Re: RARA-AVIS: Re: Leo Malet (was Chandler's Influences)

From: JIM DOHERTY ( jimdohertyjr@yahoo.com)
Date: 15 Dec 2002


Kevin,

Re your response to my point below:

>> 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.
>
> At least those written by American authors. There
> may be more P.I.s
> in heaven and earth than dreamt of in your
> philosophy, Horatio.

Nestor Burma notwithstanding, American PIs working out of large American cities were not exclusively the creations of American writers.

And check out the word "almost" in my comment.

Chase was certainly a hack. Peter Chambers may be a hack (I haven't read him, so can't comment). And if there are French, German, or Italian PI writers writing about American characters in the US (there are French and German western writers writing about American characters on the American frontier, so maybe there are PI writers as well), they may all, uniformaly, be hacks.

But hacks or not, they are all showing the influence of what had gone before, and while Chandler can't properly be called the originator of any single item in the "Marlowe Paradigm," the "based in a large US city" item perhaps least of all, he is the first, as far as I can tell (and I may be wrong here; I certainly don't have access to all the pulp writers who receded Chandler), to put those items together in a single character who wielded a tremendously heavy influence on subsequent PI writers and their creations.

JIM DOHERTY

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