Sorry, I havenīt mailed till now. My mailserver took a rest, suddenly
and unexpected.
The paper you wrote about post-Vietnam detetective Novels, is it on the
net somewhere I can read it?
And no, I havenīt read either Sympathy for the devil by Kent Anderson or Dog
Soldiers
by Robert Stone but I certainly will, as soon as possible.
Bengt E
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Sullivan" <DJ-Anonyme@webtv.net>
To: "rara-avis" <rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, August 05, 2009 6:46 PM
Subject: RE: RARA-AVIS: Vietnam noir
>
> I actually wrote a paper on that way back when, "From GI to PI: The
> Post-Vietnam Hard-boiled Detective Novel." I was writing long before
> Connelly, Burke or Cole were writing and was already finding a number of
> vets among the wave of new PIs: along with Crumley's Sughrue, Spenser,
> Peter Israel's BF Cage, Gregory McDonald's Fletch and Timothy Harris's
> Thomas Kyd were all veterans. The latter says:
> "For some reason clients trust inverstigators with war records. They
> assume you're going to be methodical and tough. I didn't see any reason
> to tell Joe Eleval that of the four soldiers in the picture, one had as
> oil-burning junk habit, one had been court martialed for black market
> activities, another was now in a Mexican jail for drug possession, and the
> fourth, whose name was Thomas Kyd, had spent a month under psychiatric
> observation in a military hospital. I didn't tell him that it had taken
> me over three years to get out of the habit of throwing myself flat on the
> street when I heard a car backfiring. Was it the picture of me with a
> crew cut and in officer's uniform that decided him? I'll never know. He
> frowned at it a long time."
> There have been many since, including those you note. Wasn't Rob Kanter's
> Ben Perkins also a vet? Wasn't Mac Bolan a vet, too? Wasn't that where
> he was when his family was destroyed?
> And, as you also note, there are a lot of bad guys who got their skills
> there.
>
> Of course, that's nothing new. I found that PI series writing seemed to
> have booms after wars, WW I, II and Korea before Vietnam.
> World War I
> Joseph Shaw in the intro to Hard-boiled Omnibus: "We returned from a five
> year sojourn abroad during and following the First World War . . ."
> World War II
> Lew Archer in Doomsters: "ever since the Army, big institutions depressed
> me: channels, red tape, protocol, buck-passing, hurry up and wait."
> (Another character in the book was defined by the Korean conflict: "Tom
> had played his part in the postwar rebellion that turned so many boys
> against authority.")
>
> And if you're interested in Vietnam noir, you should really check out
> Robert Stone's excellent Dog Soldiers.
> Mark
>
>> To: rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com
>> From: bengt@mediaimorronidag.se
>> Date: Wed, 5 Aug 2009 12:35:08 +0200
>> Subject: RARA-AVIS: Vietnam noir
>>
>> Still writing about James Crumley, thinking:
>>
>> Could one say there is a "new" genre inside the noir genre that could be
>> called Vietnam noir, possibly with the word trauma in the middle.
>>
>> There seem to be so many detectives (police or private) in (and also
>> outside) the American noir and hard-boiled genres who are Vietnam
>> veterans:
>> Harry Bosch (Michael Connely), Dave Robicheaux (James Lee Burke), Elvis
>> Cole
>> (Robert Crais) and more.. ???
>>
>> And C.W. Sughrue (Crumley), as well - and most? In the Sughrue novels
>> Vietnam seems to be alive so to speak more than in most other Vietnam
>> (trauma) noir, or am I wrong?
>>
>> Och then there must be loots of Vietnam vets on the bad side in American
>> noir fiction.
>>
>> Is it right to talk about noir after Vietnam, did the Vietnam war change
>> both noir and hard-boiled crime writing? And what will happen after the
>> Irak
>> war?
>>
>> Bengt
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------------
>>
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>> Yahoo! Groups Links
>>
>>
>>
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------
>
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