Yeah, California (or at the southern part) is the big broken
dream of American mythology. It never rains in southern
California and all that. But, like Don Henley sang in The
Last Resort, "You call some place paradise, kiss it
good-bye."
It makes it an appropriate setting for sure, but I'm not so
sure it was originally so well-planned. The significance is
all in retrospect. It's more coincidence than anything than
any literary plan that Hammett, Chandler and Macdonald all
ended up there, and then they wrote what they knew. And a lot
of less talented writers and even hacks mistook setting for
substance. Easier to set their own books in a location that
someone else had done so well, than tame their own
backyards.
Thank God that yoke has been broken. John D. MacDonald did
Florida, Raoul Whitfield did the Phillipines, Spillane did
New York, Peter Corris does Sydney, Australia, Bill does
Texas, George does Washington, D.C., and Kerry does Hamilton,
Ontario. And the list goes on and on.
Hard-boiled fiction can be set almost anywhere. A hard-boiled
protagonist, detective or otherwise, who doesn't know his own
turf is a pretty pathetic one indeed. And I think that's one
of the genre's strengths -- that it's one of the few genres
that really, truly celebrates regional writing.
--
Kevin Burton Smith The Thrilling Detective Web Site http://www.thrillingdetective.com
Now online: The 3rd Annual Cheap Thrill Awards. Fiction by Laura Lippman, Scott Wolven and Anthony Rain. And Tim Broderick's ODD JOBS. -- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 13 Feb 2001 EST