Sof’town Sleuths: The Hard-Boiled Genre Goes to Jo’Burg

Abstract

In an attempt to develop new constellations of world literature, this article places the writers of South Africa’sDrumgeneration within the orbit of the American hard-boiled genre. For a brief period in the 1950 s,Drumwas home to a team of gifted writers who cut their literary teeth in the fast-paced, hard-drinking, crime-riddled streets of Sophiatown, Johannesburg’s last remaining black township. Their unique style was a blend of quick-witted Hollywood dialogue, a private detective’s street sense, and the hard-boiled aesthetic of writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Writing in English in the era of the Bantu Education Act (1953),Drumwriters challenged attempts to retribalize the African natives with the counter discourse of an educated, urbanized, modern African. This article (dis)orients conventional treatments of bothDrumwriters and the hard-boiled tradition by tracing alternative lines of flight between seemingly disparate fields of study.