{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/2809",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 2809,
    "subject": "\"Forget it, Number Five, it's Chinatown.\"",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2001-08-25T17:11:22+00:00",
    "last": "2001-08-25T17:11:22+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0030-0673@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Tony Ellis",
        "address": "littlesense at necronomicon.co.uk"
      },
      "date": "2001-08-25T17:11:22+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) \"Forget it, Number Five, it's Chinatown.\"",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "Dan wrote:\nOoh now this gets interesting. How, if the ancients were so sold on\nreason, did they manage to be so ridiculously wrong about the way the\nworld was put together?"
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Would these be the ridiculous Pythagorean scholars who postulated a\nspherical Earth moving in a circular orbit about a central fire in the fifth\ncentury BC, or the ridiculous Aristarchus of Samos who did the same thing in\n250 BC? :-)"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "(and I'm inclined, personally, to think that the ancients\nweren't so ridiculously wrong and the moderns not\nnecessarily spot on) ..."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Agreed. And I think you're right: broadly speaking, the ancients applied\nReason through discourse, the Moderns through experiment. But then, the\nModerns had access to a whole technology of glass instruments and vacuum\npumps with which to be experimenters."
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "My own example of\npostmodern detective lit was going to be film noir but I don't really\nknow the genre well enough to give examples."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Off the top of my head:\n\nThe Third Man, which just about invents the genre: Holly Johnson, writer of\ncowboy stories, attempts to impose his own naïve form of narrative on post\nWWII Vienna. But the solution to his dogged quest to find the Bad Guy who\nkilled his friend is the discovery that the friend -is- the Bad Guy.\n\nKiss Me Deadly: Mike Hammer slugs his way right out of the hard-boiled\ndetective genre and into the terrifying, unsolvable world of the atom bomb,\nin of the most jaw-dropping dénouements in the genre's history.\n\nChinatown: gumshoe Jake solves the murder mystery, but precipitates tragedy,\nnot a restoration of order.\n\nThere you have it: solving the mystery in detective fiction brings order,\nsolving it in film noir brings the discovery that there -is- no order.\n\nBroadly speaking I would agree with what I take to be the general consensus:\nthat this is precisely the sort of mystery Gene Wolfe does not write. But at\nleast one important exception springs immediately to mind: The Fifth Head of\nCerberus. In both the first and the final novellas, the 'detective' far from\nsolving a mystery becomes ensnared in one. The universe remains corrupt and\nunsolved.\n\nIn fact it's just hit me: the seedy underworlds of St Anne and St Croix are\npure film noir, complete with criminal kingpin, bent cops, and femmes\nfatales. Does anyone else think \"Mean Streets: The Fifth Head of Cerberus\nConsidered as Film Noir\" sounds like a good title for a Wolfe essay?"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}