The genres of PEACE

Adam Stephanides · 01 Nov 2000, 21:29 · from urth-v0030.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: Adam Stephanides <adamsteph at EARTHLINK.NET>
Subject: Re: (urth) The genres of PEACE
Date: Wed, 01 Nov 2000 21:29:42
Message-ID: <urth-v0030-0079 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0030/0079.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Michael Andre-Driussi wrote:
>=20
> >Part four is a hardbooiled detective story.  We have a crime being
> >investigated (forgery) and an alluring but treacherous woman whom the
> >"detective" gets entangled with.  The bogus treasure is out of THE
> >MALTESE FALCON, and Gold's dusty bookshop is out of THE BIG SLEEP.  Weer
> >even compares himself to "Humphrey Bogart or Charlie Chan." (213)
>=20
> That part is especially good, Adam.

Thanks.  I actually got the part four-detective story connection first,
and that encouraged me to go after the others.

> (Although technically: wasn't the
> bookshop in THE BIG SLEEP more an open, uncluttered, false front for
> something else?

Well, I was seeing the bookshop as just an allusion, not evidence for
any real parallelism with THE BIG SLEEP (although the decrepit Blaine,
with his "proud, cold eyes (184) does put me in mind of General (?)
Sternwood).  It's actually been a long time since I either read or saw
THE BIG SLEEP.

One thing I didn't mention in my original post was that my list of
genres was surprisingly cinematic.  "Screwball comedy" is really a film
genre, and part four owes as much to film noir, it seems to me, as to
written detective stories.  And parts three and five could also easily
be films.  Surprisingly, because there are almost no explicit references
to films, although there is that unexplained projector and can of film
in his memory office.  (Any other references aside from the Bogart
mention I quoted above?)

--Adam

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net