RARA-AVIS: Inside/Outside

From: Kevin Burton Smith ( kvnsmith@colba.net)
Date: 26 May 2001


Scatalogic wrote:

>Wasn't Chandler the unfortunate recipient of an English Public School
>education? (translates as private school), perhaps that helped shape his
>writing and the "outsider" perspective?

Unfortunate? It seems to have helped turned him into one hell of a writer. And there's a simple reason he had an outsider perspective. He was an outsider. Chandler was always very conscious of it, and never really thought of himself as completely American.

And it's a funny thing. The weak characters, general artificialness and forced-down-your-throat bleakness some of you claim to find in British HB is exactly the sort of thing I didn't like about Boston Terrier's GOD IS A BULLET, which was -- here's the funny part -- far better received in the U.K. than it was in North America.

Marianne, we'll have to talk.

-- 

Kevin Burton Smith The Thrilling Detective Web Site http://www.thrillingdetective.com
Now online: The P.I. Poll Grab Bag. Fiction by Laura Lippman, Darren Subarton, Robert Hoyden and Kent Westmoreland. And the debut of FEMME NOIR. -- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .



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