At 05:23 PM 22/02/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>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.
A friend of mine recently pointed out that cozies are
mannered novels that question the rights to authority of
"superior", titled classes. In their private lives, in their
drawing rooms and on their estates Lord & Lady Whatsis,
Colonel Mustard etc. were as corrupt and capable of murder as
the
"criminal" classes.
Like hardboil, the cozy became popular between the wars.
During WWI upper-class officers who often inherited their
rank, hurled the lower-class rank and file into certain death
to win a few feet of ground, and then give it back.
Technologies that might have broken stalemates were sometimes
ignored as ungentlemanly or unsporting. And life for the
Tommy in the trenches was much worse than that enjoyed by
commanders behind the lines.
This might argue that the difference between the cozy and the
hardboiled, at least at that time, reflected the different
reactions Americans and Britons had to their war experiences,
relative to their different cultures. Hardboil would seem
more real to Americans because it springs from the American
experience, the shift from rural to urban and the inability
to outrun industrialization. Artificialities are overlooked
in this dialogue of real issues. For the Brits, the cozy may
be superficially, and perhaps necessarily artificial, in
order to deal with real issues of class.
Best Kerry
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