PB wrote:
"The only possibility for the qualities that made the 30s --
70s PI believable lies now in your average Joe who's had his
life interrupted, and reacts with alacrity. Only the average
Joe can be accepted as not having access to all the
investigatory trinkets while retaining the ooomph to kick
ass."
Okay, I understand what you're saying. I even take your point
about the appeal of the sort of "average Joe" amateur you are
championing, as opposed to the cozy amateur.
However (you knew there had to be a however), I don't think
it has to be an either or situation. Now, I'm not interested
in, nor do I read techno-thrillers. However, technology
doesn't need to get in the way, as long as the story is not
just about the technology. And frankly, I find a fetishistic
refusal of technology far more annoying than its
embrace.
No matter what the technology used to commit or investigate
crime, the human factor behind those crimes is what is of
interest and for me helps define hardboiled. For instance,
Kerr's A Philosophical Investigation is set in a future of
genetic fingerprinting, but the story is never just about
speculative technology. It is about the cat and mouse game
between the killer and the police investigator trying to
catch him, just like any good police procedural, even if
these procedures are from the day-after-tomorrow. The rest,
no matter how fascinating (and I found it very interesting)
is ultimately just window dressing if it is not about
people.
As Jim noted, amateurs are really only good for one-shots,
otherwise you lose the verisimilitude which you praise. And I
like a number of these. Goodis is one of my favorites.
However, for a series, you need a pro and series are my
default literature (as Sharon so rightly pointed out, you
really get to know someone's taste when you know the form
they will read right or wrong). Not only that, I like series
with PIs.
Now PI lit has always been a somewhat artificial construct. I
never read it, so I don't know which McBain it's in, but
someone once quoted to me a bit of dialog that went something
like this: One cop: When's the last time you remember a PI
solving a case? Other cop: Well, that would be never. I think
we all know that real PIs are seldom even involved with
murder investigations and when they are it is probably on
behalf of a defense attorney looking for dirt to impeach a
prosecution witness.
There has always been a major ritual aspect to PI fiction,
which is what I like about it. However, that does not mean
the PI must be a '30s guy in the '90s or '00s world. I would
be far more disturbed if Elvis Cole wore a '30s suit than
some people seem to be because he wears jeans. And one of the
things that gets me to return to the waning Scudder series is
the interplay between Scudder and TJ (with his beeper and
cell phone -- Hell, any PI that relied on public phones in NY
would soon be out of business) as the techno-phobic older
detective is forced to rely more and more on his young
partner as the old maxim "Get Off Your Ass, Knock On Doors"
gets flipped with so much of the"footwork" like background
checks being done while sitting on your ass in front of a
computer screen.
Finally, I'd much rather a PI calling and/or being called on
a cell phone, than Robicheaux's wife receiving a warning call
from a ghost in a pay phone simply because Burke wrote
himself into a Big Sleep corner -- at least Chandler used
sheer momentum to carry the reader past the insolvable death
of the chauffeur.
Mark
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