Al,
Re your post below:
> Chase was known to have visited both Miami and
New
> Orleans. To claim that
> he never set foot in the US is
inaccurate.
I'd read that he'd never been to the US. I stand corrected.
Brief visits to Miami and New Orleans aside, however, his
lack of knowledge about the places he wrote about is
legendary.
> 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.
The paradigm was actually set years earlier in the first
Marlowe short story, "Finger Man," which predated ORCHIDS by
several years. Maybe Chase never read Chandlers short
fiction. Who knows? On the other hand, Chandler was often
irritated by the fact that the British regarded him as a
serious, important writer, while many Americans dismissed him
as a genre hack. Perhaps Chase WAS an early admirer.
> 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.
Lots more don't. The PI story HAS become more international
in recent years, but for many years, particularly the years
immediately post-Chandler, it was almost exclusively the
province of American characters.
There are always exceptions, but the large number of
characters who fit the Marlowe paradigm in every single
respect, particularly after "A" movies based on Chandler's
novels began to be released in the post-war era, is truly
staggering. For many years the Marlowe paradigm seemed almost
as rigid a set of standards as the rules governing the
writing of sonnetts.
JIM DOHERTY
__________________________________________________ Do you
Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
http://mailplus.yahoo.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/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 14 Dec 2002 EST