RARA-AVIS: Re: More Likable P.I.s?

From: Frederick Zackel (fzackel@wcnet.org)
Date: 16 Sep 2009

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    (To continue a questionable thread ...)

    Probably not a zombie. ("Down these mean streets a man must go, shuffling and lurching, who is not himself alive or mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid, but decomposing .") Naw, probably not a zombie.

    OTOH, a werewolf? Well . Chandler also said that "Undoubtedly the stories about them [hard-boiled detectives] had a fantastic element." But probably he didn't mean werewolves.

    I can see the Lone Ranger fighting a werewolf. That whole silver bullet thing .

    Speaking of fantasy, which is a good segue into the publishing industry, while PI writers struggle to be published, the latest issue of PW says that .

    http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6696288.html?q=angel

    Vampires may be on the way out. (Yea!!!) And fallen angels may be coming in.
    (Huh?)

    "We've kind of exhausted where we can go with vampires," said Heather Doss, children's merchandise manager for Bookazine.

    Move over, Edward Cullen. Bad-boy angels are the new hotties. Like modern vampires, they can be gorgeous, immortal and otherworldly heartthrobs, unlike, say, zombies. "With all that rotting-off, they're not very sexy," said Justin Chanda, v-p and publisher of Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, who calls angels "safe gothic" and "romantic."

    Zombies not romantic? Huh. Oh, it's "the ick factor."

    (A good Christian friend of mine told me about another publishing trend in the Christian book biz where teenage missionaries tried to "save the souls of the undead, you know, the vampires, because everybody deserves a second chance." Yeah. Right. But I digress.)

    PW continues:

    "These are not your Sunday angels by any means," said Doss at Bookazine. After all, Candlewick is offering Angel in Vegas (not Bethlehem), and Carter's Evil? tackles such topics as masturbation and homosexuality.

    If I remember my bible .

    The Fallen Angels were called the Nepheraim.

    In the Bible the fallen angels mated with human women. I always figured it was rape. Not fueled by lust but by rage that God thought higher of humanity than of His angels.

    Those fallen angels had sex with our women! They didn't have their own? Or were ours so much better-looking? I know ours are smarter. And God loves them more.

    (Once you go human . you never go back?)

    Their bastards were the Nephilim. Their bastards were giants who walked the land!

    Part angel. Part human. All mean.

    So there's this fallen angel turned private eye walking down the mean streets of the city after dark .

    Naw. I think I'll pass.

     But what was the plot of that novel "Fallen Angel?"

    I forget who wrote it.



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