Recently Mark Sullivan suggested that Thomas Harris's cop
charcters
are not hard-boiled because"
"they are too institutional. They generally work within the
system,
not as an outsider."
What about Hammett's Continental Op, Nebel's Donahue, or
Gores's DKA
operatives? All of them hard-boiled, and all of them
working, quite
happily, within an organizational structure. I still think
that any
crime novel that is tough-minded and colloquial is
hard-boiled. How
many minutes it's been boiling may be a matter of debate,
but not its
hardness relative to most crime fiction. As for hard-boiled
serial
killer books, there've been at least two, possibly more,
books in
Block's Matt Scudder series dealing with serial killers (*A
Stab in
the Dark* in which Matt is hired to prove that one murder in
a series
credited to aparticular killer was actually the work of
somone else
comes immediately to mind). It's not whether or not the
villain is a
serial killer that makes a book hard-boiled, it's the
attitude with
which the material is handled. Christie's *The ABC Murders*
obviously
isn't. Benjamin Schutz's *Embrace the Wolf* is. - Jim
Doherty
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