The Crime of the Sign: Dashiell Hammett's Detective Fiction - Critical Essay

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1999 by Carl D. Malmgren

Narrating his story for the reader, the 0p implicitly promises to tell all. In so doing he establishes a convention that detective fiction picks up on, a commitment to the truth of the enunciation. The narrator of detective fiction cannot and does not break faith with the reader because his narration is the last, best, and only ground. This is finally why, for those who come after Hammett, that narration and the voice that renders it become so important; they represent an affirmation of signification, an assertion of mastery and control over a world otherwise unanchored. For Chandler and others, the style (of the enunciation) is indeed the man. Hammett, for his part, is true enough to his vision to call a spade a spade and show just what that means to the ground(s) we tend to take for granted.

NOTES

(1.) Barzun and Taylor say: "There is no warrant for the commonly held belief that the tough detective tale yields a greater truth than the gentler classical form and marks a forward step toward the 'real novel'" (9). They go on to enumerate (and make fun of) the conventions and motifs of detective fiction (9-11). For an extended discussion of the difference between Hammett's detective fiction and Christie's mystery fiction, see Malmgren.

(2.) See, for example, Cawelti, esp. 139-61, and Grella.

(3.) Metress says: "While it is true that Chandler, Spillane, MacDonald, and others influenced by Hammett have each embraced to some extent an ethos of rugged individualism, Hammett's fiction does not support such a doctrine" (243).

(4.) For a skeptical view of language and communication in The Maltese Falcon, see Hall.

WORKS CITED

Barzun, Jacques, and Wendell H. Taylor. Introductory. A Catalogue of Crime. New York: Harper, 1971. 3-21.

Bentley, Christopher. "Radical Anger: Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest." American Crime Fiction: Studies in the Genre. Ed. Brian Docherty. New York: St. Martin's, 1988. 54-70.

Cawelti, John. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976.

Chandler, Raymond. "The Simple Art of Murder." The Art of the Mystery Story. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Carrol, 1985. 222-37.

Edenbaum, Robert I. "The Poetics of the Private Eye: The Novels of Dashiell Hammett." Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties. Ed. David Madden. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1968. 80-103.

Goux, Jean-Joseph. Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud. Trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990.

Gregory, Sinda. Private Investigations: The Novels of Dashiell Hammett. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1985.

Grella, George. "The Hard-Boiled Detective Novel." Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Robin W. Winks. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice, 1980. 103--20.

Hall, Jasmine Yong. "Jameson, Genre, and Gumshoes: The Maltese Falcon as Inverted Romance." The Cunning Craft: Original Essays on Detective Fiction and Contemporary Literary Theory. Ed. Ronald G. Walker and June M. Frazer. Macomb: Yeast, 1990. 109-19.

Hammett, Dashiell. The Big Knockover and Other Stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.