Comparative Coursework:
Detective Fiction
• For the higher grades, you will need
a concept or thesis, which you will
develop and or “prove” over the
course of the essay.
• You should also demonstrate evidence
of wider reading.
• Today: “flesh out” cultural
background of American hard-boiled
tradition
• Introduction to some critical
opinions
• Possible points of comparison.
Cultural-historical
backdrop
Before we start:
• Modernism = artistic
(especially literary) avant
garde of the early twentieth
century.
• Modernity = technological,
industrial, institutional scene
of any given epoch/time.
2 precursors to American tradition
of hard-boiled detective fiction:
1) Ratiocinative Detective Fiction
• Begins with Poe in the 1840s, and his
armchair detective C. Auguste Dupin.
• Doyle takes over the role of leading
writer of detective fiction with
Sherlock Holmes
• Doyle profits from magazine sales –
his stories appeared in The Strand
Magazine, which became a bestselling
publication with the serialization of
The Hound of the Baskervilles (190102).
2 precursors to American tradition
of hard-boiled detective fiction:
2) The Western
• Published in dime novels and pulp
magazines
• True crime stories of, e.g., Jesse
James, the James-Younger gang, the
Dalton gang, and the travelling wildwest shows had made westerns popular.
• Frontiersman/cowboy eventually becomes
the gumshoe; the frontier becomes the
city
– Possible comparison: the city as
“frontier” of post-war modernity?.
The Pulps
1930
1935
1937
The Pulps
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Pulp fiction magazines (so called because of the poor quality paper
they were printed on) & dime novels were popular in America by the
early C20
Targeted working class readers; usually gender-specific
Because of their demographic, they had to be cheap; this makes
competition tight.
Finding winning formula & winning writers is important.
Before the early 20s, pulp magazines generally published substandard, Holmes-style stories.
In the early 20s, Carroll John Daly published the first so-called
“hard-boiled” detective stories. The kinship with the western is
clear in his stories.
Daly publishes them in Black Mask magazine; it becomes the leading
hard-boiled/detective/adventure pulp (still has a website).
Daly popular in his day but has been eclipsed by Hammett, Raymond
Chandler, Gardner, Cain, and others.
Hammett, before becoming a professional writer, worked as a writer
of advertising copy, and as a Pinkerton.
• It’s interesting to note, then, that hardboiled detective fiction could be seen as more
a product of cultural modernity as of artistic
modernism (difference?).
• However, some critics make the case for
Hammett, Chandler and others to be considered
properly a part of the American modernist
canon.
• Additionally, in Europe (France
particularly), Hammett, Chandler, Himes etc.
were not seen as separate from the major
American modernist writers of the day –
Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway, William
Faulkner, John Dos Passos, and others. They
were all part of the same tradition (as
opposed to genre).
One option, then,
is to start with
literary
history/culture,
and think about
different types of
modernism –
“high”/”literary”
modernism versus,
e.g.,
“proletarian”/”dime
-store”/populist
modernism...
Other options
emerging from this:
- Classic vs. hardboiled detective
fiction
- Frontier/west/cou
ntry vs. postwar
city
What the critics have said
Holmes, in Doyle’s A Study
“Now, in my opinion, Dupin
some analytical genius, no
phenomenon as Poe appeared
in Scarlet (first Holmes novel):
was a very inferior fellow. … He had
doubt; but he was by no means such a
to imagine.”
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (1957; London: Penguin,
1990, p. 48)
The “ironic comedy [of detective fiction] is addressed to
people who can realize that murderous violence is less an
attack on a virtuous society by a malignant individual than a
symptom of that society’s own viciousness.”
Tsvetan Todorov , “The Typology of Detective Fiction [1966],”
in The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (1971; Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1977, p. 43)
[T]he masterpiece of popular literature is precisely the book
which best fits its genre. Detective fiction has its norms; to
“develop” them is also to disappoint them: to “improve upon”
detective fiction is to write “literature,” not detective
fiction. The whodunit par excellence is not the one which
transgresses the rules of the genre, but the one which conforms
to them[.]
What the critics have said
Philosopher Gilles Deleuze praised hard-boiled detective/crime
fiction for presenting “society in its entirety at the heights
of its powers of falsehood.” (“The Philosophy of Crime Novels,”
Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974, ed. David Laponjade,
trans. Michael Taormina [Paris: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agent
Series, 2004, p. 83])
Fredric Jameson suggests that the trails of blood in Chandler’s
novels oppose the basic logic of the classical detective story,
which “always invests murder with purpose [...]. The murder is
[...] made to bear meaning and significance by the convergence
of all lines upon it. In the world of the classical detective
story nothing happens which is not related to the central
murder.” Precisely through the apparent meaninglessness of
death, argues Jameson, Chandler “is able to bring us up short
without warning, against the reality of death itself, stale
death, reaching out to remind the living of its own moldering
resting place.” (“On Raymond Chandler,” The Poetics of Murder:
Detective Fiction and Literary Theory, eds Glenn W. Most and
William W. Stowe [San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983,
pp. 146, 148.])
Links/Comparisons/Texts
• Alienation
• Cultural politics of
detective fiction:
Marxism/liberalism/con
servatism
• Gender/sexual politics
• Race
• Depictions of the
city/landscape
• Post-war
nihilism/trauma
• Detectives/detection
as cultural metaphor
• Significance of
violence
• Voice/perspective
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Eliot’s The Waste Land
Walter Mosley
Chester Himes
Sue Grafton
Sarah Paretsky
Virginia Wolf
Toni Morrison (Jazz,
depictions of the
city)
John Steinbeck
Paul Auster
Graham Greene
Ron Hansen
Cormac MacCarthy
Oxford poets
Links/Comparisons/Texts
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Walter Mosley
Chester Himes
Sue Grafton
Sarah Paretsky
Paul Auster
Graham Greene
George Pelecanos (A Firing
Offence)
James M. Cain
Doyle
Poe
•
Science Fiction?
•
•
Ron Hansen
Cormac MacCarthyPatricia
Highsmith (Ripley)
Richard Price (The
Wanderers/Clockers)
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Eliot’s The Waste Land
Virginia Wolf
Toni Morrison (Jazz,
depictions of the city)
John Steinbeck
Oxford poets
Anne Tyler (depictions of
“middle America”)
Annie Proulx (masculinity
[“Brokeback
Mountain”];landscape)
Angela Carter
(genre/postmodernism/femini
sm – careful if doing
gothic)