But does hardboiled fiction have to come from huge,
crime-ridden urban
centres in the U.S.? Seems to me it only takes one violent
antagonist to
get things going.
Think of stuff like Lansdale's Savage Season, Dickey's
Deliverance or
Robert Parker's Wilderness. All rural, all full of
nastiness.
And in many areas, it isn't even the city that's the killing
ground
anymore-it's the consumer-defined suburbs, full of soulless
malls, and
bored kids, where people are really in danger.
But the perception of the city as "the great wrong place"
persists. In the
intro to City Sleuths and Tough Guys (great anthology, by the
way) David
Willis talks all around it. I think I'll dig it up later and
re-read it.
And us poor Canadian (and British and Swedish and Japanese
and wherever
else) writers are stuck trying to make our cities look worse
than they are
in order to make our fiction seem sufficiently hardboiled, as
though a
high murder rate was a badge of honour.
This is all just off the top of my no-coffee-yet head, and
I'm not trying
to dis anyone, but the question of setting in hardboiled
novels has always
intrigued me.
**************************************************
Kevin Smith
The Thrilling Detective Web Site
http://www.colba.net/~kvnsmith/thrillingdetective/
This month: New fiction by Terry White and Henry Mazel,
and Stand-Alone Private Eye Novels
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