Jim wrote:
>Even today, the vast majority of PI
writers,
>characters like Dick Francis's Sid Halley
>notwithstanding, ARE American, which was my
point.
Was it? I thought your point was Chandler's influence on
everyone. Sure, most P.I. writers are still American, but
that also explains why most of them set their stories in
American cities. Chandler's influence, at least as far as
setting goes, is fading rapidly. P.I. writers nowadays (and
even pre-Chandler) tend to write what they know, which is
often where they live (or at least, have lived).
>And a surprisingly large number of
non-American
>writers who wrote PI stories, such as James
Hadley
>Chase, Peter Cheney, and Peter Chambers (not to
be
>confused with the PI character of the same name)
used
>American characters and settings precisely because
the
>PI story was so closely identified with the
US.
Well, yeah, but those guys (by the way, you forgot Carter
Brown, another wordpump) are, well, they're not exactly
Chandler. Though, in fact, Chandler doessort of back up your
argument, since he was a British citizen when he wrote most
of his work (maybe he was influenced by himself?) And Ross
Macdonald, who was half Canadian. My guess is they wrote
about southern California, not because of what their
passports or birth certificates said, but because of where
they lived.
And, uh, Cheney's P.I.s were Brits, weren't they?
To put it another way, do you really think someone like, oh,
George Pelecanos, would still write about Washington, DC, if
he grew up and lived in Shepherd's Bush, London?
You can credit Chandler with a lot, but the American setting
for P.I.s isn't one of them. Especially since most P.I.
writers are, as you point out, American.
>Certainly this has changed to a degree in
recent
>years, but the hard-boiled private eye character
is
>still widely regarded as an American, just as
the
>traditional "cozy" amateur is still widely
regarded
>as a Briton, despite the large influx of
American
>writers and characters in recent years.
Oh, no denying that. But "widely-regarded" or not, more and
more non-American (and non-male and non-white) writers are
using the hard-boiled P.I. genre to tell their own stories,
often to very great effect. The genre has proven to very
adaptable, and offers a powerful literary tool for cracking
open the lid and getting a good look at the works.
What good writers (as opposed to hacks) got from Chandler is
the notion of really crawling into a setting, and making it
come alive. Hacks saw just the Los Angeles setting, good
writers saw beyond it, to what Chandler really did. And I
would argue that the very strong regionalism of the P.I.
genre, be it Parker's Boston, Malet's Paris, Grafton's Santa
Theresa, Peter Corris' Sydney or Christopher Moore's Bangkok,
is one of Chandler's true legacies.
--
Kevin -- # 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/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 06 Dec 2002 EST