Re: RARA-AVIS: Sensitive detectives


Doug Bassett (dj_bassett@yahoo.com)
Tue, 30 Nov 1999 14:29:06 -0800 (PST)


--- Brian Lawrence <bdlawrence@netscape.net> wrote:
>
> One more question, and I'll shut up for a while.
> Does hardboiled have to be a
> PI story?

No, not at all. Bukowski's stuff, for example, seems to me to be very hardboiled and is virtually crime-free (unless you consider public intoxication to be a crime). William Burroughs first novel, Junky, is also a fine hardboiled book.

As I think I mentioned in another post, it works the other way, too. You can have fine PI stories that aren't hardboiled (Stephen Greenleaf's work comes to mind).

The more I think about it, the more I think that this debate about sensitive detectives is really a debate about the popularity of sensitive detectives. It's not that there isn't hardboiled stuff being published nowadays -- recent postings here have pointed out many authors. Why, though, is the "sensitive" detective so popular now?

Doug

Doug

===== Doug Bassett dj_bassett@yahoo.com
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Thousands of Stores. Millions of Products. All in one place. Yahoo! Shopping: http://shopping.yahoo.com

--
# 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 Tue 30 Nov 1999 - 18:12:19 EST