Mario Taboada wrote:
I think that, after The Galton Case, Lew Archer is no longer
a hardboiled detective. He is a tired, pessimistic detective,
a pretty polite and civilized one, a compassionate one. The
classic hardboiled detective could just as easily have been a
criminal; not so Archer. To be sure, this transformation of
the hardboiled PI into a noble knight started with Chandler's
Marlowe, but Marlowe is still a violent guy who cuts a lot of
corners and cracks heads in order to get things done. He is
still of the old school, a detective from the pulps. He lives
in danger and has fun with danger. Post-Galtonian (!) Archer
does not have much fun, he just goes ahead and takes on
cases. He is watching people and analyzing them.
a.n.smith wrote:
> It complicates the comfy notion of what
some
> consider to be hard-boiled, a notion that keeps
lesser writers mired in the
> cliché³ they picked up off the movie versions of
Maltese Falcon and The Big
> Sleep, eh?
I know it gets tiring to cover the same ground, but I've
often wondered how there can be meaningful discussions about
hardboiled and noir fiction without a common understanding of
what it means to qualify. Then again, I like that all seem to
have their own ideas to be rehashed on Rara-Avis. And Mario's
alludes to what I thought Peter Chambers was doing on Bill
Denton's panel at Bloody Words, that is to define hardboil by
the level of violence. Exactly how much is enough to qualify?
Mario at least narrows it down to how much the series
detective is willing to become engaged in the violence.
Personally, I think it has nothing to do with the level of
violence, but rather that the genre deals with the role of
power in human relationships, and the inevitable corruption
of power. We aspire to rise above this, but find it
impossible to achieve. But maybe that's just noir. Hardboil,
or at least a hardboiled detective could be something else
entirely. More a style, as a.n. says.
Kerry
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