American Hardboiled Fiction

DGAR LLAN OE

Dupin + establishes elements that will later on develop in detective fiction genre, such as:

setting: city, metropolis (such as Paris, London, etc) — marked a difference with Western stories

• Dupin ~ Sherlock Holmes — comparison that helps telling a story to people (ex. Detective

• → →

Watson in Dupin he’s the same split with narrative consequences)

1840 T M C — short story, origin of dark novel. archetype of American

HE AN OF THE ROWD

hardboiled: 1st person narrator, urban setting, chase as a narrative technique (circular story), moral

value + hardboiled detective as someone between middle-class man, criminal and law

after an unnamed illness, the unnamed narrator sits in an unnamed coffee shop in London. while

he’s sitting there, “a decrepit old man, some 65 or 70 years of age” attracts his attention. the

narrator goes out of the coffee shop and starts chasing after him: the man never stops anywhere,

never buys anything and the narrator ends up chasing him the whole night and well into the

morning after. exhausted, the narrator stands in front of the man, who still doesn’t seem to notice

him. he concludes that the man is “the type and genius of deep crime” due to his inscrutability and

inability to leave the crowds of London.

→

story built on a chase detective story, but with no conclusion

: 1910-20s success of gangster stories, with no individual criminal. gangsters

GANGSTER STORIES →

come from the country to the city, following the money typical pattern: they die but not after we

→

have sympathized with them. story ranks the rise and fall of gangsters, making them humans

they become American heroes, ~ self-made man with the idea of being fair to the gang as you are

to your family (mafia is based on it).

R H (1929) by Dashiell Hammett — criminality built around gangs, that control the

• ED ARVEST →

power. cities are created more around this power then around the major or police

transformation of ways of managing the cities. clash between aristocracy and new economic

power: self-made man becomes ~ criminal.

a detective from a national agency is summoned to investigate a murder in a Western

PLOT

mining town named Personville, sardonically referred to by the locals as “Poisonville”. the

murdered man was the town’s leading reformer; his father hires the Op to stay and clean up the

→

town looks like a western: the twist that separates it from a western is that the town has no

→

good guys everyone is tapped into some form of corruption, everyone wears a shade of gray

(in westerns there is always a hero). the Op uses his resources to hire both sides and plays both

ends against the middle.

no movies of this novel, although 1961 Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo has the same plot and

numerous parallels

B M

LACK ASK

pulp stories for large audience: colored, attractive, fiction aimed primarily to men

• →

• begins publishing after the civil war, just as the radio become popular connection to radios:

radio series with narrative style, strongly based on dialogs and facts

sometimes came out in smart sets: not pulps, printed on good and more expensive paper,

• →

aimed to limited audience urbanization of pulps, aimed to cosmopolitans

at 1st they were aimed to African Americans in town, soon this idea was left behind as they

• →

became magazine based on detective fiction, supernatural and exotic lands it becomes a

true detective story magazine full of actions, where the black mask end up being characters (ex.

women are masks as they are either victims or temptresses).

→

1926 Captain Joseph T. Shaw becomes director becomes more centered around hardboiled.

• he singles out Dashiell Hammett and his simplicity for the sake of clarity, plausibility and belief.

he creates the : its objective is a realistic style, using the

HARDBOILED SCHOOL OF DETECTIVE FICTION

principle of allowing the characters to act and talk tough and to then demonstrate their abilities

instead of just making them talk about it.

ritualized scenes:

• client goes to office to negotiate for a contract

• PI is never safe, not even in his own office

• routine of detective life

• →

• change of role: from being the hunted to being the hunter (or vice versa) everything is

ethos

taken back to the of hunting: darwinistic world of the survival of the fittest, where the

best hunters are those who can anticipate the animal’s behavior

30s films made as if they were serialized: they share the same setting and the classic b/w with

• shadow and light play that depended mainly on the necessity of the studio of saving money.

boom during modernism — emerges the consciousness that culture is a fragmentary assembly

• of voices and institution in conflict with each other + accentuates elements of poplar fiction an

entertainment →

50s crisis of detectives and hardboiled stories as hardboiled fiction is a genre writing, there

• has to be an escalation to keep the genres up

• →

60s people started to talk in literature about the death of the novel it seemed exhausted,

impossible to write new stories. people started to say the same thing about movies (death of

film studies)

ORIGINS →

• adventure story — it’s a Western that takes place somewhere else a morality play about

retribution, not redemption, where the lawmen is similar to the outlaw in his use of violence

picaresque story — open ended initiation tale, emphasizing action, exploration through a boldly

• drawn central character

gothic fiction — substrata of horror, decline of traditional belief system

• domestic fiction — focused on manners, questions traditional patriarchal authority

•

DETECTIVE →

• hardboiled hero masculine, mythical elements of folk hero

he exists above everything else, ~ ideal cop

heir of the western hero, can be seen as a gangster

• →

represents urban chronic loneliness consecration of American urban culture: he’s the bad

• conscience of the typical American man in between the 2 wars

narrative disembodied voice: 1st person narrator, but detached

• vigilantism — he avenges fictional transgression and urban American frustration. superior to

• stupid cops he becomes similar to a one-man mob, with the innocence of a psychopath: his

→

superiority blinds the reader into a false sense of admiration we regard him as sympathetic

and identify with him without seeing how similar he is to criminals

emblem of public rage vs. problems without solution

• :

KEY POINTS — the way of telling an event is the source of telling the truth of the

• WAY OF TELLING EVENTS →

event itself (lying, making up truths and scenes) hardboiled novels and film noir leaves us

with various versions of reality and truth that makes sense only for those who tell them.

contemporary language

•

• →

PI — he lies at the center of the triangle of police, client and crime maker

FIGURE OF THE

ethos of PI: defends client and tries not to expose them

→ they don’t have to follow the law

• PRIVATE DETECTIVES ARE DIFFERENT FROM THE POLICE

→ →

urbanization of the “sheriff” private detectives ~

• ADAPTATION OF WILDERNESS TO SOCIETY

cacciatori di teste

it is the world of S H , where everything is clear in the end and the order is

• NOT HERLOCK OLMES

restored, in hardboiled tradition there is not only one truth, but as many as the characters

→

involved difficult to identify with just one character

PI use the data they get over the data they have of a false reality, using it again but with the

→

knowledge to it being false they use it to unmask the truth

readers tend to pay attention to the picture and lose sight of the meaning, the image that

becomes a faded sensation of memory and that only fills in, particularizes and falsifies the

author’s intention

=/= police stories (parodies of misunderstandings)

idea of law — important as it provides the framework under which the guilty are punished and

• →

the innocent vindicated private eye punishes, meeting out punishment for sin: violent hero

FILM NOIR AND HARDBOILED STORIES

hardboiled came first, noir later on in order to sum up and describe things, things that included

• hardboiled atmosphere. they ended up going beyond “simple” hardboiled

→

movies were different from the novels more dialogues, always something different

• novels are more direct and show you more than they tell, while in films audience can make an

• idea for himself →

boom of film noir: 2nd half of 40s most of the movies came to EU only post WW2, when

• French critics realized the importance of this genre. in Italy, American films were prohibited

before and during WW2 and can only be imported there thanks to the Marshall Plan.

typical of film noir is the use of different frames, kept together by voice-overs

• scores become one of the distinctive signs of noir movies, along with the shades/light games,

• particularly between blinds

MOVIE REMAKES

when in the 60s people started to say there could be no more “new” movies, the solution was to

remake the classics

in color — directors decided they wouldn’t film in b/w (only a few films were the exception):

• colorful LA with aesthetic vogues that went through all kind of things (clothes, etc), everything

→

was turned into pastel colors it became an actual style

:

WAYS OF REMAKING FILMS

(1) remaking it with a better awareness — PI jobs and their differences with detectives jobs,

balance between what you can say to the police and the loyalty to your client

Farewell, My Lovely

1975 set the standard for remakes: importance of music, idea of

• →

nostalgia, key to understand most of the remakes detectives that grow old as a sign of

nostalgia (notion that wasn’t in Chandler’s original story but was added by the screenwriter)

(2) old stories, but filmed and written in a new style — aesthetic recreation of different elements

→

of different stories normally period pieces of the 30s, 40s

(3) updating the spirit of old hardboiled stories to the contemporary world — contemporary

detectives going through stories that reflect hardboiled traditions. not really in the tradition of

hardboiled stories, but were the first movies of later-on would-be famous directors

TV IMPORTANCE

in 70s, tv was functional in keeping detectives alive, while theaters had killed the characters in late

→

70s, early 80s (vogue of remakes) films became more similar to it, with productions that

changed and tried to make