William Marling,Ph.D. Professor of English, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA
Characteristics of the Genre: Common Themes
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).
To discuss theme, one must first grasp the difference between the apparent plot and the revealed plot. In the apparent plot of The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade is helping Brigid to find a valuable object and to discover who killed his partner, or so readers think while reading. But when they have finished, readers can see that, in retrospect, Spade betrayed and sacrificed her, so as not to be killed like his partner. This is the revealed plot. In the apparent plot of Farewell, My Lovely, Philip Marlowe is looking for Moose Malloy and delivering ransom for a necklace, but in the revealed plot he has uncovered the lower class and criminal origins of a wealthy, socialite wife, who then kills her old boyfriend, flees, and later commits suicide. The revealed plot often gives readers the dark side of the author's theme or beliefs, so it must be taken seriously. Ever since French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan demonstrated how the revealed plot of Poe's "The Purloined Letter" concerned Poe's conflict over his parentage, critics have treated the revealed plot as if it were the writer's unconscious. Sometimes this is true, but the revealed plot can also be the object of conscious, methodical craft, as in Ross Macdonald's works. The apparent and revealed plots must merge plausibly in the denouement for a proper sense of closure. Some of the more common apparent plots involve:
-- the search for a reputedly valuable object that turns out to be worthless. The Maltese Falcon borrowed this motif from Arthur Canon Doyle's "The Sign of Four," and it has been popular ever since. It can be reversed, as in Cotton Comes to Harlem, where the apparently worthless bale of cotton actually did contain the missing money.
-- an apparent crime that the revealed plot shows to be a repetition of an earlier crime. In Ross Macdonald's The Underground Man, Stanley Broadhurst disappears, running off with a woman, just as his father Leo ran off with a woman years earlier. Archer will find them literally buried one atop the other. In The Postman Always Rings Twice, Frank Chambers is finally convicted of murder for accidentally killing his wife in a car accident, when he was acquitted of deliberately killing her (then) husband in a faked accident earlier.
-- the wealthy family with a problem or secret. The Sternwoods, the Grayles, the Galtons, and the Broadhursts need detectives to straighten out their messy lives. Those who believe that the rich are scandalous but not in need of correction from their inferiors probably read novelists of the English School or S.S. Van Dine. The hard-boiled novel recruited a readership during the Depression and afterwards in part by appealing to prejudices against the rich, and it has worked them shamelessly ever since. Of course, the rich have valuable things to lose and the means to hire detectives; many of the rich or their ancestors were once poor, so the story of their ascent can be scandalous. Paradoxically, the hard-boiled novel often views the rich as prospering through evil means and yet naïve about evil. The detective must be especially vigilant about his code when dealing with the rich, who will seduce him by money and manners. In fact, the detective's parsimony will be most emphasized in novels where wealth is investigated, because the circulation of money must be viewed suspiciously.
-- the antagonist who is a double of the detective or the author. Edgar
Allan Poe is usually credited with inventing this motif in his story "William Wilson." Hammett played with it, in his character Clyde Wynant, who looks like the author, in The Thin Man. Raymond Chandler provided Marlowe with a double in Rusty Regan of The Big Sleep, and he wrote the genre's first masterpiece of this type, The Long Goodbye, in which he developed three psychological faces of himself. In The Galton Case Lew Archer essentially investigates the past of a character much like author Ross Macdonald. Paul Auster is a contemporary author who uses the motif in his quasi-detective (but not hard-boiled) novels.
-- cleaning up a corrupt town. Although developed in the pulps as far back as the 1870s and 1880s, this plot motif was more often seen in the western and the crime novel until Hammett's Red Harvest. Mickey Spillane is the genre's great town-cleaner, taking on the Mafia or the Communist Party in such novels as My Gun Is Quick and One Lonely Night.