James Rogers (jetan@ionet.net)
Sun, 05 Dec 1999 13:35:36 -0600
At 08:45 AM 12/5/99 -0500, >Sharon Villines wrote:
>
>> [snip]....Tony Soprano, with a hung
dog
>> look, lamented the fact that an attempt had been
made on his life by
>> "...two guys with 9mm's. My self esteem is at an
all time low". Life,
>> for a modern Mafia family, is definitely getting
more complicated.
>>[snip].....unless Bobby, a no-mark
>> college student civilian, can work something out
he'll be sleeping
>> with the fish before you can say "Keep your
friends close....."
>> [snip].... very funny. But Wolf doesn't
sacrifice the
>> humour for believable characters.
>> There's a kangaroo called Ali who offs
a
>> Mafia consigliere is a scene that had me
laughing out loud.
>> It is both original and hilarious
>
>This is likely to be a dumb question but it is
important. I'm working on a
>classification system for detective fiction--not with
an attempt to classify
>ALL titles but with an attempt to classify
quintessential examples of
>various types. At the moment I'm working with three
attitudes or world views
>that influence each of the sub-genres:
>
>--traditional or classic which assumes a benevolent
social order,
>--hard-boiled or mean streets which assumes a
predatory social order
>--comic, which assumes a nonsensical social
order
>
>I would expect a description like the one above to
indicate a comic world
>view. As readers of hard-boiled detective fiction,
what do you think?
>
>Sharon.
>--
In
my uninformed, humble, pre-first cupucawfee opinion, the
description you quote sounds a little like someone trying to
imitate P.G. Wodehouse and Donald Westlake at the same time
and not having a lot of luck with either mode, though perhaps
it is a better book than it sounds to me here (pretty hard to
work in a killer 'roo, though). Since it comes recommended by
a list member, I am probably being unfair, which I am mindful
of since I was just taken to task for judging Vacchs based on
only the Burke books. At any rate, I think a lot of the humor
in this kind of thing stems from the attempt to portray the
contemporary criminals as the same sort of neurotic, "me
generation", Starbucks-sipping jerks that one finds on "Ally
Mcbeal" or wherever. Incongruity, I guess. Doesn't usually
work for me very well. I would suggest a better example of
"comic, nonsensical social order" would be soemthing like
G.K.Chesterton's _The Man Who Was Thursday_ (not hardboiled,
not cozy, very strange). It seems like mysteries _ought _to
produce a lot of absurdist books, but as I try to think of
them, all I can come up with are a bunch of usually
not-very-funny burlesques of the genre. Actually, I think
some of the
_real_ hardboiled stuff has a kind of comic aspect, as in
James M. Cain....where the world isn't so much
Chandler-corrupt as it is Beckett-hopeless. In fact, I kind
of think I'd like to see a Keaton or Chaplin version of
_Postman Always Rings Twice_. Then again, I've always wanted
to hear Groucho Marx reading Chandler.
Anyway, I didn't think it was a
dumb question. Maybe someone else can suggest a more
satisfactory answer. And, I promise, I will look up a copy of
the book in question.
James
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