Jim wrote:
"Since it was so obviously different from what had gone
before, they had to be aware that this was a break from the
artificial style that had been the pattern of the traditional
mystery, . . ."
Okay, I know this is the party line of hardboiled. I've said
it enough times myself. But I have to wonder if the cozy
really is any more
"artificial" than most hardboiled?
Even Chandler himself admitted of his essay "The Simple Art
of Murder":
". . . but you must not take a polemic piece of writing like
my own article from the Atlantic too literally. I could have
written a piece of propaganda in favor of the English
detective story just as easily. All polemic writing is
over-stated. The instant you admit that both sides in a
controversy may be right, you have thrown away your whole
argument . . ." (from Raymond Chandler Speaking)
I'm not even hinting that hardboiled and the cozy are the
same thing (or that cozies aren't by their nature inferior to
hardboiled, at least according to my taste), but I'm not sure
that most hardboiled literature is any more natural, no
matter how much more naturalistic it purports to be. (And
much of it isn't even that naturalistic, not that that's
necessarily a bad thing -- Latimer, anyone?) It is a genre
(or Jim would probably say, not wrongly, a group of genres)
and as such, it has certain requirements which have more to
do with telling a good story than with telling a natural one.
Of course, some of the best do both.
Mark
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