Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Stories (review)

The American hard-boiled crime novel typically features a tough and laconic detective who, according to Raymond Chandler in "The Simple Art of Murder" (1950), "keeps the mean streets safe," but Leonard Cassuto exposes Chandler's mythical crusader as "just that: a myth, even in his own genre," by demonstrating how the detached, hard-boiled detectives of the first generation (Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade, Chandler's Philip Marlowe) already betray a certain sentimentality or sympathy with people they want to help and how their successors become more and more personally engaged in trying to protect the victims of crime. This hard-boiled sentimentality derives from the predominantly feminine view of the family in 19th century sentimental fiction (see esp. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin [1852]), and the philosophical origins of sentimental fiction may be traced back to Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), while the crime story tends to view the world according to the logic of Smith's The Wealth of Nations (1776).

Cassuto begins by identifying the roots of the hard-boiled sentimental in the fiction of Theodore Dreiser and Ernest Hemingway. Dreiser has been celebrated as a fatalistic naturalist and criticized as too much of a sentimentalist, but An American Tragedy (1925) stands as "a gateway book" anticipating the hard-boiled, but also revealing the unlikely sentimental sources of the hard-boiled attitude and illustrating the social changes (from nineteenth century family- and faith-based morality to twentieth century commercial acquisitiveness) that sparked the shift from one to the other. Hemingway is the more obvious source, for his stripped-down expressiveness clearly served as a model for the hard-boiled writing of Hammett and his successors. For Cassuto Hemingway is not an anti-sentimentalist, but rather an anti-sentimental sentimentalist, whose works of the time expose the difficulty of sustaining sympathy in an impersonal industrial world.

Subsequent chapters develop this theme of sentiment confronting hard-nosed business, with detailed looks at classics of detective fiction from the 1930s and 1940s. Hammett's foundational The Maltese Falcon (1930), which Cassuto calls "the ur-text of the hard-boiled sentimental" and which he describes as "a novel about lack of trust," is archetypally illustrated when Sam Spade turns his lover Brigid O'Shaughnessy in to the police as a murderer. As Cassuto has it, the invention of the trust (John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil) moved a family metaphor into the world of business, but if the trust conceived business relationships as family ties, business practices in The Maltese Falcon govern family and other intimate relationships. The result is a society of self-interested individuals cut loose from family ties and obligations, abandoning sympathy to chase the dollar. Sam Spade's suspicion of everybody defines him as both a detective and a businessman (in "the detective business"). Hard-boiled writing during the Depression, particularly the work of James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler, further illustrate themes of social change addressed by Dreiser. Cain's Mildred Pierce (1941), for example, is not a crime novel, but rather a hard-boiled sentimental novel, in which Mildred is a sap to her daughter Veda because she tries to practice nineteenth century sentimentalism in a twentieth century world, where the home is no longer the moral center of society, and where domesticity is now overseen by government agencies implementing FDR's New Deal. In Chandler's The Big Sleep (1939), Philip Marlowe tries to rescue an old man's wayward daughters, illustrating "one of the ur-plots of hard-boiled crime fiction, in which the detective arrives to fix the broken family." Closing the first half of the book, Cassuto tracks Chandler's influence on postwar crime fiction (as distinct from Cold War espionage fiction), in which the male "sentimental action hero," modeled particularly on the more sympathetic Marlowe in The Long Goodbye (1953) and reflecting the return of servicemen to...