Hard-boiled Detective Fiction (Week 6 extras)

Hard-boiled Detective Fiction Origins

• The first hard-boiled detective stories came out in early American pulp magazines.
• Black Mask Magazine published hard-boiled stories starting in 1923.
• Notable authors include Erle Stanley Gardner, Dashiell Hammett, Raoul Whitfield, and Raymond Chandler.
• William F. Nolan considers these Black Mask writers to be the 'inventors and refiners' of the hard-boiled style.

Evolution and Definition

• Some believe hard-boiled detective fiction didn't last beyond the 1950s, with Mickey Spillane and Jim Thompson representing a more sociopathic version.
• Others argue that writers like John D. MacDonald, Charles Willeford, Elmore Leonard, Robert Parker, and Andrew Vachss continued the tradition into later decades.
• Feminist hard-boiled fiction, featuring tough female detectives, has recently gained popularity.
• These female-led stories are only superficially hard-boiled which lack the same ideological orientation as their male counterparts, despite exhibiting similar traits.
• The term "hard-boiled" describes a way of speaking and seeing, rather than just following a formula.
• Stories with non-white, male, heterosexual detectives critique hard-boiled ideology, even while using elements of traditional stories.
• A core hard-boiled ideology exists at the center of the genre and from the perspective of white, heterosexual men.

Hard-boiled Detective and the Mythic American Hero

• Like a Western hero, a tough detective's code allows violent action while maintaining moral purity.
• Isolation maintains the purity of honor in a false society.
• Academic critiques have discussed the meaning of hard-boiled stories, but have not fully explained the ideological significance.
• One approach legitimizes certain hard-boiled fiction by creating high/low distinctions.
• Another approach casts the hard-boiled detective as a post-industrial version of the Mythic American Hero.
• The hard-boiled detective descends from the frontier hero and restores moral order, like a cowboy.
• George Grella views the hard-boiled detective as another version of the cowboy, or an avatar of the prototypical American hero Natty Bumppo.
• Frederic Svoboda, Leslie Fiedler, and William F. Nolan have also compared the hard-boiled detective to the Western hero.
• Jerry Palmer suggests the detective's job is to carve civilization out of the wilderness.
• Dennis Porter calls the hard-boiled detective story a truncated American myth because the detective lacks a link with "true nature".
• Though set in an unnatural urban landscape, the detective takes a final test of self-worth through violent action.

Critique of High/Low Divisions

• Seeing the hard-boiled environment as wilderness and connecting it to the American heroic tradition overlooks those who define the hard-boiled novel's social composition.
• Approaches that impose a high/low hierarchy onto the genre make the social environment disappear.
• "Low" fiction is often left unexamined, while ideological continuity is ignored.
• Aesthetic criteria separate the high end from the low end.
• Critiques address the genre abstractly, legitimizing the high end by contrasting it with the "crap" at the bottom.
• This hinders discussion of how the hard-boiled social environment is constructed.

Class Divisions

• Ernest Mandel believes there is a high/low division is based on a historical degeneration regarding popular visual representation.
• Brutality and sadism in the genre became pronounced in the forties and fifties because of comic strips and television.
• Mandel argues that a "reversal to non-written language" stimulates primitive forms of thinking.
• Sinda Gregory divides the genre to "rescue" Dashiell Hammett, emphasizing his sensibility and complexity.
• George Grella explicitly distinguishes Hammett and Chandler, comparing them to Hemingway and Faulkner.
• Mickey Spillane exemplifies the "perversion" of the genre in "the hands of the unthinking and the inept".

Realism and Description in Hard-boiled Fiction

• The "realism" of hard-boiled detective stories is asserted by detectives, writers, and critics.
• This realism is found in the tough language, attitude, violence, and descriptions of "urban America".
• Frederick Svoboda claims the reader can get “bloodied by reality”
• James Cain and Raymond Chandler have contemplated realism and its relation to hard-boiled fiction.

Chandler's Perspective

• Chandler explains that the world of his stories is the world you live in.
• Writers can make interesting and amusing patterns out of it with tough detachment.
• Book jacket blurbs highlight the realistic nature of hard-boiled stories.
• Andrew Vachss's Blue Belle examines the darkest sides of life; Dashiell Hammett's works have realistic intrigue; Charles Willeford's early works have harsh realism; and John D. MacDonald knows dangerous things about people.
• Supposed realism implies that the hard-boiled writer and detective are ideologically detached from their subjects.
• The identities of people in the hard-boiled social environment are categorized as "reality".
• Readers should recognize this environment and corroborate its veracity.
• Hard-boiled language becomes a transparent documentary transmitter.
• Terry Eagleton comments that Realist literature conceals the socially relative nature of language
• It confirms the prejudice that there is a form of ordinary language that gives reality “as it is”
• The largest amount of space goes to description, not action.
• Fredric Jameson quotes Chandler: readers care about dialogue and description
• Dennis Porter notes the ideological significance of descriptive passages
• His findings suggest that this has to do with the "dark myth of the unredeemable city".
• Porter finishes with the hero uncovering not people, but "the corruption and perversion of society".

Dehumanization and the Construction of "Otherness"

• It's questioned whether Porter's reference to "corruption and perversion of society" is a meaningless phrase.
• Hard-boiled narratives revolve around demeaning descriptions of others, their perverted psychologies, and destroyed bodies.
• Descriptions focus on body fluids and viscera, characterizing non-white men, women, and homosexual/impotent white men.
• These descriptions construct a mirror against which a hyper-masculine identity appears.
• The self is defined by what it is not, establishing identity through negation.
• The hard-boiled man's perception must be addressed.
• Stories are set in threatening and realistic environments, such as large, urban, multiracial cities in the U.S.
• Robert Parker's Pale Kings and Princes features a Columbian immigrant population and is called "Miami North".
• Those who populate the hard-boiled detective story are described in terms of excess smell, body fluids, and desire.

Descriptions of Women

• An aggressive, sexually avaricious, and dangerous woman is at first presented as desirable and later discovered as perverted/immoral.
• Barbara Ann (Wild Wives) is described as a child with a pretty, innocent face.
• She is described is throwing herself over the detective's desk, asking to be spanked.
• Florence (Wild Wives) is a clinically diagnosed nymphomaniac, chronic liar, and husband killer.
• Velma (Farewell My Lovely) has tongue like a "darting snake" and leaves Marlowe feeling 'cold' and 'nasty'.
• Lauren (The Horse Latitudes) is a sexual sadist who sacrifices a man in an "ancient Mayan ritual".
• A painting of a female deity illustrates Lauren and generally the female threat.
• Destroying women are mentally diseased, while non-villainous women are physically diseased.
• Elena (The Way We Die Now), is described in what are intended as disinterested terms but clearly as grotesque.
• An older woman (The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper) describes herself as having the sexuality of a depraved and evil old hag and later degenerates because of her bowel issues.

Descriptions of Men

• Soft-boiled men psychologically exhibit feminine traits, such as cowardice, sexual perversity, and greed.
• Chinese bootleggers (Dead Yellow Women) have the smell of unwashed Chinese.
• The Continental Op smells "stinking bodies" and "unwashed Chinese".
• Ed Jenkins (Hell's Kettle) notices the abhorrent smell of Chinese while working as a doctor.
• Farewell My Lovely’s 'Hollywood Indian' wears a hat that has been perspired by somebody it fits better than him.
• Cundo Rey (LaBrava) is an effeminate Afro-Hispanic Cuban stripper who pleasures himself.
• The detective describes Cundo as 'sucking and smacking' as he 'squirmed and writhed'.
• Blue Belle’s detective describes New York City as a pit, and Hispanic hoods a torterer
• Hoke Mosley’s partner, Teddy Gonzales (The Way We Die Now) is described as a vain and clownish Latino or bed-wetter

Violence Evisceration and Mutilation

• Such detailed descriptive passages are also mirrored and intensified in hard-boiled descriptions of eviscerated bodies and body fluids
• Gruesome destruction described as carried out by or observed by the detective.
• In Dead Yellow Women, drug-addicted snitch "slid[es] down to the floor and ma[kes] more of a puddle than a pile there".
• Philip Marlowe (Farewell My Lovely) finds Lindsay Marriott 'lay smeared to the ground'.
• Hoke Mosley (The Way We Die Now) pounds Chico and causes Mexican bloodshed
• Jake Blake (Wild Wives) shoots the head and has blood from the violence
• Burke (Blue Belle) sees news of drowning 'boat people' with pus bleed out
• He slams a Grenade in a Asian mans mouth
• Is against child molester
• Danny (The Horse Latitudes) beats a Samoan

Freikorps Literature Comparison

• Just as Ferrigno calls someone Samoan
• Finally in The Horse Latitudes, there is a body with no sight
• Fascist Language appears to be unified around many points.
• Freikorps (German paramilitary organizations that fought after World War I) literature shares similarities with hard-boiled fiction.
• Theweleit analyzes Freikorps novels and memoirs.
• Freikorps descriptions of the working class, "Red Whore," and destroyed bodies are analogous to hard-boiled descriptions of "the foreigner" and "destroying woman".
• Metaphorical language is also similar.

Junger on the human race

• Junger calls the human race a mysterious tangled force
• The treetops are a mystery of force growing from the hazy earth.
• A hideous profusion of wildlife, victims and a forest of claws
• Examples in Blue Belle with zombies and vodoo
• Freikorps describes the post world war working class masses are damp, hybrid.
• In contrast is a soldier.
• Marlowe compares cops to civility
• The freikorps see mass habits as disgusting.

Perceived Feminine Identity

• The perceived feminine identity is written onto and in the aggressive whore
• Leads to the assumption
• It allows the soldier to be “whole”..
• The Freikorps writing is related
• Travis Magee can feel this within his skin: “the impact had Jelied her”

Another View of The Freikorps

• Relates how a soldier will shoot into a slobering and asking is this really the end
• In Freikorps The gunfire changes empty space that is the flick of a switch creates emptiness
• The continental op does everything here

Hard Boiled Context

• The detective is set on a military course
• The hard boiled detective rejects ideals.
• As well as Freikorps has the male can create himself
• In this creation the army is the
• The way the solider belongs The Freikorps solider is a unit to the army machine
• The other soldier units work from different units and sides
• He has help parentless relationships
• It might point out is the “hard boiled” member

The Army Of Freikorps

• The story does not have family
• One might suggest
• The hard boiled army to
• The heros might go by himself but
• It has army of white hero
• The ideology has very striking comparisons

Mythic American Hero

• One context is to relate the hard boiled store
• The force provides the harboiled genre is to seperate people.
• The writer the moment they read has to be the norm
• I suggest its not to make sure its known
• The reader can get by there actions through force
• Its very meaning is denied to one's life.