cooper (jane@almaludo.freeserve.co.uk)
Tue, 20 Jul 1999 19:39:54 +0100
Just a thought apropos of a throwaway line in my last message
about costume dramas,which started one of those 3am train of
thoughts, is there any truly hardboiled historical fiction,
by which I mean written contemporarily, about pre 20th
century. I know HB usually pertains to a modern,
urban -generally- situation, but if you think about it
previous centuries were just as, if not more, violent and
grim, than our own, which could provide numerous nasty, dark
and lovely scenarios for the right author. The only vaguely
HB historical book I can dredge up is The Alienist by Caleb
Carr; which has all the right plot elements to be pretty HB,
but most of the others set in previous centuries, or even
millenia, are distinctly fluffy. Does the constraints imposed
by the correct forms of language and manners prevent the
books being Hard, and is it something that authors just
haven't got their heads round? Also back to the reading list,
I read They Shoot Horses... quite a bit back, and Grief what
a really bleak,numbing book, short but devastating. A book I
would compare it to, in it's effect at least, would be *I Was
Dora Suarez* by the very much missed Derek Raymond. In fact I
would say, in my small understanding of the term, that Horses
would be what Raymond terms _the black novel_. His definition
of this is far too long for me to quote, but I would refer
the interested to his kind of autobigraphy *The Hidden Files*
and _probably_ some of his interviews and articles, but a
brief paraphrase about it is; the investigation of the
tragedy behind the headlines, its despair, violence and
misery, the analysis of the way we live, unflinching from all
its uncumbent horror. Not light hearted escapist reading
then, but that's the point. The tragedy of these books stays
in the soul for a long time. Jane
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