Mae West has this to say about her hardboiled character Babe Gordon in her novel The Constant Sinner: "Babe was the living example of all that is immoral, when viewed through conventional eyes. But she herself was unmoral. For her, morals did not exist. She would not have known what a moral was if it could be made to dance naked in front of her."
Suggests that in the hardboiled at least one protagonist may have need or reason to view the scene through unconventional eyes.
--- In rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com, sonny <sforstater@...> wrote:
>
> jim,
>
> although i agree with you, i will disagree anyway.
>
> i firmly believe that a hard-boiled character can (or cannot) exist in a non hard-boiled book. and the phrase 'hard-boiled' can be replaced in the previous sentence with 'noir', etc.
>
> likewise, a non hard-boiled character can (or can not) exist in a hard-boiled book. and you can replace, etc.
>
> morality can be immoral (though not amoral). right can be wrong (and usually is).
>
> in sanity,
> s
>
> --- On Sat, 9/19/09, JIM DOHERTY <jimdohertyjr@...> wrote:
>
> From: JIM DOHERTY <jimdohertyjr@...>
> Subject: RARA-AVIS: Re: good news/terrible news
> To: rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com
> Date: Saturday, September 19, 2009, 8:57 AM
>
> Sonny,
>
> "but that's no fun. and certainly not hard-boiled. in fact it's absolutely cozy."
>
> While being hard-boiled (or noir for that matter) characters not necessarily moral, neither are they inherently immoral.
>
> The determining factor in hard-boiledness is certainly not morality or else a character like Chandler's Marlowe, forever agonizing over doing the right thing, or Hammett's Spade, resisting an almost overwhelming sexual temptation in order to turn in the killer of a partner he didn't even like, would never qualify as hard-boiled, let alone characters who wear the compasson on their sleeve like Macdonald's Archer, Thomas B. Dewey's Mac, or Pronzini's "Bill."
>
> Of course this has nothing to do with keeping the Philly Library open.
>
> JIM DOHERTY
>
>
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