Bob Toomey (btoomey@javanet.com)
Sun, 05 Dec 1999 22:14:24 -0500
James Rogers wrote:
> 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.
Jim Thompson is mostly an absurdist. The ending of THE
GETAWAY -- excised in the movie versions -- is a masterpiece
of absurdist horror, a descent into a paranoid comic inferno,
like something out of Ambrose Bierce. Actually, that ending
would make a very interesting movie in itself. POP. 1280 is
an absurd nightmare, another descent, this time into
madness.
> 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.
But wasn't Chandler a superb comic writer? It doesn't get
mentioned often, but it's why I reread him. He was very
funny, not just with the wisecracks, although nobody cracked
them better, but the whole weary world view -- been there,
done that, had that done to me, didn't learn a damn thing
from it. And Marlowe saw himself as an absurd anachronism, a
White Knight sliding down the poker and balancing very
badly.
BobT
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