Bill Crane by Jonathan Latimer (screwball stuff that's
funnier than The
Thin Man
Max Latin by Norbert Davis
Angel MacLean by Mike Ripley
The Trace/Digger books by Warren Murphy
Stephanie Plum by Janet Evanovich (so shoot me! She's
funny!)
Shell Scott by Richard S. Prather
Dan Turner by Robert Leslie Bellem
Almost anything by Carl Hiassen (in fact, when he was on 60
Minutes a few
weeks ago, he even made Florida's corruption look
funny)
But this begs the question: when is it funny, and when is it
a spoof, or
even just hilariously bad writing? A case could easily be
made that people
like Bellem and Prather were parodying the genre, not
combining humour with
it an even scarier thought is that they didn't know they were
funny). The
hardboiled genre, with its artificial conventions posing as
"realism", and
its chronic literary pretensions, is ripe for parody, after
all. Besides
the ones already mentioned, these guys are definitely spoofs.
I think...
Red Diamond by Mark Schoor and Sam Marlowe by Andrew J.
Fenady (Don
Quixote-types in a fedora and trenchcoat)
Kaiser Lupowitz by Woody Allen (sometimes the Big Man is
really BIG!)
and Steve Martin's Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, as much tribute
as parody.
Oh, and The Rockford Files, a TV show that spoofed PI shows
the way
Maverick spoofed westerns.
Kevin Smith
Web & Graphic Design
mailto:kvnsmith@total.net
#
# To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to
majordomo@icomm.ca.
# The web pages for the list are at http://www.vex.net/~buff/rara-avis/.