Described by critics as a "poet of the losers" who masterfully portrayed the "economic struggles, in a truly Kafkaesque sense, of the underbelly of America during his time," noir novelist David ...Goodis often used postwar Philadelphia as a microcosm of urban blight and disenfranchisement. At the same time his down-and-outers are typically unable to account for their predicaments. A brother of protagonist Eddie Lynn in Down There (1956) voices this bafflement when he says that "there's something wrong somewhere." A strong sense of the American Dream's bankruptcy in the 1950s, coupled with the inability of Goodis's characters to analyze it, lies behind his reliance on the narratological devices of internal dialogue, silent conversations, and indirect discourse to project the solipsistic repercussions of withdrawal from an alienating, ultimately hostile environment. Though defeated in the end, Goodis's inner-city denizens are valorized by an attempt to escape from the prison-house of self and act on behalf of another person. Diegesis is central to this author's exploration of the pervasive sense in Down There that "the sum of everything was a circle ... labeled Zero."
In his early career, Kenneth Millar, better known as Ross Macdonald, emulated the style of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. By the 1960s he had established himself as a distinct voice in the ...hardboiled genre. In his Lew Archer series, he conveys the complexity of his characters and settings primarily by the use of metaphors. In his 1966 novel "Black Money" the device performs three functions. In the case of minor characters, the author uses metaphors to comment on Californian society. Concurrently, metaphors describing major characters allow him to develop their dramatic arcs, whereas the recurring elements of the leitmotif serve to demonstrate the narrating detective’s growing concerns with the ongoing investigation. Arguably, it was Macdonald’s use of metaphors that helped define his unique voice.
Though Vera Caspary's novel Laura (1943) remains far less famous than Otto Preminger's 1944 film version, this article argues that the novel deserves more critical and popular attention, particularly ...for its feminist achievements. The novel's experimental narrative employs a literary character I call the murderous male aesthete to combat and ultimately eliminate detective fiction's attraction to and reliance on dead women.
This dissertation tracks the intersections and entanglements of nature, race, and class in Los Angeles literature through 1930s-1940s literary noir (environmental noir) and more contemporary climate ...fiction or “cli-fi” (California cli-fi). The project’s consideration of dual genres and periods generates a prismatic effect to perceive environmental patterns embedded in L.A.’s literature, and, in this way, it becomes clear that issues of race and class are entwined with the city’s environmental concerns. Environmental noir extends noir’s foundations to other texts not traditionally classified as noir, and ecocritical readings of novels by Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and Chester Himes reveal interconnections between the destruction of L.A.’s environment and the social rot at the heart of the noir novel. Environmental noir’s concepts of entangled environmental and social devolution link directly to cli-fi’s project: showing the (imagined) impacts of anthropogenic climate change. With California cli-fi, this dissertation expands on ‘traditional’ climate fiction to incorporate narratives emerging from other types of apocalyptic or catastrophic events. Thus, in addition to Octavia Butler’s Earthseed novels, this project considers “accidental cli-fi” texts that feature new California landscapes, ecosystems, climates, and human habitation as the result of nuclear war, earthquakes, and more fantastical ruinations of the region. Environmental noir and California cli-fi’s shared concerns demonstrate the complex interplay between environment, race, and class in the “darkness” of L.A.’s noir and cli-fi literature, often located in moments of environmental, racial, and moral conflict or collapse.
Reviews TANI, STEFANO
Journal of American studies,
02/2013, Letnik:
47, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The first is the one of the forerunner, the critic who discovers the forgotten author; in the second stage the author reassessed is studied and written about by a substantial number of scholars and ...journalists (very good, good and less than good contributions); if steps one and two work, the writer is canonized (edition in the most prestigious series of the country). Athanasourelis's two-hundred-page one-idea book is riddled with unnecessary plot summaries and information on the hard-boiled genre; to make his point, the author compares Marlowe even with such characters as Race Williams by Carroll John Daly and Mike Hammer by Mickey Spillane. Athanasourelis's obsession is "rugged individualism," a term that recurs in every other page of his essay like a negative mantra: according to him, Marlowe does not deserve such a label, which instead accommodates the pioneer, the forerunner of the detective, the above-mentioned brutes, the Continental Op and most of the hard-boiled detectives.
A Working-Class Sherlock Shotwell, Gregg
Monthly Review,
10/2016, Letnik:
68, Številka:
5
Journal Article, Book Review, Magazine Article
Recenzirano
Timothy Sheard, the Lenny Moss mystery series (New York: Hardball).At its best, the art of fiction reveals the underlying truth of human relations: we are communal and collaborative by nature. ...Selfishness and greed are social aberrations because, ultimately, they violate the principle of self-preservation. No wonder we are drawn to crime stories: they mirror our common experience. Capitalism is high crime disguised as church doctrine. Conspiracy is evident, though the evidence is concealed. Hence, our fascination with the detective genre. We are in dire need of Timothy Sheard's scrutiny—a detective who peers through a working-class eyeglass.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.
This article argues that Dashiell Hammett’s least-known novel, The Dain Curse , which is often read as a metacritique of the detective form, actually operates as a hard-boiled critique of the ...competing pulp weird tale, most associated with H. P. Lovecraft. Hammett’s novel exposes the weird tale’s inherent nativism and its implicit reliance on notions of the criminally degenerate body popularized by Cesare Lombroso. The Dain Curse dismantles the positivism of Lombrosian criminology, weird fiction, and—by extension—the classical ratiocinative detective tradition, and their attendant eugenic epistemology.
In this paper, I demonstrate the formal debt of Raymond Chandler’s hardboiled fiction to literary dandyism, a debt occurring along the axis of what I call “epigrammatic speech.” I note Chandler’s ...interest in the Oscar Wilde trials, from which I develop a theory of epigrammatic aggressivity drawing on Wilde’s trial transcripts and on Amanda Anderson’s work on Wilde. I look closely at Wilde’s combative deployment of the epigram as entextualized in the trial transcripts. I read Chandlerian “tough talk” as a mode of oppositional epigrammatic speech dialectically invested in the figure of the dandy. In the paper’s second half, I analyze the social content of epigrammatic tough-talk in Chandler’s first two novels, The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely --each of which, not coincidentally, prominently feature dandies. Borrowing some analytic categories from Eric Lott’s Love and Theft , I tease out the contradictory modes of identification and disidentification at play in the tough-guy’s appropriation of epigrammatic speech.
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