--- Chris Routledge <
srcrout@ntlworld.com> wrote:
> Actually there are pretty good fictionalizations
of
> Pinkerton detectives in
> Conan Doyle, so hard-boiled detectives must
already
> have had some cultural
> weight - Daly may have popularized the H-B dick
in
> the US, but there are
> precedents both fictional and
non-fictional.
I have to disagree with this. Conan Doyle never wrote a
hard-boiled word in his life of which I am aware. He included
some private detectives, but so have many other people--Nick
Carter in the U.S., written by a number of people, being
probably the best example. However, there's nothing
hard-boiled about Nick Carter, either. My argument is that
CJD invented the hard-boiled private eye. And, actually,
that's not really my argument. Erle Stanley Gardner said it
in 1965, and probably earlier (I've never been able to get my
hands on his earlier piece, though), and it's been an
accepted piece of PI trivia since William F. Nolan
re-discovered "Three Gun Terry" (_Black Mask_, Spring of
1923--I can't remember the month off hand) in 1970.
Since then, CJD has been recognized by dozens of critics as
the inventor of the genre of hard-boiled fiction with his
"The False Burton Combs", _Black Mask_, December 1922, as
well as the inventor of the hard-boiled private eye in "Three
Gun Terry." I don't know of anyone else who has been
seriously put forth as the inventor of the PI sub-genre in
the past 30 years.
Although there are certainly ficitonal precedents to Terry
Mack, there are no non-fictional precedents of which I am
aware. None, that is, that bare any actual resemblance to the
hard-boiled characters that CJD wrote about. Of course, there
were fictional detectives as far back as Poe, and there were
non-fictional PI's in Europe from about 1835 (I know
Pinkerton was active in the US during the Civil War, but I'm
not sure how long before that we had actual detectives here).
But none of these look much like Terry Mack, which is what
intrigues me so much. It's as if he took one ingredient each
from about a hundred different sources, and came up with
something completely new.
G.
===== George C. Upper III UNC-Greensboro
(336) 393-0013 The city don't know that the city is
getting... a show with everything but Yul Brynner
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