>Next up I'll be reading one of Bill Pronzini's
Nameless Detective books.
>Walker and Nameless must rank high when considering
hardboiled 1980s
>detectives.
Yep, for sure. The eighties is when I really became
interested in private eye fiction, and it was certainly an
exciting time for the genre, particularly the series P.I.
There were so many great series launched in the seventies
that were really hitting their stride about then. Pronzini,
Parker, Block, Hansen and the like had already demonstrated
there were new ways to use the genre, and in their wake
(and perhaps at least partly inspired by them, or at least by
Parker's commercial success) a whole bunch of new voices
(Grafton, Paretsky, Mosley, Burke, et al) entered the genre
in the early eighties. In retrospect, I can see that when the
slew of non-pale males and other fresh voices began to pop up
all over the genre, it was not so much a big shake-up as a
logical progression to what had been going on in the
seventies (and arguably, the sixties as well).
Of course, some of the other older writers (and older fans
whose sole qualification for a P.I. was seemingly whether
they could imagine Bogart playing them in a film or not)
began to resent the success of Parker and some of these other
uppity newcomers who were tinkering with the form. But the
genre would probably be a quaint museum piece by now,
appreciated only by collector geeks, or relegated to the
men's action racks (over there by the skin mags), if it
hadn't seen such a vigorous renewal and growth spurt in the
late seventies/early eighties.
--
Kevin Burton Smith The Thrilling Detective Web Site http://www.thrillingdetective.com Five years on... -- # 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/ .
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