Reinterpretation of American Literature (1928) (New York: Russell and Russell, 1959), pp. 139-141.
19 Leo Marx, ‘Double Consciousness and the Cultural Politics of F.O. Matthiessen’, Monthly Review, February 1983, p. 43.
20 For instance in B. Traven’s celebrated novel, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which we discuss in- Chapter Six.
21 Noting Frederick Jackson Turner's famous ‘Frontier Thesis’, Gelfant argues that the sociological theory of urbanism can be used as a literary tool, in a manner analogous to the application of Turner’s approach
to earlier writing. See Blanche Housman Gelfant, The American City Novel (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1954), p.28.
Paradoxically, hard-boiled writing developed as both a national and a regional style. In part, it originated in Californian locales, notably San Francisco and Los Angeles. With reference to the second of these cities, the hard-boiled writer could embellish an extant cultural convention in which proximity to the Mexican border signalled danger and exotica, a Heart o f Darkness scenario tailored for American imperialism. Hammett develops this trend in his short stoiy The Golden Horseshoe’, in which the Continental Op investigates a missing persons case in an assortment of Tijuana bars. It is also
present in a letter to the police in The Dain Curse, which informs them of the killing of a Cockney confidence trickster in Mexico City. Hammetf s punchy tone and tempo works as well in describing social life on either side of the border, but if we focus excessively on adventures on the 'periphery', we could become distracted from an assessment of the 'core’, namely the urban metropolis inhabited by Sam Spade, Ned Beaumont and the Continental Op.
An important aspect of the hard-boiled detective story was the shift to detection as a form of wage labour, in that the reader’s sympathies are drawn to the plight of the
‘working stiff. As Ralph Willett has observed, ’the hard-boiled detective novel is one of the few fictional genres where the depiction of work is a major concern'.25 Hence the violence in such narratives was often represented as a variation on the labour process itself, a form of concrete labour inextricable from the generation of surplus in society. Implicitly, the worlds of work and crime were interchangeable, echoing perhaps a society in which crime and public life mixed openly in conditions of Prohibition.26 Furthermore, the rhetoric of free enterprise, like the monopolistic tendencies it concealed, overlapped with illegal activity, while the wealthy and powerful were represented as corrupt and
• 9 7
degenerate. From Red Harvest's presidential near-namesake Ellihu Willson to The Dain Curse's failed society boy Eric Collinson, the elite found few friends among hard- boiled writers. Hence, the formulation 'a style o f crisis', describing their rejection of dominant institutions and social groups.
Such oppositional currents were more qualified when it came to the role of the detectives themselves. Public perceptions of the Pinkerton Agency, from where the phrase ’private eye' was derived, were ambiguous. Its activities led many to regard it as little more than a private army, prostituting its operatives to the powerful. As late as 1935, Herber Blankenhom (1915-1956), Senator Robert F. Wagner's assistant on the National Labour Relations Act, kept files on professional sleuths, under such headings as 'Company Unions Formed By Detective Agencies'.28 Likewise, he advised miners'
23 Graham Bishop, ‘The Good, the Bad and the Western’, Living Marxism, September 1992, p.40.
24 Hammett, The Dain Curse (1928) (London: Pan, 1975), p.49; the ‘Ashcraft’ character o f ‘the Golden Horseshoe’ is reworked as ‘Flitcraft’ in Sam Spade’s famous philosophical interlude in The Maltese Falcon. 25 Willett, ’Another Big Slug o f the Hard Stuff, Times Higher Education Supplement, 2 July 1993, p. 17. 26 Daniel Bell argues that the ‘rise o f the Italian political bloc was connected, at least in the major northern urban centres, with another important development which tended to make the traditional relationship between the politician and the protected or tolerated illicit operator more close than it had been in the past.’ Bell, The End o f Ideology: On the Exhaustion o f Political Ideas in the Fifties (1961) (New York: Free Press, 1965), p. 143.
27 An observation made in Christopher Bentley, ‘Radical Anger: Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest', in Docherty (ed.), American Crime Fiction, p.68.
28 ’Company Unions Formed By Detective Agencies', Blankenhom papers, Walter Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit. Other typical headings include ’What conditions are necessary for ”successful fascist preparation"?’, suggesting an anti-authoritarian current among New Deal administrators.
leader John L. Lewis to launch a blistering attack on the 'high-power corporation lawyers, who also sit on the boards of directors of the tear gas companies and of the spy corporations. Next day they sit on eminent committees of the Liberty League solemnly "finding " labour laws unconstitutional'.29 As the rise of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation deprived it of its 19th century parastatal role, suspicions of the Pinkerton agency were displaced by a hatred of company 'goons'.
Despite popular distaste for detective agencies, published accounts of their exploits were commercially successful, suggesting a degree of popular fascination, if not active
endorsement. In a similar vein, the fictitious ‘Old Sleuth’ enjoyed steady success following his first appearance in George Munro’s Fireside Companion30 (1867). In sum, long before Hammett, an American detective genre was developing independently of its British counterpart. It enjoyed a mass audience and a place in popular culture, but what is significant is the reworking of those themes into the tropes and generic elements that characterised hard-boiled writing.
Evidence suggests that the distinctive hard-boiled approach was pioneered by Carroll John Daley's 'Race Williams' melodramas, although the issue is somewhat confused by discussions of Ernest Hemingway. On his admission to the selective tradition of American letters he was praised as the initiator of a style he had now transcended. While there is undoubtedly an emphasis on the violent and the vernacular in
Hemingway - in Harry Morgan’s Havana, for instance, replete with machine gun fire and racial epithets31 - the debate over who invented the style obscures the more
important issue of the historically specific meanings which a given society would derive from it. Given its diffuse origins, it is not implausible that the genre and its idiom developed across a range of different writers and, although less documented, through different centres of cultural production. Hence the need for a rounded understanding, developed by considering the coalescence of Hemingway, Black Mask, and a wide range of neglected a but significant trends.32
In terms of ‘generic’ authors, the invention of hard-boiled fiction is more generally attributed to Dashiell Hammett than Daley or other more ‘minor’ figures. Hammett, whose previous occupations included that of Pinkerton operative, incorporated real experiences into his short stories, fascinating the reader and perplexing his editors with street language and underworld argot. Raised in Baltimore, a home town he shared with such cultural-politicos of the 1930s as Calverton, Cain, Upton Sinclair, and H.L.
Mencken,33 Hammett was well acquainted with the American city and, following his frequent departures for new surroundings, with the experience of dislocation. Mobility presented Hammett with few problems, however; one account recalls how his failure to
"successful fascist preparation"?', suggesting an anti-authoritarian current among New Deal administrators.
29 Blankenhom to Lewis, 'Suggestion for Radio Speech', June 26, 1936; Blankenhom papers. Blankenhorn's biographical details appear in 'Obituary', Washington Post, January 2, 1956. 30 Denning, Mechanic Accents, p.23.
31 Ernest Hemingway, To Have and Have Not (1937) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), pp. 7-17.
32 Morris Dickstein, ‘Popular Fiction and Critical Values: The Novel as a Challenge to Literary History' in
Sacvan Bercovitch (ed.), Reconstructing American Literary History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1986), pp. 52-53.
33 Stoddard Martin, California Writers: Jack London, John Steinbeck, The Tough Guys (London: Macmillan, 1983), p.134.
travel prompted him to resign from the Pinkerton agency. Hammett was searching an ocean liner on behalf of an insurance company, in the certainty that it contained ‘missing’ gold bullion. Unsuccessful in his investigations, he was delighted at the opportunity to accompany the vessel to Australia. Hours before departure, he uncovered the gold during a routine search.34
Others note Hammett’s growing disgust with the agency’s coercive role. Perhaps these experiences shaped the notions of ‘cosmic uncertainty’ which informed his writing for Black Mask. His drift into earning ‘a small living from pulp magazines and squibs and even poems sold to Mencken’s Smart Set,35 saw him take advantage of the new
opportunities offered by mass circulation popular narratives.36 (Despite Mencken’s reported dislike of detective fiction, he and George Jean Nathan first established Black Mask in order to finance their upmarket Smart Set venture,37 and to recycle material considered unsuitable for other publications. ) Hammett’s success at Black Mask is suggested by a readers’ poll in the late 1920s which placed him among the magazine’s three most popular writers.39
Economics
None of this should distract us from the genuinely transformative impact of Black Mask magazine upon popular fiction. Part of its success can be located in the impact of modernity. Illiteracy declined from 17% in 1880 to 6% by 1920, while urbanisation quickened the pace of development in publishing. Likewise, state intervention, in the form of copyright laws commencing in 1891 banned the piracy of texts from Britain, spurring publishers to commission contributions by indigenous writers 40 Cumulatively, such trends transformed the possibilities available to writers; ‘nearly a quarter of all the new novels published in the 1930s were detective stories, rising from twelve in 1914 to 97 in 1925 to 217 by the last year of the thirties.’41 Commensurate with this
groundswell of interest in detective fiction was the rise of the Black Mask magazine, with a circulation estimated at a quarter of a million.42
However, Ernest Mandel suggests relatively low sales of detective novels, which ‘only sold a few thousand copies at the most in the 1930s, read by the same lending library addicts’ 43 This can be attributed, in part, to the slump, although such an explanation takes little account of other mechanisms through which such texts could be circulated. Moreover, the distinction between novels and magazines is important, given that the
34 Heilman, An Unfinished Woman (1969) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p.214.
35 Ibid., pp. 213-214.
36 Another writer to import radical messages into Mencken’s mass media was Jack Conroy. See Jack Salzman, ‘Conroy, Mencken, and the American Mercury’, Journal o f Popular Culture 7, Winter 1973, pp. 524-28.
37 Martin, California Writers, p. 134.
38 T.J. Binyon, 'Murder Will Out': The Detective in Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p.38.
39 Cynthia S. Hamilton, ‘American Dreaming: The American Adventure Formula in the Western and Hard-Boiled Detective Novel’ Ph.D. Thesis, University of Sussex, 1981, p.23.
40 Statistics from ibid., p.39.
41 Dickstein, ‘Popular Fiction and Critical Values', p.35. 42 Hamilton, ‘American Dreaming’, p.23.
former were usually circulated in expensive hard-cover form. Thus, Black Mask
represented a crucial moment in the development of hard-boiled writing, reinforced by a host of lesser publications. (After all, even the declining American Mercury featured hard-boiled contributions from Cain and Jack Conroy.) Overall, popular narratives were acquiring a significant readership and beginning to articulate the growing strain placed upon the social order. Our study now turns to the question of challenging the
conventions of the twenties, in that it helps to frame an opposition between hard-boiled writing and post-1918 reaction.
In sum, although the varying interpretations of hard-boiled fiction's origins can contribute to a more comprehensive genealogy of the genre, they can also obscure its relationship to the city. As we see below, such relationships are both contingent and constitutive, yet there is no direct correlation between the city's shifting fortunes in history and the genre that used it both as a setting and as a sensibility.
In a symmetrical world, rehabilitated cities and their inhabitants would appear as such in fiction. However, as was suggested previously, a post-Prohibition division emerged between the city's new-found parity of esteem with the rural populace and its
representation in popular novels. Prior to the New Deal, the key faultline in detective novels was that of the gentleman amateur and arch criminal counterposed to the Pinkerton agent and bestial mob. Perhaps these conservative antecedents help to explain why the pulps 'came to define a kind of disgruntled faction in the rearguard of the culture industry' in the late 1920s and beyond.44 In short, the factors that constituted hard-boiled writing as a distinctive genre also articulated a distaste for the predominant patterns of consensus and exclusion that unfolded under the Coolidge and Harding administrations.
Audience
In the moral cosmos of the 1920s, the city became an alien ‘Other’ against which respectable society could define itself. This intersected with broader concerns about public morality and criminal populations, expressed in the 'cleavage [which] developed between the Big City and the small town conscience. Crime as a growing business was fed by the revenues from prostitution, liquor, and gambling that a wide-open urban society encouraged and that a middle class Protestant ethos tried to suppress with a ferocity unmatched in any other civilised country'.45 Such arrangements informed contemporaneous crime narratives, albeit indirectly.
If the city was the site of these tensions, it was likely that they would also be expressed in literature. While some 1930s novelists opted for a broadly sympathetic portrayal of the urban ghetto 46 others suggested its capacity to frustrate ambition and drag down the better off 47 The hard-boiled genre’s continuing success has a similar relationship to the
44 Sean McCann, ‘“A Roughneck Reaching for Higher Things”: The Vagaries of Pulp Populism’, Radical
History Review 61, Winter 1995, p.17.
45 Bell, End of Ideology, p. 128.
46 For instance, Henry Roth, Call It Sleep (1934) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 198? ed.) and Mike Gold’s
Jews Without Money (1930), which are discussed elsewhere in this study.
47 One critic cites Nelson Algren and Tess Slesinger as typifying this approach. See Gelphant, American
city, owing much to a visceral fascination with representations of society’s underbelly. Normative public propriety is set at odds with reading pleasures. Suggesting a process of continuity and change, ‘the mysterious, fascinating and frightening image of the city recurs throughout the nineteenth century. It represents an outside to the rule of order. To the individual swallowed up in the crowd, to the law in the refuge given to the criminal, to the morality faced with a profusion of bars and prostitutes the city at night epitomises chaos and uncertainty.’48 Such sensibilities continued into the twentieth century.
However, this scenario remains far too general. We need to examine the specific representation of the city as shaped by particular historical circumstances, as this impacts upon subsequent critical readings. Why, for instance should James T. Farrell’s role be characterised as making us realise the ‘drab and vicious character of city life,’49 when authors of previous and subsequent generations represent the city as the site of liberation? One source of the differentiation between these responses can be found by shifting from general perceptions of the American city, bound up with issues of public morality and social control, to the way particular cities gave a regional flavour to hard- boiled writing. Whereas once 'the city' had suggested New York, Boston or Chicago, hard-boiled writers made West Coast cities, especially those of California, central to their chosen genre. Indeed, by the 1940s, according to one critic, 'there followed a procession of epigones, usually distinguishable from one another only by the city in which they work'.50 Given the general arguments of our study concerning national identity, the contribution of cities and regions to this process warrants further consideration.
This becomes clear if one considers the fragmentary nature of the ‘Golden State’, which made temporary living arrangements the norm. Significantly, the local economies thrown up by the Gold Rush offered little that could sustain a local literary tradition.51 Yet if ‘California writers’ seemed like an oxymoron, it also indicated a vacuum which others could fill. Among the most prominent were Baltimoreans like Hammett, Cain and Sinclair; the Chicago-born Englishman, Raymond Chandler, and significant indigenous writers, such as John Steinbeck from Salinas.52 Once again, a relationship between hard-boiled style and social breakdown becomes apparent; hence the
observation that ‘the thirties saw toughness by itself developed into a standard fashion, which reached what may be called its high point in James M. Cain’s ... Postman’.53 Cold War-era critics echoed this theme by alleging that writers of Cain's generation were obsessed with violence.
Cain is important in this respect, as he codified his interpretation of his adopted home in Southern California in an article written for a Mencken publication. He offered
humorous and detailed descriptions of such Califomiana as a shop in the shape of a
48 Laura Mulvey, ‘Melodrama In and Out of the Home’, in Colin McCabe (ed.), High Theory/Low Culture
(New York: St Martins, 1986), p.90.
49 Carl Van Doren, The American Novel, 1789-1939 (New York: Macmillan, 1940), p.356.
50Binyon, 'Murder Will Out', p.42. 51 Martin, California Writers, pp. 2-3.
52 The relationship between writer and state is discussed in Freeman Champney, ‘John Steinbeck, Californian’, The Antioch Review, September 1947, pp. 345-62.
Kangaroo head, staffed by polite, well-spoken people, all bleached with a ‘gray,
sunbaked tan’. In contrast, Cain notes a ‘dreadful vacuity’, and that there is ’no reward for aesthetic virtue here, no punishment for aesthetic crime; nothing but a vast cosmic indifference'.54 Cain’s representation of public space, while lacking Hammett’s darker undertones, expresses the sense of foreboding which characterises the hard-boiled genre. The suspense Cain loses by omitting dark alleyways is regained in his California
sunshine, which removes all colour and character.55 In short, what makes Cain’s Golden State sinister are the tensions unravelling beneath otherwise calm, even bland and
artificial, surfaces.
One explanation of the recurrence of these themes in Southern California writing is the relative group coherence of its intelligentsia. Los Angeles was ‘invariably destructive of the “true” intellectuals, still self-defined as artisans or rentiers of their own unique mental productions’,56 thus consolidating an existing common experiential backdrop. Likewise, a multitude of occupations, from lumbeijack to wartime ambulance driver, was among the similar biographical factors which added to a sense of group identity among California writers. A separation between these ‘fabricators of spectacle’ and ‘thec n “practical intellectuals” who actually build cities’ emerged, organising the public