Mark S. wrote:
>Shouldn't that be "honky big holes"?
No, Honky Big Holes was that white rapper on Ice-T's label
for a while in the early nineties, Mark... Gee, and you claim
you know pop music? For shame...
As for Richard's perceptive comments on Hawk, McBride, etc.,
just a thought on this:
>But I will say I am troubled by the
>concept of a black guy doing the dirty work for a
white guy. I grew up in
>the south and, brother, do I know that
story.
See, I'm not troubled at all by Hawk being black, but then, I
didn't grow up in the South. And I know race is a bigger
issue in the States than here (though, of course, Canada has
its own problems with race), and it's a card that seems to
show up in a lot of decks. It's just the unfortunate pairing
of white Spenser and black Hawk that bothers some folks.
After all, Mouse is black and Pike is white, and nobody says
"Boo!" But I honestly feel Parker was aiming more for
Chingcachook than Tonto when he paired his detective with a
non-white partner. And his aim wasn't to play up to the
stereotype, but to play with it, and ultimately dismantle
it.
And there's the fact that Parker is from Boston, and race is
a different game there, I think. Granted, I haven't travelled
all over the States, but one of the recurring memories I have
of Boston is the surprising number of inter-racial couples I
saw in the Cambridge/Boston axis -- on subways, street
corners, malls, bars, etc. It was cool, and nobody seemed to
blink an eye (though this wasn't South Boston or somewhere
like that). But at the Bouchercon in D.C. (or at least
Virginia -- part of the South, right?) an innocent and
harmless observation about me being the only white guy on a
bus from New York provoked the worried but apparently sincere
question
"Did they bother you?"
Now, these are quick snaps, but I think it goes a long way to
explaining how we can all be reading the same book, but
somehow all getting different stories and thoughts on Hawk
and his sidekick, the Irish guy.
--
Kevin Burton Smith The Thrilling Detective Web Site http://www.thrillingdetective.com -- # 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/ .
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