RE: RARA-AVIS: Re: Those were the days

From: Chris Routledge ( srcrout@ntlworld.com)
Date: 08 Sep 2000


Anthony Dauer wrote:

>The easily offended should stick with cozies anyway ... no use offending
>their delicate sensibilities with reality. ;)

I realize this was tongue-in cheek, but isn't this one of the myths of the hard-boiled, that it's more realistic than other forms of crime writing? Since when did a lone detective solve anything, for example? As a literary form the hard-boiled gives a subjective impression of reality - for commercial reasons (among others) hard-boiled writers perpetuate a popular
(and not necessarily accurate) view of reality in order to sell more books. It's the sensibility we're buying into, not the reportage. If I want hard-boiled reality, I'll go for a walk along Liverpool docks at night - but I don't want it that badly, so I'll stick to Horace McCoy.

Cheers Chris

--
# To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to
# majordomo@icomm.ca.  This will not work for the digest version.
# The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 08 Sep 2000 EDT