Re: RARA-AVIS: RE: RARA-AVIS Digest V3 #129

From: Doug Bassett ( dj_bassett@yahoo.com)
Date: 09 Mar 2000


This will probably sound ridiculous to many of you, but I actually read my very first Perry Mason not so long ago -- THE CASE OF THE VAGABOND VIRGIN. Gardner seems to me to be working in this same sort of
"semi-boiled" or "medium-boiled" niche -- something more than a cozy, but less than the full hard-boiled treatment. (I found Gardner wonderfully readable, incidentally, although he's no Stout.). I'm no expert on Fifties-era mystery fiction, but I suspect that you could find a host of writers plowing the same field.

doug

--- Dick Lochte < dlock@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> As for the continuing question as to whether or not
> the Wolfe books are
> hardboiled, there were a number of authors whose
> work, while less tough than
> the Hammett-Chandler school are far enough away from
> the Christie-Van Dine
> type of mystery to qualify. Even Ellery Queen
> breaks loose in some of his
> adventures. Perry Mason. Simon Templar. The
> regrettably neglected Johnny
> Fletcher and Sam Cragg stories by Frank Gruber.
> Craig Rice's John J. Malone.
> You couldn't call any of these soft-boiled, exactly.
> There's probably even a
> case to be made for old Sherlock. How many
> hardboiled heroes are as dark and
> moody as Holmes, or need a hit of that seven
> per-cent solution to keep the
> world in focus?
> Dick Lochte

===== Doug Bassett dj_bassett@yahoo.com
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