Criminal pleasures, pleasurable crime - pleasures of reading detective stories

Style, Fall, 1995 by Gregory Forter

One way to begin to formulate an answer is through an account of the hard-boiled style. Critics have suggested that this style is to be distinguished from that of the classical detective story because it is a language in excess, a kind of linguistic surplus that adds whole new ranges of color, affect, and consciousness.(4) I want to argue, however, that this language which seems to offer us "something extra" can best be characterized, not by what it includes, but - precisely - by what it subtracts and omits. Here is the opening of Hammett's The Glass Key:

Green dice rolled across the green table, struck the rim together, and bounced back. One stopped short holding six white spots in two equal rows uppermost. The other tumbled out to the center of the table and came to rest with a single spot on top. (3)

Language like this wreaks both epistemological and ontological havoc, disappearing in the very gesture of its emergence and unsaying as much as it says. We can stress, as critics often do, the "clipped," "bare," "sparse," "lean," "clean," "hard," or whatever stylistic indices; but clearly what is crucial is the singularly withholding character of a discourse that seems, at the same time, generous: so attentive to the minutiae of detail that it is almost forced to operate in slow-motion. The temporal distention of an event that lasts seconds mirrors in miniature the dilatory fixations of hard-boiled narrative as a whole, while simultaneously masking, beneath the strained attitude of its concentration, the informational dearth of its content. Where are we? When are we? Who is there? Who is speaking? The epistemological uncertainties of such a style give way finally to an ontological murder that is the very purpose of the hard-boiled style.

For only some of these omissions of knowledge are at last made good narrationally. Though the novel relays us, in relative coherence, along its syntagmatic chain, suturing us gradually into its "world" and binding that world in the telos of a plot that confers at least moments of mastery and control, we have come a long way from the social density of - for example - a James novel. The "where" of the main action remains unspecified, for example; the historical moment shows up only on the faces of the novel's commodities, and spatial articulations in any given scene are kept to the barest minimum. The novel's unflinching attention, therefore, to the "realities" of corruption and violence, as well as its tendency minimally to satisfy the desire to "know all" that it produces, may well betoken a certain "realism." But we need also to reckon the abrogation of that project. Hammet once wrote that "Realistic is one of those words when it comes up in conversation sensible people put on their hats and go home" (Naremore 54). For all the apparent objectivity of its vision, The Glass Key tends to corroborate such a sentiment - not so much because it does not "close" as because of the disturbances to the function of language effected by the particulars of its prose style. The eye of that style is too superficial in its grasp to dispel the sense that something yet remains, beyond and animating the representational field, to be seen, mastered, and understood: