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Western
Noir
Has has been
noted many times, Dashiell Hammett took the cowboy hero of the
frontier century and put him on the mean streets of the urban
American century. He called him a private investigator.
Historically, of course, the Pinkertons and others had long been
operating on the frontier, often working as mercenaries for big
business, even, in the case of the Pinkertons, providing
intelligence for President Lincoln during the Civil War. Lincoln had
no confidence in his own intelligence service.
The traditional western frequently deals with myth rather than
reality. The truth of the frontier west was that it was like any
other epoch in history--money and power drove it. Cattle, gold,
silver, timber, railroad lines, banking--not too much different than
today when you think about the riches of the past few centuries.
And criminals weren't much different than they were today. I think
that's the greatest fallacy of all in the traditional western. That
somehow thieves and killers were different then than they are now.
To divorce yourself of this notion read anything about the criminals
of ancient Rome. Or pick up a book about the criminals of New York
and San Francisco (as by Herbert Asberry) in the early 1800s. Crooks
are crooks.
And that's what we hope these stories demonstrate. That crime
fiction is crime fiction, no matter the era it's set in. Elmore
Leonard's lads could be found in Brooklyn New York as early as the
late 1700s. They wore difference types of clothes and spoke a
different street lingo. But they were the same guys then as they are
now.
We hope you enjoy these stories and see in them how Hammett's cowboy
(and he did write some westerns) gradually became his private op and
his criminals.
Ed Gorman, August 2006
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