Hardboiled: Life's a piece of shit, but you can make a
difference. Noir: life's a piece of shit, and that's it
Geir
----- Original Message ---- From: David L. Wilson <
dwilson@sccn.net> To:
rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com Sent: Sunday, November 18,
2007 12:41:10 AM Subject: RARA-AVIS: Comments on a couple
recent issues
I haven't followed the whole discussion, but I've always sort
of felt that "Hard-Boiled" was when the criminals were after
your ass, "Noir" is when the criminals and the government are
after you. Granted, that's simplistic, but it works for me.
As far as allowing the outside world to intrude into the
discussions, I've always felt that was unnecessary. Noir is
defined by corruption and deceit. Anybody who feels that
everything is going hunky dory would have no reason to write
the stuff. Rather, the words are our defenses, or our
weapons. Consequently, I'm looking forward to some great
novels coming out of our national experience, these last
several years. I just felt that no one had to go to the
trouble to complete the dots, in this forum.
As far as the books with sexual themes, and those in that ill
defined category of crime-sex books, well, I've never felt
that it was uncharacteristic for brutal characters to have
unenlightened attitudes about sex. In many of the PG novels I
imagine that the heavies entertained themselves with many of
the same activities, only off screen.
It's the nature of my own work that I search out not only a
writer's lesser efforts, their literary defeats and
unpublished manuscripts, but that I've tried to identify the
books that they chose not to grace with their own names. My
old friend Niven Busch used to counsel me ... and he
counseled me all the time ... that you can learn a lot more
about a writer from their failures than their masterpiece.
The masterpieces fit into their own category, they are
transcendent, seamless, and you can't perceive a writer's
tricks. Any writer is lucky to have more than one
masterpiece, if that, but we can all have our own favorites
among their work.
David Laurence Wilson Downieville, CA
Watch for the latest of these uncovered efforts, masterpiece
or not, with Gil Brewer's A Devil For O'Shaugnessey, out in
January from Stark House
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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