MrT wrote
"Why does the Horse figure so rarely in hardboiled fiction?
It surely
(with the Bull) is a central metaphor of Vigor and
Nobility."
Possibly because of the horse's ties to westerns? While
hardboiled certainly has very deep roots in the western (as
Cawelti so convincing shows), it usually, particularly in the
early days (with some exceptions like the town-taming, Red
Harvest plot), employed an urban setting. The western often
focused on the encroachment of the "civilization" of the
modern world upon the frontier, thereby making the hero's
frontier skills obsolete and leading him to ride towards the
horizon, just ahead of schoolmarms, politicians and cars. At
least in movies, the horseless carriage (or bicycles, in the
case of Butch Cassidy) often represents
"the future."
In hardboiled, the frontier is no more, but the loner hero
still finds its vestiges, often hidden behind, even shored up
by the trappings of civilization. Perhaps the mention of a
horse would feel anachronistic in the modern world and call a
little too much attention to the genre's lingering debt. Of
course, that hasn't stopped many hardboiled writers from
eulogizing horse-power, in the form of that horseless
carriage.
Mark
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