Wednesday, July 02, 2014

Dan J. Marlowe plus an urban hideout

I've been reading much Dan J. Marlowe on this vacation. Among other things, the man's career spanned the transition from the nervous 1950s to the more permissive 1960s, and Marlowe negotiated the shift better than he might have.  I'll be back with a full report, but in the meantime, here'a vintage hideout perfect for laying low in the heart of New York compact yet bustling state capital!!!

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

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posted by Peter Rozovsky at 1:23 PM

2 Comments:

Blogger Unknown said...

Ah, it is an address suitable for the lower streets of Poisonville!

As you are reading Marlowe, I wonder if people who have not lived in the era of his settings can fully appreciate the allusions. Perhaps that issue pertains to all crime fiction. For example, Doyle's original readers had a different sense of Holmes' world than we do; people who read Hammett when he was writing understood more than we do.

Perhaps the photography also provoked those thoughts. It looks a lot like neighborhoods where I lived the first 18 years of my life -- in the mean streets of McKeesport, a steel mill town south of Pittsburgh.

Finally, enjoy your vacation!

July 02, 2014  
Blogger Peter Rozovsky said...

That photo is of the apparently neglected read to a building that time forgot in an otherwise rather spruce section of Albany down by the Hudson riverfront. The area has pockets of an industrial and commercial past amid a forest of shiny buildings that have grown up around the stat4 Capitol--precisely the location of last year's Bouchercon's crime fiction conference.

In re eras and allusions, I always wonder why a given work of crime fiction seems dated while another, equally a product of its own era, does not. Marlowe knew how to build suspense and hold a reader’s interest, and he was hard-boiled all the way. He manages the transition to a new era, with the exception of one novel published in the early 1970s where he has a character familiar from previous books say something like, “Like, hey man.”

July 05, 2014  

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