rara-avis@icomm.ca wrote:
> Holmes brooded, he was a loner, he was tough, he
walked some mean
> streets and he was not himself mean--the more I go
on the more I can
> see the case for it--but I'd never consider him a
part of the
> hardboiled canon. He was a Victorian gentleman, and
the whole
> package of the era, his nature, his habits, Conan
Doyle's (or
> Watson's) writing, the mysteries themselves, all
combine to exclude
> him. The stories have been favourites since I was
10, but I
> wouldn't count Holmes in with Spade, Marlowe, and
all the rest.
> Some traits in common, but things are just shifted a
bit too far out
> of line.
One of the essential differences is that the mean streets
Holmes walked were, in the Holmes universe, essentially
correctable, and not irredeemably corrupted. There are two
kinds of horror stories: the ones in which an unnatural
horror intrudes into the natural world, disrupting the proper
order of things, and is fought and then expelled/killed; and
the ones in which characters come in contact with a horror
and discover that it is the universe itself which is horrible
and inimical.
To a lesser degree the Holmesian milieu is the former and the
hardboiled milieu is the latter.
jess
-- # 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/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 07 Sep 2001 EDT