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

Moreover, Mechanic Accents is a far more traditional work of scholarship than is Hard-boiled--and I mean that pejoratively. Denning, for all his brilliance, writes the kind of flat, lifeless, prose one expects to hear read in a nearly-empty lecture hall by a doddering, half-blind, English professor who speaks only in the frowning monotone of a man who has been divorced for ten years and has yet to realize his wife is gone. Every line in Mechanic Accents drips with the superiority Denning obviously feels toward his subject matter--he might write about dime novels, but you can tell he wouldn't be caught dead reading one. Smith, on the other hand, loves hard-boiled detective fiction and it's obvious that she reveled in the chance to spend a considerable amount of time immersed in it. Her prose is lively and passionate, funny and poignant--in short, she can write as well as she can think, which is unusual for someone in her field. Just look at the excerpts below, one taken randomly from each book:

This sense of the social situation of sensational fiction reading is very important; though reading is probably always one of the more private and individual activities, and no doubt many dime novels were read and savored as something private and one's own, the reading of popular fiction in nineteenth-century working-class cultures does have social, familial and communal aspects.

(Mechanic Accents, 69)

The running gag in Chandler's The High Window is Marlowe's sense of solidarity with a statue of a little black boy in livery in his client's front yard. "He looked a little sad," Marlowe says, "as if he had been waiting there a long time and was getting discouraged." After an ill-tempered housekeeper has taken his card and slammed the door in his face, Marlowe muses: "I thought that maybe I ought to have gone to the back door." He pats the "little Negro" on the head with the words, "Brother, you and me both." Race here is less a matter of skin color than a power relationship. Marlowe is "black" in this scenario because he is a poorly paid hireling of a wealthy white woman.

(Hard-boiled, 120)

And here's something interesting: as far as bodies of evidence go, Smith casts her net far wider than Denning does and yet Denning's subject matter is far broader than Smith's. Most of Denning's sources are secondary and Conservative--you find in his bibliography the names you would expect to find in a work of left-leaning interdisciplinary history (and I do mean "interdisciplinary history," not American Studies--the difference between the two becomes clear when you read Mechanic Accents and Hard-boiled against each other): Henry Nash Smith, Alan Trachtenberg, Karl Marx. But I should mention that where these books differ in their bodies of evidence is not nearly as interesting, or as mysterious, as where they are alike. Aside from the fact that they both dip into the rather predictable wells of Kathy Peiss and Fredric Jameson, they also share a citation of Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. What the cosmos of a sixteenth-century miller has to do with twentieth -century hard-boiled detective fiction and nineteenth-century dime novels is beyond me.