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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