Moorcock must be slipping. Hasn't he ever read "The Oakdale
Affair" or more tellingly, "The Mucker" (both by Edgar Rice
Burroughs)? Neither of the protagonists in these books
(especially the title character in the latter) was a
'gent.'
The Mucker's a great read, btw. I read all of ERB's stuff
when I was a kid. It doesn't weather all that well, but it's
still fun, as if Howard's stuff (which is better and darker,
for my money.).
All the Best,
Brian
At 04:58 PM 9/1/2003 -0400, you wrote:
>Sorry about my false posting just now. Sometimes my
pinkie hits an extra
>beat. I just picked up a copy of MARTIAN Q UEST by
Leigh Brackett
>(Haffner Press
>2002) which collects all the early Brackett science
fiction. The
>introduction by Michael Moorcock had a passage of
interest to this list.
>
>I've often thought about the elements of hardboiled
style that Brackett
>uniquely combined with romantic science fiction
tradition. Separately,
>I've also
>remarked upon the hardboiled aspects of cyberpunk
fiction. In this passage
>Moorcock begins discussing ERB's influence on
Brackett and moves into our
>area.
>
>"Burroughs could sometimes rise to her (Brackett's)
romantic vision but his
>heroes were fundamentally country (occasionally
arboreal) gents, while
>Leigh's,
>wherever their actual adventures took place, were
fundamentally urban rough
>diamonds. They tended to bring metropolitan
experience and values to the
>frontier. It was Ed Hamilton who described the likes
of The Continental
>Op not as
>detective stories but as urban adventure stories, and
Leigh approved of that
>description. She took as much from the likes of James
M. Cain, who came from
>Maryland to use the sharp street language of Southern
California as his
>inspiration, as she took from Burroughs. She
antedated cyberpunk by some
>fifty
>years, by bringing the spare, larconic prose and
psychically wounded
>heroes of
>Hemingway, Hammett and Chandler into the sf pulp,
rather as Max Brand
>(especially
>as Evan Evans) had brought it to the
Western."
>
>The only part that gives me pause is his last point.
I have read (and
>enjoyed) a fair amount of Max Brand and much of it
predates Hemingway,
>Hammett and
>Chandler. I have not read as much of his later
stories which would include
>those published under the Evan Evans name but I have
trouble imagining Faust
>changing styles as a result of reading Hammett and
the like and channeling
>that
>into stories published as by Evans. What I have read
of late Brand does not
>seem all that different from the Brand of the late
teens and early 1920s.
>
>But leaving that aside, I thought this was an
insightful comment, especially
>in the urban nature of Brackett's heroes.
>
>Richard Moore
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