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Re: RARA-AVIS: "Red Wind": Never the whole truth.



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!
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Curtiss Leung                              (212)267-7722 Voice
hleung@prolifics.com                       (212)608-6753 Fax
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"Futility is...hard to deal with" -- Patrick Bateman
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