Mark,
Re your comment below:
"As we all know, Chandler wrote that Hammet 'gave murder back
to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to
provide a corpse.' The above strikes me as ancillary to that:
hardboiled/noir gave corpses back their lives, so they were
real people, not just puzzle pieces."
That strikes me as the real crux of the thing. Murderers in
traditional mysteries killed people for reasons, too, and, if
the characters had been believable, rather than stick figures
pushed around a puzzle board, they probably would have seemed
like believable motives.
What hard-boiled/noir did (and this is not to say that there
were NEVER traditional mysteries that did the same thing) was
create people you could believe in, so that when they killed,
or were killed, you could believe the reasons for the
deaths.
JIM DOHERTY
__________________________________________________ Do You
Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam
protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
RARA-AVIS home page: http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rara-avis-l/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email
to:
rara-avis-l-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 01 Sep 2006 EDT