--- In
rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com, "caroli1975"
<karabair@...> wrote:
> I'm not sure what you mean by 'cosiness' -- would
that be
> psychological distance, and lack of
aggressiveness?
Part of it may be cultural: the distance between two British
speakers is not at all the same as between two American
speakers. This includes the distance between a writer and his
reader.
>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.
Absolutely not, that's not what I was trying to say. I was
using
"cosy" (spelled like that) in order to convey a certain
mateyness between writer and reader, something that most
American crime writers avoid. The hardboiled ones all avoid
it.
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.
>
Yes, definitely a categorization, and an eternally
fluctuating one, be it American or British noir.
Best,
MrT
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