If Cain, Thompson, Goodis, etc., represent a healthy break
within the hardboiled tradition, as I have granted they do,
that break came a long time ago, not too long after
Chandler's model. Hell, it was contemporaneous enough that
Chandler scripted (and in his mind improved) a Cain book for
the screen. I'm not sure it hasn't gelled into a mold as
proscriptive as the PI model.
Don't we now see "In the vein of Cain and Thompson" as often
as we used to see "In the tradition of Chandler, Hammett and
Macdonald," later to be replaced with "As good as Parker's
Spenser"?
As much as I like Jason Starr, Vicki Hendricks' Miami Purity,
Kent Harrington's Dark Ride, Terrill Lankford's Shooters,
etc. don't we immediately identify each as being an update of
one of those earlier authors -- for instance, Miami Purity is
a "female Thompson."
And didn't each of those earlier authors develop a
distinctive plot structure upon which many of their books
rely? (Willeford is one of the glorious exceptions to all of
these comments.) And I don't see anything wrong with that. I
like to see how convention and innovation play out against
each other. I'm just not willing to say any of these writers
are any less genre bound (even if they did much to identify
the nature of their chosen genre, as Chandler did) than the
PI writers. And I'm not sure I'd say their world view is any
more complex or nonreassuring than the PI writers.
I have to go to work now, but later I'll add that the modern
PIs are not nearly as all powerful and world-renewing as Juri
states, right down to David Brandstetter's solutions never
save his insurance company employers any money, often lead to
bigger pay-offs. More later.
Mark
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