----- Original Message ----- From: "Terrill Lankford" <
lankford2000@earthlink.net>
> To which I reply: Right on, Mark! The notion that
horror is rife with
romantic
> sentimentality and hard-boiled novels are somehow
above all that strikes
me as
> complete nonsense. Romantic sentimentality is the
subtext of most
hard-boiled
> fiction, especially the P.I.. subgenre. Chandler is
probably one of the
worst
> "offenders" (but even the likes of Hemingway and
Bukowski can be "accused"
of
> it).
Yup. Neo-realism takes a romantic core and encapsulates it in
"realism." A lot of what makes the genre interesting to me is
the clash between the two sensibilities. It's also this
conflict that makes a lot of hardboiled writing seem ready to
explode. I'd go one step further and claim it's this very
tension that we term the hardboiled "attitude," as in the
appellation
"hb is an attitude, not a genre." It's a lot more obvious in
Chandler than in Hammet. And, it's what's lacking or at least
not fully-formed in early Carroll John Daly. (He finally got
it right with Satan Hall.)
Greg Swan
-- # To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to majordomo@icomm.ca. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 09 Feb 2000 EST