I don't know of an angrier character in hard-boiled fiction
than V. I.
Warshawski, or a tougher one. I've often thought that she
bought into
the hard-boiled mystique far more than many of the modern
male writers
in this genre. There are a lot of feminist views in her work,
but I've
often thought of V. I. Warshawski as a hard-boiled fantasy,
as much in
her was as Philip Marlowe is in his. If anybody ought to be
defending
Chandler, it ought to be her.
<(I dunno-I haven't read it [Oates's essay]).
I haven't either, but Dulcy Brainard cites in in her essay on
women
P.I.'s in Ed Gorman's THE BIG BOOK OF NOIR. What she got from
Oates's
essay is that Oates finds fault with Chandler for making such
a case for
hard-boiled heroes being more "realistic" than those of other
writers.
She finds Marlowe and his colleagues as much a fantasy as
the
traditional British characters that Chandler shoots down in
his famous
essay. She may have something there. I've always
considered
hard-boiled fiction something of a fantasy, too--straight out
of
medieval knight-errantry.
> Oh, and welcome to the playhouse, Robert. I'll be
stockpiling some
brickbats as soon as I figure out what they are....>
Thanks . . . and just bring a machine gun. Never mind the
brickbats.
-- ************************************** Robert E. Skinner, Director Xavier University of Louisiana Library 7325 Palmetto Street New Orleans, LA 70125 (504) 483-7303 (voice) (504) 485-7917 (FAX) e-mail: rskinner@mail.xula.edu ************************************** # # To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to majordomo@icomm.ca. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.vex.net/~buff/rara-avis/.