Kevin,
Re your comments below:
> 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.
Okay, I misspoke (or miswrote). My overall point was
Chandler's influence. My corollary point was the the
prevalence of large American cities as a home base for PI
characters is at least partly attributable to Chandler's
Marlowe working out of a large US city. Certainly the fact
that the large speicific US city is so often Los Angeles is
attributable to Chandler's influence.
> Well, yeah, but those guys (by the way, you
forgot
> Carter Brown,
> another wordpump) are, well, they're not
exactly
> Chandler.
My point was certainly not that the writers who slavishly
followed in Chandler's pattern were the equal of Chandler, or
even in Chandler's league. It was that so many writers,
tellingly even those who neither US citizens nor US
residents, were so influenced by Chandler that they wrote
according to the pattern he set.
> And, uh, Cheney's P.I.s were Brits, weren't
they?
Slim Callaghan was. I acknowledged this error in an earlier
post. I don't know about his other PI characters. Lemmy
Caution was certainly American, but, of course, he was a
federal cop, not a PI.
> 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?
No, and I think current events when the "hard-boiled" mystery
was in its embryonic state (Prohibition, gang wars, etc.) was
at least as responsible for the relentlessly urban settings
of HB crime fiction as the fact that Chandler used an urban
setting. But there was lots of rural crime, too. The
Dillingers, Nelsons, Floyds, Bonnnies & Clydes, etc., of
the era came from rural backgrounds and often operated in
rural settings. Yet the home base of the PI was always urban,
never rural or suburban.
> 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.
I don't say that Chandler originated all, or for that matter
ANY, of the points in the Paradigm. Hammett and Daly, to name
two, established a lot of them first. The Op and Williams
were both first person narrators operating out of large US
cities. Williams owned and operated his own one-man agency.
Alec Rush was an ex-cop operating a one man agency in a large
city. But the Continental Op was a Continental op. Williams
was never a cop. Alec Rush's single appearance was a third
person narrative.
What Chandler did was combine all of these points into a
total package that became the model for all (or at least
MOST) who followed.
> 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.
I certainly have no argument with that. But I don't think my
original point is, or should be, that controversial. Chandler
had and continues to have the greatest influence on the PI
genre, for better or for worse. The opening of the entry on
Marlowe on your site acknowledges as much.
One of the interesting things about really good PI characters
is to see them pull away from the Paradigm as their creators
develop their series.
Bart Spicer's Carney Wilde, for example, starts out fitting
the Paradigm in every respect, but in the course of the
series, his business grows and he starts to hire new
operatives until, by the last book, he owns and operates one
of the biggest investigative/security agencies in Philly. A
confirmed bachelor in THE DARK LIGHT, he's happily married by
EXIT RUNNING.
Stephen Marlowe's Chet Drum also follows the model in every
respect (a fact that Milton Lesser was probably acknowledging
in his choice of pseudonym), but to the familiar Chandler
recipe he adds one very original ingredient, world
travel.
Bill Pronzini's Nameless starts out by following the model in
every respect save his age, but in the course of the a long
and well-thought out series, he takes on a partner, splits
up, falls in love and gets married, takes on new employees,
changes his world-view, and ages with some realism.
Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer starts out as one of the most
slavish of Marlowe imitators (as Macdonald himself admits in
his intro to the omnibus volume ARCHER IN HOLLYWOOD), but in
the his regular use of the "crimes of the past" plot, and the
development of Archer as a truly compassionate man, not just
a tough and honest one, he adds new dimensions to the genre
that have had almost as great an influence as Chandler.
But, while all these writers took their characters in
different directions, they were all clearly influenced by
Chandler. Which is all I was saying.
JIM DOHERTY
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