Farewell, My Lovely (novel & film)

Farewell, My Lovely (1940) is famous for its metaphors. Chandler's second novel also features one of the richest troves of grotesque characters in American literature. The plot may be disjointed but the theme is sure. This was Chandler's favorite novel, and many critics think it his best. Foremost among the grotesques is Moose Malloy, a …

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Female authors (early)

Although there were women detectives in American popular fiction as early as 1883 (Clarice Dyke, by Harry Rockwood), Anna Katharine Green's aristocratic spinster Amelia Butterworth was the best-known, premiering in That Affair Next Door (1897). Over fifty of these titles are still in print. As Frances A. DellaCava and Madeline H. Engel show in their …

Femme Fatale

The femme fatale, defined simply, is an irresistibly attractive woman, especially one who leads men into danger. In hard-boiled fiction, she is usually the protagonist's romantic interest. There have not yet been any hommes fatales (though they abound in gothic and romance fiction). The protagonist's involvement with her may range from mild flirtation to passionate …

Film Noir

Film Noir ("dark film") refers to a genre of movies that employ hard-boiled protagonists, urban settings, dark tones, and a sense of despair. Most of these movies date from the period of 1940 to 1960 and share similar techniques and styles. The term owes to two Frenchmen, Nino Frank and Jean-Pierre Chartier. These critics were …

The Galton Case

The Galton Case (1959) was Macdonald's favorite, a novel pivotal in the genre and in his career. It manifests irony and physical toughness, but the it is ultimately psychological: the relation between the apparent plot and the revealed plot is that of adulthood to childhood, an exploration of the conscious and unconscious desires of parents …

German Expressionism

German Expressionism as a movement in the arts flourished in the 1920s, strongly associated with the disillusionment of the post-WWI era. It contrasted itself to the reigning canons of realism and impressionism and, instead, focused on subjective emotional experience, alienation and violence of modern city life. Artists like Wassily Kandinsky, George Grosz, and Oskar Kokoschka, …

The Glass Key

The Glass Key (1931) features Ned Beaumont, who is tall, lean, mustachioed, tubercular, and a gambler – like his creator. He is not a detective, but a political fixer for construction magnate Paul Madvig, probably in Baltimore. The toughest of Hammett's heroes, he is the ten-minute egg of the genre. This quality springs partly from …

High Sierra (film), Treasure of the Sierra Madre & “Desert Noir”

High Sierra (1941) is often described as a “heist” film, but it is actually part of a broader incorporation of the American West into film noir.       The West, especially in its arid parts, has long been the scene of American myth-making, some of it inspired by actual history.   The general theme of popular narratives …

hero / heroine

Heroes and Heroines:  The first protagonists in the genre were usually detectives. As the genre evolved, he or she became a policeman, an insurance salesman, a politician, a reporter, a crook, unemployed, or a bystander sucked into events. However, as the genre branched and crossed with other forms of popular fiction, most hard-boiled heroes and …

Imagery

The Imagery of Detective Fiction Detective fiction knows no metaphoric bounds today, but texts of the classic period make use of common kinds of imagery. The images per se vary, but they cluster around the opposition of hard versus soft, and smooth versus rough. This might seem obvious, but it has some history. The terms …