> <<I've always seen Macdonald listed with the
hard-boiled
> writers, so your comment puzzled
me.>>
>
> Yes, that's the conventional placed assigned him,
but we
> have to be careful with labels. This is rara-avis.
We like
> to make things complicated...
Keeping Archer as a hard-boiled PI complicates things a lot
more than saying he's not, if you ask me. It complicates the
comfy notion of what some consider to be hard-boiled, a
notion that keeps lesser writers mired in the cliché³ they
picked up off the movie versions of Maltese Falcon and The
Big Sleep, eh?
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