.
I've observed elsewhere that hard-boiled/noir crime stories
tends to be about professionals. On both sides of the fence.
Good guys tend to be cops, private eyes, spies, etc.
Bad guys tend to be organized crime figures, armed robbers,
drug dealers, enemy agents, etc.
I'm talking about trends here, of course, not hard and fast
rules, but it strikes me that the cozy tends to be as much
about amateur criminals as it is about amateur sleuths. In
the hard-boiled/noir world, it takes a professional to
survive.
Joe Gores seems to exemplify this trend better than most.
Although his first novel, A TIME OF PREDATORS, has amateurs
on both sides of the fence, by and large he deals with pros,
professional criminals as much as professional
crime-solvers.
The main character in his Edgar-winning short story,
"Goodbye,Pops," is a latter-day Dillinger type, a prison
escapee heading ultimately to a shoot-out with the cops hot
on his trail.
The initial DKA trilogy pits Kearney and his staff against
mobsters modeled on Jimmy "The Weasel" Frattiano and his
confederates.
MENACED ASSASSIN pits an SFPD Organized Crime specialist
against a Syndicate hit man.
Even the gypsies of the later DKA novels, for all their
tribal traditions and rituals, are essentially nothing but
professional thieves.
The prevalence of pros in Gores's work will, in the coming
month, provide something of a counterpoint to Cornell
Woolrich, whose work is much more likely to feature amateurs
in both the heroic and villainous roles.
JIM DOHERTY
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