Bill writes: >Lola is made of slightly different stuff. She'll lose memories of Stan >Phillips, like the pearls from Marlowe's hand, one by one. His lie will >let her lose them in her own time; he won't have been responsible for >killing them with the truth. > >Isn't this a consistent theme in hard-boiled fiction? It is never best >that the "whole truth" come out. Anything but the whole truth! End of >"Scorched Face," for instance. > Yes! Or Chandler's _The Big Sleep_ or Hammett's short story "The Golden Horseshoe," for that matter. But even though justice is best served by not revealing the whole truth, it's necessary that somebody -- the dectective -- has to discover it for justice to be served at all. This puts the hard-boiled dectective in a difficult, equivocal position; he has to create justice from truth. This is something that makes the hard-boiled dectectives different from the genteel, formal-problem solvers that Chandler criticized in "Simple Art of Murder." For them, justice followed immediately from truth. >Stop me before I say more, You kidding? Say more! Say more! ----------------------------------------------------------------- Curtiss Leung (212)267-7722 Voice hleung@prolifics.com (212)608-6753 Fax ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Futility is...hard to deal with" -- Patrick Bateman ----------------------------------------------------------------- - # RARA-AVIS: To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" # to majordomo@icomm.ca