As a term in the contemporary critical lexicon, popular modernism has the unusual distinction of being both suggestive and, until recently, unthinkable. It hints at a hidden or “soft” side of modernism, where work that is acceptable, accessible, and inoffensive might be accommodated, yet for the founders of the “old” modernist studies—from Edmund Wilson, Hugh Kenner, and Richard Ellmann to Malcolm Bradbury—such a side did not, could not, exist. As far as these critics were concerned, modernism was difficult, demanding, and refractory, or it was nothing at all. Surrendering to the lures of the popular was tantamount to sacrificing the core strengths that shook up the literary world. Popular modernism, then, had no place as a term in postwar critical discourse. In addition to this genetic or heritage-derived problem, there is the wider question concerning the popular itself and its definition. Is it simply a matter of sales numbers, in which those works that have a strong enough foothold in the marketplace are deemed popular? Or can it be defined in terms of style and technique, especially those that have proved themselves market friendly?Matthew Levay’s engrossing survey, Violent Minds, is not a study of popular modernism per se, but it does provide new resources for rethinking the disputatious conjunction of modernism and genre. Levay’s subject is crime and detective fiction, which he sees as feeding into (and fed by) the modernist fascination with ungovernable or outlaw behavior. Earlier work in this area, initially dubbed “pulp modernism” (noir’s focus on the detritus of modernity) and then “hit-man modernism” (contract killing as a deviant form of professional advancement), either anticipated or was spun out of the New Modernist Studies and its self-declared expansive tendency. But the NMS was mostly concerned with geographic and historical enlargement, rather than generic accommodation, and so Violent Minds has these new instruments at its disposal without necessarily being bound to a wider scholarly agenda.A major virtue of the book is its multisided approach to the collocation of modernism and crime or criminality. Each of the four chapters takes a different angle, both in the kinds of texts under critical analysis and in the guiding thematic that binds them. Chapter 1 begins, as any consideration of detective fiction must, with Edgar Allan Poe’s three gothic-inflected stories from the 1830s. Levay joins the theoretical camp that considers Poe not just (as Baudelaire and Mallarmé believed) a peerless chronicler of modernity but a “protomodernist” writer. This is made clear via the methodical “ratiocination” of Poe’s protagonist, C. Auguste Dupin—a mental calculus that amounts to psychological gamesmanship. An even colder form of deductive reasoning can be seen in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Levay’s second practitioner of “modernist detection” (26). More detached than Dupin, Holmes indulges in sensory distractions merely to fortify his machine-like processes of analysis. The chapter is rounded out with Dorothy L. Sayers’s amateur sleuth, the eccentric aristocrat Lord Peter Wimsey. Flawed, forgetful, and suffering the residual effects of shell shock—the quintessential modernist malady—Wimsey betokens, for Levay, a riposte to Dupin and Holmes. Moreover, the novels in which he appears, published in the 1920s and 1930s, represent a “popular” alternative to modernist work produced elsewhere, outside the mainstream.The next three chapters examine different facets of the modernism/genre couple, running the gamut from the canonical to the verifiably popular. Insofar as chapter 3 begins with the former, it is less arresting than the inquiries that follow—even though its focus is anarchist terror. By concentrating on works by two stalwarts of modernist studies, Henry James (The Princess Casamassima) and Joseph Conrad (The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes), the chapter adopts a fairly standard approach to fictions dealing with political violence. But the irreproachable duumvirate of James and Conrad makes sense in the context of what follows: a detailed examination of G. K. Chesterton and his surreal satire, The Man Who Was Thursday (1908). The novel brings together art and terror, poet and anarchist, to show violent political action as leading not to ideological triumphalism, as might be expected, but to the dissolution of identity. Chesterton has had no place in the history of modernist fiction until recently; Levay’s analysis suggests that, in the new dispensation, there is more work to be done in this area.With an appreciable shifting of gears, chapter 3 takes us from the high-minded modernist works of James and Conrad to the (as it were) low-minded attempts of Wyndham Lewis and Gertrude Stein to enter the world of crime fiction, albeit on their own terms. This chapter presses Levay’s method to the limit, for the two works on which he focuses, Lewis’s Mrs Dukes’ Million and Stein’s Blood on the Dining-Room Floor, were both published posthumously, are anomalies in their authors’ bibliographies, and are generally unknown to anyone except Lewis and Stein specialists. Yet Levay manages to make strong cases for both works as worthy of reassessment—or perhaps, given the minimal impact that each has had, of assessment. In his hands, the notion of a “modernist potboiler,” as he calls Lewis’s convoluted thriller (129), is no more scandalous or misguided than the concept of “popular modernism” itself.Finally, chapter 4 deals with “late modernism,” which in this context means not Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy, David Jones, or any other interwar modernist writer but Dashiell Hammett, Graham Greene, and Patricia Highsmith. Levay uses the notion of the “case study”—a medical, diagnostic term, as well as a watchword of literary criticism—to explore late modernist criminality. His trio of authors demonstrate how criminal activity can be the spur to self-creation rather than (as in Chesterton) to self-dissolution. Yet in common with the Chesterton section of chapter 2, popular modernism comes into clear focus here, and a new repertoire for understanding its significance and usefulness starts to emerge. Levay’s fourfold approach to modernist criminality is never less than engaging, but it is these parts that stand out, that renew certain modernist promises.In terms of the recent interest in modernism and genre fiction, Levay avoids the compression and constriction that beset Paul March-Russell’s otherwise informative Modernism and Science Fiction (2015) and the temptations of a freewheeling looseness that beleaguer James Gifford’s Modernist Fantasy: Modernism, Anarchism, and the Radical Fantastic (2018). Levay is thorough but not pedantic, judicious but not cavalier. Moreover, he acknowledges his sources to a fault and is respectful rather than combative. In that regard, his most formidable adversary is Andreas Huyssen, whose influential critique, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (1986), set the tone for a generation of critics hell-bent on exposing modernism’s superiority complex. Levay refers to it twice, but only to point out how unsustainable the “great divide” thesis has become. In any case, Violent Minds marks a significant shift in the decades since Huyssen’s landmark work. To come back to my initial problematic: if mass culture denotes those artifacts that have gained mass acceptance, then popular culture names a potential that is identifiable instead through its composition and stylistics. Moreover, the latter is no longer synonymous with populism, no longer linked to commodity culture as a kind of destiny. Popular culture can also, in its way, challenge and provoke, rather than simply placate.Violent Minds concludes on a somewhat disappointing note, with a brief foray into Tom McCarthy’s Remainder (2005). Although no less incisive and original than the four chapters that precede it, the piece leads the genealogy into the elusive abstraction of “subjective transcendence” (220). A more apt, alternate path might have been found that maintains the spirit of chapter 3 (say, twenty-first-century modernism engaging with criminality) or of chapter 4 (popular fiction exhibiting modernist characteristics). In this regard, it is possible to trace the lineage of modernist crime fiction to the other McCarthy, Cormac, and to another crime novel published in 2005, No Country for Old Men. The “violent mind” at both center and periphery of McCarthy’s narrative, which belongs to Anton Chigurh, exhibits a non- or para-identity that effectively occludes any kind of psychological profile. Moving across media, there is Nic Pizzolatto’s television series True Detective (2014–), with its singular, existentialist take on detection, and its nonlinear, über-modernist temporal schemas. Violent Minds is the kind of book that reaches beyond its own corpus of fictional works to make us, as readers, reconsider our settled assumptions about genre, style, and popularity.