miker wrote:
>Hector is a Mexico City private detective. Taibo
works hard on evoking the
>city but I think his Proletariat-colored glasses
hinders him. Instead of
>feeling
>the city, you feel his politics. The characters are
eccentric, funny,
>touching,
>interesting, and believable.
Ah, but politics can be as much of a city's life (or a
character's make-up) as its streets and cafes. Montreal, for
example, is a place where people know and discuss and argue
politics (and everything else) incessantly, not just Quebec,
or Canadian politics, but international politics as well.
Maybe Mexico City is like that as well.
You ask me, far too much crime fiction pretends politics
doesn't exist at all, that it has no effect on any of us. So
it becomes apolitical (or more precisely, politically bland),
as though the mere thought that someone somewhere may take
exception or actually disagree with an opinion is a bad
thing. So much crime fiction sticks to the warm, comfy middle
of the road, a safe distance from those nasty questions that
lie in wait in the ditches.
Fortunately, there's a small but strong counter-current to
this trend who do stick their necks out, desperadoes who head
for the ditch and take chances, daring to speak out and raise
hard questions to which there may be no easy answers. These
are the crime writers who seem to go over well and be taken a
little more seriously abroad. It's like an edgy secret signal
that only some pick up, that slides across borders. And most
of these writers tend to be from the hard-boiled side of the
genre.
Perhaps it's because the genre tends to move so easily
through all layers of society, but of all the sub-genres of
mystery, I would say hard-boiled detective fiction is
possibly (or at least has the greatest potential to be) the
most political of them all. Cozies and amateur sleuth
mysteries (particularly those labelled as
"traditional") tend to closed worlds, and spy fiction and
thrillers too often reduce politics to the cartoon level. But
hard-boiled detective fiction, with its dysfunctional dicks
wandering and stumbling around in the real world annoying
people, seems perfectly suited to asking those rude
questions. From Hector's
"Proletariat-colored glasses" and Parestsky's prickly
paranoia to Mike Hammer's bloodthirsty rants and Marlowe's
moral quest through a ravaged landscape -- it's all
politics.
Thinking back on some of my favourite hard-boiled authors, I
can see a trend -- most of them do deal with politics in one
way or another
-- sometimes overtly, and sometimes in far more subtle ways.
I don't always agree with the politics, but they do offer the
reader a little more food for thought than simply answering
the burning question of who killed Thursby.
So, some of my favourite "political" crime authors, just off
the top of my head:
Raymond Chandler Ross Macdonald Joseph Hansen Michael Collins
Sara Paretsky Thomas B. Dewey James Ellroy Paco Taibo George
Pelecanos John Shannon John D. MacDonald Gary Phillips Manuel
Vasquez Montalban Walter Mosley Jerome Doolittle Gordon
DeMarco Gar Haywood
(What am I going on about? I'm not quite sure, but I think I
may be close to something... though maybe it's just a pile of
manure...)
--
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