Hard-boiled Detective Fiction Research Articles

하드보일드 추리소설의 인종적 변용—월터 모즐리의 이지 롤린스 연작을 중심으로

This paper aims to closely examine the racial transformation of the traditional hard-boiled detective fiction in Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins Series. Although Mosley’s Easy Rawlins Series makes use of genre conventions of hard-boiled detective novels (such as displaying a pessimistic view of the world or introducing independent detectives), it establishes a new paradigm of race and criminality that goes against the tradition. While the ruling class is represented as the root of social evil in hard-boiled detective fiction, racism is the cause of social oppression and political corruption in the Easy Rawlins Series. When the hard-boiled detective is able to maintain absolute independence, Mosley's detective has to compromise with governmental authority due to his racial position. Whereas the hard-boiled detective novels define blackness as criminality, whiteness embodies criminality in the Easy Rawlins Series. This paper concludes that, unlike the traditional hard-boiled detective fiction which reaffirms racial hierarchies, Mosley’s Easy Rawlins Series presents a radically different type of hard-boiled detective novel which challenges the dominant structural ideologies of race.

British Detective Fiction 1891-1901: The Successors to Sherlock Holmes, by Clare Clarke

Reviewed by: British Detective Fiction 1891–1901: The Successors to Sherlock Holmes by Clare Clarke Caroline Reitz (bio) British Detective Fiction 1891–1901: The Successors to Sherlock Holmes, by Clare Clarke; pp. xi + 166. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, $74.99, $59.99 ebook. Clare Clarke’s British Detective Fiction 1891–1901: The Successors to Sherlock Holmes begins like any good detective story: with a missing person. That person is Sherlock Holmes, who died tumbling over Reichenbach Falls with archnemesis Professor Moriarity in “The Final Problem” (1893). Clarke examines six different authors who published detective fiction during “The Great Hiatus,” the decade between Holmes’s fall and Arthur Conan Doyle’s revival of the Great Detective in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901–2). Focusing on this decade allows Clarke to explore the colorful characters who stepped through the Sherlock-shaped hole. More importantly, the book adds to an ongoing critical correction. Scholarly work on the genre has been theorized disproportionately around the Sherlock Holmes canon. Clarke persuasively and engagingly makes the case that stories that “enjoyed widespread circulation . . . but . . . did not conform to later-decided rules of the genre” allow us to see “what the post-Sherlock fin-de-siècle detective narrative could be and do” (7–8). While some of these stories and series are derivative of Holmes (from archnemeses, to vulnerable female clients, to twelve story collections), and while Holmes is frequently invoked in reviews and marketing as both yardstick and lure, some of these stories represent a real departure in character and tone, including a female Romany pawnbroker, a ghost detective fighting man-eating plants on the “blurry boundaries” of the detective story, and an amoral detective-cum-murderer (150). These innovations challenge some sacred ideas about the genre, such as the immunity of detectives, the American origin of hardboiled detective fiction, and the conservative cultural work that the whodunnit allegedly provides. This book is a sequel of sorts to Clarke’s earlier and excellent Late Victorian Crime Fiction in the Shadows of Sherlock (2014); like that text, it balances close readings of significant overlooked figures with a broad overview of historical and publication contexts. Indeed, if recovery anthologies have been organized around gender or nationality (for example, Nick Rennison’s Sherlock’s Sisters: Stories from the Golden Age of the Female Detective [2020] or LeRoy Lad Panek and Mary M. Bendel-Simso’s Early American Detective Stories: An Anthology [2014]), Clarke is “particularly eager to uncover the lesser-known places and the publications in which late-Victorian British readers consumed detective fiction” (154). Clarke’s attention to the original publication (and republication) of these stories in regional weekly and daily newspapers is a tremendously useful addition to our [End Page 689] understanding of the popular fiction of this period. As Clarke writes, we are familiar with the “well-known account of white-collar London middle-class male workers on their commuter trains reading sixpenny or shilling monthlies, like the Strand,” the home of Sherlock (154). But regional newspapers outnumbered and outsold London publications from the mid-nineteenth century until the 1950s. An eager cadre of writers emerged (think George Gissing’s 1891 New Grub Street) to meet a newly literate reading public and drew their topics from a late-nineteenth-century culture anxious about scientific discoveries, shifting gender roles, imperial expansion, urban poverty, and religious crises. Noting that she “simply [wrote] to order,” L. T. Meade’s complicated female criminals replaced Holmes in the Strand (1891–1950) and ticked several of those boxes (qtd. in Clarke 16). While Madame Koluchy and Madame Sara are perhaps the most well-known of Clarke’s subjects, her chapter on Meade goes beyond showing the ways in which femme fatales are brought to heel by the middle-class masculine professional competence of scientists, lawyers, and police. These stories, Clarke notes, feature strong secondary female characters, including a New Woman journalist, a bacteriologist’s assistant, and a woman brought in to assist Scotland Yard who is like a “bloodhound when she scents the prey” (32). Popular fiction at the end of the century is a fertile ground for female characters. C. L. Pirkis’s Loveday Brooke, frequently compared to Sherlock...

The Complex Art of Murder

Abstract This article demonstrates the literary value of hardboiled detective fiction. I consider two different arguments for literary value, one based on Martin Heidegger's philosophy of art and the other on the tradition of form-content inseparability in literary aesthetics and literary criticism. The former is reliant on the genre's combination of formal complexity with substantive superficiality and the latter on the combination of formal complexity with substantive complexity. I employ Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep (1939) and Nelson DeMille's Plum Island (1997) as examples, focusing on the question of whether they have thematic content. I demonstrate that the novels instantiate substantive themes—about corruption, alienation, and moral amnesia—in consequence of which the argument for form-content inseparability is more compelling. I conclude by suggesting that form-content inseparability underpins both the literary value of hardboiled detective fiction and the genre's capacity for aesthetic education.

Detective Facts|Detective Fiction: Listing the Tools of the Trade

Dashiell Hammett is often regarded as the founding father of the American school of hard-boiled detective fiction, which features tough male detective figures, organized crime, and treacherous wome...

Suki Kim’s The Interpreter

This article argues that Suki Kim’s The Interpreter (2003) is influenced by and, at the same time, critically revises early American hard-boiled crime fiction, the genre with which it is least likely to be associated. Although dead bodies do not pile up in the novel, the urban world in which Kim’s protagonist operates, attempting to solve the case of her parents’ murder, is as treacherous as the world portrayed in early hard-boiled detective fiction. Kim has inherited from early hard-boiled crime fiction such elements as its rugged individualism, a cynical-but-sentimental worldview, and not least, its social concerns about economic inequality and corruption among the powerful. At the same time, Kim’s novel subtly reconfigures her hard-boiled sleuth as well as adapts the genre to a contemporary racial context. In this revision, both the institutional and personal practices of racism are placed on trial. Female solidarity is also celebrated as a means to counter the violence and corruption of a racialized society. In so doing, Kim’s novel subverts both the sexism and racism of the traditional detective genre. The conclusion of this article is that the novel legitimates a female immigrant and person of color’s right to belong and challenges the white masculine hegemony that the traditional hard-boiled genre maintains.

The Labyrinth and the Non-Solution: Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase and the Metaphysical Detective

Many of Murakami’s novels demonstrate his appropriation of the terminology, imagery and metaphor that are found in hardboiled detective fiction. The question of Haruki Murakami’s use of the tropes from hardboiled detective stories has been discussed by scholars such as Hantke (2007), Stretcher (2002) and Suter (2008), who argue that the writer uses these features as a way to organize his narratives and to pay homage to one of his literary heroes, Raymond Chandler. However, these arguments have not adequately addressed the fact that many of Murakami’s novels fit into the definition of the metaphysical detective story, which is “a text that parodies or subverts traditional detective-story conventions” (Merivale & Sweeney 1999:2). Using this definition as a guiding principle, this paper addresses the issue of the metaphysical detective features apparent in Murakami’s third novel, A Wild Sheep Chase, and, more specifically, looks at his use of the non-solution and labyrinth as narrative devices. The main argument, then, is that Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase fits in with the metaphysical detective novel and uses the familiar tropes of the labyrinth and the non-solution to highlight our impossible search for meaning.

Jiro Ikushima's "Shanghai International Settlement" Depicted as a Scar: Hardboiled Detective Fiction as an Alternative Form of Postwar Literature

Jiro Ikushima's "Shanghai International Settlement" Depicted as a Scar: Hardboiled Detective Fiction as an Alternative Form of Postwar Literature

Against the law: Arthur Maimane’s pioneering hard-boiled black detective fiction in Drum Magazine

ABSTRACTThis article sets out to re-examine, and recover, South Africa’s first hard-boiled crime fiction created by a black writer: Arthur Maimane’s crime stories published in Drum magazine in 1953. Maimane wrote a series of stories about a black PI, styled on the American hard-boiled genre for Drum, a popular South African magazine aimed at a black audience, known for its borrowing from American popular culture. Mamaine’s fiction has been widely dismissed by generations of Drum critics, as “derivative” “imitation.” Repositioning the stories within the broader context of crime fiction suggests quite a different reading. Maimane’s stories reveal how tensions between the genre and laws in apartheid South Africa resulted in radical alterations to the hard boiled formula. Since Maimane’s stories precede Chester Himes’s African-American novels, they should be recognized as a pioneering example of black crime fiction that demonstrates the relationship between race and genre.

Reimagining Delilah's Afterlives as Femme Fatale: The Lost Seduction by Caroline Blyth

Reviewed by: Reimagining Delilah's Afterlives as Femme Fatale: The Lost Seduction by Caroline Blyth Brandon R. Grafius caroline blyth, Reimagining Delilah's Afterlives as Femme Fatale: The Lost Seduction (LHBOTS 652; London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017). Pp. 198. $91.99. Caroline Blyth's monograph explores depictions of Delilah in art and film, arguing that, instead of filling in the narrative gaps in a variety of ways, these "various interpretive afterlives … more often than not follow the lines and contours of the classic femme fatale" (1-2; emphasis original). Using primarily fin-de-siècle paintings and noir and neo-noir film, Blyth argues for the figure of the femme fatale as a "product of sociocultural discourses" (emphasis original), which demonstrate male fears of female agency and sexuality. While B. finds little warrant for it in the biblical text, Delilah has frequently been portrayed as the embodiment of these male anxieties. The first chapter lays the theoretical groundwork for understanding the figure of the femme fatale. B. first provides an overview of the figure in fin de siècle art, beginning with Gustave Moreau's two paintings depicting a hyper-sexualized Salomé. Along with this emphasis on sexuality, B. notes how fatale women of this epoch were portrayed as subverting "dominant gender roles and discourses" (p. 16), frequently combined with associations with the animal or the foreign. B. attributes the popularity of the femme fatale in this era to the "sense of terminal decline" felt by the European population (p. 21), with particular anxiety surrounding the role of women. She finds a similar portrayal, connected to analogous feelings of anxiety, in the femmes fatales of hard-boiled detective fiction (1920s–1940s), and the 1940s Hollywood films noir, which frequently used these novels as source material. [End Page 307] This figure blends sexuality and violence, while also disturbing culturally defined gender roles. While she is a compelling figure, the femme fatale seldom made it out of a film noir alive, serving as a "cautionary tale" (p. 36). The femme fatale returned in the '80's and '90's with a vengeance; this time, due to changes in audience expectations, the femme fatale was sometimes allowed to live to seduce another day. The second chapter visits the "gap-ridden" picture of Delilah in Judges 16. The first instance of unknowability B. detects is in the interpretation of Delilah's name. She identifies proposals ranging from "dangling curls" to "weakened," "helpless," or a play on the Hebrew word for "night." However, "uncertainty will always prevail" in attempts to interpret Delilah's name (p. 57). This theme of "unknowability" continues into the ambiguity regarding whether Samson and Delilah were sexually intimate, how Delilah felt about Samson, and her racial identity. We have hints, however, that Delilah refused "to conform to any of the social functions typically prescribed for biblical women" (p. 67), most notably motherhood, and she further disrupts gender norms through her conquest of Samson the warrior. B. notes these ambiguities to argue that interpreters have consistently filled in these narrative gaps in ways that transform Delilah into a femme fatale. The next chapter moves from the text itself to Delilah's portrayal in culture. B. argues that Delilah has been turned into a femme fatale in works as diverse as Milton's Samson Agonistes; paintings by Rubens, Moreau, and others; and operas and more contemporary music. But B. is most interested in portrayals of Delilah in film, starting with Cecil B. DeMille's 1949 biblical epic Samson and Delilah. In Hedy Lamarr's performance as Delilah, B. finds "the classic fatale woman of film noir, who ensnares her prey with her sexual allure" (p. 123). This view of Delilah is encouraged by Lamarr's physical appearance as well as by her off-screen "nuance of sexual scandal" (p. 124), including multiple marriages and divorces, and her notoriety from playing "the first completely nude part in movie history" in the 1933 film Ecstasy (p. 124). B. further notes that Lamarr's costuming evokes both 1940s Hollywood and an exotic glamour that emphasizes her foreignness. To further stress Delilah's role as femme fatale, DeMille adds the character of Miriam, a rival for...

The Case of the Femme Fatale: : A Poetics of Hardboiled Detective Fiction

The Case of the Femme Fatale: : A Poetics of Hardboiled Detective Fiction

On Influence and (Un)Originality. A Review of Matthew Luter’s Understanding Jonathan Lethem

On Influence and (Un)Originality.A Review of Matthew Luter’s Understanding Jonathan Lethem David Coughlan (bio) Luter, Matthew. Understanding Jonathan Lethem. U of South Carolina P, 2015. Just the second monograph published on the work of Jonathan Lethem, following James Peacock’s 2012 volume, Matthew Luter’s Understanding Jonathan Lethem is issued as part of the University of South Carolina’s Understanding Contemporary American Literature series. It provides an engaging and accessible account of Lethem’s three most high-profile novels, Motherless Brooklyn (1999), The Fortress of Solitude (2003), and Chronic City (2009), together with an analysis of selected short stories and essays. Luter’s welcome book is an enjoyable and illuminating read, and its author has a clear appreciation and enthusiasm for Lethem’s work, as can be seen in the way he burrows out the references and allusions buried in the texts. The particular strengths of the book lie in the clarity of the structure and especially in its choice of an effective and fitting approach to Lethem’s work, focusing on the writer’s “career-long interest in questioning what literary originality means in a postmodernist age” of “collage, pop art, pastiche, remixing, or sampling” (2). The book’s introductory chapter, in addition to providing a short biography, situates Lethem in the context of three studies on literary influence: Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence (1973), which provides a “definition of influence that Lethem has spent an entire career rejecting” (Luter 9), given its emphasis on the anxiety of the text, cultural belatedness, and “a poet’s melancholy at his lack of priority” (Bloom qtd. in Luter 9); “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1967) by John Barth, with whom Lethem shares an appreciation for the work of Italo Calvino; and Michael Chabon’s “Fan Fictions” (2008), in which Chabon concludes that “all novels are sequels; influence is bliss” (qtd. in Luter 12). Luter suggests that Lethem “sounds most like Chabon when he discusses his vision for himself as a writer.” He illuminates Lethem’s perspective with a detailed analysis of his essay “The Ecstasy of Influence” (2007), “both a brilliant defense of creative appropriation and a call for a new, more generous understanding of copyright” (13). Luter then identifies two of the most significant influences on Lethem, sci-fi novelist Philip K. Dick and American film critic Manny Farber, before moving to discuss a number of Lethem’s earlier short stories, particularly “Vanilla Dunk” from The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye (1996), drawing attention to the ways in which Lethem recontextualizes and reuses elements from earlier texts and, therefore, providing a useful starting point for the following considerations of influence and originality in the novels. The second chapter is about Motherless Brooklyn, a book that Luter describes as “Lethem’s breakthrough novel and a book as much about hard-boiled detective fiction as it is a hard-boiled novel” (27). Luter argues that Lethem’s adoption and adaptation of the rules of the genre as set out in Raymond Chandler’s essays “The Simple Art of Murder” (1944) and “Twelve Notes on the Mystery Story” (1948) result in a novel that is an “excellent exercise in accepting the weight of literary history without being visibly burdened by it” and an “example of purely joyful quasi-fan fiction” (29). Initially establishing its indebtedness to its precursors and their “vibrant, hostile, punning, impossible language” through the heightened style of its own language, the novel is not so much about a detective as it is about a fan of detective fiction who then becomes a detective; Lethem’s protagonist, Lionel Essrog, understands his experiences in terms of the conventions of the noir genre even as Lethem constantly invokes that genre through references and citations in his framing of Essrog’s world (Lethem qtd. in Luter 30). Throughout this chapter, Luter pays welcome and effective attention to the patterns of language both of the hard-boiled detective novel and of Essrog’s speech, which is affected by his Tourette’s syndrome, thereby addressing the question of how the influence (of a genre or of a syndrome) expresses itself and then shapes, or is shaped by, representation...

Hard-boiled homemakers: The individual and the dystopian urban in the Japanese anti‑detective novel

This paper discusses the ways in which Japanese authors have engaged with the tropes of hard-boiled detective fiction in order to examine post-capitalist Japanese society. With reference to the extant framework on the relationship between hard-boiled fiction and the urban space, discussion will focus on two Japanese novels: Natsuo Kirino’s Out (アウト, 1997), and Haruki Murakami’s Dance Dance Dance (ダンス・ダンス・ダンス, 1983). Both texts depict individuals who have been displaced to the spatial and socioeconomic ‘margins’ of a dystopian urban space, and who, through narratives of crime and detection, attempt to escape its mundane oppression. However, both texts also challenge the hard-boiled genre through an integration of detective fiction archetypes with post-modern textual elements. Accordingly, they are emblematic of the emergent ‘anti-detective’ novel, which denies the hermetic and cathartic aspects of the traditional crime novel to discuss irresolvable issues of modern identity. Nonetheless, whilst Dance uses surreal ‘dream spaces’ as a source of relief for its protagonist, Out instead ultimately critiques its own escapist fantasy through stark violence. Regardless, both texts argue personal autonomy can only be achieved by the rejection of the urban space itself for an arguably unattainable imaginary.

Trump and the Resurgence of American Noir

This essay examines the political persona of Donald Trump as mediated by the imagery of hardboiled detective fiction and film noir. By evoking and distorting noir’s challenge to the status quo, its suspicion of systems of power and questioning of dominant norms, Trump has fashioned his political persona in ways that deliberately revise the popular conception of the hardboiled hero as brash-talking rebel at the margins of a corrupt system. Reading Trump’s persona through the mediating function of noir exposes how Trump’s rhetoric plays on, and benefits from, a theme of citizen estrangement while simultaneously reinforcing political expediency and self-interested power. Moreover, it is not only Trump who uses noir imagery provocatively to shape his political image. The media have also participated in crafting images of Trump as either entertaining disruptor or more darkly destabilising. As responses to crises of capitalism, corruption, and social fracture, noir narratives provide critical ways of investigating periods of disequilibrium and their resurfacing in the present. Analysing the production, expression, and reception of Trump’s political persona through the historical and discursive structures of noir underscores the salience of the study of persona to reveal underlying fissures in current American politics and society.

Narratives of apprehension: crime fiction and the aftermath of the Northern Irish Troubles

With over four hundred produced between 1969 and 1998, the thriller was the most popular fictional form of representing the Northern Ireland Troubles. Critics, however, were highly dismissive of the genre, claiming it offered little more than clichés and stereotypes, and that it marked the enthronement and reiteration of a problematically reductive take on the conflict. The Belfast Agreement (1998) signalled the official end of the Troubles and the beginning of what many hoped would be a new era in Northern Irish history. The decades since the Agreement era have witnessed a remarkable resurgence of interest, both critically and creatively, in crime fiction, and in the ways in which the hermeneutic codes of the genre might be brought to bear on the various legacies of the Troubles. For a new generation of Northern Irish crime writers, academic critics and literary novelists the possibilities and limitations of genre fiction have provided an arena in which key issues might be theorised and thought through; these include the challenge of dealing with the past, questions about truth recovery and transitional justice, and the need within the region to achieve some form of closure on the traumatic events of recent years. Far from continuing a process of ideological reductionism, post-Agreement crime fiction has exemplary value. Drawing inspiration from the police procedural, the comic thriller and the noir-ish Weltanschauung of hardboiled detective fiction, it contains a series of idiosyncratic and sophisticated responses to the aftermath of political conflict. Image source: ‘Loyalist banner and graffiti on a building in the Shankill area of Belfast, 1970’. By Fribbler - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7569750

Crossing shadows: Bridging the voices of hard-boiled detective and noir crime fiction

This paper discusses the notion of Voice. It attempts to articulate the nature of voice in hard-boiled detective fiction and noir crime fiction. In doing so, it examines discusses how these narrative styles, particularly found within private eye novels, explores aspects of the subjectivity as the narrator-investigator; and, thus crossing and bridging a cynical, hard-boiled style and an alienated, reflective voice within a noir world.

The Avant-Garde Detective Fiction of Antonio Helú

The Avant-Garde Detective Fiction of Antonio Helú Mike Strayer The “delgado, inteligente, nervioso y . . . explosivo” Antonio Helú Atta lived as a newspaper and magazine editor, filmmaker, dramatist, and fiction writer known for his unabashed championing of the detective genre in Mexico (Villaurrutia 17). This largely-ignored father of Mexican detective fiction, however, also maintained deep, yet hitherto forgotten, ties with the Mexican avant-gardes. Helú’s involvement with both the Stridentists and the Contemporáneos not only informed his literary output but his radical, working-class politics, bridging the gap between literary avant-gardism and popular fiction. In his most famous novella La obligación de asesinar (1947), Helú develops an anarchistic hermeneutic for solving crime in which avant-garde free play out-deduces bourgeois reason. Through ad hoc investigations Helú’s detective – a lumpen thief named Carlos Miranda – brings into relief the failures of the Mexican Revolution and hints at alternative futures antagonistic towards private property regimes. Understanding Helú’s avant-garde affinities thus salvages his work from the dustbin of literary history by opening up certain radical possibilities for a literary mode, detective fiction, widely known for its hegemonic underpinnings. The Detective Mode South of the Border Most literary critics only consider Helú’s work important in relation to the broader genealogy of Mexican detective fiction. Speaking, for instance, of La obligación de asesinar, one literary scholar laments that “la importancia del libro es más documental que estética” (Negrín 40). For many critics, Helú’s work is only valuable in so far as it occupies what Ilan Stavans has called “the cornerstone of detective letters in Mexico” (75). Consequently, Stavans and other critics typically employ Helú’s literary biography in order [End Page 273] to contextualize the “literary explosion of this ‘subgenre’” during the nineteen seventies and eighties in Latin America (74). This is perhaps due in part to Mexican detective fiction’s perceived debt to foreign fonts of creative output, resulting in its misrecognition as, what Donald Yates calls, “a type of imported literature” practiced by so-called “native authors” (xi-xii). Notwithstanding the ivory-tower anthropology of Yates’s assessment, the empirical outcome is not all that surprising: a shallow pool of Helú scholarship. Over the past sixty years only a handful of academic books have treated either Helú or La obligación de asesinar in passing. Such is certainly the case with Persephone Braham’s Crimes against the State, Crimes against Persons (2004) and Glen S. Close’s Contemporary Hispanic Crime Fiction (2008). The most recent academic book to reference Helú – Artful Assassins (2010) by Fernando Fabio Sánchez – continues in the mold of previous literary histories by situating Helú as the noble precursor to bigger and better things yet to come (61). Couple this with a Queen’s Quorum reference to La obligación de asesinar from 1948 where Helú is credited with “founding a south-of-the-border school of detection” and two or three websites, along with a few anthologies, and therein lies the extent of criticism devoted to Helú (125). This critical neglect is especially strange, however, considering the influence that Helú has exercised on generations of Mexican writers like Carlos Monsiváis – who authored the prologue to the latest compilation of Helú’s stories and novellas published by Porrúa in 1997. Monsiváis, in fact, praises Helú as “un autor que creyó radicalmente en la literatura policiaca y a ella consagró lo mejor de su activa, generosa vida profesional” (19). Fifty years earlier, in another prologue to Helú’s work, the avant-garde poet Xavier Villaurrutia enthusiastically commented “para la sed de los lectores de novelas policíacas, existe ya el pequeño oasis de los cuentos policíacas de Antonio Helú” (16).1 In other words, two of the most prominent Mexican intellectuals of the twentieth century have put their stamp of approval on Helú’s work, and yet no serious academic scholarship has paid him any due attention. Much critical ink, however, has been spilled on Latin American detective narratives that channel hard-boiled detective fiction, which “appears to be a [End Page 274] much more...

“I don’t know a lot of rude words”: Herbst, Paretsky, and Grafton’s Struggle to Master the Tough Guy Voice

Abstract The proletarian literature of the 1930s and traditional 1930s era hard-boiled detective fiction are literary siblings. Both genres came of age in popular publications. Both genres deal with establishing order. Both genres use the “tough guy” voice. This voice was a no-nonsense powerful tool used to highlight the gritty realism of blue collar life. This style of writing quickly became a central component for both genres. Embedded in the term “tough guy voice” is masculine identity. This is the voice for the active underdog male hero. Writing in genres for women is an on-going challenge given the expectation of gender implied in the narrative voice. For the contemporary feminist hard-boiled detective and the 1930’s women proletarian protagonist to be taken seriously in their respective tough guy genres, they must show the same verbal acumen as the male characters who built the genres. At the core of each genre, the expectation that tough guys remain tough guys is an issue that stretches beyond the time frame of 1930s and 1940s to contemporary iterations of the genres. The gendered transition from male protagonist to female protagonist requires authors like Josephine Herbst, Sara Paretsky, and Sue Grafton to engage in a series of dynamic manipulations verbal and textual manipulations. Both sets of authors created protagonists that faced the threat of being dismissed due to their gender, traditional family roles, and conflicts with authority. The authors dealt with these threats using very similar strategies, to varying levels of success. Paretsky and Grafton’s heroines win verbal battles by showing mastery of the voice and the other voices in the texts. At the core of this struggle is the protagonists’ ability to maintain the power of professing.

Strange Birds: RewritingThe Maltese Falcon

Hammett's formative role in establishing the conventions of the hard-boiled detective formula is widely acknowledged, but the formative influence of his masterpiece,The Maltese Falcon, on specific texts by subsequent innovators has remained largely unexplored territory. Both Sara Paretsky and Chester Himes have paid tribute to Hammett's influence, with particular reference toThe Maltese Falcon. An examination ofIndemnity OnlyandFor the Love of Imabellein relation toThe Maltese Falconoffers a unique perspective on Paretsky's and Himes's stylistic choices and the social perspectives these articulated. It also helps to explain the critical reception of their work. Paretsky, writing within the grain of a type of social realism associated with both protest literature and hard-boiled detective fiction, achieved early recognition. Himes, writing against the grain, did not. Those of his detective novels most closely allied to his protest writing have received the most critical attention, but inFor the Love of Imabelle, Himes used techniques allied to surrealism. These effectively disrupted and destabilized important, socially privileged discourses – and discomforted audiences and wrong-footed critics.

Class, Masculinity, Crime: Sociology of Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction

Class, Masculinity, Crime: Sociology of Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction

Clash of Desires: Detective vs. Femme Fatale

This article discusses the theme of desire presented in American hard-boiled detective fiction and its subsequent transformation on the screen in form of films noir of the 1940’s. The works in focus are novels The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett, Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler and Build My Gallows High by Daniel Mainwaring and their film noir adaptations – The Maltese Falcon (1941), Murder, My Sweet (1944) and Out of the Past (1947). The proposed paper seeks to offer a contrastive analysis of the novels and the films and situate them in their respective social and cultural contexts. The central conflict of this article is presented by the clash between the femme fatale’s and detective’s desires. Hard-boiled novels present femme fatale as a dame with a past, a spider woman, and the detective as a hero with no future, caught in her web of intrigues. The only way out for the detective is to suppress the sexual desire for the woman and hold strong to his professional code. The femme fatale’s desire for more and for better is deadly and dangerous for those who succumb to her lure, but the detective’s desire for truth can be fatal for the dark lady too. This clash presented in the novels is confronted with the 1940’s Hollywood production. When the detective frees himself from the sexual lure of the fatal woman he has a chance to live and even bring her to justice, but she can still escape or decide herself what to do with her destiny. Both, the dame and the hero are victims of their desires. The 1940’s films noir’s femme fatales have to pay for their crimes, no matter how crafty, seductive or manipulative they are. Thus these films present the masculine dominance as strong and undefeated.