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Thinking back on why Harry Potter works as a detective story I realised it also clearly works as part of The Western genre.
-The Half-Blood Prince contains an excellent pistols at dawn sequence and even an old style shoot out in its conclusion.
-Aside from the obvious wands=guns, brooms=horses analogy (which I'm sure was mentioned somewhere previously) there's also the heavily reinforced revenge structure (present in My Darling Clementine, The Unforgiven to name but two). Voldemort has not only killed Harry's father and mother but later his uncle and Dumbledore. In essence it's "You killed my Pa(and Ma)!" to the power of three.
-The role of Hogwarts can be conflated with that of the community in Westerns. Hogwarts as well as its ideals and self contained law, like the often insular community in westerns, always remains at the centre of conflict. Any unravelling of this society and balance whether from internal or external factors is seen to be of high importance to the story. Time and time again Harry, like the archetypal Western hero, asserts himself as a valid member of this community by combating anything that could endanger its social structure.
-Harry is the epitome of the archetypal Western hero as Yves Kovacs describes it:
"Sheriff, or outlaw, he assumes the condition of an adventurer in spite of himself, with a patient sang-froid, so that he always appears to us to be on the defensive and poses as a witness or a victim of an implacable world". |
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