Hardboiled Crime Fiction - Essay Example

Hardboiled crime Fiction (2,000) Hardboiled crime fiction is a literary genre that deals mainly with detective stories and although deriving from romantic tradition, which placed a lot of emphasis on the emotions of apprehension, among others. The attitude is carried through what can be described as the detective's description of what he is doing and feeling in the first person. The genre's typical central character in this case is a detective, who daily witnesses the violence of organized crime that flourishes during the Prohibition, while dealing with a legal system that has become as corrupt as the organized crime itself. This is because the detective has been rendered cynical by this cycle of violence; the detectives of hardboiled fiction are classic antiheros (Arnold 108). It is a fact that African American authors of detective fiction helped develop the hardboiled detective novel and while writers of the classical detective novel often focused on solving the crimes and finding the criminal at the end of the novel. The new generation authors of the detective fiction, mainly African American authors, achieved a substantial alteration in this genre. These African American authors started using this genre to serve their ethnic social groups by bringing into prominence the social problems that faced them in America and presenting their viewpoints. In fact, most African American detective writers within this genre of crime fiction treat the race issue as a theme in their novels and among these are Barbara Neely among others. The focus of these writers in the novels is not just identifying or solving crimes, but also revealing the world around their characters to their readers and presenting crimes because of class conflict, and it can be said that their fiction raises issues that relate to race in American society. Hardboiled crime fiction can be said to have been an American reaction to the relaxed traditional values of British murder mysteries and writers such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Jonathan Latimer, and Mickey Spillane among others decided on an altogether different, ground-breaking approach to crime fiction (Bunyan 339). This approach created whole new stereotypes of crime fiction writing and the typical American investigator in these novels, was modelled in such a way that he worked alone, he was aged between 35 and 45 years, and was both a loner and a tough guy. His usual diet consisted of fried eggs, black coffee and cigarettes and he tended to hang out at shady all-night bars where he displayed his character as a heavy drinker who was always aware of his surroundings and able to fight back when attacked. This detective always carried a gun and he had the tendency to shoot criminals or took a beating if it would enable him to solve a case. These characters were often poor and cases that at first seemed uncomplicated, often turned out to be quite intricate, forcing him to embark on a journey through the urban environment (Browne 83). Because the detective was often involved with organized crime and other individuals in the underworld of cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, or Chicago, a hardboiled private eye had an ambivalent attitude towards the police (Howe 15). The sense of lack of expectation in the years between the two world wars was finely tuned by political and economic catastrophes for which people were altogether unprepared. Among these were the problem brought about because of the Prohibition and its accompanying development of gangster groups, as well as growing evidence of illicit connections between crime, business and politics in American cities. The different crises, which afflicted both American and European economies, brought about the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression, which writers such as Keynes saw as the worst catastrophe of modern times. Because of these, in the hardboiled fiction of this period, the anxious sense of fatality is usually attached to a cynical certainty that economic and socio-political circumstances would end up depriving the people of control over their lives (Bailey 26). These writers believed that these circumstances would work against the people by obliterating their hopes and by creating in them the flaws of character that would turn them into transgressors or point them out as victims. Hardboiled crime fiction just uses a different set of cliches and stereotypes and in general, it does include a murder mystery. While this is often the case, the atmosphere created by hardboiled writers and the settings they choose for their novels are different from English holiday home murders or mysteries, surrounding affluent old women sophisticatedly bumped off on a cruise ship, with a detective happening to be on board. It is believed that the development of hardboiled crime fiction would have happened anyway, even if the most renown writers of this genre had not written the way they did or even if Knox had not formulated his rules. Therefore, it can be said that the impetus came from the conditions of American life and the opportunities available to the American writer in the 1920s (Heise 485). The economic boom following the First World War combined with the introduction of Prohibition in 1920 to encourage the rise of the gangster and it is a fact that the familiar issues of law and lawlessness in a society determined to judge itself by the most ideal standards took on a new urgency (Bertolini 188). During the same period, the pulp magazines were by that time exploiting a ready market for escapade stories, which, according to Ronald Knox, were known as "shockers” that made heroes of cowboys, militias, voyagers and masked retaliators. It took no major leap of thoughts for these pulp magazines to challenge modern offense and revealing,and create heroes out of the abovementioned characters for the consumption of the public. Hardboiled fiction is an impassive style of writing about American Crime, which was used to bring earthy practicality and naturalism in the field of detective fiction. This form of fiction employs the use of graphic sex and violence that is vivid and takes part in sordid urban backgrounds, fast-paced with slangy dialogue. Dashiell Hammett is credited for the intervention of this genre, he was a detective in Pinkerton and made contributions to the pulp magazine where there was a first hardboiled story called Fly Paper that appeared in Black Mask magazine in the year 1929. Hammett combined his experiences with realistic influences of other writers who include Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos; together they created an American detective fiction different from previously written English mystery stories. They were set in country houses that were populated with relatives, cooks, among others, and this was a pattern followed by majority of American writers for generations (Reyes-Torres 33). Red Harvest was written in 1929 and was the first of Hammett’s detective novel and readers believed the masterpiece was The Maltese Falcon that was introduced by Sam Spade who was Hammett’s famous sleuth; the Thin Man that was written in 1934 was Hammett’s most successful story and was the last of quintet of novels that were extraordinary. Hammett’s innovation of American Crime was incorporated in hard-boiled melodramas produced by James Cain and this was seen in The Postman Always Rings Twice that was released in 1934 and Double Identity in 1936. Raymond Chandler is another successful writer and his novels include The Big Sleep, The Little Sister, Farewell and My Lovely, these novels dealt with racketeering and corruption in California (Klein 791). Other significant writers in the field of hard-edged school such as George Harmon who wrote actioners such as Murder with Pictures and Eye Witness; W.R. Burnett wrote The Asphalt Jungle in 1949 and Little Caesar in 1929. Thereafter, hardboiled fiction degenerated and became sensational and undisguised sadism that Ellery Queen’s Magazine called it guts-gore-and-gals-school, this is found in the work of Mickey Spillane who wrote novels that were best-sellers in 1947 such as I, the Jury. Hardboiled crime fiction sleuths are attractive such as Marlowe that has fem fatals who try tempting him and Carmen tried to sit on Marlowe’s slap while he was standing up. When it began raining, Marlowe gave remarks to the bookstore owner that he would rather get wet in the rain (Whiting 149). The detectives were given these characteristics based on the settings they were in, the hard-boiled novels replicated on the authenticity of crime that took place in America at that time. The environment presented a tough world with a tough detective who drinks and smokes heavily showing the realism of criminal character and circumstance (Smith 235). The sleuth in the novel lives by their morals and not by their society, in the field, they are upright and do not care about the society’s games; there is lack of long term relationship and the metaphorical for this relationship that is conflicting is the presence of a run-down house. The moral codes of the sleuth’s is never giving up when faced with danger and never giving up on a client; a hardboiled will never text a detective to give up on an account of OH and S; hardboiled texts are the most violent except for contemporary texts (Macpherson 443). There is the presence of weapons in a hostile world and there is gunplay in hardboiled texts and guns in general. In ‘The Big Sleep’ Marlowe talked about the presence of many guns around the town and few brains, he goes ahead and states that within a day, two people pointed a gun towards him. Hard-boiled texts victims are linked to criminal underground in one way or another; the victim becomes first persons to be murdered in a series of murders. In other circumstances, a detective will take on a case before a murder occurs and this is similar to ‘The Big Sleep’. Marlowe was initially allocated the task of discovering a extortionist and later ends up following several leads running in rounds when murder after murder befall. The Private investigator of Hard-boiled fiction often experiences the police as a burden, this is similar to police in Early Crime Fiction who failed to achieve justice (O'Donnell 783). The sleuth breaks the law when in the process of searching for the truth and at the same time becomes a ‘good-guy’, on the other hand, the police are portrayed to be either stupid or bound to the police system, therefore, they require assistance from the PI. The detective follows the leads on a hunch, nevertheless, a detective never goes beyond the bounds of faith in crime fiction texts, and hence the hunch is usually based on the knowledge that is gained from detective work. Works Cited Arnold, David. "The Case for Crime." Studies in the Novel 35.1 (2003): 108-18. Bailey, Frankie Y. "Community, Crime, and Traces of Noir: The Conjure-Man Dies and A Rage in Harlem." Clues 28.1 (2010): 26-37. Bertolini, Joseph. "Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism; McCann, Sean." Perspectives on Political Science 31.3 (2002): 188. Browne, Ray B. "Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Stories." The Journal of American Culture32.1 (2009): 83. Bunyan, Scott. "No Order from Chaos: The Absence of Chandler's Extra-Legal Space in the Detective Fiction of Chester Himes and Walter Mosley." Studies in the Novel 35.3 (2003): 339-65. Heise, Thomas. ""GOING BLOOD-SIMPLE LIKE THE NATIVES": CONTAGIOUS URBAN SPACES AND MODERN POWER IN DASHIELL HAMMETT'S RED HARVEST." Modern Fiction Studies 51.3 (2005): 485,512,728. Howe, Alexander N. "The Detective and the Analyst: Truth, Knowledge, and Psychoanalysis in the Hard-Boiled Fiction of Raymond Chandler." Clues 24.4 (2006): 15-29. Klein, Kathleen Gregory. "Traces, Codes, and Clues: Reading Race in Crime Fiction." Modern Fiction Studies 50.3 (2004): 791-2. Macpherson, Heidi. "Hardboiled and High Heeled: The Woman Detective in Popular Culture." Journal of American Studies 40.2 (2006): 443-4. O'Donnell, Patrick. "Unless the Threat of Death is Behind them: Hard-Boiled Fiction and Film Noir." Modernism/Modernity 14.4 (2007): 783-5. Reyes-Torres, Agust. "A Pedagogical Approach to Detective Fiction." International Education Studies 4.5 (2011): 33-8. Smith, Erin A. "The Street was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir." Studies in the Novel 37.2 (2005): 235-7. Whiting, Frederick. "Bodies of Evidence: Post-War Detective Fiction and the Monstrous Origins of the Sexual Psychopath. “The Yale Journal of Criticism 18.1 (2005): 149,178,208. Read More