Just to clarify...by 'over the top prose' I mean that in
GREEN ICE Whitfield's writing is very hard-boiled, even
occasionally becoming borderline self-parody. In FRIGHT
Woolrich seems to write in a very ornately formal way. His
descriptions of Press's intended, Marjorie, are almost poetic
or at least the noir equivalent of poetic. This is a marked
contrast to the more traditional noir economy of word use.
Thus, both Woolrich and Whitfield, in these novels at least,
adopted what I am describing as a kind of 'over the top'
style, albeit in very different ways.
My question is did either author intend for these stories to
turn out this way or were they merely the results of
different kinds of literary experimentation?
Any insight on either author would be greatly
appreciated!
Thanks! Harry
Quoting
harry.lerner@mail.mcgill.ca:
> I just started FRIGHT and among my first reactions
was that it, at
> least so far, reads very much like a lot of the pulp
stories that came
> out in the 1920s and 1930s. In particular, as I was
reading the first
> few chapters of FRIGHT I found myself thinking back
a few years to when
> I read Raoul Whitfield's GREEN ICE that originally
came out in
> serialized form in BLACK MASK. What made the
connection for me was the
> almost, but not quite, over the top prose that both
authors apparently
> had a tendency to use, at least in these two
stories. Even though they
> sometimes flirt, perhaps inadvertently, with
self-parody, they managed
> to largely get away with pushing the envelope (in
the above cases
> anyway). What I would be curious to know is, for
either Woolrich or
> Whitfield, if this was intentional or merely a
fortuitous turn of
> events that resulted from different forms of
experimentation.
>
> Best,
> Harry
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