Word: gardners
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This is John Gardner's argument in his essay On Moral Fiction. It sounds simplistic, and--of course--it is. Gardner poses as the Gabriel for a new artistic responsibility, sternly blasting forth on the trumpet, calling on the forces of "Beauty, Truth and Goodness" to regroup...
...amazing thing about On Moral Fiction is that, despite the naivete of its fundamental tenet, it is filled with acute, valuable observations on contemporary art. Gardner's ideas make a lot more sense when he applies them to contemporary culture than when he states them in the abstract...
...takes guts today to write about the old virtues; Gardner obviously knows this himself. Every time he introduces one of the hallowed concepts he cherishes, he selfconsciously mentions how embarassed he is to be talking about "love," or "morality." Yet talk about them he does, and usually without giving us concrete definitions of what he means by them...
...Gardner tries hard; he struggles every now and then to pin down exactly what he means by one of these terms--"love," for example...
...than ever, to the benefit of their checkbooks and their readers, crime and mystery writers work at other professions. Britain's Don Rumbelow (The Complete Jack the Ripper) is a London bobby; Los Angeles Cop Joe Wambaugh only recently quit the force. In the tradition of Erie Stanley Gardner, many are lawyers, notably Harold Q. Masur (Bury Me Deep), Francis ("Mike") Nevins Jr. (Publish and Perish), Joe Hensley (A Killing in Gold), and, of course, Englishman Michael Gilbert, creator of the Patrick Petrella series and, be it noted, the author of Raymond Chandler's will. The remarkable...