Murdering Masculinities: Fantasies of Gender and Violence in the American Crime Novel

1. Hardboiled Masochism: The Corpse in Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key

1 Hardboiled Masochism The Corpse in Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key “I liked somebody being dead” Let us begin with the hardboiled detective novel, as this—according to the critical history—is both the first American species of crime novel and the most resolutely masculinist.1 These two claims are not unrelated. The Amer­ ican character of the hardboiled form resides in part, as critics have noted, in its preoccupation with violence.2 And that violence typically includes a mi­ sogyny by which the male hero defines himself by vanquishing a feminine principle that threatens his “sense of discrete self.”3 The pleasure of hard­ boiled reading in this sense inheres in our identification with an invulnera­ ble agent of male power and mastery. It results from our imaginative align­ ment with a man whose mastery includes a capacity to overcome a feminine “outside” that threatens to pierce and dissolve him, as well as a more con­ ventional ability to reduce semantic plurality to a unity by solving the mys­ tery’s crime. Without denying this basic characterization, I want to begin by sug­ gesting that there are pleasures to hardboiled reading that can’t be con­ tained within these contours. Critics have often noted these pleasures, 11 HARDBOILED MASOCHISM though without pursuing their full implication. They’ve stressed, for exam­ ple, how hardboiled fiction lingers over linguistic textures and non­teleolog­ ical narrative elements that are strictly absent from the analytical detective story, and that tend to downplay or even subvert the pleasures of solution.4 And they’ve emphasized how the hardboiled detective, far from demon­ strating unending mastery, often becomes a manipulated object and even a victim of violence. Tzvetan Todorov thus speaks of hardboiled fiction as “the story of the vulnerable detective.” “Its chief feature,” he writes, “is that the detective loses his immunity, gets beaten up, badly hurt, constantly risks his life, in short, he is integrated into the universe of the other characters, in­ stead of being an independent observer.”5 Marty Roth suggestively re­ describes this danger in terms of a masochistic erotics within the hardboiled form. “Masochism,” he writes, “flourishes in hardboiled detective fiction,” as “[a]sking for pain is the point of the detective’s dares and challenges and his wisecracks.”6 The repeated danger that the dick encounters results in this light from his compulsively repetitive effort to put himself in harm’s way. And a final comment, by Gertrude Stein, links this effort more generally to the dilatory pleasures of hardboiled reading: I never was interested in cross word puzzles or any kind of puzzles but I do like detec­ tive stories. I never try to guess who has done the crime and if I did I would be sure to guess wrong but I liked somebody being dead and how it moves along and Dashiell Hammett was all that and more.7 “How it moves along,” not “how it ends”: the penetration of the mystery is here inessential to the pleasure of hardboiled reading. “I liked somebody being dead,” Stein says. Such a preference may help refine our sense of the “other” hardboiled enjoyment. For to say “I like somebody being dead” is to say that the end­pleasure of narrative significance is subordinated to what we might call the fore­pleasure of a traumatic violation. It’s to offer the disturb­ ing but provocative suggestion that the hardboiled corpse—the very thing that provides the mystery and seems therefore most intimately bound up with a temporality of semantic recuperation—is also that which erodes that 12 HARDBOILED MASOCHISM temporality, dysfunctionalizes pleasure, fixates us on a brute physicality that resists hermeneutic or semantic redemption. To be sure, the detective con­ ventionally manages to overcome that resistance. And, to be sure, he typi­ cally does so through gestures of mastery whose incipient misogyny often becomes explicitly violent and central to his success. But inasmuch as the hardboiled novel subordinates the sense of an ending, the scene of the crime might be said to become not just something to be reconstructed and mas­ tered but a scene to whose trauma we’re invited to submit. It becomes not merely the impetus for a quest that dramatizes the detective’s prowess, but also an initiation into the limits of that prowess: an opportunity to let the mind play over death as one’s ownmost...