Re: RARA-AVIS: Broadly speaking
James Rogers (jetan@ionet.net)
Sat, 22 Aug 1998 20:34:59 -0500 (CDT)
At 07:07 PM 8/22/98 -0500, Mario Taobooda wrote and quoted
:
>RMINOT:
>
><<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.>>
>
>The list is about hardboiled crime fiction. I don't know
the work of
>Carol O'Connell, but I would say that neither Harris nor
Rendell are
>hardboiled. Harris writes pure suspense with psychos and
Rendell writes
>what, for lack of a better word, I'll call polite
psychological
>mysteries (at times she reminds me of that great writer,
Margaret
>Millar). I don't see what is hardboiled about either of
these two
>writers; they don't have hardboiled characters or
situations. I can't
>see them as noir either.
>
>I personally would not be interested in discussions of
serial killer
>novels, a subgenre that has become an industry - even
when it's done
>brilliantly as in Thomas Harris's or John Camp's work.
At this point, I
>cannot help but read these stories as clich=E9s. After
reading Connelly'=
s
>_The Poet_ I felt I had been taken - a fast and
suspenseful read that
>broke no new ground and left no sediment.
>
>
I agree with all these points. The best of the serial
killer writers are, in my opinion, Harris and Peter Straub but
I don't
really see either of them fitting in well with our subject
matter, though=
I
admire both of them. As to discussing " any fictional crime
novel which i=
s
suspenseful and fairly tough-minded" it seems to me that this
is just too
inclusive ....this would encompass everything from _Crime And
Punishment_=
to
P.D. James's novels which are pretty "tough minded" and dark
but are
nontheless almost definitively cozy (cozy noir?...Nah, no
commercial pote=
ntial).
No doubt there are serial killer books that fit into =
the
hardboiled pigieon hole, just as occassionaly a police
procedural present=
s a
borderline case. Female protagonists are cerainly acceptable -
as in John
McDonald's _the Neon Jungle _ which I have been reading - and
so are fema=
le
writers.... but they frankly aren't as common in the genre as
males.
One of the most interesting things about this thread =
is
that even though we generally can't agree on a good working
defintion of
what hardboiled *is* I hear a rare note of general agreement
that Harris =
is
*not*. Why not? Protagonists too introspective?=20
James
James Michael Rogers
jetan@ionet.net =20
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