John Williams said:
..it strikes me - talking right off the top of my head
now - that maybe the
most interesting way for the noir/hb writing to develop
is to move out of
the genre confines. The challenge, certainly, that
interests me as a writer,
is to apply the things I like about noir/hb - the sense
that the world is
not OK, that the underdog viewpoint is the one to take,
that corruption is
everywhere, that the evocation of place can be crucial
to the creation of
character - to novels that do not neccessarily need to
revolve around a dead
body or a zillion dollar coke deal.
************** Its been done, and pretty darned successfully,
too.
Earl Thompson's _A Garden of Sand_ is outside the usual
bounds of of the genre, but still as hardboiled as it gets.
And narrowing your "dead body" requirement to the solution of
a murder, I would say that Cormac McCarthy's _Blood Meridian_
fills the bill. There's plenty of dead bodies in
_Blood Meridian_, but solving the crime isn't very high on
the plot's priority. And what about Frazer's recent _Cold
Mountain_? Very tough. ;-)
And yes, the books I listed above are very interesting.
miker
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