Bill wrote re: Richard Neely's THE PLASTIC NIGHTMARE (aka
NIGHTMARE) (1969)
'It got me thinking about how hardboiled and noir
writing went through the sixties and into the seventies.
Science fiction changed a lot in that time, but how did HB
writers deal with it all? For all that other writing, and
other genre fiction, was affected by the sixties, from what
little I know about that
time, I don't see many changes.'
It's an interesting question this one - how the sixties
impacted on H/B fiction. There are a couple of general points
I think are worth making. First off the counter culture
'sixties' didn't actually happen between 1960 and 1969 but
from the mid sixties to the mid seventies (or till the
present in some places). Second there are novels of the
sixties and novels about the sixties. It's perhaps one of
those times that's easier to make sense of in retrospect and
some very fine h/b novels do just that - Leonard's Freaky
Deaky, Higgins' Outlaws amongst others.
There may also have been a fashion element - it does seem
true that hepcats of the time were more likely to write
sci-fi than h/b which was no doubt seeming very 'fifties'.
Interestingly some of the h/b ish novels of the time that did
deal with 60s radicalism were written by authors better known
for their sci-fi (I'm thinking of Disch & Sladek's Black
Alice and John Brunner's Black Is The Color). Oddly enough
both of them deal explicitly with black radicalism and the
other source of 60s semi-h/b that deals with the politics of
the era is the lode of black American writing - not just
Himes but novels like John A. Williams' Sons Of Darkness,
Sons Of Light, Sam Greenlee's The Spook Who Sat By The Door,
even some of the Holloway House stuff.
However I think it's fair to say that h/b didn't really come
into sync with the counter culture till the seventies and the
advent of post hippie post Vietnam disillusion - an era we
will no doubt be going into in depth next month so I leave it
out for now.
Finally though one exception to all these rules is Joe Gores
extraordinary Interface - as black a counter culture novel as
one could imagine.
John
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