--- William Denton <
buff@pobox.com> wrote:
> On 30 August 2000,
marianne.macdonald@lineone.net
> wrote:
>
> : I happen to think that this is a great time
for
> crime writing and that
> : in part this is because a lot of boundaries
are
> being crossed.
> : Perhaps this makes some people uneasy?
>
> It doesn't make me uneasy, but it makes me see
stuff
> called hardboiled
> that isn't. A PI who carries a gun and drinks,
a
> decent citizen who gets
> mixed up in corruption, anything like that, can
be
> done in such a way that
> people who like other kinds of mysteries will
call
> it hardboiled. We've
> all got standards and definitions of what is
and
> isn't, and sometimes
> they'll be met and sometimes they won't.
I think this is very important. If you believe that
"hardboiled" means something, that it's an authentic artistic
approach, then I think it's important to try to define what
you mean by that -- even knowing that people will disagree,
and that there'll always be marginal cases.
I think the attempt is important, in other words. Without it
people get lazy, and they start pointing at anything they
like and calling it "hardboiled". And that doesn't help the
hb genre -- although the remnants of the hb reputation do
help these faux-hb books.
(That's not to say that everything hb is necessarily good, or
that a faux-hb is necessarily a bad book -- I've made this
point earlier. But I do think one should know what one is
dealing with.)
Mr. Denton tries to draw an analogy with jazz music. I'm
pretty sure most people on rara-avis don't listen to heavy
metal music :) -- but that might be a better fit. To an
educated listener of the genre, there is a qualitative
difference between, say, Def Leppard and Motorhead, and it's
not simply that one of them sucks and the other one is great.
The difference, to state it briefly, is that one of them
(Motorhead) is an authentic metal band, while the other is a
pop band faking it the metal arena. One of them believes in
their aesthetic, while the other is wrapping the aesthetic
around them in an attempt, basically, to sell records.
The same sort of thing is going on nowadays, I think, with
the hb genre.
doug
===== Doug Bassett
dj_bassett@yahoo.com
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