Well, I guess I take the "middle path" on this
topic. For one thing I resist the notion that a hard-boiled
book *has* to be
a crime novel. _For instance, McCoy's _They Shoot Horses,
Don't They?_ is
only secondarily a crime novel yet it has always been a
touchstone for folks
seeking to define what constitutes "hardboiled". Same for
Nathaniel West. On
the other hand, Mr. Doherty's defintion is hard to dispute
except to the
extent that it includes a lot of books that we probably were
not thinking
of....._Huckleberry Finn_ is colloquial and tough -minded
(although
Hemingway would have said that this was absolutely right and
that it was the
father of the hardboiled book).
Mr. Duggan and I occasionally push Madden's
anthology of essays....here is a *small* part of his
(Madden's)definition. I
thought that it wa interesting, pretty good, and touches on a
lot of the
topics that we have covered.
"What is a tough guy or hardboiled novel?.....a
few observations are appropriate here. The lower social and
economic levels
provide the locale and characters of tough novels; it is
mainly the private
detective novels that penetrate to the underworld, and in
those novels high
society often completes the social picture - the poles meet,
clash, merge,
often prove essentially identical.....[Madden makes the point
that the
protagonist thrives in periods of social confusion and
disillusion, such as
the depression].....The tough guy hero is not very often a
professional
killer or criminal; such men are tough in any era. Except in
the private
detective novels, the tough novels depict less crime and
violence than one
might imagine......Reacting in kind to the indifferent,
violent,
deceptiveworld that made him, the tough guy describes and
reponds
objectively to a world that made him an object."
James
James Michael Rogers
jetan@ionet.net
Mundus Vult Decipi
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