On Feb 5, 2008, at 4:46 AM,
rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com wrote:
> Dorothy Dunn anyone? She was a rare bird in Black
Mask once the
> magazine
> became hardboiled under Joseph Shaw's editorship
(there were more
> female
> writers before that). She wrote one novel (IIRC),
MURDER'S WEB, in
> 1950. I
> haven't read it, has anyone?
Yep. I'm not near my notes, but I recall (I think) it was a
little uneven. Ambitious, though -- an attempt to track the
effect murder and crime has on all it touches; a theme David
Lapham's great STRAY BULLETS comic also plays around
with.
Dunn's short stories are a little more hard-boiled; full of
nasty little twist endings and the usual lowlifes, thugs,
killers, bar girls, etc.
Not bad for a school teacher.
> Earl and Marion Scott were a married couple who
wrote hardboiled
> crime for
> Black Mask in the late twenties and early thirties.
I haven't read
> their
> stories and never read any comment on
them.
Still trying to track down some of their stories. The one
book of Marion 's I've read so far (and again, I'm not near
my notes) is about as far from hard-boiled (or any sort of
quality) as you can get. Just a horrid, stilted and lame
example of the worst of the "had I but known" school.
(Anyone who thinks the pulps -- even in their hay day, even
the very best pulps -- were consistently full of great
stories is in for a shock. There's a reason the same stories
keep getting reprinted. Judging from the novel, I don't have
high hopes for Earl and Marion.)
> There are some noirish touches in Canadian Pamela
Fry's one crime
> novel,
> HARSH EVIDENCE, from the early fifties.
Another book that has -- so far -- eluded me. Was she
translated into Finnish?
And Debbi wrote:
> Certainly, none of these women would be mistaken for
cozy writers.
That's been one of the problems compiling this book. They're
not cozy, some of these writers, but do they qualify as
hard-boiled?
How hard do you have to be to be hard-boiled? How tough? How
colloquial?
Or am I subjecting these women writers to to a stricter
criteria than male authors?
Maybe it's me, but sometimes I feel that women authors often
have to have to pass a harsher litmus test on this list (and
elsewhere) than many male writers.
Is it our own biases at play here, or are we (or I) maybe
just hesitant to challenge the actual hard-boiled stature of
some of our
(my) favourite male authors?
It's easy enough to peg a dese-and-dose caveman character as
hard- boiled, but the definition of what qualifies as
toughness in a character or a piece of fiction gets more and
more slippery as you move towards the more compassionate,
more nuanced, less knuckle- dragging end of the scale, and
becomes a virtual slip'n'slide for some once you get to
authors who tinker a little with the form or dare to inject a
little sticky humanity into the works. Especially, it seems,
if they're female.
If we include, say, Lew Archer or Dan Fortune, why not Kinsey
Millhone? Or Quinn in Margaret Millar's HOW LIKE AN ANGEL,
for that matter.
If Bill Crane is hard-boiled, why not Stephanie Plum?
The same thing with noir. Would MILDRED PIERCE, for example,
a pretty domestic kinda book about a not-so-perfect mother
and daughter, be considered noir if it were written by a
woman best known for her gothic or cozy melodramas? Or would
it simply be dismissed a particularly tawdry soap
opera?
Kevin Burton Smith The Thrilling Detective Web Site 1998-2008
10 Years of P.I. Thrills
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