Geoff Mayer
I don’t know what the game was. I’m not sure how it should be played. No one ever tells you. I only know we must have played it wrong, somewhere along the way. I don’t even know what the stakes are. I only know they’re not for us.
We’ve lost. That’s all I know. We’ve lost. And now the game is through.
The End
—Cornell Woolrich, I Married a Dead Man (1948)
Many of the ingredients that formed fi lm noir in Hollywood in the 1940s were developed a decade or more earlier in the hard-boiled fi ction that reached the American public via pulp magazines and, to a lesser extent, the crime novel.
The critical and commercial success of Double Indemnity (1944), based on James M. Cain’s 1936 novel and coscripted by Raymond Chandler; Murder, My Sweet (1945), based on Chandler’s 1945 novel; The Big Sleep (1946), based on Chandler’s 1939 novel; and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), based on Cain’s 1934 novel, consolidated the growing interest in Hollywood in the adaptation of hard-boiled novels.
Although Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich, and others are frequently grouped together as a kind of “hard-boiled”
school of writing, there are substantial differences between these writers, and all of them would refute any kind of grouping. Yet Hammett, followed by Cain and the others, did change the basis of American crime fi ction. The dominant crime genre
prior to Hammett was the classical, or English, detective story. In the 1920s, and especially the 1930s, this type of crime fi ction lost its preeminence in America and was replaced by a much tougher, less cerebral form of crime writing.
Whereas hard-boiled crime fi ction assumes that the world is inherently cor-rupt, classical writers present a more optimistic view of the world—once the guilty person is exposed, the assumption is that innocence will return as the moral equilibrium is restored. This view is represented in the fi ction of European and American writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ellery Queen, John Dickson Carr, S. S. Van Dine, Earl Derr Biggers, and Rex Stout. They, in turn, structured their stories on the model created by Edgar Allan Poe. In 1841 Poe wrote “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and introduced the fi rst fi ctional private detective, Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin.
Dupin’s characteristics, intellectually gifted, eccentric, arrogant, superior, and overbearing, provided a prototype for subsequent classical detectives who took on cases out of interest, not economic necessity. Dupin is not part of ordinary society—he is above it.
The most well-known example of this kind of crime fi ction is Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, who fi rst appeared in 1887. When this formula developed in America with Nick Carter in 1886, there were a few changes as Carter was more of an adventurer than Holmes. He, unlike the British detective, was more physical and less removed from everyday society. While Carter also utilized the classical detective’s ratiocinative skill in solving crimes, the stories also emphasized action and violence.
The fi rst Nick Carter story appeared in the September 18, 1886, edition of Street and Smith’s New York Weekly. He appeared in pulp magazines, dime nov-els, comics, fi lm and radio series, and in 1964, he was reformulated into a secret agent fi ghting Cold War spies. Carter’s most popular period, however, was prior to World War I, and he was part of the spectacular success of so-called sensational literature, which found its greatest outlet in America in pulp magazines, which began in the early 1880s. This medium also became a prime outlet for hard-boiled fi ction. Between 1915 and 1955, there were nearly 200 mystery-detective magazines.
Hard-boiled fi ction developed out of the melodramatic patterns formulated by the penny dreadfuls in Britain and the dime novels in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. This rapid spread of crime stories, which were part of sensational literature, was largely due to an increase in literacy together with the invention of the rotary steam press and other techniques that facilitated the cheap production of newspapers and weekly magazines. The fi rst pulp magazine, a term given to magazines printed on pulpwood paper, was published in 1882. The fi rst crime pulp, based on the exploits of detective Nick Carter in Nick Carter Weekly, appeared in 1891.
This was followed by a host of similar magazines, including Detective Story Magazine, that began in 1915. From the point of view of hard-boiled fi ction, the
most important pulp magazine was Black Mask, which was established in 1920 by H. L. Mencken, who described his magazine as a “louse,” and George Jean Nathan to offset losses incurred by their more “sophisticated” magazine, Smart Set. Black Mask was an immediate success, and circulation rose to 250,000 within the fi rst year, although Mencken and Nathan sold it for a substantial profi t within six months for $100,000; their initial investment was only $500.
The hard-boiled crime story, as opposed to the classical model, fi rst appeared in 1922–1923 with the publication of two short stories in Black Mask from men with totally different backgrounds: Carroll John Daly and Dashiell Hammett. While Hammett was well read and self-taught, with fi rsthand experience of the criminal world through his employment as a Pinkerton detective, Daly was a former usher and owner of a movie theater in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Daly’s hard-boiled story “The False Burton Combs” appeared in the December 1922 issue of Black Mask, three months before Hammett’s crime story.
Although Daly lacked Hammett’s writing skills, he created the hard-boiled protagonist who resided somewhere between law-abiding society and the criminal underworld:
I ain’t a crook; just a gentleman adventurer and make my living working against the law breakers. Not that I work with police—no, not me. I’m no knight errant either.
(Daly 1977, 3)
Daly initially described his protagonist as an “adventurer”:
Not the kind the name generally means; those that sit around waiting for a sucker or spend their time helping governments out of trouble. . . . There ain’t nothing in governments unless you’re a politician. . . . I’m a kind of a fellow in the center—not a crook and not a policeman. Both of them look on me with suspicion, though the crooks don’t often know I’m out after their hides. And the police—well they run me pretty close at times but I got to take the chances. (Daly 1977, 4)
Even more important than “The False Burton Combs” was Daly’s second story for Black Mask in May 1923, where he introduced private investigator Terry Mack in “Three-Gun Terry.” Soon after, in the June 1, 1923, issue of Black Mask, he introduced readers to private detective Race Williams, his most popular series fi g-ure, in “Knights of the Open Palm.” In this short story, Williams fi ghts the Ku Klux Klan, and the ensuing violence became a recurring feature of hard-boiled fi ction.
Williams, in this story, functioned as a vigilante not interested in working with law offi cers, as Daly, who showed no interest in the intellectual puzzles used by classical fi ction, tried to capture the speech patterns of the everyday world.
Hammett, Cain, Chandler, Woolrich, and others retained Daly’s emphasis on the individuality, and even alienation, of Daly’s protagonist while extending his assumption that the world is irredeemably corrupt. As Raymond Chandler explained,
It was the smell of fear which these stories managed to generate. Their characters lived in a world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civiliza-tion had created the machinery for its own destrucciviliza-tion and was learning to use it with all the moronic delight of a gangster trying out his fi rst machine-gun. The law was something to be manipulated for profi t and power. The streets were dark with some-thing more than the night. (Chandler 1950, 7)
This evocative passage, which was fi rst published in the Saturday Review on April 15, 1950, captures the essential difference between American hard-boiled fi ction and the classical form. It also reveals the essence of the relationship between fi lm noir and hard-boiled fi ction, with its assumption that corruption permeates every layer of society, thereby generating a cynical attitude that, in the best example, exposes the underlying nihilism shared between both media.
Frank Krutnik (1991) estimates that almost 20 percent of noir fi lms produced between 1941 and 1948 were adaptations of hard-boiled novels and short stories, although its infl uence went well beyond just literal adaptations as hard-boiled conventions infi ltrated many American genres and many different types of production, from the expensive “A” fi lms from the major studios to the “pov-erty row” programmer released for a preinterval screening from studios such as Republic, Monogram, and PRC. For example, in 1945, one year after the release of Double Indemnity, PRC released Apology for Murder. The fi lm starred Ann Savage as the mercenary wife of an older man who encourages a newspaper reporter to kill her husband. After the murder, the love affair between the wife and her lover turns sour. She dies, and he writes his confession while mortally wounded. The fi lm’s producer, Leon Fromkess, was even tempted to call the fi lm Single Indemnity. However, Paramount was not impressed and forced PRC to withdraw their fi lm two days after its release. While other scriptwriters were more creative in adapting the characters and situations in Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain became so annoyed with these thinly disguised copies, and the fact that he was not receiving any money from them, that he left Hollywood for Maryland.
Hammett’s fi rst Black Mask story appeared a few months after Daly’s debut, and his detective, the Continental Op, was also willing to play both sides against each other. Unlike Daly, Hammett had fi rsthand experience of the underworld as an operative for the Pinkerton National Detective Service. When “Captain”
Joseph T. Shaw took over the editorship of Black Mask in 1926, he recognized Hammett’s talent and encouraged Raymond Chandler, and other writers, to emu-late Hammett’s sparse, tough writing style.
Shaw’s period as editor of Black Mask, which ended in 1936, was signifi cant as the magazine maintained a high standard of crime fi ction with regular stories from Erle Stanley Gardner (Perry Mason), Raymond Chandler, Raoul Whitfi eld, Brett Halliday (Michael Shayne), Cornell Woolrich, Louis L’Amour, George Harmon Coxe, Frederick Nebel, Horace McCoy, Max Brand, Steve Fisher, Frank Gruber,
W. T. Ballard, Bruno Fischer, and John D. MacDonald. Many years later, Shaw outlined his approach to hard-boiled crime fi ction:
The formula or pattern emphasizes character and the problems inherent in human behaviour over crime solution. In other words, in this new pattern, character confl ict is the main theme; the ensuing crime, or its threat, is incidental. . . . Such distinctive treatment comprises a hard, brittle style. (Wilt 1991, 2)
Shaw also encouraged Hammett to adapt some of his short stories into novels, and his fi rst four novels, Red Harvest (1929), The Dain Curse (1929), The Maltese Falcon (1930), and The Glass Key (1931) were all published in Black Mask prior to their publication by New York publisher A. A. Knopf. Other pulp writers soon fol-lowed Hammlett’s example with novels such as Paul Cain’s The Fast One (1932), Erle Stanley Gardner’s The Case of the Velvet Claw (1933), Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939), and Cornell Woolrich’s The Bride Wore Black (1940).
The fi lm studios in Hollywood in the 1930s mostly ignored hard-boiled fi ction and preferred the classical mode of detective fi ction. Even though the fi rst screen appearance of Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon was released by Warner Bros. in 1931, it was Hammett’s fi nal novel, The Thin Man, published in 1934, that attracted MGM’s attention—the studio quickly rushed a fi lm version into production.
The Thin Man differs from Hammett’s earlier short stories and novels. Although it retains Hammett’s clever prose and carefully detailed characters, it does not pre-sent the nihilistic view of the world that characterized novels such as The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key. The story concerns a former detective (Nick Charles), now living the life of a socialite, who is drawn back into the world of crime when an old friend asks him to investigate the disappearance of a relative. However, the section of the story that most appealed to MGM was the relationship between the often inebriated former detective, Nick Charles, and his wife, Nora. This element, which had some of the qualities of the screwball comedy, was further developed by MGM so that Nick, who is living off the wealth of his wife, only helps those people he cares for. Unlike the hard-boiled detective, Nick does not have to work.
The success of the fi rst fi lm, starring William Powell and Myrna Loy as the battling Charleses, resulted in fi ve sequels.
The same year that MGM bought the rights to The Thin Man, they also pur-chased James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice. However, unlike the quick success enjoyed by The Thin Man, censorship objections from Joseph Breen and his Production Code Administration delayed the adaptation of Cain’s novel until 1945. When Paramount showed interest in purchasing the rights to Cain’s Double Indemnity, the Production Code Administration also opposed a screen ver-sion, and it did not reach the screen until 1944.
Aside from objections from the Production Code Administration, Frank Krutnik (1991) suggests that the delay in fi lm adaptations of hard-boiled stories published in the 1930s was primarily due to government policies in the period
following America’s entry into World War II on December 7, 1941. Krutnik argues that the studios were “warned off ” these stories as they violated the “war-time projects of ‘cultural mobilisation’ ” (p. 36). Consequently, John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon and Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943) did not immedi-ately initiate a cycle of similar fi lms in the early 1940s because the Offi ce of War Information rejected such fi lms as suitable entertainment. These fi lms did not, Krutnik maintains, endorse the “general wartime ideology of commitment and community” (p. 36).
While there is some truth in this argument, there were also notable fi lm noirs released prior to Double Indemnity. Paramount, for example, produced two noir fi lms in 1942: This Gun for Hire, based on Graham Greene’s novel, in May and The Street of Chance, an excellent adaptation of Cornell Woolrich’s The Black Curtain, in November. Both fi lms provided wartime audiences with an alterna-tive to combat, espionage, and other war-related fi lms that proliferated during this period. Hence the studios, in late 1942 and early 1943, began planning a shift to detective fi lms and suspense thrillers—the term fi lm noir was unknown at this time.
As a consequence of this shift, they began employing pulp writers such as Frank Gruber, Steve Fisher, and Raymond Chandler.
In 1943 Paramount purchased the rights to James M. Cain’s novella Double Indemnity after it was published, with two other stories, in a hardcover novel by Knopf as Three of a Kind. By the time fi lming began in September 1943, Universal was also shooting their adaptation of Cornell Woolrich’s Phantom Lady. The suc-cess of these two fi lms encouraged other studios to begin purchasing the rights to hard-boiled novels and short stories for their own productions.
It is also signifi cant that Double Indemnity and Phantom Lady were budgeted as
“A” fi lms by their studios. Detective fi lms in the 1930s, with the exception of The Thin Man series and a few other fi lms, were mostly low-budget fi lms with little critical prestige. When Columbia purchased the rights to Cornell Woolrich’s 1937 short story “Face Work” and released it as Convicted in 1938, it continued this trend of low-budget crime fi lms. Similarly, the fi rst two adaptations of Raymond Chandlers’ fi ction in the early 1940s were low-budget fi lms. His second novel, Farewell, My Lovely, which was published in 1940, was purchased by RKO in July 1941 and reworked into their Falcon series, starring George Sanders as the debonair detective. It was released as the third fi lm in the series, The Falcon Takes Over (1942).
After Chandler’s agent, Sydney Sanders, sold the rights to Farewell, My Lovely to RKO for $2,000, he sold the fi lm rights to Chandler’s third novel, The High Window, to Twentieth Century Fox for $3,500. Fox did the same thing as RKO and adapted the novel to its low-budget detective series starring Lloyd Nolan as Michael Shayne. It was released as Time to Kill in 1942, the seventh fi lm in the series. Although both fi lms have their merits, especially Time to Kill, their hard-boiled attributes were compromised by the series format, which had to delete Chandler’s detective, Philip Marlowe, and insert either the Falcon or Mike
Shayne, who had little in common with Marlowe, especially the night-clubbing Falcon.
HARD-BOILED WRITERS W. R. Burnett (1899–1982)
Burnett wrote 33 novels, 18 of which were thrillers, 27 screenplays, and received 60 screen credits. His importance to the gangster genre and, to a lesser extent, fi lm noir cannot be overestimated. Two of his novels changed fi lm history (Little Caesar and The Asphalt Jungle), and a third, High Sierra, marked a change in the gangster genre that prefi gured the infl uence of noir a few years later. Each fi lm adaptation was 10 years apart—Little Caesar in 1930, High Sierra in 1941, and The Asphalt Jungle in 1950—and each represented a substantial, and infl uential, reworking of the genre he established in 1930. Little Caesar infl uenced Horace McCoy to write as well as encouraging William Faulkner’s Sanctuary and Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock.
Born in Springfi eld, Ohio, Burnett’s career as a novelist only developed after he left a secure job as a statistician in Ohio in 1927 for the uncertainty of life in Chicago. Working as a night clerk at the Northmere Hotel, Burnett listened to the gangsters that populated the hotel. This not only provided material, but also taught Burnett how to incorporate their distinctive slang in his stories. This was evident in his fi rst novel, Little Caesar, which was published in 1929. Building on the stories from the local gangsters, Burnett used Machiavelli’s story of power, betrayal, and corruption in The Prince to give structure to his novel, which traced the rise and fall of a gangster, Cesare Bandello (“Rico”). After the novel was an immediate success, Warner Bros. purchased the rights and adapted it into a highly successful fi lm starring Edward G. Robinson as Rico. Little Caesar also created a prototype for subsequent gangster fi lms such as The Public Enemy (1931).
After the success of his fi rst novel, Burnett was offered employment as a screen-writer, and he continued in this role until 1972 while also continuing to write novels in a range of genres, including Iron Man (1930), a tough boxing novel;
After the success of his fi rst novel, Burnett was offered employment as a screen-writer, and he continued in this role until 1972 while also continuing to write novels in a range of genres, including Iron Man (1930), a tough boxing novel;