Abstract
Abstract Noting the affinity between modernist aesthetics and the vernacular “entertainment” of genre fiction—in particular, the detective story—this chapter charts the ways in which the style and tone of US detective fiction was intimately bound up with the growth of a Hollywood studio system organized around genres like westerns, adventure stories, musicals, screwball comedy, gangster dramas, and crime stories. The chapter charts the influence of the idea of film noir—conceived as a fusion of US hard-boiled crime fiction and German expressionist cinematography—on detective fiction in both text and film after 1940. It concludes by noting that in the last quarter of the twentieth century, hard-boiled detective fiction veered in two different directions: it was given new life as genre fiction by women writers, even as some notable practitioners of “literary fiction” took the idea of “mystery” in the direction of the fantastic.
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