Watching the detectives: reading dime novels and hard-boiled detective stories in context - Review Essay - Book Review

Journal of Social History, Winter, 2002 by Jay Hopler

The Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction. Edited by Maxim Jakubowski (New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers, Inc., 1996. 586 pages. $9.95/paperback).

Hard-boiled: Working-Class Readers and Pulp Magazines. By Erin A. Smith (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000. 248 pages. $13.96/paperback).

Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science. By Ronald R. Thomas (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 341 pages. $59.95).

Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (Revised Edition). By Michael Denning (New York: Verso Press, 1998. 271 pages. $18.00/paperback).

When I began to research the literature of contractual murder in 1993, my colleagues at Johns Hopkins suggested I dig up some of the old pulp fiction magazines of the 20s, 30s and 40s, magazines like Black Mask, Detective Story and Dime Detective. They were sure I would find enough hit men in the pages of those periodicals to keep me busy for years. And I was sure they were right--hit men, con men, prostitutes, drug and gun runners, hired thugs, ex-cons, gangsters and racketeers were the foundations of pulp mystery and crime fiction; still, I didn't take their advice until I was stranded in a bookstore in a blizzard in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, almost three years later.

My reluctance to read the work of writers like Erle Stanley Gardner, Frederick Nebel and W.T. Ballard was a result of having been told by every academic I had ever encountered that it was completely worthless, not just as art, but even as schlock fiction. "They can't even do good garbage," one of my colleagues declared during one of our many discussions on the subject. And though the issue of class was never raised during any of our discussions, there was a tacit understanding that the "they" to which my colleague referred, and the people "they" wrote for, were of the lower classes, people who, according to the June 1933 issue of Vanity Fair, " ... move their lips when they read" (1)--people, according to my colleague, who did not attend Johns Hopkins. With the notable exception of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammert and Ross Macdonald, that hard-boiled trio the snooty, gate-keeping literati eventually embraced as delightfully cynical American modernists, the authors of hard-boiled detective fiction were not t o be taken seriously.

But that afternoon in 1996, as I browsed the rows of books in Johnson's Book Trader and waited for the snow to let up, the cover of Maxim Jakubowski's then-just-published noir anthology, The Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction, caught my eye. Now that I think about it, that's probably how many readers of magazines like Black Mask and Dime Detective came to the original periodicals and why they took a chance on the stories inside. The cover of Jakubowski's mammoth book is an authentic reproduction (I'm assuming it's an authentic reproduction--there is no mention anywhere in the book of the artist's name or the periodical from which it was taken) of an old pulp magazine cover that depicts only three things: a street lamp, a Mercedes and a raven-haired woman in a red dress shooting a look over her shoulder hotter than the cigarette she's smoking. The words "Pulp Fiction" scream out, just above her ample behind, in an almost nauseating lemon-jelly yellow shadowed in red. It was so tawdry and cheap looking, I couldn't re sist. I bought the book and found a quiet place by a window to wait out the storm.

In the two hours it took for the storm to move through and the snow plows to make the roads passable, I had read nearly half of the anthology and was, with one or two exceptions, completely disappointed. While the language of the stories was wonderful--take a look at this line from "Flight to Nowhere" by Charles Williams

  "Gone," the mate said, with the air of a man
  who has been talking to ghosts without
  believing in them. (16)

and this exchange from Dashiell Hammett's
"Too Many Have Lived":

  "Who is this Eli Haven? What does he do?"
  "He's a bad egg. He doesn't do anything.
  Writes poetry or something." (2)

--the stories themselves were shallow and formulaic; the characters were cardboard cut-outs that meandered from one almost-sexual encounter to another and, no matter what the plot was or where the story was set, someone inevitably ended up unconscious in an alley behind some strip bar or juke joint where guys named Sal or Eddie poured a beer no matter what the order was. The Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction confirmed what I had always suspected--pulp fiction was worthless. When I got back to my apartment in Iowa City, I threw the anthology on a shelf and forgot about it.

It wasn't until I read Hard-boiled: Working-Class Readers and Pulp Magazines, that I took the anthology down from that shelf and started reading it again, almost seven years (and three states) later. In Hard-boiled, Erin A. Smith breaks away from the formalist and structuralist traditions ("text-based models of literary criticism") out of which most detective fiction scholarship springs and focuses instead on reconstructing the lives and reading practices of the people who read and enjoyed hard-boiled fiction--those people who, as luck would have it, were not members of the record-keeping classes: "African-Americans, recent immigrants, the poor, the working classes--those customarily denied meaningful access to advanced literacy or the means of cultural production."