Re: RARA-AVIS: Hannibal/Bill Denton


William Denton (buff@pobox.com)
Wed, 23 Jun 1999 12:29:06 -0400 (EDT)


On 23 June 1999, Peter Walker wrote:

: Child abuse
: Police corruption / Political corruption
: Corrupt Wealthy Buisnesmen (subverting the law etc)
: Women / Strong women characters (are they HB?)

Dickens often dealt with those topics, but that doesn't make him hardboiled. And while sometimes things stray on the list, that's what we're here for. We may all like chocolate cheesecake but that doesn't mean we send around recipes.

Anyway, my point was pretty much the same as that made by Etienne Borgers, Kevin Smith and Mark Sullivan, except that they did it better. I think that Baffler article I mentioned a few days talked about serial killer stories, and I'll try to post something about them and the old hardboiled stuff sometime. There's something going on, reflecting a change in North American (and possible British or European) society and a shift from New Deal-style (or Wobbly, or communist) politics to corporatism that plays out in this move from lone idealists taking on corruption to teams of government experts (and, sometimes, loners) tracking down serial killers. I know this has already been noticed but I can't remember where I've read a discussion about it.

Bill (not Will)

-- 
William Denton : Toronto, Canada : http://www.miskatonic.org/ : Caveat lector.


--
# To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to majordomo@icomm.ca.
# The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/.






This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Thu 24 Jun 1999 - 02:05:27 EDT