Kev: Over-compensation is viewed as a negative these days, if I corectly catch the media drift regarding pay for corporate executives. Remember the good old days when stock options and performance bonuses were guaranteed to focus top talents' attentions on bottom lines? Was over-compensation over or under sold, do you think?
Narratives about the misdeeds of the commercially powerful are perennially popular, but are there any new noir yarns that take place in the milieu of low-skilled workers displaced in the shift from an industrial to a service and information-based economy? Or has noir been displaced by reality TV?
Best,
Kerry
----- Original Message -----
From: Kevin Burton Smith
To: rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Sunday, May 31, 2009 6:27 PM
Subject: RARA-AVIS: Re: talking tough
> Somehow I think if Child ever got his wish things wouldn't go too
> well for him.
Maybe he'd be tougher if he posed in a leather jacket or brandished a
pool cue.
I dunno. This whole notion that you have to be "tough" to write hard-
boiled fiction is a little hard to take too seriously. Usually it's
just harmless posing, a sort of wink-wink, but some people really fall
for it. It's silly.
Not as silly, perhaps, as the book I'm reading now, which goes out of
its way to sound totally tough all the time ("red as a used tampon,"
etc.), but still, ultimately, pretty silly.
Anyone trying that hard is probably trying to over-compensate.
Kevin Burton Smith
www.thrillingdetective.com
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