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Gumshoe America - Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism (Paperback)
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Gumshoe America - Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism (Paperback)
Series: New Americanists
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In "Gumshoe America" Sean McCann offers a bold new account of the
hard-boiled crime story and its literary and political
significance. Illuminating a previously unnoticed set of concerns
at the heart of the fiction, he contends that mid-twentieth-century
American crime writers used the genre to confront and wrestle with
many of the paradoxes and disappointments of New Deal liberalism.
For these authors, the same contradictions inherent in liberal
democracy were present within the changing literary marketplace of
the mid-twentieth-century United States: the competing claims of
the elite versus the popular, the demands of market capitalism
versus conceptions of quality, and the individual versus a
homogenized society.
"Gumshoe America" traces the way those problems surfaced in
hard-boiled crime
fiction from the1920s through the 1960s. Beginning by using a forum
on the KKK in the pulp magazine "Black Mask" to describe both the
economic and political culture of pulp fiction in the early
twenties, McCann locates the origins of the hard-boiled crime story
in the genre's conflict with the racist antiliberalism prominent at
the time. Turning his focus to Dashiell Hammett's career, McCann
shows how Hammett's writings in the late 1920s and early 1930s
moved detective fiction away from its founding fables of social
compact to the cultural alienation triggered by a burgeoning
administrative state. He then examines how Raymond Chandler's
fiction, unlike Hammett's, idealized sentimental fraternity,
echoing the communitarian appeals of the late New Deal. Two of the
first crime writers to publish original fiction in paperback--Jim
Thompson and Charles Willeford--are examined next in juxtaposition
to the popularity enjoyed by their contemporaries Mickey Spillane
and Ross Macdonald. The stories of the former two, claims McCann,
portray the decline of the New Deal and the emergence of the
rights-based liberalism of the postwar years and reveal new
attitudes toward government: individual alienation, frustration
with bureaucratic institutions, and dissatisfaction with the
growing vision of America as a meritocracy. Before concluding,
McCann turns to the work of Chester Himes, who, in producing
revolutionary hard-boiled novels, used the genre to explore the
changing political significance of race that accompanied the rise
of the Civil Rights movement in the late 1950s and the 1960s.
Combining a striking reinterpretation of the hard-boiled crime
story with a fresh view of the political complications and cultural
legacies of the New Deal, "Gumshoe America "will interest students
and fans of the genre, and scholars of American history, culture,
and government.
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