: BUT the goal is not always as clear as "find the grail" or
"save my
: daughter from the ogre.". . . this may explain why I like
Chandler
: so much -- all those novels are quests, but there's a kind
of
: pleasure in questing for questing's sake -- the initial
goal (find
: my missing son-in-law) is never the last goal, and we don't
know
: until we're very deep (if ever) precisely where the story's
headed.
And James Rogers wrote:
: As someone said, the cozy writers generally restore order
to the
: community. the hardboiled gang usually are openly hostile
to the
: community and bring disorder by blowing up all the little
lies the
: community has grown used to living with (_Red Harvest_
being one of
: about a hundred good examples).
And, to sort of tie this together, the goals that get set
along the
way come from the detective stepping right into the action
and blowing
things apart. This is one of the things I've always liked
about
hardboiled stories as opposed to cozies and pure
ratiocination. The
Thinking Machine or some other enormous brain can sit in his
study and
solve The Mystery of Rev. Dingledottie's Saffron Tea Doily
before
elevenses, but in hardboiled stories the detective becomes
the centre
of the action and causes all manner of new things to happen.
Holmes
and Poirot, as I recall, usually follow along after a crime
has been
committed, but Spade and Marlowe (forgive me, Mario), as
James say,
start off on one small part of a case and end up cracking a
big thing
wide open.
So, are most hardboiled detective stories romances while
cozies are
purer quests? Maybe I think this because I remember the
Holmes short
stories where there's much less space to develop a complex
plot, so
there's only the one goal of finding who the killer or thief
is.
By the way, I wish people would stop apologizing for posting
such
interesting messages.
Bill
--
William Denton | Toronto, Canada | http://www.vex.net/~buff/ | Caveat lector.
"Let's keep the party polite."
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