If our definition of hard-boiled stretches to include Dos
Passos (an old favorite of mine), then it should also be
broad enough to include B. Traven. I fell for THE TREASURE OF
THE SIERRA MADRE when I was 13 and it is still one of my all
time favorite novels.
Beyond TREASURE, there are the other novels and stories of
Gale the American down south, such as THE COTTON PICKERS and
"The Cattle Drive." Several of the short stories in the
Harlan Ellison edited STORIES BY THE MAN NOBODY KNOWS
(Regency 1961) include several originally published in that
later-day Bible of the hard-boiled "Manhunt." But in novel
length, I doubt anything by Traven is more hard-boiled than
his first novel THE DEATH SHIP, first published in Germany in
1926 and then by Knopf in 1934 in the US. "And don't you ever
think you get paid here. Not in your life-time. What you get
is advances and advances. Just enough to get drunk and get a
dame under your legs. Sometimes there is just a bit left to
buy a shirt, a pair of pants, or new clogs. You never get
enough to buy you a complete outfit. You see, if you look
like a respectable citizen, you might get some ideas into
your head and walk off and become alive again. Nothing doing.
Get trick now? As long as you haven't got money, and as long
as you are in rags, you cannot get away here. You stay dead."
Welcome to the good ship Yorikke.
On another topic, there was a string a few days ago about
books on writing. One specific to suspense writing worth
checking out is WRITING SUSPENSE AND MYSTERY FICTION edited
by A.S. Burack (The Writer 1977). This consists mostly of
articles from The Writer magazine but also includes reprints
of importance by Chandler, Haycraft, Sayers and Van Dine. Of
the articles, I remember finding those by Bill Pronzini, Joe
Gores, Stanley Ellin and John Lutz to be interesting and
useful.
There is also an article by Albert F. Nussbaum, robber turned
writer who we have discussed here before, that has a great
opening, beginning with the line
"I was sitting at one of the four-place tables in the mess
hall of the U.S. Penitentiary, Leavenworth, Kansas." One of
Nussbaum's major points is that among themselves prisoners
seldom deny guilt. Sometimes they even pretend to greater
offenses in order to gain status and acceptance...such as a
check passer pretending to be a bank robber.
Now I may never use that piece of knowledge but somehow it is
interesting to have learned it.
Richard Moore
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