Unless the Threat of Death Is Behind Them: Hard-Boiled Fiction and Film Noir

Preface

Preface In the preface to my previous book of literary criticism, The Mystery to a Solution : Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story, I explained that it was the first of a three-book project whose other two planned volumes would be titled “Apollinaire Lived in Paris. I Live in Cleveland, Ohio”: Approaches to the Poetry of Hart Crane and An Almost Theatrical Distance: Figuration and Desire in the Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald. That project still continues, but accounting for the present book’s appearance before the project’s completion requires a brief explanation. After finishing The Mystery to a Solution, I started back to work on the Hart Crane book, but it occurred to me that since I had just written on the analytic detective story tradition that links Poe and Borges, I might as well go on to deal with the main offshoot of this tradition, hard-boiled detective fiction, and then with hard-boiled fiction’s relation to film noir. And since one of the ongoing themes of The Mystery to a Solution is the undecidability between the numbers three and four, it seemed to me that the irruption of a fourth book within that three-book project was not unexpected. That threebook project is now back on track; indeed, even as you read this preface I am at work on Hart Crane’s poetry, but I want to acknowledge here all those whose generous help and advice have contributed to the present book. First, my thanks to Donald Yates and Mike Nevins, who both read the entire manuscript, caught errors, and made countless useful comments; next, Millard Kaufman and John Astin, who read the film noir chapters and gave me the benefit of their years of working in Hollywood; next, Dr. Melvin McInnis and Dr. Francis Mondimore, who both read chapter 5 and saw to it that my remarks on Woolrich’s psychological make-up accurately reflected the way in which a psychoanalytic approach contemporaneous with the period during which Woolrich was writing would have understood Woolrich’s sexuality and its effect on his fiction. Finally, I am grateful to the editors and journals that first published chapters of the book and who have given me permission to reprint them here: Sarah Spence at Literary Imagination (chap. 1, on Hammett), Dave Smith at the Southern Review (chap. 2, on Chandler), and Gordon Hutner at American Literary History (chap. 3, on Cain). Needless to say, whatever strengths this book exhibits are in large part due to the generous advice and help I received during its composition from the above-mentioned individuals; any faults the book has are all my own. x Preface ...