On Wed, 26 Jan 2000, Kevin Burton Smith wrote:
> As for why hard-boiled, well, that's another story.
As someone else
> said, it has something to do with attitude, a way of
looking at the
> world with your eyes wide open. Not just to the
nastiness, because
> that just becomes an empty macho pissing contest,
but to the
> possibilities, as well. Not to turn too Pollyanna
here, or anything,
> but I've always found the best hard-boiled fiction
always offers a
> slight glimmer of hope, even as the characters slide
closer and
> closer towards doom, even if it's merely one doomed
man or woman
> making an ultimately futile and useless, although
possibly heroic,
> gesture, be it Cody yelling "Top of the world, Ma!"
or Spade turning
> over Brigid.
Like Chandler said, the text must offer a glimpse of hope.
(He put it more nicely than I did...) But for me, hardboiled
literature presents the capitalist society stripped bare, and
barer it is, more effective it gets, for example in Richard
Stark. Or in Richard Deming's "Hit and Run" (1960), in which
this woman hires a P.I. to kill her man and then keeps the
body in the bathtub with ice and chops the ice for the
drinks! Or in James M. Cain. These examples show the people
trying to survive. The society does nothing to encourage or
help them, so there's only crime. This is what makes me read
hardboiled: an effective view of how the society works.
There is some fascination in reading about people who seem to
have no hope. They are put against the wall and they try to
do something about it and don't always succeed. The
communication in these books is always about something else
than normal relationships, or rather: the normal
relationships have been replaced by those that prevent people
to have normal relationships. Greed. Lust. Anger. Hate. And
the communication has to happen with guns, fists, deception.
It's not the animal in us, it's the animal in the society.
And this is why I like hardboiled literature - it portrays
people more truthfully than the classical mystery tradition
in which a man is an animal, calculating but nevertheless an
animal. This might seem like a contradiction with the usual
attitude about HB, but I'm behind my words.
And if there's only hint of this in any classical mystery
novel, I'm more than willing to read it. For example, I've
always liked Francis Iles, in whose books the people don't
murder because they like it and can do it, but because they
have no choice.
And I like Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, but only because of
their adventure-like feeling.
Juri
jurnum@utu.fi
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