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

Though Detective Fiction, by itself, would not be of much use or interest to anyone but a literary scholar--and is certainly destined to become little more than one of those arcane sources tweed-clad graduate students use to support their improbable theories--it gains something like credibility when read in conjunction with Denning and Smith. Thomas's argument, that breakthroughs in forensic science in the nineteenth century like "fingerprint technology, forensic profiling [and] crime photography" (4) turned the human body into a text that could be read and were then used by writers like Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allen Poe to transform the mysteries of the individual body into compelling representations of the body politic, is not a frivolous one; however, had I not had the benefit of reading Mechanic Accents and Hard-boiled, two excellent examples of scholarship based on broad bodies of evidence, I doubt I would have been as open to it. Put another way: Denning and Smith prove that this kind of scholarshi p can be done well (whether it is an examination of the culture via its productions or an examination of a culture's productions via the culture that produced them makes no difference), so when Thomas makes his attempt, I can at least go along with him in theory.

Of the three books, Erin A. Smith's Hard-boiled: Working-Class Readers and Pulp Magazines is easily the most compelling, if not the most important. Michael Denning's Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America still holds that title and probably always will. It is still the last word in this particular area of inquiry. Ronald R. Thomas's Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science is an oddity more than anything else--what few good ideas there are in the book are not adequately supported and come off as spontaneous declarations apropos of nothing. I doubt it will do much harm, but I can't imagine that it will contribute to his or any other field in any significant way. As for Maxim Jakubowski, his Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction was the first book in what has become a trend. With pulp fiction being published in anthologies (read: decontextualized) more than ever (a random sampling of some of the more widely distributed offerings include: American Pulp, Edited by Ed Gorman; The Vinta ge Book of Classic Crime, Edited by Michael Dibdin and Hard-boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories, Edited by Bill Pronzini and Jack Adrian), books like Smith's and Denning's become important not only to scholars but also to readers interested in having more than just a passably enjoyable reading experience.

ENDNOTES

(1.) As quoted in Hard-boiled, by Erin A. Smith, 18.

(2.) Thomas also considers several other of Poe's tales to be detective stories, among them, "The Tell-Tale Heart." While I understand the point he is trying to make, that the heart in that particular tale gives the killer away in much the same way that the heart rate and blood pressure of a criminal will give him or her away when he or she is questioned while hooked up to a lie detector, to refer to the lie detector as a "bizarre mechanical incarnation" (21) of Poe's tale is more than just a little bit of a stretch.