Re: RARA-AVIS: Broadly speaking
RMINOT@aol.com
Sat, 22 Aug 1998 15:56:33 EDT
Okay, Eddie. If we define "hardboiled" as a private eye; then
we don't have
any females who fit that description. In fact, we're running
out of men, too,
unless you count historical fiction, i.e., authors like Walter
Mosley who set
their stories in the forties or the Scudder character, who's
fast losing his
livelihood because of computers. So then we have to include
members of the
police force and there are plenty of women characters who fit
that category:
Clarice Starling, Inspector Tenneson, Mallory--to name a few.
And with FBI
profiling being all the rage with its emphasis on "getting into
the mind of
the killer" and interviewing serial killers to get info, it's
but a short step
to making the serial killer the protagonist. (Yes, there are
very few, if
any, female serial killers in real life so few if any in
fiction but plenty of
good detectives as I said. Now the "noir" aspect of all this is
broader: no
one knows for sure, unless I'm missing something the exact
derivation--could
be the French movie critic's term "film noir" referring to
American "tough,
real-life" thriller mysteries as opposed to twee English
puzzle-solving
mysteries; but "film noir" may have derived from the Black Mask
pulp magazine
that published Chandler et al, at a time when private dicks
were willing to
break some rules to get to the truth. Or maybe the term comes
from "serie
noire" the French string of pulp stories very similar to Black
Mask. Maybe we
should just say that we discuss any fictional crime novel which
is suspenseful
and fairly tough-minded, in which the protagonist can be a
criminal or not,
female or male, sane or insane, that has that wonderful noirish
je ne sais
quoi. In this sense I'd vote for including Thomas Harris and
Caroll O'Connell
and Ruth Rendell.
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