Something more than night: Forms of existence in American hard-boiled crime fiction (Raymond Chandler, David Goodis, Dashiell Hammett).

摘要

Hard-boiled crime fiction in America has had an unexpectedly lasting influence. Crime fiction communicates a feeling of exclusion, alienation and loss of identity which it couples with the rewards of membership in a class which sustains its subscribers despite their own individual fragility. Crime fiction in the time of the pulp magazines, the early period of the hard-boiled style, was supposed to help people identify with those who would redeem society. The redeemers' ability to succeed in their missions depended on a deep knowledge of their subjects which guaranteed a degree of complicity in all they sought to reform. A certain courage is required of hard-boiled heroes who set about unmasking the hidden in both the great houses of the wealthy and the "mean streets" of the anonymous poor. Preserving or challenging genre is thus not only the situation in which hard-boiled crime fiction finds itself as a literature but also is the situation, broadly defined, which drives its plots and figures forward in what often resembles a romantic quest. The picaresque qualities of both the knights and the rogues complicate the scenarios, often resulting in flashes of insight in which characters must acknowledge the breadth of their own mythmaking while continuing to operate successfully in their trumped-up roles.