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 (1901-02).

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 wild-west 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

1935

1937

1930

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 sub-

standard, 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 hard-boiled 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. hard-boiled detective fiction-Frontier/west/country vs. postwar city

What the critics have said

Holmes, in Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (first Holmes novel): “Now, in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow. … He had some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared 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/conservatism

• 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/feminism – careful if doing gothic)