sitting on the sidewalk like a baby

Back in the 1980s, Donald Westlake wrote a fascinating essay on genre, and the gay subtext in Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye. It was not well received, but nowadays few are aware of the homophobic response it prompted at the time.

Up until that point, a particular literary genre had nurtured the American vision of homosexuality, a genre whose point of departure was a burning curiosity to know what really goes on in the lower depths: the hardboiled crime novel. While the reform-minded social realists (Crane, Norris, Farrell, et al.) had never had much time for homosexuality -- perhaps sharing the notion that it was chiefly an aristocratic pastime typical of pallid Etonians -- the hardboiled writers from Hammett onward found it hard to keep away. Although gays are not as commonly associated with tough-guy fiction as racketeers, crooked cops or B-girls, the fact remains that all the main contributors to the genre -- Hammett, Chandler, Cain, Spillane, Ross Macdonald, John D. MacDonald, among others -- helped to elaborate a gay stereotype. As the influence of hardboiled realism spread, the incidence of homosexual characters increased dramatically in mainstream mystery writing.

She was always a great one for encouraging sin. Blue sin, red sin, fabulous purple sin.

You have to lean how to clean everything. Everything that was used.

Richard Stark’s Parker: Snapshots from the Road — A Postcard Collection

This project is something I've wanted to put together for quite a while, and you may look at it as a roadmap of Parker's and Grofield's travels presented here in postcard and collage form. For fictional cities, I've opted to use the state instead, and for Slayground and Butcher’s Moon all available hints have been used to roughly determine the location of Tyler — a Midwest city with a hotel called Ohio House and an amusement park that may have very well been somewhat inspired by Cedar Point. Although many of the novels do feature multiple locations, I've only taken a few into consideration and expanded across several postcards for the ones where it is thematically or narratively relevant. The cover of the album where these postcards now reside has also been included, and the collage is presented in chronological order with one exception. (x)