crimeculture
Lee Horsley, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction and The Noir Thriller
Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction The Noir Thriller
Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction
Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction (Oxford University Press, August 2005) aims to enhance understanding of one of the most popular forms of genre fiction by examining a wide variety of the detective and crime fiction produced in Britain and America during the twentieth century. It will be of interest to anyone who enjoys reading crime fiction but is specifically designed with the needs of students in mind. It introduces different theoretical approaches to crime fiction (e.g., formalist, historicist, psychoanalytic, postcolonial, feminist) and will be a useful supplement to a range of crime fiction courses, whether they focus on historical contexts, ideological shifts, the emergence of sub-genres, or the application of critical theories. Forty-seven widely available stories and novels are chosen for detailed discussion.
This commissioned study was commended in THES (2006) as a “commanding survey”. Two recent (2007) US reviews stress its ambitious agenda: the Modern Fiction Studies reviewer calls it “the most comprehensive study of this literature that I am aware of” and notes that the approach “allows Horsley to trace generally overlooked but salutary connections”, to bring out “the developmental energies and heterogeneity of crime fiction, rather than its generic indexing” and to provide “a compelling way to read race and gender based interventions”; the Journal of Popular Culture reviewer comments on the strength of an approach that “provides historical context, and a sense of development across the century,” adding that the “detailed discussions of model texts are always accurate and insightful, of American and British novels equally…The book is well-written, its text sophisticated yet accessible.”
Description
• Covers a wide range of twentieth-century material, both British and American, using close analysis of over 40 individual texts to develop a wider argument
• Combines close attention to different critical concepts with an overview of generic development, using chronologically overlapping chapters to show how successive transformations have their roots in earlier phases of crime writing
• Analyses the use of crime fiction as a vehicle of socio-political protest, providing a unified framework for understanding transgressive modes of representation and subversive appropriations
In seeking to illuminate the relationship between different phases of generic development, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction employs an overlapping historical framework, with sections doubling back chronologically in order to explore the extent to which successive transformations have their roots within the earlier phases of crime writing, as well as responding in complex ways to the preoccupations and anxieties of their own eras. The first part of the study considers the nature and evolution of the main sub-genres of crime fiction: the classic and hard-boiled strands of detective fiction, the non-investigative crime novel (centred on transgressors or victims), and the 'mixed' form of the police procedural.
The second half of the study examines the ways in which writers have used crime fiction as a vehicle for socio-political critique. These chapters consider the evolution of committed, oppositional strategies, tracing the development of politicized detective and crime fiction, from Depression-era protests against economic injustice to more recent decades which have seen writers launching protests against ecological crimes, rampant consumerism, Reaganomics, racism, and sexism.
Contents
1. Classic Detective Fiction
The turn of the century: Sherlock Holmes and his contemporaries
Classic detection in the interwar years
Transforming the tradition in the 1950s and 1960s
2. Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction
The Black Mask boys
The mid-century paperback revolution
Contemporary investigations
3. Transgression and Pathology
The Prohibition-era gangsters
The killers inside us
Serial killers, pathologists, and police procedurals
4. Crime Fiction as Socio-Political Critique
Despairing of the Depression
Despoiling Florida
The politics of self-enrichment
5. Black Appropriations
'A Harlem of my mind'
Writing the other Los Angeles
Diasporic identities in contemporary Britain
Detectives, mammies, bitches, and whores
6. Regendering the Genre
Mothering feminist crime fiction in the 1970s
Butch vs. femme in the Reganite '80s
Unsolved crimes of the '90s
Into the twenty-first century
The Noir Thriller was reissued in an expanded paperback version in 2009 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001; 2009). This ground-breaking study, covering hundreds of novels, analyses the politics and poetics of literary noir from the hard-boiled fiction of Hammett, Chandler and Cain to the exciting diversity of twenty-first century thrillers.
Noir sensibility tends to come to the fore at times of discontent and anxiety, of disillusionment with institutional structures and loss of confidence in the possibility of effective agency. It undermines conventional values and 'moral meaning', questions our ability to interpret and judge the world, and prompts a sceptical distrust of the whole of society.
The aim of this study is to establish a broad understanding of literary noir, its contexts, techniques, themes and protagonists. Ranging from Chandler’s mean streets to the dark cityscapes of noir science fiction, it includes Depression-era private eyes, gangsters and victims, postwar avengers and femmes fatales, Harlem cops and small town killers, the game-players, voyeurs and consumers of late twentieth-century commodity culture, the cyberpunk hackers of future worlds and the doomed hard men of a new millennium.
Praise for Noir Thriller
'Within her constantly original overall argument, Lee Horsley gives or implies a fresh, carefully nuanced reading of each of the hundreds of books and many films she touches on. This study of the twentieth-century thriller in all of its darker manifestations is from now on indispensable.' - Martin Priestman, International Fiction Review, 2006
'An event to delight the heart and invigorate the mind of every fan of crime fiction and every scholar of modernism's sensational "dark side". Lee Horsley brings noir into the twenty-first century with panoramic aplomb, dexterity, and rigour, in a new edition every bit as accessible, erudite, witty and informed as the original.' - Charles Rzepka, Boston University, USA
'Unmatched in its scope, its concision, and the acuity of its readings, The Noir Thriller is indispensable. Horsley captures the rich variety of noir fiction like no other critic and in doing so gives this transatlantic, transgeneric tradition of writing the status it deserves.' - David Schmid, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, USA
'It's a pleasure to follow her journey from Joseph Conrad to James Ellroy, from Black Mask magazine to William Gibson Very inspiring is [her] attention to the links between literature and film throughout the book recommended as a handbook for anyone with a deeper interest in classic as well as modern crime fiction. Audiences of noir and neo-noir cinema are sure to find in it their favourite genre's sources of inspiration.' - Marcus Stiglegger, Paradoxa, 2001
'The Noir Thriller marks another title in Palgrave's "Crime Files" series, whose editorial philosophy is to offer "scholars, students and discerning readers a comprehensive set of guides to the world of crime and detective fiction", a philosophy Lee Horsley admirably meets with her readable, serious (though sometimes humorous) journey through noir streets and landscapes more varied than critics recognize.' - Anthony Bukoski, Studies in the Novel, 2002
'A welcome scholarly project The Noir Thriller will stand for the foreseeable future as the one-volume scholarly handbook to the hardboiled/bleak/violent end of crime fiction The range and depth of her scholarship is impressive - not only does she know about more crime novels than anyone I know of, she knows more about what's been written about them.' - Crime Factory, The Australian Crime Fiction Magazine, 2002
Contents
Dedication
Introduction
PART I: 1920-45
Hard-boiled Investigators
Big-shot Gangsters and Small-time Crooks
Victims of Circumstance
PART II: 1945-70
Fatal Men
Fatal Women
Strangers and Outcasts
PART III: 1970-the present
Players, Voyeurs and Consumers
Pasts and Futures
Literary Noir in the Twenty-First Century
Bibliography
Index