Crime Fiction and Black Criminality

Nor was I up to being both criminal and detective—though why criminal

I didn't know.

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

1. The Criminal Type

A remarkable number of US literature's most recognizable criminals reside in mid-twentieth-century fiction. Between 1934 and 1958, James M. Cain gave us Frank Chambers and Walter Huff; Patricia Highsmith gave us Charles Bruno and Tom Ripley; Richard Wright gave us Bigger Thomas and Cross Damon; Jim Thompson gave us Lou Ford and Doc McCoy; Dorothy B. Hughes gave us Dix Steele. Many other once-estimable authors of the middle decades of the century—like Horace McCoy, Vera Caspary, Charles Willeford, and Willard Motley—wrote novels centrally concerned with what it felt like to be a criminal. What, it is only natural to wonder, was this midcentury preoccupation with crime all about?

Consider what midcentury crime fiction was not about: detectives. Although scholars of twentieth-century US literature often use the phrases crime fiction and detective fiction interchangeably, the detective and the criminal were, by midcentury, the anchoring protagonists of two distinct genres. While hardboiled detectives continued to dominate the literary marketplace of pulp magazines and paperback originals in the 1940s and 1950s, they were soon accompanied on the shelves by a different kind of crime fiction, which was less concerned with the solving of crime than with the experience of committing it.¹

The subgenre often referred to as the "noir" novel or the crime thriller—defined here as crime fiction that swapped out the detective's perspective for the criminal's—had a number of cultural antecedents.² Midcentury crime novels owed a debt to noir films of the 1940s, whose protagonists were often embattled or unwitting criminals; to the detective fiction invented and popularized in the pulps of the 1920s and 1930s, whose heroes were often partially outside the law; and to the expansive landscape of magazine culture preoccupied with sensationalist accounts of crime, which, as Paula Rabinowitz recounts, created a "working-class reading public … immersed in the language of crime reporting" (44). Nevertheless, readers in the pulp era hesitated to sympathize with unreconstructed criminals. The editor and anthologist Otto Penzler notes that this audience "didn't mind criminals as central characters just so long as they stole from the rich." To this end, Penzler explains, a criminal could "salvag[e] himself to some degree by swearing … that he never shot anyone" (571). It took a slow drip of more serious and celebrated true crime novels—most notably, Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (1925), Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and Double Indemnity (first published serially in 1936), and Wright's Native Son (1940)—to establish the criminal's point of view as a standard feature of twentieth-century US literature. From there, more and more novelists went on to position the consciousness of the criminal as the proper subject of the crime novel.

Why did this intensified focus on criminality appeal to writers and readers alike? In what follows, I argue that midcentury crime fiction took shape primarily in response to midcentury discourses of racialized crime. Crime, of course, has been a perennial preoccupation for US literature and a key term in the drama of US democracy since the founding of the republic. There is, however, a more specific story to tell about crime fiction in the 1940s and 1950s, as novelists began to explore what it meant to inhabit the perspective of the criminal at precisely the moment when discourses of criminality gained renewed traction as responses to the second Great Migration and the emergence of the Civil Rights movement. In the thick of a historical moment whose racial and economic upheavals found common expression in the language of crime, the crime novel became a key site for investigating how the narration of crime might be linked to the criminalization of race.

Midcentury crime fiction can thus be read as a genre not merely about individual crimes but about the process of criminalization itself. This process of ascription has long been central to the production of US ideas about race. From...