Product Description

In the 1920s a distinctively American detective fiction emerged from the pages of pulp magazines. The 'hard-boiled' stories published in "Black Mask", "Dime Detective", "Detective Fiction Weekly", and "Clues" featured a new kind of hero and soon challenged the popularity of the British mysteries that held readers in thrall on both sides of the Atlantic. In Hard-Boiled Erin A. Smith examines the culture that produced and supported this form of detective story through the 1940s. Relying on pulp magazine advertising, the memoirs of writers and publishers, Depression-era studies of adult reading habits, social and labor history, Smith offers an innovative account of how these popular stories were generated and read. She shows that although the work of pulp fiction authors like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Erle Stanley Gardner have become 'classics' of popular culture, the hard-boiled genre was dominated by hack writers paid by the word, not self-styled artists. Pulp magazine editors and writers emphasized a gritty realism in the new genre. Unlike the highly rational and respectable British protagonists (Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, for instance), tough-talking American private eyes relied as much on their fists as their brains as they made their way through tangled plot lines. Casting working-class readers of pulp fiction as 'poachers', Smith argues that they understood these stories as parables about Taylorism, work and manhood; as guides to navigating consumer culture; and, as sites for managing anxieties about working women. Engaged in re-creating white, male privilege for the modern, heterosocial world, pulp detective fiction shaped readers into consumers by selling them what they wanted to hear stories about manly artisan-heroes who resisted encroaching commodity culture and the female consumers who came with it. Commenting on the genre's staying power, Smith considers contemporary detective fiction by women, minority and gay and lesbian writers. Erin A. Smith is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Literature at the University of Texas.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1077898 in Books
• Published on: 2000-05-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 215 pages

Review
"Picking up a classic 'hard-boiled' detective novel by Dashiell Hammet or Raymond Chandler--or even modern-day Sara Paretsky--is an entirely different experience after reading Smith's fascinating book. Now the pages of these novels and their close cousins, the pulp magazines, have become rich canvases for working out struggles over readers' class and consumer identities." --Lizabeth Cohen, Harvard University "Not until Erin Smith's innovative study have we had such a fully-grounded look at the imagined community of working-class fraternity, masculinity, and consumerism through which pulp audiences interpreted the 'fast-talking' heroes of hard-boiled detective fiction. A lively, engaging book that ranges from the linguistics to the sartorial dimensions of the genre, from labor to cultural capital, from advertising copy to literary theory." --Christopher P. Wilson, author of Cap Knowledge: Police Power and Cultural Narrative in Twentieth Century America "Hard-Boiled [is] a valuable contribution to the study of American literature between the wars." --Modern Fiction Studies

From the Publisher
An examination of the culture that produced and supported pulp-fiction

About the Author
Erin A. Smith is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Literature at the University of Texas.

Customer Reviews

A MUST FOR THOUGHTFUL FANS OF THE MYSTERY GENRE
In "Hard Boiled," Erin A Smith's study of detective fiction, she quotes a review of a book of ghost stories, written by an academic: "There is nothing of the usual professor's dullness about them." The same could be said of her witty, provocative book.

What began life as a doctoral dissertation about the so-called hard-boiled detective novels of the first half of this century (Hammett, Chandler, et. al.) has been turned into an entertaining, thoughtful look at who read potboilers and what they learned from them. Smith argues pursuasively that hard-boiled readers, most of them male and blue collar, unwittingly picked up lessons about culture, masculinity, even how to dress and talk to women, from the books they bought at the drug store because they cost a dime and had pictures of loose women on the cover.

For me, the best chapter is the one in which Smith compares a hard-boiled novel to a British let's-have-tea-on-the-lawn-shall-we? mystery. Both novels are set on trains, but they have little else in common and Smith's discussion of the class, sociological and stylistic differences between the two books almost convinced this lover of both kinds of mysteries that the hard-boiled ones are more fun (almost; I'll still take my murder in the drawing room, preferably with a snoopy old biddy in the house next door, just dying to solve it).

Smith is an engaging writer (her dry description of the almost impenetrable plot of "The Big Sleep" is hilarious and cogent), whose wit, enthusiasm and gift for spotting the revelatory detail is on every page of "Hard-Boiled." Her descriptions of the novels and stories she discusses are so vivid that you understand what they're about, even if you haven't read them. And her grasp of the technique of writing pulp fiction is so strong that some of the writers, especially "Perry Mason" creator Erle Stanley Gardner, emerge as characters (somebody really needs to write a book about him, based on the evidence here).

Near the end of "Hard-Boiled," Smith suggests how that genre of fiction continues to influence today's writers, who are broadening the scope of mysteries to investigate gender, race. Obviously, it's a genre that deserves more study and Smith's work is a convincing, eminently readable place to start.