At NoirCon 2008, one of the things Robert Polito and I are
going to explore, via the author George Lippard, are the
noirish elements of city crime novels in the 19th Century.
Lippard's The Quaker City is not noir, but it shares a dark,
hopeless sensibility with 20th century noir. Everyone in the
novel is a villain, everyone is involved in crime.
Although there is no caged Jesus in the basment,
Al, there is still lots of grim stuff that goes on in the
vaults of Monk-Hall.
Ed
The Quaker City, or the Monks of Monk-Hall, now
an online serial
http://www.omnigatherum.com/QuakerCityFront.html
NoirCon 2008
http://www.noircon.com/
Allan Guthrie <
allan@allanguthrie.co.uk> wrote:
THE
BASTARD is a non-investigative novella about a guy, Gene
Morgan, who's a literal and figurative bastard. We're told
his mother, a prostitute, had to be tied to a tree to avoid
killing him with a steak mallet when he was born. He doesn't
like her much (surprise, surprise), but when a guy shows him
naked pictures of her (it's definitely her: 'there too was
her left breast, nippleless where some drunken horseman had
severed it with his teeth') our
non-sympathetic-but-vastly-engaging protagonist fires 'three
slugs of steel-jacketed lead into the stranger's lungs.'
That's all on page one. There's a lot of extremely
transgressive behaviour thereafter.
BODIES ARE DUST is a superb novel about a corrupt cop who
deliberately gets his best friend killed and marries the
deceased's wife. But it's not a procedural -- in fact, in
NOIR FICTION, Paul Duncan calls it a 'devastating use of
domestic melodrama'. Stylistically, it's Hammett -- , but it
sinks into a level of emotional pain that's rare even for the
likes of Goodis. Makes your eyes bleed and your appendix
explode, so take care when reading. Until I just looked up
the entry in NOIR FICTION, I didn't think it had been
reprinted, but it was, in 1960 as HELL COP.
Are they hardboiled crime novels? They're both full of
various crimes and are written in a tough and colloquial
manner, so I guess so. They're also noir.
Al
Recent Activity
2
New Members
Visit Your Group
SPONSORED LINKS
Business writing
Writing press releases
Writing
Creative writing
Writing help
Yahoo! Movies
Enter your spoof
and you could win
an MTV Movie Award
Yahoo! News
Kevin Sites
Get coverage of
world crises.
Yahoo! TV
Staying in tonight?
Check listings to
see what is on.
.
The Bibliothecary, a blog of literary endeavour. http://bibliothecary.squarespace.com/
--------------------------------- Bored stiff? Loosen up...
Download and play hundreds of games for free on Yahoo!
Games.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 20 May 2007 EDT