Kevin,
Re your comments below:
> I'm not saying Chandler wasn't influential,
he
> obviously was. He's
> certainly my favourite, by a long, long shot. But
I
> don't think we
> should attribute things to him which were
already
> and are still
> pretty much standard items in P.I.
literature,
> archetypes if you
> will. All Chandler did was popularize them, and
he
> did it by writing
> very very well.
I think we may be syaing the same things differently enough
that it seems like we're disagreeing. A lot of what Chandler
did had been done before. Indeed every item on the "paradigm"
had been done at least once by an earlier writer. But in
Marlowe, the items were combined for the first time, and my
point was that this was how that particular recipe for PI
characters became so standardized. Certainly it was partly
Chandler's talent that made Marlowe archetypal, but it was
also Chandler's knack for synthesizing what had gone before
and presenting them in a new way.
Sam Spade is NOT the private eye archetype, nor is THE
MALTESE FALCON the archetypal PI novel. Similarly, neither
the Contintal Op (my personal favorite), nor RED HARVEST hold
those positions. Philip Marlowe and THE BIG SLEEP do. Hammett
was extraordinarily talented, too. I would argue that he was
a better writer than Chandler (without in the least
diminishing my huge admiration for Chandler). So it was more
than talent.
Why Chandler became more influential than Hammett? I don't
know. Talent, as you say, was part of the reason. Perhaps
timing was another. Perhaps the fact that Chandler was in a
position to be influenced by a decades worth of hard-boiled
fiction, while Hammett was not.
But that Chandler's Marlowe set the standard that hundreds
and hundreds of PI characters would alvishly follow over the
succeeding decades is a fact, whatever the reason.
> And attributing "the American setting" to
Chandler,
> particularly by
> American writers, is absolutely ridiculous.
Just
> because a few
> Commonwealth copycats tried to jump on the
bandwagon
> by aping the US
> setting doesn't mean much. Are you suggesting
that
> without Chandler,
> Ross Macdonald might have written about
Buenos
> Aires, Leigh Brackett
> about Alaska or Howard Browne about Tickle
Creek,
> Tasmania? No, they
> wrote about towns they lived in and knew.
What I'm suggesting is that, pre-Chandler, the PI's base as a
"large US city" wasn't as cast in iron as it was
post-Chandler.
For example, Raoul Whitfield wrote a series about Jo Gar, a
Filipino PI in Manila. You could argue that, technically,
since the Phillipines were stil US territory at that time,
that Manila was a US city, and Gar a US citizen, but I think
we'd both agree that, to the average BALCK MASK reader,
Manila was a foreign locale, and Gar a non-American
sleuth.
Off-hand I can't name any other PI characters that qualify as
well as Gar does. What I CAN say is that, post-Chandler, the
idea of a the hard-boiled PI being an American who worked out
of (if not always in) a large American city became so
iron-clad an ingredient of the PI novel that even writers
who'd never set foot in the US, like James Hadley Chase,
wrote about American private eyes in American cities, and
characters like Jo Gar, who weren't particularly numerous to
begin with, became even more rare.
> Hacks see the clothes and mistake it for the
man.
> Good writers see
> the surface stuff for what it is, and pick
and
> choose from it.
A lot of very good writers, most of them, in fact, chose the
entire roster of ingredients. And, as you say, the hacks did
the same thing as a matter of course.
JIM DOHERTY
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