On 17 November 2002, Bludis Jack wrote:
: The only question I have . . . wasn't Dos Passos trilogy
much earlier in
: the century?
It might seem like it, but the dates are: THE 42nd PARALLEL
(1930), 1919
(1932) and THE BIG MONEY (1936). That trilogy has a lot of
admirers on the list, and I'm one. I think it's one of the
greatest works of American writing of the twentieth
century.
Books like Cain's THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE (1934) and
McCoy's THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON'T THEY? (1935) deal directly
with the Depression. Hammett ignores it in THE THIN MAN
(1934), doesn't he? But that's in the same way that the
screwball film comedies did, for escapism. Is it part of the
background in, say, Cain's DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1936)? I don't
think it was mentioned in the Latimer book I read, which was
from 1935. There are people down on their uppers, but you'd
see the same lowlifes and hoods twenty years earlier or
later.
I suppose crime writers didn't have to be any different than
other writers: they could write about the Depression, or not.
Jim Thompson was out there living it and working for the WPA,
but he wrote about it later. Hammett was boozing and mostly
not writing. Chandler was out of work from the oil business,
if I remember right, and turned to writing to make money. Did
Okies or Hoovervilles crop up in any of his short stories? I
don't remember any. Prohibition wasn't repealed until 1933,
and the gangster network didn't disappear with it, so that
provided a hoods, guns and violence, without the
poverty.
One would think that crime writing would be closer to the
down-and-outers, the street life and gangsters, but on the
other hand the pulps weren't for realism, they were ten cent
tickets to somewhere else.
Bill
-- William Denton : Toronto, Canada : http://www.miskatonic.org/ : Caveat lector.
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