----- Original Message ----- From: "JIM DOHERTY" <
jimdohertyjr@yahoo.com>
> 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.
Chase was known to have visited both Miami and New Orleans.
To claim that he never set foot in the US is
inaccurate.
Of his 80 or so novels, less than ten percent feature PIs.
He's known as a thriller writer, not as a PI writer.
However, given that he did write a few PI novels, let's look
at his most famous. Featuring PI, Dave Fenner, NO ORCHIDS FOR
MISS BLANDISH was written in 1938 and published the following
year. THE BIG SLEEP was also published in 1939. I find it
hard to see how the large American city setting element of
the Marlowe Paradigm (or any other element) established by
THE BIG SLEEP, could have influenced Chase when neither he,
nor anyone else, had read it.
Chase is hugely imitative. That's undeniable. But
Chandler?
And, Jim, lots of fictional private eyes operate outside
American cities. For a local example, Quintin Jardine's Oz
Blackstone (when he's not in Spain) and Paul Johnston's
Quintilian Dalrymple are both based in Edinburgh.
Al
-- # 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 : 14 Dec 2002 EST