Bob Toomey (btoomey@javanet.com)
Wed, 01 Dec 1999 01:36:36 -0500
"a.n.smith" wrote:
> To suggest that something is "truly hardboiled" kind
of locks in the style
> so permanently that it implies formula, to me, at
least. The best
> hardboiled writers are not the copycats who had the
swagger, the cliches,
> the mood, the tough-guy street lingo. No, the best
ones push the edges of
> the genre and force it to accept new ideas and
change.
Hardboiled is an attitude, not a style or a genre. There are
genres within it, or types, like the hardboiled private eye
story. But it really depends on what you'll let past the
doorkeeper. Kim Wozencraft's "Rush" seems pretty hardboiled
to me; so does Wambaugh's "The Glitter Dome" and Kate
Morgenroth's
"Kill Me First," and a fair amount of Algren and Hemmingway.
Hardboiled stories don't even require a crime, let alone a
private eye. Horace McCoy's "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?"
is a hardboiled novel about crime only in the sense that it's
a crime to be poor and desperate. George Alec Effinger's
"When Gravity Fails," and its sequals are hardboiled science
fiction, following Chandler, whose attitude was taken over
wholesale by the cyberpunks. There's hardboiled fantasy that
mimics Chandler, like Michael Reeves' "Darkworld Detective,"
Glen Cook's Garrett novels, and too many hardboiled vampire
PI series to list. It's an attitude, not a genre.
BobT
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