--- Mario Taboada <
matrxtech@yahoo.com> wrote:
> <<Is in fact the Private Eye himself a
cliche?>>
> Yes, or an archetype, which is the same thing
but
> higher,thicker and deeper.
I agree. I think in ye olden days (circa 1925), just being a
hard-boiled private eye was almost enough. The last thing any
of us wants to see today, though, is that same character with
nothing new. I mean, Marlowe is unbeatable, but how many
Marlowes have there been in the past thirty years? Gracious
plenty, in my opinion. So we want him to be an alcoholic, or
a woman, or ethnic, or in some other diagnosable /
catagorical sense Other. We want different. BUT we also want
to know what genre we're dealing with, so if the writer is
going to mess with some of the conventions, others should
probably be left intact. This is one of the things that, to
me, makes a writer like Lawrence Block stand out. Matt
Scudder is an alcoholic, office-less, weapon-less,
license-less PI, but he's clearly a PI nonetheless, charging
a fee
(although not so much per day plus expenses), working police
contacts, getting info from informers, etc. He's
unconventional without just leaving the genre behind--he has,
in fact, changed the genre.
G.
===== George C. Upper III, Editor The Lightning Bell Poetry
Journal http://www.lightningbell.org/
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