Yes, the attitudes of many hardboiled eyes could have been
shaped by
military experience, but it could also be a result of just
living in the
world, a "shared vision, something more cultural," as Bill
Hagen puts it.
Maybe it would be better to say that many eyes were shaped,
not by being
soldiers, but by war. And you don't need to be a soldier to
know about war.
Chandler did serve, in WWI, in a Canadian regiment, and saw
bloody trench
warfare up close. Hammett was, indeed, an ambulance driver in
WWI, but did
his hitch a whopping twenty miles from his home in Baltimore,
before being
hospitalized with influenza. He later served in World War II,
years after
he'd finished writing The Maltese Falcon, the Glass Key, and
everything
else. But both Chandler and Hammett are the authors, not the
characters.
And I would contend there is a difference between Marlowe
and, say, Richard
Barre's
Wil Hardesty. Marlowe lets slip little about his past (which
is why we're
debating his military status) while Hardesty can't wait to
tell us
everything, sometimes two or three times. Yes, he went to
war; yes, his son
died, yes yes yes, boo hoo hoo...
I like a good wallow in a tragic past as much as the next
hardboiled softie
on this list, but I found Barres' The Innocents, with all its
moping, a bit
too much, and also, considering all the buzz, pretty
overrated, and
definitely suffering from the first-book-blues. A good book,
but hardly the
instant classic I was expecting. Has anyone read the second
book? It's
supposed to be much better, and more tightly written.
**************************************************
Kevin Smith
The Thrilling Detective Web Site
http://www.colba.net/~kvnsmith/thrillingdetective/
This month: New fiction by Burl Barer and Kim Sellers,
and a look at the 1998 Private Eye scene in our P.I.
Poll.
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