In a message dated 07/09/01 20:10:55 GMT Daylight Time,
srcrout@ntlworld.com writes:
<<
I've always thought that villains in the Holmes milieu
(maybe Victorian
fiction generally) had made a choice to be bad:
Moriarty is after all just
Holmes with an evil cackle. But in H-B fiction people
are just mean,
whether because they are born bad, or because something
happened to them in
the past that they can't back out of. On the other
hand, as I've mentioned
here before, Doyle does mention Pinkerton detectives
now and then. The
American scenes in THe Valley of Fear could come
straight out of the
hard-boiled canon.
Chris >> To be a bit finickety a lot of Holmes is
Edwardian. Not sure that Holmes believed that his world was
correctable - he always seemed fairly accepting of this, see
the opium den in "the Man with the twisted lip" and his
opinion of London and atypically the countryside. He only
acted when commissioned - whether for cash or the challenge.
He was quite happy to cut a deal with a crook if necessary
and so on. I think Holmes is not allowed to eat at the
hardboiled eatery cos of his era, and that's something I am
quite happy with, I think there are a lot of similarities
though as I have said, and would love to hear if anyone can
educate me as to any acknowledged debt/opinion from
hardboiled masters to Doyle. Any parodists out there might
wanna try a tough, wisecracking and truly hardboiled Holmes -
A Scandal in Bohemia becomes That One Bad Luck Dame and the
Eastern Prince, say. Going back to earlier, What is
Hardboiled? discussion, I think it just stretches the genre a
little too far, as does the inclusion of GGreene, although I
love hime dearly so I do. Holmes as a serialised mass market
magazine hero has a lot of claims but just as a Thomas Moore
writer can't really be a Utopian......... Mind you, that
Hamlet - moody, a loner, death, corruption, mmmmm.
Elementary? So long for now Colin - 221A Baker Street, and
shut that F******* violin up!
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