<<But he did take the crime novel in directions it had
never gone
before, and sold a lot of books doing it. And in the long
run, he's
remained a strong influence on the hardboiled genre, like it
or not.>>
Yes, he has been influential, but that influence has not been
entirely
beneficial. Macdonald was, I think, the first universally
famous
hardboiled writer that did not serve time in the pulps. He
had literary
aspirations and he showed the literary technique of a
heavyweight right
from his first book. However, his thematic range is quite
narrow, and
his cast of characters is restricted almost exclusively to
certain
groups of wealthy people in Southern California and their
young. If you
compare him to contemporaries like John D. MacDonald, William
Campbell
Gault, Fredric Brown, Charles Willeford, Cornell Woolrich, or
even
Thomas Dewey (though Dewey is in some respects close to
Macdonald), you
will notice that they surpassed him in variety of invention
of plots,
characters, and situations. Then, too, after The Galton Case,
all of
Macdonald's books are essentially the same Freudian tangle;
the
virtuosity is persuasive and one cannot stop reading -- but
at the end,
this reader feels cheated. It was the same story all over
again, once
again.
<<Certainly you can see traces of Archer's compassion
(or bleeding heart
weenie-ness, depending on your point of view) in the work of
Robert
Parker, Robert Crais, Michael Collins, Bill Pronzini, Sue
Grafton,
Joseph Hansen, Jonathan Valin and Stephen Greenleaf, among
countless
others. Someone must have actually read the books, and not
just a few
newspaper pieces.>>
I rank Hansen and Greenleaf quite a bit above Macdonald; they
are every
bit as good technically but they add a lot of depth and range
to the
characters and situations; their novels are definitely not
all the same.
I think Parker and Crais take after Chandler, not Macdonald.
Grafton has
the trappings and settings but not the depth of Macdonald.
Her excellent
plots deserve a Chandler treatment.
As to the conspiracy theory, there must be some truth to it,
but, as has
been pointed out, Macdonald was already famous when those
articles
appeared. I am sure that they boosted his sales, a good thing
that
didn't hurt anybody else. On the contrary, it kept the genre
visible at
a difficult time.
In some ways, he led the P.I. genre towards a dead end; too
much Freud,
too little adventure; too much gloom, too little action.
Sometimes his
beautifully crafted scenes are suffocating, especially since
there is no
humor to lighten them up. It's an ordered, boring,
predictably rotten
world.
To be continued, probably. I have a feeling that this thread
is going to
heat up.
mt
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