At 03:58 PM 9/7/01 EDT, you wrote:
>To be a bit finickety a lot of Holmes is
Edwardian.
Yes, very finickety. Study in Scarlet was written in 1887
(can't get higher Victorian than that), but Valley of Fear is
1915, so Holmes as Modernist anyone? Defining by writers by
dates is no more useful than defining them by (naturalised)
nationality. It's just one factor.
>Not sure that Holmes
>believed that his world was correctable - he always
seemed fairly accepting
>of this, see the opium den in "the Man with the
twisted lip"
I'll give you this, but I still think the overall tone of the
stories (if not Holmes in all cases) is a Victorian one of
redemption and choice. You can condemn (and punish) someone
far more strongly if you believe they have chosen to do
something. Unemployed? Lazy, right? The problem is, writers
change their ideas as they go on. So Greene isn't hard-boiled
in the sense of say, Hammett, but was aware of what was going
on and could be hard-boiled in his own way. Seems strange to
me that a group of people interested in popular fiction
should be so bothered about making categories so rigidly. I
thought that was for Harold Bloom and pals. I reckon it's
quite interesting to find hard-boiled elements where you
wouldn't expect them. So Hamlet, well, he's not *so* far from
Phil Marlowe, if we leave out the family troubles.
Chris
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