Miker wrote:
>LAURA has been suggested as an early noir by a female
author, but I didn't
>think there was enough sweat and desperation to award
it the noir tag.
Uh, that would probably be the film version, not the book
version. And I'm sure most of you don't think even the film
version qualifies. I'm not sure, myself. Maybe
gothic/romantic/cosy noir, of a sort. Certainly not mean
streets noir, anyway.
But worth seeing, hard-boiled or not. I always thought
McPherson should have been a little more desperate and on
edge.
Oh, and speaking of Gerald Kersh, a character in Michael
Collins' CADILLAC COWBOY is called Gerald Kirsch. I
wonder....
As for James Ellroy, we just rented JAMES ELLROY: DEMON DOG
OF AMERICAN CRIME FICTION, a Austrian TV documentary that
came out about the time of the publication of WHITE JAZZ.
It's like rubbernecking a car wreck - fascinating, but then
we feel guilty for looking. This isn't the calm, articulate
Ellroy that we saw on that PBS PAGE TO SCREEN thing a few
nights ago, this is the tiresome pretentious jerk who we all
know and love, playing up the myth of big bad America for the
Europeans. He wants us to take him seriously, but he comes
off as a Robert Leslie Bellem character.
Hmmm.... Ellroy as the bastard child of Bellem and Jim
Thompson, with delusions of Proust. anyone buy that?
--
Kevin Burton Smith The Thrilling Detective Web Site http://www.thrillingdetective.com -- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
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