THE CASE FOR CRIME

Author(s): DAVID ARNOLD

Source: Studies in the Novel, Vol. 35, No. 1 (spring 2003), pp. 108-118
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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 ESSAY-REVIEW

THE CASE FOR CRIME

DAVID ARNOLD

PAUL COBLE Y. The American Thriller: Generic Innovation and Social

Change in the 1970s. Hampshire and New York: Palgrave, 2000. 242
pp.

GREG FORTER. Murdering Masculinities: Fantasies of Gender and

Violence in the American Crime Novel. New York: New York Univer?
sity Press, 2000. 268 pp.

SEAN MCCANN. Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and

the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism. Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2000. 370 pp.

In his 1995 book Pulp Culture, which connects developments in

hardboiled detective fiction to political trends during the forties and fifties,
Woody Haut makes a point that is surprising only in that people keep having
to make it: "Still considered low-brow and throwaway, hardboiled writing
has remained marginal in its relationship to mainstream literary criticism.
Given the tediousness of mainstream literary criticism, there may be little
reason to regret this" (3). Writing a decade earlier, Ernest Mandel begins his
sober exploration of the social and commercial aspects of crime fiction with
this shamefaced admission: "Let me confess at the outset that I like to read
crime stories" (vi). It seems, in fact, that although he "likes" them, Mandel's
intellectual interest in crime stories arises more out of a bewildered fascina?
tion at their popularity. Serious intellectuals, apparently, continue to be

Studies in the Novel, Volume 35, number 1 (Spring 2003). Copyright ? 2003 by the
University of North Texas. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.

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 ESSAY-REVIEW I 109

conflicted about the appropriateness of this genre for serious literary study.
To be sure, the attention paid to crime fiction by mainstream literary critics
has increased in the last three decades. Haut himself mentions, not wholly
uncritically, work by Tzvetan Todorov and Fredric Jameson, and we can
point as well to deeply insightful and serious work on the genre and the
related subject of film noir by Joan Copjec and Slavoj ?izek, to mention but
a few. But even though it grows more and more common to see these works
show up on undergraduate syllabi or in MLA panels, the lingering taint of the
popular remains.
The arguments about the artistic status of works of popular culture, and
the potential threats to the collective intellect implied by mass culture and
mass consumerism, are too numerous to outline here,1 but we might profit?
ably remember that Matthew Arnold, in Culture and Anarchy, argued for the
value of literature by suggesting that it is "the best that has been thought and
said" in a culture (6), a kind of distillation of all that is most admirable. If
this is true, we might then imagine that in hardboiled crime fiction we are,
equally valuably and importantly, treated to the worst that has been thought
and said (and done) by members of our culture whose thoughts and words are,
because of their social class, less often recorded.
The authors of the three books under review here share essentially the
same agenda: to contribute to the decades-old but still seemingly controver?
sial argument that crime fiction, whether "classic," "hardboiled," or merely
"generic," can comment meaningfully on culture and society and worthily
attract the attention of literary scholars. An interesting difference is that
while the first two go about their business-productively reading crime fiction
through the cultural and theoretical lenses of mainstream academic inquiry
the third takes this act of inclusiveness, and its putative controversiality, as
one of its chief points of contention. Sean McCann draws a political
connection between the gritty world of thirties crime fiction and Roosevelt's
New Deal, while Greg Forter mounts a Freudian/post-Freudian analysis of
classic noir crime fiction. Paul Cobley makes a similar kind of point, that
American thrillers written during the seventies reflect a growing paranoia in
the American public, but expends what seems like a lot of energy arguing that
such a project is valid.
In Gumshoe America, Sean McCann traces the political impulses in
crime fiction by the fathers of the genre-including Dashiell Hammett and
Raymond Chandler, and also social protest/crime writer Chester Himes-to
the implementation and ultimate failure of the New Deal social and economic
policies of the thirties. Crises of class and power in the U. S., McCann argues,
are reflected in the uneasy position of hardboiled crime fiction as a
subliterary genre. Like both Forter and Cobley, as we shall see, he focuses
on the features of this genre that specifically render it subliterary to suggest

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 110 / ARNOLD

an int?mate connection between the works and the political ferment they are
said to reflect.
McCann begins his examination by tracing the career of James M. Cain
through a reading of Cain's novel Serenade. McCann suggests an essential
similarity between Cain's ambivalence about his literary status and the
dilemmas of John Howard Sharp, the novel's protagonist. Like Hammett and
Chandler, writers who gained fame and popularity selling sensationalist
stories to the pulp magazines, Cain's protagonist, an opera singer, yearns for
recognition from a more sophisticated audience. Convinced of the gulf
between literary experts and urban, working class audiences, but intent on
"overcoming] the limits of intractable cultural institutions," McCann ar?
gues, "the major hard-boiled writers became, in effect, pulp avant-gardists
. . . [whose] novels became . . . entries in an ongoing mediation on the
difficulty of imagining a democratic culture in a literary marketplace shaped
by the institution of mass communication and professional expertise" (4). By
virtue of their aspirations beyond mere popular fiction, these authors combat
the apparently class-based marginalization of their genre.
The implications of class in the creation of popular culture are central to
this construction: the writers of hard-boiled crime fiction are catering
specifically to a new, mass readership, a class whose economic clout was
threatening, even before the twenties and thirties, to redefine culture and
radically restructure its production. Many early theorists of mass culture
sounded alarums at the perceived deadening of culture that was sure to attend
this kind of commercialized mass production, while others, notably
Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart, were more optimistic about the
possibilities of blending high and low culture. In responding to the elitism,
and to the fundamental illogic, of this split, writers like Hammett were
simultaneously responding to their own perceived marginalization as literary
artists.
In this sense, McCann argues, the hard-boiled crime novel as a genre
reflects what these writers, and many Americans, felt to be the essential
failure of liberal social philosophy: based on the idea of free individuals
freely submitting themselves to fairly and disinterestedly promulgated regu?
lations, this construction began to seem outdated as private and corporate
interests of unregulated industrial capitalism grew during the first decades of
the century. We can see the kind of social crisis this reflects, McCann argues,
if we measure the hard-boiled crime novel against its classic predecessors:
in the latter, the cohesiveness of society is reaffirmed by the professional
expertise of the detective. By deploying the master narratives of rationalism,
this figure assures "the victory of public knowledge and civic solidarity over
the dangers of private desire." In the hard-boiled crime narrative, no such
complacent confidence in the stability of society is available: "the idea of

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 ESSAY-REVIEW I 111

common culture seems ... ultimately unbelievable," and the genre becomes
a kind of social critique (4).
Part of this critique, according to McCann, is an affirmation of the
populism and (relative) multicultural diversity that characterized the growing
urban centers of the early twentieth-century United States, a focus on what
pulp writers thought characterized the grit of real life as opposed to the
"genteel fantasy" of classic detective fiction and, implicitly, outdated liberal
political philosophies (39). McCann notes interestingly that hard-boiled
writers were not alone in sounding this kind of "populist jeremiad" (40):
during the twenties, Black Mask magazine featured an ongoing debate about
the Ku Klux Klan, whose members also descried the vice and degradation
plaguing urban populations (40). But while both Klan members and hard
boiled writers like Hammett and Carroll John Daly responded to this per?
ceived corruption with representations of violence, the ideological underpin?
nings of these responses differed. According to McCann, "In rejecting the
racialized social coherence of the Klan, writers like Hammett and Daly
challenged that myth, fashioning a detective fiction whose most striking
feature was its own relative incoherence" (196-97). Thus, in a sense, these
hardboiled writers are striking out against the kind of class prejudice that
marginalizes their efforts, against a society whose defining structure is a kind
of intolerance.
McCann's comments on Hammett's early career highlight the ambiva?
lence that this sense of populism created for an author who, despite his
working class credentials, aspired to literary elitism. McCann contrasts the
figure of Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon with earlier detective heroes,
making the point that, unlike Holmes or Dupin, whose ability to read sign
systems derives apparently from the socially as well as intellectually elevated
position from which they observe, Spade is, in fact, a suspect in the case he
investigates (the murder of his partner and several other people). For
McCann, this represents a society moving away from a reliance on benevo?
lent experts and toward an uneasy but more egalitarian populism (91).
Yet, even as he is asserting his detective's street credibility, Hammett is
struggling with his own desire to enter the literary elite, to step beyond the
audience of urban working class men with whom he got his start. "In short,"
McCann says, "though he later became famous ... for his socialist politics,
Hammett was also an elitist, and he envisioned the pursuit of literary
autonomy as a way to elude and objectify the forms of imprisonment implicit
in vernacular expression" (95). Still, Hammett had little use for the purely
academic, and thought of the writer, of himself, as "'someone who could
make sense of... [things] for folks'"(96). Thus Hammett's personal agenda,
apropos of the literary status of his and other crime writing, seems to involve
a kind of merging of popular and literary discourses, replacing the fustian
with the gritty and "real," and the simple-minded with the artful.

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 112 / ARNOLD

In a political sense, however, Hammett ' s desire to blend the popular with
the elite bespeaks a certain conflictedness about the role of government, of
expert administration, in the lives of common people. In the works of
Raymond Chandler, however, we are invited, at least for a moment, to see this
increased governmental presence, part of New Deal social policies, as a
positive feature of a changing political landscape. Focusing on the images
of a soldier and a bridge at the conclusion of Chandler's The Lady in the Lake,
McCann argues that Chandler is reflecting a new, "decentralist" take on the
New Deal that sprang from mistrust of well-established east coast financial
institutions (143).
In Chandler's novel we see these structures coming together to suggest
a model of private dependence on and cooperation with an expanding
governmental presence that would grow throughout the thirties in the form
of public works projects and solidify with the wartime spending of the forties.
As McCann indicates, however, Chandler's vision of the possibilities of this
kind of civic cooperation was short lived. Like Hammett, his earlier fiction
was directed mostly against the abuses of an old, well-established elite (see,
for instance, the Sternwoods in The Big Sleep). In his later fiction, he sees
the common man "swamped by postwar consumerism" (144). But it is,
crucially, his experience writing for the pulp magazines that fosters his
deepest disdain for concentrations of power: the pulps as he saw them were
independent and implicitly masculine, a place where he could make a new
kind of art out of the riches of vernacular language (145-47). Unlike
Hammett, who saw Black Mask basically as a way station on his road to
creating true literature, Chandler was convinced that the pulps themselves
were the sources of art.
We get this sense in Chandler's querulous essay "The Simple Art of
Murder": "The detective story," he intones, is not "a vital and significant
form of art. There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art,
and precious little ofthat" (2). He clarifies this elliptical and, we suspect,
somewhat disingenuous construction in his conclusion, where he indicates
that

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It

may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony,
and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these
mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither
tarnished nor afraid. The detective [in the artistic crime story] must be
such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. (18)

Thus by the time he concludes an essay whose apparent thesis is the

artlessness of crime fiction, Chandler has revealed his true obsession, the

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 ESSAY-REVIEW I 113

hero, the chivalrous isolato fit to embody the ethos of Chandler's elitist alter
ego.
In his comments about these writers, and also about Chester Himes,
McCann is arguing that the politics of the New Deal, and class friction in the
U. S. in general, created a political ferment that fostered hardboiled fiction,
while at the same time engendering the class bigotry that would marginalize
it. Greg Forter uses a different critical lens, but his program is essentially
similar to McCann's. In Murdering Masculinities, he draws chiefly on
several models of Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalysis to examine
constructions of gender in works by Hammett, James M. Cain, and Jim
Thompson, even throwing in Sanctuary, Faulkner's pulpiest novel, in a sort
of inverted gesture of inclusiveness. Like McCann, one of his implicit
agendas is to assert that this fiction comments meaningfully on a potentially
under-analyzed aspect of American culture. His introduction is an Ellroy
like confession about his psychic ambivalence toward his mother's death, a
pocket of buried emotional and intellectual energy that burst forth, he
indicates, as he began this project: "[T]he fragile defenses by which I
expelled my dying mother from view, and which were saturated with violent
fantasies that confused the boundaries they sought to establish, were pro?
foundly linked to the crime novel" (2-3). His own response to the genre
becomes a kind of gnomon for that of American society, with crime fiction
viewed as "a place in our culture where fantasies of extraordinary relevance
to me get a kind of hyperbolic and public elaboration ... a genre in which
the implicitly gendered content of those fantasies is heightened and rendered
explicit: in which it's manhood that defines itself against a femininity whose
proximity demands that it be ambivalently repudiated-and in which that
femininity often returns ... to perforate, shatter, and dissolve the male ego"
(3).
Forter's aim is to demonstrate that the crime fiction he analyzes brings
to the surface facets of male sexuality that Freud, and, presumably, the male
authors and protagonists of these novels, tacitly acknowledged but sought to
bury. He specifically invokes the more recent psychological and sexual
theories of Leo Bersani and Kaja Silverman in asserting that what is "toxic"
in the male struggle for sexual dominance can find a cure in the disruption
of the male ego through the transgression of its psychic boundaries and the
forcible introduction of the feminine.
Some of Forter's most convincing arguments arise in his examinations
of crises of male sexuality as they are embodied in Dashiell Hammett's The
Glass Key. Ned Beaumont, the novel's protagonist, achieves agency in this
troubling novel less through ratiocinative or even regular physical prowess
than through his capacity to withstand abuse. Forter contends that this
apparent inversion of the standard tough-guy persona is important in under?
standing how we read crime fiction and why we enjoy it. A key element of

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 114 / ARNOLD

this economy is our submerged identification with the victim, the corpse,
suggesting that part of the pleasure of reading crime novels lies in a kind of
masochism or death wish. According to Forter, "To the extent that we enjoy
ourselves through this identification, the hardboiled novel begins to subvert
the conventionally masculine commitment to mastery, exposing it as a reflex
of fear that masks a secret desire: a desire for the renunciation of power in
the name of a compulsively repeated submission to the pleasures of masoch?
istic pain" (13). In rejecting the first-person narrative perspective character?
istic of much hard-boiled fiction, Forter says, Hammett seeks to de-centralize
and dissolve the traditional male power structures at work in the novel.
This dissolution is realized in Ned Beaumont's apparent compulsion to
expose himself to physical pain, a dissolution of his own personal, physical
boundaries that amounts to a feminization. Forter proceeds to connect this
hypothesis to a reading of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, arguing
that, latent in that essay, we can discover a linkage between pleasure and
submission that Freud "both sees and seeks to suppress" (13). Read through
this lens, Ned Beaumont becomes an avatar of the male search for psychic
dissolution, one that is often sterilized by projecting it onto the feminine, but
which can here be enjoyed safely "because it no longer appears to issue from
within" (25).
Forter also makes provocative analyses of James M. Cain's Serenade.
For Forter, this story centers on John Sharp's questions about his sexuality,
which, Forter argues, allow Cain to examine and then systematically reduce
the sanctity of the inviolable white, male, American self. Forter uses Freud's
essay "The Uncanny" to demonstrate that "if Cain provokes in his readers a
disgusted self-assertion, it's because his texts seek to degrade and primitivize
the civilized self by reamassing it with its primordially familiar 'others'"
(52). By tracing a pattern of doubling in the novel, Forter argues that John
Sharp's identity is systematically compromised and finally bestialized first
by association with Juana, the Mexican Indian girl, and later in his ritual
slaughter of an iguana. Beyond the racism implicit in this dissolution of John
Sharp's status as a white man lies the novel's "crude homophobia," which,
according to Forter, Cain also sets up specifically as a threat to autonomy of
self: "What Cain reviles as 'homosexual love,' . . . consists in a bond that
abolishes the other's autonomy; it threatens independence because it reduces
the other to a function of the ego's enjoyment, and this means that the danger
of gay bonds resides in their status as identificatory attachments" (59).
Because of his uncanny similarity to and familiarity with the straight male,
the gay male is a specter, a threat to traditional masculinity that seems to rise
from within.
In his reading of William Faulkner's pulp potboiler Sanctuary, Forter
makes the interesting point that what makes this Faulkner's "crime novel"
(besides all the crimes, I suppose) is that, unlike many modernist experiments

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 ESSAY-REVIEW I 115

that plumb the depths of subjectivity, its narrative perspective is insistently

objective. However, the relationship between subject and object is pro?
foundly troubled. In a convincing close-reading of the novel's first scene,
Forter demonstrates that the narrative's mode functions to blur the distinc?
tions between subject and object by softening the boundaries of human
bodies themselves and collapsing the spatial and temporal distances that
usually make such distinctions possible. Drawing on Freud's essay "Nega?
tion," he suggests that the creation of the objective world involves an act of
rejection by the subject, a kind of psychic vomiting resulting from the
subject's decision to reject the object and thus render it "not me." He
connects this to a discussion of gender by equating this expelled "not me"
with the image of the feminine and the mother: "What, after all, is this
(no)thing I spit up if not the fantasy of maleficent motherhood?" (90). His
"final hypothesis" about this novel is that it "drives male readers to distrac?
tion by making them envision the vomitory 'mother' that it also forces them
to eat-to like-and therefore, to be" (92).
Forter's concluding comments make an interesting point about the
marginalized place of crime fiction among other more arguably serious
literary genres. Here he argues, as he has been attempting to demonstrate
throughout the book, that crime fiction is where our literature works out some
of its darker fantasies, where it confronts and attempts to talk through the
uglier binaries it is so intent on sensationalizing.
The scope of Paul Cobley's investigation is largely the same as those of
McCann and Forter. In The American Thriller, he limits his examination to
representatives of this genre (fairly broadly defined to include fiction, non
fiction bestsellers, and films) produced during the 1970s. Also like McCann
and Forter, he attempts, with good success, to locate in these diverse texts
traces of certain social phenomena, in this case, the idea that political events
in the sixties and seventies, like the Watergate scandal and the conduct of the
Vietnam War, gave rise to a sense of paranoia about governmental conspira?
cies in the United States. This Zeitgeist, he suggests, infects the works he
reads and also the way they were originally read.
Cobley is centrally concerned with defining the genre he is working with,
and, moreover, in establishing that it is worthy of scholarly inquiry. He
begins with a broad inquiry into the concept of genre itself, arguing against
the tendency to read the concept only as a means of fixing meanings. He uses
this to lead into a suggestion that, though certain texts may be recognized to
belong to a stably conceived genre, like the "seventies thriller," they should
not be regarded as "the same entity" (3). Rather, he argues that the spectrum
of social phenomena defining a genre during a given period, in this case
paranoia about conspiracies, is "so wide and accommodating that it enables
an expansive range of diverse texts. Except where flagrant rip-offs occur, all
thrillers are actually totally different, even while still sharing the conspiracy

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 116 / ARNOLD

theme" (3). Cobley cites the concept of "generic innovation" and "generic
overlap" as responses to the reductive argument that genre ossifies meaning:
"The fact that genres ... are always in some kind of relation to each other,
whether that be a relation of apparent isolation, peaceful co-existence,
outright conflict or active poaching, entails that genre is a dynamic phenom?
enon no matter how static it feels" (191).
He is also concerned that as a component of this information we make
ourselves aware, if possible, of exactly how these texts would have been
received by their original, contemporary readers, undertaking thumbnail
examinations of reception theory and new historicist models of reading,
among other approaches. He demonstrates the importance of these consid?
erations in his analyses of "thrillers" whose roots lie in historical events. Our
understanding, or rather, the understanding of a reader during the seventies,
of a text like All the President 's Men is conditioned not only by awareness
of the unfolding of historical events, but also by the complex of marketing
strategies that define the text first as a series of breaking news stories and then
as a blockbuster bestseller, finally complicating that definition by linking it
to a popular, "thriller"-style motion picture. Thus, understanding this text's
relationship to its genre requires that we be aware of these different valences
of association or "reading formations" (16-17).
What is most interesting, troubling, perhaps, about Cobley's book is that
it expends so much ink and energy on the kind of argument that I laid out at
the beginning of this essay. His readings are apt and accurate, and his agenda
is, to my way of thinking, admirable: that this kind of text-whether a novel,
a film, or a work of non-fiction-should not be marginalized solely because
it is popular. Both McCann and Forter recognize this stigmatization. For
Forter, it is the "single-mindedness" of its obsessions with the binaries in
which it wallows that is "both the cause and the result of the genre's
marginalization" (215). McCann notes that although during the twenties and
thirties the pulp market could stand on its own as a populist literary front
politically distinct from the major publishing houses, the paperback revolu?
tion of the fifties diluted that distinction and sank hardboiled crime fiction
into a "m?lange of trash" from which it has never, critically speaking,
resurfaced (200-01). Neither Forter nor McCann, however, make establish?
ing the legitimacy of crime fiction scholarship the kind of crusade that Cobley
does. However, it is not only the stigmatization of the popular that troubles
Cobley: he confronts as well the stigmatization of genre and the arguments
of reductivism that surround its use as a critical tool. Tzvetan Todorov
confronts the same question in his examination of genre in detective fiction:
"for nearly two centuries, there has been a powerful reaction in literary
studies against the very notion of genre . . . There is good historical
explanation for this attitude: literary reflection of the classical period, which

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 ESSAY-REVIEW I 117

concerned genres more than works, also manifested a penalizing tendency

. . . such criticism sought not only to describe genres but to prescribe them;
the grid of genre preceded literary creation instead of following it" (42). Like
Todorov, Cobley is eager to argue that we read genre as a means of assessing,
rather than limiting meaning.
Ultimately, whether or not he protests too much, we must admit that
Cobley is right to address this stigmatization: as I suggested at the outset, it
is a question that always lingers around the serious critical examination of
crime fiction. In a sense, we can read the debate as crucial to the expansion
of literary canons in general. The need to continue asking serious questions
about literature and culture will force readers to ask more probing questions
of "classic" texts, and also to confront new and different texts, seeking out
voices thus far under-represented in academic discussions. We are used to
hearing this argument made about writers of marginalized races or genders,
and Woody Haut makes the interesting point that, regarding pulp crime
fiction, we might regard its creators as members of a marginalized social
class: this marginalization, he says, "indicates a class-based separation
between writers who have the status of literary artists and those who are
relegated to the status of literary workers'" (3 ). Cobley ' s work to alleviate this
stigmatization is surely necessary. Interestingly, we could argue that the
marginalization of any form of popular culture is ultimately based on class:
fear of the popular, of mass culture and its deadening, diluting effects on high
culture, has been part of the critical landscape throughout the twentieth
century. In one sense, though, this might ultimately prove a benefit. Haut
suggests that "hardboiled writing has been marginalized precisely because it
is class-based literature. Yet this marginalization has, in turn, provided
hardboiled writing a perspective from which to continue its reflection and
critique of society" (3-4). This critique is the central concern of the writers
reviewed here, and each makes a demonstrable contribution to the reversal
of crime fiction's marginalization.

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-STEVENS POINT

NOTES

1 See, for instance, Dwight MacDonald's "A Theory of Mass Culture." Mass Culture:
The Popular Arts in America. Ed. Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White. Glencoe:
The Free Press, 1957. See also F. R. Leavis, Education and the University. London: Chatto
and Windus, 1961 and Nor Shall My Sword. London: Chatto and Windus, 1972. See also Q.
D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public. London: Chatto and Windus, 1932.

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 118 / ARNOLD

WORKS CITED

Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1932.

Chandler, Raymond. The Simple Art of Murder. New York: Vintage, 1988.
Haut, Woody. Pulp Culture: Hardboiled Fiction and the Cold War. London: Serpent's Tail,
1995.
Mandel, Ernest. Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1984.
Todorov, Tzvetan. The Poetics of Prose. Trans. Richard Howard. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977.

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