Yesterday Al said, "PI novels don't sell well in the UK ... " and while I do agree that great PI stoires will always be welcomed and maybe even best-sellers, I have been wondering if maybe the mythos of the PI might be fading and something newer might be on the horizon.
We used to have the Western and the cowboy, a rural mythos, and by the 1950s & 1960s we had 7,067,835 TV cowboys. (Well, it seemed like that many.) The western & the cowboy faded from the scene. (Except for Clint Eastwood who ONLY made five western movies and for Tom Selleck who made westerns for the Hallmark channel or something like it.) When the western & the cowboy mythos faded, we got all the Rockford-esque PIs, who were mostly the rural cowboy moved to the big city. (Oklahoma-born Jim Garner was a Maverick before John McCain was, by the way. Garner made the city transition almost seamlessly.)
Chinatown was 1974, but Star Wars was 1977 or 1978. Blade Runner came in 1982. That one was not the lone wolf mythos, but more like a reluctant rogue working with the system.
Any guesses?
Fred Zackel
(whose latest ficitonal effort ... clears squatters from apartments.)
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