A new deal for thirties literature

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall 2000 by Entin, Joseph

Like Gumshoe America, Erin Smith's deeply historicist study, Hard-Boiled, offers a thoroughly inventive approach to sensational crime fiction. Aiming to reclaim pulp crime fiction from "formalist accounts [that] ascribe a monolithic, reactionary politics" (6) to the genre, Smith approaches hard-boiled detective literature from the perspective of its predominantly working-class, male readership, arguing that such fiction provided a complex idiom through which those readers made sense of the de-skilling of industrial labor, the growth of consumer culture, and changing gender dynamics.

If McCann interprets hard-boiled fiction as allegories of New Deal liberalism that echo the literary ambitions and attitudes of its authors, then Smith reads these texts as parables of working-class dilemmas, engaging the central aspirations and anxieties of the genre's readers. Drawing on letters to the pulps, editorials, advertisements, and 1930s research on workers' reading habits, Smith reconstructs an historical reader-a white, often immigrant, working-class man-for whom detective fiction was less about crime and detection than about "the hard-boiled private eye's struggles for autonomy at work, his skill at reading class and social positions from details of dress and decor, his manly physical and rhetorical prowess, and his tortured relations with women" (17). Building on recent working-- class and social history, Smith contends that pulp crime fiction was a "highly ambivalent proletarian literature" that "simultaneously expressed and manipulated [its] readers' needs and desires" (102, 11). The disjointed plots, lacking continuity or coherence, Smith contends, accustomed workers to Taylorism; however, by promoting an ethic of manly independence, embodied in the figure of the detective, these texts served as parables of an historically anachronistic but ideologically potent vision of artisanal integrity and control. Although "nostalgic," the ideal of the artisanal republic that these texts promoted offered "psychic compensation" for the loss of occupational autonomy readers faced on the job (12). Smith's perspective fosters some interpretive differences from McCann, who reads hard-boiled fiction as meditations on liberal philosophy. For example, if McCann interprets the Continental Op's reluctant daily reports to his boss in Red Harvest (1929) as a sign of his complicity with administrative expertise, then Smith reads his behavior as resistance to corporate authority.

One of the most original aspects of Smith's approach-which examines pulp magazines as complex and ambivalent sites upon which the often competing agendas of editors, writers, advertisers, and readers converged-is her attention to consumer culture, both in the form of the advertisements that surrounded the stories and also in the form of a discourse of commodity-fascination and self-presentation within the stories themselves. While McCann downplays the presence and significance of advertising in pulp magazines, Smith argues that pulp fiction and advertising were mutually reinforcing: hard-boiled fiction articulated the social concerns of working-class men-work, manliness, class position-and advertisements offered material solutions to the psychic needs voiced in the literature-job training by correspondence, body building manuals, elocution courses. Building on the work of historians like Lizabeth Cohen and Kathy Peiss, Smith argues that this "working-class variant of consumer culture" both empowered and constrained readers, on the one hand offering them skills to make sense of bourgeois culture, on the other hand addressing than exclusively as consuming individuals, thereby closing down possibilities for considering them as a class with mammon interests (44). In a fascinating chapter, Smith employs her analysis of consumer culture as a way of reading hard-boiled fiction's intense attention to dress, gesture, and physical detail, arguing that this aspect of the literature provided its working-class audience a guide to interpreting the material aspects of social class distinctions.