Stephen King's appearance on CBS's _Sunday Morning_ today
featured some interesting statements about how he got
interested in crime fiction. The mythical aspects of the
plotting and the PI's defiant argot were two I remember. But
the prevalent tone of the interview, studded by images of
paperback covers (many from Hard Case Crime) indicated that
the tough guy novels of the 50s and their illustrated covers
were basically
/amusing/. Maybe that, and the GG art on the covers, were
reasons for their popularity. But those covers also show
urban working- and under-class settings as well as clothing
and body language typical of people of these backgrounds.
Many of their readers identified more with the stories of
Cain,. McCoy, Thompson, or Goodis rather than a high-brow,
culturally sanctioned one. Police and racketeers were many
readers' antagonists, as well as the writers'. What seems
amusing or camp today was much more than amusing when the
1950s crime novels were being written and read. The _Sunday
Morning_ focus on those sexy outrageous covers, while good
for Hard Case Crime now that King is their latest author,
trivialized the genre (as Hard Cases writers, both classic
and contemporary, certainly do not).
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 09 Oct 2005 EDT