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  • Unless the Threat of Death is Behind Them: Hard-Boiled Fiction and Film Noir
  • Patrick O’Donnell
Unless the Threat of Death is Behind Them: Hard-Boiled Fiction and Film Noir. John T. Irwin . Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Pp. xii + 290. $45.00 (cloth).

John Irwin begins his new book by announcing that it is the product of an annual ritual for which he is willing to accept the diagnosis of "obessive-compulsive"—a rereading of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon (1930). Slipping to some degree into the hard-boiled idiom himself, Irwin explains his continuing attraction to the novel: "[i]t's a work so intelligent, with [End Page 783] dialogue so witty and a view of life so worldly-wise, presented with such formal economy and flawless pacing and yet such fun to read, that it continually renews my belief in the principal that art and brains can transform just about anything . . . into something intelligent, moving, and worthy" (2). The "art and brains" play on the classic "beauty and brains" tag for the noir femme fatale might be said to characterize Irwin's ongoing interests. In the previous, capacious, and encyclopedic discussions of American literature to be found in American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyph in the American Renaissance (1983) or The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story (1996), Irwin extensively pursued the relation between cognition and aesthetics, rational mental processes and the complex, baroque interlacings of literary art that approach a representation (more accurately, an imitation or doubling) of consciousness as such. Unless the Threat of Death is Behind Them is a slimmer volume, and something of a self-admitted digression from a trilogy that includes the Poe and Borges book, and planned volumes on Hart Crane and F. Scott Fitzgerald, yet it offers intensive readings of several key "noir" novels and films that explore the relation between "art and brains" in terms of the perpetual conflict between the professional and the personal in the construction of modern identity. While many discussions of film noir exist, few consider the relation between the hard-boiled literary fiction of the American 1930s and 1940s and the evolution of Hollywood noir, and none to my knowledge, before Irwin, considers how the narrative strategies of hard-boiled fiction/film noir undergird the public/private split in modern identity that critically affect popular conceptualizations of gender, work, and the "life one should lead" in the face of the catastrophe of death. Unless the Threat of Death is Behind Them compellingly assesses how a number of rich and strange exemplars of the "pulp," "noir," or "popular" imagination have contributed to our understanding of how the modern, divided self operates in a capitalist environment where being contests with having in the pursuit of life.

Irwin's chief concern in this book is to reflect upon the ways in which hard-boiled fictional and cinematic protagonists are often confronted with a choice between pursuing professional and ethical goals or fulfilling personal desire—often, a vexed decision when we recognize that it takes place within a social environment of obsessive (not to say, narcissistic) individualism and in genres where the engine of human desire drives the plot. The most compelling example is the work that feeds Irwin's "obsessive-compulsive" reading habit, The Maltese Falcon. Irwin views the novel as encapsulating

the great adventure of Spade's career as a detective . . . and if his affair with the beautiful, sensuous murderess Brigid is the most exciting and memorable liaison in his life, then his decision both to complete the case and end the affair by "sending over" Brigid for Archer's murder is essentially the decision to choose repetition over singularity (as figured by the exceptional), to choose life over death (the death he knows could easily occur if the affair continues), or, more exactly, to choose his life, and thus allow himself to be recaptured by repetition.

(25)

This key point follows from a discussion of Freud's repetition compulsion, the Book of Job, and Hawthorne's "Wakefield," demonstrating Irwin's commitment, usually reserved for the study of "serious" literature, to understanding such...

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