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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