| "Politics and the Private Eye" uses Sara Paretsky's 2003 detective novel, Blacklist, to launch an investigation of how ideology and aesthetics converge to make the hardboiled detective story a uniquely adaptable popular form, one especially ripe for reflecting and confronting contemporary issues. The study begins by examining the roots of the hardboiled form, assessing how and why early masters shaped and used the genre, thereby laying the groundwork for authors to come. It closes with an analysis of how several current writers have responded, via the hardboiled detective story, to the cultural and political developments spurred by September 11th and its aftermath.;Chapter One positions Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Unpunished within the literary and social context of the 1920s and 30s---detective fiction's "golden age"---and addresses the question of why, at age 69 and after a long and productive career as a feminist and a "serious" writer, Gilman might make her last major piece of fiction her first full-length detective story. Chapter Two focuses on Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest as a contemporary of Unpunished (both books were written in 1929) and as a masterwork of hardboiled fiction whose politics have consistently been either flatly denied or misread. Chapter Three follows the hardboiled detective novel into the 1940s and 50s and the midst of the Cold War, featuring Mickey Spillane's virulently anti-communist novel, One Lonely Night. It also tackles the issue of adaptation, exploring why director Robert Aldrich and screenwriter A. I. Bezzerides chose Spillane's Kiss Me, Deadly, a text originally intended to expose the evils of the mafia, as the basis for their famous, anti-apocalyptic film noir. The conclusion returns to Paretsky's novel---along with others by Lawrence Block, S. J. Rozan, Stuart Woods, and Greg Rucka---and the question of how contemporary detective writers have employed their particular brand of popular fiction in the effort to explain both the emotional and political impact of the terrorist attack on New York's World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. |
