Look, whether you like Pelecanos' style or not is up to
you.
But he gets his time, and a certain cultural attitude, dead
right, in a way some of his better-selling contemporaries,
with their heads stuck up the asshole of the past, will never
come close to approaching. They're too busy trying to write
like it's 1949. Not that there's really anything necessarily
wrong with that, except that they're fifty years too
late.
Sure, Pelecanos' pop culture references and
brand-name-dropping may be a generational thing, here today,
gone tomorrow, but that doesn't make it any less valid. That
a guy of a certain age wears a pork pie hat or smokes Fatimas
can say as much as whether a guy listens to James Brown and
Nirvana or Celine Dion and Billy Joel.
Lew Archer was obsessed with flowers and shrubs. And Marlowe
saw guys with faces like collapsed lungs. Nick Stefanos
notices whether a girl has a Replacements album in her
collection.
The thing in common is that things are being noticed. Surely
one function of a private eye is to see.
Yeah, the references will be dated, and obscure in a few
years. But hardboiled fiction should be written for today,
not for tomorrow. And there's something inherently bogus, or
maybe just a tad precious, about writing for yesterday.
Kevin Burton Smith The Thrilling Detective Web Site http://www.colba.net/~kvnsmith/thrillingdetective/
Now: The last few days to vote for The Thrillies. Soon: The
P.I. Poll on Short Fiction, plus new stuff of our own.
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