Pulp Virilities and Post-War American Culture (Renewing the American Narrative) 3031090535, 9783031090530

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RENEWING THE AMERICAN NARRATIVE

Pulp Virilities and Post-War American Culture Arthur Redding

Renewing the American Narrative Series Editor

Sam B. Girgus Nashville, TN, USA

​ his series calls for new visions, voices, and ideas in telling the American T story through a focus on the creative energies and generative powers of the American narrative. As opposed to assuming a fixed, inherited narrative for the total American experience, this series argues that American history has been a story of inclusion and conflict, renewal and regression, revision and reversion. It examines the values, tensions, and structures of the American Idea that motivate and compel rethinking and revising the American narrative. It stresses inclusion of so-called “others” – the marginalized, the unseen, and the unheard. Rather than simply repeating the slogans of the past, the series assumes the American story demands and dramatizes renewal by engaging the questions, crises, and challenges to the American story itself and to the democratic institutions that cultivate and propagate it.

Arthur Redding

Pulp Virilities and Post-War American Culture

Arthur Redding York University Toronto, ON, Canada

ISSN 2524-8332     ISSN 2524-8340 (electronic) Renewing the American Narrative ISBN 978-3-031-09053-0    ISBN 978-3-031-09054-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09054-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: © bunhill / GettyImages This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

… the he-man writers—Hemingway, Burnett, Cain, whose words tersely proclaim their masculinity; every tight-lipped phrase shows guts (the author’s), his decency, his ability to handle any situation: insurrection (he is an instinctive leader or else too superior to show it), shipwreck, liquor, women. Through the words shot out of the typewriter clip-clip one watches the play of his muscles, one sighs to lay one’s head upon that hairy shoulder. —Dawn Powell, Journals (July 24, 1934) The American ideal, then, of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This ideal has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white. It is an ideal so paralytically infantile that it is virtually forbidden—as an unpatriotic act—that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood. —James Baldwin, “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood”

Acknowledgments

Research for this book has been generously supported by an Insight Grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I would like to thank Janet Friskney, Research Officer in the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies at York University, for her invaluable assistance in obtaining that grant. Additional support has been provided by a Sabbatical Leave Fellowship from the York University Faculty Association as well as a Minor Research Grant from the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies at York University. I am indebted to the outstanding research assistants at York University who have aided me in this project: Jared Morrow, who first introduced me to many of these materials, Jessica Ireland, Daniel Dufournaud, and Homa Hedayat. The global pandemic has made undertaking research difficult for scholars everywhere. Before COVID lockdowns limited the possibilities for travel, I was grateful to be able to undertake research visits to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Library Special Collections and to the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University. Additional research was conducted at the University of Toronto Libraries and at the Libraries of Memorial University in St. John’s, Newfoundland. I thank the archivists and librarians there as well as those at my home institution, York University, for their courteous professional generosity as they shared their expertise. A shorter version of Chap. 2 was first published as “The Eisenhower Blues: Returning GIs and Racial Masquerade in Post-War American Film vii

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and Fiction” in the fiftieth-anniversary edition of the Canadian Review of American Studies (CRAS). Thanks to CRAS for permission to reprint this work. I am grateful to editor and exemplary scholar Percy Walton for championing my work there. Some of the argument in Chap. 3 was based on research that I undertook for an essay titled “The Mystery of the Missing Mystery: Midcentury Intellectuals on Modernism and Detective Fiction” that will appear in the annual review of critical aesthetics, Symbolism 22. Thanks to Patrick Gill for his generous and capable editorial guidance. Portions of this book were initially delivered as talks at a number of conferences over the past several years, including at the annual meetings of the Canadian Association for American Studies (CAAS). Let me express my gratitude to all those in CAAS who have provided me with a congenial and supportive intellectual home over the eighteen years that I have been in Canada. Other venues where I have had the chance to present my work in progress include the annual meeting of the American Studies Association, the European Association of American Studies conference, the Midwestern Popular Culture Association conference, the Canadian Comparative Literature Association conference, the Urban Affairs Association annual conference, and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual conference. I am grateful to have had the chance to discuss these ideas with so many brilliant colleagues working in so many disciplines around the world. At York University, fellow pulp fiction enthusiast Bill Denton has been immensely supportive, sharing his insights and the occasional gift of novels from his impressive personal collection. Susan Ingram and Markus Reisenleitner have provided genial intellectual friendship, as has Linda Peake of the City Institute at York University. I am appreciative of the institutional support I have received from the York University Faculty Association (YUFA) and the personal support of YUFA colleagues and staff members. Andy Weaver, Stephen Cain, Marcus Boon, and other colleagues in the York University Department of English have shared their love of mysteries and thrillers and lent me sympathetic ears. Emotional and intellectual ballast has also been provided by dear friends here in Toronto and around the globe: Bill Decker, Ilka Saal, Natalia Barykina, Jamie Zeppa, Lianne Moyes, Marc Egnal, Anindo Hazra, Chip Blackwell, and others. Thanks to Martin O’Brien, Andrea Stone, and Tara McPherson for your hospitality. Thanks to Sam B.  Gurgis, Renewing the American Narrative series editor, for his interest in my work. Thanks to my

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anonymous readers, to Molly Beck, Karthika Devi, and all the good people at Palgrave Macmillan for ushering the manuscript through. This book is dedicated to my students, each and all. At York I am blessed with remarkable students. Even in these perilous times and regardless of whether we convene in person or virtually, you continue to bring to our conversations a committed intelligence, a mutually supportive consideration for each other, and a rare devotion to unknotting the intricacies of these texts and of the world. Stay curious.

Contents

1 What  Would Robert Mitchum Do? The Cultural Production of Pulp Virilities  1 A Working-Class Hero Is Something to Be   2 Populism, Resentment, and Pulp Virilities  11 Hard-Boiled, Pulp, Noir: The Genres of Pulp Virility  22 References  33 2 The  Eisenhower Blues: Returning GIs and Racial Masquerade 35 The Anxieties of Affluence  37 Unlovable Losers: Elegies for the Urban Working Class  50 Authentic Bearers of Alienation: Racial Encounters  64 References  75 3 Pulp  Sexualities: Gender and American Popular Crime Fiction at Midcentury 79 Highbrow Heroes: The Remasculinization of American Crime Fiction  80 Femmes Fatales: Gender, Sexuality, and the Book Market  84 Women Who Kill: Vera Caspary’s Domestic Noir  96 References 102

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4 Run  Man Run: Black Urban Crime Fiction in the 1960s and 1970s105 Mean Streets: Urban Paranoia and Persecution 106 Walkers and Runners: Chester Himes 110 Promised Land: The L.A. Street Fiction of Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines 116 “Los Angeles and Me Had Had Enough of Each Other”: Militant Virilities 130 References 134 5 Nightmare  Alleys: The Afterlives of Pulp Virility137 Post-Pulp: 1960 and After 140 Detective Fiction for the Great Society: Ross Macdonald 144 The Best a Man Can Do: Donald Westlake and Company 152 Losing More Slowly: Nightmares and Neo Neo-Noir 157 Pandemic Pulp: Panic in the Streets  162 References 164 Index167

CHAPTER 1

What Would Robert Mitchum Do? The Cultural Production of Pulp Virilities

Notable amid the many embarrassments and outcries that marked American President Donald Trump’s disgraceful exit from the world stage was the degree to which public commentators focused on the predicament of white masculinity in the twenty-first century. In a Guardian op-ed that appeared on the fateful inauguration day, for example, philosopher Judith Butler indicted a “masculinist refusal to mourn” (2021) that underlay both Trump’s belligerence and the white supremacist movement at large, which is unable to countenance—let alone grieve—the inevitable eclipse of white power in America. In The Atlantic, during the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, conservative journalist Tom Nichols deemed Trump “the most unmanly President,” querying why his supporters seem drawn to a man “who is a vain, cowardly, lying, vulgar, jabbering blowhard.” White working-class culture, Nichols asserts, “looks down upon lying, cheating, and bragging, especially about sex or courage”; its standards of masculinity prioritize honesty, courage, integrity, and most of all “an economy of words, a bit of modesty, and a willingness to take responsibility,” a masculinity whose swagger is “understated,” exemplified by “the rock-solid confidence, and the quiet reserve of such cultural heroes as John Wayne’s Green Beret Colonel Mike Kirby and Sylvester Stallone’s John Rambo” (2020). Some months later, in an interview with Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg that appeared just after the election, former American President Barack Obama highlighted the same paradox, also © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Redding, Pulp Virilities and Post-War American Culture, Renewing the American Narrative, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09054-7_1

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drawing on a conventional Hollywood iconography of white male heroism: “I think about the classic male hero in American culture when you and I were growing up, the John Waynes, the Gary Coopers, the Jimmy Stewarts, the Clint Eastwoods, for that matter. There was a code … the code of masculinity that I grew up with that harkens back to the ‘30s and ‘40s and before that. There’s a notion that a man is true to his word, that he takes responsibility, that he doesn’t complain, that he isn’t a bully—in fact, he defends the vulnerable against bullies” (Goldberg 2020). This study takes up the challenges: what is American masculinity, and where did it come from? What are its codes? Why the appeal to fictional characters of decades long gone by as ideal models of virility? In examining the development of these codes of masculinity, Pulp Virilities and Postwar American Culture aims to provide a partial cultural genealogy and to make a critical intervention into ongoing discussions of toxic masculinity in the era of #MeToo. Advancing the need for a replete critical history of portrayals of masculinity in all spaces of the American imagination, Pulp Virilities interrogates the vast, remarkably varied repertoire of masculine performance in post-war cultural production.

A Working-Class Hero Is Something to Be While rumors of the death of white male power are no doubt greatly exaggerated, what these conversations suggest is that the somewhat hoary American mythos of male competence, resiliency, honor, and self-­ sacrificing bravado under duress no longer characterizes a white virility that perceives itself to be besieged. Rather than dutiful stoicism, the public spectacle of American white power under siege today offers unhinged displays of resentment, braggadocio, denial, defensiveness, and riotous insurrection. It isn’t as if Hollywood isn’t trying hard to shore up the time-honored narrative of the working-class hero, of course, though only liberals and centrists seem to be watching the movies. Consider a film like The Marksman (2021), for instance, an allegory of beset white manhood that aims to capture the temper of the times, and which was released in the turbulent month of January 2021. The Marksman self-consciously dramatizes nearly all the touchstone grievances of the American right: porous national borders, illegal immigration, the villainy of financial elites in the banking and insurance industries who prey on the honest blue-collar laboring man, the inefficacy and corruption of big government, and so forth. To this familiar list of grievances are added a couple

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of newer, distinctly Trump-ian fears: the infiltration of Latin American-­ based gangs into the United States and, more pressingly, the potential betrayal of the country on the part of those who are sworn to enforce the law. In the film, nearly every law officer, from the State Highway Patrolman to Homeland Security border guard, is depicted as corrupt—in the pay of the Mexican drug cartels. Every male law officer, that is; female cops are represented as well intentioned, but ultimately ineffectual. Directed by longtime Eastwood collaborator Robert Lorenz, The Marksman stars Liam Neeson, an actor who, in such films as Taken (2008), The Grey (2012), The Commuter (2018), Honest Thief (2020) and seemingly countless others has had a late-career renaissance portraying aging white males successfully resisting the various global forces that besiege them (from white slavers to drug addiction to redundancy to bad cops to bad weather to—mostly—old age). In The Marksman, Neeson portrays Vietnam veteran Jim Hanson, a rancher who is in a world of trouble. In the opening, a coyote mauls one of his cattle. We subsequently learn that his land is overrun with refugees, his wife has died of cancer, he has spent all his money on her medical bills and his ranch will be repossessed. Despite his many skills, he can’t land a paying part-time job, and he drinks too much. Eventually the cartels will come to hunt him down, burning his house, shooting up his pickup, and even killing his dog. It is enough to turn any man into Cliven Bundy! Director Lorenz tries to flip the script of right-wing paranoia, however, by evoking precisely those traditional codes of American masculinity to which Obama refers. The film also gestures, somewhat gropingly, toward a Butler-esque mourning. Like so many heroes before him, Hanson comes to find within himself a capacity for self-sacrifice and empathy—even a humanistic liberalism—consummate with his innate courage, honesty, competence, and, yes, capacity for violence. Male violence is presented as a given. That men are innately violent will be a truism in most all of the texts I consider. The fundamental ethical question they pose seems to be the manner and direction in which such violence is channeled. Rather than exploding in the resentful aggressiveness that has characterized the public performances of Trump and his infamous followers and mimics (from Bundy to Brett Kavanaugh to Kyle Rittenhouse), Hanson redirects his libertarian-inflected rage into a violence that serves the causes of liberal benevolence. Hanson “illegally” frees an orphaned Mexican boy, Miguel (Jacob Perez) from state internment. Battling off the bad guys, and risking his own life, he delivers Miguel safely to his family in Chicago. Hanson

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then disappears and, severely wounded, presumably, dies. With these acts of self-sacrifice, Hanson thereby symbolically offers to the collective Miguels of the world—“illegal” immigrants—trusteeship over the American future. We’ve seen the contours of this script before, most notably in such Eastwood vehicles as Gran Torino (2008), where a superannuated white power, grudgingly at first, but, ultimately, graciously, cedes symbolic control over the American future to immigrants through acts of heroic self-­ sacrifice. In Gran Torino, the Eastwood character, Walt Kowalski, gifts the patriarchal American domain as well as his own muscle car over to Hmong immigrants, as represented in the person of young Thao Vang Lor (Bee Vang).1 Moreover, the transfiguration of a self-reliant libertarianism that borders on the solipsistic and anti-social into one that commits itself to a more generous and communitarian social vision through self-sacrificial acts of valor forms the durable mythic template for American masculinity. As Obama points out, that same narrative underpins most every John Wayne movie, though the most classic formulation is probably the dramatic change of heart on the part of stoic sentimentalist Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), which famously concludes Casablanca. (1942): “I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world,” Rick declaims, committing himself to the “job” of anti-fascist resistance. It is significant, as Robert B. Ray notes, that Rick’s character represents an “extralegal morality” (1985, 102), characteristic of not only “the typical frontiersman, but also America itself” (1985, 100). By this formula, self-­ centered libertarianism become expansive patriotism; self-interest is transformed into self-sacrifice, and male competence—and even violence—is rechanneled toward a social good. Virility becomes virtue. One of the characters in James M. Cain’s novel Galatea (1953)—to introduce another among the subset of midcentury texts I will survey—expresses it this way, speaking of a boxer who has trouble winning in the ring: “He couldn’t hit for money but he could hit for right” (Cain 1953, 32). The code demands that we decry violence that is either mercenary or vengeful, but that we applaud that which is righteous. Again, it is a question of the uses and ends to which a presumably 1  For a fuller discussion of Gran Torino, see my 2014 article “A Finish Worthy of the Start: The Poetics of Age and Masculinity in Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino.” Film Criticism 38.3: 2–23.

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innate male violence is put. In Galatea, Cain, as is typical of his writing, will ironize the formula: his relentlessly self-serving heroes, unlike Rick Blaine, unlike Jim Hanson, often have difficulty discerning the difference between social good and self-interest, between empathy and lust. “Rightness” is a thornier problem than most Hollywood thrillers care to admit. No doubt there is a lot more to be said about The Marksman as a homosocial fantasy; along with many recent Eastwood vehicles (not to mention much of the canon of tough-guy Hollywood classics), it envisions social reproduction without the participation of women. More can be said about how its insistent libertarian ethos and gun fetishism works against the social contract it aims to endorse, about its glorification of the white hero and its negligent racism (tellingly, only the white characters seem to have surnames), about how old age has come to figure so largely in the contemporary public dramas of male heroism (all themes I will touch upon in the pages that follow), about how male capability and virtue is everywhere entwined with violence. Suffice it to say that the liberal gesturing at work in this movie is deeply unsatisfying, for a number of reasons. One stands out: the legacy of male heroism turns out to be tarred from the start. For if we follow Obama’s directive and hearken “back to the ‘30s and ‘40s”—a task I take up in this study—we will come to question the putative heroism of the hero. If we look closely into the deep cultural genealogy of the working-class hero—which is among my central aims in this study—we learn that the classic American male hero and the raging insurrectionist Proud Boy of January 6, 2021, turn out to share entirely the same DNA. For, in fact, what critic Nina Baym aptly termed “melodramas of beset manhood” have traditionally constituted the American cultural canon.2 Male rage and its discontents have found fertile ground in trashy American action thrillers and literary and cinematic masterpieces alike. And when I teach, say, Dashiell Hammett’s classic crime thriller The Maltese Falcon (1930), my students are quick to point out that Sam Spade, 2  The evocative formula is the title of Baym’s now classic 1981 essay from American Quarterly, in which she argues that the bias against woman’s cultural production arises from the theoretical premises buttressing American literary criticism as a disciplinary field. Following a circular logic, critics look exclusively to male writers in order to discover and verify what they had already preconceived as the cultural essence of the nation. The same tautology holds in the efforts of Nichols or Obama—and, potentially, my own—to excavate an explanation for contemporary political behavior in a mythicized American cinematic tradition of male heroism.

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that hardest of hard-boiled protagonists, in his haphazard, easy-going womanizing, casual homophobia, and unequivocal racism is the very prototype of what would today be termed a “toxic” masculinity. Spade is incapable of sacrifice, of generosity. The very code of masculinity he adheres to forbids it. “The John Waynes, the Gary Coopers, the Jimmy Stewarts, the Clint Eastwoods” are more complex, tendentious, and morally ambivalent characters when analyzed without the nostalgic gloss provided by so many contemporary commentators. Outcasts to a man, our hard-boiled heroes have always been antiheros, vigilantes, outlaws, ironists, fools, dupes, psychopaths, or (to be blunt) assholes. Often unapologetically so, as any replete poetics of American manhood (toward which this volume is an incomplete gesture) will be obliged to take as a jumping-­ off point. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term “hard-boiled” (or “hardboiled”) to mean unsentimental, cynical, tough-minded, or even amoral dates back at least as far as 1884, and seems to have been a common idiom by 1916. Generally, hard-boiled had a negative connotation. Literary protagonists often came to realize that their cynicism was largely a front. Ernest Hemingway, whose influence on this canon cannot be overstated, used the term famously in The Sun Also Rises (1926)3 to characterize Jake Barnes’s ambivalence about the stoical persona he has adopted: “It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing” (Hemingway 2006, 42). “He was hard-boiled. Being soft was nothing in the pocket” (12) proclaims Bill Tenant, the protagonist of Benjamin Appel’s debut novel, Brain Guy (1934), a book that relishes underworld slang. Typically, hard-boiled was taken to be a male attribute. Frances Newman is ironizing gender conventions when she appropriates the term for the title of her 1926 novel, The Hard-Boiled Virgin, about a tough-minded, free-thinking, and sexually independent “new woman” trying to navigate the social strictures of the old South. By 1929, the year such genre-defining works as W. R. Burnett’s Little Caesar, Hammett’s Red Harvest and The Glass Key, and Carroll John Daly’s The Hidden Hand all appeared, the term “hard-boiled” was 3  Because I am making in part a historical argument, I will indicate in parentheses that original publication date of the books, essays, and films to which I refer. However, as I may be quoting from a subsequent republication of the text—as for Hemingway and Appel, here—my citations will refer to the date of the publication I quote from. The original year of publication will be included in brackets in the list of references.

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used commonly by critics to designate a specifically American type of crime writing, largely associated with the journal Black Mask. Perhaps the belligerence and criminality of the hard-boiled hero comes as no surprise. Such contemporary commentators as Ljeoma Oluo, for example, in Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America (2020), an indispensable contribution to current debates, points out that the finely honed myth of white male competence was a pretty fraudulent imposture from the get-go. On nearly all fronts, she argues—and her examples are legion, encompassing predictable cowboy heroes like Buffalo Bill Cody as well as more unexpected figures, like such committed revolutionaries as Max Eastman and Floyd Dell—a hegemonic white supremacist and patriarchal culture has conspired to align power with competence, white rights with white might. Just as in a conventional Hollywood morality play, wherein the hero who occupies the moral high ground also happens, coincidentally enough, to be the most skilled fighter, so too dominant American narratives rationalize white privilege by repeatedly dramatizing white masculine competence. In The Green Berets (1968), to use Nichols’s example, it is because Colonel Mike Kirby is portrayed as both virtuous and hyper-competent that the American cause in South Vietnam is rendered, by an ideological sleight of hand, righteous. The historical record, by contrast, suggests that both military and civilian leadership (in the persons, say, of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara or General William Westmoreland) were none of them geniuses of warcraft. But it would be absurd to contend that, outside a mythmaking apparatus, the innate justness of a cause had any link whatsoever to the competence of its prosecutors. To be fair, most Wayne vehicles recognize that problem, and dramatically play the integrity of the Wayne character variously off against the ineptitude of the military brass or the corruption of political leaders, as famously, for example, in the John Ford-directed classic Fort Apache (1948). Fort Apache pits the honorable, capable Captain Kirby York (Wayne) against the arrogant, inefficient, and condescending Lieutenant Colonel Owen Thursday (Henry Fonda) as the American cavalry engage in a series of skirmishes with Apache warriors, led by Cochise (Miguel Inclan).4 Ford takes pains to generate sympathy toward Cochise and his fighters, but the very respect York shows for the Apache ironically renders 4  See Richard Slotkin’s perceptive analysis of Wayne’s persona as “the man who knows Indians” in this and other classic roles, in his interrogation of enduring frontier mythologies in American culture, Gunfighter Nation (1992, New York: Atheneum). My grateful indebtedness to Slotkin’s wide-angled mode of analysis and interest in deeply rooted American mythographies should be obvious throughout this work.

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the film’s implicit criticism of manifest destiny and “pacification” policies void. According to this mythical logic, the goodness of the hero renders the cause—however misconceived politically—justifiable in the long run. When fought by good men (rather than corrupt elites), even a genocidal war becomes magically rendered not only tolerable but righteous. The same clichéd formula drives a thousand and more male-oriented movies, wherein working-class heroes—frontline rescue workers, police officers, soldiers—redeem and render humane the misbegotten missions that a corrupt elite leadership has embroiled them in. This is the logic that underwrites “support our troops” sloganeering: the war might be wrong, but the soldiers fighting it are, morally, rock solid. By this formula—and it is one key to understanding the imaginary political formation that sustains Trumpism, whatever his own opinion of soldiers and the military—the righteousness of the American cause emanates democratically from the very decency and competency of the average and unsung working-class hero, despite his inevitable—or should we say, given its long legacy in our most operative fictions, perpetual—betrayal by political, social, or economic elites. By Oluo’s argument, our cultural formations generate a pervasive myth that greatness is a birthright, that white men have earned our place at the top of the social ladder because we are genuinely more capable, more competent, more heroic, more righteous than others. But (and I speak as a member of this group), we know we are not; in fact, we are pretty mediocre. What threatens us is the fear of being exposed as such. Oluo writes: “whiteness is … threatened when it takes on too many traits of identities of color; it is also threatened when communities of color cease to stay below whiteness, where society’s script say they belong” (2020, 50). I would modify that slightly, to suggest that white paranoia is inflected to some degree by a measure of resentment. White supremacy depends upon our knowing, even among relatively powerless commoners, that we have inherited this power by virtue of our birthright, an unquestioned assumption that many critics today term white privilege. Consequently, if we perceive that we have been unjustly denied our rights, then we will feel compelled dramatically to reaffirm our rights against turncoats, weaklings, or race-traitors.

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Additionally, the white working-class “hero” has, to some extent, always been represented as somewhat slighted or disinherited. Typically, his resentment toward elites is driven by a somewhat ineluctable sense of dispossession and envy. The opening pages of Nelson Algren’s A Walk on the Wild Side (1956) introduce us to Fitz Linkhorn, an archetypal case of white working-class resentment: “For what had embittered him Fitz had no name” (3). Algren goes on to render this sensibility poetically and precisely: “Yet he felt that every daybreak duped him into waking and every evening conned him into sleep. The feeling of having been cheated—of having been cheated—that was it. Nobody knows why or by whom” (Algren 1998, 3). In his paean to Linkhorn, Algren provides the full cultural genealogy for all those white wannabe heroes who feel they have been deprived of their rightful ascendancy: Six-foot one of slack-muscled shamble, he came of a shambling race. That gander-necked clan from which Calhoun and Jackson sprang. Jesse James’ and Jeff Davis’ people. Lincoln’s people. Forest solitaries spare and swart, left landless as ever in sandland and Hooverville now the time of the forests had passed. Whites called them “white trash” and Negroes “po buckra.” Since the first rock had risen above the moving waters there had not been a single prince in Fitzbrian’s branch of the Linkhorn clan. Unremembered kings had talked them out of their crops in that colder land. (Algren 1998, 2–3)

Such writers as Algren (along with a slew of others whom I shall be examining) provide a discernible template for American masculinity, white and (as we shall see) otherwise. In what follows, I will not distinguish particularly between “trashy” works and “literary” works. As many commentators point out, Mickey Spillane and William Faulkner inhabit the same moral and mythical universe, whatever their differences in outlook or aesthetic. Both are essential participants in the evolution of what I term “pulp virilities.” I have little interest in evaluating or defending the purportedly literary quality of any of these texts, though I will often gravitate toward works that have been neglected by critics or left out of the cultural canon. There is critical commentary aplenty, most of it rewarding, insightful, and sophisticated, about such established authors as Hammett and Raymond Chandler, or Algren, for that matter; less has been written about

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Benjamin Appel, say, or Donald Goines, though I will find the books of these authors equally—if differently—rich and complex. Evolving from dime novels, pulp fiction, literary naturalism and modernism, traditional detective stories, and gothic writing, a distinctively American, modern, urban, and masculine style of “hard-boiled” and (later) “noir” writing developed during the Jazz age, matured during the Depression, and thrived (often as paperback originals) in the early years of the Cold War. I will also, in Chap. 3, consider as well women writers of the era, female protagonists of crime fiction, and women-oriented texts and readerships in order to suggest that the production of hegemonic gender norms was a fraught cultural product across the spectrum. However preponderant femme fatale stereotypes in hard-boiled writing and film noir, “pulp femininities” can be at times as vexed, contradictory, elusive, and hard to pin down. I will, as should already be evident, consider film and literature together as well, and you will find only a handful of extended readings of primary texts. My approach is rather to consider the cultural ensemble: an array of the dense ideological, psychological, and aesthetic threads that are layered across the social configurations of gender, race, class, and geography at distinct historical moments in various textual productions. By my argument, these strands work together collectively to produce distinct sensibilities and awarenesses by which social players come to inhabit and perform agency and identity. What I call “pulp” cultural productions (though my examples embrace feature films, and reputable hardback novels as well as sleazy paperbacks) are often the sort of action-adventure thrillers that cast the reader into the imaginative role of “hero,” even if many of the works are explicitly critical of that relationship. Overall, however, this fantasmatic insertion of reader into protagonist is a process that continues, even in our present age of digital culture, to largely define the way in which cultural consumers come to inhabit imaginative products. As Christopher Breu has argued in his indispensable study, Hard-Boiled Masculinity (2005), pulp fictions convey to their readership a cultural fantasy whereby “a complex set of relays between … fictional characters and ‘real-life’ masculine ideals” generate “a fantasy of correspondence in which fiction and everyday life are bound together, meanings from the one shaping and reformulating those from the other and vice versa” (11). And the ensemble of cultural texts defines an imaginative field: we intuitively “know” many cultural scripts, even if we don’t read a whole lot of books or watch a whole lot of movies, which is one reason I aim, methodologically, to consider the component parts of

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the broader pictures. To overgeneralize a bit, we might say that we consumers of masculinist tales imagine ourselves as protagonists of movies or other narratives. And, if we don’t fully misconceive of ourselves as those heroes, we nonetheless measure and assess our own behaviors in light of the protagonists of such culturally hegemonic tales. James Thurber dramatized a “pulp virility” model of self-knowledge in his popular 1939 short story, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” in which Mitty daydreams himself variously as a heroic navy commander, a world-­ renowned surgeon, a tough-guy defendant in a murder trial, a stoical death-defying soldier in the trenches of the first world war, all models of male courage drawn from the pages of the pulps. In these fanciful scenarios, the reader is inserted into a world where he can presume his actions have potent consequences. In Thurber’s version, even in the face of potential defeat one acquires the potency of nobility. The film adaption of Thurber’s very brief story, a Danny Kaye vehicle from 1947 directed by Norman Z. McLeod—a Goldwyn technicolor extravaganza that is quite possibly the most un-noir film ever produced—nonetheless makes the link to pulp explicit. Mitty is an editor at pulp magazine company Pierce Publications, an average guy daydreamer who, his fantasies tempered by the publications he edits, finds himself embroiled in a real-life struggle against villainous Nazi art thieves.

Populism, Resentment, and Pulp Virilities As critic Justus Nieland observes, “the politics of hard-boiled crime fiction … are inseparable from populism, whose rhetoric requires attacks on a menacing ‘bigness’ in the name of a virtuous common people” (2017, 179–180). It will be an open question as to when and how that populism toggles over from the left-leaning New Deal era populism that Nieland and Sean McCann attribute to the early years of the genre into the later hard-right populism of a Mickey Spillane or a Donald Trump. McCann’s exemplary Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism (2000) is to my mind among the most astute and insightful study of American hard-boiled crime friction as “a pop genre, a cultural complaint, and a political myth” (5). Equally essential is Christopher Breu’s psycho-analytically inflected Hard-Boiled Masculinities (2005), which details the complexity of the imaginary class location of the hard-boiled protagonist. Such figures represent “both an adaptation to, as well as a reaction against, the workings of corporate capitalism” (5), Breu

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points out. The model masculinity they embody is “instrumentalized and efficient” as per the strictures of emerging corporate capitalism. But they also figure resistance to those self-same strictures, “by maintaining a rigorously individualist stance, by being self-directed, and by rebelling against all forms of authority and social connection” (2005, 5). That ambivalence runs deep in pulp virilities. Indeed, the genre tends to dramatize the very dilemma of allegiance. In many of the male melodramas I examine, the protagonist, cast out of power, has to choose between serving the cause that has oppressed him or subversively resisting it: what loyalty does Wayne’s York owe Fonda’s Thursday? What “patriotic” duty should a GI feel toward the inept military brass—or the US Congress— that has betrayed him and put his life at risk? The John Wayne answer is that duty and honor—understood to be innate—dictate unswerving loyalty to the cause and to one’s compatriots, if not to the men who lead it; this is the classically patriotic assumption. Other cultural texts suggest otherwise. Think, for example, of the resolutely independent heroes of pulp fiction writer Ayn Rand. Rand cut her eyeteeth working in the wardrobe department at RKO Studios and sold her first screenplay, Red Pawn, to Universal in 1932. Such Randian heroes as Howard Roark and John Galt exhibit many of the classic features of the hard-boiled hero, and her writing emerges from the traditions of pulp melodrama. As a philosophy, objectivism, which challenges every man to think of himself as a hero, lies squarely within the thematics of pulp virilities. After the success of The Fountainhead (1943), her earlier 1938 novella Anthem was reprinted in the June 1953 issue of American pulp magazine Famous Fantastic Mysteries. The libertarian solution to the dilemma necessitates that the hero follow the path of virtuous independence and contemptuous indifference toward authority (if not outright resistance or rebellion). The January 6 insurrectionists get to have it both ways: the most “patriotic” and “loyal” course of action turned out to be insurrection. This feeling of having been unjustly slighted is precisely the psychic mechanism that produced the uprising of January 6, 2021. In any case, however, the formula is haunted by doubt. If this is so, and it seems indisputable, then the work of mourning envisioned by Butler will necessitate a deeper confrontation with white male fragility than has so far proven permissible. And this is because the elaborate mythic complex that I am terming pulp virilities, where the anxieties and possibilities of American masculinity are hammered out in works of popular culture, foretell and dramatize a good deal of what we are now witnessing being played out in

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contemporary venues. What is to be a man? It may prove illustrative to compare a contemporary text like The Marksman, for example, with a predecessor that tells the same story of a disinherited and beleaguered man faced with an ethical reckoning: Lionel White’s classic midcentury crime novel The Snatchers (1953). White was a prolific author of at least thirtyfive thrillers, several of which were made into classic films by Jean-Luc Godard—Peirrot le Fou (1965), based on White’s Obsession (1963)—and Burt Kennedy—The Money Trap (1965), based on White’s 1963 novel of the same name. White’s most significant book was probably Clean Break (1955), which was adapted by Stanley Kubrick (in fabled collaboration with the paperback writer Jim Thompson) into the noir classic The Killing (1956).5 Already evident in his first venture, however, published as a Fawcett Gold Medal paperback original, was White’s characteristic welding together of the intricate “caper” plot, the unadorned, straight-ahead narrative approach of Hammett and other earlier writers for the celebrated crime magazine, Black Mask, a somewhat purple prose style, relatively complex characterization, and an existential, amoral worldview paradigmatic of what would later come to be characterized as “noir.” 5  Rick Ollerman’s introduction to the Stark House Press reissue of The Snatchers and Clean Break (2017) is enormously helpful in contextualizing White’s life and writing, much of which has fallen out of print. Sources are rare. The crime classic series of Stark House, in California, and Hard Case Crime, a division of London publisher Titan Books, have been instrumental in bringing lost classics of the paperback original era and after back into print in recent decades, following the path charted in the 1980s and 1990s by the Black Lizard reprints issued by Vintage/Random House. Of particular importance too was the series “Old School Books,” which was distributed by Norton beginning in 1996. Explicitly drawing the link between Black-authored crime fiction and such hard-boiled writers as Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson, and James Ellroy, this now defunct line reissued out-of-print works by Clarence Cooper, Jr., Chester Himes, Donald Goines, and Roland S.  Jefferson. More recently, Penzler Publishers has brought out a handsomely edited series of American Mystery Classics, complete with new introductions by contemporary writers and distributed by Norton. In 1995, Oxford University Press published an indispensable anthology of hard-­ boiled short stories, capably edited by Bill Pronzini and Jack Adrian. The Library of America boxed sets, including Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 40s and American Noir of the 1950s (1997) as well as their collections of works by Hammett (1999), Chandler (1995), Ross Macdonald (2016/2017), and the sometimes overlooked David Goodis (2012) make other excellent introductions to the tradition. An appendix to Geoffrey O’Brien’s classic critical introduction Hard-Boiled America includes a list of titles published between 1929 and 1960. Cambridge University Press has published excellent anthologies of critical essays, including The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction (2003), The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction (2010), and A History of American Crime Fiction (2017).

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In The Snatchers, antihero protagonist Cal Dent (note the monosyllabic Christian name and surname, a cliché of the genre) orchestrates an elaborate kidnapping in league with his variously desperate, sadistic, alcoholic, and incompetent crew. Things go awry from the start, however, as the kidnappers, who aim to snatch the infant Janie Wilton for ransom, find themselves also obliged to capture Terry Ballin, the alluring young hired nurse of their target. Brutalized by life and a stint in prison, Cal is the very prototype of the disposable American male, a character type we will encounter over and over again: a hard-hearted, unsentimental, pragmatic social Darwinist, an outsider, even a pariah, possessed of a crafty, alert, and street-schooled intelligence, courageous in an entirely self-centered and unremorseful way, not exactly cold-blooded but more than willing to sacrifice any (or all) of his colleagues and lovers to get what he wants. His conscience begins to be awakened, however, when the nurse, Terry, for whom he has developed feelings, becomes enlisted as an emissary in negotiations with police, who have surrounded the gang’s hideout. She is sent out with a note asking for food and whisky, and instructed that, should she not return within the hour, the child will be killed. “Don’t come back,” Cal tells her “in an undertone,” for the first time in his life prioritizing the interest of someone else ahead of his own, “there’s nothing more you can do, now” (White 2017, 145). He is entirely flummoxed by her act of courage and love when, an hour later, he witnesses Terry, dutiful to her charge, returning: Why was she doing it? Why was she coming back when he had ordered her not to? She must have known in her heart that only violence and death awaited her in the cottage. And then this man Dent, who from his earliest childhood had lived by the law of the jungle, who had forever worshipped only at the altar of greed and selfishness, who had been aloof from all men and all women, this man had a strange and unusual thought. She has love; that was the thought in his mind. A love beyond selfishness and the need for safety. Love beyond fear or desire. For the first time in his entire life, Cal Dent understood something about the human heart that he had never heretofore known. He watched her and he also thought: God, what courage she has! Would I have as much if I were in her shoes? (White 2017, 146–47)

The prose in this passage is overstated, even gushy. White will, as he comes to perfect his craft in later works, emulate the clipped reticence and

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breakneck pace of Hammett, Paul Cain, Raoul Whitfield and other predecessors, whose protagonists can’t be bothered to articulate insights or ironies (never the burnished, chuckling conceits with which protagonists in works by James M.  Cain or Chandler often do). Even so, the moral is clear: like Neeson’s Jim Hansen, like Eastwood’s Walt Kowalski, like Bogart’s Rick Blaine, like so many American working-class heroes before and since Cal learns that the power of love is self-less; like so many working-­ class heroes his life culminates in an act that is at once a gesture of heroic benevolence and an orgy of violent self-sacrifice. A quick glance at works published from the thirties through the fifties (and, indeed, up to today) reveals another recurrent plot device. The moral resolution typically hinges on whether the love of a good woman will reform the hard-bitten hero. In White’s novel, the love interest—a very good woman, it turns out—does awaken this simmering conscience of the erstwhile self-centered hero. But often the answer to the question is no. First, with the stock femme fatale character, the apparent good woman often turns out to be pretty bad. The ingenue Miss Wonderly of Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon morphs predictably into the murderous temptress, Brigid O’Shaugnessy. Cora Papadakis née Smith, in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), Phyllis Nirdlinger in Double Indemnity (1943), Holly Valenty in Galatea all seduce the affable narrators of Cain’s novels into criminal acts. Alternatively, women, even if good, are disposable; ultimately, they are unable to generate the moral force capable of awakening altruism in the cynical self-interested hero (a failure that distinguishes hard-boiled and noir from the more sentimental genre of the western). The relatively free-spirited Dinah Brand of Hammett’s Red Harvest (1929) dies early; the love of the admirably tough and sexually independent Holiday or the wealthy adventuress Margaret Dobson in Horace McCoy’s Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1948) are incapable of moving the resolutely vicious and cynical protagonist. Given the critical tenor of these fictions, even sexuality is envisaged as complicit in a corrupt, overly commercialized capitalist system, that has reduced all matters of the heart to cold-blooded, calculating logic of exchange. In the hands of Horace McCoy or Jim Thompson, the misanthropic contempt of the hero for his fellow human beings spills over into a brutally misogynistic psychopathic rage. In such works as Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me (1952) women characters are scapegoated, subject to severe beatings, rape, and murder-­ punished for offering the possibility of solace and love.

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Let’s consider, briefly, an even more bracing and ethically challenging work which offers both models of amorous morality. Benjamin Appel’s Plunder (1952), another Fawcett Gold Medal paperback original, records in excruciating horrifying detail, the crimes of two renegade soldiers setting themselves up as con men in the black markets of post-war American-­ occupied Manila. Joe “the Lawyer” Trent, a brutal, sadistic con man, is the brains of the operation, and Blacky MacIntyre, “the big silent type” (Appel 2005, 240), his adjutant. Both men have been deeply hurt by life, and feel abandoned by their family and hard used by the army. Both men are AWOL (absent without leave) from the service. Both men are criminals who, at the novel’s opening, team up to escape from a military stockade, later murdering the sergeant who has assisted their jailbreak. Joe describes the murder as necessary; even if they could afford to pay him off, the blackmail never ends. The flinty, monosyllabic names should signify. Joe Trent, like White’s Cal Dent, understands himself to be pragmatic, coldly calculating, efficient, ruthlessly self-reliant; raised on the mean streets of Depression-era New York City and later a soldier of fortune, he will do whatever it takes to survive in a dog-eat-dog environment: “I didn’t have a peso to my name, worked in a steel mill in Pennsylvania. A strike there, like the waterfront strike here. Reds! It was rough. My brother was no good,” he rambled on. “Got into trouble, goddam big brother!” His past wavered before him for a second, and he glimpsed the lonely kid he had been in the city of a hundred bread lines where he had learned that a big brother could be no br0ther at all. And then, unsubstantial as any champagne bubble, the past was gone. He summed it all up: “you have to take care of yourself!” The life and times of Joe Trent, who joined the Navy and fought as a guerilla in the Luzon mountains north of Manila and went awol, and ­whatever he did, was always true to one principal: You have to look out for yourself. (Appel 2005, 311)6

Joe is the libertarian hero, who remains true to his own self-conception. Appel tells much of the story from Blacky’s perspective, however, and it is 6  Appel knew the environment intimately. As house journalist in 1945 and 1946, he was in the entourage of Paul V. McNutt. High Commissioner of the Philippines after Japan’s surrender and later as US Ambassador. Plunder is a sequel of sorts to earlier novels, including his first, Brain Guy, which records some of the adventures of Joe Trent referred to in this passage.

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Blacky’s moral and intellectual coming of age that constitutes the central drama of the novel. Outgrowing his dog-like admiration for Joe, Blacky matures into a critical view of the social racketeering that such philosophies endorse. Blacky, though not a deep thinker, comes to recognize that his friend’s hard-boiled pragmatism is, in fact, a cover for a psychopathic sadism. Driven by a deep but shrouded sense of loss, betrayal, and abandonment, Joe wants money, sex. He wants the power and respect of which he feels he has been robbed. Mostly, however, he wants vindication; mostly he wants others to suffer—those whom he believes have unjustly been granted the trappings of success that are rightfully his. He forces others to abject themselves. Joe takes a savage joy in persecuting, violating, hurting, and humiliating others; an Iago character, of sorts, he particularly relishes corrupting those who believe themselves virtuous, seducing them into committing crimes that they would not ordinarily commit. He bullies Blacky constantly. Noticing that Blacky has a sentimental attachment to romantic love and an old-fashioned sense of chivalry, he not only demands that Blacky hand over his girlfriends for Joe’s sexual use but compels Black to betray them—and himself—in myriad other ways. Joe smashes all ideals. By compelling his allies to so betray themselves, to knowingly violate the beliefs they not only hold dear but which provide the validating bedrock of their identity and existence, Joe thereby confirms his own view of the world as ineluctably cruel and universally corrupt and a social order that is both chaotic and unjust. When Blacky, after killing Joe in a rage, is, eventually, hunted down and caught by the MPs, he tells his interrogator that Joe had already destroyed his soul: “He’d killed me anyway.” Captain Hagstrom stared at the prisoner, and then he laughed. “you’re not getting yourself into the psycho ward that easy.” Blacky knew it was no use trying to explain what he’d learned in the hospital: that a corpse can sometimes commit murder. He had been Joe’s stooge a little too long. A stooge, a shadow, a muscle twitching when the brain commanded. The brain was dead. Joe the Lawyer was dead. But the jinx wasn’t dead. (Appel 2005, 525)

Blacky, who believe he has already sold his soul to the devil, will be offered another chance. “What were their names?” Captain Haggstrom, asks, demanding he rat out the Filipino women who had assisted him. He is asked to betray his lover, Lucy, to the authorities, a woman whom he has

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already betrayed several times, a woman who has offered him love and help when he was injured. At least for the moment, Blacky keeps silent: “All he could do for her now was to keep still. To give her the secret of the name that Captain Haggstrom wanted so much. In this moment of giving he felt that he’d become Blacky MacIntyre again. For the last time on earth” (Appel 2005, 326). And with those words the novel concludes. In protecting the vulnerable, Blacky finds the same measure of redemption as does Cal Dent; he finds the same measure of redemption as Jim Hanson. In fact, the concluding scripts are identical, insofar as the hero regains his virtue by protecting the innocent but non-citizen minority from her oppressive subjugation by an overbearing American state. By such gestures are working-class heroes forged. In such cathartic closing scenes, the (typically male) reader or viewer is solicited to identify imaginatively with such heroes (without, of course, being killed, and presumably without enacting any genuine violence). At one point, Appel reflexively, ironically, thematizes precisely this relationship between thriller and reader. Impersonating an Air Force major, Joe is working his graft at the American Commercial Agency. He finds the clerk he will need to bribe there reading an adventure comic book: “The Clerk was now thumbing through the pages of his comic book. ‘Manila’s more fantastic than this book. That’s my honest opinion, Major. That’s what I say to everybody who comes in here. Manila’s more fantastic’” (Appel 2005, 285). What need to fantasize along Walter Mitty lines? These fanatasmatic identificatory mechanisms whereby the everyday Joe can be transformed into hero are central to pulp sensibilities, and the writing is rife with such metafictional self-awareness of how it takes effect as a genre. Prolific crime-writer Donald E.  Westlake, a master of the “caper” plot, whose writing is heavily indebted to White and Appel, provides the title for my introductory chapter with his novel, Somebody Owes Me Money (2008 [1969]). One of Westlake’s more disposable comic thrillers, the book tells the story of Chet Conway, a hapless cabdriver and small-­ time gambler who stumbles into a murder mystery. Hunted down and captured by hoods, he asks himself, “what would Robert Mitchum do now, what would he do in a situation like this?” (38). Notably, Chet’s position replicates the role of the reader whenever we delve into one of these hard-boiled thrillers. As George Orwell notes in his 1944 essay “Raffles and Miss Blandish,” the conventions of the genre dictate that, “in the adventure story, one can think of oneself as being at the centre of events” (1957, 159). To imagine oneself at the center of events is

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essentially a cinematic and consumerist process of self-fashioning. When Bill Tenant, protagonist of Appel’s earlier Brain Guy, for example, finds himself embroiled in murder, he too compares events in his life to plots “from a gangster movie … He felt sorry for Duffy. Good God, Duffy wasn’t Cagney or Robinson or Raft. Christ, Duffy had been real. Duffy wouldn’t ever come to life like the movies fellows when the film was over” (Appel 2005, 171). The plots of many of the formula fictions that I will be concerned with unfold around the predicament of an “everyman” who, in a moment of crisis, is challenged to test his mettle. In so doing, he measures himself against an array of culturally available models of heroic or romantic masculine competence. Such books repeatedly ask their readers to imagine what it is to be a man. My investigations suggest that the answers provided, however, are more varied and unsettling than we might expect. At the same, time, such popular works provide in compelling if highly sensationalized form rich cultural genealogies for the workaday misogyny and institutionalized patterns and practices of racism entrenched within American culture. A good deal of outstanding critical work on the topic has appeared over the last couple of decades, and I will be careful to indicate my appreciation and to flag my indebtedness to other critics and scholars, without, I hope, distracting readers or straying too far from the contentions I aim to lay out. While engaging with a range of challenging and sophisticated theory, a formidable body of scholarship, and a series of brilliant critical analyses, I will endeavor to keep my own arguments as lucid and accessible as possible and I hope that both newcomers to the literature as well as aficionados will find ideas of interest herein. I argue for an expansive understanding of the genre, including considerations of such understudied but important artists and writers as White, or Charles Willeford, and considering a wide range of cultural texts created by both recognized masters (from Patricia Highsmith to Chester Himes), and lesser known, critically neglected, or later practitioners of the genre, and assessing as well the later novels of, say, memoirist and pimp, Iceberg Slim (Robert Beck), works not typically included in the hard-boiled or pulp canon alongside classic works by Hammett, Chandler, and Thompson. So too will it prove illuminating help to analyze more-or-less forgotten movies like the bleakly pessimistic RKO gangster tale Born to Kill (1947) or the more progressive-minded (but still deeply weird) depictions of homosexuality and anti-Semitism in army life, Crossfire (1947), alongside such template noir classics as Out of the Past (also 1947). All three

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films were released by RKO during the same year; Born to Kill features Lawrence Tierney as a psychotic alpha-male and social climber; the latter two both star Robert Mitchum as, variously, a benevolent Army sergeant, helping his men readjust to civilian life and a lovelorn fugitive. Tierney was the quintessential bad boy, often portraying tough guys and mobsters whose chances for moral redemption were slim. His first starring role was as the titular Dillinger (1945), and in his off-camera life, he was notorious for brawling and drunkenness.7 Mitchum presented a public persona infinitely cooler, more tempered, though he also had plenty of street cred. In his indispensable cultural history, The Origins of Cool in Postwar America (2017), Joel Dinerstein describes him as a central embodiment of noirish post-war virility: “On screen he was the ethical rebel-loner incarnate, a man of mystery, ‘dangerous, strong, but guarded,’ and yet ‘always unconvinced by the actions of those around him.’ Off screen, Mitchum ignored nearly all rules, codes and social norms; rather he was a fearsome, seductive rogue whose reputation was only burnished by a famous 1948 bust for marijuana possession” (Dinerstein 2017, 109). Mitchum is an ethical conundrum; though strong, silent, and (mostly) virtuous he does not easily align with the simplistic model of working-class hero outlined above. There is a reason that Obama references the predictably virtuous Gary Cooper rather than the more tempestuous and ambiguous Mitchum. In Mitchum’s many performances, ranging from his classic role as bootlegger Lucas Dollin in Thunder Road (1958) to such late roles as a world-weary Philip Marlowe in Dick Richard’s version of Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely (1975) a suppressed rage can typically be discerned behind his lizard-lidded gaze, a rage nearly as volatile as Tierney’s. Mitchum seldom fully shrouds his capacity for violence. Thunder Road, for example, concludes with the stereotypical act of benevolent self-­ sacrifice I have described above, but the range of blue-collar characters in his movies suggests the spectrum of violence and redemption in hard-­ boiled and noir narratives. Consider, for example, Mitchum’s turn as the creepily villainous Reverend Harry Powell in Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter (1955), with the words “love” and “hate” iconically tattooed across the knuckles of his hands. Or watch his performance as the brutal 7  Even to the point of self-parody, as when he played Elaine Benes’s father on a 1991 episode of the television serial Seinfeld. Apparently Tierney so frightened the cast, after stealing a butcher knife from the set and acting out the shower scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) on star Jerry Seinfeld, that he was never asked to reprise the role.

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psychopath Max Cady in Cape Fear (1962). In his deep ambivalence and mystery, the specter of Mitchum functions as a sort of Virgil figure, who will guide us through much of the subsequent material in this study. We can sweep up a few more methodological and theoretical issues before continuing. Most critics distinguish between straightforward “hard-boiled” writing and a more existentially and morally vexed and cinematically inflected “noir” style. In hard-boiled writing, presumably, male violence remains aligned with a defense of the social order and the detective remains, mostly, the hero and good guy. Noir, by contrast, is ambivalent, at best, or downright pessimistic about prospects for justice typically invoked by mystery writing, and which often features criminals as protagonists. In this sense, crime writing is a more capacious term than mystery novel proper. I will also treat such critical terms somewhat more capaciously. First, the sensationalist tough-guy tradition was in many cases fairly amoral and pessimistic in its vision. Breu (2005) makes a strong case that hard-boiled writing is noir in its outlook from the get-go. As developed most famously in the pulp detective magazine Black Mask, which was founded in 1920 by H. L Mencken and George Jean Nathan, and which, under the direction of legendary editor Philip C.  Cody, launched the careers of Hammett, Chandler, and Erle Stanley Gardner (creator of Perry Mason), the style accentuated a bare-knuckled sensationalism over and above any comforting moralism. If Gardner and Chandler were moralistic in their vision, Hammett remained the most cynical and reluctant of casuists. Other writers, such as the critically neglected Paul Cain (George Caryl Sims) took the pessimism to extreme ends well before the age of noir. Cain produced a handful of blistering stories for Black Mask, some of which were stitched together to produce the novel Fast One (1933), a withering work of stoicism, dread, and fatalism that makes the early novels of Hemingway, by contrast, seem downright blithe. So too do the cosmic ironies featured in such works as James M. Cain’s much celebrated The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) or the perversions bubbling right at the surface of stories by Cornell Woolrich make any distinction between hard-boiled and noir tenuous and provisional, at best. W.  R. Burnett, whose Little Caesar (1929) is generally recognized as a founding text of the genre, and who went on to write such classics as High Sierra (1941) and Asphalt Jungle (1949) and to contribute to the film versions of most of his own works, remained predominantly an urban naturalist in outlook. Burnett’s works elicit sympathy for criminals and brutalized and brutalizing police officers alike, characters whose morality was constrained by the ruthless social environment that defined their characters.

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Hard-Boiled, Pulp, Noir: The Genres of Pulp Virility Critic Lee Horsley, in his study of both British and American works, The Noir Thriller (2001), provides perhaps the most capacious—and, I believe, insightful and sympathetic—understanding of the sort of novels and films I will be discussing in this study. Though characteristically dealing with matters of crime and vice, and in many cases involving the solution to a crime, the noir thriller is, for Horsley, typified less by specific features of genre. Noir sensibilities stand in contrast, say, with the more traditional and limited category, “Detective Fiction,” which always involves a sleuth, sometimes a law enforcement office, often an amateur, and often (especially in American hard-boiled fiction) a professional private eye, as a central protagonist. Possessed and at least dimly aware of some sort of moral compass, however errant or compromised, the detective does eventually solve the crime—at least to the reader’s satisfaction if not fully to his own or to the court’s—and thereby resolve the social conflict. Such resolutions may be variously ingenious, provisional, or playful, in contemporary writing, but are no less conservative in their worldview for that, insofar as they reaffirm a durable social stability. Obviously, such generic categories will bleed into one other at times—hard-boiled as they may be, are the works of Hammett ultimately detective stories or not? In Hammett, the solution to the crime seems incidental, plot-wise, compared to the moral, political, and existential quandaries being scrutinized. Further, the supposed “restoration” of social order in such novels as Red Harvest is understood to be little more than farcical (in keeping with Hammett’s scorn for capitalism) as that social order is acknowledged to be corrupt to its very roots. Hammett’s champion, Chandler, earnestly insists everywhere on the centrality of a rather shopworn chivalry, but in Chandler’s novels the precise solution to the crime seems almost endlessly deferred. For these reasons, Horsley argues, noting the dark vision of such writers as Thompson, what overwhelmingly characterizes the noir thriller is its mournful and critical sensibility; it is “the most durable popular expression of … modernist pessimism” (2001, 1). Further, noir itself is no doubt best understood as a literary and cinematic assemblage. As pulp scholar Geoffrey O’Brien (1997) notes, many of these writers also worked in radio and scripted comic books, which also should be considered part of the urban cultural complex that comes to be known as noir. Given a volatile publishing market, all of these writers (and

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many more, including most of the writers I consider in what follows) gravitated to Hollywood at various points in their lives, and, as Woody Haut8 documents in Heartbreak and Vine: The Fate of Hardboiled Writers in Hollywood (2002), with various but largely dismal rates of success. As Haut argues, Hollywood was a crucible formative to noir sensibilities. The shift from the straightforward hard-boiled style of Black Mask to the deceptive, paranoid, amoral vision that was cemented in Cold War paranoia was perhaps reinforced by the back-stabbing business ethos of Tinseltown—as we shall see in Chap. 4, Los Angeles (L.A.) and California more generally are depicted as grim and pathological environments by writers of both suburban and inner-city fiction, from James Cain to Walter Mosely. Other changes in the structural dimensions of cultural productions also inflected literary sensibilities. After the second world war, when the pulp magazines were fading, many authors including John D.  MacDonald, Thompson, and Cornell Woolrich turned to the broadening market of paperback originals. Louis Menand, in The Free World (2021), his entertaining recent survey of art and thought in the Cold War, asserts that the so-called paperback revolution in the book industry has been exaggerated, although he concedes it was central to the dissemination of a new generation of hard-­ boiled works: What the format seemed most readily to attract were iterations of the hard-­ boiled detective story. Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett were paperbacked, and there were dozens of titles like Exit for a Dame, by Richard Ellington (Pocket) Benny Muscles In by Peter Rabe (Gold Medal Books), Lady, Don’t Die on My Doorstep, by Joseph Shallitt (Avon), Report for a Corpse, by Henry Kane (Dell), and starting with I, The Jury in 1948, the multimillion-selling Mike Hammer Detective novels by Mickey Spillane (Signet). This product was not trying to pass itself off as serious literature. It was deliberately down-market, comic books for grown-ups. (Menand 2021, 358)

The presumably more serious writers, such as Chandler or Ross Macdonald, were published initially in hardback by prestigious publishers such as Knopf or Random House. However, as Macdonald biographer 8  My inquiry is everywhere indebted to Haut, who is not only one of the most perceptive commentators on pulp fiction but who in his three volumes Pulp Culture (1995), Neon Noir (1999), and Heartbreak and Vine (2002) has compellingly theorized and mapped out the dynamics of pulp culture over decades of American social and political history.

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Tom Nolan observes, hardcover mystery sales averaged about 3000 copies. These books were then hurried into paperback copies contracted out to such companies as Dell, Pocket Books, or Lion. “Paperback printings jumped from 66 million in 1945 to 214 million in 1950, with mysteries being more than a quarter of that 1950 output” (Nolan 1999, 119). Even Spillane was first published in hardback by E. P. Dutton, though most of the 6.5 million copies of his breakthrough success, I, The Jury (1947), sold in the United States were of the Signet softcover. Despite Menand’s derision, such important writers as Charles Willeford, Thompson, David Goodis, Charles Williams, and the prolific John D.  MacDonald wrote works mostly for the paperback originals market. MacDonald’s first full-­ length novel, The Brass Cupcake (1950), for example, appeared in the Fawcett Gold Medal paperback line, though his classic The Executioners (1957), the basis for the Gregory Peck/Robert Mitchum vehicle Cape Fear (1962) and its 1991 remake by Martin Scorsese, was published by Simon & Schuster. It was not uncommon, either, for successful paperback originals to be reissued in hardcover. Chapter 3 will discuss in more detail how the market both inflects and, to a great extent, reflects the gender and mythologies and class bias embedded in fictional narratives. Spillane’s best-selling work in particular, proved a sensation, to the consternation of many highbrow and middlebrow commentators at the time, as we shall see. His immense popularity was a springboard into a second career as a Hollywood actor and producer. This often tension-filled nexus between publishing and cinema produced some of the strangest cultural texts ever. In the hands of director Robert Aldrich and contrarian screenwriter A.  I. Bezzerides, for example, even such reactionary works as Spillane’s Kiss Me, Deadly (1952) could be transformed into a compellingly subversive indictment of the atomic age, in the apocalyptic noir film, Kiss Me Deadly (1955).9 Bezzerides was a pugilistic, proletarian novelist, with leftist political commitments. His first novel, The Long Haul (1938), was adapted for film, They Drive by Night (1940), starring Bogart. A scriptwriter for Warner Bros, Bezzerides was one of the unsung driving forces behind noir, responsible for penning such classics as Thieves’ Highway (1949), directed by Jules Dassin and based on his own novel 9  For the full story of this adaptation and its reception (as well as an exemplary essay on the Spillane phenomenon), see chapter 3 of Peter Stanfield’s Maximum Movies, Pulp Fictions: Film Culture and the Worlds of Samuel Fuller, Mickey Spillane, and Jim Thompson (2011, New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press).

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Thieves’ Market (1949). Born to Kill was an adaptation of the brutally allegorical slice of literary naturalism Deadlier than the Male (1942), the only book published by screenwriter James Gunn (about whom even less is known than Paul Cain10). Crossfire was based on The Brick Foxhole, a 1945 novel by screenwriter Richard Brooks, who, on the strength of that book, co-authored with John Huston The Killers (1946), a Richard Siodmak adaptation of the Ernest Hemingway story, and Key Largo (1948), which I will also discuss at more length below. As is well known, Daniel Mainwaring, writing under the pseudonym Geoffrey Homes, adapted his own novel Build My Gallows High (1946) as Out of the Past, with some uncredited assistance by James Cain. The argument that noir is best viewed as a literary-cinematic ensemble hardly seems a controversial point given how many writers involved themselves in the production of both books and film. In his encyclopedic history of American film noir, Street with No Name (2002), for example, Andrew Dickos is clear about the indebtedness: “the characteristics of this literature—in the patter of these writers’ vernacularisms and the roughness of their characters actions, actions driven by passion and in quest of elusive happiness—inspired and helped define a portrait of the noir world on screen” (2002, 98).11 But it was more, I contend, than a question of the influence of hard-­ boiled writing on noir; rather, it was a matter of the multifaceted and multi-generic co-production of masculine self-styling and democratic vernaculars across a spectrum of venues. Clearly, as just about all historians note, the incorporation of stylistic elements associated with German expressionism (often by directors seeking refuge from the horrors of Nazi Europe) were also key. We could point as well to, say, the influence of the dramatic crime photojournalism of Weegee (Arthur Fellig) or other sensibilities honed by experiences in the press or in the military to make a claim for the full multi-mediality of the noir cultural moment. The influential 10  Despite the endorsement of no less a figure than philosopher Gilles Deleuze, Gunn’s work has merited almost no critical attention whatsoever, a fact that itself is suggestive of the potential thinness of discourse around pulp, hard-boiled and noir culture, despite a voluminous critical output dedicated to the field. One exception is a brief but pointed review by Sean Carswell from the Los Angeles Review of Books (November 17, 2019), which argues that Gunn’s portrayal of women is considerably richer, more humorous, more generous, and more complex than is typical of the stock femme fatales of the period. 11  Also see chapter 2 of James Naremore’s Film Noir: A Very Short Introduction (2019, New York: Oxford Univ. Press) for an excellent brisk discussion of the interface between noir cinema and modernist crime fiction.

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B-movie director, Samuel Fuller, for example, a director of westerns and war films whose noir bona fides can be discerned in such movies as Pickup on South Street (1953) or The Naked Kiss (1964) and who remained committed to an emphasis on proletarian experience long after it was fashionable, was a newspaperman, crime novelist, and infantryman before getting his start in Hollywood.12 And Dinerstein makes a credible case that, despite its relative absence from noir films (and the neglect of Black culture in noir cinema more generally), even Jazz was instrumental in inspiring the cool—“underground, mysterious, secret, oblique, subterranean” (2017, 199) sensibilities cultivated by noir performers.13As Dinerstein contends, and as we will explore in more detail in the next chapter, white cultural productions were self-consciously channeling Black models even as they disavowed those source materials. Such leading men as Bogart, Orson Welles, Marlon Brando,14 Clint Eastwood, and (obviously) Frank Sinatra were all Jazz fans or performers themselves. Mitchum was himself a saxophone player, singer, and songwriter—he helped to compose “The Whippoorwill” and “The Ballad of Thunder Road,” the theme songs for Thunder Road, and released his own 45 recording of the latter for Capitol records. As Dinerstein asserts, in many ways these actors cultivated a masculine persona based on social behaviors cultivated by such Black American performers as Lester Young or Miles Davis. Other cultural shifts can be discerned in these works as well, which again complicate familiar understandings of mythicized American virilities, not least the stereotype that American heroes are both strong and silent. Often, they display a facility for wordplay, which may be one feature that distinguished the urban protagonist (detective or criminal) from the western cowboy hero. From early on, writers like James Cain, Appel, or Horace McCoy have been concerned with articulating the connections between masculine self-styling and democratic vernaculars, bravado and lingo. In her classic study West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (1992), Jane 12  On Fuller, see my chapter on the “Cold War” in American Literature in Transition, 1950–1960 (2018, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press). 13  Dinerstein’s critical survey of post-war American “cool” has been extremely important in helping me develop my own line of thinking. I am indebted as well to other critics including Paula Rabinowitz, Eric Lott, and Michael Szalay, who have also argued suggestively along these lines. 14  On Brando, see, for example, Amy Taubin’s gloss of his immersion in the 52nd Street Jazz scene and his indebtedness to Miles Davis, “Orpheus Ascending,” Film Commentary 40.5 (2004): 58–60, 62.

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Tompkins has made a strong case that the related genre of pulp and paperback Western dramatizes the hero’s fear of language, which is associated with femininity, with racial miscegenation, and with a cloying and emasculating urban civilization, in cities overrun by immigrants. The Anglo-­ Saxon cowboy hero flees the mean streets of the city in a symbolic claim to regain his threatened racial and gender purity. The hard-boiled hero, by contrast, and the noir antihero are tasked rather to navigate the urban, measured by his fluency in slang, underworld jargon, and other hip subcultural forms of expression. Lee Clark Mitchell goes so far as to argue that in the hard-boiled tradition, plot becomes the mere scaffolding for the otherwise irresistible music of dialogues” (2021, 73). In Appel’s Brain Guy, Joe Tenant, newly arrived in New York from Easton, Pennsylvania, notes the change in the speech of his older brother, who is drifting into the criminal subculture: “Joe seemed bewildered at his talk, the queer stresses upon quiet words shaped into sounds of things ominous, sounds echoing of Paddy, of McMann, of his brother’s new life, cold, brutally phlegmatic” (2005, 68). This braininess, this markedly capacious linguistic facility—the elder Tenant, the titular “brain guy” moves in the world of immigrants, criminals, hard cases—will characterize protagonists ranging from Ralph Cotter in Horace McCoy’s Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1948), a one-time Phi Beta Kappa scholar turned outlaw, through Chandler’s wisecracking Marlowe, and up to the pyrotechnical wordplay of Iceberg Slim’s memoirs and novels. Though no fan of the pulps, George Orwell notes, perceptively, that much of the pleasure that accompanies the reading of these works arises the reader’s sense of mastery over the street slang, which mirrors the fantasy of virility and agency derived from the violent plot. Paperback writers of the mid-1940s and after produced books about working-class males (often returning soldiers) footloose and adrift in a post-war American society aptly described by novelist Charles Willeford as “half-socialist, half Republican” (1989, 11). As a précis of the argument elaborated throughout Pulp Virilities, this opening chapter uses paperback fiction (along with mostly B-picture from Hollywood and pulp culture more generally) to discern distinct predicaments of an avowedly working-­ class masculinity. Working-class literature, I claim, functioned as an imaginative field guide for men grappling with challenges of post-war American life, as newly minted stereotypes—William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956), Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956)— offered models of self-hood that were often unattainable and/or

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unattractive, as is most critically dramatized in Richard Yates’s 1961 novel, Revolutionary Road. Though designed to be consumed by a somewhat older audience than its near cousins, comic books and rock and roll, fifties pulp and paperback fiction was considered equally menacing to the moral order. A House Select Committee report on Current Pornographic Materials concluded that “low cost, paper-bound publications known as ‘pocket-size books’ have degenerated into media for the dissemination of artful appeals to sensuality, immorality, filth, perversion and degeneracy” (qtd. in Haut 1995, 5). Libertarian in their sensibilities, self-aggrandizing in their sentiments, skeptical of left liberal bromides, lazily or half-heartedly availing themselves of the opportunities afforded by the GI Bill, scornful of and often resistant to the lures of upper mobility or consumerist pleasures of middle-­ class suburban life and of white-collar and corporate culture, the protagonists of paperback novels produced from the mid-1940s and after viewed themselves as working-class heroes more or less out of time—bereft of a context adequate to their grandeur, of an environment in which they could prove themselves. If Spillane’s reactionary Mike Hammer is the archetypical wise fool of the genre, more subtle “pulp” texts of the time exposed, mourned, or lampooned the fragility of masculine edifice: examples of this range from the films of Samuel Fuller through the schizophrenic breakdowns of Thompson’s heroes to the misogynist serial killer, Dix Steele, in Dorothy Hughes’s In a Lonely Place (1947). A central text is the aforementioned 1955 feature, Night of the Hunter, starring Robert Mitchum as a menacingly charismatic serial killer cum preacher, whose contradictions and cool passions function as a funhouse mirror exaggeration of midcentury male paranoia. In such a climate, a will to mastery could be little more than mockery; stoicism was a feeble alibi for hysteria. In post-war noir film and cinema, the dominant imagined scenario of the city is the terrain of the fugitive. By examining a select range of postwar writings which feature protagonists who are pursued, hunted, threatened, we can consider how such works the evisceration of both geographic sense and communal relations in the de-industrializing and racially stratified post-war city, as we shall see in Chap. 4. Accordingly, the popular crime fiction of the era undergoes a shift from a “hard-boiled” sensibility (where the detective functions as a modern-day knight errant according to Chandler) to the noir form. Post war noir focuses on the existential, perceptual, and epistemological crisis of the protagonist, who is neither certifiably hero nor fully villain, but who is everywhere (in works of both

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highbrow and popular culture) on the lam. Emersonian ethical models of masculine self-reliance become transformed into consumerist patterns of subsistence and self-stylization. Further, we might say that self-doubt, rather than being disavowed or repressed, was at the dramatic heart of narratives of pulp virility. Many midcentury texts feature figurative male impersonators and are obsessed with secret identities and models of manhood that are fully dissimulated. In Chandler’s The Long Goodbye (1953), for example, the fugitive Terry Lennox becomes a model of protean manhood. As an allegory of American male self-fashioning, Terry remakes himself several times over. His story articulates one of the central dilemmas allegorized in American crime fiction: in a supposedly class-less and democratic society, how free are we to script our own social roles? To what extent does race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and so on prevent the radical self-fashioning that is at the heart of the so-called American dream? Crime fiction is all about the “drama” of self-fashioning, a theme we find replicated again and again in novels of the 1950s. Drawing in part on the insights of critic Steve Cohan in his important study, Masked Men: Masculinity and Movies in the Fifties (Cohan 1997), Pulp Virilities considers a range of male models and male impersonators in texts of the decade, showing how crime writing variously worked to “naturalize” the imitative manhood (and thus smooth over anxieties and accommodate males to heteronormative and middle-class ideals) even as it, in a more subversive vein, exposed the cracks in the façade of authentic manhood. The “natural man,” however idealized, is the most feigned, and can seldom be trusted. Most of these characters, after all, are psychopaths. Another paradigmatic example, for instance, is Patricia Highsmith’s enigmatic psychopath, Tom Ripley, who first appears in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955). Equipped with what he laments is the most “conformist” face in the world, Tom has the capacity to take on the attributes of others. He assumes both the social role and the personality of the man he has killed, the wealthy, cosmopolitan devil-may-care Dickie Greenleaf. In Highsmith, upward mobility is simply acting the part. In Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me (1952), by contrast, the child-molester and woman killer Lou Ford, dissimulates a good-old-boy nonchalance. Ford disdains consumer culture, and, though brilliant and educated, hides his uniqueness behind a façade of small-town ordinariness. The same tactic—hiding out in the guise of the ordinary guy—is adopted by Jeff Bailey (played by Robert Mitchum) in Jacques Tourneur’s 1947 noir classic Out of the Past.

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To be a man, it seems, for post-war man, is to pretend to be a man—more accurately, it is to hide what one “really” is, to dissimulate. For cultural historian Haut, the decade saw the rise and eclipse of what he terms “pulp culture,” a post-war and post “popular front” interregnum characterized and described by often lurid original paperback novels. For the writers of these works, as for their readers, whose ironies were never easy and who were obsessed with “guns, low necklines and shadows,” pulp was the white, lowbrow working-class ballast of Hollywood noir, more proletarian than hip or beat, and too uncouth, in many ways, to survive the 1960s. That decade occasioned a transition into the “the sharp textures, public icons, blatant sexuality and sophisticated war technology” (1999, 164) of a decidedly cool, ironically poised, and polished popular culture whose crown prince was John F. Kennedy and whose most enduring visual artist would prove no doubt to be Andy Warhol. Although Haut has argued that, “in general, pulp culture fiction … could not contend with the confrontational politics of the 1960s” (1999, 8), many popular “post-pulp” writers persisted, producing work that didn’t square comfortably with dominant cultural, political, or gender paradigms of the decade. As Haut has asserted, “A class-based literature—primarily oriented toward working class readers—it had literally lost its class” (1999, 8). How, then, best to assess such popular “post-pulp” genre writers as Donald E. Westlake or Dan J. Marlowe, whose work doesn’t square comfortably with dominant cultural, political, or gender paradigms of the decade? As Westlake has acknowledged, he developed his “comic” serial character, Dortmund, in contradistinction to his flinty, stoical, criminal protagonist, Stark. Accordingly, my working thesis is that over the course of the 1970s, the protagonists of crime novels (whether heroes or villains) tended to be increasingly one-dimensional, and either brutally efficient and ruthless or comically inept. Arguing that an often comic, pointedly apolitical, stylistically vintage and sometimes camp mode predominates, I will in Chaps. 4 and 5 consider compensatory representations of white masculine performances variously fragile, wounded, impotent, or mute in the work I will consider, in particular, the enduring legacy of the hard-­ boiled hero in such innovative Black writers of “street fiction” as Donald Goines. By so expanding the field of analysis, I reconsider the complex traditions of hard-boiled and noir literatures, casting a critical eye on its depictions of urban life and representations of gender, crime, labor, and race, its various functions as social critique and stricture, while investigating as well considerations of style, problems of genre and popular culture,

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and the economics of the film and publishing industries. This critical survey of the back alleys of pulp culture reveals the cultural representations of American masculinities to be unsettled, contentious, crisis-ridden, racially fraught, and sexually anxious. American noir film, alongside paperback and pulp fiction, has certainly provided a remarkably durable set of cultural templates. The 1980s witnessed a powerful film noir revival, spurred in large part by success of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974) as well, perhaps more influentially, Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980), along with Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat (1981). Also key to the rise of neo-noir is Robert Altman, with a groovy twist on classic Chandler, The Long Goodbye (1973), and Thieves Like Us (1974), based on Edward Anderson’s 1937 depression chronicle as well as on Nicholas Ray’s noirish RKO adaptation They Live by Night (1950). Recall that Altman got an initial leg up in Hollywood in the very thick of the noir era, by co-authoring the story for RKO production The Bodyguard (1948), with Lawrence Tierney. We can point as well to Bob Rafelson’s remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), scripted by David Mamet, Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner (1982), perhaps the most celebrated postmodern work of the genre, and Alan Parker’s Angel Heart (1987). The neo-noir of the New Hollywood, in keeping, no doubt, with a post-Vietnam skepticism toward American male heroics, interrogates and usually undermines the hard-boiled tradition. Detectives are typically unable to figure things out. Ultimately, the parodic over the top films of Quentin Tarantino, Reservoir Dogs (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994), and subsequent works, all pay explicit homage to literary and cinema pulp and noir traditions, variously lampooning masculine violence, recoding it in terms of gender, as in Kill Bill (2003/2004), or racially, as in Django Unchained (2012), recasting it as heroic absurdism, as in Inglorious Basterds (2009). In these later films, in Tarantino’s hands, the genre quite literally works to undo the very strictures of history. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2020) fantasizes the genre itself embodied in the self-doubting character of Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) coming to the rescue of Sharon Tate and rescripting the Manson murders. So too in literature, with William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), a “fusion of the noir thriller, science fiction, and the Gothic” (Horsley 2001, 228) or such works as Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) and Glamorama (1998), or even writing by Dennis Cooper. Other American crime writers working specifically in the noir tradition include Dennis Lehane, and Elmore Leonard. The late twentieth-century renaissance of the genre has

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grown, in the twenty-first century, to a remarkable global resurgence in neo-noir writing and film. For a genre that presumably died off sometime during the late 1960s, pulp fiction and noir have shown surprising resilience. We might be able to identify a “second wave” of neo-noir productions, including the writing of Joan Didion, from her first novel, Play It as It Lays (1970) and extending through to later works by such polymath writers as Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49, 1966), through to Inherent Vice (2009) or Denis Johnson (Nobody Move, 2009). Female and feminist writers such as Sara Paretsky have found huge audiences, along with such popular masters of the contemporary form as Lehane, Leonard, or Walter Mosely. Surprising too, at least on the face of things, is the development of international modes of noir and hard-boiled writing. Best-selling crime fictions by Europeans (Stieg Larsson; Philip Kerr), Asian (Wang Shuo; Vikram Chandra) and other world writers from around the globe is a case in point. Akashic Books sells a popular noir series of anthologies of crime writing from around the world. There will soon be over hundred titles in this series: Baghdad Noir, Zagreb Noir, Rio Noir, Haiti Noir (two volumes), and more—there is even a Toronto Noir title, dedicated to works from and about my home city.15 What explains the remarkable global resurgence of noir in the twenty-­ first century? My speculation is that contemporary suspense thrillers can be productively read as allegories of mass population displacement; given diaspora, the wave after wave of refugee crises, the mass concentrations of populations into the megalopolis slum cities over the course of the past three or four decades, global writers today are—for understandable reasons—consciously drawing on the rich repertoire of idioms and conceits that had been originally developed in hard-boiled and noir writing in the early and mid-twentieth century and after to document urban disorientation, moral panic, and the challenge of accommodating an American mythos of self-invention to rapidly shifting social transformations. In keeping with its populist tenor, in fact, pulp and noir cultural productions 15  It is striking how news events in twenty-first-century Toronto seem drawn straight from the pages of a Chandler novel, from our one-time crack-smoking, patois-speaking mayor, Rob Ford, whose misdeeds have been chronicled by journalist Robyn Doolittle in Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story (2014, Toronto: Viking Canada) to the perplexing unsolved murders of pharmaceutical billionaires Barry and Honey Sherman in 2017. See Kevin Donovan’s The Billionaire Murders: The Mysterious Deaths of Barry and Honey Sherman (2019, New York: Penguin).

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appeal to the profound distrust many people—and not only Americans— have cultivated toward bureaucratic state and corporate institutions, especially the police, the legal system, the media, religious institutions, a contempt for institutions shared across the political spectrum. A working-class hero is still something to be.

References Algren, Nelson. 1998 [1956]. A Walk on the Wild Side. New York: Noonday. Appel, Benjamin. 2005. Brain Guy/Plunder. Two Novels by Benjamin Appel. [Brain Guy. 1934. Plunder 1952.] Eureka, CA: Stark House. Baym, Nina. 1981. Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors. American Quarterly 33 (2): 123–139. Breu, Christopher. 2005. Hard-Boiled Masculinities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Butler, Judith. 2021. Why Donald Trump Will Never Admit Defeat. The Guardian, January 20. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/20/ donald-­trump-­election-­defeat-­covid-­19-­deaths. Cain, James M. 1953. Galatea. New York: Knopf. Casablanca. 1942. Dir. Michael Curtiz. Warner Bros. Cohan, Steven. 1997. Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Dickos, Andrew. 2002. Street with No Name: A History of the Classic American Film Noir. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Dinerstein, Joel. 2017. The Origins of Cool in Postwar America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fort Apache. 1948. Dir. John Ford. Argosy/RKO. Goldberg, Jeffrey. 2020. Why Obama Fears for Our Democracy. The Atlantic, November 16. https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2020/11/ why-­obama-­fears-­for-­our-­democracy/617121/. Haut, Woody. 1995. Pulp Culture: Hardboiled Fiction and the Cold War. London: Serpent’s Tail. ———. 1999. Neon Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction. London: Serpent’s Tail. ———. 2002. Heartbreak and Vine: The Fate of Hardboiled Writers in Hollywood. London: Serpent’s Tail. Hemingway, Ernest. 2006 [1926]. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner. Horsley, Lee. 2001. The Noir Thriller. New York: Palgrave. The Marksman. 2021. Dir. Robert Lorenz. Voltage Pictures/Open Road Films. McCann, Sean. 2000. Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press.

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Menand, Louis. 2021. The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Mitchell, Lee Clark. 2021. Noir Fiction and Film: Diversions and Misdirections. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nichols, Tom. 2020. Donald Trump, the Most Unmanly President: Why Don’t the President’s Supporters Hold Him to Their Own Standard of Masculinity? The Atlantic, May 25. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/ donald-­trump-­the-­most-­unmanly-­president/612031/. Nieland, Justus. 2017. Red Harvest: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Fate of Left Populism. In A History of American Crime Fiction, ed. Christopher Raczkowski, 179–191. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nolan, Tom. 1999. Ross Macdonald: A Biography. New York: Scribner. O’Brien, Geoffrey. 1997 [1981]. Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks and the Masters of Noir. New York: Da Capo. Oluo, Ljeoma. 2020. Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America. New York: Seal Press. Orwell, George. 1957 [1944]. Raffles and Miss Blandish. In Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, ed. Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, 154–164. New York: The Free Press. Ray, Robert B. 1985. A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1980. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Taubin, Amy. 2004. Orpheus Ascending. Film Commentary 40.5: 58–60, 62. Westlake, Donald E. 2008 [1969]. Somebody Owes Me Money. London: Titan. White, Lionel. 2017. The Snatchers/Clean Break [The Killing]. Eureka, CA: Stark House. [The Snatchers. 1953. Clean Break 1955]. Willeford, Charles. 1989. Black Mass of Brother Springer. New York: Black Lizard. [Orig. Published as Honey Gal, 1958].

CHAPTER 2

The Eisenhower Blues: Returning GIs and Racial Masquerade

“Eisenhower Blues” was recorded by Chicago blues guitarist J. B. Lenoir in October 1954. The song is a brisk reminder that, even in good times, security and prosperity were not extended to all: “I got them Eisenhower blues,” Lenoir laments: “Take all my money, to pay the tax … Ain’t got a dime, ain’t even got a cent,/I don’t have no money to pay my rent” (qtd. in van Rijn 2004, 106).1 As Guido van Rijn has documented, a remarkable number of post-war blues and gospel songs lamented the limited progress on civil rights as well as the country’s neglect of African American veterans hoping to adapt to a peacetime economy. Fearing a repeat of the recession, riots, and labor strife of 1919, occasioned when vast numbers of demobilized soldiers returned to American shores and flooded the labor market, the Roosevelt administration had generated grandiose plans for the successful reconversion of returning GIs. The government prepared carefully to ensure that returning soldiers would reintegrate as effectively as possible. In 1944, in the wake of impending victory, Roosevelt proposed an “Economic Bill of Rights,” guaranteeing veterans access to jobs, food, medical care, housing, and social security. His aim was to ensure that the benefits of prosperity and peace would be extended to all servicemen and their families. Famously, with the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (or the  In a subsequent release, Parrot Records had Lenoir re-record the same song under the more generic title “Tax Paying Blues”; “I’m in Korea” was on the flipside of both 45s. 1

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“GI Bill,” as it became popularly known), signed in June 1944, the federal government provided unemployment compensation, established a system for grants allowing many veterans access to higher education, made low-­ interest mortgages available to veterans, and invested in Veterans Administration hospitals. Upon re-election, Roosevelt appointed military and business leaders to newly revamped Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion. Despite a brief recession in 1946 that saw millions of workers unemployed and wages drop to levels not seen since the Great Depression, the conventional historical narrative suggests that, over the long term, reconversion was largely a success, at least for white GIs. But the rising tide did not necessary lift all the boats. Black Americans, many of whom had enthusiastically supported Roosevelt, were initially optimistic. “Reconversion Blues,” recorded in 1945 by popular bandleader Louis Jordan, envisions a time when the Black soldier can “buy a new automobile and a pair of two-tone shoes./I can walk right past my draft board, and I won’t get no dirty looks,/I can go down to see my grocer, without taking my ration books” (qtd. in van Rijn 9). Increasingly, however, this optimism waned, as African Americans became critical of the embedded biases and habitual discrimination on the part of white-run Veterans Administration field offices as well as federal inaction on civil rights during the Truman and Eisenhower years. This discontent was expressed in popular musical pieces, such as Jordan’s subsequent “Inflation Blues” (1947) or Brownie McGhee’s “High Price Blues” (1947), as well as in Lenoir’s “Eisenhower Blues.” At the same time, numerous popular texts from the late 1940s and early 1950s testified as well to a crisis of assimilation on the part of returning white soldiers. Cultural texts of the period depict a sometimes inchoate but surprisingly uniform and often singularly articulate resistance to the consolidation of consensus culture. In particular, characters in these books and movies contest new expectations placed upon men to assume their roles as responsible, married, breadwinning members of the managerial and professional classes. This unease is dramatized repeatedly in the melodramas of returning soldiers. As Elizabeth D.  Samet has been the most recent to document in her recent Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness (2021), the “disaffected veteran” (157) is central to the plot of such noir films as Nobody Lives Forever (1946), Daisy Kenyon (1947), Sudden Fear (1952), and more. In novels by writers ranging from Nelson Algren to David Goodis to Charles

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Willeford, prosperity is depicted as variously undesirable, unachievable, or, when it does arrive, too loathsome a burden to bear.2 Why, we need to ask, do we find on the part of Algren, Goodis, and so many others, a pointed emphasis on losers, malcontents, slum-dwellers, failures, and the downtrodden? Why the literature of the dissolute working classes, in the midst of a period of abundance and prosperity? Why the turn in popular fiction and, at least briefly, Hollywood film (between 1945 and 1953, or thereabouts, as we shall see) to down-and-out protagonists? Why the obsession, in even more highbrow literary fiction, with failure? For even novels that depicted the lives of the prosperous, such as J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951), Sloan Wilson’s fairly equivocal The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), or Richard Yates’s later, bleaker, and more pessimistic Revolutionary Road (1961), tended to depict conventional success, suburban lifestyles, and business culture as one form of death trap or another. Why did white men share in the Eisenhower blues?

The Anxieties of Affluence As Andrew Pepper has argued, the noir novel in particular registered the “disjuncture between the freedom offered by a world of material abundance and the consequences of … the Fordist regime of capitalist accumulation” referring, “quite specifically to changing practices of work and leisure and the reorganization of American life in the years immediately following the end of the Second World War” (2011, 91). The new economic order was characterized by accelerating rates of production and higher wages, which in turn drove increasing demand for consumer goods. Large private corporations increasingly separated ownership from managerial and employee control and radically expanded the number of whitecollar office jobs. The accompanying hegemonic social model concentrated consumption of goods and lifestyles within the nuclear family, itself aligned 2  Elizabth Samet’s discussion of noir and crime fiction in her brilliant Looking for the Good War (2021, 154–175) summarizes many of the same touchstone texts as my own in this chapter to arrive at very similar conclusions. She documents the phenomenon of the alienated veteran even more amply than I have here. Her book was published in November 2021, just as I was completing the final draft of Pulp Virilities, though much of my argument earlier appeared in 2020 essay, “The Eisenhower Blues: Returning GIs and Racial Masquerade in Post-war American Film and Fiction,” published in the Canadian Review of American Studies 50.1.

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within a bureaucratic state that provided standardized services. Time and again the plots of midcentury novels and films dramatically depict the process by which white male protagonists are slotted into their new roles; time and again, the protagonists balk. Movies by directors such as Jules Dassin, John Huston, and Elia Kazan lament the sacrifices men are seemingly compelled to make in order to enter into middle-class respectability. These movies characteristically mourn the loss of the homosocial spaces of working-class and military culture. “The heroes of these films are often returning vets,” Paula Rabinowitz observes, “out of place in the newly scrubbed world of home appliances and of women’s shoulder-­padded assertiveness” (2002, 4). Consequently, fictions by white writers during this period, along with many Hollywood movies, often depicted exchanges between Black and white characters in efforts variously to underscore shared economic anxieties, to highlight distinct levels of privilege and access to social and economic prosperity, and to reassert a fragile white masculine competence, dramatized as the ability of white heroes to masterfully navigate Black subcultural milieus. More strikingly, and insofar as white dismay became— at least to some extent—discursively impermissible through the early 1950s, as the ideology of American prosperity became increasingly cemented in the formative years of the Cold War, white authors often conjured up fantasized, highly stylized, and surrealistically charged images of African American disfranchisement in order to embellish and articulate their own disenchantment. Upward mobility, as documented in the crime fiction and film of the era, was a challenging accomplishment. It would prove no easy task for veterans to transition without anxiety into a peacetime economy, nor to move smoothly from the rigors and stresses of military life into professional occupations and the supposed tranquility of suburban family life. Yet there were few public outlets for white working-class discontent to express itself directly. Americans were expected to concentrate on the blessings provided by a booming consumer economy and the zeitgeist demanded conformity to heteronormative models of professional life and domesticity. Consequently, as Richard Dyer has so persuasively argued in “Queer Noir,” films of the era offer prolix representations of male characters with ambiguous and uncertain sexualities; what Dyer terms “queer doubt” (2004, 92) is in keeping with the mood of uncertainty, anxiety, distress, and paranoia that inflects not just noir films but proves to characterize more pervasive social sensibilities: “uncertainty about how to

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decipher the world” (Dyer 2004, 89). This is manifest in the literature of the period as well. Witness the complicated reactions of Ralph Cotter/ Paul Murphy, protagonist of McCoy’s Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1948), as he heads to an assignation at the “pansy joint” (McCoy 1996, 256), The Persian Cat: I never saw such a crowd of dikes and faggots. This was their joint, by God, and they were all over it—hanging over the tables, standing by the tables, sitting on the tables, blocking the aisle, filling the tiny dance space; all of them wearing a different kind of perfume that collected into a ball of debauched saccharinity and bounced off the walls and the ceiling and the floor. (McCoy 1996, 257)

Cotter’s initial disgust changes into a feeling of admiration, as he recognizes the crowd has banded together to make the space of the bar haven for those who are elsewhere despised: This was their joint, and here, by God, they could afford to be unrestrained. Here there were none of the daytime world’s hostile faces to haunt them, none of the daytime’s world cruel contemptuous eyes, none of the daytime world’s merciless incompassion. (McCoy 1996, 257)

Ultimately, while disavowing his own queer doubt, Cotter—who has determinedly remade himself from successful, college-educated aspiring professional into a cold-blooded thief and killer—recognizes his own kinship: I made a sudden and extraordinary discovery. The noxiousness and disgust I had felt a few moments earlier were gone, my own strength and virility, of which I was so proud when I entered, with which I could prove our difference, now served only to emphasize our sameness. We all had a touch of twilight in our souls; in every man there are homosexual tendencies, this is immutable, there is no variant, the only variant is the depth of the latency, but in me these tendencies were not being stirred, even faintly, they were there, but this was not stirring them. No. The sameness was of the species, of the psyche, of the … They were rebels too, rebels introverted; I was a rebel extroverted—theirs was the force that did not kill, mine was the force that did kill. (McCoy 1996, 257–58)

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This is a remarkable passage, which merits a bit of analysis, insofar as it crystalizes most of the themes of pulp virility. The run-ons, the ellipses, the crabbed syntax bespeak a moment of sexual panic, even as Cotter both recognizes and repudiates his own homo-erotic desire. By compartmentalizing that desire—“this was not stirring them. No,” he insists to himself—he re-affirms mastery over the situation and thereby is able to dissimulate the icy self-command that he prides himself on. Cotter is another in the long sequence of midcentury protagonists who have deferred upward mobility; he has everywhere refused the trappings of success. His own rebellion against conformism has made him the most self-­ reliant of criminals. And yet, just as Mailer diagnoses the hipster’s imagined solidarity with Black as social pariah, so too does Cotter fantasize an imagined solidarity with the queer outcast. This feigned solidarity allows him to imagine himself as both queer and yet entirely straight. These encounters with the racialized or sexualized other allow the protagonist to claim the paradoxical status of the have-nots. It is thus perhaps unsurprising that so many Hollywood films featuring returning white servicemen and so many white-authored literary works dramatize encounters with African Americans, Native Americans, and Mexicans. Films set in Mexico or at the borderlands such as Anthony Mann’s Border Incident (1949), John Farrow’s Where Danger Lives (1950), Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-Hiker (1953), or, most famously, Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958) share in the cultivation of ambiguity as well, both racial anxiety and moral confusion, depicting in these borderland geographies a particular strain of shadow and menace. For such beat writers as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and William Burroughs, during the 1950s and early 60s, a (largely imaginary) Mexico typically represented a space of sexual and psychic freedom, a utopian alternative to the regimented banality and dross strictures of American social life. These cross-racial encounters seem symptomatic of the historical moment, reflecting on the part of white authors deep discontent with the privilege assigned them by their designated caste. In sum, such encounters function to mediate and often allegorize white male anxiety at the prospect of an accessible prosperity that is viewed with deep ambivalence. “The cameos of security for the average white: mother and the home, job and the family, are not even a mockery to millions of Negroes,” observes Norman Mailer in his notorious essay “The White Negro,” first published in Dissent in 1957, “they are impossible” (1957, 279). Those who were implicitly denied access to the post-war boom

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become, for Mailer as for other writers during the period, the “authentic bearers of alienation” (Rabinowitz 2002, 61). In Hip Figures (2012), Michael Szalay has perceptively described this period as one “when anxious white men sought and found in Black subcultures a means of negotiating the conflicted ideological and organizational imperatives of postwar liberalism” (2012, 8), and I think that is correct, so far as it goes. For Szalay, such writers as Mailer, John Updike, Robert Penn Warren, and Joan Didion were (however ambivalently) members of professional-­ managerial class. Thus a certain type of “blackface” performance could “stylize the social relations that obtained between the PMC [professional-­ managerial class] and the working class whose labor it was employed to oversee” (Szalay 2012, 23). The largely male, homosocial practices involved were a matter of appropriating alienation, more or less existentially, as Alan Liu describes it: “White-collars displaced the very experience of alienation on outsiders who could do the heavy lifting of being alienated” (2004, 100), leading a decade or so on to the experiential emphases of New Left politics. Popular texts of the late 1940s and 1950s reflect a distinct crisis of authenticity for white American men, and many commentators at the time described the phenomenon in such terms, or in the rhetoric of alienation and existential despair. Many late 1940s works were narratives of upward mobility; but upward mobility and middle-class heteronormativity were not always prized. Rather, works from the era offered surprisingly anxious, suspicious, or panic-stricken views of the promise of middle-class security; others made poetry of the protagonists’ dogged refusal of the new American social contract. We should not overlook the singularly stubborn resistance to the lures of upward mobility on the part of male protagonists in both proletariat fiction per se and the genre fiction popular with working-­class readers. Set on Chicago’s West Division Street, populated with barflies and junkies and deadbeats, for example, Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm (1949) features Francis “Frankie Machine” Majcinek, a “smashnosed vet with buffalo-colored eyes” (1977, 8), card-­ dealer, drummer, small-time hood, and heroin addict, who, with his fellow denizens of the neighborhood, remains determinedly down and out. In the figure of Frankie, Algren depicts the entirety of the post-war American promise in particularly bleak terms: “The great, secret, and special American guilt of owning nothing, nothing at all, in the one land where ownership and virtue are one” (Algren 1977, 22). For this returning soldier, the urban landscape forms the terrain of his own failure.

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So too does the hard-boiled fiction of David Goodis pay poetic, ironic homage to the slum-dwellers and the urban downtrodden in the land of plenty that was post-war America. In Goodis’s Cassidy’s Girl (1951), for example, the hero is a World War II flying ace, who prospers as a commercial airline pilot after the war until he is blamed for a horrific plane crash, which derails both his career and his life. Though not a veteran, William Kerrigan, hero of The Moon in the Gutter (1953), is likewise unable to successfully navigate his way into the middle classes. As critic Jay A. Gertzman observes, Goodis’s protagonists most often seem to almost voluntarily choose failure as a lifestyle preference: “His characters were outcasts, hiding in cellars, flop houses, automobile graveyards, or skid row alleys, all in decaying working-class neighborhoods. Often they had fallen a long way from college education, football heroics, battlefield commendations, and aviator’s medals” (2018, 6). In Goodis’s Down There (1956),3 for example, Eddie Lynne has clawed his way out of poverty to become a success. After a stint in the US Army (with Merrill’s marauders, a jungle warfare unit famous for its valor in the south Asian islands), Eddie makes himself through force of will into a world-famous concert pianist. Betrayed by his wife, however, Eddie comes undone, ultimately taking a job playing piano in a seedy dive, which is where we find him at the opening of the novel. In a similar vein, Nathaniel Harbin, eponymous hero of The Burglar (1953), realizes only too late that he has always loved his accomplice, Gladden. Pursued by police in Atlantic City, the two lovers swim out too far to sea and are drowned. For his part, Szalay doesn’t mention genre fiction at all, nor hardly any paperback writers (apart from Richard Condon) though he has much to say about popular music and assorted other “lowbrow” arts. But it is precisely the erosion of working-class culture in the years after the war and the concomitant masculine anxiety that merits analysis, as it is a theme constantly expressed in popular writing. If we extend that investigation to include not only the middle- and highbrow literature of the managerial classes and cultural elite but also, and perhaps more importantly, the working-­class cultural texts of paperback fiction and Hollywood thrillers, we find that, in much white and Jewish-authored popular culture artifacts of the period, Black, Mexican, and Native American characters also appear as highly romanticized images of “unassimilable” peoples. Yet the tenor of such imagery was slightly different in popular working-class texts; it is 3

 Later adapted to film by François Truffaut as Shoot the Piano Player (1960).

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often in exchanges with people of color that white protagonists are depicted as working through their discontent with the post-war order, according to a variety of trajectories. As Eric Lott argues, the hard-boiled and noir melodramas of male “self-reliance” typically featured white protagonists navigating (successfully or not) highly “racialized” and/or ethnic social spaces (1997, 545). Both Hollywood film and popular genre writing (dime novels, westerns, detective fiction) have traditionally celebrated male competence and heroism. But what is unusual in the films and so much of the working-class fiction of the late forties and fifties—a period often dubbed the noir moment in American cultural history—is how often mastery eludes the protagonist. In some post-war texts, heroes end up acquiescing to available models of prosperity, providing they have been recalibrated to a more humane inclusiveness that would embrace the have-nots, as in, for example, the Lew Archer novels of Ross Macdonald, a series that began in 1949, or the 1948 John Huston film, Key Largo. In other works from the period, down-and-out protagonists, infused with both principled street ethics and a mournfulness born of the school of hard knocks, wind up rejecting prosperity outright, usually in favor of a bohemian-inflected voluntary poverty, as is often the case in the work of Goodis. Alternatively— as Mailer imagines in his notorious essay—we encounter works whose narrators or main characters extract a manner of cultural revenge against an establishment that they cannot fully inhabit through an imposture of psychosis that catastrophizes American culture writ large, as is nearly always the case in a Jim Thompson thriller. Indeed, as the 1950s wear on, psychosis comes to supplant melancholy as the stereotypically male malaise. Finally, I will argue, in the hate-able losers who populate the blackface writing of Charles Willeford male mastery becomes lampooned to the point of utter irrelevance. While the depictions of such encounters, obviously, everywhere run—and often succumb to—the risk of fetishizing people of color, of indulging in voyeuristic exoticism, of displaying cheaply purchased forms of cultural appropriation, such encounters also formed a vehicle in popular cultural texts wherein white working-class masculinity might express its own, largely impermissible, discontent. For if “prosperity” is the great advertised political theme of Eisenhower’s America, prosperity and its sometimes dormant discontents might be its most consistent cultural motif. “We are accustomed to think of ourselves as an emancipated people; we say that we are democratic, liberty-loving, free of prejudices and hatred. This is the melting-pot, the seat of a great

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human experiment” (1945, 20) Henry Miller’s broadside against the entirety of the American dream in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945) is no doubt the most full-throated indictment: Actually we are a vulgar, pushing mob whose passions are easily mobilized by demagogues, newspaper men, religious quacks, agitators and suchlike. To call this a society of free peoples is blasphemous. What have we to offer the world beside the superabundant loot which we recklessly plunder from the earth under the maniacal delusion that this insane activity represents progress and enlightenment? The land of opportunity has become the land of endless sweat and struggle. (1945, 20)

But discontent is everywhere. And, in particular the discontent of veterans. Sam Masterson (Van Heflin) is a war hero, and an itinerant gambler in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)—his name echoes that of the iconic celebrity lawman and gambler, Bat Masterson. Returning to his hometown of Iverstown, Masterson is offered the opportunity for wealth, power, and security in the form of marriage to his childhood sweetheart, Martha Ivers (Barbara Stanwyck). Wealth, power, stability, security—all the burnished aspirational goals of the American dream—however, turn out to in this film to be depicted as fraudulent, corrupt, murderous. Respectability, a steady life, is perverse at every level. Refusing a decadent upward mobility, Sam opts for the fancy-free working-class, and pointedly “ethnic” romantic interest, Antonia “Toni” Marachek (Lizabeth Scott), and together they scurry back to the relative freedom of life on the road. A common theme in these damning representations of the emerging post-war social order is the malaise of the returning soldier. What is a returning GI to do? The demobilized soldier Dix Steel, in Dorothy Hughes’s novel In a Lonely Place (1947), for instance, recalls his years in the war with fondness: The war years were the first happy years he’d ever known. You didn’t have to kowtow to the stinking rich, you were all equal in pay; and before long you were the rich guy. Because you didn’t give a damn and you were going to be the best God-damned pilot in the company with the promotions coming fast. You wore swell-tailored uniforms, high polish on your shoes. You didn’t need a car, you had something better, sleek powerful planes. You were the Mister, you were what you’d always wanted to be, class. You could have any woman you wanted, in Africa or India or England or Australia or the United States, or any place in the world. The world was yours. (Hughes 2003, 113–14)

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In the war, the soldiers’ capacity to kill had been channeled into presumably ethical ends: the struggle against fascism. But in civilian life, violence and ethics are no longer so happily aligned; the violence to which the soldier has become necessarily habituated is now a threat to the social good. Further, bereft of the supportive homosocial structures of military life, the demobilized GI is more or less on his own, compelled to recast his fate according to individualistic models of self-reliance, and this in a context that places the burdens of heteronormativity upon him. He is asked to settle down, to be a family man, a father, a husband, a productive member of society. But the world was no longer his. In Huston’s Key Largo (1948), the former Major Frank McCloud (Humphrey Bogart) laments his lack of career possibilities: a circulation manager for a newspaper prior to the war, he has since then found that he “couldn’t stick it” in the white-­ collar world and cobbled together a living by “driving taxis, waiting on tables, anything to make a dollar, including day labor.” At the film’s beginning we encounter McCloud reduced to little more than a drifter: a letter he is sent in Saint Louis trails him from “Portland, Saint Paul, and Memphis—all of those places—before it was returned.” He is ill-at-ease with the prospect of professionalism and upward mobility that an expanding economy and the GI Bill presumably offers to veterans. McCloud’s ethical challenge in the drama is to recover his capacity for heroism. Crossfire (1947) elaborates poignantly upon the existential dilemma of veterans: “now we don’t know what we’re supposed to do … We’re used to fighting, but we don’t know what to fight. You can feel the tension in the air. A whole lot of fight and hate that doesn’t know where to go.” The “fight and hate” stirred up by/in the war carries over and is transformed into a fight and hate stirred up upon returning to a world no longer their own. The challenge of a soldier’s return to civilian life, according to the conventional plots of so many post-war noir films and novels, is whether he will succumb to the fight and hate within him, or whether that fight and hate can be productively rechanneled. Again, it is a matter of how male violence is to be directed. Focusing on cinematic depictions of handicapped and traumatized GIs in particular, critic Mark Osteen observes that “these characters lend sociopolitical weight to the noir theme of alienation and isolation by acting as synecdoche for a whole generation of displaced men and for American society in its postwar transitional phase” (2013, 77–8). Such works subjected the American model of self-­ reinvention to a critical scrutiny, argues Osteen, as the characters were often unable to re-assimilate to civilian life. In keeping with the stylized

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conventions of the genre, consequently, many of the home-coming GIs in popular texts turn out to be killers, as does Algren’s Frankie Machine, as does Hughes’s Dix Steel. As, in turn, does the anti-Semite Sergeant Montgomery (Robert Ryan) from Crossfire. A common plot device designed to evict suspense in narratives of the post-war years hinges on the question of whether the returning soldier can indeed tame his anger to “pass” as normal: is he, or is he not, a killer? Is he, or is he not, a hero? The litmus test for the character of the protagonist, in such features, hinges upon his attitude toward and treatment of vulnerable and marginalized people: gay people, Native Americans, the poor, women, and, increasingly, African Americans. The protagonist who ends up as “killer” will inevitably be on the lookout for a scapegoat toward whom he can channel his rage. The salvageable soldier, the soldier who can be redeemed, by contrast, will be challenged to generate empathy for the disadvantaged and to act in an effectively chivalrous manner, even if, in an existential twist of irony, that chivalry fails to be socially productive. Often, the masculine drama involves an ethical duel between those returning soldiers who, in returning to civilian life, cannot help but continue to kill in order to achieve those ends and those who find a way to lay down their arms. In Crossfire, the murderous anti-Semite, Montgomery, is countered by the “good” sergeant, the cool, diffident Peter Keeley (Robert Mitchum), who, driven by fraternal loyalty, helps to investigate the crime. The film wears its progressive politics on its sleeve. Police investigator Captain Finlay (Robert Young) enlists the aid of a reluctant witness by lecturing to him on the history of ethnic intolerance and xenophobia. Irish immigrants, he recounts, were hated because they were different, treated as “dirty foreigners trying to rob men of jobs.” Finlay’s own grandfather had been murdered in the street. “That’s history … They don’t teach it in the schools, but its real American history just the same.” Strikingly, in Finlay’s plea for ethnic and religious tolerance, no mention whatsoever is made of discrimination against African Americans, even though the speech is delivered, quite pointedly, to a white southerner, the “dumb hillbilly” from Tennessee, Leroy (William Phipps). “Hating is always the same,” Finlay declaims, “always senseless.” It can be aimed at Catholics, Jews, Protestants, Quakers; it can end up killing men who wear striped neckties, or people from Tennessee.” The unrest of the returning soldier was interlaced with both racial and sexual panic. The baddie in Crossfire hates Jews, whom he understands to have been shirkers during the war. In the book on which Crossfire was

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based, The Brick Foxhole (1945) by Richard Brooks—not incidentally, the co-writer of the screenplay for Key Largo—the killer lashed out at a homosexual soldier. The film, though oozing with male-to-male eroticism, makes no explicit mention of queer love—or hate. So too does the film plea explicitly for racial tolerance, although the pointed omission of Black people on the list of those who are targeted by hate crimes speaks volumes. What other forms of intolerance go unmentioned? Presumably, the Hays Code would forbid explicit mention of homosexuality, though the film is suggestive enough. “Trying to act like a soldier,” Keeley explains, Mitchell went out looking for a girl, but their assignation is never consummated. Mitchell is an artist, a sensitive type, with sexual problems, all Hollywood codes for gay or closeted. Mitchell’s malaise—his post-war anomie, “the snakes,” as Mitchum’s Keeley terms the unease—makes little plausible sense, unless he is read as gay and troubled: “what’s wrong with me, anyway?” he asks. And all the older men clearly covet his attention. Keeley is his best friend and wants to protect Mitchell. The interest Samuels (Sam Levene), the murder victim, takes in the young man he initially meets at a bar is frankly erotic, and Montgomery, the villain, seems motivated by sexual jealousy in his dislike of Samuels, at least initially. More typically, in post-war texts, the traumatized soldier, however anxious about the complex nature of his own desires, lashed out at women, as we have seen in books by Horace McCoy and Jim Thompson. Dorothy Hughes’s intense study of a serial killer, In a Lonely Place, is an astute psychological portrait of misogyny. Bereft of the solaces of military life, Hughes’s pointedly named protagonist, Dix Steele, wanders the beaches of southern California at night, stalking working women. By contrast, the “good” returning soldier in this narrative is Dix’s colleague from the war, Brub Nicolai, who has become a police detective, and who has settled happily into professional and domestic life. The novel is told largely from Dix’s point of view, in free indirect discourse, though Hughes conceals the full extent of Dix’s psychosis from the reader until the very end. At one point, Dix observes his friend’s home: It was so comfortable. The room was a good one, only the chair was gaudy, the couch was like green grass and another couch the yellow of sunlight. There was pale matting on the polished floor; there was a big green chair and heavy white drapes across the Venetian blinds. Good prints, O’Keefe and Rivera. The bar was of light wood—convenient and unobtrusive in the corner. (Hughes 2003, 9)

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Note the “gaudy chair”—the single stab of jealousy in this description. Dix observes Brub and Sylvia, the happy couple together in their comfortable home in Santa Monica, with an envy he aims to hide even from himself. A failed writer, Dix is bitter at what he sees as the stinginess of his wealthy uncle Fergus, and suffers in general from feelings of inadequacy, loneliness, envy, and class resentment.4 Dissimulating a man of wealth and leisure, Dix takes on the devil-may-care attitude toward his victims: “It was easy sailing for Dix after that, with Mel’s clothes and Mel’s car, and the babes thinking Dix was the rich guy” (Hughes 2003, 113). Ultimately, like a twenty-first-century “incel,” Dix’s self-pity and resentment of others’ wealth and prestige finds outlet in a rage that is focused on women, specifically on Laurel Gray, his love interest: “He hated her. She was a cheat and a liar and a whore, and he hated her while the tears rolled from his eyes down his cheeks to salt his mouth. No one cared, no one had ever cared. Only Brucie” (Hughes 2003, 193). Dix’s first victim, as we are told in various flashbacks, was a woman with the pointedly masculine name of Brucie, whom he had loved during the war and strangled when his outfit was compelled to leave England. Like Dix’s tears, Brucie’s androgynous name is telling: in Hughes’s psychological allegory, woman-hatred is a variation of self-hatred, and militarism, like all forms of male violence, is little more than a cover for male insecurity. In his wounded vanity, Dix mistakenly believes himself to be a man of distinction, by virtue of being the only one capable of affection: “no-one cared, only he. All of them had lost so many, dear as brothers, as their own selves, they had learned not to talk about death. They had refused to think about death being death. Even in the heart’s inmost core where each dwelled alone, they did not admit death” (Hughes 2003, 123). On the one hand an indictment of that most cherished of hard-boiled virtues, stoicism, Hughes is also targeting its inverse and double: male sentimentalism, which, as such critics as Tania Modleski have argued, is little more than a variation on the same theme. Male affect is occasioned by the destruction of women or the racialized other, argues Modleski: it is the depiction of their suffering that occasions the valor of male affect, and, in a twist on an old patriarchal story, yet again re-inscribes the male subject as centrally 4  Not unlike Patricia Highsmith’s celebrated character Tom Ripley, Dix has usurped the apartment of an old friend, Mel Terris, whom he also seems to have killed. While Hughes’s novel never makes it entirely clear whether Dix has in fact murdered Terris, Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) will indeed, eight years on, mimic Hughes’s plot fairly closely.

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worthy of cultural authority. Modleski demonstrates how “extensively white men” in Hollywood dramas and elsewhere rely on a discourse of “privileged suffering” (Modleski 2010, 154). Of course, Dix has aspirations to be a writer: the hard guy is the sentimentalist is the killer is the sensitive man whose life drama is centrally worthy of celebration. Pay attention to me, cries the man. My suffering is the story here, not your death. Dix’s crocodile tears at the death of Brucie, the very woman he has killed, reveal the fraudulence of his position: it is Dix for whom Dix weeps. In Hughes’s dissection of this mythic apparatus of wounded masculinity, male rage and misogyny are not the exception but the norm. The film version of In a Lonely Place, from 1950, portrays Dix (Humphrey Bogart) as a down-on his-luck screenwriter, rather than a veteran. In the film version, Dix is a run-of-the-mill misogynist with a temper problem, but he is no longer a serial killer—although according to director Nicholas Ray, the ending originally intended for the film, as scripted by Andrew Solt, saw Dix strangling Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame) to death in a fit of rage (Eisenschitz 1993, 144). While both texts dramatize the question as to whether the returning soldier can be effectively “domesticated,” Hughes’s earlier book is much more pessimistic; by 1950, it seems, cultural texts assumed that the “whole lot of fight and hate that doesn’t know where to go” had somewhat receded. Though not entirely. Jim Thompson’s later contribution to the theme, The Nothing Man (1954), allegorizes the psychotic veteran posing as solid citizen as the central problem of Eisenhower’s America, a period when such matters seem to have been resolved. For anyone familiar with Thompson’s writing, the theme is hardly surprising. In such classics as The Killer Inside Me (1952), wherein the supposedly solid citizen is inherently psychotic, Thompson’s repeated critical point is to expose and satirize the psychosis of the dominant social order. In The Nothing Man, Thompson riffs on Hemingway’s prototypical hard-boiled hero, Jake Barnes, from The Sun Also Rises (1926). A newspaperman, a heavy alcoholic, a womanizer cursed with good looks, and a satirist with a gift for barbed putdowns and obscene verse, Clinton Brown, or “Brownie,” as his friends and lovers affectionately call him, has had his penis blown off in the war. Brown’s gonads, Thompson hints broadly, have survived intact, which only exacerbates his suffering. Brown blames his Colonel, Dave Randall, who had, inadvertently or, Brown suspects, deliberately, “ordered him into a field of anti-­ personnel mines” (Thompson 1997, 7). Now, in his job as city editor of

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the Pacific City Courier, Randall is again Brown’s boss. In order to keep his secret, and in between prodigious feats of alcohol consumption and orchestrating a one-man campaign to clean up corruption in the city, Brownie feels compelled to kill off, first his ex-wife, and then a series of potential love-interests who are becoming too affectionate and looking to him for sexual gratification. The twist, when it comes, turns out to be that Brownie is innocent; his victims all turn out actually to have been killed after—or already dead before—Brown assaulted them. A satirist whose stock-in trade-is exaggeration, Thompson is not, however, an outlier. If we consider a range of popular movies and paperback novels of the period, male perversion seems the norm, and straight, patriarchal heteronormativity very much the exception. Many cultural historians have identified a specific crisis of masculinity in the immediate post-war years, and we can isolate the ways in which that crisis was reflected in the popular culture of the period. In his indispensable study of masculine eroticism in 1950s Hollywood film, for example, Steven Cohan (1997) perceptively observes “the unease with which this reformulation of masculinity took place, the disturbances it produced, and the instabilities it made evident … This era also records … how gender and sexuality did not easily or securely meld together as the coordinates as a normative masculinity” (Cohan 1997, xv). Any normative model of masculinity proved perhaps even more elusive in working-class popular texts, which also underwent a series of jarring formal changes. The shifting gender and social configurations can be mapped fairly precisely onto the social history of genre.

Unlovable Losers: Elegies for the Urban Working Class It is in the work of the paperback novelist Charles Willeford, perhaps, that we encounter the most damning compendium of existential tales, and we can chart in the course of Willeford’s erratic career precisely these shifts. Willeford was one of the more curious, offbeat, and compelling (but strangely neglected) paperback writers of post-war era. His first four novels appeared under the Universal Publishing and Distributing imprint, alongside such salacious titles as John B. Thompson’s Hitch-Hike Hussy (1952) and Ben West’s Loves of a Girl Wrestler (1952). Willeford also published a collection of poems, Proletarian Laughter (1948), and, ultimately, nine original paperback thrillers (the last of which, Cockfighter, came out

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in 1962). He struggled for years, often publishing work under pseudonyms, but found success in the 1980s with the Hoke Mosely series of detective novels. Willeford’s novels stich together epistemological dread, the anxieties of the returning soldier, and the eclipse of positivism within the genre of the hard-boiled novel. His short, stabbingly satirical 1956 contribution to the hard-boiled detective genre, Wild Wives, would prove Willeford’s last foray into the detective fiction genre per se for nearly three decades, when he returned to the form with Miami Blues (1984). Wild Wives parodies all the clichés of the genre. Tough-guy detective Jacob C. “Jake” Blake sits smoking in his shabby office on a rainy San Francisco day when he is visited by the alluring, wealthy, Florence Weintraub. As designated femme fatale, she draws Blake into a steamy love plot, where she plans to frame him for the murder of her husband. Drawing on the skill and competence he had gained as a soldier, Blake is able to outwit and, eventually, outshoot that psychotic Florence, only to be picked up, arraigned, and eventually convicted for another, unrelated, murder, which he also did not commit. The joke is that, like Marlowe or Sam Spade, Blake is cunning, noble, ruthlessly efficient, deadly when need be, logical, and cool under-pressure. But, in spite of his hyper-competence—or, more tellingly, because of that competence—Blake botches everything. Willeford parodies not only the excesses and exaggerations of the genre; he lampoons the very ontological premise of the imagined American social contract: that there is in American life any connection whatsoever between the competent performance of masculinity and material compensation. In Willeford’s novels, hard work, skills, and social privilege all add up to failure. In Wild Wives there is even, in another ironic nod to Chandler, and echoing the era’s unease around homo-eroticism, a key homosexual subplot: Blake is friends with wealthy and genteel art dealer, Jefferson Davis, collector of the paintings of surrealist master Paul Klee. Davis has a jealous young lover, Freddie Allen; he wants Blake somehow to dispose of Freddie. When he is jumped by the jealous Freddie, Blake unleashes his inner Mike Hammer, working himself into a homophobic rage: Now, I don’t really object to homosexuals. It’s a big world and there is room for everybody. The way some men prefer to make love is their business, not mine, but it seemed that I was being used as a short blunt apex for a crazy triangle. I didn’t like it, and I didn’t like Freddy. Davis was one type of homosexual, and Freddy was another. … As I held Freddy against the wall

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and watched the juicy tears boil out of his eyes through his long lashes, I was filled with loathing and aversion. And in addition to him being an overly pretty, petty-minded kept boy, he had ruined my suit with a fire extinguisher…. I smashed my right fist into his face. His nose crushed noisily and blood spattered and smeared against his skin. His nose would never be aristocratic again. I hit him again in the face several times. After each blow, he tried to scream, but before he could get it out I would hit him again. I didn’t try to knock him out. I wanted him conscious. I wanted him to feel it. (Willeford 2006, 49–50)

There is a lot going on in this passage. In his mimicry of the brutalism of Spillane’s prose, Willeford is, in a somewhat grim manner, and perhaps unwittingly, exposing the violence that preserves—helps to establish, Cohan argues—what turns out to be a very precarious heterosexual regime of masculinity, threatened as it is everywhere by the temptations of same-­ sex attraction: such moments are ubiquitous in popular works of the American 1950s. Further, while no overt depiction is made of racial tension in Wild Wives, the allusive name of Blake’s art-dealer friend should tip us off. The historical Jefferson Davis was, of course, the president of the Confederacy, his name a byword for white supremacy. The Jefferson Davis in the novel, however, is, in Blake’s estimation, the “good” sort of homosexual: open, uncloseted, sophisticated, genteel. He is neither a threat to heteropatriarchy, nor, so far as the reader is aware, a racist. Even so, the name Willeford saddles him with hints at a certain decadence and hypocrisy. Inchoate here is a charge that Willeford makes more explicitly in much of his writing: that the new post-war American social order is a bastion of white privilege. And it is no coincidence that Jefferson Davis is an art dealer, with an eye for the work of Paul Klee. As is also the case in so much of Willeford’s output, there is a meta-fictional reflexivity to the novel insofar as it takes up the daunting question of the commensurability of representational art to the contemporary social condition. We may not think of 1950s texts as reflecting a crisis of form, especially not on the part of paperback writers. Yet almost all of Willeford’s novels take up the question of artistic production, often in side-plots about visual arts or artists. The narrator of Pick-Up (1955), for example, veteran Harry Jordan, is a failed non-­representational painter, working as a short-order cook. The hero of The Woman Chaser (1960) is a used-car dealer who gets the chance to make his own film;

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significantly, he is also an admirer of Georges Rouault, the French expressionist painter known for his tormented spiritualism. Willeford had studied painting in France after his time in the military; as a writer cycling parodically through popular genres, he searches for an artform adequate to his own somewhat tortured, often vexing, and always ironical predicament of what it means—in precisely this moment, in exactly this American milieu, in this too often unquestioned but deeply brutalizing ideological and social cocktail of class, sexuality, and race—to be a man. In his novels, the problem is often displaced onto the visual arts. In Wild Wives, the hero and fall guy Blake appreciates Klee but cannot fully pretend to understand his work. Klee—an exuberant painter and an alert but playful social critic whose work is not fully given over to critique nor to despair; a symbolist whose work is not entirely devoted to the promise of myth; an absurdist; an individualist; a surrealist whose canvases are nonetheless not fully saturated in the unconscious—might very well provide a suitable model to such an aspiring literary artist as Willeford. At any rate, the deposed Freddy, beaten and jealous, will have his revenge. Freddy murders Davis, but it is our hero, Jake Blake, who, despite all his masculine virtue, smarts, competence, and valor, is left to take the fall. Blake is, in every way, the good soldier, who resolves to make good in the post-war world. Further, he is, in every way, Chandler’s noble knight-­ errant of classic pre-war detective fiction, determined to make his resolute way with some shred of dignity and honesty intact through the cruelest and most disorienting of social landscapes. In turn, Blake is also the model uncastrated American male, able to elude and outgun the perils of feminizing domesticity or the unmanning strictures of white-collar corporate conformity. He is also, in this respect, the bigoted, reactionary powerhouse of Spillane’s Mike Hammer series. In short, Blake conforms precisely to not just some but pretty near all of the available popular codes of heroic masculinity. None of it is to any avail, as Willeford’s deadpan closing lines underscore: There isn’t any use to tell about the trial. It was in all the papers. The only defense I had was that I was a good soldier during the war. My lawyer passed my medals around the jury box, and they were closely examined. They didn’t help a bit. (Willeford 2006, 102)

And, in his subsequent books, Willeford’s losers will turn out to be not even loveable.

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Contrary to popular nativist mythology, and despite Hollywood’s insistence on heroic masculinity where competence is always aligned with virtue, one sub-stream of American writing has always been replete with losers. In their devotion to the have-nots, such writers of thrillers variously sentimental, subversive, or psychotic as Goodis, Thompson, and Willeford during the 1950s preserve and revive an older tradition of American tramp novels. Like the post-war thrillers they anticipate, earlier tramp novels depict the travails of the vagabond hero with considerable sympathy. In other words, the argument implied by Chandler and Westlake—that postwar writers turned to their subject matters as a consequence of the exhaustion of the traditional hard-boiled detective novel—is only partially accurate. There is a long tradition in American writing that valorized the hard-luck criminal over and above either the official forces of law and order or the erstwhile, often semi-anarchist, but always uneasy ally of that order, the private dick. The tramp tradition dates back to the nineteenth century and further: Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1884) is probably the most famous exemplar and prototype. During the Depression, this tradition found its classic expression in the modernist, hard-boiled, ironic, and streamlined fiction of such writers as Edward Anderson and James M. Cain. Orphaned as a child, Willeford himself spent much of his youth in the 1930s tramping, experiences recounted in his memoir I Was Looking for a Street (1988). In his 2010 introduction to that memoir, Luc Sante catalogues as well such neglected accounts of life on the road as Josiah Flynt’s Tramping with Tramps (1901), Vachel Lindsay’s A Handy Guide for Beggars (1916), Jack Black’s You Can’t Win (1926), and Ben Reitman’s Sister of the Road (1936): “It is a fundamental American genre,” Sante observes, “which occupies the historical space between the closing of the frontier and the opening of the interstate highway systems—a chronicle of freedom intersecting with misery and of a native restlessness that nowadays has little outlet” (2010, viii). After the war, the tramp tradition buttresses the resistance to settling down that we have been discussing: Key Largo’s Frank McCloud is a drifter, and Martha Ivers’s Sam Masterson is happiest on the road. And Jack Kerouac’s celebrated On the Road (1957) is the most well-known indictment of 1950s conformist culture. Nonetheless, it is the paradoxical re-entrenchment of that vagabond hero yoked, as it so often was, to the conundrum of the returning soldier, within the horizon of the presumed good years of the post-war boom that merits further explanation. As all students of the genre know, it was in, case after case, precisely these Depression-era novels of vagrancy, crime,

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and dispossession, along with, say, works by Hammett and others from the Black Mask stable, that became the pretexts for the golden age of Hollywood noir. Hammett’s 1930 The Maltese Falcon was filmed in 1941 by John Huston in his debut as a director. Anderson’s 1937 novel, Thieves Like Us, about a group of outlaws struggling to secure some measure of peace and freedom, was adapted in 1948 by director Nicholas Ray as They Live by Night. Cain’s 1934 classic The Postman Always Rings Twice, the story of ill-fated drifter Frank Cambers, resulted in the celebrated 1946 film version, starring John Garfield and Lana Turner. Cain’s 1943 novella, Double Indemnity, came to the silver screen a year later. Certainly noir texts dramatize paranoid ahistorical fantasies of fate working universally against us. Consider the way protagonist Al Roberts (Tom Neal) is buffeted by bad luck and grotesque coincidences in Detour (1945). Or how one wrong turn leads to the undoing of Joe Gillis (William Holden) in Sunset Boulevard (1950). It can also be argued, however, that such fatalism is historically located. Often, film noir plundered the sometimes decades-older stories about outcast males buffeted by economic forces that worked against them and recast them as moral tales of social subjects beaten down by social forces and new gender codes that eluded them and made them suffer. The economic alienation (in the classic Marxist sense) suffered by so many during the Great Depression resurfaces as the existential and psychological alienation so characteristic of the cultural productions of midcentury American prosperity. As we will see, in a similar form of social displacement, the economic alienation of the underclasses becomes in so many texts of the period, the lens through which the white hero comes to grips with his own existential alienation. For, as many commentators have likewise observed, the post-war period saw a sea change in the hard-boiled novel; for various reasons the figure of the hyper-competent detective seems to have exhausted itself. As Sean McCann recounts, by the 1950s even Raymond Chandler acknowledged that the hard-boiled detective story had run its course. Countless imitations had led the private eye into lifeless caricature. Worse still, those writers who ­managed to be innovative with the genre, and who had achieved surprising success as a result, split off into two disappointing directions. Both surrendered to the spirit of the age as Chandler saw it and abandoned the tension between literary art and popular expression that he thought crucial to his own fiction. The virtues of Philip Marlowe had fallen prey, on the one hand,

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to Mickey Spillane’s lowbrow “mixture of violence and outright pornography” and, on the other, to the literary pretense of Ross Macdonald. (2000, 198–99)

Writer Donald Westlake, assuming his nom  de  plume as the hardest of hard-boiled stylists, Richard Stark, for a 1977 interview, concurs: The detective story died about thirty years ago, but that’s OK. Poetry died hundreds of years ago, but ther’re still poets. By “die,” by “dead,” I mean as a hot center of public interest. In the Thirties you could have honest-to-­ God detective stories on the bestseller lists. Ellery Queen, for instance. The detective story was hot when science was new, with gaslight and then electricity, telephones, automobiles, everything starting up, the whole world seeming to get solved all at once, in one life span. World War II shifted the emphasis from gaining knowledge to what you’d do with the knowledge, which is kill people. So the big postwar detective was Mike Hammer, who couldn’t deduce his way up a flight of stairs, and the emphasis shifted from the whodunnit to who’s-gonna-get-it. (2014, 15)

In Westlake’s estimation, detective fiction is a distinctly modern genre, one that unfurls in a largely positivist mode, one that yokes itself to the promises of modernity. The post-war thriller, by contrast, is a transmutation of the genre that registers rather deep anxieties about the perils of technology and science during the atomic age. I find that as compelling a thesis as any, frankly, insofar as it highlights the epistemological unease that formed a Cold War undercurrent to the American myth of prosperity and ideological consensus so dominant during the 1950s. We should note, as well, how many texts functioned as elegies for the urban white working class. The opening sequence of Jules Dassin’s classic film The Naked City (1948) promises viewers something “a bit different.” As explained in the famed voiceover (spoken by producer Mark Hellinger), the “story of a number of people, and a story also of the city itself” was “not photographed in a studio” but rather shot “on the streets, in the apartment houses, in the skyscrapers of New York itself.” Inspired by Weegee’s book of photographs, Naked City (a book published in 1945 but shot mostly during the early 1940s), and anticipating cinema verité, insofar as it incorporates performances by everyday New  Yorkers, and highlighting the allure and menace of the urban, Dassin’s film pays homage to laborers—newspapermen, taxi drivers, streetsweepers, bakers, grocers, cops—and their habitat. But it depicts the masculine, multi-ethnic

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working-class environs of the city as places that are passing away. The Naked City deploys a specific sort of blue-collar queer nostalgia, devoted both to the displaying the beauties of the male body and to lamenting the decline of urban, ethnic working-class homosocial spaces as the era recasts the masculine ideal as assimilated, professional, ensconced within domesticity and a happy marriage. Lampooning such aspirations, The Naked City styles itself as a love affair with the city and its denizens, especially with those who labor for a living. The scenes are filmed on the streets of New York, and many of the actors are actual New Yorkers, without makeup; we see “the city as it is.” Yet, as we have seen, if the action takes place on city streets, the beloved urban environment is being emptied out. Naked City shows us the city rather as it was, or as it was imagined. Even the “legwork” of Detective Halloran will be rendered obsolete. The Naked City serves as elegy for the older working-class, immigrant homosocial institutions (the police force, the gym, the press room, the great city itself) threatened by the post-war boom, ethnic assimilation, absorption into the middle classes, and suburbanization. The Naked City deploys a specific sort of blue-collar queer nostalgia, devoted both to the displaying the beauties of the male body (wrestlers, gymnasts) and to lamenting the decline of urban, ethnic working-class homosocial spaces as the era recasts the masculine ideal as assimilated, professional, ensconced within domesticity and a happy marriage. The film lampoons each of these aspirations. The Naked City styles itself as a love affair with the city and its denizens, especially with those who labor for a living. Celebrating the allure and menace of the urban, it anticipates the cinema verité of the 1960s. The film’s chronology simulates “real time,” and as we are told in the film’s famous voiceover narrative, the scenes are filmed on the streets of New  York, and many of the actors are actual New  Yorkers, without makeup; we see “the city as it is.” Yet, if the action takes place on the urban streets, much of the psychological strain and social stress marking the movie takes place in a quiet residential inner suburban home. In fact, we see the city as it may no longer be, at least not for very long. The film is nostalgic for a vigorous and frankly homosocial urban environment that it knows to be threatened by a post-war prosperity that imaginatively repositions the American male as comfortable suburban dad. As an ancillary to the plot, which is a typical police procedural and whodunnit, a complex oedipal drama is being worked through by the three generations of males, and a great degree of the psychological action: the benevolent patriarch is the veteran cop, Detective Lieutenant Dan

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Muldoon (Barry Fitzgerald). He serves as mentor to his young assistant Jimmy Halloran (Don Taylor), who, Muldoon comments, “reminds me of myself when I was young.” Finally, there is Halloran’s toddler son, Billy (Stevie Harris, uncredited), who figures significantly in the film’s highly symbolic domestic subplot, and who is heir apparent. At one point, when it seems the case has come to a dead end, and Muldoon insists that the New York City police never give up on a case, Halloran replies that, “twenty years from now I’ll put my kid on it.” The drama of the three generations tells in miniature the American story of assimilation and upward mobility. As in Crossfire, the film reminds us that policework was often taken up by immigrants who otherwise found themselves locked out of other professions and more despised than other laborers. In keeping with this popular stereotype, the police officers have mostly Irish (Donahue), and in one case Italian (Pirelli) names. However, only the benign older detective, Muldoon, possesses an identifiable brogue accent or displays ethnic pride; the younger generation has been assimilated. Halloran sounds and looks and acts like an average white American, ethnically unmarked, apart from his name. Billy is an all-American boy. Upon her move to the city, the murder victim had changed her name from the “Polish” Mary Bathory to the more Anglo sounding Jean Dexter, and her parents bemoan her assimilationist tendencies almost more than they mourn her death. Her fate is typical of the punishments typically meted out to sexually liberated or otherwise non-conformist women characters in most post-war Hollywood films. For this and other reasons, such critics as the usually astute Joel Dinerstein have, to my mind, misread the film as endorsing conservative values. For Dinerstein, Naked City “endorses the Horatio Alger aspects of American mythology: social mobility is real, virtue rises, hard work will be rewarded, America is a meritocracy open to immigrants” (2017, 285). Moreover, it “revels in the hierarchical nature of corporate society as a stabilizing force enabling each individual enough wiggle room to gain a viable freedom within a democracy of surveillance” (2017, 286). Further, the film exemplifies “a moralistic turn” that signaled “the end of noir cool” (2017, 283) as lead characters were increasingly stripped of their menacing ethical ambiguities and cast into two-dimensional roles of heroes or villains. Dassin, whose Communist background and unstinting progressivism would very shortly make him persona non grata in Hollywood, was unhappy with the editing, which did seem to play up these emphases. But

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the film is, at the same time, touchingly ambivalent about what has been lost during the accomplishment of this American century. Halloran, a returning soldier, navigates the city on foot: during the war, he had walked halfway across Europe, our voiceover informs us. Of particular interest, however, are the scenes at Halloran’s home in the exurbs. Still young, living on a cop’s salary, he resides with his family in a rowhouse, but—in contrast to the chaotic hum of the city itself—the Halloran’s neighborhood is leafy, pleasant, quiet. The film is structured to follow a day-in-the-life chronology, unfolding in a chronological sequencing that mimics real time. In an opening scene, we witness the proud father heading off to work. Billy is dressed in a warbonnet, an Indian. He rides a tricycle, which his dad refers to as his horse. The allusion is to the Hollywood or television western, presenting a mythicized American frontier masculinity embodied in larger-than-life heroes played by such actors as John Wayne or Robert Mitchum, popular in the drab Cold War climate of the corporate workplace or the suburban split-level. The son imagines himself untamed, savage, undomesticated. And, indeed, Billy runs a bit wild. Halloran takes the subway home to Jackson Heights, a Queens suburb that had been developed during the 1920s for middle income workers seeking refuge from the city. Upon return home that evening, Halloran is informed by his wife that he is to whip the boy. Billy, following almost literally in his father’s footsteps, has crossed a busy street and wandered out into the streets where he has been forbidden to go. His mother (Anne Sargent) wants him punished: “Billy has to have a whipping.” Halloran, despite being a hard-boiled cop, doesn’t believe in physical punishment, and tries to slip out of the task: “it’s a nasty job,” Halloran protests. Then he asks her to do it. “It’s not a woman’s job,” she fires back, “it’s always a man’s job.” After first trying to shame him, his wife then tries to seduce him. Sargent is dressed during this scene in some sort of skin-tight high-waisted plaid sunsuit, that shows off her bare midriff and her legs—hardly the mid-calf skirt, apron, and heels that we stereotypically associate with hegemonic representations of the post-war housewife. Sargent plays the scene for both erotic and comic effect, and her onscreen husband squirms. Boy, does he squirm. Fortunately, Halloran is saved from being forced to carry out his husbandly duties (both sexual and fatherly) by a timely phone call from Muldoon, who, needing him back on the job, summons him back to the streets. On the streets, in the company of his fellows, called to duty, Halloran will be able to reassert his manhood once again. He reasserts

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himself before his wife, even if he overcompensates just a bit in the performance: strapping on his gun, he secures his shoulder holster first by one strap, and, just to be sure, also by another around his waist. The domestic is envisioned throughout as a space dedicated to male stricture, for both father and son. But, in 1948, in this film, domesticity refuses to “take.” Billy is never punished; Halloran is never seduced: the promised discipline of masculinity is deferred. So much for the comforts of family life. So much for domestic bliss.5 This scene, by the way, is almost entirely incidental to the plot. It does serve to establish Halloran’s character as a little bit weak: later, when he encounters the killer, he will try to trick him into surrendering rather than using force to arrest him. More tellingly, however, it demonstrates Halloran’s deep discomfort with his domestic role as benevolent suburban patriarch and his squeamishness around women. He prefers being back at work with the boys. His patron, Muldoon, handles patriarchal benevolence somewhat better, being of a judicious, even-handed temperament— but then, Muldoon is a widower and lives alone: his largesse is toward society at large, and not confined to the family. The murder victim is Jean Dexter, a model and a woman, we learn, of easy virtue, who uses her sexuality to make her way ahead in the world. Though her parents condemn her for this—“why wasn’t she born ugly,” her mother despairs—Muldoon, the benevolent patriarch, does not. In keeping with sweeping ethical vision of at least one strain of hard-boiled fiction (as in such figures as Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer), Muldoon never uses violence unless pushed to, and demonstrates great sympathy for sinners who succumb to the hard pressures of the contemporary urban environment. The film, a confessed work of scopophilia, also admits to a professed and distinct homophilia. As with Dassin’s other classic urban noir Night and the City (1950), which is set in London, England, The Naked City takes a sometimes embarrassed, somewhat reluctant, but nonetheless genuine delight in the working-class male body: we get to watch wrestlers practicing their craft; the villain is an accomplished gymnast; the camera relishes the workout routines of which he is so proud. In both instances, 5  In In a Lonely Street (1991), Frank Krutnik makes a similar observation about the disavowal of a “normal heterosexual relationship” (123). Krutnik offers a detailed analysis of the threat female eroticism poses to male autonomy in The Killers (1946), another film in which “the male body is the source of spectacle” (118). “As with most ‘tough’ thrillers,” Krutnik notes, “the main interest lies in neither normal social life nor in any pure and simple masculine celebration: it rests, rather, in the representation of the problems which beset any attempt to consolidate masculine identity as secure and unified” (123).

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male eroticism is, in part, undermined by comic bathos, but it is palpable nonetheless: however comic, the working-class male body in The Naked City is simply more desire-able, more alluring, more alive, and, ultimately, even less menacing than the female. As the camera lovingly lingers on male bodies working in male urban spaces, The Naked City, in its nostalgia for older homosocial utopias and resistance to upward mobility, it shares much with the other post-proletarian texts of the period, mentioned above, such as fictions by Goodis or Algren. In the Cold War classic On the Waterfront (1954), to cite another well-­ known example, Terry Molloy has to give up homosocial spaces: the union hall, the bar, the shipping yards—in order to move out of the working class. By 1954, that move up was assumed to be worth it: the working-­ class life that Molloy rejects is portrayed as criminally corrupt. Even in Otto Preminger’s relatively upbeat 1955 adaption of Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm, there remains a strain of remorse for an urban culture that has been lost. In the book, Frankie is a veteran who became addicted to opium during the war. Back in civvies, he is a three-time loser; having inadvertently killed his heroin dealer in a drug-fueled rage, he ends up killing himself in prison. For Algren’s Frankie Machine, post-war life is a dead end. There is no hope, no out. Preminger’s Frankie Machine (Frank Sinatra), by contrast, is a loser who just might transform himself into a winner. If he is too stoned to play the drums very well, he does manage by the end of the film to successfully kick the heroin habit, and, in the filmscript, he is innocent of murder.6 Set in the contemporary mid-1950s rather than the late 1940s, only one line of dialogue from the film alludes, glancingly, to Frankie’s war service. At another juncture, after he secures his membership in the musicians’ union, Frankie walks dreamily arm in arm with his girlfriend, Molly (Kim Novak) down a street lined with a series of downtown display windows advertising a shiny Chrysler ­convertible, a color television, a beautiful kitchen. Almost too frightened to dream of the materials goods to which they might—in a less rotten world—aspire, they stand before the panoramic kitchen display and mock the sterility of the upper-middle-class lifestyle it puts on display. The housewife and husband in this display are wax figures, distanced, solitary. They don’t help each other, they don’t communicate, they can barely

6  Algren, who abhorred post-war commercialism, understandably hated the film. To be fair, he had an axe to grind, as Preminger had fired him.

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stand the sight of one another, Frankie mocks. Maybe, Molly proposes, they can.7 Nonetheless, Preminger’s film is, at best, ambivalent about prosperity. Frankie can achieve success, and he just might: though espousing a naturalist point of view—Frankie is a creature of his environment and his distress a function of that environment—he can, and the film suggests, most probably will free himself from both the slum that surrounds him and the slum that lives in his heart and his mind. And yet, and yet: will he want to? Even for a junkie, the slum still possesses considerably more vitality than does the suburb. Curiously, Frankie has the idea that he can become successful as a jazz drummer, which hardly seems the gateway to prosperity. He badly botches his audition, however, so perhaps he will need to master a different trade. Or maybe not. His urban Chicago slum is populated by ethnics, but not—curiously—by any African Americans. The orchestra playing Elmer Bernstein’s great jazz score for the film looks to be composed of performers who are all white, too. Perhaps they will give him another shot, now that he is clean. The film version of The Man with the Golden Arm envisions, somewhat absurdly, an all-white Chicago jazz scene.8 The absence of Black people and other minorities in 1950s cultural texts about the anxieties of upward mobility on the very eve of the civil rights era is glaring, but telling. As I have suggested, Preminger’s film went some way toward endorsing a new consumerist order that Algren’s novel openly resisted. By the mid-1950s, 7  It is worth comparing Sinatra’s performance in Suddenly (1954), where he plays a baddie, John Baron, hoping to assassinate the American president. Ultimately, however, his plot is foiled and he is killed. Though carefully examining the crisis of post-war America—Ellen Benson (Nancy Gates) is a war-widow struggling to raise her son alone—the film ends with a ringing endorsement of the heteronormative order, the nuclear family, small-town values, consumerism, and pretty much the entire edifice of a new post-war American social hegemony. The presidential assassination plot here also anticipates The Manchurian Candidate (1962), a much more surreal work that I and other critics have read as marking the collapse of the selfsame Cold War consensus culture that Suddenly inaugurates. Sinatra plays the good guy in The Manchurian Candidate, and, while he manages to save America, few of its vaunted freedoms or values survive intact. 8  To be fair, Preminger was decidedly no racist. The year before he had directed Carmen Jones (1954), which featured Dorothy Dandridge, Pearl Bailey, Harry Belafonte, and an all-­ Black cast. Dandridge and Sidney Poitier starred in his production of Porgy and Bess (1959) and he hired Duke Ellington to write the score for Anatomy of a Murder (1959), in which Ellington also appeared in a cameo. For a full discussion of Jazz in film noir, see David Butler, Jazz Noir (2002).

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this order would be imagined as both suburban and homogenously white.9 Crossfire as we have seen, preaches tolerance for Irish, Italian, Jewish, and Slavic immigrants, and the audience for this lesson is a presumably bigoted white southerner, but Black people are never mentioned. But the effective production of the white American imaginary was itself a difficult and often compromised achievement. Many of these works have to self-consciously calibrate the trade-off between a pre-war urban order that was crime-­ ridden, multi-ethnic, violent, Hobbesian, homosocial, and fun against a more peaceable but depressingly sterile post-war socio-sexual order that is imagined as one where men are dominated by women and subject to strictures of a potentially painful or even castrating heteronormativity. This is the case in one of the examples cited earlier in this chapter. In Key Largo, gangsters reminisce about the good old days, which they describe as a blessedly Hobbesian war of all against all. The mobsters in the film might fantasize about a new order where prohibition returns and where gangs, instead of fighting one another for turf, will work together in harmony to control the market. Such is not to be—nor is it really what the mob wants. The villain, Johnny Rocco, cannot help but delight in betraying his accomplices. It is his failure, ultimately, to help the Osceola brothers (Jay Silverheel and Rodd Redwing) that provides the occasion for McCloud’s redemption in Key Largo. Eventually, McCloud has to regain his manhood, fight off the mob single-handedly, and restore order. In doing so, he will settle down, marry Nora and rejoin the family business of running the hotel. McCloud’s redemption is occasioned by those who cannot join the new order: the brothers, who are sacrificial victims to the new prosperity. If McCloud can regain his virility and join the emerging social order, the film—liberal in its sympathies—specifically acknowledges those who will be left behind: Seminole Indians. The group of Seminoles are kept outside the house during the hurricane, which is symbolic of the post-war social upheaval. Dismissed by Johnny Rocco and his thugs, abandoned, forgotten, left outside during a hurricane, they will have no place in the emerging new order.

9  Eric Avila’s Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (2004, Berkeley: Univ. of California Press) offers a brilliant discussion of this shift. See in particular chapter 1, “Chocolate Cities and Vanilla Suburbs: Race, Space, and the New Mass Culture of Postwar America,” pp. 1–19.

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Authentic Bearers of Alienation: Racial Encounters For this is how racial minorities do appear: as foils to the melodrama attendant upon white male class mobility. In so many novels and noir films of the period, racialized, ethnic, and African American characters, in particular, figured as (to use Rabinowitz’s term once more) “authentic bearers of alienation.” As James Naremore asserts, “black extras or bit players give the protagonist an aura of ‘cool’” (2008, 240). Nearly every noir and hard-boiled film of the decade features a scene where the white detective, at a crossroads, spends time in a club populated by Black entertainers and, often, Black patrons, in order not only to suss out the truth about the case he is investigating—clues are to be found everywhere in the Black demi-­ monde—but, more importantly, to confront his own existential condition, often through an alcoholic or (implied) sexual debauch. A quick scan of classic noir films tells the tale quite plainly: think of Robert Mitchum as Jeff Bailey (with an uncredited Theresa Harris as Eunice), who chases down clues at a Harlem club in Out of the Past (1947).10 Or, correspondingly, the relation between Humphrey Bogart’s Dix Steele, with the entertainer Hadda Brooks, from In a Lonely Place (1950). Or Ralph Meeker’s Mike Hammer and Black actress and singer Mady Comfort, from Kiss Me Deadly (1955), to offer only a few examples. It is perhaps too easy to observe that such works reflected a distinct crisis of authenticity for white American men. Such a critical term as “crisis of authenticity” tends to beg the question, and further, glosses over the distinct racial and class forces that over-code the subjective dimensions of these cultural texts. Nonetheless, as we have seen, many observers at the time described the phenomenon in precisely such terms, or in the rhetoric of alienation and existential despair. Consequently, the hard-boiled and noir melodramas of male “self-reliance” typically featured white protagonists navigating (successfully or not) highly racialized and/or ethnic social

 For a full analysis of this episode and a compelling overview of the importance of jazz to film noir, see chapter 3 of Jans B. Wager’s Jazz and Cocktails: Rethinking Race and the Sound of Film Noir (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2017). 10

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spaces.11 Amid the rapidly shifting class and gender configurations, Black masculinity provided a measure (and in many cases a model) for white masculinity. White virility comes to know itself in the feigning of Black masculinity. This is explicitly acknowledged not only by Norman Mailer (in the aforementioned “The White Negro”) but also by such critics, journalists, and commentators as Leslie Fiedler, in Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), John Berryman, in The Dream Songs (begun in 1955, first published in book form in 1964), and John Howard Griffin, in Black Like Me (1961), and a bit later, by Willian Styron in The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967)—all of whom, somewhat notoriously, practiced, or investigated, a certain form of Cold War blackface in their works.12 In linking these texts to nineteenth-century traditions of blackface performance, Eric Lott has argued persuasively that “the dispossessed become bearers of the dominant classes’ ‘folk’ culture, its repository of joy and revivification” (1994, 482), which, in the 1950s and 1960s, became an available venue for social critique. Commenting on interactions between Black and white men in film noir, for example, Lott points out that Black characters characteristically functioned as surrogates for white helplessness, enabling white characters to displace their frustrations in efforts (variously vain or successful) to recover white male mastery: [R]acial dominance was so built into Hollywood industrial and generic norms that a new cinematic mode built on human corruption and darkened composition created, as an almost inevitably by product, a new intensity of racialized imagining—an intensity undoubtedly overdetermined by a climate of felt social decline, cultural degradation, moral brutality, and spiritual

 See, for example, Parker Tyler’s critique, in a 1950 essay titled “Hollywood as a Universal Church” (American Quarterly 2.2: 165–176). As Jonathan Auerbach (2006) observes in “American Studies and Film: Blindness and Insight” published in the same journal over a half-century later (American Quarterly 58.1: 31–50), Tyler was deeply skeptical of Hollywood’s impostures of tolerance in the social “problem film.” 12  Berryman, of course, was not so much imitating Black vernacular as imitating whites imitating Black vernacular, blackface minstrelsy. 11

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defeat: what Joseph Losey, one of noir’s leftist directors, called “the complete unreality of the American dream”. (1997, 562)13

Lott concurs with the conventional notion that Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958) marks both the apex and the end of film noir, a date that maps well onto Haut’s argument about the sunnier cynicism of sixties’ pop, and, not incidentally, onto the contemporary mainstreaming of the Civil Rights movement in the United States. And Welles’s film, incidentally, is another sort of racial masquerade; the encounter with the racialized other that typically functions to reinvigorate a white masculinity that is flagging often takes place south of the border. As noted earlier, we should not neglect the dread images of Mexico and Mexicans in film noir. In Out of the Past, following clues provided by her Black maid, Mitchum’s Jeff Bailey tracks his lover to Acapulco, for example. One of the most extraordinary interrogations of emasculated white masculinity, The Hitch-Hiker (1953), is about male bluff, cowardice, and bonding, dramatically pitting a vision of empathy and male solidarity against an aggrieved libertarianism. Directed by Ida Lupino (a rare woman director in Hollywood at the time), The Hitch-­ Hiker tells the tale of a fishing trip into Mexico that goes horrifically awry, as two road-tripping friends, Roy Collins (Edmond O’Brien) and Gilbert Bowen (Frank Lovejoy), happen upon psychopathic hitch-hiker, the murderer Emmett Miles (William Talman). Miles excoriates the two for their suburban flaccidity: “you guys are soft. Up to your necks in I.O.U.s.” 13  While somewhat ancillary to my argument, I should note that as I was drafting this chapter, the past offenses of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who has performed in both blackface and brownface, were revealed. As a Canadian, and as a self-confessed child of privilege, Trudeau may or may not have been able to cultivate a deep understanding of the fraught and offensive tradition of blackface, although minstrel shows were very popular in Canada during the nineteenth century. Curiously, few commentators have discussed the gendered nature of Trudeau’s acts. While non-Black figures from Mezz Mezzrow to Rachel Dolezal have claimed for themselves the right to embrace Black identities not given to them by birthright, such life-performances invoke racial cultures that are deemed to be authentic and empowering, if they draw upon stylized and gendered stereotypes, such performances of racial crossing nonetheless assume that the fabricated identities are nonetheless rooted in actual social practices. And while countless highly exaggerated and patently offensive stereotypes of Black womanhood have circulated in our culture, the tradition of blackface minstrelsy is already a caricature of a caricature. The comic tradition of minstrelsy targets Black masculinity in particular: by exaggerating “masculine” swagger, the tradition works to emasculate, to counter the perceived threat of Black male potency. Both documented instances of Trudeau’s guise evoke a largely emasculated racialized masculinity. For a succinct, pointed survey and indictment of the damages that blackface performance continues to incur, see Ayanna Thompson’s Blackface (2021, New York: Bloomsbury Academic).

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Ultimately, however, his own predatory individualism replicates the competitive ethic of corporate capitalism. In Lupino’s vision, the corporate world is dangerous, and, not unlike those by Dassin, her film evokes a nostalgia for pre-war forms of blue-collar homosocial utopias. Perhaps unsurprisingly, at this juncture, we need to turn again to Charles Willeford, who I think dramatizes the problem of competitive cross-racial masculinity most thoroughly, and consider racial mimicry and masquerade in his singular early work, especially his novels Pick-Up (1955) and The Black Mass of Brother Springer, originally published under the title Honey Gal (1958). Set in the bohemian subcultures of San Francisco, Pick-Up tells the story of short-order chef, failed abstract painter, and heavy drinker Harry Jordan, who hooks up with Helen Meredith, a confirmed and “helpless lush,” as the book cover helpfully tells us. Over the course of the novel, the two drink too much, have a series of alcohol-­fueled misadventures, grow depressed, try and fail to kill themselves, check themselves into a psychiatric hospital for treatment, which does no good, and eventually agree for a second time to a suicide pact. Harry throttles Helen, goes out to buy a bottle of gin, which he drinks upon returning to his apartment, turns on the gas jets of his two ring burner, stuffs newspapers into the cracks in his apartment doors and windows, pens a goodbye note, and goes to sleep. A failure at suicide, as at most things, he forgets to close the transom and is woken the next morning by his landlady, who summons the police. Arrested, imprisoned, and due to be tried, he is—irony of ironies--told by his defense attorney that he was also a failure as a murderer: “now, get a grip on yourself, boy. Helen Meredith was not choked to death, as you claimed, she dies a natural death! … Coronary thrombosis. Know what that is?… I’m not making this up, Jordan. This was the Medical Examiner’s report … There’s no case against you at all” (Willeford 1990, 151–152). And Harry is again left, bereft. The novel concludes with him alone, in the rain: I left the shelter of the awning and walked up the hill in the rain. Just a tall, lonely Negro. Walking in the rain. The End. (Willeford 1990, 160)

This is the first point in the novel where the protagonist’s race is being explicitly mentioned; most readers, presumably, have assumed all along that Harry was white. When I asked my graduate students each year how they respond to the book’s ending, they claim—all of them—to be surprised, impressed, and even moved by the ending. It is a cheap trick, I

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protest; for his part, Sean McCann terms it “a stunt” (2000, 239); Pepper points out that the revelation of Harry’s race in the last sentence is “more a narrative trick, and perhaps even a red herring than a convincing explanation of his alienation” (2011, 102); and Theodore Martin, in his discussion of the novel, points out the absurdity of depicting any American justice system as one where a Black man would be let off for the murder of a white woman, even if he were entirely innocent: “the story … is less crime fiction than crime fantasy: the fantasy of a colorblind justice system whose claim to justice only applies in the absence of racially ascribed subjects” (2018, 719). Though there are at least two episodes in the novel where Harry Jordan has spoken in what seems to be a stereotypically “Black” vernacular, the reveal nonetheless “works,” my students mostly tell me, and powerfully. We are compelled, of course, to re-read the novel, and to confront our own biases and expectations as readers. The evidence that Harry is Black has been there all along, somewhat skillfully hidden in plain sight: note how casually his attorney refers to him as “boy” (Harry is thirty-two); he is at one point assaulted by a group of drunken marines, for kissing Helen in public; at another juncture he is interrogated by his psychiatrist, Dr. Davidson: “Is Mrs. Meredith colored?” “Helen?” My laugh was hard and brittle. “Of course not. What made you ask that?” He hesitated a bit before he answered. “Her expression and eyes, the bone structure of her face. She denied it too, but I thought I’d check with you.” “No,” I said emphatically. “She definitely isn’t colored.” (Willeford 1990, 65)

Among the most horrible scenes, certainly upon second reading, is the one that takes place when Harry is imprisoned. One of his jailers brings him paper and colored pencils to help pass the time, and word gets around that he is a gifted draftsman; more and more people working in the institution drop by to have their portraits sketched (some of whom, it turns out, are covertly selling his work to the press). Among these is a young stenographer who admires Harry. She arranges for a private sitting, undresses and attempts to seduce him; she is described as having “creamy white, soft looking thighs” and “corn-colored hair” (Willeford 1990, 143). He is excited at first, then angry: “That’s part of the thrill. That’s what you want, isn’t it? To do it with a freak. A dangerous freak. And a murderer!” … I lifted my hand and, as hard as I could, slapped her in the face.

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But instead of looking at me in consternation and fear and disappointment, she giggled. Damn her, in her eyes I was just living up to expectations. This was what she had come for! (Willeford 1990, 144)

If this rehearses a famous scene from Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), it also points to another important subtext for the novel: in many ways, Pick-Up is, as David Cochrane (2000) notes, an ironic revision of Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), a novel that itself reads very differently when read as a crime thriller in the context of other noir and hard-boiled works. (Wright was a great fan of pulp fiction.) Much of the hard-boiled and noir genre, it turns out, has to do with managing threats of miscegenation and curtailing cross-racial forms of sexual desire through spectacles of violence—so much of which begins to resemble somewhat coded dramatizations of lynching. To be sure, Willeford was hardly alone in bringing blackface to hard-­ boiled, pulp, and noir writing, much of which is, after all, a mutant form of melodrama. As Christopher Breu argues, fantasies about Black masculinity as both exemplary and menacing in its presumed sexual potency and primitivism have proliferated in pulp writing from its earliest incarnations in Black Mask. “White masculinity defined itself in relationship to a whole rang of sexual and social fantasie figures associated with black virility and its opposition to the dominant order, such as figures of the rebellious slave and the sexually potent black male” (Breu 2005, 33). Racial antagonism has a deep link to pulp fiction, and I have read midcentury cultural texts as elegies—variously embittered or stoical, variously reactionary or progressive in their sympathies—for distinct forms of working-class masculinity understood to be in peril. Yet, for better or worse, popular culture—and crime fiction in particular—has always tried to take the measure of threat to dominant male order and white privilege. The Sherlock Holmes story titled “The Five Orange Pips,” first published in The Strand Magazine in 1891, features the murderous international reach of the Ku Klux Klan. The journal Black Mask published a timely, if notorious, “Ku Klux Klan” special issue in 1923; editors George Sutton, Jr., and Harry North proclaimed themselves “absolutely neutral” (qtd. in Bailey 1991, 41), and some writers did in fact submit pro-Klan stories. Writing in 1963, critic John Bradbury estimates there were “some eighty five” white-authored literary “novels written wholly or largely from the Negro’s point of view” (Bradbury 1963, 79) since 1920, which he characterizes as falling into three historical phases: “sociological” novels of the 20s and early 30s, which often betrayed a residual sense of white superiority” (Bradbury 1963, 81); radical, liberal, or polemical novels of the 1930s and 1940s, in which racial problems “on farm and in industry are faced with a new

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head-­on directness” (Bradbury 1963, 81); and the “humanism” of the 1950s, in which, happily, “Negro-view writers abandon the case history and the tendentious approach and begin to treat the Negro simply as a human individual” (81). That claim is no doubt little more than wishful thinking; throughout the 1950s and 1960s, most works had a political or social axe to grind. The “social problem” film, Pinky (1949), for example, based on a 1946 novel, Quality, by Cid Ricketts Sumner (Bradbury 1963, 143), featured white actress Jeanne Crain playing a light-skinned southern Black woman who has been “passing” for white in the north. However, noir films and crime novels proved fertile ground for such works. In A Double Life (1947), affable white actor Anthony John (Ronald Colman) becomes increasingly obsessed with the stage role of Othello he is playing in blackface. Confessing to a crisis of identity—“Look, if I could find out who I am, I’d be a happy man, you know it?”—he hooks up with a working-class waitress, Pat Kroll (Shelley Winters), and claims not to have a “real” name: “Martin, Ernest, Paul, Hamlet, Joe, maybe Othello?” Jealous of his ex-wife, Brita (Signe Hasso), who plays Desdemona and has in real life taken on a new lover, he goes berserk and imagining himself Othello, instead kills Pat. The film is both noir and police procedural; in the closing half, press agent Bill Friend (Edmond O’Brien), Brita’s new lover, is able to join with the police and solve the crime. As Theodore Martin has argued, the emergence of the new “noir” novel or crime thriller that, as we have seen, displaced the standard detective novel was “less concerned with the solving of crime than the experience of committing it” (2018, 704). This development of the genre, Martin points out, coincides with the apex of a “discourse of black criminality” (Martin 2018, 709), a “notion of an immutable link between blackness and criminality” (Martin 2018, 708). The designation of a particular population group as inherently “criminal” (Martin 2018, 705) is, of course, an older racial trope, which, however, became increasingly entrenched during the post-war years and increasingly yoked to an urban or ghetto underclass. To be a criminal was in some sense to be Black, whether one castigated criminality or, as with Mailer, romanticized the presumably “outlaw” status of those who were excluded from the fold of upper middle-class respectability. Willeford’s Harry Jordan refuses to participate, as Pepper astutely observes, even if his suggestion that, “arguably like Willeford, he ends up performing menial tasks far beneath his status as an artist” (2011, 105) seems a bit harsh. As a refusenik, Harry insistently refuses to be “co-opted into the all-consuming logic of the market” (Pepper 2011, 101) and we are invited to admire him for that, at least, even though neither he nor Hellen is able

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to muster “an effective means of self-fashioning” (Pepper 2011, 101). Willeford would become a great admirer of Chester Himes’s Harlem novels (as who isn’t? I will turn to them in somewhat more detail in Chap. 4); the first of which, For the Love of Imabelle (better known as A Rage in Harlem), was published in 1957. Dorothy Hughes’s later crime novel The Expendable Man (1963) features a slow reveal of the race of the protagonist, a middle-class “respectable” medical intern, Dr. Hugh Densmore. Though broad hints are dropped, Hughes does not disclose the race of the protagonist to the reader until nearly a quarter of the way through the book, when a bigoted police detective terms him “a nigger doctor driving a big white Cadillac” (Hughes 2012, 55). Pointedly, The Expendable Man more or less replicates the plot of Hughes’s earlier In a Lonely Place, with the twist that Hugh Densmore, unlike Dix Steele, is ultimately absolved of murder. As the novel opens, Hugh is driving from Los Angeles, where he interns, to visit his grandparents in Phoenix, Arizona. Despite the risks involved, Hugh offers a lift to a young girl, who later shows up at his hotel hoping he will perform an abortion. When she turns up murdered, all evidence points to Hugh, who enlists a powerful, ambitious white attorney to help him clear his name. Hugh is from an upper middle-class family, and the setting, Phoenix, is hardly the Jim Crow Deep South. The novel meditates on the project of civil rights in sunbelt suburbia. Time and again noting how the suburban landscape is changing quickly to what later generations will term sprawl, Hugh has to repeatedly remind himself that he is not the Jim Crow south. Class, racial identity, and real estate development are all intertwined, even if there is no overt practice of redlining: “it hurt to think that the poison of uncontrolled development, the money greed, if unchecked, would soon reduce not only this oasis but the whole of the beautiful desert valley to the sterility of the tract” (Hughes 2012, 127). But sprawl was an effect of white flight: there is some question as to whether other guests will object if Hugh swims in the hotel pool. And despite some run-of-the-mill habitual racism on the part of deputies, the Sheriff’s office is vigilant, in the climate of civil rights, to run as clean an investigation as possible. Hugh discusses his predicament with his brother-in-law, also a doctor: “I suppose most doctors are asked at some time or other,” Edward went on. “Certainly ours are. I doubt if any of them can escape that. His face was thoughtful. “One thing I’ll say, Hugh, and it’s God’s truth. I’ve never been approached by any of our people. Only by the ofays.”

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The ugly word was incongruous on Edward’s lips. “Somehow they seem to think that a Negro doctor lacks morality. They become so surprised, almost affronted, when they’re turned down.” (Hughes 2012, 105)

In Hughes’s earlier work, Dix Steele, a white male, eludes suspicion for a long time; the Black male, no matter how professional or integrated, remains everywhere under a cloud of suspicion. Ultimately, however, Hughes embraces a liberal view of race relations and is relatively sanguine about the prospect of racial harmony, though her work acknowledges that it won’t come easily. The Expendable Man is a pro-civil rights novel, a critique of American racial biases. If Hughes’s crime fiction functions as critique, it nowhere gives way to despair. For American male despair, there is always Jim Thompson, who in turn coded white despair via blackface in some of his own works. It should not come as a surprise, either, that Thompson, who also struggled to find an audience for his work in the 1960s and 1970s, also wrote in blackface. Thompson’s later works include a novelization of Michael Roemer’s 1964 film, Nothing But a Man (1970), which earned Thompson an entry in an encyclopedia of African American literature (Haut 1999, 23) and Child of Rage (1972), a pornographic rant—excessive even by Thompson’s standards—featuring the mixed-race protagonist, Allen Smith. For his part, the much less vitriolic Willeford makes the theme even more explicit, if comic and absurd, in The Black Mask of Brother Springer, which was originally published in 1958 as Honey Gal after the publisher (Universal) rejected Willeford’s preferred title—and (unsurprisingly) his alternate, Nigger Lover. As McCann notes, “the lure and peril of miscegenation” (2000, 227) is at the core of much of Willeford’s writing, although McCann’s conclusion—that Black female sexuality inevitably “turns stalwart white men into docile subjects” (2000, 227)—seems to me only partially the case. Rather, the encounter with Black culture and Black sexuality, in Willeford’s texts, seems to offer the white protagonist a path through his own abjection. Again, Willeford’s work is meta-critical, reflexive—a meditation on cultural production. When Sam Springer publishes his first book, No Bed Too High, with Zenith Press and receives a royalty check for 250 dollars, he quits his hated job as a wage-slave accountant in Columbus, Ohio, and heads to Florida to set himself up as a writer. In Miami, his imagination and his funds dry up; desperate for a story he can sell, he comes across an item about the

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Church of God’s Flock Monastery in Orangeville and hastens there to interview the Abbot. Abbott Dover rehearses the story of the church, founded by the Right Reverend Cosmo Bird of Birmingham Alabama, and, over the course of the afternoon, converts Springer, ordains him, and dispatches him to head an “all-Negro” congregation in Jax. The pastorship comes with food and board, and the sermons of the “Right Reverend Deuteronomy Springer,” fraudulent as they are, go well; he cobbles together the first by plagiarizing “the bit from Sartre’s Being and Nothingness that [he] remembered, … and then [he] recalled K’s conversation with the priest in Kafka’s The Trial … and then [he] remembered a fragment of a scene from Henry Miller’s The Tropic of Capricorn, and [he] wrote down some of my thoughts on Miller’s philosophy of money” (Willeford 1989, 60). The sermons go so well that Springer earns the trust of his congregation, and, with other ministers in Jax, organizes a bus boycott on the part of local Blacks, throwing himself into the civil rights movement (Willeford drafted the novel in the year following the Montgomery bus boycott of 1956). In the novel, things begin to heat up, as you can imagine, and when they get too hot, Springer panics. Abandoning the cause, he takes off with Merita, the beautiful young wife of one his elderly congregationists, and flees to New York. He hesitates before abandoning her—“Merita would want excitement, night clubs, jazz, jewelry—all of the things she had been denied as the wife of the old dentist” (Willeford 1989, 173)—but when he returned to the hotel where he had left her sleeping, he witnesses her emerging from the revolving door followed by a male Negro carrying her suitcase. He was a prime specimen of an American man: wide shoulders, with a thick powerful neck and an erect athletic posture. There was a broad, self-assured smile on his shiny handsome face, and he was obviously amused by the steady stream of chatter Merita was babbling so cheerfully. As I watched her animated face and dark flirting eyes as she looked admiringly at the big Negro’s face, I knew that I had lost her forever. (Willeford 1989, 178)

There are a number of ways to read this very provocative but necessarily unhappy ending, of course. Springer is hardly the prototypical wounded white male. He rather happily surrenders his sexual rights to a Black male who is depicted as taking his rightful social (and thereby sexual) position in life: he is described as an American. Yet, for all its barbed ferocity, this is hardly an endorsement of the civil rights project, nor does the novel depict

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an imagined liberal post-racial utopia. The reference to Kafka is one important clue. In fact, Willeford’s conclusion echoes the very famous ending of Kafka’s celebrated story “The Metamorphosis”: Herr and Frau Samsa noticed almost together that, during this affair, Grete had blossomed into a fine strapping girl, despite the make-up which made her cheeks look pale. They became calmer; almost unconsciously they exchanged glances; it occurred to both of them that it would soon be time to find her a husband. And it seemed to them that their daughter’s gestures were a confirmation of these new dreams of theirs, an encouragement for their good intentions, when, at the end of the journey, the girl rose before them and stretched her young body. (Kafka 1949, 98)

Kafka’s conclusion shifts rapidly from the rather dreary tragedy of Gregor Samsa’s transformation into a celebration of his sister’s budding sexuality. So too in The Black Mass of Brother Springer: the novel’s ending moves us out of the sad tragedy of Springer’s sexual obsessions. Like Gregor, Springer is exiled from what is no longer his story. Stepping back, the anxious male clears the space for Merita to become a person of her own.14 There are two final distinctions to make. First, as we have seen and as Szalay argues, post-war culture displaces the question of a genuinely working-class literature, of which the paperback writers may have been the last vestiges. In his encyclopedic study The Cultural Front (1996), Michael Denning has amply documented the shifts from a self-consciously proletarian political culture to a more sublimated expression of class consciousness in post-war cultural texts; and Steven Schryer as well, in Fantasies of the New Class (2011), has documented the increasing importance of fictions devoted to describing the lives of the professional-managerial classes at precisely this same juncture. Just as so many soldiers resigned themselves to professional careers, domestic harmony, and split-level homes in the suburbs, so too did a distinctly white, immigrant, urban socius of virility find itself in eclipse, and it is this eclipse that the paperback writing and many Hollywood movies elegize: the apex and waning of pulp virility. And, as noted earlier, Haut has argued, most persuasively, that the literature of pulp virilities was eclipsed with the dissolution of urban 14  It is worth noting that the original manuscript concludes on an entirely different note, as Springer simply abandons Merita, commenting that “she was stupid” and “she wasn’t worth it.” (Manuscript to Honey Gal, Box 3, Folder 2, page 211. Charles Willeford Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University, August 14, 2019).

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working-­class culture in general, However, Haut notes, Willeford was one of the few writers from the 1950s who, after a long interregnum, managed to negotiate the transition more or less successfully. Further, while Willeford was in his own right every bit as misogynistic a writer as Thompson or Mailer (probably more so), in his work Black-white social relations are largely figured through heterosexuality rather than homosociality. His work is less a mimicry of the “authentic” exile on the part of the white Negro than an interrogation of the open secret of interracial desire sex. To grossly overstate my thesis, the alienation was genuine; what all of these texts anticipate, inchoately, and what Willeford narrates, ultimately, is the perceived evaporation of a very distinct white working-class urban American masculine imaginary, whose trajectory has been traced in the rise and fall of the hard-boiled novel and noir film. After, and at least until 2008 or thereabouts, in popular texts, at least, and with startlingly few exceptions, every American white man is doomed to become middle class.

References A Double Life. 1947. Dir. George Cukor. Universal Pictures. Algren, Nelson. 1977 [1949]. The Man with the Golden Arm. New York: Penguin. Bailey, Frankie Y. 1991. Out of the Woodpile: Black Characters in Crime and Detective Fiction. New York: Greenwood. Bradbury, John M. 1963. Renaissance in the South: A Critical History of the Literature, 1920–1960. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Breu, Christopher. 2005. Hard-Boiled Masculinities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Butler, David. 2002. Jazz Noir: Listening to Music from Phantom Lady to The Last Discussion. Westport, CT: Praeger. Cochrane, David. 2000. American Noir: Underground Writers and Filmmakers of the Postwar Era. Washington: Smithsonian. Cohan, Steven. 1997. Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Crossfire. 1947. Dir. Edward Dmytryk. RKO Pictures. Denning, Michael. 1996. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. New York: Verso. Dinerstein, Joel. 2017. The Origins of Cool in Postwar America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dyer, Richard. 2004. Queer Noir. In Queer Cinema: The Film Reader, ed. Harry M. Benhoff and Sean Griffin, 89–104. New York: Routledge.

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Eisenschitz, Bernard. 1993. Nicholas Ray: An American Journey. London: Faber and Faber. Gertzman, Jay A. 2018. Pulp According to David Goodis. Lutz, FL: Down and Out Books. Haut, Woody. 1999. Neon Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction. London: Serpent’s Tail. Hughes, Dorothy B. 2003 [1947]. In a Lonely Place. New York: Feminist Press. ———.. 2012 [1963]. The Expendable Man. New York: NYRB Classics. In a Lonely Place. 1950. Dir. Nicholas Ray. Columbia. Kafka, Franz. 1949. Metamorphoses. Trans. A. L. Lloyd. New York: Vanguard. Key Largo. 1948. Dir. John Huston. Warner Bros. Krutnik, Frank. 1991. In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity. London: Routledge. Liu, Alan. 2004. The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lott, Eric. 1994. White Like Me: Racial Cross-Dressing and the Construction of American Whiteness. In Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease, 474–495. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 1997. The Whiteness of Film Noir. American Literary History 9 (3): 542–567. Mailer, Norman. 1957. The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster. San Francisco: City Lights. Martin, Theodore. 2018. Crime Fiction and Black Criminality. American Literary History 30 (4): 703–729. McCann, Sean. 2000. Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press. McCoy, Horace. 1996 [1948]. Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye. New York: Serpent’s Tail. Miller, Henry. 1945. The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. New York: New Directions. Modleski, Tania. 2010. Clint Eastwood and the Male Weepies. American Literary History 22 (1): 136–158. Naremore, James. 2008. More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts. Oakland: University of California Press. Osteen, Mark. 2013. Nightmare Alley: Film Noir and the American Dream. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Out of the Past. 1947. Dir. Jacques Tourneur. RKO. Pepper, Andrew. 2011. Post-War American Noir: Confronting Fordism. In Crime Culture: Figuring Criminality in Fiction and Film, ed. Bran Nicol, Eugene McNulty, and Patricia Pulham, 90–108. London: Continuum. Rabinowitz, Paula. 2002. Black & White & Noir: America’s Pulp Modernism. New York Columbia University Press. Samet, Elizabeth D. 2021. Looking for the God War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness. New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux.

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Sante, Luc. 2010 [1988]. “Introduction” to I was Looking for a Street by Charles Willeford. New York and Los Angeles: Picture Box/Family. Schryer, Stephen. 2011. Fantasies of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism in Post-World War II American Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press. Szalay, Michael. 2012. Hip Figures: A Literary History of the Democratic Party. Stanford: Stanford University Press. The Naked City. 1948. Dir. Jules Dassin. Universal Pictures. The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. 1946. Dir. Lewis Milestone. Paramount Pictures. Thompson, Jim. 1991 [1972]. Child of Rage. Los Angeles: Blood and Guts Press. ———. 1997 [1954]. The Nothing Man. New York: Black Lizard. van Rijn, Guido. 2004. The Truman and Eisenhower Blues: African-American Blues and Gospel Songs, 1945–1960. London: Continuum. Wager, Jans B. 2017. Jazz and Cocktails: Rethinking Race and the Sound of Film Noir. Austin: University of Texas Press. Westlake, Donald E. 2014. The Getaway Car: A Donald Westlake Nonfiction Miscellany. Ed. Levi Stahl. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Willeford, Charles. 1989. Black Mass of Brother Springer. [Orig. Published as Honey Gal, 1958]. Berkeley: Black Lizard. ———. 1990 [1955]. Pick-Up. New York: Black Lizard. ———. 2006 [1956]. Wild Wives. New York: Vintage.

CHAPTER 3

Pulp Sexualities: Gender and American Popular Crime Fiction at Midcentury

“Many million people in the United States have bought, and presumably read, the books on the adventures of Mickey Spillane’s creation, Mike Hammer, the Vigilante-Killer” (1956, 176), noted Christopher La Farge, worrisomely, in 1954  in the pages of The Saturday Review, citing sales number in the millions that testified to Spillane’s staggering popularity and linking “Hammerism” (1956, 178) to McCarthyism. In Spillane’s blood-soaked novels, Hammer mostly took out his resentments by murdering the communists and women who tried to take advantage of him. For La Farge, the appeal of Spillane’s books had little to do with anti-­ communism per se. Their appeal had much to do, rather, with the helplessness experienced by “overcrowded city men” aimlessly adrift amid “the huge impersonal groupings of an industrial civilization” (La Farge 1956, 178) and how they resented their own perceived lack of agency amid a national imaginary that prioritized radical self-reliance. La Farge recounts: “Hammerism … is the dream of justice, however imperfect, meted out without delay, with fierce and wonderfully satisfying immediacy” (1956, 178). Seemingly everyone was worried about the popularity of Mickey Spillane. And, perhaps as a consequence, at midcentury nearly every cultural broker worth his salt felt obliged to outline a position on popular crime fiction.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Redding, Pulp Virilities and Post-War American Culture, Renewing the American Narrative, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09054-7_3

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Highbrow Heroes: The Remasculinization of American Crime Fiction In the pages of such journals as The New Yorker, where Edmund Wilson belittled detective fiction, Harper’s, where Bernard DeVoto and W.  H. Auden defended it, Horizon, where George Orwell derided American-style hard-boiled writing as “pure Fascism” (Orwell 1956, 163), tastemakers felt obliged in the years after the war to assess the pleasures and perils of the genre. Even Marshall McLuhan got into the act. McLuhan, in a 1946 Sewanee Review essay, “Footsteps in the Sands of Crime,” likewise laments the insipidity of the genre. “The total absence of felt life in the action of thriller literature perfectly reflects the immaturity of our age” (1946, 630), he chortles, going on to single out the prose style of Hammett—Hammett, not Spillane—for its “emotional illiteracy and confusion” (McLuhan 1946, 631). If a somewhat more distinguished writer, like Graham Greene, can in his thrillers expose “the moral evisceration of all levels of society” (McLuhan 1946, 633), then the satisfactions of more run-of-the-mill mystery novels emerge from the ways that they flatter the reader’s intellect: “the sleuth also enables the reader to ‘escape’ from the horror of his own world by conferring on him the sense of detached power associated with the scientific attitude” (McLuhan 1946, 634). These debates formed part of a larger set of social concerns about the rising hegemony of what intellectuals at the time termed “mass” culture. It was not unusual to find such public intellectuals as Dwight Macdonald, Paul Goodman, or Mary McCarthy fretting openly about the potential demise of cultural standards. In 1957, Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White edited a collection of essays that documents the debates. Titled Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, it included thought pieces mostly decrying popular culture by such luminaries as Irving Howe, Macdonald, Theodor Adorno, and others. The section devoted to detective fiction opens with Wilson’s denunciation and includes Orwell’s “Raffles and Miss Blandish” as well as La Farge’s analysis of Spillane. And, as such cultural theorists as Andreas Huyssen in After the Great Divide (1986) and Andrew Ross in No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (1989) have amply documented, these midcentury debates about the status of culture betrayed anxieties about the waning of the British empire and rise of American military power and the recalibration of class and gender standards on both sides of the Atlantic, as well the emergence of standardized forms of culture. Often, as McLuhan’s heavily

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coded dictions implies, the celebrity status accorded writers like Hammett (by highbrows) and Spillane (by boors, presumably) threatened to topple the cultural hierarchy. Critics, however disposed, unanimously distinguished between the older, presumably more genteel, and largely pastoral British mystery tradition, cemented by such golden age writers as Agatha Christie and Dorothy L.  Sayers, and the upstart American hard-boiled writers working in the urban tradition of Hammett and Cain. In his 1944 contribution to The Atlantic Monthly, “the Simple Art of Murder,” Chandler lampooned the former for its pseudo-aristocratic pretense, its priggishness, implausibility, and—ultimately—its effeminacy. Auden, who felt a real detective story had to be set in a vicarage, considered the writing of Chandler more “adventure stories” than mysteries per se, and thus in some measure redeemable: “whatever he may say, I think Mr. Chandler is interested in writing, not detective stories, but serious studies of a criminal milieu, the Great Wrong Place, and his powerful but extremely depressing books should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art” (1948). Orwell, by contrast, couldn’t disagree more. “In America, both in life and in fiction, the tendency to tolerate crime, even to admire the criminal so long as he is successful, is very much more marked” (1956, 160) than in the United Kingdom, asserts Orwell. Lamenting the Americanization of the British mystery novel, castigates hard-boiled writing for precisely the same reason: “There exists in America an enormous literature of more or less the same stamp. … Quite apart from books, there is the huge array of ‘pulp magazines,’ graded so as to cater to different kinds of fantasy, but nearly all having the same mental atmosphere. A few of them go in for straight pornography, but the great majority are quite plainly aimed at sadists and masochists” (1956, 159). McLuhan, as we have seen, was more or less okay with the tradition, provided that it be cultivated by more sophisticated (meaning British) writers like Graham Greene. Jean-Paul Sartre, also in The Atlantic, was, by contrast, enamored of the way American writing recounted “the dark murderous fury which sometimes swept through an entire city”—a reference to Hammett’s Red Harvest (1929)—and “the blind and criminal love in the novels of James Cain” (1946, 114). Sartre was not the only French intellectual to laud the “primitive” American genius on display in thrillers. An enthusiastic French readership and a devoted fandom of Hollywood movie versions of the thrillers were largely responsible for cultivating noir sensibilities. In 1945, French

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publisher Gallimard’s launched its celebrated La Série Noire, a line of crime fiction devoted to American-style hard-boiled and noir thrillers. Edited by Marcel Duhamel, the series included works by Americans David Goodis, Jim Thompson, Horace McCoy, and Ed McBain, as well as Hammett and Chandler, alongside new talents like Chester Himes, whom Duhamel recruited to the genre, and French and British writers mimicking the pulp tradition. The very term “noir” for the distinctive black covers of the series, was derived by critic Nino Frank to describe a whole generic literary and cinematic style. “France invented the concept of American film noir,” asserts James Naremore (2019, 4), pointing out that the term had “during the 1930s” described “atmospheric French Popular-­ Front films about doomed low-life or working-class characters (Naremore 2019, 1). As we saw in Chap. 2, the sense of doom persists and post-war writers and filmmakers modified the sensibilities of economic “alienation” (along with a Prohibition era gangster ethos) to describe the post-war malaise afflicting the professional and upwardly mobile middle classes. But, as La Farge points out, the appeal of Spillane had to do with the way in which it might salve a perceptible crisis of masculine potency in the changing post-war world. In Spillane’s novels, Hammer symbolically reclaimed male power by murdering women, foreigners, communists, and others who threatened white male virility. McLuhan, Wilson, and even Sartre may have despised the brutalist low-brow Spillane, but they were responding to what they imagined as an equally perilous threat to the authority of male cultural power as represented by the traditionally feminine genre of mystery novels and by popular culture more broadly. They had to either slay it or claim it. Citing Sartre, Huyssen has interrogated, cogently, the “notion which gained ground during the nineteenth century that mass culture is somehow associated with woman while real, authentic culture remains the prerogative of men” (1986, 47). Huyssen notes that, early in the century, socialism and women’s suffrage suggested that the barbarians were at the gate. By midcentury, that threat had broadened out into communism and women more generally, in the mindset of hysterical American males like Spillane, who felt their pulp virilities threatened. For equally hysterical if more culturally authorized highbrows at midcentury, the threat was a womanly mass culture. They responded by hiving off a domain of mass culture—hard-boiled writing—that was both decidedly male and could be—must be—elevated to the status of authentic culture. If, as Huyssen has asserted, popular culture in toto tended to be coded as

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feminine, then Chandler, Sartre, and other defenders of the hard-boiled had to effect a remasculinization (that was at once a re-aestheticization) of the genre in order to claim it as culturally viable. The vigorous debate among midcentury intellectuals about the status of mystery novels and popular betrayed various anxieties about rapidly shifting class and gender  configurations in post-war American life. Against a viewpoint that derided detective fiction as effeminate, defenders of the American hard-­ boiled tradition were able to recast the genre as masculine and at least proto-literary. The remasculinization of the genre replicated the commonplace misogyny of many of the plots of pulp and paperback novels and noir movies; like Spillane’s Mike Hammer, these intellectuals had to purge the feminine. But, as we will see below, these gender dynamics are countered by developments of melodrama in women’s mystery writing and film. In the hands of novelist Vera Caspary, for example, the femme fatale stereotype is recast in order to develop critical analyses of hardening social roles facing women in post-war American life. It is not surprising, then, that the books featured quite literal battles of the sexes, which were also battles over form. Philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who at the time was developing an affective rather than intellectual theory of reading, argued that “the most beautiful works” in the series are those in which “the real finds its proper parody, such that in turn the parody shows us directions in the real world which we would not have found otherwise” (2004, 85). Deleuze’s favorite work in La Série Noire was a little-known work titled, after Rudyard Kipling’s poem of that name, Deadlier than the Male (1942). Deadlier than the Male was a one-off by the Hollywood screenwriter James Gunn, about whom very little is known, and which is now sadly out of print. The book, a gangster novel on the surface, is remarkable as an allegory of passion and homosocial rage understood as pure power: “I’m strong. I’m the strongest guy I know,” claims one of its antiheroes, the aptly named killer Sam Wild, “And what I want is mine, and I take it, and then nobody cuts in” (Gunn 1942, 41). Somebody does cut in, of course—many bodies do—both Sam’s adoring male partner and the adoring but conniving femme fatale, who proves to be, as a character, precisely what the title stipulates. The book was the basis for the controversial Robert Wise film, Born to Kill (1947), starring Lawrence Tierney, a deeply disturbing RKO feature that ended up being banned in Ohio, Memphis, and Chicago.

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Femmes Fatales: Gender, Sexuality, and the Book Market And what of the femme fatale? To be fair to the film adaptation of Gunn’s novel, the murderous woman in Born to Kill, Helen Brent (Claire Trevor), gets her just deserts, as she is killed in a final gun-battle with the police. In Gunn’s original book, she gets away with it, she even thrives. However, gestural the moral over-coding in this case, the Hollywood formula does demand that the amoral outlook of the story at large be overwritten with a requisite ending: the bad are, ultimately punished for their deeds, even if, in noir, the virtuous are not always rewarded. Women are not only subject to punishment but to scapegoating, as many critics have noted. In Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession (2018), a survey of contemporary television shows, movies, journalism, and novels, for example, Alice Bolin contends, persuasively, that the noir-inflected American cultural edifice virtually in its entirety remains built on the corpses of women, real and fictional: “American boys have trampled most of our popular stories” she asserts. “American boys in their grievance and longing invented their dream girl, the Dead Girl” (2018, 10). We don’t have to look very deep to discern the misogynistic rage that underpins the tough guy sensibilities of hard-boiled heroes. We witness it in Sam Spade’s—or is it Dashiell Hammett’s?—stony-hearted indictment of the murderous Bridget O’Shaugnessy at the close of The Maltese Falcon (1930): “I won’t play the sap for you!” (1992, 215). We witness it more baldly in the debut of Spillane’s Mike Hammer, when in Spillane’s characteristically short blunt paragraphs, at the notorious end of I, the Jury (1947), he kills the significantly named Dr. Charlotte Manning: Her eyes had pain in them now, the pain preceding death. Pain and unbelief. “How c-could you?” she gasped. I only had a moment before talking to a corpse, but I got it in. “It was easy,” I said. (1987, 246)

But the murderous woman is an ambivalent figure. Spade, for his part, confesses to a grudging admiration for O’Shaugnessy, and certainly the dangerous women in James Cain’s novels are portrayed with considerable sympathy. In Cornell Woolrich’s The Bride Wore Black (1940), for example, the putative villain, Julie Killeen (another female character whose

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overtly symbolic name pretty much sums up her occupation), goes on a murder spree to revenge those whom, she believes, have been responsible for the death of her husband. Woolrich depicts her as somewhat justified, although ironically erroneous: she ends up murdering innocent men. At any rate, however, as a character, she far outshines the hero of the novel, the dogged but dour police investigator, Lew Wanger. Wanger witness Killeen’s transfiguration: Then little by little a change came over her. She seemed to fill out before his eyes, gain color, body. … The life force, that inextinguishable thing, flowed back into her. She was somehow a younger, more vibrant woman. A woman who knew no fear, a woman who knew how to admit defeat gracefully. But a vengeful sort of grace it was, even now. … “Do you take me for the usual petty-larceny criminal for gain, trying to cover up what he’s done, trying to welsh out of it? There was unutterable contempt in the look she gave him. “You have a lot to learn about me! I glory in it! I want to shout t from the housetops, I want the world to know!” (Woolrich 2021, 197–98)

A vengeful sort of grace. Given the standards of the time (to use a particularly hackneyed phrase), we might consider the femme fatale an allegory of women’s power. At very least, we might say that the figure of the bride/ killer, as developed in so queer a writer as Woolrich, points as well to a deep dissatisfaction with prevailing heteronormative gender standards. Notice that women—their aspirations, their desires—are everywhere ensconced within the constraints of genre. In their introduction to a recent anthology about contemporary representations of female murders, Women Who Kill: Gender and Sexuality in Film and Series of the Post-­ Feminist Era (2020), Cristelle Maury and David Roche underline the ambivalence of these figures, who appear both exceptional and banal: Women who kill are almost always incorporated into genre conventions, almost always those of crime fiction and noir, horror, melodrama, and more recently, action and adventure. No doubt, these generic figures—the female vigilante, the femme fatale, the jealous wife, the madwoman, the monstrous woman—[…] work to simultaneously construct the sensational—and thus deviant—“nature” of the woman who kills, while containing her safely within the realm of genre fiction. (2020, 4–5)

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Such formulas acknowledge powerful women, even as they constrain that power. Despite the way such characters “underline the threat of deceptive femininity” (Doane 1987, 120), as Mary Ann Doane avers in her assessment of the femme fatale in film, they nonetheless resist such constrictions. Angela Martin in her extensive catalogue of women in film noir, notes the relative paucity of murderous femmes fatales, Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwick) from Double Indemnity (1944) being no doubt the most notorious. In her survey of the 1940s genre films, however, Martin lists only eight female killers, along with two victims who decide to retaliate, two accidental killers, and two suicides (1980, 220). She also notes the importance of a significant number of women screenwriters as well as the female authorship of several the stories on which the films are based. While acknowledging there is no necessary correlation between the gender of the writer and the perspective of the (certainly not in studio-­ dominated Hollywood of the time), there may nonetheless be a “greater possibility of a woman’s discourse at work in these films than is generally suggested” (Martin 1980, 210). Presumably, that sensibility would betray a sympathy for women characters, who would not come off as monsters. It doesn’t necessarily follow, however, that a female character not be a killer. The relatively few representations of murderous women in the films of the period “either dramatize the threat of female desire and subjectivity or safely frame acts within traditional views of femininity” (Maury and Roche 2020, 5). Mary Ann Doane’s classic studies, Femmes Fatales (1986) and The Desire to Desire: Women’s Films of the 1940s (1987), read the femme fatale as symptomatic of an “epistemological trauma” (Doane 1991, 1) representing a perceived threat: “she is not the subject of feminism but a symptom of male fears about feminism” (Doane 1991, 2–3). At the same time, however, that very excessiveness marks the space that women’s desire can come, however uncomfortably, to inhabit: A necessary by-product of such processes seems to be the recognition of the impossible position of women in relation to desire in a patriarchal society. … Desire is always in excess—even if it simply the desire to desire, the striving for an access to a desiring subjectivity. The desiring woman and her excessive sexuality may be theoretically unrepresentable (according to the logic of a masculine theory, in any event); she may be doomed to die in order to insure closure for the narrative, but for a moment of cinematic time she is at least present, flaunting her excess. (Doane 1987, 122)

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And a moment of literary time too, I would add, in keeping my contention that the movies and fictions of the time were of a cultural piece. We have already examined Hughes’s indictment of masculinist rage. It might be worth our while, consequently, to send some time with the sympathetic portrayals of such characters in the hands of American women writers. While less inclined to noirish themes, women’s crime fiction of the period betrays in its own figurations as deep and critical a malcontent with emerging social standards as does the men’s writing we examined in earlier chapters. Vera Caspary’s 1945 novel Bedelia, for example, the novel I will be mostly concerned with in closing this chapter, opens with Charles Horst, an architect, living a happy life, flush with professional success. Charlie Horse, as his friends affectionately call him, is newly married to a beautiful young bride who has just told him she is expecting a child. It is Christmas. Living out a dream of domestic bliss, Charlie “believed himself the luckiest man in the world” (Caspary 2004, 1). At the very apex of his happiness, his neighbor, Ben Chaney, a private detective working undercover, informs him that his young wife, Bedelia, is not the woman she pretends to be. She has a past, it turns out. In that past, she has murdered her three previous husbands. Charlie does want to recognize that the life he has built is a sham: This woman was his wife, he knew her intimately. He had been madly in love with her, bedazzled by her charms, but he had not lost his head so completely that he had mistaken a vulgar adventuress for a sincere woman. And the woman Ben described had been far worse than an adventuress, she had been a hideous monster, a siren, a bloodsucker, Lucrezia Borgia and Lady Macbeth, all at once. (Caspary 2004, 116)

The good wife turns out to be a man-killer, the monstrous woman of misogynistic myth. Set in 1913 at the dawn of the “New Women” era, Bedelia enticingly inverts increasingly hegemonic models of sexuality and married domesticity and prefigures the suburban gothic of Joyce Carol Oates and the hugely popular domestic noir of the twenty-first century: the Grand Guignol of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012) or the therapy-­ paranoia of Paula Hawkins The Girl on the Train (2015), whose characters oscillate between woman as psychopath and seemingly psychopathic woman as improbable sleuth. Why do women kill? If you have been following Marc Cherry’s contemporary television series Why Women Kill, you will know that we will

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have to travel down the dusky corridors of time, as measured out melodrama, in order to find an answer. In 1980, Ann Jones began her bestselling 1980 study Women Who Kill with a pointedly literary example: “in a women’s literature seminar, a student depressed by reading The Awakening, The House of Mirth, and The Bell Jar, complained, “Isn’t there anything a woman can do but kill herself?” To lighten the mood, I quipped, “She can always kill somebody else,” and realized in the instant that it was true” (Jones 2009, 23). Jones’s study is not quite, but almost an endorsement of murder as a singular act of feminist emancipation, a calculated if spectacular resistance to misogynist violence, spousal abuse, and serial woman-­ killing that dominates modern life. Jones offers a sympathetic historical overview of (mostly American) women who have (mostly) killed their husbands, masters, or the family members who have oppressed them. Apart from the opening, however, Jones investigates very few literary examples. The world of fiction is certainly as littered with women’s corpses as our sad world; and yes, literary fiction is especially replete with women who either take their own lives (or have their lives taken), having no other way, seemingly, successfully to navigate the perils of patriarchy, let alone to be liberated from its yoke. But, as Cherry’s serial reminds us, there have been plenty of female murderers in fiction, particularly in popular and genre fiction. Typically, however, from the wicked witch of a Grimm’s fairy tale to the femme fatale of film noir, from Medea to Lady Macbeth, from Lizzie Borden to Lucretia Borgia (to invoke historical figures who have become mythic), these scheming, monstrous women characters only reinforce the indomitable cultural weight of misogyny. Women who kill are seldom depicted with sympathy. Certainly, these archetypal characters do not serve the narrative of “justifiable homicide” that Jones invokes. But, as critic K. T. Saxton argues in her splendid reading of Bedelia, “the twin narratives of law and literature define female violence as monstrous, rather than motivated” (2017, 80). The early Cold War has been characterized by such historians as Elaine Tyler May1 as involving concerted efforts to prioritize family life and reconstitute a hegemonic model of domesticity, yet the popular culture of the period documents fairly starkly how perilous, precarious, and fraught a project that was. The preceding chapter outlined a post-war “crisis of masculinity” in American life as returning GIs accommodated themselves 1  In her classic study Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (1988, New York: Basic Books).

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to new models of suburban domesticity, the upward mobility afforded by the GI Bill, regimes of heteronormativity and the like. As we have seen, this crisis was articulated in various social texts of the period, from such films as Crossfire and Key Largo to Norman Mailer’s notorious essay “The White Negro.” How were these shifting social configurations represented in women’s popular culture? It turns out, as a renewed critical interest in melodrama has established, that popular depictions of women at midcentury showed them to be just as reluctant to be slotted into assigned heteronormative roles and capable of mounting all sort of cagey—though often covert—forms of resistance. Jonathan Goldberg astute readings of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels in Melodrama: An Aesthetic of Impossibility (2016) are a telling example. As Goldberg argues, melodrama is an excessive aesthetic mode, which signals beyond the experienced durability of lived experience toward an impossible social transformation while also underlining how “impossible” the extant world is for those who are trapped in it. As he puts it, melodramatic “violations of form and history can take us to a place that defies the making of boundaries and that refuses to hand over to the real a straitened version of reality, or a straightened version, in which the miseries of heterosexuality for women who suffer the female complaint can be resisted only by voicing suffering within the constraints of the desire it produces, or where minorities suffer and suffer the desire to be majority” (2016, xiv–xv). Film melodramas depicting women variously resisting domestic recalibration include pretty much anything with Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, or Shelley Winters, from wartime films questioning (but affirming) women’s independence like Now Voyager (1942), through the troubled or possibly psychotic women of Gaslight (1944), The Snake Pit (1948), Sunset Boulevard (1950), A Place in the Sun (1951), and up to Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (1962). Gun Crazy (1950), scripted by Dalton Trumbo and MacKinlay Kantor after a 1940 Kantor story and starring Peggy Cummins as cold-blooded killer Laurie Starr, merits particular attention, as it features, rather unusually, a female gangster who kills with little remorse. Using Caspary’s understudied but compelling noirish novel as my primary example, I will posit the short-lived emergence of a women’s “domestic noir” in the decades after the war, reflecting white and ethnic working-class women’s resistance to new social models. Clearly, a protest against the straitjackets imposed on female subjectivity, sexuality, social roles, and literary figurations are of apiece. This chapter isolates another turbulent cultural moment where popular works of represented women as

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“always killing somebody else” more or less gleefully. Caspary’s work, alongside a handful of other American writers of the period, including Patricia Highsmith and Shirley Jackson as well as such important lesser-­ known suspense writers as Margaret Millar, Dolores Hitchens, Dorothy B. Hughes, and others, developed during the decades immediately following the second world war a uniquely subversive form of domestic noir that was deeply critical of the attempted social restoration of heteronormative standards associated with the Cold War consensus. Caspary’s novels, in particular, offer a poignant and compelling expression of murder as symbolic resistance to the strict new regimes of heteronormatively being imposed on Americans after the second world war. Mystery novels had for some decades been a somewhat special case. Agatha Christie, for example, whose books are chock-full of women who kill, is careful to present the motives of killers as at very least comprehensible, if not precisely defensible. The “golden age” of crime fiction is replete with women whose violent acts of murder can easily be construed as their only way of lashing out at their pitiful lot in life. Such a work as Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night (1936), for example, self-consciously and probingly represents a wide array of expanded and alternative social roles for women occasioned by a turbulent post-Edwardian British society. Not incidentally, Sayers, in this novel, was also as determined to articulate alternative literary capacities for women (as readers, as writers, as subjects) as was her contemporary, Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One’s Own (1929). Paula Rabinowitz, for one, has commented on the myriad scenes of reading and movie-watching” (2014, 42) in pulp fiction. We have noted that explicitly in the Walter Mitty model of male fantasy life; but it is particularly true as well of female characters in works written by women, readers whose access to impermissible forms of power or sexuality was in everyday post-war life thwarted by increasingly hegemonic restrictions. Without overstating the work of repression and sublimation at play in American life, these tensions, no doubt, between the possibilities of one’s fantasy life and the decorousness expected of women and of women’s writing help explain the particularly complex bundle of “crime, perversity, desire and sensation operating within the work” (2014, 42) of the period, Rabinowitz argues. The question of what kind of a life a woman might lead and what kind of novel a woman might write (or read) are ineluctably twinned in the gender technologies of popular culture, as middle-brow “mysteries” and melodramas became increasingly designated “women’s” realm (a cultural turn that, as we have earlier seen, underwrites the sexual hysteria with

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which Raymond Chandler and others at midcentury tried to reclaim detective fiction as “serious” literature). Focusing on mystery fiction per se in their study Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard-Boiled Tradition (1999), Priscilla Walton and Manina Jones trace the emergence of the female professional private investigator sleuth—beginning with British writer P. D. James’s groundbreaking An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972) and as certified in the subsequent popularity of writing by Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky—back to second wave feminism of the late 1960s and 1970s, pointing to a combination of market and social forces that heralded a new Golden Age of women’s mystery writing. But what about the interregnum? Until recently, and partly because of the celebration of male works we have just surveyed, literary historians have largely scanted a whole generation of women’s crime fiction. Interestingly, according to Kathleen Gregory Klein’s indispensable The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre (1995), the first professional woman detective appeared in 1864, a Mrs. Gladden, in The Female Detective, by Andrew Forrester (Klein 1995, 1), and such characters proliferated in American dime novels, between 1860 and 1901, when changes in postal laws eliminated second-class mailing privileges, leading to collapse of the industry (Klein 1995, 31). Such works, Klein avers, prioritized “action over investigation, physical over mental power, and a superhuman ability to succeed” (Klein 1995, 31–32). They also reflected social changes specific to the progressive era, the rise of feminism, suffrage movement, and women’s education. Such works were double-voiced, according to Klein, stories in which the detection narrative was undergirded by a conventional marriage plot. This reflected the inherent conservatism of the genre, which upholds power and privilege and reinforces the reader’s sense of a safely ordered social world, one in which criminals and deviants and other threats can be controlled and be put in their place. In this regard, a woman detective might be taken as almost inherently destabilizing or subversive, or  even representing  affirmative alternatives to prescriptive gender roles, even if the implicit feminist revision of traditional roles is typically raised only to be contained (typically, by marriage). Similarly, there were many women detectives in the pulp magazine stories of the 1920s and 1930s, though no such character ever seems to have been featured in a full-length work of fiction. Not unexpectedly, the changes attendant upon the end of World War II also marked a shift in gender representations in popular fiction, as military demobilization compelled woman out of the workforce and presumably

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“back” into their homes. Yet these readjustments did not take place so easily, Klein notes. “By 1944, for the first time in U.S. history, married women outnumbered single women for the first time in the female workforce” (Klein 1995, 124). At least one serial professional female sleuth in two works by skip tracer “Gale Gallagher” (Will Ourseler and Margaret Scott), I Found Him Dead (1947) and Chord in Crimson (1949), which also send “mixed messages” (Klein 1995, 126). Like her hard-boiled brethren, Gallagher, of Acme Investigating Bureau drinks bourbon or scotch and smokes; she also shoots. Ultimately, however, the books endorse traditional stereotypes about male aggressiveness and female passivity, according to Klein, culminating in a “rejection of genre’s characteristics in favor of restating limited roles for women” (Klein 1995, 129). As with the character Bertha Cool, who showed up in twenty-nine humorous but tellingly misogynistic novels published between 1939 and 1970 by A. A. Fair (Earle Stanley Gardner), these salacious characters tended to be written by male writers and for male readers, in keeping with alignment of gender and genre marketing configurations of pulp and paperback publishing. Within a few years, writing about women detectives became increasingly sleazy and tended to show up in works circulated in proliferating adult bookstores which proliferated in the downtowns of American cities during the 1960s and 1970s.2 In eleven novels published between 1957 and 1970, for example, G.  G. Fickling portrayed the titillating Honey West, a “sexsational private eyeful” (132), whose exploits involve her getting naked and winding up in bed, as does female detective Marla Kent in Henry Kane’s Private Eyeful (1959). The mass market thriller began to move such cliched representations in different directions, however. Jim Thompson, Chester Himes, Charles Willeford, William Burroughs, and other now celebrated male masters of hard-boiled and noir fiction turned to penning paperback originals, and the paperback revolution in publishing opened another cultural space dramatizing resistance to the emerging social sexual consensus. Both hardbacks, like George Mandel’s Flee the Angry Strangers (1952), about heroin addicts in bohemian Greenwich Village, and such lurid paperback 2  Too little research has been done on the history of sleaze publishing and adult bookstores, although Sin-A-Rama: Sleaze Sex Paperbacks of the 1960s (2005, 2016, Port Townsend, WA: Feral House), edited by B. Astrid Daley and Adam Parfrey, is an excellent resource. According to its admittedly incomplete list of writers and pseudonyms, such important writers as Alex Trocchi and Christopher Logue published adult fiction under pseudonyms, along with noted science fiction authors Robert Silverberg and Harlan Ellison, and, importantly for this study, Donald Westlake.

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originals as Ace’s Junky (1953), by William Burroughs, publishing under the pseudonym William Lee, delved into bohemian subcultures of the period. Such series as the Gold Medal originals of Fawcett, who beginning in 1950 also published lesbian melodramas by Ann Bannon, Tereska Torrès, Marijane Meaker, and others (often writing under androgynous pseudonyms).3 Ace, Dell, Ballantine, Popular, Avon, Bantam, Signet, and so on soon following in those footsteps, incorporating and supplanting the themes of prewar pulp periodicals. Lesbian pulp fiction was comprised primarily of paperback originals, mostly written by men for heterosexual readers. This period also saw a fledgling respectable gay literature, by such writers as Truman Capote, James Baldwin, Charles Jackson, and William Maxwell from mid-forties on, as well as sympathetic treatments of gay characters by Carson McCullers and others. This literature typically appeared in editions from more respectable, hardbound, legitimate publishing houses, and aimed to appeal to gay and also sometimes straight audiences alike. Though not writers of suspense novels and often characterized as proponents of a distinctly “Southern Gothic,” both McCullers, notorious in some ways for her sympathetic portrayal of the lurid lives of freaks and malcontents and social undesirables in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) and subsequent works, and Flannery O’Connor, who began publishing her celebrated short stories and novels in the early 1950s, should be included in the discussion of midcentury domestic noir, insofar as their women characters are sexual and social non-conformists. As Rabinowitz, who reads Caspary’s work adroitly as a cultural assemblage of “interface,” has argued, it was the very marginality of pulp that afforded it license to investigate taboo domains and explore alternative figurations of gender and sexuality: Pulp worked at the borders of several overlapping fields or systems.…Pulp linked high modernism to the vernacular, moved social concerns into the bedrooms—and reversed this at the same time—and crossed into multi media appearing in the 20th century: tabloids, magazines, radio, film, ­television. … Reading pulp, in the form of eroticized paperback objects of 3  See Lesbian Pulp Fiction: The Sexually Intrepid World of Lesbian Paperback Novels, 1950–1965 (2005, San Francisco: Cleis Press), an anthology edited by Katherine V. Forrest, Jaye Zimet’s Strange Sisters: The Art of Lesbian Pulp Fiction, 1949–1969 (1999, New York: Viking Studio), Susan Stryker’s Queer Pulp (2001, San Francisco: Chronicle) as well as Michael Bronski’s chapter “Gay Male and Lesbian Pulp Fiction and Mass Culture” in The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature (2014).

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postwar America, meant entering the frontier, the contact zone … between high and low, secrecy and disclosure, forging a collective intimacy at once mass mediated and private. (2014, 42)

The market splintered into niche audiences, following different and distinct distribution models: romance, true crime, westerns, true confessionals, and so forth were sold in dime-stores and newsstands. Orwell’s point about the link between pulp fiction and outright pornography is well taken. Sleaze fiction increasingly in the adult bookstores that became ubiquitous in American cities by 1970s. Those bookstores, along with adult cinema theaters, became gathering places for gay clientele. Companies like Grove Press, founded in 1947, aimed to split the difference, publishing both underground and celebrated avant-garde works—translations of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot—as well as obscene and erotic works of fiction then currently banned in the United States—D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1954 (originally published in 1928), Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1934) in 1961, and William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959) in 1962—thereby effectively challenging American obscenity laws.4 In 1963, Grove published John Rechy’s breakthrough City of Night, for example, a hybrid between a campy, lurid, “pulp” expose of the subculture of male prostitution and an emotionally searing coming-of-age novel, and in 1964 Hubert Selby Jr.’s celebrated and controversial Last Exit to Brooklyn. An already established public interest in underground Beat lifestyle and writing exploded when Jack Kerouac’s much celebrated On The Road appeared in 1957. While Beat and noir sensibilities seem, on the face of things, poles apart, there is a curious overlap. Mandel’s was celebrated as the first Beat novel, and Burroughs’s status as paperback writers is suggestive. In his recent The Beats: A Literary History (2020, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press), Steven Belletto accentuates the “hard-boiled” quality of such early collaborative efforts as And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, originally drafted by Burroughs ad Kerouac in 1945 though not published until 2008.5 At any rate, “the fact that these novels were easily available in bus stations and newsstands gave homosexuality a particular visibility” notes cultural historian Michael Bronski (2014, 683). Hollywood too began rather cautiously to depict ambiguously gay 4  See Louis Menand’s entertaining recount of this history in The Free World (2021, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 367–379. 5  See, in particular, Belletto’s chapter 4, “The Rise of the Beat Novel.”

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and lesbian characters (of ambivalent morality) in such features as All About Eve (1950), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), The Strange One (1957), and Imitation of Life (1959). Pulp sexualities were changing swiftly. Patricia Highsmith, who began publishing her gender-bending satirical thrillers in 1950, with Strangers on a Train, along with a quite different but equally key writer of thrillers, Shirley Jackson have garnered most of the critical attention. According to critic Fiona Peters, “Highsmith performs a forensic examination of the perils of the domestic” targeting “the ways in which the domestic exerts its stranglehold over the individual” (2018, 23), but I would expand that statement to include such neglected authors as Dorothy Hughes, Margaret Millar, Elizabeth Janeway (author of Daisy Kenyon), Vera Caspary and other women writers of the time, even if their books often read as more conventional mystery novels.6 But as Sarah Weinman notes in her introduction to Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives, the pulps published male writers almost exclusively; women writers did better in middle-brow fare of the slicks: Colliers, The Saturday Evening Post, McCall’s, even The New  Yorker, where Jackson’s notorious allegory of small-town deviance and cruelty, “The Lottery,” appeared in 1948. Mystery novels proper were published exclusively in hardcovers, and publishing developed fairly strict codes of “literary formula fiction” that were marketed along gender lines. Women’s domestic mystery novels tended to be positivist, wherein crimes are solved and social order is restored, although there are plenty of counter-­ examples, and these works must also be considered double-­ voiced, despite their seemingly conservative endings. Honored by such contemporary reviewers as Anthony Boucher much of this writing is now out of print and largely neglected by literary historians. As critic Esther Sonnet has concluded, “women-authored popular fiction in general but women’s crime fiction in particular during the 1940s and 1950s is positioned to advance feminist understanding through distanciating exposures of the ideological terms of gender and its difference. The lack of generic purity and narrative heterogeneity of women’s crime writing argues for 6  We owe a great debt to the Femmes Fatales series at the Feminist Press and to anthology editor Sarah Weinman for bringing many of these works back into print. Weinman’s two-­ volume Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s and 1950s (2015) from the Library of America helps to redress the gender imbalance, as does her collection Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense (2013, New York: Penguin).

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understanding them as hybrid crime forms within the overall structures of suspense and the psychological thriller” (2010, 10).

Women Who Kill: Vera Caspary’s Domestic Noir The opening to Caspary’s memoir The Secrets of Grown-ups (1979) alludes explicitly to the Communist Manifesto and channels the “madwoman in the attic” trope of women’s romance: A specter haunts my ego. For most of my life, I have tried to escape this ghoul, bury her in a respectable family plot, lock her in a closet smelling of old women’s dresses. Tenacious and spiteful, she rises out of memory, laughing, mocking, me with memories of failed dreams. Like everyone else in this contradictory world, I have two definite and well-developed sides, one that I show off, and one I am afraid to see plain. So much of my life has been given to the exploitation of the exhibited side that the hidden self, the specter, has to be hunted down, smoked out of secret cells, stripped of disguise. (Caspary 1979, 1)

That “ghoul”—variously romantic, energizing, and malicious is Caspary’s “skinny … eighteen or nineteen” (Caspary 1979, 1) year-old self. She describes herself as zestful, creative, ambitious, sexually confident, determined to be economically self-reliant, but also self-flagellating, tempted to cynicism about her prospects, a free-spirited Greenwich Village bohemian disdainful of both snobs and conformists, an incipient Communist, Jewish and proudly ethnic, but determinably secular, torn between devotion to her own poetic vision and the need to be “a real working girl” (Caspary 1979, 39)—the two often contradictory routes to independence available to American women after the First World War. Note as well the play on “respectable family plot,” which reads as both graveyard and the heteronormative over-codings of romantic narrative: the respectable family plot that was threatening to entomb American women during the early years of the Cold War. In Caspary’s writing, domesticity is, for women, a burial ground. Caspary is best remembered for Laura (1943), which was made into the classic Otto Preminger film of the same title (1944), but she was both a prolific and a popular writer, publishing (by my count), twenty-one novels, an autobiography, a manual for dancers, and a handful of short stories, co-scripting five plays, and receiving writing credit for at least ten films and

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television series (though it seems clear she contributed to scores more). Born in 1904 in Chicago, Caspary moved as an adult to New York, where she worked in fashion, advertising, and magazine publishing, professional experiences she later mined for her novels. Committed to women’s liberation, she threw herself into bohemian demimonde of Greenwich Village; publishing sporadically in New York, she relocated to Hollywood during the 30s. She joined the Communist Party and in 1939 took the requisite tour of the Soviet Union. At age forty she met producer I. G. Goldsmith, whom she married after the war. Buoyed by the success of Laura, Caspary’s Hollywood career flourished until, as Caspary recalls in her memoir, by1951, she found herself “on the roll of dishonor known as the gray list” (Caspary 1979, 240). Worried that she would be subpoenaed, the couple spent 1953–1954 in Europe, and she subsequently returned to novel writing to earn her living. Caspary later returned to work in Hollywood, and, after Igee’s death in 1964, she continued to write novels. Generally these works were less successful (and were not adapted into movies), though such unconventional mysteries as The Man Who Loved His Wife (1966) combine scathing social satire with complex psychological portraits and mediate on ambivalence of married life. Caspary’s early writings tended to document the hardships of working girls, torn between the seductions of a bohemian, sophisticated, intellectually charged, and sexually liberated lifestyle opportunities available in these cities to the “new woman,” on the one hand, and the familial strictures and economic pressures that compel her protagonists to more conventional career and romantic trajectories. In her memoir, Caspary relates the tale of an early colleague and friend, Byrne MacFadden, with whom Caspary worked as editor of Dance magazine. Suffering from a heart condition and a worrying cough, Byrne was and hounded to death by her publisher father, a health faddist, who forbid her medical treatment. In most cases Caspary accentuates women’s self-invention at the cost of spurning monogamy. This episode was reworked into her novel Stranger than Truth (1946), which, like so many of her books, dramatizes the dilemmas faced by ambitious women whose capacity for self-invention may be quashed by social and familiar strictures. Importantly, her first novel, The White Girl (1929), tells the story of a Black southerner who moves north to Chicago where she lives as white—exactly cotemporaneous (and largely coincidental) with Nella Larsen’s Passing, which appeared the same year. Both works use the passing trope to explore nonconventional sexualities. Caspary’s melodrama explores the fate of Solaria Cox, an

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ambitious but poor working girl who moves to New York to live as white and to work in modeling. In her first full-length work, Caspary’s dominant concerns with women’s independence, work, and sexual awakening are already evident. Whiteness is coded as freedom: Solaria Cox was a white girl now. There had been no difficulty making the change, No one questioned her right to ride in a Pullman, to register at a downtown hotel, to take a room in a white woman’s house, to hold a job as a typist in a big office where only white girls worked. No one asked questions about a girl’s race or about the complexion of her parents. (Caspary 1929, 70)

The White Girl—were I to offer an extended reading of this rich and strange work—deploys the conventional narrative of African American passing as a screen on which to project her meditations about the vexed prospects of working-class, Jewish assimilation into Anglo-American upper-middle classes. In this instance (as was the case for such post-war male writers as Mailer and Willeford, explored in Chap. 2), Black American characters become a proxy for working through white anxieties. In The Secrets of Grown-Ups, Caspary confesses to how her own sense of estrangement aligned with that of a high school classmate who partly inspired the character: She became the heroine of my story. Our experiences and characters were woven together. I knew her loneliness, her fears, hopes and shame; she shared my early jobs. I endured the snubs and insults of white people who believed themselves superior. When I walked on a crowded street or rode on the subway I was a black girl passing as white. She suffered and rejoiced as I had in love. I shed her childhood tears. (Caspary 1979, 114)

In keeping with her espoused principals of working-class, feminist, interracial solidarity, it is also important that her 1930 stage play, Blind Mice (co-authored with Winifred Lenihan) featured an all-female cast; that became the basis for the film Working Girls (1931), directed by Dorothy Arzner (Saxton 2017, 77–78), at the time the only woman director in Hollywood. If her earlier works thematized working-class ambivalence toward marriage as the path to social and financial security, Caspary’s later works tended to thematize the woe that is in those marriages. Increasingly, her books were marketed as murder mysteries; in this sense, Bedelia and Laura

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are transitional novels. Referencing both these successful works, the liner notes to Stranger than Truth, published by Random House, note her bona fides as mystery writer since 1942, but also frame Caspary as a serious literary author. Though she did not consider herself a conventional writer of mysteries—the crime, no less than its solution, is often peripheral to the plot, setting, or thematic concerns—you might say that the mystery format allowed her to dramatically resolve the fundamentally unresolvable tensions as protagonist struggled to reconcile their desires for career security, sexual and intellectual independence, and the social stability afforded by marriage. While in her writing the official detective is typically male, he is seldom the protagonist. The female protagonists—killers, victims, survivors, aids to the detective—are rendered with potency, urgency, and agency that the men in her work lack. Both Stranger than Truth and Murder in the Stork Club (also 1946) continued in this vein. Murder provided a somewhat more satisfying resolution to the complications and contradictions of women’s desire as represented in melodrama than did marriage. And, very much like those marriages, mystery novels, particularly those marketed as women’s fiction, tended to be published in hardback editions, by such large and reputable presses as Random House or Knopf. There was, by the fifties, something stolid, conservative, comfortably suburban and even bourgeois about the genre. It was where a writer could go if she wanted to be comfortable. A woman was murdered; a woman murdered. These domestic noirs—not quite melodramas, not quite mysteries—mark the limits of patriarchal over-coding of women’s desires and resistance, as represented in popular women’s crime writing of the period. And I would argue that is more or less true of Highsmith, Millar, and other contemporaries of Caspary. Millar, like Caspary, often embeds grimy but deeply sympathetic and compelling stories of perversion within a more or less disposable, but conventional, framework of girl-meets-detective romance, tends to pathologize sexual discontent. Perhaps Millar’s most well-known novel Beast in View (1955), for example, features a gay “marriage”: “I’m his wife” (Millar 2016, 468) confesses one male character, speaking of his relationship to his lover. The plot hinges on the dissociative identity disorder suffered by the seemingly scheming criminal. In Vanish in an Instant (1952), we encounter another unhappy woman murderer— one among a whole slew of unhappy women in the novel—“needy for some man who will depend on her, a prodigal son she can mother” (Millar 2016, 114). Millar’s novels are often told in large part from the detective’s

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point of view, as is also the case with many of Caspary’s books, including Bedelia and Laura, which is narrated in part by Detective Mark McPherson. Yet the male hero/detectives of the stories are men who are challenged to come to at least a partial understanding the perpetual sorrows of womanhood (compared, say, to the prototypically indifferent or misogynist hard-­ boiled detective, Sam Spade or Mike Hammer). Further, the marriages depicted in Caspary’s books are seldom happy marriages, nor were the books happy mystery novels. While noting the preponderation of “unhappy marriages based on sadomasochism,” in these later works, critic Gary Storhoff writes somewhat condescendingly that “Caspary herself seems unaware of the underlying sexual dynamics in Laura (and in most of her novels),” which ultimately “uphold society’s definitions of power relations between the sexes” (1994, 54). This is a judgment I will strongly refute (not least because it is a fairly lame invocation of the intentional fallacy). Though Laura does end with a seemingly conventional consummation of a romance, it is about a murdered woman who refuses to stay murdered and a man who falls in love with a painting. Such Pygmalion-esque weirdness abounds in much of her writing. Women who do marry often end up unhappy: the murderess in The Man who Loved His Wife (1966)—an intellectual married to a somewhat boorish businessman in the very sadomasochistic narrative that Storhoff flags— instructs her lawyer to use a “mercy killing” argument in her defense. The irony here is that it is unclear whether, in killing her increasingly abusive and jealous husband, who has been treated for “carcinoma of the larynx” (Caspary 1966, 8) and rendered both mute and impotent, she is being merciful to him or to herself. The plotting of the book—a murder designed to look like a suicide designed to look like a murder—is fairly ingenious. Murder is not quite an act of liberation, nor of self-articulation, though as a defiant and active refusal to be scripted into patriarchal narratives of upward mobility it registers as something more than a protest. Caspary consistently lampoons domestic economy as well the labor involved in the fabrication of women’s sexuality. Though the story is told exclusively from the male point of view, the work generates sympathy for Bedelia as “a woman whose various life stories are a fiction of her own design” (Saxton 2017, 76). Caspary was a lifelong advocate of free love. In Evvie (1960), for example, a work characterized by its frank depictions of women’s sexuality and birth control—or, more shockingly, Virginia Woolf would say—its unadulterated representation of female friendship, for those reasons, Evvie makes an interesting companion to the more

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celebrated The Group, which Mary McCarthy published three years later.7 According to critic Stefania Ciocia, Caspary destabilizes “the conventions of hard-boiled fiction and tough guy movies” (2018, 29) by presenting “fully-rounded” (2018, 29) female characters, in particular. Preminger’s film, she argues, displaces “Laura’s independence and agency, turning Caspary’s flesh-and-blood career woman into a striking but passive icon” (Ciocia 2018, 30). True, Caspary’s nuanced depictions of women offer considerably more complexity than the femme fatale stereotypes of noir. What is equally important is that, in Caspary’s writing, this complexity evolves everywhere in counterpoint with female roles that circulate in the popular culture. Moreover, if there is a good number of women who kill in Caspary’s novels, so too are there a significant number of writers. As Saxton points out, in her works Caspary insistently highlights the connection between the capacity to author one’s own life story and the capacity to write stories that represent a variety of female experiences” (2017, 76). Ironically enough, as Saxton notes, Bedelia was originally serialized in the woman’s journal Good Housekeeping (2017, 77). Recall that Caspary authored a dance manual, which is significant. She edited popular true-crime journals and self-help books about how to succeed in business. The “working girls” that populate Caspary’s dramas, screenplays, and novels tend to work as did Caspary herself, in the creative industries, in advertising, as magazine editors, proofreaders, Hollywood script-fixers. As Lauren Berlant points out, “advertising makes explicit the routes by which persons might individually and collectively give a name to their desire” (1997, 11). Madison Avenue, the Hollywood dream factory, popular fiction, trashy women’s journals or even respectable magazines for housewives: not only are these culture industries that articulate the nexus between intimacies and public identities, as Berlant asserts, they are industries where women found remunerative work as creative laborers and earn an independent living. And though he was not fully alert to the sexual and gender dimensions of 7  I will need to do more research to assess the extent to which McCarthy modeled her novel on Caspary’s work. The two writers were sometimes aligned with one another, as, for example, in a strikingly positive review of Evvie jointly with such other “new novels” as Raymond Williams’s Border Country and Margaret Laurence’s This Side Jordan in the New Statesman (November 19, 1960), reviewer Gerda Charles (pseudonym of the important Anglo-Jewish feminist writer Edna Lipson) opens with homage to McCarthy’s insistence on facticity. Evvie, a free-spirited painter, is killed by a resentful spurned male. The novel is an indictment of male resentment of economically and sexually independent women.

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the terrain, it was not for nothing that such post-war political theorists as C. Wright Mills looked to those cultural intellectuals to fabricate new cultural politics freed from the class dynamics of traditional Marxist understandings. Storytelling, even in these relatively genre-bound professions, provides a measure of autonomy as well as economic independence. There is a clear parallel to modes of literary self-fashioning to be found in popular thrillers, where murderous women variously perform and act out their discontent with the restricted sexual and social roles assigned them within heteronormative regimes. Pulp femininities, pulp virilities, pulp gender and sexualities are all the products of the increasingly hegemonic consumer ecologies of post-war American cultural life.

References Auden, Wystan Hugh. 1948. The Guilty Vicarage; Notes on the Detective story, by an Addict. Harper’s Magazine, May. Available online at: [Article] The Guilty Vicarage, By W.H. (Wystan Hugh) Auden | Harper’s Magazine (harpers.org). Belletto, Steven. 2020. The Beats: A Literary History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Berlant, Lauren. 1997. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham: Duke University Press. Bolin, Alice. 2018. Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession. New York: William Morrow. Born to Kill. 1947. Dir. Robert Wise. RKO Radio Pictures. Bronski, Michael. 2014. Gay Male and Lesbian Pulp Fiction and Mass Culture. In The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature, ed. E. McCallum and M. Tuhkanen, 677–694. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Caspary, Vera. 1929. The White Girl. New York: Grosset & Dunlap. ———. 1960. Evvie. New York: Harper & Bros. ———. 1966. The Man Who Loved His Wife. New York: Putnam’s. ———. 1979. The Secrets of Grown-ups. New York: McGraw-Hill. ———. 2004. Bedelia [1945]. New York: Feminist Press. Ciocia, Stefania. 2018. Hollywood and the Trailblazers of Domestic Noir: The Case of Vera Caspary’s Laura (1943). In Domestic Noir: The New Face of 21st Century Crime Fiction, ed. Laura Joyce and Henry Sutton, 27–49. Palgrave Macmillan. Deleuze, Gilles. 2004. The Philosophy of Crime Novels. Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974. Edited by David Lapoujade. Translated by Michael Taormina, 81–85. New York: Semiotext(e).

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Doane, Mary Ann. 1987. The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 940s. Bloomington: Indiana UP. ———. 1991. Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis [1986]. New York: Routledge. Goldberg, Jonathan. 2016. Melodrama: An Aesthetics of Impossibility. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press. Gunn, James. 1942. Deadlier than the Male. New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce. Hammett, Dashiell. 1992. The Maltese Falcon [1930]. New  York: Vintage/ Black Lizard. Huyssen, Andreas. 1986. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jones, Ann. 2009. Women Who Kill [1980]. New York: Feminist Press. Klein, Kathleen Gregory. 1995. The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. La Farge, Christopher. 1956. Mickey Spillane and His Bloody Hammer. In Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, ed. Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, 176–186. New York: Free Press. Martin, Angela. 1980. ‘Gilda Didn’t Do Any of Those Things You’ve Been Losing Sleep Over!’: The Central Women of 40s Films Noirs. In Women in Film Noir, ed. E. Ann Kaplan, 202–228. London: BFI. Maury, Cristelle, and David Roche. 2020. Introduction. In Women Who Kill: Gender and Sexuality in Film and Series of the Post-Feminist Era, 1–30. London: Bloomsbury. McLuhan, Marshall. 1946. Footsteps in the Sands of Crime. The Sewanee Review. 54 (4): 617–634. Millar, Margaret. 2016. Collected Millar: The Master at Her Zenith (Vanish in an Instant, Wives and Lovers, Beast in View, An Air that Kills, The Listening Walls). New York: Syndicate Books. Naremore, James. 2019. Film Noir: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Orwell, George. 1956. Raffles and Miss Blandish. In Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, ed. Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, 154–164. New York: Free Press. Peters, Fiona. 2018. The Literary Antecedents of Domestic Noir. In Domestic Noir: The New Face of 21st Century Crime Fiction, ed. Laura Joyce and Henry Sutton, 11–25. Palgrave Macmillan. Rabinowitz, Paul. 2014. American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1946. American Novelists in French Eyes. The Atlantic Monthly, August: 114–118.

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Saxton, K.T. 2017. Vera Caspary’s Bedelia: Murder as a Domestic Art, or Lethal Home Economics. In Bad Girls and Transgressive Women in Popular Television, Fiction, and Film, ed. Julie A. Chappell and Mallory Young, 75–95. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Sonnet, Esther. 2010. Why Film Noir? Hollywood, Adaptation, and Women’s Writing of the 1940s and 1950s. Adaptation 4 (1): 1–13. Spillane, Mickey. 1987. I, the Jury [1947]. New York: Signet. Storhoff, Gary. 1994. Vera Caspary. In Great Women Mystery Writers: Classic to Contemporary, ed. Kathleen Gregory Klein, 53–56. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Walton, Priscilla, and Manina Jones. 1999. Detective Agency: Women Re-writing the Hard-Boiled Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press. Woolrich, Cornell. 2021. The Bride Wore Black [1940]. New  York: Penzler Publishers.

CHAPTER 4

Run Man Run: Black Urban Crime Fiction in the 1960s and 1970s

As Raymond Williams succinctly observes in The Country and The City (1973), “the perception of the new qualities of the modern city” were “associated from the beginning, with a man walking, as if alone, in its streets” (1973, 280). A lot hinges on the isolation of the walker: bereft, displaced, uprooted, or alienated, to use the once voguish term, he—and I’ll accentuate the masculine, for this chapter—is compelled to cobble together an invented, highly mediated community, mediated by print and other cultural technologies (cinema, radio, phonograph). The city has long been a core problem of literature, and modern literature in particular. The great modern tradition is city-writing: think of Baudelaire’s flaneur, about which Walter Benjamin has written so eloquently. Another prime example is James Joyce’s Ulysses (1918–1922), whose hero wanders the streets of Dublin in a quest for self-understanding. Teju Cole’s much celebrated Open City (2011) adapts pretty much the same narrative formula as Joyce, a century after. We could probably turn that formula on its head and say that writing has been the great problem of the urban. I don’t believe a sociologist of the city like Georg Simmel would find that too wild a proposition, nor most urban theorists—not Guy Debord, nor Michel de Certeau, nor, in the United States, Lewis Mumford, author of The City in History (1961), who began his career as a literary critic, and who saw in metropolitan sprawl a whole civilization “become progressively more empty and trivial, more infantile and primitive, more barbarous and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Redding, Pulp Virilities and Post-War American Culture, Renewing the American Narrative, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09054-7_4

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massively irrational” (1963, 554). With Mumford’s bleak, fairly paranoid take on urban sprawl, however, I am starting to home in a little more on the topic for this chapter, which is the transformations of the post-war American city, particularly into the 60s and after, and the implications for Black pulp fiction.

Mean Streets: Urban Paranoia and Persecution The late novelist Larry McMurtry, thinking of Hank Williams and other midcentury performers of what came anachronistically to be labeled “country and western,” has claimed that post-war “hillbilly music is a music of estrangement, the estrangement of a country people who have moved to the city and not found the city good” (1968, 76). I think that, in mythic terms, this is a truism that can be applied to a considerable amount of American cultural production over the course of the twentieth century, particularly if you expand the scope of “moving people” to include immigrants and Blacks. For African Americans, the Great Migration to the cities of the American Northeast and Midwest, a purported escape from the horrors of the Jim Crow South in the 1890s, constitutes a defining collective history that over-determines modern American cultural production. And not just Black cultural production; it was Bluesman Rufus “TeeTot” Payne, legendarily, who gifted us with Hank Williams, which raises questions not only of cultural appropriation but of the difficulty Black performers had maintaining intellectual and financial control over their works in white-dominated culture industries and a segregated marketplace. With the ascendency of Williams, for example, post-war “country music” came to be dominated almost exclusively by white performers and marketed to a white working-class audience, and Black contributions to the genre were systematically airbrushed from the chronicle. This problem could be particularly acute in publishing, especially after the “vogue” for Black writing (to use Langston Hughes’s term) was eclipsed. The careers of so many luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance went into tailspin by the mid-1930s, and Hughes, Chester Himes, and others have described the difficulty of finding an audience, let alone making a living. Much as they tried, neither Hughes nor Himes could make a steady living as a Black writer in a racist Hollywood market, and Himes’s own notoriously tempestuous relations with his American publishers provide further testimony. Most decidedly that sense of displacement and disorientation applies to urban crime writing. Set on the mean streets of the crowded city, suspense

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thrillers can, with their disorienting urban and moral landscapes, I think, be productively read as allegories of mass population displacement. This is a fact that might explain the remarkable global resurgence of the genre in the twenty-first century, when, in the estimation of most cultural historians, it had died (unnoticed, effectively un-mourned) as a popular American subgenre sometime between 1960 and 1963. The city is differently “not good,” however, at different historical junctures, and for its different denizens. Much of the literature of the Harlem Renaissance, for example, sifted through the prospects and pitfalls of city life. Assessments of Harlem as the capital of Black culture ranged from the cosmopolitan utopianism of Alain Locke to the sternly dystopic queer melodrama of Angelina Grimké. Tracking the evolving literary ethos of post-war culture alongside the rapidly changing post-war urban landscapes, critic Elizabeth A. Wheeler notes: The World War II armed forces served as a “giant centrifuge,” shaking up and rearranging all American culture. Troop deployments, the defense industry, and the removal of all West Coast Japanese Americans caused massive flows of populations in and out of American cities. This mobilization broke down regional differences and sparked a new postwar interest in relocation (and, of course, relocation was not a matter of choice for Japanese Americans). GI benefits for mortgages and higher education, new suburbs and new freeways made massive relocation possible. The postwar era saw a simultaneous opening-up and closing-down of public spaces and civil liberties. With the 1950s came a greatly intensified racial segregation and the worst repression of gays and lesbians in U.S. history but also the birth of the civil rights movement and the modern gay community. (2001, 9)

For Wheeler, these contradictions emerge in literary imaginary as an imagined “City of Dread,” with its new mixing of people and fears of violence: the split between new suburbs and more tightly knit ethnic enclaves, barrios, and ghettos. Those factors all inform the changing emotional resonance as well as the geographical locales of post-war crime thrillers. Consider ex-cop Cliff Bartells, protagonist of John D. MacDonald’s inaugural crime thriller The Brass Cupcake (1950). Bartells, like so many of the heroes we have encountered, is afflicted with pulp virility. “One of those men who always plots himself as the hero of a very bitter James M. Cain novel” (2013, 46), he has been drummed from the police force for being too honest and is now working as an insurance adjustor. His beat is the fictional resort town of

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Florence City, Florida. Something about the city has changed, Bartells ruminates, with the post-war real estate boom, the injection of big money, and the incursion of big mafia: Before the war Florence City was a quiet middle-class resort. But the war expanded the field of endeavor. Gambling houses, breast of guinea hen under glass, seagoing yachts from Havana, seventy-dollar night-club tabs for a quiet dinner for two—with the appropriate wines, of course. The bakers from Dayton and the shoe clerks from Buffalo still came down, but the high rentals had shoved them inland off the beaches, in as far as the swamps and the mangroves and the range-juice factories. A new group had taken over the beaches. Middle-aged ladies with puffy faces and granite eyes brought down whole stables of hundred-dollar call girls, giggling like a sorority on a social welfare trip. But the rate was bumped to two hundred to over the higher cost of accommodations and traveling expenses. Sleek little men with hand-blocked sports shirts strolled around and made with the Bogart gestures. Boom town, fun town, money town, rough town. Lay it on the line. You can take it with you. Next year comes the H bomb. Put it on the travel account. (MacDonald 2013, 14)

MacDonald’s setting is his adopted home state Florida, whose landscape of unbridled and mercenary wildcat capitalism proved fertile ground for his numerous hard-boiled thrillers and, later, his popular Travis McGee series of crime novels. But the notes he sounds here are typical of so many thrillers of the time, as we have already witnessed in Chap. 2. With what you might call the anxiety of abundance, the protagonists of these works experience a sense not only of alienation in the modern city, but persecution. If the American dream has become real, one reasons, why has it not extended its largesse to me? And we will see in post-war works in particular, a discernable change in the affective depiction of American city life. My hypothesis, put crudely, is that the modern city of the early twentieth century, as represented primarily in naturalist and high modernist writing, is typically figured as a place of generalized if often vitalizing alienation. In the popular cultural productions after the second world war, by contrast, the landscape of the post-war “city” mutates to become a place of distinct persecution; a more or less anonymous affect of urban dread is transformed into a distinctly personal sense that one is directly targeted, and the Joycean quest of the protagonist for an elusive self-knowledge devolves into a pell-mell

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scramble for an equally elusive survival. “Next year comes the H bomb”; clearly our uneasy entry into the precarity of the atomic age shaped new urban anxieties in distinct ways, as it was the large cities that, presumably, would be targeted and destroyed in a nuclear war or accident. The scale of the imagined destruction was terrifying, and withered any masculinist pretense to autonomy or individual agency. But it wasn’t just the bomb that was to blame. The perils of the urban accentuated the menace. Without flattening out regional differences (between the heartland, the rust belt, the South, California), and remaining duly attentive to the local particularities, to racial, ethnic, and gender experiential distinctions, we can nonetheless suggest that these shifts are subject to and overdetermined by the familiar structural transformations of the post-war city. The characters and plots depicted in so many popular midcentury representations are firmly if tangentially attached to concomitant stresses of suburbanization, the consequent expansion of automobile culture and federal commitments to the new, gigantic interstate system, the shift to televisual paradigms of entertainment, all the social technologies of disaggregation, the growing hegemony of a specifically “corporate” capitalism, the ideological fantasy of the erosion of class in American life, and, overarchingly, the more or less systemic and conspiratorial forms of racial apartheid in the real estate market, social institutions, and urban geographies that crystalized in the production of the so-called inner city, where populations exiled from the post-war boom became increasingly concentrated. Further, the change can be traced in a series of formal concatenations. Northrop Frye, whose Anatomy of Criticism (1957) is very much of the same cultural moment, would call this a move from a high mimetic to a low mimetic and, ultimately, an ironic fictional mode. Most famously, perhaps, it has been traced in the change from an assured first-person narrative voice governing traditional hard-boiled novels and film—think of the swagger with which Raymond Chandler endows Marlowe—to the disorientating voiceover that characterizes so many post-war noir productions; think of Sunset Boulevard (1950), a tale told in voiceover by a corpse. And, as we have already seen, this disorientation has everything to do with an American manhood seemingly out of joint. Noting a significant “cultural preoccupation with what to do with the returning veteran,” critic Leo Braudy has observed that the expanding market for paperback fiction of the fifties was driven by “soldiers without guns in real life read[ing] about dicks with guns in detective novels, seeking revenge on an uncaring or

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hostile world for their murdered friends, their lost values, their own words” (2003, 499). While fantasies of power and retributive cosmic justice are, to be sure, at work in “escapist” formula fictions, we can complicate this picture by noting how many significant works of the late 1940s and 1950s were clear-cut allegories of persecution and paranoia. Accordingly, as so many critics and historians have noted, the popular crime fiction of the era undergoes a shift from a “hard-boiled” sensibility, where the detective functions as a Chandler-esque modern-day knight errant, to the noir form. Post-war noir focuses on the existential, perceptual, and epistemological crisis of the protagonist, who is neither certifiably hero nor fully villain, but who is everywhere (in works of both highbrow and popular culture) on the lam. Think too of the opening of François Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player (1960) where a pursued man runs pell-mell through the darkened streets, in fear for his life. Truffaut based that film on the fiction of American writer David Goodis, primarily Down There (1956), though Truffaut shoehorns in a few scenes from Goodis’s other books. Most all of those books are about men being hunted down; they all center around the same primal scene of persecution.1 In 1965, just before he himself died after being beaten up in a street robbery in Philadelphia, Goodis had sued United Artists/ABC, producers of television serial The Fugitive (1963–1967) for stealing plot of Dark Passage (1946). The basis for the 1947 Bogart Lauren Bacall film, Dark Passage had been his most famous work and successful work. In a case of what might best be termed art intimidating life, however, the producers countered that they had based the plot of the poplar serial on the notorious Sam Sheppard uxoricide case. Put even more crudely, my thesis is this: if the motif or formula of high modernist urban literature (e.g., Joyce) is “walk man walk,” the formula of popular post-war pulp and noir writing is “Run Man Run.”

Walkers and Runners: Chester Himes Which brings us to Chester Himes, who has gifted me the title for this chapter, which is taken from his early (and relatively understudied), bleakly comic Harlem thriller, Run Man Run (1959/1966). Run Man Run is 1  Sheppard, a Cleveland neurosurgeon, was convicted of the July 4, 1954, murder of his wife, Marilyn Sheppard, though he steadfastly maintained his innocence. He was acquitted in a second trial, a decade later in 1966.

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variously dated 1959 and 1966; an early draft was translated into French by Pierre Verrier and published as Dare-dare (Double-quick Time) by Gallimard as part of its Série Noire. The first English edition, by Putnam’s, appeared in 1966.2 Himes was living in Paris and found a large and receptive French audience for his Harlem thrillers. Himes’s writing is situated at the confluence of Black literary tradition and hard-boiled crime fiction, leavened (as with so many of his contemporaries) by existentialism and his disillusionment with the promises of radical labor over the previous two decades. Himes’s crime fiction is somewhat less obviously surreal than other post-war crime writers (say Jim Thompson), insofar as the narrator or narrative voice is seldom schizophrenic. The implied narrator of a Himes novel is perfectly reliable; it is the urban landscape that is violently unhinged. Such earlier novels as If He Hollers, Let Him Go (1945) or The Lonely Crusade (1947) had been largely naturalist in approach, and Himes’s earlier style even might be characterized as a variant of “socialist realism.” When Himes turned to detective fiction in the mid-1950s, at the behest of his French publishers and because he was starving, he melded a cantankerous, grotesque surrealism to that fundamentally rationalist and critical methodological approach.3 Run Man Run tells the perpetually tragic American tale of the police murder of young Black men. Witness to an “accidental” police shooting of Black workers, the novel’s protagonist, Jimmy Johnson, finds himself being hunted down by a bent white cop, named (appropriately, even inevitably) Detective Walker. The character of Walker, as critic Stephen Soitos points out, is rendered as a “vicious parody of the prototypical hard-boiled hero” (1996, 41). Told partly from Walker’s point of view, and partly from that of another white colleague in the police force, Run, Man, Run, as critic Justin Gifford has perceptively argued, “showcases how racist violence and the containment of urban minorities underwrite the apparently 2  For a detailed precis of the complicated publishing history, see chapter five, “The Continental Entertainer,” of Stephen F. Millikin’s Chester Himes: A Critical Appraisal (1976, Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press). Himes recounts part of this history as well in his autobiography, My Life of Absurdity: The Later Years (1972. New York: Paragon, 1976). The most recent of three biographies of Himes is by Lawrence P. Jackson, Chester B. Himes: A Biography (2017, New York: Norton). 3  Though he does not address the writing of Himes, historian Robin D.G. Kelley’s The Black Radical Imagination (2002, Boston: Beacon Press) includes an excellent discussion of the importance surrealist aesthetics to the project of Black liberation globally and in North America.

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disinterested art of detection and city planning” (2010b, 39). It is a drama of “Urban Renewal,” which effectively dispossessed Black communities. I want to highlight a counter-moment in the novel, however, which points to the ambivalent persistence and resistance of threatened community. As Jimmy recounts things, he finds that, while other Blacks (and even most whites) “believe” him, few people are willing to fully “credit” his story. The old story of the police murder of Black men is an everyday truth, which remains nonetheless unutterable; it is a commonplace that saturates the culture, but which has no official status as a sayable truth. Jimmy laments: “a goddamn drunk cop murders two porters and … I’m not supposed to talk about it because he’s white and it might prejudice the civil rights movement” (Himes 1969, 75). Jimmy, who is, importantly, a southerner by birth and a newcomer to Harlem, looks (with ambivalent success) for refuge among his community and for solace in a Black cultural tradition: He went out and stopped next door to read the titles of books by colored authors in the showcase of the hotel bookstore. Black No More, by George Schuyler, he read; Black Thunder, by arna bontemps [sic]; The Blacker the Berry, by Wallace Thurman; Black Metropolis, by Cayton and Drake; Black Boy, by Richard Wright; Banana Bottom, by Claude McKay; The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, by James Weldon Johnson; The Conjure-Man Dies, by Rudolph Fisher, Not Without Laughter, by Langston Hughes. Suddenly he felt safe. There, in the heart of the Negro community, he was lulled into a sense of absolute security. He was surrounded by black people who talked his language and thought his thoughts; he was served by black people in businesses catering to black people; he was presented with the literature of black people. Black was a big word in Harlem. No wonder so many Negro people desired their own neighborhood, he thought. They felt safe; there was safety in numbers. The idea of a white maniac hunting him down to kill him seemed as remote as yesterday’s dream. (Himes 1969, 152)

There is a lot going on in this passage. Clearly the past and future purpose of Black writing is on Himes’s mind; he wrote Run Man Run while at a crossroads in his career when he was torn between trying to continue with his ambitious literary writing (for which there was little market) and churning out the successful paperback thrillers that were proving successful and lucrative. These are all classics of the Harlem Renaissance and after;

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it is important that this bookstore preserves a literary canon that had been largely scanted by white tastemakers and white cultural institutions. Most of the titles are works that involve fictional or sociological assessments of Black urban life. Bontemp’s Black Thunder (1936) is a historical novel about a slave uprising; the novels by Hughes (1930) and McKay (1933) treat the conflict between cosmopolitan and rural small-town Black experience in Kansas and Jamaica, respectively; Thurman’s (1929) novel assesses Black life in Boise, Idaho, Los Angeles, and Harlem. Importantly, Fisher’s The Conjure-Man Dies, is generally considered the first mystery novel penned by a Black American author;4 it grafts ribald vignettes of Harlem street life to a Victorian-style “locked-room” puzzle in an entertaining fashion that would serve as a model for Himes.5 Notably, no books by women are part of the catalog.6 As critic Alice Mikal Craven observes, Run Man Run “epitomizes the dichotomous nature of Himes’s thought: his firm belief that the mass readership wanted to see the black man depicted as a victim, incapable of overcoming his obstacles, and his equal and compelling desire to avoid giving in to this generic expectation” (2007, 50). Jimmy is both, of course; and Himes’s better-known urban crime fiction that featured black Harlem police detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones would effectively enable Himes to split the difference. What is at stake, ultimately, is the struggle to claim cultural rights in the city, here joined inextricably to the drama of struggle for rights to the street. Jimmy goes looking for a gun with which to defend himself; Jimmy goes looking for a cultural narrative in which he can embed his own story. The bookstore window scene “firmly locates Himes as the keystone in the arch of Black detective 4  Soitos contests the notion that The Conjure-Man Dies is the first Black-authored detective fiction; earlier models include Pauline Hopkins’s Hagar’s Daughter: A Story of Southern Caste Prejudice and an unfinished serial novel by John Edward Bruce, The Black Sleuth, which, beginning in 1907 appeared in McGirt’s Magazine, a Black journal published in Philadelphia between 1903 and 1909 (1996, 76). Additionally, while there seem to have been no identifiable Black authors in the golden age of pulp magazines (1920–1940), though there were Black detectives and characters, often deployed for comic and/or racist purposes. 5  The Conjure-Man Dies has been reissued in 2021 by HarperCollins. 6  According to Soitos, Black women began to write mystery novels only in the 1990s. Dolores Como’s Clio Browne (1988) is the first, though such writers as Toni Morrison and Ann Petry deployed many popular tropes (1996, 226). Even so, Himes’s pointed omission from this catalog of such notable and at one time popular Harlem Renaissance authors as Zora Neale Hurston, Jessie Fauset, and Nella Larsen is telling.

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fiction” (128), according to Soitos’s discerning reading of Run Man Run in his essential study The Blues Detective (1996), a much more firmly established tradition than is typically acknowledged. For Soitos, Run Man Run focuses on the ambivalent prospect of “African American survival” (1996, 165). Jimmy “futilely tries to outwit the power and control of white authority” (Soitos 1996, 164). Deciding that he can only rely on himself, Jimmy purchases a gun and plans to murder Walker. This scene is an allegory of “self-empowerment” (1996, 166), as Soitos asserts, although it would be suicidal at another but equally inevitable level were Jimmy in fact to murder a white policeman. Jimmy whiffs his showdown, which “symbolically … takes place at 149th Street and Broadway in the heart of Harlem” (Soitos 1996, 164). And Walker, expectedly, is a better shot (putting the lie to the right-makes might-makes-white logic of the standard pulp virilities we have been concerned with). Ultimately, it is the intercession of a benevolent white policeman who eventually saves the day; there are limits to self-empowerment through violence. From Edgar Allan Poe on, crime fiction has largely told the story of white supremacy. In contradistinction to the rugged individualism espoused by hard-boiled protagonists, whose adventures are most typically recounted in first person, consequently, Soitos notes that Black-­ authored depictions of “nonstandard detectives” are typically written in third person: “Black detectives are intimately connected to their surroundings, often involved in family relations, certainly deeply committed to exploring the meaning of blackness in the text” (Soitos 1996, 31). This devotion to community is, for Soitos, the first of four defining features of a distinctively Black detective in the development of American crime ­writing. While Himes’s absurdist, chaotic, and surreal works provide cover for him to deliver “political and social statements in what was generally considered a low form of popular culture” (Soitos 1996, 124), other ­characteristic features include what Soitos terms a process of “DoubleConsciousness Detection.” This he characterizes as works in which the heroes (like Himes’s Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones) are both inside and outside of power hegemon, as the genre becomes thematically concerned with disguise and doubling and typically depicts the detective as a trickster figure and folk hero. Typically, too, Black crime writing will celebrate a Black vernacular, claims Soitos, as “expressive arts of black Americans … [are] derived from the folk tradition” (Soitos 1996, 37) along with

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Hoodoo, “indigenous, syncretic religions of African Americans in the New World,” and  “alternative worldviews” (1996, 42). This upsets the ideological logic of mystery genre itself, as it raises the question of other ways of knowing than traditional ratiocination (inductive or deductive logic) typically at heart of detective fiction. Ultimately, for Soitos, Black detective fiction involves the wholesale rejection of Anglo-Saxon morality. Himes “was the first Black detective novelist to portray the desperate and deadly side of the African American community,” notes Soitos (1996, 135). In Urban Underworlds Thomas Heise argues, American narratives produce “an affective geography by encoding for readers very abstract processes of capitalist development as dramatic stories of embattled communities that are struggling to redefine themselves” (2011, 10). However, often the drama in such works hinges upon the ambivalent relationship between protagonist and a community that is present but—under the pressures of the rapidly changing post-war urban environment, under the pressures of the blistering and community-destroying American racial history—elusive. In post-war noir film and cinema, the dominant imagined scenario of the city is the terrain of the fugitive. The books of Chester Himes which feature protagonists who are pursued, hunted, threatened, depict the evisceration of both geographic sense and precarious communal relations in the de-industrializing, over-policed, and racially stratified postwar city. Himes’s narrative of the police murder of Black lives and the fragile durability of Black resistance has a resolute currency, of course. Like so many young Black men, in the face of this violence, Jimmy is primarily tasked to elude, to survive, rather than to know, master, or contemplate. His quest to draw sustenance from community, therefore, is rendered doubly difficult. If there can be no trust in law enforcement, it is also at times the urban environment that can be another source of alienation, or even persecution. As Wheeler contends, “Himes’s rewriting of the noir suggest an alternative city model beyond lone masculinity, even within the alienated phallocentricity of noir discourse” (2001, 20). Yet the solace of community can be rendered ephemeral, remote, inaccessible—and yet urgently necessary as a matter of simple survival, urgently necessary as cultural and historical legacy in a world that has so long worked to systematically strip Black culture of its communal history.

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Promised Land: The L.A. Street Fiction of Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines The protagonist of Donald Goines’s Street Players (1973), a down-on-his-­ luck pimp, “Earl the Black Pearl” and his lover, the prostitute Vickie, dream of a better life in sunny California: “I’m taking you cross country, baby. Just you and me—and let you party a little bit. You know, show up the square bitches and all that shit. Just you and me, baby. This time next month we should be on our way to California” (2008a, 171). Chuck Berry sings about the same California dream: “I left my home in Norfolk Virginia,” begins Berry’s iconic “Promised Land,” “California on my mind.” Set to the tune of “The Wabash Cannonball,” and released in 1964, Berry’s iconic anthem about freedom, American promise, and the appeal of the West Coast to African Americans was initially drafted some years earlier, in 1960. At the time, Berry was imprisoned in Springfield Missouri, in violation of the Mann Act for the rape and interstate transport of a young indigenous female, fourteen-year-old Janice Escalanti. The Mann Act, aka the “White Slave Traffic Act,” passed in 1910, made the interstate transport of “any woman or girl for the purposes of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose” a felony. It was applied to police instances of polygamy, pedophilia, and miscegenation. Notice the emphasis on race; the law was invoked disproportionately to target African American males. Berry’s case involved a fourteen-year-old, Janice Escalante (or Escalanti, also known by her “Indian name” of Heba Norine), of Mescalero Apache and Yuma descent, whom he brought from Juarez, Mexico, to work in his nightclub in St Louis, raping her an alleged fourteen times en route.7 It is significant that Berry wrote this when he was in prison; presumably he was browsing the prison’s atlas of America, dreaming of freedom, hence the cities named in the itinerary. Our theme is California and the promise it represents, but also sexual crimes and the ways in which they are racially over-coded in the American justice system, incarceration, what’s available on the shelves of prison libraries. Pimping, illicit sexuality, incarceration, the racism of the American justice system, and the elusive dream of California will all figure as themes in 7  While Berry skirts the details in his own 1987 autobiography, a fuller recounting of this ugly episode can be found in chapters seven through ten of Bruce Pegg’s unauthorized biography of Berry, Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry (2002, New York: Routledge).

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the second half of this chapter. Dennis Chester makes explicit the link between earlier pulp fiction and the novels of Slim and Goines, pointing out that “crime fiction maintained a significant audience in African American communities” (2011, 96). Moreover, from Cain to Chandler, California and Los Angeles in particular had been central to the fabrication of noir sensibilities. As critic David Fine notes in his introduction to Los Angeles in Fiction (1984), “For West, Cain, Fitzgerald, McCoy and others, Los Angeles could not serve as setting for the American dream. … Writing against the myth of El Dorado, they transformed it into its antithesis. … The tension between myth and antimyth, between southern California as the place of the fresh start and as the scene of the disastrous finish recurs in almost all the fiction” (1984, 23). Mike Davis, too, in City of Quartz (1990) accentuates the “sinister” dimensions of California noir (1990, 38). Wheeler’s estimates that “the huge movement of population into and out of wartime Los Angeles serves as a model of postwar cities to come” (2001, 21), particularly in terms of the allure it held—and the promises it failed to keep—for the millions of Black Americans who migrated there from the South and Midwest. If we couple that insight to Julian Murphet’s assertion in Literature and Race in Los Angeles (2001) that neo-noir, in the hands of Black authors, has both reinvigorated the genre and worked to bring out the racial dimensions of noir pessimism that were always present (if typically disavowed), as we have seen, in the film and fiction, we might understand why L.A. figures so largely in the development of Black urban crime writing. However, nearly all the critical commentary on L.A. fiction and Black noir focuses on the writing of Chester Himes and, somewhat later, Walter Mosley.8 Both are admittedly giants, but so too are Iceberg Slim and Goines, two of the best-selling Black writers ever, whose urban crime fiction owes a great deal to the tradition of pulp virilities we have been examining. In turn, critics of Goines and Slim have almost entirely scanted their later works, set in California, an oversight I would like to begin to redress in what follows. A trigger warning might be necessary as we turn our attention to writing of Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines. Some of the materials we will be 8  See, for example, Ralph Willett’s otherwise brilliant discussion of Black Los Angeles in chapter two of his study The Naked City: Urban Crime Fiction in the USA (1996, Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press). The omission of Slim and Goines in so many critical histories overlooks what I will argue is the key moment in the literature, and frankly, reflects the biases of a largely white critical establishment that is devoted to hard-boiled, pulp, noir, and crime writing.

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considering are fairly vile, smutty if not downright pornographic. They are, like so much of the pulp and paperback fiction we have been considering, decidedly, resolutely misogynistic. Our considerations might trespass once again into arenas that have become rife with offensive forms of racial and sexual stereotyping. For reasons that will become clear, I want to focus on the noir variant writings of Robert Beck, better known as his literary persona, Iceberg Slim,9 whose early work has of late begun to receive substantial critical attention as an early creator of Black pulp fiction. His posthumous publications, set in Los Angeles, have garnered literally no critical commentary whatsoever, however, nor is his work typically considered in the context of earlier pulp and noir writing by white authors, though I believe there are clear affinities to the tradition. Further, like Himes, he helped to inspire a new generation of Black crime writers and poets, including Donald Goines, whose fiction I will also consider below, and Gil Scott-Heron, whose debut novel The Vulture (1970) was a murder mystery. Scott-Heron’s rather ingeniously constructed novel about young activists, scholars, drug-dealers, and aspiring hard-guys navigating adolescence on the streets of Manhattan, is told from multiple perspectives. The novel pays expect homage to the hard-boiled tradition: “In truth, I was Humphrey Bogart” (Scott-Heron 2010, 25), notes the narrator of the opening section, whose nickname “Spade” owes as much to his mimicry of the protagonists of The Maltese Falcon as it does to his racial identity. The book’s title, The Vulture, recalls Hammett’s avian imagery, even as it is a self-conscious play on Gil-Scott-Heron’s own surname. Most all of the narrators are characterized by their nicknames: Spade (Edward Percy Shannon) is the tough guy, the role model for the younger “Junior “Jones, aspiring hard guy. “Afro” is the nickname of Brother Tommy Hall, a Black nationalist militant, while the designated poet intellectual of the group of friends, Ivan Quinn, is monikered “I.Q.” Scott-Heron’s developing revolutionary aesthetic, one that will transform Black poetic and musical production in the decades to follow, has deep and solid roots in pulp virilities. In his breakthrough study of the genre, Pimping Fictions (2013), critic Justin Gifford underscores the double-sided political valence of popular culture, especially Black crime fiction: “the paperback novels written by 9  I will use the name “Robert Beck” when referring to the biographical person, and “Iceberg Slim” when referring to Beck in his capacity as the author of the texts as well as in his public persona.

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African American criminals and prisoners in years after World War II (2013, 2), including those by Himes, Robert Beck, and Donald Goines, most prominently, alongside later street fiction by such writers as Joseph Nazel, Odie Hawkins, Wanda Coleman, Vickie Stringer, Sister Souljah, and Nikki Turner.10 Set in “prisons, housing projects, urban streets,” and thematizing urban renewal, white flight, the prison system, the federal housing authority, and redlining in real estate, these works recount the double-bind of Black urban post-war life, Gifford contends, insofar as they are “whiteconstructed spaces of containment” (2013, 3). And so too does life on these mean streets replicate or parody racial capitalism. Pimping offers “a useful symbolic system for comprehending the black artist’s precarious position in the commercial marketplace” (2013, 3). What Gifford terms a “pimp poetics” containing “contradictory subversive and conservative energies” has a “troubled relationship to African American cultural and political movements” (2013, 41), even as the pimp recalibrates the bad man character as resistant to white hegemony, an “African American antihero that can be traced back to the ballads of Stagolee” (2013, 4). Though best known for his writings about pimps, prostitutes, and con men set in the cities of the American Midwest (Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee), Beck moved to Los Angeles in 1961, where he initially took up writing in collaboration with his common-law wife, Betty Mae Shew. Their jointly produced autobiography of Slim, Pimp (1967), marketed initially as interracial smut by the adult publishing firm, Holloway House, became instead a surprise bestseller. It was sold at “liquor stores, barber shops, and newsstands in inner city communities across America” (2013, 48). Beck’s writing draws on a number of sources. Earlier fictional pimps include Jericho Jones—Jerco, for short—in Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928), Boots Smith in Ann Petry’s The Street (1946), and of course, Rinehart in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). (Though it seems unlikely that they knew each other very well, Beck attended Tuskegee Institute at the same time as Ellison.) Although no doubt influenced by these, as well as by pulp literature, Pimp introduced a unique new streetwise voice, marked by pyrotechnic idiomatic vernacular grafted to Chandler-esque similes. The same could be said of Hubert Selby Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964) and Piri Thomas’s pulp-inflected Down These 10  Apart from Gifford’s discussion, the genre has not yet fully received the critical attention it merits. One notable exception is the anthology Street Lit: Representing the Urban Landscape, edited by Keenan Norris (2014, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press).

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Mean Streets (1967). Published by Knopf, Thomas’s memoir, though controversial, received a much warmer welcome from the white critical establishment than did Slim’s. Pimp opens like any pulp thriller, but with a difference: “Dawn was breaking as the big Hog scooted through the streets. My five whores were chattering like drunk magpies. I smelled the stink that only a street whore has after a long, busy night. The inside of my nose was raw. It happens when you are a pig for snorting cocaine” (Beck 2011, ix). His follow-up novels, Trick Baby (1967) and Mama Black Widow: A Story of the South’s Black Underworld (1969), along with a collection of essays, The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim (1971), according to Gifford, “created an entirely new niche market of black readers by building literary cultures in state and federal prison libraries and on military bases” (2013, 48–49). On the strength of Slim’s sales and those of his disciple, Donald Goines, who in his four year tenure as an author, penned sixteen best-selling titles for the press, beginning with Dopefiend (1971) and Whoreson (1972), Holloway transformed itself into a major disseminator of a new genre: “the black experience novel” (Gifford 2013, 49). Trick Baby was adapted as a “Blaxploitation” film in 1972 and distributed by Universal Pictures with relative success. Though largely ignored by both the Black and the white critical establishment, Beck found himself something of a celebrity in the L.A. area. He made the album, Reflections (1976), recorded with the Red Holloway Quintet. Beck’s star began to fade, however. Both Long White Con (1977), the sequel to Trick Baby, and Death Wish: A Story of the Mafia (1977) sold well enough, but Beck, exploited by his publisher, saw little of the profits. His marriage to Shew dissolved in 1978. A story collection, Airtight Willie and Me (1985) was the last piece he would publish in his lifetime. Critical consensus is that his last three works were nowhere near the standard of his first ones. Kinohi Nishikawa goes so far as to claim that “whereas the sleaze confessional gave him license to speak with a bravado that was florid but pointed, the ‘short story toast,’ so to speak, restricted his voice to a hall of racial masks. … This is why no-one talks about Slim’s late fiction. The collected stories Airtight Willie and Me (1979) and two novels from 1977—Death Wish, a mafia novel, and Long White Con, the sequel to Trick Baby—seem regrettable, as though they were written by a different author” (Nishikawa 2018, 203). But Beck lived in Los Angeles until his death in 1992 and continued to write. In his later years, Beck turned his creative gaze upon his adopted

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city, producing (alongside numerous stories and essays), along with three late novels late set in L.A.: Doom Fox (1978/1998), a sprawling panoramic study of the Black community along the Central Avenue corridor after World War II (with an introduction by Tracy “Ice-T” Marrow); Shetani’s Sister (1983/2015), a hyperviolent crime thriller pitting a shrewd pimp against a tough white vice squad police officer; and Night Train to Sugar Hill (1990/2019, with Justin Gifford), an auto-fictional recounting of his relationship with heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson and an indictment of Reagan-era racism during the decade’s crack epidemic. Though he was the top-selling Black author of his time, because of his distrust of his publisher, Holloway House, none of these books appeared during Beck’s lifetime. Nonetheless, I believe that his creative work in Los Angeles deserves sustained critical attention as an important thematic variation on pulp virilities, due in part to Slim’s central role in the controversial development of contemporary “street literature,” not to mention his influence as a cultural godfather upon west coast gangsta rap culture. Reportedly Ice-T and Ice Cube, who both grew up in Crenshaw reading Slim’s work, “chose their monikers in honor of” him (Gifford, “Foreword” to Shetani’s Sister, 2015b, vii). Further, these late works merit consideration in their own right, as compelling representations of South Central and Crenshaw neighborhoods reflect a distinct social geography and constitute as well a distinct urban aesthetic. The problem was not simply that, as writer, he was no longer at the top of his game. Rather, Iceberg Slim’s moment—a distinctly important moment in American cultural history when radical Black tradition (cross -fertilized by pulp and noir sensibilities) powerfully inflected American cultural production at large—had passed. As critic Bonnie Rhee Andryeyev has argued of Slim’s work (and that of Goines), “the protagonists … reveal ghetto epistemology through the figures of the pimp, the con man, and the drug lord. Throughout their works, Goines and Slim utilize these popular urban icons as truth tellers of the black ghetto whose characters actively perform and intimate knowledge of the city that is problematized by the cultural framing of the black ghetto and its inhabitants as voyeuristic subjects” (2014, 25). But this “Black ghetto” holds different connotations at different junctures: in the mid-to-late 60s, after uprisings in Watts, it signifies incendiary rebellion, riot, revolutionary. As “Black Power” militancy morphed into a more genial “Black is beautiful” aesthetic, the figure of the pimp—largely the invention of Iceberg Slim—takes hold in Blaxploitation film, the ghetto becomes increasingly glamorized. The “glam ghetto” of the early to

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mid-­1970s would, in turn, rapidly come to be supplanted in the American cultural imaginary by the “pathologized ghetto” of what might be termed the Reaganite cultural regime of the 1980s, which comes to a close with the Rodney King riots of 1992. Beck’s writing, not incidentally, though most closely associated with that middle imaginary, comprehends each of these historical periods, even as at hearkens back to middle- and working-­ class African American society and anticipates as well the undiminished racial struggles of the twenty-first century, which have played out so tragically in the streets of American cities over the past two decades. And, I will argue, as both a real and an imagined site, Los Angeles holds a uniquely central place. As Eric Lott has pointed out, the thematic plots of Black noir, from Himes’s earlier novels set in Los Angeles, If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945) and The Lonely Crusade (1947) through to the crime thrillers of Walter Mosley, whose hard-boiled Ezekial “Easy” Rawlins series dramatizes the landscape of Watts between the 1940s and 1960s, involve “failed revolutions, thwarted upward mobility, cross-class romance” (Lott 1993, 5). If we consider as well the posthumous writing of Slim (and Goines), other key themes emerge. First, these books take up the promise and peril of Los Angeles for American Blacks, relocating from the south and from the industrial cities of the American north and Midwest. As far back as 1913, W.E.B.  Du Bois had commented in The Crisis on the unique attributes of “Colored California”: “The colored population of Los Angeles has grown fast. It was but 2,000 in 1900, while in 1910 it was 7,500 and it has grown very rapidly since that. These colored people are pushing and energetic. They are without a doubt the most beautifully housed group of colored people in the United States. They are full of push and energy and are used to working together. … To be sure Los Angeles is not paradise, much as the sight of its lilies and roses might lead one at first to believe. The color line is there and is sharply drawn” (Du Bois 1913, 193–94). Between 1940 and 1970, according to historian Josh Sides, the Black population in L.A. increased by more than tenfold, from 63,744 to 763,000. As late as 1964, the year the Civil Rights Bill passed, a survey by the National Urban League rated L.A. the most desirable city in the United States for Blacks to live in (Sides 2006, 4). In their recent, monumental Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties (2020), Mike Davis and Jon Wiener detail the failures and exclusions of the urban utopia during that turbulent decade as well insisting on the Black political resistance and cultural renaissance. Disappointingly, Davis and Wiener don’t bother to mention the two best-selling Black writers

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from L.A. of the period. They do, however, survey other L.A. writers of the period, including those in the orbit of the Watts Writers Workshop (Davis and Wiener 2020, 250), headed by Bud Schulberg, author of the classic Hollywood expose What Makes Sammy Run (1941) and screenwriter of On The Waterfront. That circle included Beck’s sometime contemporaries at Holloway House, Roland Jefferson, author of the cult classic The School on 103rd Street (originally published by Vantage, a vanity press, in 1974, and reissued by Holloway House in 1976) and another transplanted Midwesterner Odie Hawkins, author of Ghetto Sketches (1972). Jefferson’s somewhat scattershot novel is at once a mournful elegy for the dissipated energies of the Civil Rights Movement, a blistering satire of the presumptions and material acquisitiveness of the Black professional classes who might wish to believe that luxury shelters them from the cruelties of the American racial order and white hatred, and an allegory of white tactics to reassert control over Black populations in the aftermath of Black resistance that had spiked in the 1960s. What is striking about Jefferson’s book, as well as the later works of Goines and Himes and other works from the early to mid-1970s is their relentless pessimism about the prospects for social transformation. Sam Greenlee’s The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1969) envisions a Black-led revolution, but defers depicting the uprising within the confines of the novel. In most of Himes’s ribald, shoot-em-up Harlem thrillers featuring Detective Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, the two tough guys had at least equivocal success in protecting their charges from the forces (poverty, racism, crime, despair) working against them. By the time he was penning Blind Man with a Pistol (1969) and the apocalyptically pessimistic drama of racial warfare, Plan B (published posthumously in 1993), Himes’s dark humor had hardened into despair. His detectives can no longer even pretend to hold the forces of chaos at bay. In Goines’s late Kenyatta series (1974–1975), as we shall see, Black revolution is not only abortive, but doomed.11 In The School on 103rd Street, white backlash reaches genocidal proportions and there is no way out whatsoever for the beleaguered protagonist, Dr. Elwin Carter in the face of white animosity. Jefferson presents this 11  While the term “Afropessimism” is of a much more recent vintage, it is striking to note that, in Afropessimism (2020, New  York: Liveright), Frank Wilderson’s biographical and theoretical account, it is a mindset that crystalized during the mid-1970s during the backlash to the Movement. See in particular his account of his own experiences with the FBI and COINTELPRO in chapter three, “Hattie McDaniel is Dead.”

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dismal trajectory as story, in part, of cultural decline: “Looking to the west up 103rd Street, one could see the Watts Writers Workshop, or what remained of it. It was pretty much a mess now. Marquee had never been fixed, there were holes in the brick walls, and the ticket window resembled a carnival. It was being used as a movie theater now, its original occupants having been displaced” (Jefferson 1997, 23). The reference to community members in the Watts Writers Workshop displaced by movie theater demonstrates the ways in which by the mid-70s white-dominated popular entertainments had eclipsed communal Black cultural resistance: “Theaters were packed with folks who wanted to believe that Shaft was real, watching superstuds and superniggers in living techniblack playing roles created by biased fantasies of white writers who never went to Harlem and thought Watts was a power company. Short-sleeved shirts, platform shoes, wide-­ brimmed hats and the bimonthly check from the Department of Public Social Services kept everyone complacent” (Jefferson 1997, 137). By this juncture, Jefferson laments, white stereotypes about Black virility had achieved a lockdown on the imaginative possibility of anymore articulating a model of Black American masculinity capable of solace and protection, capable of fending off the onslaughts of white terror. The pulp fiction of Beck and Goines, however, allegorizes the move to California on the part of African Americans from the industrial hubs of the Midwest as both gesture of unremitting utopian desire and the dashed hopes of twentieth-century exodus. Beck’s tenure there coincided roughly with the period stretching from the Watts uprising to the Rodney King rebellions in 1992, the year Beck died (he died on the second day of the riots). Further, you find again and again in the later works a reflexive consideration of the vexed and contradictory scene of authorship. “Inner-­ city” L.A. is figured as both a trap, as a confining ghetto, and, paradoxically, a place of creative sustenance and nourishment. In this sense, too, the city becomes indispensable to Black cultural and intellectual production of the period. The story of Pimp and Holloway house is one of the most remarkable in the annals of American publishing history. It has been ably told by Justin Gifford in his study Pimping Fictions: African American Crime Literature and the Untold Story of Black Pulp Publishing (2013) and in his biography of Beck, Street Poison (2015). Gifford has long served as Slim’s biographer, untiring champion, and most prominent critic. More recently his scholarship has been supplemented by that of Kinohi Nishikawa, with Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground

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(2018). Holloway House published sleaze. Its catalog of books “for adults” included Victorian erotica, salacious memoirs of minor celebrities, and semi-scientific studies of human sexuality. One popular strain of adult novels, emerging in the mid-60s but drawing on long traditions of dread and fascination, featured interracial sex, and Pimp was initially marketed in this vein. Holloway’s first “Black-authored” title, Some Like It Dark: The Intimate Biography of a Negro Call Girl (1966), for example, netted six million dollars for the publisher (Gifford 2010a, 111), and Pimp would do even better as a breakthrough bestseller among Black audiences. For Gifford, both the analogy of the pimp and that of the ghetto help to explain the paradox: “The very conditions that produced America’s confined ghetto spaces also created a culture of readers desiring to read commercial narratives that represented black heroes who were contesting the same spaces” (2013, 49). Black readers found in such works an “authentic” reflection of Black life. But that experience, was not entirely liberating, for financial control of the representation remained in the hands of a white culture industry. Publisher Bentley Morriss, recalls that “we didn’t do it to emancipate a community. We did it because it was economically viable” (qtd. in Gifford 2013, 48) and for Gifford the commercial model remained unchanged “White publishers pimping the fiction of black authors” (Gifford 2013, 47). The text is ambivalent insofar as it is “both as an innovative cultural expression drawn from the popular energies of street life and as a literary commodity encoded by the constraints of a commercial literary market” (Gifford 2013, 51). Although “pimp cool is a adopted as a tactical posture of defense” to oppression (Gifford 2013, 55), Black Arts poets such as Larry Neal scorned the appeal of the pimp figure as lacking genuine revolutionary power (Bernstein 2006, 306). Gifford cites Eric Lott, who has emphasized in these aesthetics “a politics of style beyond protest, focusing the struggles of its moment in a live and irreverent art” (qtd. in Gifford 2013, 54), others have dismissed the pimp as a white and capitalist  fantasy. Women in these works are “beaten, whipped with wire hangers, verbally abused, raped, and shot” (Gifford 2013, 56) and such feminist critics as Hortense Spillers and others have pointed out that “wounded black masculinity” is a “damaging cultural myth” (qtd. in Gifford 2013, 57), perpetuating a mythology of women as bitches and whores. That’s a constant in Iceberg Slim’s writing. At the same time, most critics recognize the Slim’s writing complicates the very clichés it indulges. His third novel, for example, offers a remarkably sympathetic portrayal of pre-Stonewall transgender experience in the

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form of drag queen Otis Tilson. Tilson’s mother, the titular Black Widow figure, is, however, absolutely horrible. D.B. Graham, in a rare appreciative early critical essay on Slim, from 1975, champions the various archetypal powers of the folk heroes depicted in the three novels—the pimp superstud hero; the drag queen; and trickster figure of Trick Baby—even while conceding that the bad-ass figure of the pimp is “stuff of bourgeois consciousness” (1975, 16) a white projection of the folk hero. Josef Benson, more recently (2012), has shown just how queer Beck’s pimp heroes are, countering the hypermasculine posturings of the Black Panthers and others. It may be that these are energizing ambivalences. In his encyclopedic study, Nishikawa argues the relatively troubling proposition that the baked-in prurience of the white gaze was central to the works’ success, even for its eventual Black readership. What is indisputable, however, is that once Slim had decidedly shifted away from an aesthetic designed for white titillation and publicly declared that his project was to write exclusively for and about a working-class urban Black population, his work, like his fame, was understood to be in decline. This is a narrative I want, obviously, to push back against. It may be more accurate to say the cultural moment marked (largely but not exclusively) by white fascination with the sexual life of the pimp passed. “The black writer is a success only when the black masses can relate to his work and him with respect and a strong sense of kinship,” Beck asserts, in The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim (1971). He must maintain “a living throbbing lifeline to his people” (1986, 219). Beck, who took himself seriously as a literary artist, wanted to—and did—cultivate a Black audience; in the late 60s and early 70s, he also cultivated a revolutionary consciousness, dedicating his 1971 collection of essays to Malcolm X, Angela Davis, George Jackson, Bobby Seale, and other prominent Black radicals who had known prison life. Eschewing white public and white critical adulation, Slim insists that the writer must be in close contact with ghetto life, where he chooses to live: “I experience and view the ghetto as a savagely familiar place of spiritual warmth, rich in the writer’s treasure of pathos, conflict, and struggle. I am convinced that for me it was the only place where I could discover and keep an awareness of who I really am and where I could find my haven, my purpose as a writer and a nigger in this criminal society” (Beck 1986, 217–218) Iceberg Slim’s 1976 LP recording, Reflections, was a collection of spoken verses that he termed “toasts,” accompanied by the Red Holloway Quartet. Holloway was house musician and MC at the Parisian Room, a

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nightclub that Beck frequented in the mid-1970s, at the height of his celebrity. It was located at the corner of Washington and La Brea, just north of Crenshaw (though Beck, flush with success of the 1972 film adaptation of his novel Trick Baby, had himself recently bought a home in Hollywood Hills) (Gifford 2015a, 184). One theme to underline here is the importance of L.A. as a site of Black cultural production in particular, especially for transplanted Midwesterners like Beck and Red Holloway. A second, ancillary theme, has to do with the creative tension occasioned by the deep chasm but narrow gap between the social space of “the ghetto” (as both a distinct cultural imaginary and a genuine urban location) and that of “Hollywood,” itself too, both a real place and an imaginative La-La Land, the absolute zenith of the twentieth-century American dream. So near, and yet so far, the distance between South Central and Hollywood. There is a long practice of cultural (and critical) “redlining” that governs and enforces these distinctions, which replicates the historical practice of enforcing real estate apartheid in L.A. as in so many North American cities, keeping the slum dwellers away from the better off white folks. It is the precise tension of the putative transgression of those lines, I argue, that both energizes and limits the remarkable cultural phenomenon of “Blaxploitation,” a phenomenon that Iceberg Slim, almost singlehandedly, inaugurated. For Slim should be recognized as that important a figure in American cultural history. “Expanding the terrain of blaxploitation scholarship requires bringing to the fore a literary movement that remains largely unheeded by the field of blaxploitation studies, a movement also long disregarded, if not maligned, among entrenched literati,” argues Zachary Manditch-Prottas (2019, 795) in an excellent essay on the film adaptation of Trick Baby. For if, as with noir, we include the literary as well as the cinematic history of Blaxploitation, we will come to understand it more precisely as a sequence of distinct cultural moments emerging from and responsive to a historical period that opens with the Watts uprising of 1965 and skids to a halt in 1980, with the election to the US presidency of one time California Governor Ronald Reagan. The cultural timeline of highlights stretches from about 1967, the year Slim’s Pimp was published and trails off about 1977. Any comprehensive cultural history of Black culture will contend with such classic of prison writing, including memoirs like The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) and Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice (1968), George Jackson’s letters from prison Soledad Brother (1971), and autobiographical fictions, including Claude Brown’s Manchild

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in the Promised Land (1965). And why do most literary histories scant Clarence L. Cooper’s brilliant existential novel, The Farm (1967) and white author Don Carpenter’s equally vivid Hard Rain Falling (1966), about interracial gay love in prison? These books testify to what might be termed a specifically African American pulp virility emerging in the mid-­ to-­late 1960s and coalescing in American popular culture more broadly by the early 1970s. The command of street slang and posture of “criminal cool” became a cliché of Blaxploitation in the early 70s. I would want to include in that cultural history the pure examples of the Blaxploitation genre, from such early classics as Melvin van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song (1971), Gordon Parks’s Shaft (1971), and Superfly (1972), directed by Gordon Parks, Jr., Parks’s son, along with those from its presumable feminist—Coffy (1973), Foxy Brown (1974), both written and directed by Jack Hill—and ultimately decadent phase—Rudy Ray Moore’s comic pimp in his project, Dolemite (1975). The discussion should also consider anticipatory works, like Jules Dassin’s Uptight (1968) or Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970). We can include as well as works in ancillary orbit like Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1978), and other realist rejoinders to increasingly stereotypical representations of inner-city life, and such television spin-offs as Starsky and Hutch (1975–1979) or Good Times (1974–1980), which to some extent indulged the clichés. Further, I would hope that this sort of a project might provide some corrective critical leavening to such recent revisionist depictions of Black and white Hollywood (or, too often, just white, as in the aforementioned La La Land (2016)), the reboots of Superfly (2018) and Shaft (2019), Eddie Murphy’s Dolemite Is My Name (2019), and Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019). Ultimately, where I want to get is to a closer reading of the work written in and about the 1980s, where ghetto life in South Central L.A. becomes largely pathologized in the wider public imagination: the years of the crack cocaine epidemic, the militarization of the L.A. police force, times when gangs like the Bloods and the Crips became household names, and gangsta rap made it to the charts nationwide. Iceberg Slim was not a shaper of this discursive shift, though he was variously complicit and resistant. His writings from this time juxtapose moments of ultraviolence and graphic descriptions of perverse sexual practices with deeply sympathetic and strikingly compassionate renderings of everyday people struggling to simply make ends meet. Doom Fox, for example, is a multi-generational epic about the intertwined lives of several families living in L.A. from the

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immediate post-war period to the late 1970s. The novel charts, for most of the characters, the diminution and ultimately the catastrophic demolition of their aspirations to live out the American dream: as social history almost Balzacean in its form. And in Night Train to Sugar Hill—the title evokes Billy Strayhorn’s lyrics to Duke Ellington’s “Take the ‘A’ Train”— an aging, dying vigilante undertakes a quixotic armed rebellion against both drug lords and the police. Consider a scene taken from just before the climax of his novel, Shetani’s Sister, drafted in the early 1980s during the height of the crack cocaine epidemic but not published until 2015. The villain, a psychopathic pimp, heroin addict, and murderer who calls himself “Master Shetani” undertakes a self-destructive final journey that literally maps the difference between Hollywood and the ghetto. He kills off his unfaithful henchmen and whores, abandons his palatial Hollywood Hills estate, shoots a police officer, hijacks an old Buick sedan driven by an elderly woman named Maggie, and, exiting “the freeway at the Vernon Avenue turnoff,” disappears into South Central Los Angeles to hole up. Maggie’s old Buick is initially chased by three police cars and a helicopter, but when they give up pursuit, “the units started a search of the ghetto” (Beck 2015, 214). Maggie lives in “a heavily barred modest stucco home on Forty-sixth Street, in the heart of the black ghetto gang turf” (Beck 2015, 214). She tells her captor that “I useta have lotsa friends on this street. But dope and the gangsters done run all the decent peoples away ‘cept me, ‘cause I’m too poor to move” (Beck 2015, 214). For Shetani, this “ghetto” is both sanctuary and trap. “I want to say at the outset that I have become ill, insane, as an inmate of the torture chamber behind America’s fake façade of justice and democracy. But I am not as ill as I was, and I am getting better all the time,” Slim writes in the Frontispiece to The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim. “I want to make clear that my reason for starting these notes at a point of personal anguish and suffering is that these experiences marked the end of a corrupt pimp life and were the prelude to a still mauled but constructive new life” (Beck 1986). In “Iceberg Adrift,” the closing essay of The Naked Soul, Beck recounts the perils and adventures encountered during a three-­ mile walk through South Central L.A. in June 1970, when he is recognized by young fans, whom he exhorts to avoid the pimp life, trailed for block by a police cruiser, and nearly knifed in a dust-up over the availability of a phone booth. He closes with a reflection on “the solace and joy” he has taken in his “determination to build instead of destroy during the

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sunrisings left to me” (Beck 1986, 248), concluding “what a joyously painful transport it is to be a part of that struggle, to be a besieged black man, an embattled nigger, in racist America” (Beck 1986, 248).

“Los Angeles and Me Had Had Enough of Each Other”: Militant Virilities Donald Goines, for any readers unfamiliar with his writing, produced a remarkable series of sensationalist crime thrillers for Holloway House— sixteen novels in all—between 1970 and his death in 1974. Though he was one of the best-selling and most beloved Black writers of his time, and a key founder of “street fiction,” whose impact has been enduring, the pulp novels of this wildly prolific Detroit writer have also been somewhat scanted by critics and literary historians.12 A brief 2016 documentary made by the gangster report.com duo of Al Profit and Scott Burnstein describes the importance of Goines’s work to prison culture and to the genesis of gangsta rap: “Donald Goines is your favorite rappers’ favorite writer. A pimp and a stickup man, addicted to heroin most of his short life, Goines’s books, with titles like “Whoreson” “Dopefiend” and “Black Gangster,” have sold over six million copies. Written in a creative frenzy between 1970 and 1974, Goines’s novels are a dark portal into Black street life and the misery of addiction and are probably the most widely read set of books in the American prison and jail system” (2015). As this testimonial suggest, the power of Goines’s writing is acknowledged among his fans, though it remains scanted by the academy and the critical establishment. This is often the case with pulp and genre fiction, of course, and particularly so for much of the Black writing in the tradition. In closing this chapter, I will focus on the allure of (and dis-infatuation with) the West Coast and Los Angeles in particular to this Midwestern crime writer. Focusing on Goines’s depiction of the late 60s/ early 70s L.A. as a false or abortive utopia for African Americans, I’ll consider such works as Street Players (1973) and Never Die Alone (1974), and in particular, the militant phantasmagory of the Kenyatta quartet (1974–1975), as well as on Goines’s own brief, unhappy sojourn in L.A. To state my thesis bluntly, in Goines’s pessimistic vision, California 12  An important exception is the collection Word Hustle: Critical Essays and Reflections on the Works of Donald Goines (2011, Inprint Editions), edited by L.H. Stallings and Greg Thomas.

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always disappointments: California dreaming means the dream of a better life, which never materializes. When you are released from prison and make it to California, Goines asserts, you always find another prison awaiting you there. In 1969, while incarcerated at Jackson State Prison in Michigan, Goines came across Iceberg Slim’s Pimp, which had been a somewhat surprise breakout bestseller for Holloway House. In a successful effort to cultivate a Black readership, Holloway House began distributing their works by subscription, to urban “adult” bookstores, to barbershops, to drugstores, and, significantly, to prisons. Inspired by Slim’s work, Goines produced a sheaf of writings, which his sister, Joanie, helped to edit upon Goines’s release. The two were able to secure a contract from Holloway House for the novel, Dopefiend (1971), and subsequently, Whoreson (1972), both of which sold quickly. By the summer of ‘72, his third book Black Gangster (1972) was on the racks, and Goines’s writing career was taking off. Flush with success, he and his partner, Shirley Sailor, moved to California. Goines’s first two or three novels are generally considered his most polished and most successful from a literary point of view. Exploited by his publisher, unhappy in Los Angeles—he drove back to Detroit within the year—and unwilling to kick his habit, Goines pumped out thrillers at a furious slapdash pace; they seem to have gone pretty much from his typewriter into print with a minimum of editorial intervention. And yet, Goines’s interests and literary ambitions soon expanded beyond the representation of Black criminal underworld; or rather, he was able to deploy his lurid and sensationalist depictions of criminal and street life into a more comprehensive social critique. Black Girl Lost (1973), for example, recounts with considerable sympathy the quest of a young woman for autonomy and for love despite the horrors of neglect, bullying, sexual abuse, and exploitation she encounters. In White Man’s Justice, Black Man’s Grief (1973), a saga of prison life, Goines pays tribute to Chester Himes, the pioneer of Black crime writing, naming his central character, Chester Hines. An even more pointed literary homage underwrites Swamp Man (1974), where the protagonist is named “George Jackson,” after the prison philosopher and revolutionary, who had been killed in an escape attempt in 1971. Goines’s writing became decidedly more militant and increasingly surreal. Set in the swamps of Mississippi, Swamp Man’s hero undertakes elaborate revenge, castrating and murdering the whites who have lynched his father and raped his sister. Goines’s subsequent Kenyatta series of novels involves a Black nationalist syndicate of bank robbers who

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uses their ill-gotten gains to try to cleanse the ghetto of drugs. The organization is loosely modeled after the Black Panthers or Jackson’s Black Guerilla Family at San Quentin. Their leader is the charismatic Kenyatta, named after the anti-colonial activist and first president of independent Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta. These four books, published initially under pseudonym because his publishers thought the Goines “brand” was over-­ saturating the market, are a key part of a body of writing from the period that imagined a nationwide armed Black militant insurrection, inaugurated no doubt by John A. Williams’s The Man Who Cried I Am (1967), and including Sam Greenlee’s The Spook Who Sat By the Door (1969), Iceberg Slim’s Death Wish (1976), and Chester Himes’s own Plan B, which he began drafting in 1969 but which he never finished. Published posthumously in 1993, and marked by both fury and bleak cynicism about the prospects for racial justice in the United States, Plan B is perhaps the most disturbing book I have ever read (and I read disturbing books for a living). For that reason, I think all these books essential reading, if we are to even begin to try to grasp the racist American dreamscape today being today so effectively interrogated by Black Lives Matter. Goines’s protagonists share all of the stereotypical features of heroic pulp masculinity. His heroes are typically larger-than-life in a literal sense: tall, powerful, handsome, charismatic, hyper-competent, stylish, well-­ endowed; they are invincible warriors and adroit lovers. Yet, with only a handful of exceptions, they are all doomed. That is, none of the protagonists are able to elude the traps that have been laid out to ensnare them nor successfully to outwit their enemies. In many cases the heroes fling themselves headlong to their fate, which is either incarceration or a horrible death. For example, in Kenyatta’s Escape (1974), Kenyatta and his crew successfully cleanse Detroit of drugs through a campaign of intimidation and assassination of dealers and suppliers. But the heat is on; knowing the police are on to him, Kenyatta gathers a handful of his most trusted henchmen and women and relocates to Los Angeles. However, he neglects to warn those he leaves behind in his rural compound about the pending police attack: after a gunfight, survivors are, predictably, massacred. Though several characters speculate on Kenyatta’s motives, the reader never discovers why. Was it spite on Kenyatta’s part? Negligence? Incompetence? We never know. Later, the plane his gang has hijacked crash-lands in the Nevada dessert and we get a long comic sequence of misadventures involving a stay at the ranch of some wealthy radical chic white hippies. Like the hero of Chuck Berry’s song, the gang just can’t

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seem to make it to California. In the final novel of the series, the posthumous Kenyatta’s Last Hit (1975), Kenyatta leads his followers on a quixotic campaign against mafiosi kingpins. In an ill-advised raid on the Las Vegas headquarters of the major drug supplier for the West Coast, he leads them into a death trap, where they are slaughtered, to a man. Kenyatta is hardly the model of masculine competence we had been led to believe in. In sum, he is pretty much a fuck-up, and the prospects for Black revolution seem pretty slim. Like many pulp fictions, the novels indulge in revenge fantasies against hegemonic power structures—white supremacy, in this case. However, they cannot, ultimately, be read simply as wish-fulfillment narratives that turn the tables on racial injustice, which is the formula adopted by most Blaxploitation films of the period. In Goines, the revenge is never fully consummated. Unlike in Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land (1965), there will be no rising up successfully against the circumstances that beat you down; unlike in Cecil Brown’s The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger (1969), there will be no trickster figure who gleefully navigates the perils of American racism to his own advantage, satirically exposing and punishing hypocrisy. Further, Goines’s books are mute about why this is so: is it that his social forces arrayed against impoverished Blacks are simply too powerful to surmount? Or is it that the environment has bred into these characters a suicidal fatalism? Are these simply cautionary tales about the dangers of drug use? Goines refuses to say. It is true that by the mid-70s revolutionary ardor had dimmed. Between 1969 and 1971 COINTELPRO had done its work. Black leaders were murdered, imprisoned, in exile. The New Left more broadly was in disarray. Goines’s books too, at this juncture, seem decidedly pessimistic about the prospect of Black autonomy and liberation. Every trip to Los Angeles is a failure; every exodus to the promised land culminates in new forms of entrapment. Perhaps Goines’s most mournful and savage book, Never Die Alone (1974), most insistently articulates Goines dis-infatuation with the allure and promise symbolized by L.A. In this volume, the biblically named King David, equal parts Iago and Macbeth, a con man, aspiring pimp and drug-­ dealer, heads to L.A. in search of the good life: riches, fame, power. Things go well at first, but in his new home in L.A. he find only another the ghetto he had fled: “Watts. Goddam, but it’s a fuckin’ ghetto out there. It looks like something out of Mississippi. All they got is small-ass houses with niggers hangin’ out on every corner. Yet I felt at home while I was out there. I guess it shows that you can take the nigger out of the country

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but you can’t get the country out of a nigger” (Goines 2008b, 97). In a fit of despair and misogynistic rage, King David murders his girlfriend and abandons the West Coast: “I turned on my heel and departed, on my way to pick up my new Cadillac. And then from there, I’d hit the highway. Like I said, Los Angeles and me had had enough of each other. It was time for me to go back” (Goines 2008b 165). Goines himself felt much the same way. Flush with early success, he had gone to L.A. full of high hopes. The success of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and Shaft in 1971, along with Superfly a year later, led him to believe he might sell one of his books to Hollywood (Allen 2008, 134), but little had panned out. Goines was exploited by his publisher, repeatedly targeted by police, and he sank into depression. His letters and the “Private Thoughts” section of his typescripts from the period recount his despair: “I don’t even have coats for me and my children, but I’d rather die of freezing than stay here and lose my mind. The police have won. I can’t cope with them much longer. … I have never hated white, but since being here, this city has made me hate everything in a … Can’t get it right. … Can’t stand it here. When my check gets here we’re going to Detroit” (qtd. in Allen 2008, 146–47). He got in his own new black Cadillac, with a white convertible top and did just that. On October 22, 1974, in a crime that was hardly investigated and never solved, he and Shirley Sailor were murdered in their Highland Park Apartment. They were each shot five times. Sailor’s two children were left “unharmed,” so to speak. The murder weapons, two thirty-eight-caliber revolvers were found at the scene. In what I find to be a multi-faceted irony, Goines did appear in a movie. According to his biographer, Eddie B. Allen, Jr., while in Los Angeles he found work as an extra in the classic dystopian depiction of urban blight and environmental degradation, Soylent Green (1973). I’ve scoured the film, but can’t identify Goines with any certainty, if in fact he does appear. The plot is a conspiracy theorist’s worst nightmare, as corporate overlords and their government minions conspire to harvest human bodies for profit. It is set, prophetically, in the fateful year of 2022.

References Allen, Eddie B. 2008. Low Road: The Life and Legacy of Donald Goines [2004]. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin. Andryeyev, Bonnie Rhee. 2014. Whose Mean Streets? Donald Goines, Iceberg Slim, and the Black Noir Aesthetic. In Street Lit: Representing the Urban Landscape, ed. Keenan Norris, 21–38. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.

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Beck, Robert (Iceberg Slim). 1986. The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim [1971]. Los Angeles: Holloway House. ———. 2011. Pimp: The Story of My Life [1967]. Cash Money Content. ———. 2015. Shetani’s Sister. New York: Vintage/Black Lizard. Benson, Josef. 2012. Myths About Pimps: Conflicting Images of Hypermasculine Pimps in U.S. American Hip-Hop and Bisexual Pimps in the Novels of Donald Goines and Iceberg Slim. Journal of Bisexuality 12 (3): 429–441. Bernstein, Lee. 2006. Prison Writers and the Black Ars Movement. In New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement, ed. Lisa Gail Collins and Margo Natalie Crawford, 297–316. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Braudy, Leo. 2003. From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity. New York: Knopf. Chester, Dennis. 2011. By Certain Codes: Structures of Masculinity in Donald Goines’s Daddy Cool. In Word Hustle: Critical Essays and Reflections on the Works of Donald Goines, ed. L.H.  Stallings and Greg Thomas, 93–105. Baltimore: Inprint Editions. Craven, Alice Mikal. 2007. A Victim in Need is a Victim In Deed: The Ritual Consumer and Self-Fashioning in Himes’ Run, Man Run. In Questions of Identity in Detective Fiction, ed. Linda Martz and Anita Higgie, 37–55. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars. Davis, Mike. 1990. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. London: Verso. Davis, Mike, and Jon Wiener. 2020. Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties. London: Verso. Du Bois, W. E. B. 1913. Colored California. The Crisis, August, 192–196. Fine, David. 1984. Los Angeles in Fiction. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Gifford, Justin. 2010a. Harvard in Hell: Holloway House Publishing Company, Players Magazine, and the Invention of Black Mass-Market Erotica: Interviews with Wanda Coleman and Emory “Butch” Holmes II. Melus 35 (4): 111–137. ———. 2010b. “There was Nothing to Stop the Colored People from Walking Across the Street”: Urban Renewal and the Reinvention of American Detective Fiction in Chester Himes’ Run, Man, Run. Clues: A Journal of Detection 28 (1): 38–50. ———. 2013. Pimping Fictions: African American Crime Literature and the Untold Story of Black Pulp Publishing, 2013. Philadelphia: Temple UP. ———. 2015a. Street Poison: The Biography of Iceberg Slim. New York: Doubleday. ———. 2015b. Foreword to Shetani’s Sister by Iceberg Slim (Robert Beck), v–xii. New York: Vintage/Black Lizard. Goines, Donald. 2008a. Street Players [1973]. New York: Kensington. ———. 2008b. Never Die Alone [1974]. New York: Kensington.

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Graham, D.B. 1975. ‘Negative Glamour’: The Pimp Hero in the Writing of Iceberg Slim. Obsidian 1 (2): 5–17. Heise, Thomas. 2011. Urban Underworlds: A Geography of Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Himes, Chester. 1969. Run Man Run [1966]. New York: Dell. Jefferson, Roland S. 1997. The School on 103rd Street [1974]. New  York: W. W. Norton. Lott, Eric. 1993. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press. MacDonald, John D. 2013. The Brass Cupcake [1950]. New York: Random House. Manditch-Prottas, Zachary. 2019. Hustlin’ from the Page to the Screen: The ‘Black Experience Book’ in the Age of Blaxploitation. The Journal of Popular Culture 52 (4): 793–816. McMurtry, Larry. 1968. In a Narrow Grave. Austin, Texas: Encino Press. Mumford, Lewis. 1963. The City in History [1961]. San Diego: Harvest/HBJ. Murphet, Julian. 2001. Literature and Race in Los Angeles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nishikawa, Kinohi. 2018. Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Profit, Al, and Scott Burnstein. 2015. The Donald Goines Documentary. https:// gangsterreport.com/donald-­goines-­documentary/ Scott-Heron, Gil. 2010. The Vulture [1970]. New York: Grove Press. Sides, Josh. 2006. L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present. Berkeley: University of California Press. Soitos, Stephen F. 1996. The Blues Detective: A Study of African American Detective Fiction. Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press. Wheeler, Elizabeth A. 2001. Uncontained: Urban Fiction in Postwar America. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Williams, Raymond. 1973. The Country and the City. New  York: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 5

Nightmare Alleys: The Afterlives of Pulp Virility

“Between the 1950s and the early 1980s, the working class undergoes changes that deeply affect its values, its points of reference, and how it is depicted; virility is no exception,” writes historian Thierry Pillon, noting the disproportional emergence of salaried employees and the rise in the number of jobs for “semi-skilled workers and manual laborers, principally women and immigrants” (2016, 532). The working class did not disappear, but its ideological coherence, social power, and cultural relevance become diminished. One problem I keep coming back to is why—and how—hard-boiled and noir-type fictions survive their historical moment. In Neon Noir Haut argues, persuasively, that hard-boiled genre writing, largely designed for a working-class audience, had difficulty engaging productively with the sensibilities of the 1960s: “in general, pulp culture fiction … could not contend with the confrontational politics of the 1960s. A class-based literature—primarily oriented toward working class readers—it had literally lost its class” (1999, 8). Geoffrey O’Brien, in turn, brings his classic study Hard-Boiled America: Lurid Paperbacks and the Masters of Noir (1981) to a close in 1960. If, as James Ellroy has remarked, “the subgenre officially died in 1960” (2010, xiv), it has proved remarkably resilient in its afterlife, subject to periodic revivals, revisionary critiques, and parodies, ranging from The Sopranos to Frank Miller’s Sin City. Still, the point is well taken. Everything does seem to shift drastically in the early 1960s. The filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, to reach for one example, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Redding, Pulp Virilities and Post-War American Culture, Renewing the American Narrative, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09054-7_5

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who had cut his eyeteeth making noir classics about the travails of the down-and-out working class, such as Killer’s Kiss (1955), The Killing (1956), and the anti-war Paths of Glory (1957), will begin to produce the cerebral films for which he becomes famous as an auteur: Lolita (1962), the apocalyptic political satire, Dr. Strangelove (1964), and, later, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), A Clockwork Orange (1975) and others—each of them a meditation on pulp virility, but none any longer devoted to portraying the tribulations of the working classes. So too the menacing, aloof nonchalance of 1950s Mitchum had been supplanted by the cool intensities of, say, Clint Eastwood or Steve McQueen. Mitchum himself made mostly westerns during the 1960s, though some of his performances in the 70s—The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), The Yakuza (1974), Farewell, My Lovely (1975)—and his cameo in Scorsese’s Cape Fear (1991) did much to reignite interest in noir. And, while I have not spoken a great deal about the impact of television on these narratives, clearly its emergence was the most decisive cultural shift of the post-war era. By the 1960s television had become entrenched within the American household, and the medium was for a variety of reasons reshaping the narratives of pulp virilities. This is partly a question of disciplinary limits: I am trained as a reader, and I have a soft spot in my otherwise cold academic heart for classic film, but I don’t watch a lot of television. But it is clear that the emergence of television was co-­ evolutionary with the eclipse of pulp virilities, as described by Haut, Ellmore, and O’Brien. The American male as television character would prove to be a very different and highly domesticated species. As a dream machine, television aimed to absorb Americans imaginatively not only into the middle class, but into the middle-class family. This was the more or less hegemonic 1950s ethos of Leave It to Beaver (1957–1963) and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (1952–1966); little space was left for the loner hero. The grand arenas for masculine heroism—the American frontier, the mean streets of the city, the theaters of war—were amply represented in television serials, of course, and the good guys with guns descended from the pulp tradition went about the screens righting wrongs and punishing evildoers in such serials as The Lone Ranger (1949–1957) and Dragnet (1950–1959). But the grandiosity of the narrative tended to be diminished, as too the heroism of the hero, even to the point of bathos. Filmed on location in New York, Naked City (1958–1959/1960–1963), for example, mimicked the documentary style and echoed the language and tone of Dassin’s original film, but its sympathetic emphasis on the

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struggles of the down-and-out waned and it suffered in the ratings. Pulp virilities remained on display in such popular western serials as Have Gun Will Travel (1957–1963), The Rebel (1959–1961), and Wanted Dead or Alive (1958–1961), in which Steve McQueen cultivated the understated cool persona that would make him a marquis star of the silver screen and the embodiment of post-pulp masculinity later in the decade. The late fifties featured several detective serials, including Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer (1957–1959), which ran for two seasons, Johnny Staccato (1959–1960), the titular hero of which was a jazz pianist/private detective played by John Cassavetes (whose independent film productions in the 1970s helped to define the rather shambling and clumsy post-pulp virility of that decade), and Peter Gunn (1958–1961). These dates confirm Haut’s contention that pulp culture was no longer sustainable. In fact, over the course of the 1960s, the blue-collar sensitivities privileged in pulp were increasingly lampooned in television serials. The sailors depicted on such shows as McHale’s Navy (1962–1966), the marines of Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C (1964–1969), or the soldiers of F-Troop (1965–1967) were portrayed as cuddly but bumbling maladroits. The heroes of Hogan’s Heroes (1965–1971) were indeed depicted as hyper-efficient and (as the 60s proceeded) remarkably multi-cultural, but they were fairly lovable as well, and fought in a war that was effectively bloodless. Even one-time noir leading man Fred MacMurray was domesticated, in the long-running situation comedy My Three Sons (1960–1972). These developments were largely  due, no doubt, to the consumer-­ driven strictures of the television shows. Advertising standards dictated serials maintain a largely upbeat, family-friendly tone. And even the very size of the screen itself, limited by the cathode ray technology of the time, didn’t lend itself to depicting characters of heroic stature. Seriality itself was a factor: if you wanted to spend company with a man for an hour every week, you wanted his character to be affable, unthreatening, housebroken. Further, the phenomenological experience of TV-viewing, at least in the early years of the medium, was also familial in nature. Unlike, say, the onanistic pleasures found in novel-reading, you didn’t enter into the seductions of the television serial narrative in isolation. Nor did you typically watch in the grand anonymity afforded by darkness, as with movie-­ watching. You watched with others in your family, before a console, in a well-lit living room, den, or family room. And those viewers who did watch alone were singularly addressed and positioned as members of the family: the housewife who watched daytime soaps; the school-child who

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watched the afterschool specials. Years on, with the advent of portable televisions (allowing families to have second sets in kitchens and bedrooms), and, later, cable technology, viewing patterns changed and the numbers of viewers watching solitude increased. The shape of the dramas changed accordingly, and you find, in the late 60s and 70s, an increasing number of non-conformist heroes. One of the first was the disillusioned and vaguely countercultural dropout motorcyclist Jim Bronson (Michael Parks) in the short-lived Then Came Bronson (1969–1970). James Garner’s rough-hewn character Jim Rockford in The Rockford Files (1974–1980) leaps to mind, as does David Carradine’s Kwai Chang Caine in Kung Fu (1972–1975). Between the late 1940s through the late 1960s, however, television offered little cultural haven whatsoever for the alienated outsider so beloved of paperback novels, noir cinema, and popular song.

Post-Pulp: 1960 and After Pulp virilities took refuge in other cultural venues, however, and persist in various mutations into the present. What might best be termed high neo-­ noir endures today in such recent works as Giuseppe Capotondi’s fashion-­ drenched The Burnt Orange Heresy (2019). Capotondi’s works is a glossy riff on Charles Willeford’s decidedly more earthy and proletarian satire of 1971—not incidentally, Willeford’s first hardcover original—which nonetheless stays true to the original’s perverse and darkly pessimistic vision. The cast—beautiful people in every age group—features Mick Jagger in his characteristically Mephistophelean persona as Joseph Cassidy, a dealer in the dark market of artists’ souls. The durable Jagger has been able to resurrect his own idiosyncratically androgynous but potently sinister parody of pulp virility in performance after performance for an astonishing six decades and counting now. Recall his turn as the polymorphously perverse Turner in Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s Performance, a shabby-­ glam and hyper-erotic “Cool Britannia” take on an American-style gangster fable. Performance was produced in 1968 but not released until 1970, presumably on account of the film’s depiction of gratuitous sex and excessive violence. The aptly titled Performance may well be at the acme of a series of X-rated or near-X-rated productions of the time dedicated to “post-sleaze” explorations of somewhat deviant forms of male sexuality: Andy Warhol’s short film Blowjob (1964) and his much longer Chelsea Girls (1966); Midnight Cowboy (1969); Medium Cool (1969), Haskell Wexler’s

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cinema-verité style drama about the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968; Ken Russell’s Women in Love (1969), the first film to display male genitals on camera (and pretty much all of Russell’s films thereafter); Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970); Bernardo Bertolucci’s notorious Last Tango in Paris (1972); Cocksucker Blues (1972), Robert Frank’s unreleased deadpan documentary about the Rolling Stones; comics-­derived films like the animated Fritz the Cat (1972) or the parodic Flesh Gordon (1974); through to Al Pacino in Cruising (1980)—pulp virilities all! Performance also self-consciously interfolds with the late 60s cool Black militant variation on pulp virility that was the topic of my last chapter. The sound-track featured Black nationalist poetry and musical group The Last Poets performing “Wake Up, Niggers.” My point with this list of references is to underline the enduring importance, even centrality of pulp virility poetics to American and, increasingly, international cultural production in the decades following the presumed evisceration of pulp culture proper in the early 1960s. So too had the golden age of original paperback writing come to an end in the early 1960s, although in this realm too we can similarly trace out the trajectories of its various offshoots over the next several decades. Consequently, the surrealistic, extravagant, and schizophrenic free-for-all that had characterized works by such writers as Charles Willeford, Jim Thompson, Patricia Highsmith, and, somewhat later, Chester Himes in the decade and a half after the war diminishes (though all of those writers continued to publish important work for several decades afterward). Arguing that an often comic, pointedly apolitical, stylistically vintage mode predominates, I consider compensatory representations of white masculine performances variously fragile, wounded, impotent, or mute in the work of, say, Donald Westlake, or dedicated to welfare state liberalism, as with Ross Macdonald. Still, it is not entirely true that the market for paperback originals disappeared; more accurately, we might point to a certain sort of market readjustment, where conventions of specialized genres—pornography, romance, detective fiction—became hardened as publishers targeted specific communities of readers and sold their works in such new venues as the adult bookstore. Donald Westlake, for example, got his start as a writer of salacious adult fiction. As we have seen, pulp fiction became something of a “parody” (Deleuze 2004, 85) around this moment as well, as Gilles Deleuze pointed out in his 1966 essay, “The Philosophy of Crime Novels.” At around the same time, in 1964, Susan Sontag had made much the same point in her essay “Notes on Camp,”

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which first appeared in Partisan Review. Sontag is not making a historical argument, per se, and her examples range over history, but certainly the dawning awareness of what she terms a camp “sensibility” aligns with Haut’s argument about the eclipse of the working class. Pulp productions acquired a certain parodic self-consciousness; they could seldom be taken straight anymore. The became parodic, camp. I recall, as a child, earnest fan discussions in the letter pages of the Detective Comics book I read about whether or not Batman was camp, in Sontag’s sense. Certainly, at that juncture, when the live action television series was running, between 1966 and 1968, he was. But so were a lot of other pulp productions, from pornography to westerns. And while the determinedly highbrow Sontag doesn’t survey pulp or noir literature in particular, Sontag does pause to consider The Maltese Falcon “among the greatest Camp movies ever” (1966, 282). The tradition, however, mutated and thrived in various contexts. In the last chapter I argued that pulp, hard-boiled and noir stylistics were refashioned by Black artists such as Chester Himes, whose writing refabricated the lonesome drama of the isolated male in the mean streets of the city that had long been at the heart of the hard-boiled tradition into a surreal, hyperviolent vision that served at once as an indictment of American racism, a uniquely loving depiction of Black social life in the slums of Harlem, and a critical medication on the challenges facing Black male under conditions of persecution. Iceberg Slim’s magical blend of street lingo with Chandler-esque irony, when filtered through the pulp virility cultural factory of adult book publishing, with its emphasis on sleazy confessional memoir, generated a broad if short-lived cultural interest in the social and political possibilities of ghetto glamor. And Donald Goines’s sometimes exploitative and lurid renderings of addiction, criminality, and sex trafficking morphed into a powerful though ultimately pessimistic vision of Black militant resistance. As cultural formations, both Black militancy and Blaxploitation developed the equivocal possibilities of pulp virilities, as did ongoing efforts by white male performers—Jagger not least among them—to appropriate a presumably enviable Black male sexuality into their own public self-stylization. Consider the rebirth of the blues in the hands of both white British (The Stones, The Yardbirds, Eric Clapton, etc.) and, a bit later, American (The Allman Brothers, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and so forth) musicians. The results here produced a post-sixties and post-­ Black Power update on the Cold War blackface performance we witness in Mailer, Willeford, and other variously non-Black writers and film-makers,

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one lampooned, for example, in Lou Reed’s song “I Wanna Be Black” of his 1978 album Street Hassle: “I don’t want to be a fucked up, middle class, / College student anymore. / I just want to have a stable of foxy little whores. / Yeah, yeah I want to be black.” The mimicry of Black cool persists, as one concatenation of pulp virility. If pulp died, it has myriad afterlives, and continues to leave its imprint. There are other mutations—or mutant offspring, as the case may be. The allusion to the film version of Fritz the Cat, originally a comic character created by cartoonist Robert Crumb, should alert us to the pulp virilities in the counterculture and underground comix scene. Fritz initially appeared in strips in the satirical journal Help! (published between 1960 and 1965 by James Warren with the aid of Harvey Kurtzman after Kurtzmann left Mad magazine). As a quick glance at his Wikipedia page reveals, Kurtzman’s staff assistants while at Help! included the likes of Terry Gilliam, later an original member of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and still later director of such post-pulp films as Brazil (1985) and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) as well as Gloria Steinem, feminist visionary and co-founder of Ms. magazine. Crumb also contributed Fritz adventures to the men’s magazine Cavalier, a Playboy competitor initially launched by paperback publisher Fawcett to promote authors in its Gold Medal original stable, including Mickey Spillane and John D.  MacDonald. It was the custom for paperback and, later, adult book publishers to develop in-house men’s magazines to promote their authors. Holloway House for example, before the success of Iceberg Slim shifted its production more exclusively to “Black experience” publications, had published the men’s journals Adam and Knight. Men’s magazines—Hugh Hefner’s Playboy, founded in 1953, has proven itself the most long-lived and successful—with their buffoonishly aristocratic titles, pitched themselves to an audience of presumably aspirational working-class male readers, trying to teach them middle- and even upper-middle-class values. In an effort to consolidate cultural legitimacy and shed their racy, pulp origins, the more upmarket skin magazines adopted increasingly glossy production values, advertised products targeted more and more to aspiring professionals, became more sophisticated in design, and, most notably, increasingly published serious literary writers and journalists. Other contributors to Cavalier, for example, included pioneering science fiction writers Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury, celebrated originators of “postmodernist” fiction Robert Coover and Thomas Pynchon, journalist Jimmy Breslin, and Nat Hentoff, jazz historian and regular music columnist for

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the Village Voice. If pulp fiction died in the early 1960s its offspring were almost unavoidable across the American cultural spectrum of the sixties, the seventies, and the eighties. Pulp virilities are legion. And has spawned a host of contemporary variants, few of which I have time to analyze in any comprehensive detail here. Rather, I aim in concluding is both to provide a suggestive catalog of the many varieties (each with its own distinct liberatory potentials as well as its own specific rearguard toxicities) and to outline a few structural and affective developments of the form. If my own interests lie in the legacy of hard-boiled crime writing and its offshoots and in noir and neo-noir film, that is largely because I believe that those genres maintained and to a great extent defended their allegiance to older proletarian values that many other pulp descendants—westerns, science fiction, comic books, sleaze—had to varying degrees quickly jettisoned. It may help, in wrapping up, to survey a couple developments in crime writing over the next few decades by considering the work of prolific authors Ross Macdonald and Donald Westlake.

Detective Fiction for the Great Society: Ross Macdonald In his recent book about the unremitting resonance of The Great Gatsby within American culture, Greil Marcus highlights the writing of Canadian-­ American crime writer Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar), aptly referring to “his Nick Carraway of a Detective, Lew Archer” (2020, 35). Macdonald, whose popular series of stories and novels featuring Archer, a tough but humane hard-boiled detective, spans the decades of the Cold War (1949–1983). A survey of Macdonald’s career helps us assess the various transformations of the hard-boiled tradition as it evolves against the backdrop of the liberal welfare state. Set in the suburbs and country clubs along the southern California coast, Macdonald’s self-consciously “literary” thrillers adapt the model of the hard-boiled hero in order critically to confront the stresses of prosperity, social and familial dysfunction, the emergence of the counterculture, and looming environmental devastation. Marcus’s instincts are sound. Macdonald spoke often of the importance of Fitzgerald’s influence on his own moral vision of America as a land of unredeemed promise. Bearing the subtitle “ceaselessly into the past,” Macdonald’s collected essays pay explicit homage to Gatsby. His detective,

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the enigmatic Lew Archer, resembles Carraway in at least two ways. As a character in his own right, Archer is, in his creator’s description, like Nick Carraway, “a semi outsider … fascinated but not completely taken in by the customs of the natives” (Macdonald 1981a, 36). “Archer is … an observer, a socially mobile man who knows all the levels of Southern California life and takes a wry pleasure in exploring its secret passages. Archer tends to live through other people, as a novelist lives through his characters” (Bruccoli and Layman 2002, 247). Archer is skeptical witness to rather than participant in  the American cult of self-invention. Like Carraway, too, he can be moralizing, prurient, chaste, a do-gooder, and sometimes a stick-in-the-mud, liable to confuse sentimentalism with its polar opposite, tough-mindedness. He is, for an action hero, surprisingly passive, to the point that, as Geoffrey O’Brien (perhaps Macdonald’s most perceptive reader) notes, he hardly exists at all: “Try to imagine him apart from the structure of the book and he becomes a cipher. We see through Archer’s eyes, and react with him, but in the end he is little more than a window through which we perceive the real figures of interest: the people whom Archer is investigating” (1997, 156). Archer is the focus of Macdonald’s sociological gaze. Moreover, as did Fitzgerald’s narrator, Archer testifies to the great mournfulness at the heart of what economist John Kenneth Galbraith in 1958 christened the “affluent society.” Macdonald is typically described as the writer who took up the mantle of such innovators of the hard-boiled tradition as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Macdonald wrote several works under his own name—he was married to the distinguished suspense writer Margaret Millar—and other pen names, but his most significant character, Archer, debuted in a 1946 story, “Find the Woman,” in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. The first Archer novel, The Moving Target, was released in 1949, and though Macdonald wrote until his death in 1983, the last of eighteen novels to feature Lew Archer was The Blue Hammer, which appeared in the bicentennial year of 1976. To such admirers as Eudora Welty, who emphasized the “delicacy and tension” of his prose (Marrs and Nolan 2015, 30), and John Leonard, his work dignified the pulp and noir tradition by lending it literary prestige and by transforming the familiar two-dimensional stereotypes of hard-boiled storytelling and the lurid melodramatic heights of noir villains into characters rendered with genuine psychological depth and complexity. Surprisingly few of his books were adapted for film, although Paul Newman took on the role of Lew “Harper” in Harper (1966), an adaption of The Moving Target, and a sequel, The

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Drowning Pool (1975). More recently, Macdonald has been justly honored with a three-volume Library of America collection, consisting of eleven of his novels. Macdonald’s leading man was modeled on such prototypes as Chandler’s Philip Marlowe or Hammett’s Sam Spade. Miles Archer, you will recall, was the name of Spade’s partner who gets murdered early in The Maltese Falcon, a murder that thereupon cemented the “lone wolf” destiny of the American hard-boiled hero. Archer will act alone, with no sidekick, no Doctor Watson, no Robin nor Tonto to accompany him (that tendency to solitude, however, will begin to change in the early 1970s). For Macdonald, the hero’s existential isolation, as we will see, is central to this perspective. Critic Jerry Speir, in an early study, points to the detective’s persistent sense of incompleteness, his “painful loneliness and fallibility” (1978, 113). Though we are repeatedly assured that Archer is a tough guy, he seldom uses force to achieve his goals. More often, as in The Galton Case (1959), he is himself the subject of brutal beatings, someone who, Christ-like, absorbs more blows than he delivers. We learn the Archer has an office in L.A., but (unlike Marlowe or Spade), we seldom see him in that office; his adventures typically find him out driving on the highways and through the towns along the coast, among the suburban sprawl of post-war America. His works document “the rush of change which the war had started continued and accelerated afterwards, particularly in the empty spaces of California” (Bruccoli and Layman 2002, 247). Macdonald indicts the excesses of an economy driven by real estate. In The Galton Case, which I will continue to take as my privileged example, the bones of a man long missing are literally disinterred when the land on which he dies is being cleared for a new shopping center. Most of the books are set in Santa Teresa (a loosely fictionalized version of Millar’s hometown of Santa Barbara), a city whose surging population after the war typified the patterns of boom times upward mobility. Macdonald’s work—however he burnished the mythic dimensions of the American dream—was characterized by explicit social commentary. Macdonald’s recurrent theme, according to one critic, is “tragedy among the privileged” (Marling 2010, 117), though I will emphasize too how discerningly he turns his sociological lens across the complete class strata; indeed the tragedy emerged from the failure of those at the top to acknowledge their social connections and responsibilities to those less well off. “One of the most ecologically aware writers” (Bryson 2010, 169), Macdonald wrote morality tales to underline the environmental costs of

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expanding economy. His writing demonstrates how precarious California development was by highlighting such ecological catastrophes as the disastrous Union Oil Platform A spill of 1969, the subject of Sleeping Beauty (1973), or devastating mountain fires, such as the 1964 Coyote Canyon fire, featured in The Underground Man (1971), which plague the state even more catastrophically today. California, Macdonald noted in an interview, constituted “an instant megalopolis superimposed on a background which could almost be described as raw nature. What we’ve got here is the 20th century right up against the primitive” (Macdonald 1972, 149). Mike Davis, in his survey of Los Angeles noir, is fairly dismissive of the work, noting that Macdonald “continued to churn out reasonably well written detective noir in a Chandleresque mode, usually with some pointed contrast between the primitive beauty of the Southern California seacoast and the primitive greed of its entrepreneurs” (1990, 44). What Davis misses, I think, is that Macdonald’s detective fictions are, by the late 1950s, no longer noir; they might not even merit the epithet “hard-­ boiled.” Rather, they document a significant shift in American popular cultural sensibilities. With the election of Kennedy and the advent of the new frontier, as historian K. A. Cuordileone has argued, dominant stereotypes of white American masculinity undergo a sea-change. In Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War (2005), Cuordileone tracks the emergence of the “liberal as superman”: “if there was one notable stylistic accomplishment that marked Kennedy’s presidency, it was a reconciliation of intellect, education, cultural refinement, and liberalism itself with masculine virility” (2005, 169–170), a morphing of tough-guy competence with sophistication, benignity, and compassionate civic largesse, all qualities embodied by Lew Archer. Other critics—both those who admire Macdonald and those who disparage him—and cultural historians agree that the early sixties were a watershed moment, which marked the collapse of noir as a distinct structure of post-war American feeling. In Gumshoe America, for example, Sean McCann recounts that, by the 1950s, even Raymond Chandler acknowledged that “the hard-boiled detective story had run its course. Countless imitations had led the private eye into lifeless caricature. … The virtues of Philip Marlowe had fallen prey, on the one hand, to Mickey Spillane’s lowbrow ‘mixture of violence and outright pornography’ and, on the other, to the literary pretense of Ross Macdonald” (2000, 198–99). “Literary pretense” might be an inevitable offshoot of the attempt by French and some American critics to salvage the trashy reputation of pulp

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fiction, which we have covered in previous chapters. It also signaled a proto-postmodern reflexivity and self-consciousness on the part of Macdonald and other writers during the late 1950s and 60s. No longer content with simply recounting the action pell-mell, hard-boiled writers were carefully observing and commenting on their own method. This may be a function of the market too. Macdonald was determined that he be published in hardback by reputable presses, that his work be treated by readers, critics, and those in the industry, as literature proper. In Macdonald’s fiction, in league with his attunement to the social and environmental locations of suburban Southern California, critics point to Macdonald’s obsessions with historical time. Typically, characters imagine themselves as self-inventing Americans, who can float free of historical determinism: their tragedy turns out to be that they are rent by history. “The California escapists of my books drag with them their whole pasts,” observes Macdonald, “rattling like chains against the castanets” (Macdonald 1981b, 67). In a typical Macdonald novel, there is a buried family secret, stretching back generations, that it becomes the task of Archer to disinter. In The Galton Case, the prodigal son of a wealthy family has been disinherited and disappeared. Some decades later, a young man shows up, claiming to be the grandson and heir. Archer must dig into the youth’s past and the family secretes in order to determine if he is indeed rightful heir or a simple confidence trickster. One of Macdonald’s most classic works, and the one most peppered with autobiography, The Galton Case analyzes the social and cultural shifts in the United States between the Depression years and the new age of post-war prosperity. Decidedly Dickensian in formula, involving an orphan’s search for his patrilineage, the discovery of which both cements his mature self-knowledge and assumes his rightful place in society, the work is an allegory of white upward mobility and the attendant imposter syndrome, as one ascends the social ladder. Archer will chase down leads in order to solve the problem, but he doesn’t really do a whole lot of sleuthing. He doesn’t solve the case through the Holmesian power of ratiocination nor through the hard-­ boiled dick’s habit of wresting the truth from suspects through threat of violence, the traditional methods for making the world yield its secrets to the detective. He hardly interrogates his suspects at all. Rather, Archer’s method is more psychoanalytical: he listens quietly while the repressed secrets buried in the intricacies of the mystery bubble up. Typically, Archer will cross thresholds into people’s personal spaces and to have them confide in him: in this respect he is more social worker than social scientist, as

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solicitude is his primary virtues. For other characters do disclose themselves to Archer, ultimately spilling their most closely guarded and self-­ incriminating secrets. As they pour out all, the pieces of the puzzle assemble themselves. And they do assemble themselves; unlike the detectives in Chandler or Hammett (or Agatha Christie, for that matter), Archer never knows more than the reader and he never conceals what he knows. We as readers witness the solution to the puzzle unfold synchronously with Archer. The Galtons are an aristocratic family, redolent of old money, who dwell in Gothic gloom, dominated by a Miss Haversham-type matriarch. She lives in a “pre-Mizener Spanish mansion” (Macdonald 1996, 12), in which “wrought iron chandeliers hung like giant black bunches of withered grapes from the high ceiling. Ancient black furniture stood in museum arrangements around the walls under old dark pictures. The windows were narrow and deep in the thick walls, like the windows of a medieval castle” (Macdonald 1996, 12–13) Architecture is literally a map of social stratification, and Archer, a discerning semiotician of class codes, reads signs of wealth and distinction as astutely as Pierre Bourdieu. By contrast, the old woman’s paid companion, who labors for a living, has “modern furniture and “Paul Klee reproductions on the walls” (Macdonald 1996, 27) in her room. The Galton’s lawyer is representative of an aspirational professional class, in the sun-baked, Kennedy-esque idiom of the new frontier (Bruccoli and Layman 2002, 247); his “house was a living-­ machine, so new it hardly existed” (Macdonald 1996, 11) a “house with many windows” complete with a surly doorman, a swimming pool, and a petulant, alcoholic trophy wife. The new development of “Arroyo Park was an economic battleground where managers and professional people matched wits and incomes. The people on Mrs. Galton’s street,” by contrast, “didn’t know there had been a war. Their grandfathers and great grandfathers had won it for them; death and taxes were all they had to cope with” (Macdonald 1996, 11). But we are also, with Archer, privy to the habitations of all social declensions, even of those lower on the scales. At her child’s invitation, Archer enters the home of a working-class woman who has married well: “I followed him into a living-room which was dominated by a large brick fireplace with a raised hearth. Everything in the room was so new and clean, the furniture so carefully placed around it that it seemed forbidding. The boy flung himself down in the middle of the green broadloom carpet” (Macdonald 1996, 101). In San Francisco, he attends a Beat poetry

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reading at bohemian dive, attended by “young people with serious expressions on their faces” (Macdonald 1996, 59). He visits a hotel room where a prostitute lives with her pimp and husband: “I followed her into the little room. At the chinks in the drawn blinds, daylight peered like a spy. She turned on a lamp and waved her hand vaguely toward a chair. A man’s shirt hung on the back of it. A half-empty half-gallon jug of muscatel stood on the floor beside it” (Macdonald 1996, 93). He encounters poverty in the dilapidated town of Pitt, Ontario, “On the second floor of the old red house, a bleary light outlined a window. The boards of the veranda groaned under my weight. I knocked on the alligatored door. A card offering “Rooms for Rent was stuck inside the window beside the door” (Macdonald 1996, 192). Archer encounters a servant’s bare room, “furnished with a single bed, a chest of drawers, a chair, and a reading lamp” (Macdonald 1996, 45) and the “subtler indescribable odor of masculine loneliness” (Macdonald 1996, 46). And here is his description of a boy’s rooming house: The room was a small bare cubicle on the second floor at the rear. I guessed it had been a servant’s room in the days when the house was a private residence. Torn places and stains among the faded roses of the wallpaper hinted at a long history of decline. The room was furnished with an iron cot covered by an army blanket, a stained pine chest of drawers topped by a clouded mirror, a teeter wardrobe, a kitchen chair standing beside a table. In spite of the books on the table, something about the room reminded me of the dead man Culligan. Perhaps it was the smell, a  compound of hidden dirt and damp and old grim masculine odors. (Macdonald 1996, 124)

As Lee Clark Mitchell helpfully points out, in these highly charged descriptions of “haunted furnishings” in Macdonald, “objects, physiognomies, landscapes, and furnishings accorded a past that looms ominously, inflecting mysteries that themselves depend for their solutions on past relations. Indeed, the past has an almost determinate hold on the present” (2017, 139–140). Macdonald is “weaving physical description into a web that binds present to past, infusing place with a fated geography” (Mitchell 2017, 124). His work is counter-ballast, thereby, against any alignment of American consumerism with that of American self-invention. While both are imagined as liberating one from fate or destiny or historical

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determinism, he shows how illusory the transformational capacity of selfstriving. Yet, an important caveat: this past is generational, in Macdonald. If it is structural, it is not bedrock; if it is mythified it is not wholly mythic. Archer leads us, invariably, inevitably, to where the bodies are buried. Secrets and lies can be disinterred, and the deeper truths of American collectivity can be known. One’s aspirations must be melded into the common good. This is not, or not fully, a sacrificial vision. It is rather a variant of the welfare state, a social vision that suggests that the common good and individual prosperity can be aligned, an assessment of the cost of social prosperity, the need to regulate a rapidly expanding economy, to police corruption and to ensure that the spoils can be accessed by all. Macdonald’s California seems to exist at a moment just before California became fully a dreamscape. The freeways and beach-houses, the feckless people of leisure and glam ennui so memorably recorded in the writing of Joan Didion from the late sixties and seventies have not yet fully cemented themselves in the coastal imaginary. Characters in Macdonald are creatures of drive, earnestness and ambition, and their crimes and failings are typically the consequences of their aspirations. In vision, he is close to Michael Harrington, who in a contemporaneous book, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (1962), chronicled the hardscrabble lives of those left behind, the book that presumably motivated President Johnson’s war on poverty and kicked off the Great Society initiatives. This is no longer noir; as McCann astutely observes, there are no “truly bad people in Macdonald’s eyes” (2000, 208). His fiction represents the voice of what would soon be called the liberal elite—the champions of mass higher education, urban renewal, and the “rights-based” liberalism that would flower in the Great Society programs of the Johnson administration” (McCann 2000, 206). Through Archer, Macdonald sees like a social scientist, or a social worker: there are few bad people in this world, just people who have been dealt a bad hand. Criminality, like poverty, is systemic (rather than deviant, or pathological). The world can be surveyed and assessed; injustice can be apprehended and, to a considerable extent redressed; corrective can be issued, reparations made, and social balance in some sense restored. What McCann might miss, however, is the mournfulness that laces Macdonald’s compassionate vision: Archer, after all is the one left out; Archer is the sacrificial victim.

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The Best a Man Can Do: Donald Westlake and Company And how best to assess such other popular “post-pulp” genre writers as Donald E. Westlake, whose work doesn’t square comfortably with dominant cultural, political, or gender paradigms of the decade? A master of the caper, a humorist, a stoic, more a parodist than an allegorist or satirist, because he has no overtly political scores to settle, Westlake adopted a variety of tones and wrote under a range of pseudonyms. Further, though a throwback in the sense that he typically subordinates problems of characterization, setting, and mood to the helter-skelter of plot, he is everywhere concerned with the problems of male performance. And though his stripped down, absurdist writing style is absolutely unique, I think his work is suggestive of other genre developments in the 1960s and after. Consequently, though I have chosen to confine my examples to selections drawn from Westlake’s writing, ultimately, I could make the argument that, to a lesser or greater degree, these are characteristics of many cultural texts from the period. What happens to the hard-boiled hero when working-class pulp culture encounters the counterculture? My working hypothesis is that, in popular fictions of the period, you see four developments: the hegemonic model of masculinity at play is subject to atomization, stylization, parody, and is, ultimately, reconfigured as ineffectual. Examples abound, from the slyly ironic fiction of Elmore Leonard to the broad travesties of Carl Hiaasen. If it is reconfigured, and rendered as insufficient, however, the model hard-boiled masculinity will not, however, be entirely abandoned. There will be consolation prizes, compensations for that ineffectuality. First, atomization. In a work on the immense popularity of thrillers amidst the turbulent social changes of the 1970s, and thinking of the film Chinatown in particular, critic Paul Cobley observes that, in a post-­Vietnam, post-Watergate moment, one is tempted to speculate that such works described an atmosphere of moral haziness, where it was difficult to tell good from bad. In fact, however, most popular fictions of the period work to counter such moral ambiguities. More precisely, we might say, ambiguities become elements of plot and moral attributes are simplified, dispersed across an array of individual characters. Gone are the murky psychological depths you might find in a Shirley Jackson novel, gone too the atmospheric paranoia that characterized the popular fiction of the 50s. By the late 60s— at least for male characters—the hero becomes decidedly heroic, and the

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villain decidedly villainous. Similarly, social types remain social types: the stock comic relief is the stock comic relief, the hard guy is the hard guy, the hippie is the hippie, the ethnic is the ethnic, and so on. Cobley (2000) remarks on the increasing seriality of these texts, an effect, no doubt, partly produced by the pressures of television on styles of popular fiction (though seriality is as old as the mystery genre itself). Consequently, however, moral codes become rather simplified. One tendency we see, as writers deal with endlessly vexing question of ends and means, is that protagonists will often have a best friend or sidekick, who is permitted to do the violent work of murder and mayhem that the central character denies himself. You can witness this the pairing of the chivalrous (but still violent) Spencer and the ruthless Hawk in Robert Parker’s serial novels, beginning with The Godwulf Manuscript (1973). You can see the same split between the detective superego and id in the friendship between the rather straitlaced Dave Robicheaux and Clete Purcel, a genuine god of misrule, in James Lee Burke’s Louisiana series. You can witness the same in the friendship between the affable Easy Rawlins with the cold-blooded Raymond “Mouse” Alexander in Walter Mosley’s Watts books, the first of which, Devil in a Blue Dress, appeared in 1990, though the series, historical in its outlook, is set in the 40s, 50s, and 60s. In Westlake’s own vast body of writing, where the heroes are themselves criminals—he was master of the caper genre, a point I will return to below—this sort of moral atomization drives the deep split between his grim novels and the comic works. As Westlake has acknowledged, he developed his “comic” serial character, Dortmund, in contradistinction to his flinty, stoical, criminal protagonist, Parker. Parker first appeared in The Hunter (1962), which Westlake wrote under the penname Richard Stark. Accordingly, we can assert that, over the course of the 1960s and particularly in the 70s, the protagonists of crime novels (whether heroes or villains) tended to be increasingly one-dimensional. They can be split into two kinds: they are either machine-like in their cruel efficiency (think Dirty Harry) or, alternately, possess Keystone Cop levels of incompetency (think Woody Allen’s inept bank-robber, Virgil Starkwell, from Take the Money and Run [1969]). A second, related development to note is the hyper-stylization of the genre. We can witness the ways in which in texts that are predominately conservative in terms of their values (if not always in terms of their explicit politics), performances of masculinity become tightly and self-consciously “scripted” by social conventions about gender behavior, however antiquated. Virility becomes, in the 60s, a highly stylized performance, and

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this is as true of works asserting he-man heteronormativity as it is of camp culture. As we saw in the reference to Robert Mitchum, in Westlake’s work, masculinity is obsessed with the problem of Hollywood. Consider this scene from A Travesty, a novella that comprises the first section of Enough (1977), a “two-reeler,” as it is titled, which pays explicit if sometimes farcical homage to the film industry. The narrator is Carey Thorpe, who makes a modest living as a freelance film reviewer and who is author of such books as Author and Auteur: Dynamism and Domination in Film and The Mob at the Movies: Down from Rico to Puzo and is hoping to find a publisher for a “glossy photo-filled coffee table book on Italian Neo-­ Realism of the postwar era” (Westlake 1977, 21). Thorpe has “accidentally” killed one his girlfriends, and has tried, in a more or less bumbling manner, to cover the murder up. He finds himself caught now between a blackmailing private eye, who witnessed him commit the crime, and a police investigation. Befriending one of the police detectives investigating him, Corey uses his familiarity with film conventions to assist him in the solution of crimes. At one point, while interviewing a well-established Hollywood director, Thorpe asks him how he would resolve the plot if her were making a movie. Well, says the director, I would stick to the script, advice that Thorpe feels to be particularly unhelpful: The script. Only a hack cares about the goddam script. What I need was to talk to a real director; Hitchcock, or John Ford, or John Huston, or Howard Hawks. What happens next? that was my question. Sam Fuller would have an answer to that. Roger Corman, even. (Westlake 1977, 107)

A third phenomenon, which Deleuze has already alerted us to, has to do with the increasingly parodic dimension of the crime fiction. In his work, A Travesty, Westlake offers another telling intertextual or meta-­ literary reference. While rifling through the pockets of his blackmailer, Thorpe finds “a tattered paperback copy of One of Our Agents Is Missing, by E. Howard Hunt” (Westlake 1977, 134). One of Our Agents Is Missing, if you haven’t had the chance to read it yet, is a real publication, a CIA yarn written in 1967 by Hunt under the pen name David St. John. Hunt was himself a CIA operative and the author of a whopping seventy-three books. But he is probably better remembered today, for having been one of President Richard Nixon’s “plumbers.” For his central part in the Watergate break-in, Hunt was convicted of burglary, conspiracy, and wiretapping, and served thirty-three months in prison. Hunt’s life story—he

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was involved in the Bay of Pigs and claimed to have participated in a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy—makes for an interesting read in the annals of the Cold War. He published two autobiographies, Undercover, in 1974, and American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate, and Beyond, posthumously, in 2007, with a foreword by no less that doyen of highbrow conservatism, William F.  Buckley! Already, American right-wing politics is almost wholly the parody of pulp virility that it remains today, a half-century later. Westlake, who liked to be playful with his own pseudonyms, would no doubt have delighted in Hunt’s multiple career paths as prolific paperback writer, seasoned spy, and political criminal. A Signet paperback, there was, in fact, a reissue of One of Our Agents is Missing that identifies Hunt as the real author. Westlake provides more homage to Hunt at another juncture in A Travesty, when Thorpe helps to decode the last message typed by a murder victim, that refers to the “capital city of Antigua,” which is St. John. The man must have been murdered by someone he knew, Thorpe rightly deduces, and St. John must be the name of the murderer. Our hero, Thorpe, needless to say, is more clever, quick-witted, and charming than anyone else in the novel, although ultimately, he proves too smart for his own good. Exonerated as a suspect, he nonetheless ends up getting framed by the police for the very he crime he has, in fact, committed. A running joke in almost all of Westlake’s writing is that his protagonists—outlaws, thieves, pranksters, rebels, con men—almost never get away with their crimes. Or rather, they get away with their crimes, but not with the loot, and sometimes not with their lives. The fourth feature of post-pulp crime writing—we have already encountered it in the novels of Charles Willeford—is the tendency of heroes to be more or less ineffectual, despite their competence. Westlake’s heroes rarely have any explicit politics. Any character with an ideological axe to grind is, in Westlake’s writing, simply played for laughs. But they are more or less natural subversives, and anti-establishmentarians, in keeping with the temper of the times. Contemptuous of straight society and, largely, contemptuous of models of manhood associated with conventional middle-class morality (though they are surprisingly monogamous in their sexual lives). Though Westlake enjoys lampooning the general idiocy of mob culture, his heroes, Parker and Dortmunder, are more refugees from an American working class that his seen itself eclipsed in popular culture. Turning to crime and refusing to climb the corporate ladder, they turn out to be more competent, cunning, funnier, more ruthless, and—in short—more “professional”

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than any professionals who have signed on to work for the establishment. Typically, they get away with the crimes, but end up, through several twists of irony, losing the loot. Much of the fun in reading a Westlake novel has to do with the clever twists of fate that undo his hero (a technique he learned, in fact, from Jim Thompson, whose work The Grifters Westlake adapted for film, directed by Stephen Frears, 1990). In The Plunder Squad (1972), for example, Stark is part of a team assembled to rob a truck that is transporting a traveling exhibition of contemporary paintings from Chicago to Saint Louis. They work an ingenious plan to hijack the truck, and all goes more or less as planned, and members of the team go their separate ways. One of their financial backers, however, has borrowed money from the mob. Thinking—mistakenly—that all is lost, he commits suicide; in retaliation, the mob comes after Parker and his allies when they try to sell them back the paintings; Parker is able to fight his way out in shootout, but has no-one to sell the artworks too, and is forced to simply give them back. The Dortmunder book Jimmy the Kid (1974) is a particular favorite of mine, one that brings many of these elements together. Kelp, one of Dortmunder’s cohorts, serving time in prison, comes across a Richard Stark novel called Child Heist. “‘About a crook.’ Kelp said. ‘A crook named Parker. He’ll remind you of Dortmunder’” (1974, 22). Recalling Lionel White’s The Snatchers— the 1953 novel with which I began my discussion of pulp virilities back in my opening chapter—Jimmy the Kid describes the kidnapping of the son of a wealthy man, and describes in detail how the gang pulled it off. Kelp’s idea is to replay the entire script, line by line, and recreate the book’s plot in a real-life kidnapping of the son of a wealthy corporate attorney. Things go more or else as planned, with a few comic twists. But the child, Jimmy Harrington, an aspiring filmmaker, turns out to be a little too smart for Dortmunder and his crew. Pretending to conspire with them to cheat his own father, he eventually wins their trust. When the ransom money arrives, under cover of night, Jimmy loads it into his own backpack. When they drop him off back home, he simply walks away with the money, using it to underwrite production of a film he has scripted. That movie, Kid Stuff, is an autobiographical story about a child who has been kidnapped. When novelist Richard Stark and his lawyer get wind of the plot, they recognize it immediately as having been plagiarized from Stark’s novel, and threaten to sue. It turns out, however, that you can’t plagiarize from events that took place in “real life.” Both Dortmunder and Parker’s creator, “Richard Stark,” get their comeuppance. Westlake’s heroes are subversives, but not

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revolutionaries: they can outwit the social forces arrayed against them and (pridefully) claim a certain degree of masculine autonomy and independence in so doing, but they will never be fully rewarded: their consolations involve a comic stoicism, which, at this juncture, is about the best “a man” can do.

Losing More Slowly: Nightmares and Neo Neo-Noir Neo-noir seems still to have a powerful hold on the cinematic imagination, as is evidenced by Guillermo del Toro’s very recent, no doubt overly stylized remake of Nightmare Alley (2021). Del Toro pays loving homage to the visual and thematic moodiness of classic noir films, aiming to recapture in detail the dramatic chiaroscuro lighting, the lurid make-up of the femme fatale, and the dramatic haberdashery of the heroes and villains, the full palate of menacing eroticism that featured in films from the forties and fifties. Fittingly, too, del Toro aims to recapture the pervading sense of incoherent doom that distinguishes noir from the larger pattern of Hollywood production. For, while all noir is pulp in its sensibilities, not all pulp is noir. The films of Quentin Tarantino for example, can’t really be considered neo-noir at all. Tarantino’s heroes, ultimately, have no real sense of doom, indulging rather an excessive, cartoonish version of the unlimited powers of the righteous male hero—who no longer even has to be Anglo-Saxon (though he most often is). Even the most dubious heroes, say the alcoholic, self-lacerating Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), rise to the occasion, unleashing orgies of retributive violence on the heads of evildoers everywhere. His heroes always triumph and rejoice in their barbarous triumphalism, indulging a happy-go-lucky he-man brutality to right historical wrongs from slavery to Fascism to the murders perpetrated by the Manson Family. Of Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994), James Naremore writes disparagingly that it is “a comic, almost encyclopedic celebration of male-adolescent trash” (1998, 217). Noir, by contrast, is ambivalent at best: “Is there a way to win?” asks Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer), in Out of the Past (1947). To which Jeff Markham (Robert Mitchum) famously replies: “there’s a way to lose more slowly.” The most compelling narratives of pulp virilities that we have been examining throughout this study—from the cranky tough-guy losers in Charles Willeford to the doomed ghetto revolutionaries of Donald Goines—are deeply skeptical about the prospects of valor embedded in

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Hollywood myth of male virtue and power. This unease reflects the “paranoia” that characterize post-war film noir, according to Power and Paranoia (1986), Dana Polan’s classic study of films of the 1940s: “In the chaotic films of film noir, especially, the ordinary world undergoes a defamiliarization in which the confidence of human projects—above all, that centrally human project of giving narrative form to experience—comes undone” (1986, 20). Assessing the somewhat superficial moralizing of neo-noir, James Holt makes a related observation, emphasizing what he terms the deep “realism” of noir. By that he means the genre’s radical delinking of righteousness and the possibility of asserting control over one’s circumstances, the dealignment of virtue and power, a condition where “values alone have nothing to do with what really happens” (2006, 39). In William Lindsay Gresham’s remarkable source novel, Nightmare Alley (1946), the protagonist, carny Stan Carlyle, traveling with the “Ackerman-Zorbaugh Monster Show,” recalls the childhood nightmare that gives the book its title. It is a dream of pursuit of the impossibility of escape, set in a menacing urban landscape of terror. Stan’s nightmare alley functions as an ur-scenario: Ever since he was a kid Stan had had the dream. He was running down a dark alley, the buildings vacant and black and menacing on either side. Far down at the end of it, a light burned; but there was something behind him, close behind him, getting closer until he woke up trembling and never reached the light. (Gresham 1946, 67)

Though neither Edmund Goulding’s 1947 film adaptation of the book nor Del Toro’s recent version highlight the racial dimensions of this episode, it should not surprise us that this memory surges up as Stan is contemplating the plight of Blacks in the American South. “Everywhere the shining, dark faces of the South’s other nation caught the highlights from the sun. They stood in quiet wonder watching the carny put up in the smoky morning light” (Gresham 1946, 65). As we saw in Chap. 2, it is in an encounter with racial others that so many protagonists come to see their own condition distortedly reflected. Stan comes to recognize—misrecognize is a better term—what he understands to be his own existential dread as he meditates on the difficult lives of the Black audience: “It was sure-fire. All of ‘em want North, San thought. It was the dark alley all over again. With a light at the end of it. … They have it too—a nightmare alley. The North isn’t the end. The light will only move further on. And the fear

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close behind them. White and black, it made no difference. The geek and his bottle, staving off the clutch of the thing that came following after” (Gresham 2010, 67). All men are pursued, thinks Stan. The story of Stan’s rise and fall is narrated over the course of the novel. Eventually, Stan is doomed to find himself forlorn and betrayed, an alcoholic, an addict, turning out to be himself the sideshow geek that both fascinated and repelled him at the opening of the book. The story of his rise to fame and undoing is told through a series of romantic relationships, as Stan uses the various women in his life to ascend the social order. From Madam Zeena, his first lover, he will learn the tricks of the fortune-telling trade. Leaving the carnival and Zeena behind, he will pursue a career as the Great Stanton in vaudeville, with his adoring young wife, Molly as assistant. Ultimately, he will fall into the clutches of the villainous Dr. Lilith Ritter, consulting psychologist. Together they will concoct a scheme to defraud the rich and powerful. Armed with Ritter’s inside knowledge of her well-heeled patients’ secrets, Stan sets himself up as the Reverend Carlisle, pastor of the spiritualist “Church of the Heavenly Message.” Together they set their predatory sights on the fabulously wealthy industrialist Ezra Grindle. Unsurprisingly—her name alone should have been a tip-off—Dr. Ritter double-crosses Stan and swindles him out of his share of the money they take. In the novel, Lilith goes in, in fine femme fatale fashion, to marry his nemesis, Grindle. The 1947 film, however, makes the very interesting choice of coding Lilith as a lesbian, who rejects Stan’s amorous advances. Either way, it is Stan’s encounters with other men that will in fact doom him. His fate is sealed when, early in the novel, he accidentally—or was it on purpose?—kills Zeena’s alcoholic husband by giving him wood alcohol to drink. When, in therapy, he confesses this crime to Dr. Ritter she uses it to blackmail him. The story is quite Oedipal. Stan has an erotic fascination with his mother and at one point, flush with success, he goes back to confront the brutal father who raised him after she abandoned the family. Stan rises by eliminating rivals who stand in his way, like Molly’s lover, the strong man Bruno. Ultimately, Stan’s demons catch up with him. He can never elude those pursuing alter-egos. Abjecting himself to take up the position of sideshow geek, Stanton he ends up becoming one of the weak men whom he so despises. But he has one more significant encounter. Hobo-ing, Stan races along to catch a freight train. As he stumbles and begins to slips underneath the boxcars wheels, he is rescued by another tramp riding the rails, “Frederick

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Douglas Scott, son of a Baptist minister, grandson of a slave” (Gresham 2010, 255). “It’s a hell of a world,” laments Stan. “A few at the top got all the dough. To get yours you got to pry ‘em loose from some of it. And then they turn around and knock your teeth out for doing just what they did” (Gresham 2010, 253). Scott, a labor organizer heading North, will have none of his cynicism: “only they ain’t going to have it forever. Someday people going to get smart and mad, same time. You can’t get nothing in this world by yourself” (Gresham 2010, 252). Stan helps Scott elude the lynch mob that is pursing him, and the chapter ends on an upbeat note: Shoulders braced against the truck frame, feet against the opposite side, [Scott] balanced his body on an inch-thick brake rod which bent under him. Inches below, the roadbed raced by, switches clawing up at him as the car pounded past them. The truck hammered and bucked. A stream of glowing coals, thrown down by the engine, blew over him and he fought them with is free hand, beating at the smoldering denim, while the train thundered on; north, north, north. A specter was haunting Grindle. It was a specter in overalls. (Gresham 2010, 255–56)

Scott refuses to be trapped in the nightmare alley. In this scene, as Gresham divests himself (and the aspirational white individualist male) of the proletarian novel he could never write, we unlock one secret to the pessimism of noir. As a genre, it mourns the missed aspirations of a white working class. Nightmare alleys are the dread futures, the various routes that pulp virilities will take in their afterlives. The legacy of the hard-boiled pulp tradition is manifest today not only in such self-conscious works as those directed by Clint Eastwood and Robert Lorenz, but in just about any popular contemporary action film you can think of: the noirish John Wick films [2014–2023] starring Keanu Reeves; the  stunt fetishism of Tom Cruise’s Mission Impossible reboots [1996–2023], etc. Pulp virilities endure as well as in such popular serial characters as Lee Child’s Jack Reacher, who is a lethal mix of Dudley Do-Right and Huckleberry Finn, moving freely to right wrongs across the world unburdened by the worries and cares of the professional classes addicted to his adventures; in the character of Mack Bolan, a cold-blooded vigilante who stars in a series of post-Vietnam revenge fantasies that cater to the felt resentments of the white working classes who devour them in

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staggering numbers. Created in 1969 by writer Don Pendleton, the series was acquired by Harlequin’s Gold Eagle imprint in 1980. Bolan, aka, “the Executioner” has featured in more than 600 novels with a reported sales of over 200 million books. Mickey Spillane, eat your heart out. While catering to the populist and often resentful fantasies of the disfranchised white working classes, Bolan’s political views, expressed more by his deeds than in his words, are worlds more progressive than the rigidly fascist Mike Hammer, which no doubt reflects Bolan’s somewhat hippie-ish, anti-­ establishmentarian roots. The market expanded, in fact, though pulp cultural products also targeted increasingly specific audiences. Comic books were sold to teenagers; westerns to adult white working-class men; men’s magazines, many of them, pitched themselves to the aspiring upwardly mobile. Paperback hard-boiled crime writing persisted in the 1960s and after, penned by such popular best-selling writers as John D. MacDonald, Ross Thomas, James Ellroy, and Robert Parker as well as by less-successful, self-consciously hack-like, but productive authors as Dan J. Marlowe, as well as by more self-consciously literary stylists like Elmore Leonard, as James Crumley, whose mournful The Last Good Kiss (1978) channels the stoicism of Hammett and the world-weary gallantry of Chandler, fusing it with the febrile drink and drug-laced hedonism of a Hunter S. Thompson. Such cerebral stylists as Denis Johnson worked in the tradition, as does Thomas Pynchon. Johnson’s Nobody Move (2009) is a stripped-down homage to crime writing of the 1920s, while Pynchon’s Inherent Vice (2009) is an elegy to the counterculture told through their perspective of Larry “Doc” Sportello, an Age-of-Aquarius version of Sam Spade.1 This tradition, obviously, becomes drastically transformed over the decades, however, and increasingly stylized, as I argue in my analysis above of two of the important crime writers to emerge after Chandler, Ross Macdonald and Donald Westlake. Pacé Haut, I would argue that the afterlives of pulp virility informed and helped to produce an astonishing array of post-pulp stylizations of variant masculinities in a range of (sometimes unexpected) cultural arenas. 1  Though it was published just as I was completing my research for Pulp Virilities, Lee Clark Mitchell’s Noir Fiction and Film (2021) contains very rich discussions of contemporary heirs to the hard-boiled tradition, including Michael Connelly, Thomas Perry, Robert Ludlum, Barry Eisler, and Lee Child, the successes of whom testify to the ongoing vitality of the genre.

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Pandemic Pulp: Panic in the Streets While accentuating the myriad pleasures of hard-boiled and noir texts, Lee Harvey Mitchell notes the “largely conservative” tenor of popular genre formulas, whereby “traditional beliefs in gendered heterosexual behavior, or supposedly obvious racial and ethnic identity, or clear class affiliations are more often cemented than scrambled” (2021, 281). A lot of pulp sides with the winners, or positions the good guys as inevitable winners, though as we have seen, the more interesting an noirish variations will be willing to roll the ethical dice. And yet, the undercurrents in such texts can take us, as we have also seen, in many directions. We might close with a text that is perhaps the most compelling dramatization of the present era of COVID, under which conditions I am completing this study. Elia Kazan’s Panic in the Streets (1950) prophetically allegorizes struggles over public health during a potential pandemic as a contestation over rights to manhood. Richard Widmark stars as Dr. Clint Reed, a beleaguered Anthony Fauci-like public health officer, fending off skepticism, indifference, and bureaucratic ineptitude—along with a sensationalist and dishonest press— as he tries desperately to contain a virulent outbreak of pneumonic plague in the port city of New Orleans. He is a dutiful, poorly paid public servant living a quiet suburban life. He dreams of adventure, of wealth and fame. His marriage is troubled, his manhood, in short, is in crisis. He teams up with crusty, hard-bitten, experienced police officer, Captain Tom Warren (Paul Douglas), who is the prototypical Chandler-esque hard-boiled hero. Warren is widowed, world-weary, lonesome, and he knows from long experience how to navigate the back alleys and mean streets of the city. The two strike up an unlikely friendship. Arrayed against this pandemic fighting duo is the sinister underworld figure Blackie (Jack Palance), a powerful crime-lord in the model of such outlaw heroes as White’s Cal Dent or Appel’s Joe Trent, or Key Largo’s Johnny Rocco (Edward G. Robinson). Blackie is ruthless, a Randian hero, an outsize presence, a self-made man, a kingpin. He is partnered in turn by his cringing, effeminate, sycophantic sidekick, Raymond Fitch (Zero Mostel). The battle is to restore public safety, to keep the streets safe. Reed and Warren hunt the wharves, the diners, the flophouses, the warehouses of the city, chasing down sailors, prostitutes, short-order chefs who may have been exposed to the virus, quarantining the infected, inoculating the population against the virus for their own good, and whether they like it or not.

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But the battle is over manhood, the model of American manhood that will prove hegemonic over the coming years. Four types are represented: the strong man, Blackie; the castrated yes man, Fitch; the honest but cynical, hard-working hard-boiled hero, Warren; and the suburban professional, the family man, the organization man and bureaucrat, Widmark’s Reed. Who is the American male who will secure the rights to dominate post-war life? Who will be the inheritor of America? A rather conservative film, Panic in the Streets looks to the future, and endorses the stereotypically white-bread heteronormativity that will come to define the Cold War consensus—this is a Kazan feature, after all, a director who in 1952 notoriously cooperated with the House Committee on Un-American Activities, serving as a friendly witness to the investigation of Hollywood radicalism. In Panic in the Streets we can already discern Kazan’s political and social proclivities, his predilection for the comfortably conservative status quo of Eisenhower’s imagined America. Unlike in the films of Jules Dassin, there is little nostalgia shown for the older ethnic urban America, the working-­ class heroes that Kazan’s earlier work in the Actor’s Studio had celebrated, or the overtly liberal social critique of the first few films he directed, like Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) or Pinky (1949). The cause of the infectious disease is—inevitably—an immigrant, Kochak’s cousin, Poldi, who might be “Armenian or Czech” but who has entered America, we find out, illegally. The plague is undoubtedly a metaphor for the spread of virulent communism, of course. And the virus is rendered as the foreign; the contaminant, symbolically, is the illegal immigrant, the virus is the urban streets themselves. The virus is the proletariat, the old, multi-ethnic working-­class masculinity, a threat to the newly emerging consensus of the Eisenhower years. We speak, at times, of toxic masculinity. Nothing could be closer to the truth, though virulent masculinity might be a slightly closer match. The terms name effectively the same things. Virulent virility is more or less a redundancy. A virus, etymologically, is a toxin, a poison, a snake’s venom, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. It shares the same Latin root—vir, or man—as virility, suggesting vigorousness, manhood, masculine power, seminal fluid, potency. A life force, but also a poison. The feminine, vira, in Latin, simply meant woman. And, by extension, virtue, the quality of predominantly male benevolence, of strength and power channeled to ethical ends. A virus is a potent juice, a sap, a sticky substance, a poison. These terms are all related back, it appears, to an IndoEuropean root that variously signified snake, or serpent, or possibly rod,

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or twig, or phallus, derived, possibly because of its shape but possibly to indicate its capacity for movement, its sinuosity, its toxicity, its virulence. To be virtuous also means to be chaste, to be uncontaminated, innocent to be—in a related term—virginal. In keeping with these dread times where we are compelled to live so much of our lives online, it is not incidental that the root also forms the base for virtual, literally the power to affect or to influence. As viruses do affect. As, too the affective set of cultural formations that I have termed “pulp virilities.” Pulp virilities are up to their infectious work every time a pudgy adolescent picks up a gun and misconceives himself to be a hero, protecting private property and the American way. Pulp virilities are at work every time a skinny adolescent strikes a cool pose. Have we moved beyond these stale tales of gender, of a masculinity beleaguered and resentful? I would like to think we are moving there, but the old stories still seem to exert their pull over our collective and individual dream lives. Battles taking place in the streets of contemporary New Orleans, in Los Angeles today, in Minneapolis, Kenosha, and Washington D.C. continue to involve struggles over the viable models of—and rights to—American masculinity. And the pulp-inflected narratives in which we continue to tell these stories weigh heavily upon our enduring and evolving understandings of male identity and performance, racially fraught and politically contested as virility remains. I have tried to suggest in this work that these narratives persist in shaping (deforming, perhaps?) the performance of American manhood. For all their potency, for all their malevolence, for all their virulence, they continue to contaminate the various and contested stories that are told about men. As in Panic in the Streets, the contest being battled over today is over life itself, and also over how to live as beings of whatever gender, if any, that we claim—or even to surpass gender. Our challenge will be to extract the virtue from virulence, to discover ways to live that are ethical and joyous and—to resurrect a term that has become overly sullied from too long a history of abuse by miscreants and reactionaries—free.

References Bruccoli, Matthew, and Richard Layman, eds. 2002 [1989]. Hardboiled Mystery Writers. Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald: A Literary Reference. New York: Carroll & Graf. Bryson, J. Scott. 2010. Surf, Sagebrush, and Cement Rivers: Reimagining Nature in Los Angeles. In Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Los Angeles, ed. Kevin R. McNamara, 167–175. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Cobley, Paul. 2000. The American Thriller. Generic Innovation and Social Change in the 1970s. New York: Palgrave. Cuordileone, K.A. 2005. Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War. New York: Routledge. Davis, Mike. 1990. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. London: Verso. Deleuze, Gilles. 2004 [1966]. The Philosophy of Crime Novels. Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974. Ed. David Lapoujade. Trans. Michael Taormina, 81–85. New York: Semiotext(e). Ellroy, James. 2010. Introduction. In The Best American Noir of the Century, ed. James Ellroy and Otto Penzler, xiii–xiv. Houghton Mifflin. Gresham, William Lindsay. 2010 [1946]. Nightmare Alley. New York: New York Review Books. Haut, Woody. 1999. Neon Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction. London: Serpent’s Tail. Holt, Jason. 2006. A Darker Shade: Realism in Neo-Noir. In The Philosophy of Film Noir, ed. Mark T. Conard, 23–40. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. Macdonald, Ross (Kenneth Millar). 1972. Ross Macdonald in Raw California. Interview with Jon Carroll. Esquire, June: 148–149, 188. ———. 1981a [1967]. Archer in Hollywood. In Self-Portrait: Ceaselessly into the Past, 35–37. Santa Barbara: Capra Press. ———. 1981b [1964]. A Death Road for the Condor. In Self-Portrait: Ceaselessly into the Past, 63–67. Santa Barbara: Capra Press. ———. 1996 [1959]. The Galton Case. New York: Vintage/Black Lizard. Marcus, Greil. 2020. Under the Red White and Blue: Patriotism, Disenchantment and the Stubborn Myth of the Great Gatsby. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. Marling, William. 2010. City of Sleuths. In The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Los Angeles, ed. Kevin R.  McNamara, 111–122. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marrs, Suzanne, and Tom Nolan, eds. 2015. Meanwhile There are Letters: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and Ross Macdonald. McCann, Sean. 2000. Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism. Durham: Duke Univ. Press. Mitchell, Lee Clark. 2017. Diversions of Furniture and Signature Styles: Hammett, Chandler, and Macdonald. In The Centrality of Crime Fiction in American Literary Culture, ed. Alfred Bendixen and Oliva Carr Edenfield, 123–146. Routledge. ———. 2021. Noir Fiction and Film: Diversions and Misdirections. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Naremore, James. 1998. More than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts. Oakland: University of California Press. Nightmare Alley. 1947. Dir. Edmund Goulding. 20th Century Fox.

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O’Brien, Geoffrey. 1997 [1981]. Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks and the Masters of Noir. New York: Da Capo. Out of the Past. 1947. Dir. Jacques Tourneur. RKO. Panic in the Streets. 1950. Dir. Ela Kazan. 20th Century Fox. Pillon, Thierry. 2016. Working Class Virility. In A History of Virility, Ed. Alain Corbin, Jean-Jacques Courtine, and Georges Vigarello. Trans. Keith Cohen, 515–536. New York: Columbia University Press Polan, Dana. 1986. Power & Paranoia: History, Narrative, and the American Cinema, 1940–1950. New York: Columbia University Press. Sontag, Susan. 1966 [1964]. Notes on Camp. In Against Interpretation and Other Essays, 275–292. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Speir, Jerry. 1978. Ross Macdonald. New York: Frederick Ungar. Westlake, Donald E. 1974. Jimmy the Kid. New York: M. Evans. ———. 1977. Enough (A Travesty and Ordo). New York: M. Evans.

Index1

NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS #MeToo, 2 A Ace (publisher), 93 Adam (journal), 143 Adorno, Theodor, 80 Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The (film), 143 Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, The (television serial), 138 Afropessimism, 123n11 Akashic Books (publisher), 32 Aldrich, Robert, 24 Algren, Nelson, 9, 36, 37, 41, 46, 61, 61n6, 62 The Man with the Golden Arm, 41, 61, 62 A Walk on the Wild Side, 9

All about Eve (film), 95 Allen, Eddie B., 134 Allen, Woody, 153 Allman Brothers, 142 Altman, Robert, 31 Anderson, Edward, 31, 54, 55 Thieves Like Us, 55 Andryeyev, Bonnie Rhee, 121 Angel Heart (film), 31 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 128, 141 Appel, Benjamin, 6, 6n3, 10, 16–19, 16n6, 26, 27, 162 Brain Guy, 6, 19, 27 Plunder, 16, 16n6 Arzner, Dorothy, 98 Asimov, Isaac, 143 Auden, W. H., 80, 81 Auerbach, Jonathan, 65n11

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Redding, Pulp Virilities and Post-War American Culture, Renewing the American Narrative, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09054-7

167

168 

INDEX

Avila, Eric Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight, 63n9 Avon (publisher), 23, 93 Awakening, The (novel), 88 B Bailey, Pearl, 62n8 Baldwin, James, 93 Ballad of Thunder Road, The (song), 26 Ballantine (publisher), 93 Bannon, Ann, 93 Bantam (publisher), 93 Baudelaire, Charles, 105 Baym, Nina, 5, 5n2 Beat, 30, 40, 94, 107, 133, 149 Beck, Robert (Iceberg Slim), 19, 27, 116–132, 118n9, 142, 143 Airtight Willie and Me, 120 Death Wish, 120, 132 Doom Fox, 121, 128 Long White Con, 120 Mama Black Widow, 120 The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim, 120, 126, 129 Night Train to Sugar Hill, 121, 129 Pimp, 119, 120, 124, 125, 127, 131 Reflections (audio recording), 120, 126 Shetani’s Sister, 121, 129 Trick Baby, 120, 126, 127 Beckett, Samuel, 94 Waiting for Godot, 94 Belafonte, Harry, 62n8 Bell Jar, The (novel), 88 Belletto, Steven, 94 The Beats, 94 Benjamin, Walter, 10, 16, 105 Berlant, Laura, 101 Bernstein, Elmer, 62, 125

Berry, Chuck, 116, 116n7, 132 Berryman, John, 65, 65n12 The Dream Song, 65 Bertolucci, Bernardo, 141 Bezzerides, I. A., 24 The Long Haul, 24 Thieves’ Market, 25 Black, Jack, 54 You Can’t Win, 54 Black Lives Matter, 132 Black Mask (journal), 7, 13, 21, 23, 55, 69 Black Panthers, 126, 132 Black Power, 121 Bladerunner (film), 31 Blaxploitation, 120, 121, 127, 128, 133, 142 Bloods, 52, 128 Blowjob (film), 140 Body Heat (film), 31 Bodyguard, The (film), 31 Bogart, Humphrey, 4, 15, 24, 26, 45, 49, 64, 108, 118 Boise, Idaho, 113 Bolin, Alice, 84 Dead Girls, 84 Bontemps, Arna, 112 Black Thunder, 112, 113 Borden, Lizzie, 88 Border Incident (film), 40 Borgia, Lucretia, 87, 88 Born to Kill (film), 19, 20, 25, 83, 84 Boucher, Anthony, 95 Bourdieu, Pierre, 149 Bradbury, John, 69, 70 Bradbury, Ray, 143 Brando, Marlon, 26 Braudy, Leo, 109 Brazil (film), 143 Breslin, Jimmy, 143 Breu, Christopher, 10, 11, 21, 69 Hard-Boiled Masculinities, 11

 INDEX 

Bronski, Michael, 94 Brooks, Hadda, 64 Brooks, Richard, 25, 47 The Brick Foxhole, 25, 47 Brown, Cecil, 133 The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger, 133 Brown, Claude, 127, 133 Manchild in the Promised Land, 127, 133 Bruce, John Edward, 113n4 The Black Sleuth, 113n4 Buckley, William F., 155 Bundy, Cliven, 3 Burke, James Lee, 153 Burnett, Charles, 128 Burnett, W. R., 6, 21 Asphalt Jungle, 21 High Sierra, 21 Little Caesar, 6, 21 Burnstein, Scott, 130 Burnt Orange Heresy, The (film), 140 Burroughs, William, 40, 92–94 And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, 94 Junky, 93 Naked Lunch, 94 Butler, David, 62n8 Jazz Noir, 62n8 Butler, Judith, 1, 12 C Cain, James M., 4, 5, 15, 21, 23, 25, 26, 54, 55, 81, 84, 107 Double Indemnity, 15, 55, 86 Galatea, 4, 5, 15 The Postman Always Rings Twice, 15, 55 Cain, Paul (George Caryl Sims), 15, 21, 25 Fast One, 21

169

Cambridge University Press (publisher), 13n5 Cammell, Donald, 140 Cape Fear (Scorsese film), 138 Cape Fear (Webb film), 21, 24 Capote, Truman, 93 Capotondi, Guisseppe, 140 Carmen Jones (film), 62n8 Carpenter, Don, 128 Hard Rain Falling, 128 Carradine, David, 140 Carswell, Sean, 25n10 Casablanca (film), 4 Caspary, Vera, 83, 87, 89, 90, 93, 95–102, 101n7 Bedelia, 87, 98, 100, 101 Blind Mice, 98 Evvie, 100, 101n7 Laura, 96–98, 100, 101 The Man Who Loved His Wife, 97, 100 Murder in the Stork Club, 99 The Secrets of Grown-Ups, 96, 98 Stranger than Truth, 97, 99 The White Girl, 97, 98 Cassavetes, John, 139 Cavalier (journal), 143 Cayton, Horace R., Jr., 112 Black Metropolis, 112 Chandler, Raymond, 9, 13n5, 15, 19–23, 27–29, 31, 32n15, 51, 53–55, 81–83, 91, 109, 117, 146, 147, 149, 161 The Long Goodbye, 29, 31 Chandra, Vikram, 32 Chelsea Girls (film), 140 Cherry, Marc, 87, 88 Chester, Dennis, 117 Chicago, 3, 35, 41, 62, 83, 97, 119, 141, 156 Child, Lee, 160, 161n1 Chinatown (film), 31, 152

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INDEX

Christie, Agatha, 81, 90, 149 Ciocia, Stefania, 101 Clapton, Eric, 142 Cleaver, Eldridge, 127 Soul on Ice, 127 Clockwork Orange, A (film), 138 Cobley, Paul, 152, 153 Cochrane, David, 69 Cocksucker Blues (film), 141 Cody, Buffalo Bill, 7 Cody, Philip C., 21 Coffy (film), 128 Cohan, Steve, 29, 50, 52 Masked Men, 29 COINTELPRO, 123n11, 133 Cold War, 10, 23, 26n12, 38, 56, 59, 61, 62n7, 65, 88, 90, 96, 142, 144, 155, 163 Cole, Teju, 105 Open City, 105 Coleman, Wanda, 119 Colliers (journal), 95 Colman, Ronald, 70 Comfort, Mady, 64 Communist Manifesto, The, 96 Commuter, The (film), 3 Como, Dolores, 113n6 Condon, Richard, 42 Cooper, Clarence L., 128 The Farm, 128 Cooper, Clarence, Jr., 13n5 Cooper, Dennis, 31 Cooper, Gary, 2, 6, 20 Coover, Robert, 143 Corso, Gregory, 40 Crain, Jeanne, 70 Craven, Alice Mikal, 113 Crawford, Joan, 89 Crenshaw, 121, 127 Crips, 128 Crisis, The (journal), 122

Crossfire (film), 19, 25, 45, 46, 58, 63, 89 Cruise, Tom, 160 Cruising (film), 141 Crumb, Robert, 143 Crumley, James, 161 The Last Good Kiss, 161 Cummins, Peggy, 89 Cuordileone, K.A., 147 Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War, 147 D Daisy Kenyon (film), 36, 95 Daley, B. Astrid, 92n2 Daly, Carroll John, 6 The Hidden Hand, 6 Dance (journal), 97 Dandridge, Dorothy, 62n8 Dassin, Jules, 24, 38, 56, 58, 67, 128, 138, 163 Davis, Angela, 126 Davis, Bette, 89 Davis, Mike, 117, 122, 123, 147 City of Quartz, 117 Set the Night on Fire, 122 Davis, Miles, 26, 26n14 de Certeau, Michel, 105 Debord, Guy, 105 del Toro, Guillermo, 157, 158 Deleuze, Gilles, 25n10, 83, 141, 154 Dell, Floyd, 7 Dell (publisher), 23, 24, 93 Detective Comics (journal), 142 Detour (film), 55 Detroit, Michigan, 119, 130–132, 134 DeVoto, Bernard, 80 DiCaprio, Leonardo, 31, 157 Dickos, Andrew, 25 Street with No Name, 25

 INDEX 

Didion, Joan, 32, 41, 151 Play It as It Lays, 32 Dinerstein, Joel, 20, 26, 26n13, 58 The Origins of Cool in Postwar America, 20 Django Unchained (film), 31 Doane, Mary Ann, 86 The Desire to Desire, 86 Femmes Fatales, 86 Dolemite (film), 128 Dolemite is My Name (film), 128 Double Indemnity (film), 15, 55, 86 Double Life, A (film), 70 Douglas, Paul, 162 Dragnet (television serial), 138 Drake, St. Clair, 112 Black Metropolis, 112 Drowning Pool, The (film), 146 Dr. Strangelove (film), 138 Du Bois, W. E. B., 122 Duhamel, Marcel, 82 Dutton (publishers), 24 Dyer, Richard, 38, 39 E Eastman, Max, 7 Eastwood, Clint, 2–6, 15, 26, 138, 160 Eisenhower Blues (song), 35–75 Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (journal), 145 Ellington, Duke, 62n8, 129 Ellington, Richard, 23 Exit for a Dame, 23 Ellis, Bret Easton, 31 American Psycho, 31 Glamorama, 31 Ellison, Harlan, 92n2 Ellison, Ralph, 69, 119 Invisible Man, 69, 119

171

Ellroy, James, 13n5, 137, 161 Escalanti, Janice, 116 F Fairy tales, 88 Famous Fantastic Mysteries (journal), 12 Farewell, My Lovely (film), 20, 138 Farrow, John, 40 Fauci, Anthony, 162 Faulkner, William, 9 Fauset, Jessie, 113n6 Fawcett Gold Medal (publisher), 13, 16, 24, 93, 143 Feminist Press (publisher), 95n6 Femme Fatale, 10, 15, 25n10, 51, 83–86, 88, 101, 157, 159 Fiedler, Leslie, 65 Love and Death in the American Novel, 65 Fine, David, 117 Fisher, Rudolph, 112, 113 The Conjure-Man Dies, 112, 113, 113n4, 113n5 Fitzgerald, Barry, 58 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 117, 144, 145 The Great Gatsby, 144 Flesh Gordon (film), 141 Florida, 72, 108 Flynn, Gillian, 87 Gone Girl, 87 Flynt, Josiah, 54 Tramping with Tramps, 54 Fonda, Henry, 7, 12 Ford, John, 7, 154 Forrester, Andrew, 91 The Female Detective, 91 Fort Apache (film), 7 Foxy Brown (film), 128 Frank, Nino, 82

172 

INDEX

Frank, Robert, 141 Frears, Stephen, 156 The Friends of Eddie Coyle (film), 138 Fritz the Cat (comic strip), 143 Fritz the Cat (film), 141 Frye, Northrup, 109 Anatomy of Criticism, 109 F-Troop (television serial), 139 Fuller, Samuel, 26, 28, 154 G Gallimard (publisher), 82, 111 Gangsta rap, 121, 128, 130 Gardner, Earle Stanley, 21, 92 Garfield, John, 55 Garner, James, 140 Gaslight (film), 89 Gentleman’s Agreement (film), 163 Gertzman, J. A., 42 GI Bill, 28, 36, 45, 89 Gibson, William, 31 Neuromancer, 31 Gifford, Justin, 111, 118–121, 119n10, 124, 125, 127 Pimping Fictions, 118, 124 Street Poison, 124 Gilliam, Terry, 143 Ginsberg, Allen, 40 Godard, Jean-Luc, 13 Goines, Donald, 10, 13n5, 30, 116–134, 142, 157 Black Gangster, 130, 131 Black Girl Lost, 131 Black Man’s Grief, 131 Dopefiend, 120, 130, 131 Kenyatta series, 123, 131 Kenyatta’s Last Hit, 133 Never Die Alone, 130, 133 Street Players, 116, 130 Swamp Man, 131 White Man’s Justice, 131 Whoreson, 120, 130, 131

Goldberg, Jeffrey, 1, 2 Goldberg, Jonathan, 89 Melodrama, 89 Goldsmith, I. G., 97 Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. (television serial), 139 Good Housekeeping (journal), 101 Goodis, David, 13n5, 24, 36, 37, 42, 43, 54, 61, 82, 110 The Burglar, 42 Cassidy’s Girl, 42 Down There, 42, 110 The Moon in the Gutter, 42 Goodman, Paul, 80 Good Times (television serial), 128 Gothic, 10, 31, 87, 149 Goulding, Edmund, 158 Grafton, Sue, 91 Graham, D. B., 126 Graham, William Lindsay Nightmare Alley, 158 Gran Torino (film), 4 Great Migration, 106 Green Berets, The (film), 7 Greene, Graham, 80, 81 Greenlee, Sam, 123, 132 The Spook Who Sat by the Door, 123, 132 Grey, The (film), 3 Griffin, John Howard, 65 Black Like Me, 65 Grifters, The (film), 156 Grimké, Angelina, 107 Gun Crazy (film), 89 Gunn, James, 25, 25n10, 83, 84 Deadlier than the Male, 25, 83 H Hammett, Dashiell, 5, 9, 13, 13n5, 15, 19, 21–23, 55, 80–82, 84, 118, 145, 146, 149, 161 The Glass Key, 6

 INDEX 

The Maltese Falcon, 5, 15, 55, 84, 118, 142, 146 Red Harvest, 6, 15, 22, 81 Hard-boiled, 6, 7, 10–12, 13n5, 15, 17, 18, 21–23, 25, 25n10, 27, 28, 30–32, 42, 43, 48, 49, 51, 54–56, 60, 64, 69, 75, 80–84, 92, 94, 100, 101, 108–111, 114, 117n8, 118, 122, 137, 142, 144–148, 152, 160–163, 161n1 Hard Case Crime (publisher), 13n5 Harlem, 64, 71, 107, 110–114, 123, 124, 142 Harlem Renaissance, 106, 107, 112, 113n6 Harlequin Gold Eagle (publisher), 161 Harper (film), 145 Harper’s (journal), 80 Harrington, Michael, 151 The Other America, 151 Harris, Stevie, 58 Hasso, Signe, 70 Haut, Woody, 23, 23n8, 28, 30, 66, 72, 74, 75, 137–139, 142, 161 Heartbreak and Vine, 23, 23n8 Neon Noir, 23n8, 137 Pulp Culture, 23n8 Have Gun Will Travel (television serial), 139 Hawkins, Odie, 119, 123 Ghetto Sketches, 123 Hawkins, Paula, 87 The Girl on the Train, 87 Hawks, Howard, 154 Heflin, Van, 44 Hefner, Hugh, 143 Hellinger, Mark, 56 Help! (journal), 143 Hemingway, Ernest, 6, 6n3, 21, 25, 49 The Sun Also Rises, 49 Hentoff, Nat, 143

173

Hiaasen, Carl, 152 High Price Blues (song), 36 Highsmith, Patricia, 19, 29, 48n4, 89, 90, 95, 99, 141 Strangers on a Train, 95 The Talented Mr. Ripley, 29, 48n4 Hill, Jack, 128 Himes, Chester, 13n5, 19, 71, 82, 92, 106, 110–115, 117–119, 122, 123, 131, 132, 141, 142 If He Hollers, Let Him Go, 111, 122 The Lonely Crusade, 111, 122 My Life of Absurdity, 111n2 A Rage in Harlem (For the Love of Imabelle), 71 Run Man Run, 105–134 Hitchcock, Alfred, 20n7, 154 Psycho, 20n7 The Hitch-Hiker (film), 40, 66 Hogan’s Heroes (television serial), 139 Holden, William, 55 Holloway, Red, 120, 127 Holloway House (publisher), 119, 121, 123–125, 130, 131, 143 Holt, Jason, 158 Homes, Geoffrey, 25 Build My Gallows High, 25 Honest Thief (film), 3 Hopkins, Pauline, 113n4 Hagar’s Daughter, 113n4 Horizon (journal), 80 Horsley, Lee, 22, 31 The Noir Thriller, 22 House of Mirth, The (novel), 88 Howe, Irving, 80 Hughes, Dorothy B., 28, 44, 46–49, 48n4, 71, 72, 87, 90, 95 The Expendable Man, 71, 72 In a Lonely Place, 28, 44, 47, 49, 64, 71 Hughes, Langston, 106, 112, 113 Not without Laughter, 112

174 

INDEX

Hunt, E. Howard, 154, 155 American Spy, 155 One of Our Agents is Missing, 154, 155 Undercover, 155 Hurston, Zora neale, 113n6 Huston, John, 25, 38, 43, 45, 55, 154 Huyssen, Andreas, 80, 82 After the Great Divide, 80 Hydrogen bomb, 108, 109 I Iceberg Slim, see Beck, Robert (Iceberg Slim) Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson, Sr.), 121 Ice-T (Tracy Lauren Marrow), 121 I’m in Korea (song), 35n1 Inclan, Miguel, 7 Inflation Blues (song), 36 I Wanna Be Black (song), 143 J Jackson, Charles, 93 Jackson, George, 126, 127, 131, 132 Soledad Brother, 127 Jackson, Shirley, 90, 95, 152 “The Lottery,” 95 Jagger, Mick, 140, 142 James, P. D., 91 An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, 91 Janeway, Elizabeth, 95 Daisy Kenyon, 36, 95 January 6, 2021, insurrection, 5, 12 Jefferson, Roland S., 13n5, 123, 124 The School on 103rd Street, 123 Johnny Staccato (television serial), 139 Johnson, Denis, 32, 161 Nobody Move, 32, 161 Johnson, James Weldon, 112 The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, 112

John Wick (film series), 160 Jones, Ann, 88 Women Who Kill, 88 Jones, Manina, 91 Detective Agency, 91 Jordan, Louis, 36 Joyce, James, 105, 110 Ulysses, 105 K Kafka, Franz, 73, 74 The Metamorphosis, 74 The Trial, 73 Kane, Henry, 23, 92 Private Eyeful, 92 Report for a Corpse, 23 Kantor, MacKinlay, 89 Kasdan, Lawrence, 31 Kavanaugh, Brett, 3 Kaye, Danny, 11 Kazan, Elia, 38, 162, 163 Kelley, Robin D. G., 111n3 Kennedy, Burt, 13 Kennedy, John F., 30, 147, 155 Kerouac, Jack, 40, 54, 94 And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, On the Road, 94 Kerr, Philip, 32 Key Largo (film), 25, 43, 45, 47, 54, 63, 89 Kill Bill (film), 31 Killer of Sheep (film), 128 Killer’s Kiss (film), 138 Killers, The (film), 25, 60n5 Killing, The (film), 13, 138 Kipling, Rudyard, 83 Kiss Me Deadly (film), 24, 64 Klee, Paul, 51–53, 149 Klein, Kathleen Gregory, 91, 92 The Woman Detective, 91 Knight (journal), 143 Knopf (publisher), 23, 99, 120

 INDEX 

175

Krutnik, Frank, 60n5 In a Lonely Street, 60n5 Kubrick, Stanley, 13, 137 Ku Klux Klan, 69 Kung Fu (television serial), 140 Kurtzman, Harry, 143

Los Angeles (L.A.), 23, 71, 113, 116–134, 146, 147, 164 Lott, Eric, 26n13, 43, 65, 66, 122, 125 Lovejoy, Frank, 66 Lupino, Ida, 40, 66, 67

L La Farge, Christopher, 79, 80, 82 La La Land (film), 128 Larsen, Nella, 97, 113n6 Passing, 97 Larsson, Stieg, 32 Last Poets, The, 141 Last Tango in Paris (film), 141 Laughton, Charles, 20 Laurence, Margaret, 101n7 This Side Jordan, 101n7 Lawrence, D. H., 94 Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 94 Leave It to Beaver (television serial), 138 Lehane, Dennis, 31, 32 Lenihan, Winifred, 98 Lenoir, J. B., 35, 35n1, 36 Leonard, Elmore, 31, 32, 152, 161 Leonard, John, 145 Lesbian pulp fiction, 93 Levene, Sam, 47 Library of America (publisher), 13n5, 95n6, 146 Lindsay, Vachel, 54 A Handy Guide for Beggars, 54 Lipson, Edna (Gerda Charles), 101n7 Liu, Alan, 41 Locke, Alain, 107 Logue, Christopher, 92n2 Lolita (film), 138 Lone Ranger, The (television serial), 138 Long Goodbye, The (film), 29, 31 Lorenz, Robert, 3, 160

M Macdonald, Dwight, 80 MacDonald, John D., 23, 24, 107, 108, 143, 161 The Brass Cupcake, 24, 107 The Executioners, 24 Travis McGee series, 108 Macdonald, Ross (Keith Millar), 13n5, 23, 43, 56, 60, 141, 144–151, 161 The Blue Hammer, 145 The Galton Case, 146, 148 The Moving Target, 145 Sleeping Beauty, 147 The Underground Man, 147 MacFadden, Byrne, 97 MacMurray, Fred, 139 Mad (journal), 143 Mailer, Norman, 40, 41, 43, 65, 70, 75, 89, 98, 142 The White Negro, 40, 65, 75, 89 Maltese Falcon, The (film), 5, 15, 55, 84, 118, 142, 146 Mamet, David, 31 Man with the Golden Arm, The (film), 41, 61, 62 Manchurian Candidate, The (film), 62n7 Mandel, George, 92, 94 Flee the Angry Strangers, 92 Manditch-Protas, Zachary, 127 Mann, Anthony, 40 Mann Act, 116 Manson Family, 157 Marcus, Greil, 144

176 

INDEX

Marksman, The (film), 2, 3, 5, 13 Marlowe, Dan J., 30, 161 Martin, Angela, 86 Martin, Theodore, 68, 70 Maury, Cristelle, 85, 86 Maxwell, William, 93 May, Elaine Tyler, 88 Homeward Bound, 88n1 McBain, Ed, 82 McCall’s (journal), 95 McCann, Sean, 11, 55, 68, 72, 147, 151 Gumshoe America, 11, 147 McCarthy, Mary, 80, 101, 101n7 The Group, 101 McCarthyism, 79 McCoy, Horace, 15, 26, 27, 39, 47, 82, 117 Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, 15, 27, 39 McCullers, Carson, 93 The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, 93 McGhee, Brownie, 36 McGirt’s Magazine (journal), 113n4 McHale’s Navy (television serial), 139 McKay, Claude, 112, 113, 119 Banana Bottom, 112 Home to Harlem, 119 McLeod, Norman Z., 11 McLuhan, Marshall, 80–82 McMurtry, Larry, 106 McNamara, Robert, 7 McNutt, Paul V., 16n6 McQueen, Steve, 138, 139 Meaker, Marijane, 93 Medium Cool (film), 140 Meeker, Ralph, 64 Menand, Louis, 23, 24, 94n4 The Free World, 23, 94n4 Mencken, H. L., 21 Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer (television serial), 139 Midnight Cowboy (film), 140

Midwest, 106, 117, 122, 124 Millar, Keith, see Ross Macdonald Millar, Margaret, 90, 95, 99, 145, 146 Beast in View, 99 Vanish in an Instant, 99 Miller, Henry, 44, 73, 94 The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, 44 The Tropic of Cancer, 94 Millikin, Stephen F., 111n2 Chester Himes, 111n2 Mills, C. Wright, 102 Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 119 Mission Impossible (film series), 160 Mitchell, Lee Clark, 27, 47, 150, 161n1 Modleski, Tania, 48, 49 Money Trap, The (film), 13 Monty Python’s Flying Circus, 143 Moore, Ruby Ray, 128 Morrison, Toni, 113n6 Mosley, Walter, 117, 122, 153 Devil in a Blue Dress, 153 Mostel, Zero, 162 Ms. (journal), 143 Mumford, Lewis, 105, 106 The City in History, 105 Murphet, Julian, 117 Literature and Race in Los Angeles, 117 Murphy, Eddie, 128 My Three Sons (television serial), 139 N Naked City (television serial), 58, 138 Naked City, The (film), 56, 57, 60, 61 Naked Kiss, The (film), 26 Naremore, James, 25n11, 64, 82, 157 Film Noir, 25n11 More than Night, 64 Nathan, George Jean, 21 Nazel, Josph, 119

 INDEX 

Neal, Larry, 125 Neal, Tom, 55 Neeson, Liam, 3 New Left, 41, 133 Newman, Frances, 6 The Hard-Boiled Virgin, 6 Newman, Paul, 145 New Statesman (journal), 101n7 New York, 16, 27, 56–58, 73, 97, 98, 138 New Yorker, The (journal), 80, 95 Nichols, Tom, 1, 5n2, 7 Night and the City (film), 60 Nightmare Alley (1947 film), 158 Nightmare Alley (2021 film), 157 Night of the Hunter (film), 20, 28 Nishikawa, Kinohi, 120, 124, 126 Nixon, Richard, 154 Nobody Lives Forever (film), 36 Noir, 10, 13, 15, 19–33, 36–38, 37n2, 43, 45, 55, 60, 62n8, 64–66, 64n10, 69, 70, 75, 81–84, 86–88, 90, 92–94, 96–102, 109, 110, 115, 117, 117n8, 118, 121, 122, 127, 138–140, 142, 144, 145, 147, 151, 157, 158, 160, 162 Nolan, Tom, 24, 145 Macdonald, 144–151, 161 North, Harry, 69 Nothing But a Man (film), 72 Novak, Kim, 61 Now Voyager (film), 89 O Oates, Joyce Carol, 87 Obama, Barack, 1, 3–5, 5n2, 20 O’Brien, Edmond, 66, 70 O’Brien, Geoffrey, 13n5, 22, 137, 138, 145 Hard-Boiled America, 13n5, 137

177

O’Connor, Flannery, 93 Old School Books (publisher), 13n5 Oluo, Ljeoma, 7, 8 Mediocre, 7 Once upon a Time in Hollywood (film), 31, 128, 157 On the Waterfront (film), 61 Orwell, George, 18, 27, 80, 81, 94 “Raffles and Miss Blandish,” 18, 80 Ourseler, Will, 92 Chord in Crimson, 92 I Found Him Dead, 92 Out of the Past (film), 19, 25, 29, 64, 66, 157 Oxford University Press (publisher), 13n5 P Pacino, Al, 141 Palance, Jack, 162 Panic in the Streets (film), 162–164 Paretsky, Sara, 32, 91 Parfrey, Adam, 92n2 Parker, Alan, 31 Parker, Robert, 153, 155, 156, 161 The Godwulf Manuscript, 153 Parks, Gordon, 128 Parks, Gordon, Jr., 128 Parks, Michael, 140 Partisan Review (journal), 142 Paths of Glory (film), 138 Payne, Rufus, 106 Pegg, Bruce Brown Eyed Handsome Man, 116n7 Pendleton, Don, 161 Penzler (Publisher), 13n5 Pepper, Andrew, 37, 68, 70, 71 Perez, Jacob, 3 Performance (film), 140, 141 Peter Gunn (television serial), 139 Peters, Fiona, 95

178 

INDEX

Petry, Ann, 113n6 The Street, 119 Phipps, William, 46 Pickup on South Street (film), 26 Pinky (film), 70, 163 Place in the Sun, A (film), 89 Playboy (journal), 143 Pocket Books (publisher), 24 Poe, Edgar Allan, 114 Poitier, Sidney, 62n8 Polanski, Roman, 31 Porgy and Bess (film), 62n8 Postman Always Rings Twice, The (film), 15, 31, 55 Preminger, Otto, 61, 61n6, 62, 62n8, 96, 101 Profit, Al, 130 Prohibition, 63, 82 Promised Land, The (song), 116–130 Psycho (film), 20n7 Pulp Fiction (film), 31, 157 Pynchon, Thomas, 143, 161 The Crying of Lot 49, Inherent Vice, 32 Inherent Vice, 161 Q Queen, Ellery, 56, 59, 145 R Rabe, Peter Benny Muscles, 23 Rabinowitz, Paula, 26n13, 38, 41, 90, 93 Rafelson, Bob, 31 Raging Bull (film), 31 Rand, Ayn, 12 Anthem, 12 The Fountainhead, 12 Red Pawn, 12

Random House (publisher), 13n5, 23, 99 Ray, Nicholas, 31, 49, 55 Ray, Robert B., 4 Reagan, Ronald, 127 Rebel, The (television serial), 139 Rebel without a Cause (film), 95 Rechy, John, 94 City of Night, 94 Reconversion Blues (song), 36 Redwing, Rodd, 63 Reed, Lou, 143 Reeves, Keanu, 160 Reservoir Dogs (film), 31 Richard, Dick, 20 Rittenhouse, Kyle, 3 RKO Studios, 12 Robinson, Edward G., 162 Robinson, J. P., 19 Roche, David, 85, 86 Rockford Files, The (television serial), 140 Rodney King riots, 122 Roeg, Nicolas, 140 Roemer, Michael, 72 Rolling Stones, The, 141 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 35, 36 Rosenberg, Bernard, 80 Ross, Andrew No Respect, 80 Ryan, Robert, 46 S Sailor, Shirley, 131, 134 Salinger, J. D. Catcher in the Rye, 37 Samet, Elizabeth D. Looking for the Good War, 36, 37n2 Santa Barbara, California, 146 Sante, Luc, 54 Sargent, Anne, 59

 INDEX 

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 81–83 Being and Nothingness, 73 Saturday Evening Post (journal), 95 Saturday Review, The (journal), 79 Saxton, K. T., 88, 98, 100, 101 Sayers, Dorothy L., 81, 90 Gaudy Night, 90 Schryer, Stephen, 74 Fantasies of the New Class, 74 Schulberg, Bud, 123 On the Waterfront, 123 What Makes Sammy Run, 123 Schuyler, George, 112 Black No More, 112 Scorsese, Martin, 24, 31, 138 Scott, Lizabeth, 44 Scott, Margaret, 92 Chord in Crimson, 92 I Found Him Dead, 92 Scott, Ridley, 31 Scott-Heron, Gil, 118 The Vulture, 118 Seale, Bobby, 126 Secret Life of Walter Mitty, The (film), 11 Seinfeld, Jerry (television serial), 20n7 Selby, Hubert, Jr., 94, 119 Last Exit to Brooklyn, 94, 119 Sewanee Review (journal), 80 Shaft (1971 film), 128, 134 Shaft (2019 film), 128 Shallitt, Joseph Lady, 23 Don’t Die on My Doorstep, 23 Shew, Betty Mae, 119 Shoot the Piano Player (film), 42n3 Signet (publishers), 23, 24, 93, 155 Silverberg, Robert, 92n2 Silverheel, Jay, 63 Simmel, Georg, 105 Sims, George Caryl, see Paul Cain Sin City (comic serial), 137 Sinatra, Frank, 26, 61, 62n7

179

Siodmak, Richard, 25 Sister Souljah (Lisa Williamson), 119 Slotkin, Richard Gunfighter Nation, 7n4 Snake Pit, The (film), 89 Soitos, Stephen, 111, 113n4, 113n6, 114, 115 The Blues Detective, 114 Sonnet, Esther, 95 Sontag, Susan, 141, 142 Sopranos (television serial), 137 South, 6, 117, 158 Southern Gothic, 93 Soylent Green (film), 134 Speir, Jerry, 146 Spillane, Mickey, 9, 11, 23, 24, 24n9, 28, 52, 53, 56, 79–84 I, the Jury, 84 Kiss Me, Deadly, 24, 64 Spillers, Hortense, 125 Stallings, L. H., 130n12 Stallone, Sylvester, 1 Stanwick, Barbara, 86 Stark House (publisher), 13n5 Starsky and Hutch (television serial), 128 Steinem, Gloria, 143 Stewart, Jimmy, 2, 6 Strand Magazine, The (journal), 69 Strange Love of Martha Ivers (film), 44 Strange One, The (film), 95 Strayhorn, Billie, 129 Street Hassle (record album), 143 Stringer, Vickie, 119 Styron, William The Confessions of Nat Turner, 65 Sudden Fear (film), 36 Suddenly (film), 62n7 Sumner, Cid Ricketts, Quality, 70 Sunset Boulevard (film), 55, 89, 109 Superfly (1972 film), 128 Superfly (2018 film), 128

180 

INDEX

Sutton, George, Jr., 69 Sweet Sweetback’s Baaadassss Song (film), 128, 134 Szalay, Michael, 26n13, 41, 42, 74 Hip Figures, 41 T Taken (film), 3 Take the “A” Train (song), 129 Take the Money and Run (film), 153 Talman, William, 66 Tarantino, Quentin, 31, 128, 157 Tate, Sharon, 31 Taubin, Amy, 26n14 Taxi Driver (film), 31 Tax Paying Blues (song), 35n1 Taylor, Don, 58 Then Came Bronson (television serial), 140 They Drive by Night (film), 24 They Live by Night (film), 31, 55 Thieves Like Us (film), 31, 55 Thieves’ Highway (film), 24 Thomas, Greg, 130n12 Thomas, Piri, 119, 120 Down These Mean Streets, 119 Thomas, Ross, 161 Thompson, Hunter S., 161 Thompson, Jim, 13, 13n5, 15, 19, 22–24, 28, 29, 43, 47, 49, 50, 72, 75, 82, 92, 111, 141, 156 Child of Rage, 72 The Killer Inside Me, 15, 29, 49 The Nothing Man, 49 Thompson, John B., 50, 54 Hitch-Hike Hussy, 50 Thunder Road (film), 20, 26 Thurber, James, 11 “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” 11 Thurman, Wallace, 112, 113 The Blacker the Berry, 112

Tierney, Lawrence, 20, 20n7, 31, 83 Tompkins, Jane, 26–27 West of Everything, 26 Torrès, Tereska, 93 Touch of Evil (film), 40, 66 Tourneur, Jacques, 29 Trevor, Claire, 84 Trick Baby (film), 120, 126, 127 Trocchi, Alex, 92n2 Trudeau, Justin, 66n13 Truffaut, François, 42n3, 110 Trumbo, Dalton, 89 Trump, Donald, 1, 3, 11 Turner, Lana, 55 Turner, Nikki, 119, 140 Tuskegee Institute, 119 Twain, Mark, 54 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 54 2001: A Space Odyssey (film), 138 Tyler, Parker, 65n11 Tyson, Mike, 121 U Universal (publisher), 12, 72 Updike, John, 41 Uptight (film), 128 V van Peebles, Melvin, 128 van Rijn, Guido, 35, 36 Vang, Bee, 4 Vaughan, Stevie Ray, 142 Verrier, Pierre, 111 Village Voice (journal), 144 W Wager, Jans B., 64n10 Jazz and Cocktails, 64n10

 INDEX 

Wake Up, Niggers (song), 141 Walton, Priscilla, 91 Detective Agency, 91 Wang Shuo, 32 Wanted Dead or Alive (television serial), 139 Warhol, Andy, 30, 140 Warren, James, 143 Warren, Robert Penn, 41 Watts, 121, 122, 124, 133, 153 Watts uprising, 124, 127 Watts Writers Workshop, 123, 124 Wayne, John, 1, 2, 4, 7, 7n4, 12, 59 Weegee (Arthur Fellig), 25, 56 Weinman, Sarah, 95, 95n6 Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives, 95, 95n6 Women Crime Writers, 95n6 Welles, Orson, 26, 40, 66 Welty, Eudora, 145 West, Ben, 50 Loves of a Girl Wrestler, 50 Westlake, Donald E., 18, 30, 54, 56, 92n2, 141, 144, 152–157, 161 The Grifters (screenplay), 156 The Hunter, 153 Jimmy the Kid, 156 The Plunder Squad, 156 Somebody Owes Me Money, 18 A Travesty (Enough), 154, 155 Westmoreland, William, 7 Wexler, Haskell, 140 Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (film), 89 Wheeler, Elizabeth, 107, 115, 117 Where Danger Lives (film), 40 Whippoorwill, The (song), 26 White, David Manning, 80 White, Lionel, 13–16, 13n5, 18, 19, 156 Clean Break, 13, 13n5

181

The Money Trap, 13 Obsession, 13 The Snatchers, 13, 13n5, 14, 156 Whitfield, Raoul, 15 Whyte, William H., 27 The Organization Man, 27 Why Women Kill (television serial), 87 Widmark, Richard, 162, 163 Wiener, Jon, 122, 123 Set the Night on Fire, 122 Wilderson, Frank B., III., 123n11 Afropessimism, 123n11 Willeford, Charles, 19, 24, 27, 36–37, 43, 50–54, 67–75, 92, 98, 140–142, 155, 157 The Black Mass of Brother Springer, 67, 74 The Burnt Orange Heresy, 140 Cockfighter, 50 I Was Looking for a Street, 54 Miami Blues, 51 Pick-Up, 52, 67, 69 Proletarian Laughter, 50 Wild Wives, 51–53 The Woman Chaser, 52 Willet, Ralph, 117n8 The Naked City, 117n8 Williams, Hank, 106 Williams, John A., 132 The Man Who Cried I Am, 132 Williams, Raymond, 101n7, 105 Border Country, 101n7 The Country and the City, 105 Wilson, Edmund, 80, 82 Wilson, Sloan, 27, 37 Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, 27, 37 Winters, Shelley, 70, 89 Women in Love (film), 141 Woolf, Virginia, 90, 100 A Room of One’s Own, 90

182 

INDEX

Woolrich, Cornell, 21, 23, 84, 85 The Bride Wore Black, 84 Working Girls (film), 98 Wright, Richard, 69, 112 Black Boy, 112 Native Son, 69 X X, Malcolm, 126 The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 127

Y The Yakuza (film), 138 Yardbirds, The, 142 Yates, Richard, 28, 37 Revolutionary Road, 28, 37 Young, Lester, 26 Young, Robert, 46 Z Zabriskie Point (film), 128, 141