--- In
rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com, "Jacques Debierue"
<matrxtech@...> wrote:
> y. He's closer to P.D. James or Ruth
> > Rendell.
>
> That may well be the problem for the original
poster... while I don't
> dislike Hill, there is a certain cosiness that makes
me not take his
> stories all that seriously. I prefer authors who put
a little more
> distance between themselves and the reader, a little
more
> aggresiveness. Fun for reading at the beach, but not
all that
> memorable. His plots are good, though.
>
I'm not sure what you mean by 'cosiness' -- would that be
psychological distance, and lack of aggressiveness? It seems
you're implying that anything that's noir must be "cosy" -- a
label that I'm resisting because it's so often used
dismissively. I don't think that the mainstream UK police
procedural (represented here by James, Rendell, and in a
slightly off-center sense, by Hill) is cosy by any stretch of
the imagination. They all delve into dark corners of
psychology, they have protagonists constantly worn down by
the things they encounter, and contain plenty of other
aspects that make the writing more than superficial. Like I
said, they're not noir, but that's a categorization, rather
than a value judgment.
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