RARA-AVIS: Hardboiled Music- Billy Holiday/Chandler/Mosley/Iceberg Slim

From: Keith Deutsch ( keithdeutsch@earthlink.net)
Date: 18 Apr 2000


on 4/18/00 12:23 AM, Etienne Borgers at freeweb@rocketmail.com wrote:

> You want blues, you want it grim, somber and Noir:
> 'Strange Fruits' by Billie Holiday.
> E.Borgers
> Hard-boiled Mysteries
> http://www.geocities.com

Without going into the noire/hard boiled issues, I always thought Billy Holiday's classic cuts (without satin strings) would be the perfect background music to the Chandler scenes in roadhouse casinos and on gambling ships.

Robert Johnson has come up a lot recently. I always thought his music would play great in early thirties Black Mask stories, particularly on radios in black bar scenes, honky tonks, and when a detective goes to a meet in a black man's room. All these scenes also appear in Chandler's novels.

Obviously Holiday and Johnson would play great in Walter Mosley's novels. He even wrote one about an aging blues singer, RL's Dream. In a recent, somewhat garbled posting (sorry) I mentioned Iceberg slim as my pick for the greatest overlooked, black, hard boiled, outlaw memoir novelist of the 20th Century. I think Mosley is one of the greatest new novelists of any color to also write in the classic Black Mask tradition. His work is literature, with depth, important themes, and brilliant characterizations. I liked Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned--a short story collection that also works as a novel; or is it a novel that also works as a short story collection? Shades of Faulkner's Go Down Moses.

Keith keithdeutsch@earthlink.net

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