Contemporary American Crime Fiction, and: Traces, Codes, and Clues: Reading Race in Crime Fiction, and: The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir (review)

It is some measure of change that we're not far into Bertens and D'haen's Contemporary American Crime Fiction when we discover that the "old guard" of their first chapter consists of white, first-wave feminist authors of the late 1970s and early 1980s: Marcia Muller, Sue Grafton, and Sarah Paretsky. In these Dutch critics' self-described "tour" of crime novels achieving both mass popularity and the top Mystery awards over the past fifteen years, the feminist and pluralist moments have dominated (9). Or rather, the postfeminist and postpluralist moments, since even in this earnest survey, a certain impatience with the times (or just the task) occasionally surfaces. Essentially, Bertens and D'haen take a modified cavalcade approach, providing synopses of trademark plots and charting genre modifications, noting the diversion of stock clich»s into irony or self-parody, or measuring the play of "liberalist individualism" against insurgent ethnic or gender-group identifications (83). The update is indeed informative. Unfortunately, the reflexes that hobble even the most useful category-driven survey also appear sporadically: writers are cited for illiberal or unprogressive reflexes, or faulted for not embracing a collectivist politics (84). (Patricia Cornwell, whose conservative views and self-absorbed heroines are seen as throwbacks to the 1950s, comes in for a familiar dunning [170].) Meanwhile, the private detective ethos, again rather predictably, is counterpointed to the supposedly more up-to-date bureaucratic donn»e of the police procedural.

Bertens and D'haen themselves concede, however, that a "modish political correctness" now reverberates back from the literary production of popular writing itself (189). Indeed, perhaps recognizing that niche marketing in the mystery field has absorbed and diluted its academic critique, Bertens and D'haen actually look beyond their "old guard" and what they dutifully call "the ethnic theme" (187). Instead, they prefer to catalog newer permutations: regional noir, historical mysteries, American revivals of the British parlor mystery. The authors also convincingly chart the increasing integration of "personal" issues (marriage, children) into the classically stoic, lone-wolf ethos of the genre. These days, hard-boiled heroes and heroines never really die, the saying goes; they just take new cooking classes. Of course, it is debatable whether taking the temperature of the PI's emotional growth is an advance over the classic noir portrait of a system connecting elite power to the criminal underworld. An expanding personal sphere, in other words, might be a sign of a shrinking public sphere. (Indeed, despite what mystery critics often assume in counterposing the Op to the Cop, it is private policing, and public-private collaboration, that is currently on the rise.)

A tone of disappointment over narrowed horizons also ultimately governs Maureen Reddy's study, which builds upon scholarship from the early 1990s (by Bethany Ogdon and Stephen Soitos, for example) that explored the centrality of white masculine heterosexism to detective fiction. But now, whiteness and its sidekick, institutional racism, are deemed not a casual feature but the very "cornerstone" of the genre (27). So much so, Reddy laments, that no dimension of pleasure in reading it can be exempt (37). In successive chapters, Reddy ranges from Hammett's Sam Spade and Continental Op to writers of color such as Walter Mosley or Dale Furutani to recent efforts by well-meaning whites (such as Dennis Lahane or Barbara D'Amato). While drawing an impressively thorough account, even the author admits her findings are dispiriting (191). Although arguing that...