--- In
rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com, sonny <sforstater@...>
wrote:
>
> cool. i began thinking about it after i had wrote
and sent that.
generally
> i think of bloch as horror, but psycho certainly
starts off as
crime/noir
> and only then enters the realm of horror. but it
never leaves
crime. is
> there horror/noir?
Yes, of course, to answer your last question here first...I
recently mentioned one of the key stories in modern horror,
Fritz Leiber's "Smoke Ghost," which is the essence of noir
(and it's notable that Leiber and Bloch were the two most
important of the junior members of the "Lovecraft Circle" of
corresponding writers and friends...Bloch and Leiber were
those who certainly, among other work, took what Lovecraft
had pioneered and refined it. Henry Kuttner did so as well,
albeit less fruitfully (his most important work was in other
modes), and I don't believe he was ever a part of the
"Circle"--Leiber had barely "joined" when HPL died).
While Bloch probably did know something of Woolrich's
predicament, Bloch stated that he based much of Norman Bates,
physically and in temperament, upon the film historian and
magazine-editor/publisher Calvin Thomas Beck, who also had
what might be termed an unusual relation with his
mother.
And as Mario noted, much of Bloch's work is indeed
hardboiled, and even more of it is noirish...for example, his
novel, THE KIDNAPPER, will do by any reasonable standard for
this list, as would NIGHT/WORLD. I might even suggest a Bloch
month. As the first to consistently introduce modern idiom
and concerns (as opposed to neo- Gothic and similar modes)
into pulp horror, he's certainly comparable to Hammett and
Hemingway and Robert Heinlein to that extent, at least, and
like Woolrich would tend to play around the edges of horror
and naturalistic suspense fiction in the 1940s onward.
Todd Mason
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