An Introduction to Contemporary American
Crime Fiction
The
inheritors of the hard-boiled tradition are diverse, producing many
different forms of contemporary American crime writing. The darkly comic
tone of much earlier crime fiction has resurfaced in the work of writers
like Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen; the tough detective has spawned
(no doubt to his surprise) a host of female private eyes; Hammett’s
Continental Op, an individualistic investigator playing a role in a
larger investigative structure, has been succeeded by the case-hardened
cops of the police procedural; the violent heirs of Jim Thompson’s
psychopathic protagonists stalk the pages of the contemporary serial
killer novel. Much that is best in this large body of crime fiction
falls into the larger category of ‘contemporary American noir’.
There
were bound to be some changes in literary noir as the 'lurid era' of
the twenty-five-cent paperback originals drew to a close in the sixties.
There was, however, no real watershed, and one's sense of continuity
is strengthened by the fact that some of the most notable noir crime
novelists of the fifties and sixties were still publishing in the seventies:
amongst others, Stanley Ellin, John D. MacDonald, Ross Macdonald, Margaret
Millar, Patricia Highsmith, Charles Willeford, Donald Westlake (under
his own name and as Richard Stark) and James Hadley Chase. The influence
of such mid-century novelists as Jim Thompson, David Goodis and Chester
Himes on contemporary writing was made possible by the reissue of their
work from the 1980s on in Black Lizard and Vintage Crime editions.
Many of the new voices of the period offer striking revivifications
of the traditional patterns of literary noir. Edward Bunker, for example,
drawing on his own experiences, writes from the criminal's point of
view about the effects of imprisonment, deprivation and exclusion in
novels like No Beast So Fierce (1973) and Little Boy Blue
(1981).
The
staple fare of gangland revenge and betrayal is given freshness and
immediacy by the dialogue of George V. Higgins' first novel, The
Friends of Eddie Coyle (1970), the film adaptation of which (directed
by Peter Yates, 1973) is judged by Silver and Ward to be 'closer to
the true noir cycle than the homage offered by such films as Chinatown
and Farewell, My Lovely'. Long-established noir themes have
continued to exert their hold in more recent fiction. Craig Holden,
in his first novel, The River Sorrow (1995), provides a distinctly
modern (or postmodern) reworking of sexual obsession and wrong man plots.
James Ellroy, writing in the eighties and nineties, uses the more extreme
possibilities of the crime novel to recreate the violence and corruption
of post-World War Two Los Angeles, imaging the beginnings of what Ellroy
calls a 'half a century of tumult and change in America'.
New Investigative
Series
The last three decades have also seen
the creation of a large number of new investigative series, with a variety
of strong regional identities. Several series protagonists have contended
with the crimes of northern cities: Lawrence Block, for example (who
started in the sixties by writing paperback originals for Gold Medal),
began, in the seventies, a series of novels featuring an ex-cop, Matt
Scudder, a guilt-ridden, gloomy alcoholic (eventually ex-alcoholic)
investigator of a New York in which it seems that 'people could adjust
to one reality after another if they put their minds to it' (A Stab
in the Dark). In the eighties, Loren Estleman started to write
his rather less noir series of Detroit-based Amos Walker novels, which
tend to move towards detective-story resolutions, complete with penetrations
of disguise and revelations of identity (for example, in The Midnight
Man and Downriver). In the nineties, Sam Reaves introduced
his cab-driving Vietnam veteran Cooper MacLeish, who first appears in
A Long Cold Fall (1991), in which sentiment, human warmth and
hearts of gold effectively counteract the noir potential of the pitiless
Chicago cold and the 'blind universe' that grants Cooper 'the grace
of survival'. Louisiana has been another location well-served by tough
investigators.
At
the more noir end of the scale, there is James Sallis' New Orleans detective,
Lew Griffin, who, like many another investigator, is guilt-ridden and
ex-alcoholic, but also a university teacher and a writer, postmodern
and self-reflexive - and black (Sallis, who is white, says he was '20
or 30 pages in before I realised he was black'). Working nearby is James
Lee Burke's Cajun detective, Dave Robicheaux, the protagonist of narratives
in which the defeat of villainy is set against reminders not to accept
'the age-old presumption that the origins of social evil can be traced
to villainous individuals' who can simply be locked away - a dark awareness
that is in turn moderated by life-affirming contacts with a loved child
(A Stained White Radiance) or an earthy dance (Dixie City
Jam). Strongly positive elements, particularly the affirmative
presence of family, also counterbalance the sense of a 'whole nother
side of [American] life, a darker, semilawless, hillbilly side' (Give
Us a Kiss), in the 'country noir' novels of Daniel Woodrell, some
of which (like Under the Bright Lights) feature another Cajun
investigator, Rene Shade.
In series such as these the honourable ghost of Marlowe is often near
at hand, encouraging the nobler possibilities within the hard-boiled
tradition, bringing to the fore the moral integrity, the compassion
and the tough-sentimental view of life that infuse the investigative
narrative with a redemptive potential and make it less darkly noir.
Contemporary writers both acknowledge Chandler's influence and try to
differentiate themselves from him, as Ross Macdonald did in the late
fifties, when he modified his 'heir to Chandler' role, declaring that
The Doomsters (1958) marked 'a fairly clean break with the
Chandler tradition'.
The Lone
Male Finds an Alternative Family
One
way in which more recent crime writers have made a break with the Chandler
tradition has been to distance their protagonists from the identity
and ethos of the lone white male, the crusader-knight of the mean streets.
They have done this either by creating an investigator who is himself
black, as in Sallis and Mosley, or by making the protagonist homosexual
(as in Joseph Hansen's Dave Brandstetter novels) or part of a close-knit
group of mixed race and gender. James Crumley, who introduced two hard-drinking,
tough-talking protagonists - Milodragovitch and Sughrue - in the 1970s,
is a self-declared heir to the Chandler tradition (describing himself
as 'a bastard child of Raymond Chandler'), but emphasises that his is
a much less traditional morality. He defines his own sensibility as
conditioned by the disillusionments of the Vietnam war and his 'vision
of justice' as in consequence less clear-cut. His protagonists are 'reverent
towards the earth and its creatures' and sustained by eccentric alliances
with criminals and other misfits. In addition to male bonding, there
are the beginnings of surrogate families - Sughrue, for example, holding
'Baby Lester laughing in my arms' at the end of Mexican Tree Duck
(1993).
Like many other recent investigators, Crumley's protagonists, though
retaining some of the romanticised qualities of the lone male, are no
longer solitary defenders of macho values. What we see in novels of
this kind is a 'softening' of the protagonist by allying him with others,
often with a larger surrogate family that represents those marginalised
by the dominant society (non-white characters, strong women, outcasts
of all kinds).
This
is a widespread tendency, evident in the little family collected together
by Easy Rawlins, in the bond between the white, straight Hap Collins
and the black, gay Leonard Pine (in the comic noir novels of Joe Lansdale,
such as Savage Season and Two-Bear Mambo) and in the
representative sampling of minorities and misfits allied with Andrew
Vachss' 'outlaw' private detective, Burke. Even in the decidedly Chandleresque
novels of Robert B. Parker (who wrote his Ph.D. thesis on Hammett, Chandler
and Ross Macdonald), the protagonist, Spenser, develops strong ties
both with an impressive black sidekick, Hawk, and with his Jewish psychiatrist-girlfriend,
Susan Silverman.
Belonging v Complicity
The alternative family offers the investigative
protagonist a real human connection, a hedge against what British writer
J.G. Ballard, in High-Rise (1975), calls 'a new kind of late
twentieth-century life' that thrives on 'the rapid turnover of acquaintances,
the lack of involvement with others'. It provides a way of belonging
that does not involve acquiescence in a wider society which, whatever
its underlying disorders, has an almost irresistible surface allure.
It has been increasingly the case in the noir thriller that various
kinds of 'belonging' - assimilation, complicity, dependency - have become
nightmares as disturbing as deprivation and exclusion. In post-eighties
noir, as America moved into the Reagan years, there was a marked emphasis
on tedious homogeneity and on the threat posed by the erasure of difference
consequent on an addiction to the pleasures and games of a consumer
society. In novels in which this kind of dependency is a source of anxiety,
what often distinguishes the more positive characters is an ability
to form individual bonds in a society that seems to be losing its capacity
for genuine social relationships.
In
a large body of contemporary noir, characters are defined in relation
to consumerism. The attack on those who 'consume' the natural world
emerges strongly, for example, in Ross Macdonald's 1971 novel, The
Underground Man, in which the greed of the destructive rich, careless
of the land on which they build their extravagant houses, is juxtaposed
with the simple integrity of Lew Archer, identified from the opening
scene with the natural simplicity implied by feeding peanuts to his
'scrub jays'. In a nineties novel like James Hall's Buzz Cut (1996), there is a similar opposition between simplicity and rampant
consumerism, epitomised in the contrast between Thorn, with his 'trial
and error' hand-made fishing canoe on the one hand and, on the other,
Morton Sampson, with a cruise ship that is the ultimate in consumerist
luxury. In the comic 'noir grotesque' of Carl Hiaasen, which takes
the commercial exploitation of South Florida as a recurrent theme, the
good guys are the reclusive drop-outs from the consumer society, like
'the guy at the lake' who lives in a cabin that 'looks like a glorified
outhouse' (Skink, in Double Whammy [1988]) or Stranahan,
in Skin Tight (1989), who lives in solitude in a 'dirt cheap'
stilt house, 'delighted to be the only soul living in Stiltsville'.
Consumer greed acts as a metaphor for moral bankruptcy (Elmore Leonard,
Charles Willeford), cannibalism acts as a metaphor for ungovernable
and dehumanising consumer urges (Bret Easton Ellis).
As a central element in the noir narrative
structure, the 'consumer' has always been there, but consumption in
all its forms is a more dominant theme in the contemporary thriller,
often accompanied by more explicit attention to the commodification
of people, the irony of the 'consumer consumed' and the postmodern city,
'saturated with signs and images', as a centre of play, performance
and consumption.
Copyright © 2002 Lee Horsley
Supplementary articles: Founding
Fathers: "Genealogies of Violence" in
James Ellroy's L.A. Quartet
Katharine Horsley
and Lee Horsley, Mères
Fatales: Maternal Guilt in the Noir Crime Novel (available at
online site of Modern Fiction Studies 45.2, Summer 1999).
All of the above images
are from amazon.co.uk, which (along
with amazon.com, of course) is highly
recommended as a source of contemporary crime fiction.
For
further discussion of the above writers, see:
Lee
Horsley, The Noir Thriller (Palgrave, 2001).
See also: http://www.litencyc.com/LitEncycFrame.htm,
for Lee Horsley, article in the online Literary Encyclopedia on 'The Noir Thriller'.
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