> > Surely there are no truly hardboiled stories
that
>> dwell on cooking, beyond
>> quick meals at diners and sumptuous feasts laid
on
>> by corrupt city bosses.
>> Haven't people here made an inverse
relationship
>> between Spenser's
> > toughness and his cooking?
Well, not everyone. I think it's more a point of emphasis. In
the earlier books, it was just something Spenser did, among
many other things. But the food and drink stuff has certainly
become more prominent in later books, as Spenser becomes more
domesticated (which isn't necessarily the same as going
soft).
While there's nothing inherently feminine about cooking,
there is something vaguely embarrassing about guys who seem
to think not being able to handle themselves in the kitchen
is some kind of point of macho honour, or that being able to
cook is a mark against one's toughness or masculinity.
After all, people have definitely made connections here
between competency and toughness. And boasting about one's
incompetence, be it about not being able to boil water, if
you're a certain type of man, or about not knowing how to
change a car tire, if you're a certain kind of woman, is just
sort of sad, sad, sad.
A hard-boiled cooking story? Why not? I think a hard-boiled
story could be about almost anything.
To carry the cooking analogy a little further, I think
hard-boiled is more about the way things are cooked, not the
ingredients themselves.
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