Detectives in the Shadows: A Hard-Boiled History, by Susanna Lee

Many of us are a little partial to a hard-boiled dick. Dressed in an old trench coat and trilby, with a satin-draped femme fatale on his arm, a quart of whisky in his stomach and a gat in his hand, the private eye is the very model of American fortitude, honesty, bravery and can-do spirit. He lives on the mean streets of Los Angeles, San Francisco or New York. Death waits round every corner from local punks and hired hitmen or it hides fiendishly in the overheated orchid houses of Beverley Hills, where narcotics and cocktails may snare the unwary.

The eye started in the pulp era of Black Mask magazine, when lurid covers encouraged callow youths to read the adventures of Race Williams or Terry Mack. Both were created by Carroll John Daly, who started the craze for tough, no-nonsense detectives. In October 1923, Dashiell Hammett published the first story featuring a private detective known as the Continental Op, which led The New York Times to christen the new genre the “hard-boiled school”. The stories of Raymond Chandler, with their hint of English morality, upper-class corruption and a style that was no longer prurient but laced with the nuances of English literature, raised the genre from its pulp origins; noir cinema and Humphrey Bogart made it instantly recognisable.

Nowadays, the American private eye, like the cowboy, seems to belong to an ancient era of self-confidence and cultural hegemony. Mention Mickey Spillane to a room full of millennial students and you will draw a blank. The private eye has vanished from cultural consciousness. Spillane’s nihilistic and anti-communist hero Mike Hammer is a character emotionally damaged by his experiences in the jungle during the Second World War. From this trauma emerges a reactionary attitude to women and a strong belief in the power of righteous violence. These attitudes reflected the triumphalism and conservatism of post-war American values. Spillane, however, also understood the period’s darker inclinations towards the sexually perverse, something he exploited in his novels. The combination meant that by the 1980s, Spillane had written seven of the top 15 best-sellers in the US. Yet he is forgotten now, consigned to the dustheap of lost authors.

Susanna Lee’s book is an archaeology of an almost defunct world of pleasure. The author sets out to map the development of hard-boiled fiction from its origins in the magazines to its appearances on television and, to a lesser extent, film. To create her history, Lee follows the writings of a very select number of iconic writers against the background of social change in the past hundred years. This is a social history of the hard-boiled, and each chapter compares the plot lines of novels, short stories and television shows with the public pronouncements of successive presidents up to Donald Trump.

While this seems an intelligent framework, it ignores anything in the genre that doesn’t conform to the premise that what the presidents before Trump said is what the writers fictionalised. This leads to a very reductive and simplistic set of arguments that both weary and frustrate. There is some good detail, however, and the chapter on Spillane is excellent, but because so few writers are discussed the result becomes repetitive. How is one to read a book whose subtitle is “a hard-boiled history” when there is no mention of James M. Cain, Cornell Woolrich, James Ellroy or Elmore Leonard, not to mention silence on Patricia Highsmith and Patricia Cornwell? The list of omissions goes on and on. Decidedly a soft-boiled approach.

Clive Bloom is emeritus professor of English and American studies at Middlesex University.

Detectives in the Shadows: A Hard-Boiled History
By Susanna Lee
Johns Hopkins University Press, 224pp, £20.00
ISBN 9781421437095
Published 4 August 2020