William Marling,Ph.D. Professor of English, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA
A Glossary of Terms Used on This Site
Classic Writers
Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar)
Development of Hard-Boiled Narrative
Early Female Authors of Hard-Boiled Writing
Chester Himes and Early Afro-American Detectives
Major Works
Red Harvest (1927) by Dashiell Hammett
The Maltese Falcon (1929) by Dashiell Hammett
The Glass Key (1931) by Dashiell Hammett
The Big Sleep (1939) by Raymond Chandler
Farewell, My Lovely (1940) by Raymond Chandler
The Long Goodbye (1953) by Raymond Chandler
The Galton Case (1959) by Ross Macdonald
The Underground Man (1971) by Ross Macdonald
Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965) by Chester Himes
Characteristics of the Genre
Imagery in Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction
Criticism, 1930 to the Present
Detective Fiction in Comics, Radio, and Television
Film Noir
Reactions against Early Crime Movies
More Film Noir (brief takes on The Glass Key (1942), Murder, My Sweet (1944), Farewell, My Lovely (1975), The Big Sleep (1946), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946, 1981), The Lady in the Lake (1947), The Lady From Shanghai (1949), Criss Cross (1949), D.O.A. ((1950), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Sunset Boulevard (1950), Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Touch of Evil (1958), Chinatown (1974), Taxi Driver (1976), Body Heat (1981), and The Ususual Suspects (1995).
Allegory - a symbolic system in a narrative that allows it to generate a second level of meaning, which develops in tandem with the primary narrative. The symbolic system may refer to myth, a historic figure, an earlier narrative, or an abstract idea. The reader understands early on that interpretive possibilities are limited by this structure. Spenser's The Faerie Queen, Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and Orwell's 1984 are well-known allegories.
Antagonist - the character who stands most directly opposed to the protagonist: his or her rival or enemy.
Apparent plot - what appears to happen in a detective or mystery novel; the clues and the way they point to the guilt or innocence of the characters before the crime is actually solved.
Black humor - the interweaving of macabre or horrid events with humorous or farcical ones. The term arose to describe "Theater of the Absurd," playwrights such as Beckett, Ionesco, and Pinter. It was then applied to such writers as Nathanael West, Joseph Heller, and Vladimir Nabokov. Not to be confused with Afro-American humor.
Chivalry - set of customs and rituals connected with Medieval knighthood, stressing loyalty to God and king, fidelity to lady-loves, ready aid to victims of injustice, and opposition to monsters, giants, and tyrants. Mallory's Mort d'Arthur and Tennyson's Idylls of the King are examples by English writers.
Closure - bringing a narrative to a conclusion that is satisfactory. Proper closure accounts for all the clues and mysteries, leaves no stray ends, makes themes clear, and gives readers a sense that order is again in sight.
Deconstruction - a term coined by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in the 1960s, and used in its stricter sense to dsignate a critical system holding that speech and writing are too imprecise to represent reality, because words only refer to other words. Used in its looser sense, the term means to take apart a narrative, a hypothesis, a theme, to show that it is not disinterested or objective, but motivated by the ideology characteristic of the author. In this second sense, the impossibility of concrete meaning key to Derrida's use is often ignored.
Denouement - a final scene or chapter that explains mysteries and straightens out misunderstandings between characters and the author and reader. The word means "unknotting" in French.
Diction -- the author's choice of words. James Joyce had a complex, poly-syllabic diction employing words from many foreign languages. Dashiell Hamett used a simple, Anglo-Saxon diction with few polysyllabic words in his "Op" stories.
Double entendre -- words or figure of speech used so that it can be understood in two ways, one of which is usually sexual or slighting. The phrase means "double understanding" in French.
Embedded plot -- a plot entirely contained within the main plot, often called a sub-plot. Embedded plots may be dream sequences, as in Hammett's Red Harvest or anecdotes, as in The Maltese Falcon, as well as actions like Frank running off with the lion-tamer in The Postman Always Rings Twice. Embedded plots should be examined for their relation to the theme of the main plot.
Expressionism -- 20th century art style in which common forms are exaggerated or distorted, often by heavy black lines. Colors are made more vivid and primary than normal. Subjective response and symbolic treatment are both encouraged as representative of the artist's perception.
Femme fatale -- an attractive woman who leads men into difficult or doomed situations. The phrase means "fatal woman" in French.
Film noir -- genre of film, originally between 1940 and 1960, originating in the United States, employing heavy shadows and patterns of darkness, in which the protagonist dies, meets defeat, or achieves meaningless victory in the end.
Foil -- a character who serves as a complete contrast to another character, thereby setting the qualities of each in high relief.
Genre -- the form of a literary work, such as tragedy, comedy, romance, epic, lyric or pastoral. Genres have characteristic subjects, reader expectations, and processes of unfolding. Works in a genre may have similar protagonists and styles. "Hard-boiled fiction" is a genre, as is the mystery novel.
Grotesques -- unnatural characters, usually identified by a feature of physical, mental or speech behavior, who stand for an exaggerated emotional quality. Washington Irving's Ichabod Crane and Sherwood Anderson's Wing Biddlebaum are examples.
Imagery -- the images and figures of speech used in a work. Images are descriptions of people, places, or things -- usually written for visual comprehension, though sometimes for other senses. Imagery in the sense of "figure of speech" means the metaphors, similes, and symbols used rhetorically to give a more abstract definition of a person, place, or thing.
I.W.W. -- The Industrial Workers of the World, also known as the "Wobblies." A radical labor union of the 1870-1950 period that believed in organizing by industry rather than by craft. The IWW was most active in the West.
Marxist -- Marxist literary critics examine the material or economic circumstances of literature's production, the economic story it narrates, and the ways in which it shows class struggle. They believe that, through a process of mediation, literature is usually economically determined.
Meta-fiction -- a short story or novel that exhibits an awareness of its own status as fiction, which it may then manipulate or make into a theme. Kurt Vonnegut and Robert Coover sometimes write meta-fiction.
Meta-narrative -- a master story, a plot that governs all other plots, an archetypal plot referred to by "lesser" specifically situated narratives.
Montage -- in film, a technique of editing in which several images are juxtaposed, superimposed, or shown in succession, to present an idea or theme greater than the sum of the individual images
Motif -- an element of narrative -- theme, character, setting, plot device -- that commonly reoccurs in literature. The "wrongly suspected man" and the "crime in a locked room" are plot motifs of mystery fiction.
Mysogyny -- hatred of women. Mysogyny can also be symbolic or buried in the mechanics of the plot. Some depictions of the femme fatale, as in Mickey Spillane's novels, have been called mysogynistic, even though the conventions of the genre seem to permit their use.
Narrative -- in its simplest sense, the telling of the story. Narrative theory uses the term in a more complex manner: to point to such formal aspects as who tells the story, how much omniscience the teller has, the order in which the events are told, the ratio of scene to summary, etc. In this sense, "narrative" means the formal apparatus of story-telling.
New Historic -- a school of criticism that believes literature always reflects economic, social, and political circumstances and that readers are basically consumers of cultural objects. New Historicists attempt to "put the history back" into texts that had been considered timeless and ahistorical, such as Shakespeare's plays and Milton's poems. The history they look for is that of the common man, rather than the great one.
Novella - a short novel, on the order of 80 to 120 pages. From the Italian word for story of "new little thing."
Objective style -- a strictly maintained third person point of view, in which the author only describes what a bystander would see and gives no insights, uses no omniscience. Hammett's The Maltese Falcon is the best known example, but it cheats in several places. The Glass Key actually carries out the technique more faithfully.
Omniscience -- a point of view used by the author in which he or she knows all and sees all. The author can look into characters' minds and tell readers some or all of the chacters' thoughts as well as the unseen qualities of places and objects. There are degrees of omniscience: in "character-bound omniscience," the author looks only into the mind of a specific character, usually the protagonist. "Limited omniscience" usually means that the author restricts omniscience to a few characters. Omniscience must be combined with point of view (see below) credibily. Omniscience must be carefully controlled and sharply limited in detective and mystery novels to create suspense and to avoid disclosing the revealed plot
Plot -- the events in a narrative and the order they are given. Plot events may be as passive as a character's perceptions, omnisciently noted, or as active as a car chase. The order given to events may appear to distinguish one plot from another, similar one, when they are simply variants on a common plot.
Point of view -- the position from which the author narrates the plot. If the narrative is presented from the point of view of a single character, s/he is referred to as the "point of view character." Sam Spade is the point of view character in The Maltese Falcon, as detectives almost always are in hard-boiled fiction. "Point of view" may also refer to grammatical position: a first-person narrator ("I"), a second person narrator ("You"), or the common third person narrator ("He," "She"). James M. Cain's Double Indemnity uses a first person point of view, with limited omniscience.
Positivist -- a philosophic system holding that speculation on ultimate causes or origins is futile; therefore it focussed on positive facts and dvelopments. In a looser sense, seeing human history as a story of progress.
Post-modern -- a term that first appeared in architectural criticism in the 1960s to refer to the end of the unified International style typical of Modernism. In literature, it also designates the period after Modernism, in which historic quotation, pastiche, and the mixing of genres became acceptable. The post-modern rejects unified styles because they embody dogmas, all of which are out-moded.
Protagonist -- the hero or heroine, the leading character in the story. The term comes from the Greek, meaning "first actor."
Pseudonym -- made up name under which an author publishes his or her stories, because of embarassment, to preserve his or her real name for "serious literature, due to other contracts or commitments, or to avoid the appearance of flooding the market. "Ross Macdonald" was the pseudonym of Kenneth Millar. Erle Stanley Gardner published under pseudonyms because his enormous output would have cheapened his appeal.
Repartee -- a quick, witty reply, or a conversation full of such replies. Hard-boiled fiction features such exchanges, also known as "wise cracks" or "cracking wise." They are important to the hard-boiled characters' desire to puncture or crack the façade (or "cheap veneer") of an opponent, thereby proving him to be "brittle."
Revealed plot -- what the author of a detective or mystery novel reveals in the denouement or ending to have actually happened, as opposed to the "apparent plot" (see above). The two plots should be compared, to check for loose ends, plausibility, and for hints about the author's basic views.
Scene, scenic -- an incident in the plot, which observes the unity of time and place, often recounted in the present time and in detail. Dialogue, action, and descriptive details are rendered as they seem to the point of view character. Raymond Chandler tended to write in "scenes." The opposite is "summary" plotting, in which the author summarizes events that occur over an extended period of time. Henry James used more summary in his plotting.
Simile -- a figure of speech in which two unlike things are compared, using the connective "like" or "as" -- "my love is like a rose." The direct comparison -- "my love is a rose" -- is a metaphor, but both terms are commonly grouped under the label of metaphor.
Style - the way the author uses the elements of writing to express his or her idea and individuality. Word choice, sentence type and length, punctuation, and ratio of scene to summary are but some of the elements of a style. In classical rhetoric, the best style was thought to be that best matched to the end of the writing. The modern use of the word also includes the verbal patterns unique to the author and individuating him or her.
Tone -- an author's attitude toward his or her material. The writers may treat the subject seriously, playfully, ironically, informally, solemnly, satirically or in many other ways.
Verisimilitude -- the appearance of truth or reality, as opposed to fantasy, science fiction or the fairy tale. Verisimilitude usually refers to a real person, place, or thing described in much believable detail.
Vernacular -- the native speech or language of a place as spoken or written by inhabitants. Everyday language as used everyday by ordinary people. English is the official language of New York City, but "Brooklynese" is the vernacular of that bourough.
Voice over -- a film technique in which a person, sometimes not present on screen, narrates the action, presents his or her feelings, or summarizes events. The voice-over is often compared to authorial omniscience in prose.