cambridge-crime-fiction

dennis porter
pictures. Old agrarian America had given way to a new, fast evolving social
and material environment characterised by monopoly capitalism, unprecedented
wealth especially for the few, the struggle between capital and labour,
heightened class conflict, and the progressive massification of everyday life.
In the cultural sphere, the first chroniclers of the new urban reality were,
on the one hand, literary naturalists such as Stephen Crane and Theodore
Dreiser, and, on the other, the muckraking journalists, of whom Lincoln
Steffens is the best known. The theme suggested by the title of the latter’s
The Shame of the Cities (1904) was for the earliest major authors of private
eye fictions, Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961) and Raymond Chandler (1888–
1959) afamiliar one. Urban blight, corrupt political machines, and de facto
disenfranchisement of significant sections of the population through graft
and influence-peddling were part of the background in which crime of a new
and organised kind was to become endemic. It is thus not altogether a coincidence
if H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan’s Black Mask magazine,
in which both Hammett and Chandler got their start, first appeared in the
year after the 18th Amendment to the Constitution was finally ratified, 1919,
and the era of Prohibition began. Probably the most deeply misguided piece
of legislation of the American twentieth century, its effect was to turn hundreds
of thousands of ordinary working and middle-class Americans into
criminals, and to create a society in which crime syndicates flourished in
the effort to cater to an appetite that could not be contained. With Prohibition
the stage was set for an unprecedented wave of crime associated in
the popular mind with speed and fire power, fast cars and machine guns.
The new frontier the fictional private eyes were to confront was the lapsed,
anything-goes world of a jazz age America as it was already mutating into
the era of the Great Depression. The time was ripe for the emergence in a
popular literary genre of a disabused, anti-authoritarian, muckraking hero,
who, instead of fleeing to Europe, like the sophisticates of lost generation
fiction, stayed at home to confront crime and corruption on the increasingly
unlovely streets of modern urban America.
Raymond Chandler (who else?) expressed most memorably the originality
of Hammett’s contribution – from the latter’s early Black Mask stories and his
first novel, Red Harvest (1929)on–in a celebrated essay that, after Thomas
De Quincey in the early nineteenth century (‘On Murder Considered as One
of the Fine Arts’), he called ‘The Simple Art of Murder’ (1944): ‘Hammett
gave murder back to the kind of people who commit it for reasons, not just
to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling
pistols, curare and tropical fish. He put these people down on paper as they
were, and he made them talk and think in the language customarily used for
these purposes.’ 2
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