Re: RARA-AVIS: RE:Hardboiled Character

From: Scatalogic@aol.com
Date: 29 Apr 2002


In a message dated 29/04/02 22:01:23 GMT Daylight Time, BaxDeal@aol.com writes:

<< and lead to a great barroom brawl.
>>
Which would be uncompromisingly, irevocably, and downright hotdamn on the money hardboiled. Apart from myself, I am a coward and would slink off into the noir shadows while you hardboiled heads belaboured one another with broken bottles and pool cues. I must, however, agree that hardboiled is a literary style rather than a character trait. Most characters (good characters) are interesting because they are more than one-dimensional, there are exceptions I suppose, Dudley Smith = evil, has been one suggested here, but even ol Dud shows different facets to different folks being both evil and very very clever. I have to go back to Chandler saying of Hammet, that he took murder out of the drawing room and back onto the streets, or words to that effect. If there was that straight hb/cosy dichotomy, hb seems to have won out. How many new crime novels do you see with "The new Agatha Christie", or
"Following in the Lord Peter Wimsey's aristocratic foot prints", emblazoned across their covers? Maybe Marx was right (after Hegel) and the hb/cosy dialectic has produced a synthesis - hard cozy, or perhaps soft boiled. Can I have the cigar award now please.
"I may goddamn despise your vision of hardboiled but I'll slug any mother to within an inch of the boneyard who tries to stop you spieling it" as Voltaire once said (I think.) Cheers Colin

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