The Maltese Touch of Evil: Film Noir and Potential Criticism

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments If you allow us here a moment of overwrought (but apt) metaphor, we promise to be straightforward in the body of this text. The road taken by most films noir winds through dark places—fog-shrouded, lonely, and full ofdeadends.Theroadtocreatingthisparticularbookonnoirhasbeenquite the opposite—a trip travelled from the beginning with a friend, a thoroughfare large enough to accommodate many fellow travelers, a place marked by numerous moments of illumination. This book is a “road map into the twisted world of noir” (as one of our listeners once said of our podcast series on the subject), and we hope it may provide many useful new inroads into the subject. But to get to this point, the latest stop on our noir journey, required direction from many parties and their encouragement to go beyond where the sidewalk ends. First, we’d like to thank the academic mentors who opened the world of thought to us. We are truly privileged to have had so many generous mentors and colleagues who modeled for us the kind of close reading and interdisciplinary thinking we are pursuing here. For Clute, these include Richard Klein, Kathleen Perry Long, Tim Murray, Mitchell Greenberg, Tom Conley, Ester Zago, and Pamela Marcantonio, along with many others at University High School, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Cornell University. For Edwards, these include David James, Marsha Kinder, Michael Renov, Dana Polan, Rick Jewell, Drew Casper, and Marita Sturken, along with many others at Loyola Academy, Wesleyan University, University of Chicago, and the University of Southern California. Special thanks go to Harvard professor Tom Conley, who provided both a substantial portion of the initial inspiration for this book (by way of a course he offered at Cornell University that taught us to visualize textual space in a more xii • Acknowledgments precise manner, and by way of his many excellent books on self-conscious language and space in literature and film) and invaluable suggestions for the final manuscript (right down to the level of helping us to navigate a particularly dicey bit of translation): “Qui ne voit que j’ay pris une route par laquelle, sans cesse et sans travail, j’iray autant qu’il y aura d’ancre et de papier au monde?” Likewise, we would like to acknowledge the support and helpful suggestions we received from our colleagues at USC, the University of Kentucky, Saint Mary’s College of California, IUPUI, Indiana University Bloomington , and Turner Classic Movies, especially Ed Tywoniak, Costanza Dopfel, Catherine Marachi, Claude-Rhéal Malary, Genevieve McGillicuddy, Scott McGee, and Heather Margolis. Special thanks to Shawny Anderson at Saint Mary’s for her early support of our noir project and her generous efforts on our behalf to get podcasting recognized as scholarly activity, and Jeffrey Peters at UK, for his reasoned defense of the importance of our podcasting scholarship and for the opportunities he supplied us to demonstrate the pedagogical applications of our podcast methodology. We would also like to thank Kristi Palmer and IU Libraries for their support of our podcasts, and those at the Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities in Bloomington, who are working with us on the MTOE Database Project, especially Ruth Stone, Suzanne Lodato, and Will Cowan. And our gratitude goes to Bryan Alexander, codirector of the Center for Educational Technology at Middlebury College, for his unflagging support of our podcasting efforts, and Jared Case of the George Eastman House for his insights into our podcasts and this book. We’d also like to thank the many authors, filmmakers, and scholars who have participated in, or provided feedback on, our two podcast series, which were the building blocks of this project: Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir and Behind the Black Mask: Mystery Writers Revealed. In particular, we’d like to thank Megan Abbott, an accomplished scholar of film noir and hard-boiled writer extraordinaire, who participated in both podcasts and read early drafts of this work (and still managed somehow, despite that, to encourage us to continue the journey). Also, David Hale Smith (who got the ball rolling), Jonathan Santlofer (who kept it rolling, with a vengeance), Acknowledgments • xiii Duane Swierczynski (who dared to be among our first guests and to connect us to many author friends), Donna Bagdasarian, Mack Lundy, Micki McGee, Elaina Richardson, Eddie Muller, Allan Guthrie, Ken Bruen, P. J. Parrish, Scott Phillips, Reed Farrel Coleman, Rian Johnson, Lou Boxer, David Corbett, Christa...