Re: Re[2]: RARA-AVIS: Broadly speaking

Carlos Andr頍oreira (carlozandre@hotmail.com)
Tue, 25 Aug 1998 17:04:29 PDT I agree with Jim Doherty. What makes a hard-boiled book is the
attittude, the way that the society is described by the author, and not
the position of the character. The first detective stories, the tales of
pure detection like the words of Conan Doyle and the Poe´s trilogy, show
a detective that acts without support of the law, but it doesn´t become
them "hard-boiled" books.

>From owner-rara-avis@icomm.ca Tue Aug 25 10:29:14 1998
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>Subject: Re[2]: RARA-AVIS: Broadly speaking
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>
> 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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