Bill,
Re your comment below:
> Sure, that's one reason, same as for
swashbucklers
> and romances and epic
> fantasy. But the hardboiled stuff is
especially
> concerned with behaving
> morally--walking the mean streets and all
that.
> We've talked about that
> here before and how readers pattern themselves
on
> heroes like Marlowe or
> Travis McGee, not just in their imagination, but
in
> real life. It's still
> like that: George Pelecanos's books are about
males
> working at being men,
> having jobs, supporting families, staying
clean,
> learning lessons like how
> "last man standing, wins" cuts two ways.
Plus,
> there are gunfights and
> lots of sex, drugs, and rock and roll,
A lot of hard-boiled stuff is about behaving morally and
honorably. Certainly that's true of Chandler. But a lot
isn't. Do you really regard that towering testament to
violence and selfishness, Richard Stark's Parker, to be a
paragon of moral virtue?
By the same token, to say that the Parker novels are not
hard-boiled would be as absurd as saying that Parker is a
moral role model.
That's just one example. How about Lou Ford in Jim Thompson's
novels, or Keller in Lawrence Block's short stories? They're
fundamentally immoral men who perform fundamentally immoral
acts, but they're no less hard-boiled for their lack of
morality.
Behaving honorably and making moral choices is not a required
ingredient of hard-boiled crime fiction, nor, for that
matter, is it limited to hard-boiled crime fiction.
JIM DOHERTY
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