In a message dated 07/09/01 03:07:10 GMT Daylight Time,
anthony.dauer@verizon.net writes:
<< I realize there are those who don't agree, but I see
Holmes as being
hardboiled. Holmes is what a Victorian England
hardboiled would be ...
to each character their culture, their time, and their
place ... he's
way to violent and in the wrong setting to be cozy. And
while there may
be an argument for soft-boiled due to his lack of
sexual conquest, I'd
be willing to give 'im that once considering the
culture and person he
was representing. There was plenty of illicit sex in
Victorian England,
but Holmes represents the ideal not the reality.
>>
I must concur, largely cos Holmes was where all my crime
reading started and going on to the largely hardboiled stuff
I read now seemed like a very natural progression, (it also
helps that I am an ex-employee of the City of Westminster
Archives Centre, which has a lot of stuff on the darker side
of Victorian London, I think the comparison with 20C LA is
valid.) While I could go on for hours about this, I won't, if
anyone wishes to discuss at further length please mail or
direct me to a new strand or whatever. I would be interested
to hear to what extent Chandler Hammet et al, read or
confessed a debt to Doyle. I do think that their is an
argument to be made that the stylistic "hard boiling down"
(cringe) of the Homes stories to the essentials and the
relatively sparse (for the time) prose style make Holmes to a
certain extent proto-hardboiled. By the way anyone interested
in dark London should try Peter Ackroyd's Dan Leno and the
Limehouse Golem, which is a superb Jack the Ripper, Karl
Marx, music hall concoction which is not at all to be sniffed
at. Colin, the boy with the thorn in his eye
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 07 Sep 2001 EDT