A poster the other day talked about how Thompson, Cain,
Chandler, etc wrote excellent tough prose without cursing, so
writers today should do the same...This really doesn't make
sense to me at all. Of course it's possible to write tough
without cursing but writers in the '50s were constrained by
the times. My guess is that Thompson and Cain, and especially
Goodis, would have loved to use more natural street language
but simply couldn't--their publishers wouldn't have all owed
it. Good writing usually overcomes this but sometimes the
lack of profanities in writers for that era sticks out for
me. I love Highsmith, for example, but sometimes her writing
seems awkard to me when she writes something like "he cursed"
without letting us know what the curse is...IMHO, George V.
Higgins really opened up the language of crime fiction with
the The Friends of Eddie Coyle, and later Willeford and
Leonard picked up the torch...Today, I think, crime writers
have much more freedom of language the 50's pulp writers, and
this is a good thing....Similarly, the language in crime
films has evolved. Think Double Indemnity vs. Pulp Fiction?
Because Double Indemnity was effective without cursing that
means that Pulp Fiction should've had no cursing because
Double Indemnity was a classic? Sorry, but that just doesn't
hold up for me..... J http://www.jasonstarr.com
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