Topic 60 – Northamerican hard-boiled novels: Dashiell hammett and raymond chandler. Detective english novel: p.d. James

1 INTRODUCTION

2 THE AMERICAN DETECTIVE NOVEL: DASHIELL HAMMETT AND RAYMOND CHANDLER

2.1 Origins of the detective novel

2.2 Dashiell Hammet´s life and works

2.3 Raymond Chandler´s life and works

3 THE ENGLISH DETECTIVE NOVEL

3.1 Origins in Europe and Great Britain: Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and Le Fanu

3.2 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

3.3 G. K. Chesterton

3.4 Agatha Christie

4 P. D. JAMES

5 RELATIONS BETWEEN CRIME FICTION AND CINEMA

6 SITUATION OF DETECTIVE NOVEL NOWADAYS

7 STUDY GUIDE

8 BIBLIOGRAPHY

1 INTRODUCTION

Although the mystery story is a minor literary genre its seeds are found in the folklore of the oldest cultures in the form of little tales, riddles and superstitions.

The Detective novel has always been related to public interest in the problems of modern, urban life, particularly in crime. But crime as a feature of Western social life was not generally recognized until the rise of large cities in the early 1800s, a period that corresponds to the creation of a mass reading public. Fascinated by and afraid of crime, new city-dwellers vilified and romanticized criminals, as well as those who fought them. Several authors have attempted to set forth a sort of list of Detective Commandments for prospective authors of the genre. According to Twenty rules for writing detective stories, by Van Dine in 1928: “The detective story is a kind of intellectual game. It is more–it is a sporting event. And for the writing of detective stories there are very definite laws–unwritten, perhaps, but nonetheless binding; and every respectable and self-respecting concocter of literary mysteries lives up to them. Herewith, then, is a sort of credo, based partly on the practice of all the great writers of detective stories, and partly on the promptings of the honest author’s inner conscience.”

The first writing on urban crime pretended to be documentary, but it was filled with archetypes and plots from preceding fiction, particularly the gothic novel. The idea of detection and the figure of the detective that would eventually stand at the centre of the genre were introduced in the early nineteenth century by a Frenchman, Francois-Eugene Vidocq in his Memoirs of Vidocq.

Interest in England in “crime stories” blended with a strong, existing genre called the gothic novel. Most scholars attribute this genre to Horace Walpole, whose Castle of Otranto, published in 1765, established the horror story, to which Mary Shelley added scientific aspects with Frankenstein (1818). The gothic influence is said to account for the dark settings, unfathomable motivations, and preoccupation with brilliant or unexpected solutions in the detective/mystery genre.

In the United States, Edgar Allan Poe read Dickens, and he read and reread Vidocq. In five stories between 1840 and 1845, Poe laid out the basics of the detective story, which underlie much hard-boiled fiction. In Murders in the Rue Morgue, Poe introduced his brilliant, eccentric detective, C. Auguste Dupin, whose solutions were chronicled by an admiring, amiable narrator. Later detectives, notably Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, became even more eccentric, and Poe’s nameless narrator had his counterpart in the amiable Dr. Watson.

On the other hand, the period from 1920 to 1950 is known as the Golden Age of mystery fiction. An important phenomenon of the golden Age were pulp magazines, cheap magazines overflowing with almost every possible genre, including detective, western adventure, science fiction, spicy or military.

A major group of writers created detectives who solved their cases through pure thinking. These writers are known as “intuitionists”, and their plots are usually extremely clever puzzles with tricky, surprising solutions. The most important examples are Agatha Christie –considered by many critics and readers the greatest mystery writer of all times– and the American Ellery Queen.

In the following topic we shall define the concept of the detective novel as a literary genre; then we will deal with a historical outline, how the genre is born and its life in Europe and America. After that we will centre our essay on Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler as the main representatives of the so-called Hard-boiled School. Then we shall analyze the features and main representatives of the English detective novel and the contribution of Phyllis Dorothy James to this genre. To conclude we shall talk about the presence of the detective novel nowadays.

2 THE AMERICAN DETECTIVE NOVEL: DASHIELL HAMMET AND RAYMOND

CHANDLER

Mystery stories have been considered as light or popular literature, but as a matter of fact, their plots and characters are loved and followed by millions of fans throughout the world.

The detective story is a type of popular literature dealing with the step-by-step investigation and solution of a crime, usually murder. The traditional elements of the detective story are: the seemingly perfect crime; the wrongly accused suspect at whom circumstantial evidence points; the bungling of dim-witted police; the greater powers of observation and superior mind of the detective; the startling and unexpected denouement, in which the detective reveals how the identity of the culprit was ascertained.

Detective stories frequently operate on the principle that superficially convincing evidence is ultimately irrelevant. Usually it is also typical that the clues from which a logical solution to the problem can be reached are presented to the reader at exactly the same time that the detective receives them and that the detective deduces the solution to the puzzle from a logical interpretation of these clues.

2.1 Origins of the detective novel

The mystery story was born as a way of expression of the emotion of fear, fear that sometimes is manifested as simple curiosity for the unknown and some other times as terror itself.

The first manifestation we find are those ones transmitted by the Egyptians that told about the Great Sphinx which were collected by the Grecian Sophocles in the IV century B.C.

But the literary genre like itself was found during the Romantic epoch where many writers inaugurated the gothic traditions based on the medieval myths of fabulous beasts and deeds of heroes, for example The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole or Mrs. Anne Radcliffe´s The mysteries of Udolpho, even Frankestain by Mary Shelley.

In the first decades of the 19^th century around 1830’s the first great group of American writers emerged. These writers are known as the American Renaissance, and many of them wrote mysteries, as well as other kinds of fiction, such as science fiction, adventure stories, or sea stories. The clearest and also the most outstanding example is Edgar Allan Poe, but other major authors such as Herman Melville, who wrote Benito Cereno, also cultivated this kind of literature. In The Murders in the Rue Morgue Poe created the first prototype of fictional detectives, C. Auguste Dupin, an intellectual amateur who shows an astonishing ability to solve crimes by analysing clues unobserved or misinterpreted by the police and his friend, the narrator of the story. Auguste Dupin, appeared in two other stories, The Mystery of Marie Roget (1845) and The Purloined Letter (1845).

In the 1850’s and 1860’s British and French writers started writing fairly realistic stories about the police hunting criminals. These are the ancestors of today’s detective fiction. In Britain other authors started writing a kind of melodramatic thrillers, known as “sensation novels”. The best example is Wilkie Collins. One of his major works, The Moonstone (1868), was described by T.S. Eliot as the first, the longest and the best of modern English detective novels. Many features in The Moonstone foreshadow the later development of the detective novel: we find a professional detective, all the clues are available to the reader –the detective must never be in possession of more information than the reader–, there is emphasis on physical evidence, it appears the formula of the most unlikely person as the criminal, and there are descriptions of contrasting places as well as reflection of social habits. Although his characters are not very well developed, Collins proved to be a master of suspense and mystery.

Late in the 19^th century we find the best writer of detective stories up till that time. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes, the great English detective whose personal eccentricity contrasts with the rationality of his methods and who would become a classic character in all time fiction literature. Doyle’s popularity provoked an explosion in mystery publishing, especially short stories. Many mystery writers such as G.K. Chesterton wrote about impossible crimes which apparently cannot be rationally explained. At the end of the story the detective will offer the solution by means of a logical, realistic explanation.

The period from 1920 to 1950 is known as the Golden Age of mystery fiction. An important phenomenon of the golden Age were pulp magazines, cheap magazines overflowing with almost every possible genre, including detective, western adventure, science fiction, spicy or military.

A different tendency is the so-called Realist school, whose writers emphasised realistic detective work, often science based, and carefully detailed backgrounds showing aspects of contemporary life, such as business or religion. Major realists include Dorothy L. Sayers and Freeman Wills Crofts.

Pulps were specifically responsible for the creation of the hard-boiled detective story, where tough detectives offer their harsh, realistic and often disillusioned vision of the world. The magazine Black Mask was the first important mystery pulp, and its leading writers included Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Urban, down-to-earth settings, realistic and slangy language, and the creation of heroes who become even more important and interesting than the actual solution of the case, are the main characteristics of the genre that persists nowadays with authors such as James Elroy, Mickey Spillane or Jim Thompson. Black Mask was a pulp magazine launched in April 1920 by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan to support the loss-making but prestigious literary magazine Smart Set. Mencken was a well-known literary journalist and sometime poet; Nathan a drama critic.

2.2 Dashiell Hammett´s life and works

American novelist who wrote his fiction under the pseudonym Peter Collinson, he also worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood.

With Raymond Chandler Hammett represented the early realistic vein in detective stories. His tough heroes confront violence with full knowledge of its corrupting potential. In his novels Hammett painted a mean picture of the American society, where greed, brutality, and treachery are the major driving forces behind human actions.

Dashiell Hammett was born in 1894 in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, the son of Richard Hammett, a farmer and politician. The family moved to Philadelphia, and then to Baltimore. Hammett studied at the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute but left school at the age of 14 to help support the family. He worked as a newsboy, freight clerk, labourer, messenger, stevedore, and advertising manager before joining the Baltimore office of the Pinkerton Detective Agency as an operator. In Butte, Montana, he was offered money to kill the IWWW labour organizer Frank Little, who was later lynched. After the murder, Hammett’s political views became more radical and he resigned from Pinkerton’s first time.

During World War I Hammett served a sergeant in an ambulance corps. At that time the worldwide Spanish influenza epidemic spread fast, and especially in military installations. Hammett contracted tuberculosis. He spent the rest of the war in hospital, and for much of his life suffered from ill health.

Hammett’s first short story appeared in the magazine Black Mask on 1 October 1923, and his fiction writing career as novelist ended in 1934. In Black Mask Hammett became along with Stanley Gardner one of its most popular writers.

Under the pseudonym Peter Collinson, Hammett introduced a short, overweight, unnamed detective employed by the San Francisco branch of the Continental Detective Agency, who became known as The Continental Op. In the three dozen stories between 1929 and 1930, featuring the tough and dedicated Op, Hammett gave shape to the first believable detective hero in American fiction. Drawing on his Pinkerton experiences, Hammett created a private eye, whose methods of detection are completely convincing, and whose personality has more than one dimension. Op stories also appeared in hardcover form. Red Harvest (1929) was a loosely constructed story about corruption and gangsters, set in ‘Poisonville’, and in The Dain Curse (1929) Op unravels a mystery involving jewel theft, religious cults, a family curse, a bombing, and a ghost.

Combining his own experiences with the realistic influence of writers such as Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos, Hammett created a definitely American type of detective fiction that was separate and distinct from the English mystery story usually set in a country house populated by cooks, butlers, and relatives, a pattern that had been followed by American writers. His novels are set in the background provided by the underworld of American gangsterdom and crime. Crime fills every part of society in his novels and even the detective is caught in this world of crime and corruption. Hammett also introduced slang language and realistic dialogues in detective fiction. He describes a violent and corrupted society where the anxious longing for power and wealth unleashes the meanest crimes. Reason and clues help him solve the mystery, but he must also use violence, just like the gangsters. In Hammett’s work, the old pattern of the thoughtful, brilliant detective hero vanishes and the character of the tough detective became as important as the aspect of ratiocination was earlier.

In 1929 Hammett turned his attention to a new private eye, Sam Spade, who made his initial appearance in Black Mask in September 1929. Next year the work appeared in book form. Hammett’s language was unsentimental, journalistic; moral judgments were left to the reader. The first-person narration of the Op stories is left behind and Hammett views the detective protagonist in the book from the outside. Hammett’s best known books include The Maltese Falcon (1930), filmed three times. It introduces detective Sam Spade who is investigating the murder of his colleague, detective Archer. Spade finds himself involved with an odd assortment of characters, all searching for a black statue of a bird. Among them are the gorgeous redhead Brigid O’Shaughnessy, her employer, Fat Man Casper Gutman, Joel Cairo, an agent of Gutman, and Wilmer Cook, a nervous, trigger-happy bodyguard.

This philosophy also marked Hammett’s attitudes when he was questioned about his Communist contacts – he did not reveal them.

In The Maltese Falcon Spade became the personification of the American private eye, thanks in no small degree to Humphrey Bogart’s portrayal of him in the 1941 film version of the novel.

However, Hollywood had already found Hammett’s work much earlier on. Roadhouse Nights, directed by Hobart Henley, was based on Hammett’s Red Harvest, and released by Paramount in 1930. The Maltese Falcon was filmed for the first time in 1931 and then in 1936 under the title Satan Met a Lady, directed by William Dieterle and starring Bette Davis. The falcon was changed into a gem-filled ram’s horn. John Huston’s adaptation from 1941 is the most famous.

In 1943 Hammett had screenplay credits for the adaptation of Watch on Rhine by Lillian Hellman. She had become Hammett’s companion in the 1930s. Hammett was first married to nurse Josephine Dolan, whom he met in the Cushman Institute in the early 1920s. After the birth of his second daughter, Hammett’s illness partly ended his family life – doctors warned Josephine of the risk of infection, and she took a house north of San Francisco, where Hammett visited during weekends. Formally they divorced in 1937. Josephine left her work as a nurse and Hammett sent his family money, more or less regularly. Reciprocally Josephine sent him her picture, in which she did not smile.

The Glass Key (1930) was apparently Hammett’s favourite among his novels. The central character, Ned Beaumont, was partly a self-portrait: a tall, thin, tuberculosis-ridden gambler and heavy drinker. The Thin Man (1934), Hammett’s last novel, presented Nick Charles, a former detective who had married a rich woman, Nora Charles. Her character was based on Lillian Hellman. The book gained a commercial success and inspired a series of adaptations for film, radio, and TV. In 1934 Hammett began working as a scriptwriter for the comic strip Secret Agent X-9. Hammett’s earnings from his books and their spin-offs allowed him to continue drinking and womanizing.

In the 1930s Hammett became politically active. He joined the Communist Party and was a fierce opponent of Nazism. However, when Hemingway and a number of other writers went to Spain to help the Republicans in the Civil War (1936-39), Hammett remained in the U.S., but helped veterans after their return from the war. at that time Hellman’s star was rising. Hammett himself was drinking heavily and had problems with his writing, but his support was crucial for Hellman’s own career. She had success as a playwright, travelled in Spain, and an affair with John Melby, a diplomat. During World War II tubercular Hammett served three years in the US Army, editing a newspaper for the troops in the Aleutian Islands. This was perhaps the last, relatively happy period in his life. In 1948 he was vice-chairman of the Civil Rights Congress, an organization that the Attorney General and F.B.I. deemed subversive. He tried to start writing again, hired a secretary, but managed only to produce some notes.

For his communist beliefs Hammett became a target during McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade. In 1951 he went to prison for five months rather than testify at the trial of four communists accused of conspiracy. He was blacklisted and when Internal Revenue Service claimed that he owed a huge amount in tax deficiencies, the federal government attacked his income. For a while the State Department kept his books away from the shelves of American libraries overseas. The rest of his life Hammett lived in and around New York, teaching creative writing in Jefferson School of Social Science from 1946 to 1956. Hammett died penniless of lung cancer on January 10, 1961.

2.3 Raymond Chandler´s life and works

Raymond Chandler was born in Chicago in 1888, but he grew up in England after the divorce of his parents. Chandler lived with his mother, grandmother, and aunt in Auckland Road, Upper Norwood, in south London. He attended Dulwich College, which was within a longish walking distance of Upper Norwood, and studied then international law in France and Germany. He worked as an assistant stores officer in the Naval Supplies Branch, a temporary teacher at Dulwich College, and published poems and essays in the Academy, the Chamber’s Journal, and Westminster Gazette. Later Chandler characterized his early poetry as ‘Grade B Georgian’.

Before returning to the United States in 1912, Chandler published twenty-seven poems and his first story, The Rose-Leaf Romance. Back in America he worked in St. Louis, then on a ranch, in a sporting goods firm, and as a bookkeeper in a creamery. During the World War I he served in the Canadian Army (1917-18), and was later transferred to the Royal Air Force (1918-19). In 1924 he married 18-years older Pearl Cecily Hurlburt, twice married and divorced. When she wed Chandler she was fifty-three, but looked far younger and listed her age as forty-three.

After the war Chandler worked in a bank in San Francisco, wrote for the Daily Express, and become then a bookkeeper and auditor for Dabney Oil Syndicate from 1922 to 1932. When Chandler lost his job during the Great Depression – he was fired for drinking and absenteeism – he began writing stories for Black Mask Magazine. At the age of forty-five, with the support of his wife, Chandler devoted himself entirely to writing. He prepared himself for his first submission by carefully studying Stanley Gardner and other representatives of pulp fiction, and spent five months writing his first story, Blackmailers Don’t Shoot. It appeared in December 1933 in Black Mask, the foremost among magazines publishing in the hard-boiled school.

Chandler was a slow writer. Between 1933 and 1939 he produced a total of nineteen pulp stories, eleven in Black Mask, seven in Dime Detective, one in Detective Fiction Weekly. Unlike most of his pulp-writing colleagues, Chandler tried to expand the limits of the pulp formula to more ambitious and humane direction. His fourth published story, Killer in the Rain, was used in The Big Sleep (1939), Chandler’s first novel. The story introduced Philip Marlowe, a 38-year-old P.I., a man of honour and a modern day knight with a college education. Marlowe is about forty, tall, with gray eyes and a hard jaw, has a college education, listens to classical music, and solves alone chess problems. Marlowe is betrayed by his friends, women, and lying clients, but he is always quick with wisecracks. In his role as narrator, Marlowe moves through the criminal world and social elite – sometimes there is not much difference – of Los Angeles in the 1930s. In The Big Sleep he helps General Sternwood, a paralyzed California millionaire, by rescuing his daughter from a potentially embarrassing blackmail scheme. The story ends in resigned contemplation.

His novels deal with corruption in Southern California. His main influences were Ernest Hemingway and his predecessor in the detective novel, Dashiell Hammett. The literary value of his novels is highly praised, and no detective writer is considered to have reached his level of literary artistry. Chandler introduced a certain “poetry of violence” in mystery fiction, and established the importance of the setting as another character in the story. He contributed to the development of the hard-boiled fiction strengthening the characterisation of the though detective. The hero of his novels is always the private detective Philip Marlowe. This detective is tough, loyal and incorruptible in his dealings with the seamy side of American life and politics. He is characterised as a poor but honest man, who keeps his ideals in the opportunistic and sometimes brutal society of Los Angeles. This character was capable of balancing sentimental romanticism with tough cynicism. The variety of characters and the ample knowledge of Los Angeles, with its beauty and its harshness, serve to characterise further the hero who moves in this environment.

Chandler’s apparently simple style was carefully and self-consciously developed and produces in his novels the effect of realism. It is a style of great sophistication and flexibility. One key factor for the magnetism of his style is the first person voice of Phillip Marlow through which the stories are narrated. The pace of the prose imitates the one of speech and his use of short sentences and slang maintains the vividness of an exciting event being told. But it is his poetic descriptions of the city, his sarcastic remarks and the use of hyperbole which are the main traits of his style and which best convey his particular blend of humour, cynicism and sentimentality.

In Farewell, My Lovely (1940) Marlowe searches for an ex-convict Moose Malloy a missing girl friend, Velma Valento. Velma is described by Moose as “cute as lace pants,” and during his investigation Marlowe deals with Los Angeles’ gambling circuit, a murder, and three potentially deadly women.

His third novel, The High Window (1942), Chandler considered his worst. It was written at the same time as The Lady in the Lake (1943), which Ross Macdonald included in his list of favorites. Chandler’s writing had already excited interest in the film community.

For Double Indemnity (1944), based on James M. Cain’s novel from 1936, Chandler and the director Billy Wilder worked together. Wilder had much problems with the author who had his own views how to write a screenplay.

In 1946 Chandler received Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for screenplay, and in 1954 for novel. When Warner Brothers was making The Big Sleep (1946), Chandler discussed the story with the screenwriters, Leigh Brackett and William Faulkner, director Howard Hawks, and star Humphrey Bogart. He even wrote a new ending which was not used. Warner Bros. was afraid that Chandler’s plot, which involved pornography, nymphomania, homosexuality, and police corruption, is too much for the censors. The plot was so complicated that even Chandler did not know, who murdered one of the characters.

The Little Sister (1949), which included the author’s opinions about Hollywood, received negative reviews. The story opens in the usual way: “‘Is this Mr Marlowe, the detective?’ It was a small, rather hurried, little-girlish voice. I said it was Mr Marlowe, the detective. ‘How much you charge for your services, Mr Marlowe?'”.

The sixth novel in the series, The Long Goodbye (1953), has been admired by many critics. Marlowe’s long and complicated investigation begins when he helps Terry Lennox, sitting drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith. Marlowe’s willingness to forgive in his own way his friends, who have betrayed him, differs completely from the attitude of Mike Hammer, who is ready to kill and never turns his other cheek.

When his wife died in 1954 Chandler was devastated. He sailed for England and met Jessica Tyndale, a banker, on board, and they became close. Playback , Chandler’s last finished novel, appeared in 1958. Originally it was written as a screenplay. In the story Marlowe renews his affair with Linda Loring, who made her first appearance in The Long Goodbye. During the writing process Helga Greene became Chandler’s literary agent. He and Helga Greene were induced by Ian Fleming to travel to Capri, and to interview Lucky Luciano along the way in Naples. Chandler essay ‘My Friend Luco’ was not published. In 1959 Helga flew to California, and Chandler proposed her from his hospital bed. Chandler died on March 26, 1959.

3 THE ENGLISH DETECTIVE NOVEL

3.1 Origins in Europe and Great Britain: Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and Le Fanu.

As we have already explained, the detective story was born in the USA and took twenty years to cross the Atlantic ocean. France was the first country to continue this line of work. The invention of the long detective story came with Gaboriau´s L´Affaire Lerouge, which met a spectacular success. From then on, Pére Tabaret and Lecoq stand among the most distinguished investigators of crime.

However, in Great Britain, the seeds of the early detective story are found in what has been labelled as “whodunit”. The most common of these tales are those ones in which circumstantial evidence implicates one person in a crime, but in which someone else is actually the guilty party. Eventually elucidation follows, and with greater or lesser ingenuity, the real villain is finally exposed.

One can see this pattern surviving after Poe in the USA; Abraham Lincoln’s The Trailor Murder Mystery (1843) adheres to much of this approach, for instance. It was also a major influence on many writers of the British Sensation school.

The early whodunit seems to be largely a British tradition, influencing British writers from Godwin and his numerous immediate successors, through Bulwer-Lytton, Dickens or Wilkie Collins, all the way from 1795 to 1877.

It is this widespread use of the mysterious in Romantic fiction, that is the true ancestor and source of the modern mystery novel. It is a systematic change in how people saw the plotting of books. It is not surprising that the whodunit murder mystery should emerge from this context, and form an important subgenre in the era.

Early exponents of this subgenre are the novels of the Brontë sisters, which they began publishing in the late 1840’s. They contain extreme dramatic events, and sometimes mysterious goings on – such as the strange events in the attic in Charlotte’s Jane Eyre (1847)and the spectral apparitions in Emily Jane Brontë´s Wuthering Heights (1847).

In prose fiction, Horace Walpole seems the dominant influence. His novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764), was the first gothic novel, and is still very good reading. Brontë and Walpole’s storytelling styles are similar. Each focuses on characters obsessed with certain beliefs, and absolutely ruthless in carrying them out. Each unfolds a complex plot. The unfolding is done with remarkable logic, as if the author were proving a theorem in mathematics. The relationships between the characters form a complex pattern, a pattern woven into the plot structure.

On the other hand, sensation novels were Victorian books featuring dramatic, thrilling events. Their plots often revolved around sinister conspiracies, hidden secrets, crimes, and villainous schemers. The events in sensation fiction clearly have a lot to do with mystery fiction. However, sometimes sensation novels take the form of a mystery story, and sometimes they don’t.

If the sensation novel is not an ancestor to real mystery fiction, it does contain some truly brilliant works of literature. Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White is especially outstanding. And the sensation novel as a form has ties to the Brontës and their great novels. Also, sometimes the sensation novel intersects and produces works that conform to the paradigms of true mystery fiction. But it is with The Moonstone with which he inaugurates a proper line of detection. The work presents Sergeant Cuff as a professional mystery-solver with more sensibility than sense, and the plot is not only an exhibition of tricks and reason, but a complex story carried out by truly characters.

Sensation novels tend to have such features as secrets from the past, often involving people’s identities, criticism of socially approved roles for men and women, and ideas of femininity ,victimization of socially naive young people, by older, more experienced criminals , criminal conspiracies, often involving major life transitions: marriage, death and inheritance; marriage as a sinister event, leading one to being fleeced of money, then killed ,crimes which the reader sees unfold from beginning to end; rather than being solved after the fact, detective story style, etc.

On the other hand, Charles Dickens was tempted to write a detective story, although his sudden death interrupted the project (he only wrote six of the twelve instalments planned). The title was The Mystery of Edwin Drood and tells the story of the choirmaster of the cathedral at Cloisterham. The main character is a very strange man whose nature is divided into his addiction to opium and the rigid rules of Victorian society. His ward, Edwin Drood disappears on Christmas Eve and the detective Dick Datehery arrives disguised at the place to solve the mystery.

Before this work and similarly, Dickens in Bleak House (1852-1853) also wrote about a murder where circumstantial evidence pointed to one party and an arrest of the actual culprit. Like other writers in the early whodunit tradition, Dickens lays considerable emphasis on the gathering of physical evidence against suspects. Dickens combines this with a look at a police detective, another major strand of early crime writing.

Besides, Three Detective Anecdotes (1853), and Bleak House (1852-1853) show his depiction of the police arresting subjects in sexual terms. Inspector Bucket’s arrest of the woman criminal in Bleak House is compared to Jupiter’s kidnap of Io in the form of a cloud, which also preserves the fog metaphor which runs through the book. There are also elements of voyeurism in both works, with the police spying on criminals. Dickens further stirs up the pot by suggesting that arrest gives lower class policemen power over upper class people, something that also must have excited him, and his readers. Despite Dickens’ great popularity, his contemporaries do not pick up on these themes.

Another early exponent of the mystery novel is Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. He came to the mystery very early. Many of his first short stories (late 1830’s) were written before Poe’s mystery tales, before Dickens, and long before Wilkie Collins. Le Fanu’s tales often deal with impossible crimes, generally explained by some architectural trick or secret passage. In this, he shows a similarity to both the Gothic writers, and to Hoffmann’s “Fraulein de Scuderi”. He was a meticulous craftsman, with a penchant for frequently reworking plots and ideas from his earlier writing in subsequent pieces of writing. (Many of his novels are expansions and refinements of earlier short stories). He specialised in tone and effect rather than “shock horror”, often following a mystery format. Key to his style was the avoidance of overt supernatural effects: in most of his major works, the supernatural is strongly implied but a possible “natural” explanation is left (barely) open—for instance, the demonic monkey in Green Tea could be a delusion of the story’s protagonist, who is the only person to see it; in The Familiar, Captain Barton’s death seems to be of supernatural causes, but is not actually witnessed, and the ghostly owl may just be a real bird. Though other writers have since chosen blunter approaches to supernatural fiction, Le Fanu’s best tales, such as the vampire novella Carmilla, remain some of the most chilling examples of the genre.

3.2 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

One of the greatest name in detective fiction is Sherlock Holmes. It appeared for the first time in A Study in Scarlet, and there was no sequel until 1890, when his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, wrote for an American magazine The Sign of Four.

From that date onwards, Doyle devoted his entire life to the production of stories carried out by the English detective, partly because he was a rich man and his only obsession was writing, partly because the admiration of the work of Poe and Gaboriau.

Sherlock Holmes and doctor Watson showed their wit in A Scandal in Bohemia, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, etc., till the master decided to kill off his famous character. However, worried by public indignation, Doyle decided to bring him into life again in The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Return of Sherlock Holmes. Some other stories were to come next, The Valley of Fear, His Last Bow, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes.

Many of these tales contain brilliant puzzle plots, with remarkable surprise endings. They also are loaded with genuinely colourful and imaginative events. Doyle’s mysteries tend to centre around situations. He tends to present the reader with some extremely puzzling situation, one that is difficult to explain. He then solves the mystery by developing some brilliant twist that stands the apparent situation on its head.

Doyle had little interest in alibis in his work. He did not present a crime, have several suspects around who might equally have committed it, and then challenge the reader to pick which one of them actually did. So Doyle could have set up his mysteries this way: he had certainly seen the pattern in Hume’s work. Doyle, and Holmes and Watson, loved the fantastic, the outré and the bizarre in his cases. He is at the start of a great tradition of surrealism in modern mystery fiction. Virtually all the great 20th Century authors of detective stories had a strong surrealist element to their work.

Many imitations based on the model of Sherlock Holmes appeared at the beginning of the 20^th century, the best ones by Morrison and his Martin Hewitt, investigator. But two other names should be mentioned apart: Gilbert Keith Chesterton and Agatha Christie.

3.3 G.K Chesterton

Although he was not only a detective writer, his political writings were of reputable estimation, he made a good contribution to the gallery of illustrious fictional detectives with the character of Father Brown.

Chesterton wrote around 80 books, several hundred poems, some 200 short stories, 4000 essays, and several plays. He was a literary and social critic, historian, playwright, novelist, Catholic theologian and apologist, debater, and mystery writer. He was a columnist for the Daily News, the Illustrated London News, and his own paper, G. K.’s Weekly; he also wrote articles for the Encyclopedia Britannica.

G.K Chesterton wrote five story collections about Father Brown. The best are the first, The Innocence of Father Brown, which contains Chesterton’s most ingenious paradoxes serving as detective concepts, and the third, The Incredulity of Father Brown, which offers his best put together impossible crimes. The Man Who Was Thursday is arguably his best-known novel.

Chesterton´s preoccupations on Catholic principles and human nature are mixed in the invented figure of the priest. His superb literary style has some obvious ancestors. His prose style, with its rich descriptions of atmosphere and light, comes from Robert Louis Stevenson. So does his sense of adventure lurking in every corner of London. Chesterton’s love of paradox, and his ability to sustain a philosophical argument with wit and invention, is modelled after the plays of George Bernard Shaw.

3.4 Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie began with a bang, writing one of her best novels, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, during World War I. It took some years to get it published, finally appearing in 1920. Styles introduced her sleuth Hercule Poirot. During 1922 – 1926, Christie followed it up with a series of much weaker non-detective books, adventure and spy novels. Much of best work during this period was in short stories. She wrote a huge number of Poirot short stories during this era. She created many new detectives, as well as writing some outstanding stories without series heroes, such as those collected much later in The Listerdale Mystery.

Christie introduces new elements in the English detective novel: the setting- she moves from the urban world to the peaceful countryside; a theme par excellence is that evil can be hidden under a pretty surface; the origins of crime are the usual sins of the human nature (vanity, envy, greed, hatred, etc.).

The greatest achievement of this period, however, is a pure detective story, the Poirot novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1925).This work is usually discussed solely in terms of its central plot idea. This main plot is certainly brilliant, to say the least, but such a view does not do full justice to Christie’s novel. The sheer complexity of Christie’s plot gets ignored, with numerous inventive plot elements that go to make up its complex solution. This plot complexity is in the Golden Age tradition – in fact, it probably helped create that tradition. Also noteworthy are the many clues Christie has included in the book, all pointing to the murderer. The killer’s identity would be obvious, were not the reader bamboozled by Christie’s main plot.

Following Ackroyd, Christie embarked on period where she changed her pace (1927 – 1931). Her spinster sleuth, Miss Jane Marple, was the subject of her finest book, the short story collection The Tuesday Club Murders (1927 -1931), as well as the novel Murder at the Vicarage (1930).The high quality of the stories, combined with their great variety of approach, make it the perfect introduction to Christie’s world.

During 1934 – 1941, Christie’s writing changed direction again. She stopped creating so many sleuths, stuck closely to the detective story proper, and concentrated on detective novels and short stories featuring Hercule Poirot. These works are the “meat and potatoes” of her career. They maintain a uniform standard of excellence, and are what many people fondly think of as a “typical Agatha Christie” novel. Cleverly plotted, with ingenious solutions that surprise even the most cunning readers, the novels also feature fascinating detective work. Especially outstanding among the many Poirot novels are The ABC Murders (1936), Murder for Christmas (1938), and An Overdose of Death (1940).

Christie also created some important non-series works during this period. And Then There Were None and Easy to Kill (both 1939) are the best; the former is a virtuoso summing up of Christie’s mystery technique.

Sometime during the early days of World War II (1939 – 1945), Agatha Christie wrote Curtain, intended as a farewell appearance for Hercule Poirot. It returns Poirot to Styles, scene of his first case, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. The two books together constitute one of Christie’s high points. As per her instructions, it was not published till the 1970’s.

After World War II ended in 1945, Christie’s work generally suffered a decline in quality. The plots generally became simpler, and the storytelling and characterization less interesting. Her best post war book was the spy novel They Came to Baghdad (1951). Like many of her novels, it is set in the contemporary Middle East, where Agatha Christie lived.

4 PHYLLIS DOROTHY JAMES

In the middle fifties the name of a woman started to be popular as detective-story writer, she was Phyllis Dorothy James. P. D. James is the inheritor of some of the most distinguished literary mantles in popular fiction, those previously worn by detective-story writers who achieved near perfection in their craft. James’s works hearken back to Agatha Christie’s ingenious plotting, evocative settings, and quirky series detective Hercule Poirot, sometimes faintly echoing her predecessor’s models but updating them and making them uniquely her own. A James plot, like Christie’s best, is a well-oiled machine, efficient and balanced in a style many modern detective-fiction writers hardly aspire to attain. Her settings, like Christie’s, reflect an impressive variety of interests, often esoteric and sometimes obscure. Like her predecessor, she speaks for a certain social class and way of life, one quintessentially English, without excluding readers who are different from the persona suggested by the narrative voice, as her success in the United States attests. By James’s time, however, the detective genre had matured into a vehicle that could take many directions, playing against the stock protagonists of Christie’s time to suggest both the diversity of realism and the rich well-roundedness of serious fiction.

Phyllis Dorothy James (1920- ) grew up in Cambridge. Her formal education ended at age 16 and she was thereafter self-educated. She worked in hospital administration and became later a civil servant in the criminal section of the Department of Home Affairs. In 1962 she published her first novel. She retired from government service in 1979 to devote full time to writing. She was named a life peer in 1991.

Her first mystery novel, Cover Her Face, appeared in 1962 and met a great success. Some other novels are Shroud for a Nightingale (1971), An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972) The Black Tower (1975) and Innocent Blood. She has also written novels of different genres such as The Children of Men, a science fiction story about a future society doomed by the sterility of men and a recent semi-autobiographical work. A number of her stories were turned into television plays.

P.D. James has attributed the popular appeal of the detective novel to the structure and contents of the genre, but she also refers to the cathartic power, as it affirms our belief that we live in a rational and benevolent universe where crime always pays, even the most difficult problems can be solved by human intelligence, human courage and human perseverance. Despite the theme of these novels, readers get comfort and entertainment from them. But she is also involved in the renewal of the detective story by modern writers, evolving from the traditional detective story which was mainly concerned with the development of an ingenious puzzle, to a mystery fiction that presents the psychological subtleties and moral ambiguities of the modern novel. Therefore the setting is described with economy and realism and the central puzzle intrigues but does not dominate completely.

But her novels are actually characterised by the compliance of the formula of the classic detective story. Perhaps the most dominant of the insistent topics and features that she takes from the traditional detective story is the closed setting, a violent death, a limited circle of suspects all with motives, means and opportunity for the crime, false clues and the final logical solution of the puzzle.

The setting in her novels is very important. Her novels nearly always begin by establishing it, as it helps to determine the mood of the narration and very much influences both the plot and the characterisation. It is usually a closed setting which provides a closed world of pettiness, scheming, jealousy and ambitions. This setting is often a village, and sometimes it is even further restricted to a building. Her novels are peopled by civilised and genteel characters.

She also uses very conventional signs for the characterisation, typical of the classic detective story. For example she uses the elements surrounding the individual, such as the books, the furnishings of a person’s room, the pictures on the wall, the music that the character listens to, etc.

Furthermore, she has some standard themes that are frequently repeated in her novels, such as the prolonged or incurable illness of some character and the topic of incest.

James has presented the same detective in most of her novels, Adam Dalgliesh. The figure of the detective is very important. In an attempt to be realistic she chose a professional detective, more likely to deal with murder and crime.

The continuation of this detective-hero through a succession of novels allow her to develop his character and turn it more complex, interesting the writer as well as the reader. He works in Scotland Yard and rises in her novels from chief inspector to chief superintendent and then to commander, but he is also a poet. He is a serious, cold, introspective person, moralistic yet realistic. By separating Dalgliesh from his normal environment in Scotland Yard she presents him neither as a professional nor as an amateur, which is a choice that most writers make, and that makes him a more complete character. In An Unsuitable Job for a Woman the dominant detective is not him, but a woman detective.

The crimes she depicts are hideously baroque, for example, in Shroud for a Nightingale, a nurse volunteering for demonstration of intravenous feeding, is administrated bathroom disinfectant instead of milk, and dies in front of a classroom.

In Devices and Desires, the killer whistles hymns while strangling his victims, and then he stuffs their mouths with pubic hair.

In James´ most recent opus A Certain Justice, a glamorous lawyer is killed in her office with a letter opener to the heart, then she is theatrically dressed in a blood-soaked wig and propped in her swivel chair.

Grotesque murders aside, James´ novels are pieces of literary art because her characters are complex and introspective, the settings are deeply described and in the grey universe that she portrays, few victims are completely innocents or killers are sympathetic. In her own words, the mystery genre is only an artificial form for the writer to criticize the society he lives in.

5 RELATIONS BETWEEN CRIME FICTION AND CINEMA

Since the beginning of the golden age of American detective fiction, Hollywood was interested in taking these novels to the screen.

The origins of this kind of film are found at the end of the 30’s and during the early 40’s. Its high popularity lasted all along the 40’s and 50’s. This era produced some of the classics of the genre, and most of the best of them can be still seen today without any loss of interest

Suddenly the screen displayed more realistic stories of crime and detectives, far from the gangster stories that were distributed earlier.
Flourishing in the B type productions in Hollywood, some of the best film makers of the time were involved at their cinematographic debuts with hard-boiled mystery films. Confirmed directors, some of whom were amongst the best Hollywood ever harboured, put their unmistakable talent in these tough and often tragic stories of corruption in society. As a consequence, this new breed of film, mostly of a quality well above Hollywood’s average, rapidly became very popular, and they would have an indelible influence on American film history, leaving their mark on the following developments of cinema of quality.
Foreign film makers were also deeply influenced, and besides some obvious assimilation by foreign directors, film Noir is one of the main roots of the French Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) from the end of the fifties, mainly for its cinema aesthetics and technique.
Some French critics, after WW2, coined the word Noir for these films that had all common traits in their forms, in their ethics and pessimistic views of the world. Their quasi-existentialist treatment of the plots was also found in cinema genres other than pure mysteries or crime stories, and Noir could as well qualify for some Westerns, war movies, Science Fiction, and dramas. But crime, violence and individual rebellion against corrupt authorities were always the fertile common backgrounds for these pessimistic tales.
From the beginning, Hard-Boiled literature was the backbone of the emerging cinema genre, either by delivering top novels to be adapted for the screen or by providing talented mystery writers as scriptwriters for these films. The film genre succeeded in creating its visual myths and symbols, equivalent to the literary creations of the Hard-Boiled novels of the time.

Through the years, violence became more graphic in these films and helped to create very tough visions, supporting the ambiance of Noir by enhancing its nihilistic tendencies.
If we establish a parallel for the timing and development of Noir in literature and cinema, we have to conclude that cinema was the vehicle that allowed the HB/Noir genre to survive until the present day. As this type of literature was neglected and voluntarily underpublished by the major publishing houses during the seventies in America, it threatened to disappear. The low esteem given to it there by traditional literary critics and the American view of it as “just entertainment” were two more factors accelerating the decay.

Crime and gangster films, including films noirs, are also heavily indebted to literary sources, many of them now gaining belated critical respect. Here, too, a considerable laxity in transformation from book to film has been widespread, even with major writers such as Raymond Chandler (1888–1959) and Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961), where only The Maltese Falcon (1941) has survived intact in its adapted form. Less “reputable” writers such as James M. Cain (1892–1977), Jim Thompson (1906–1977), Cornell Woolrich (1903–1968), and David Goodis (1917–1967) have nevertheless provided the basis for some of the finest of American (and also French) films, once again in the form of loose or free rather than strict adaptations. Cain’s Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice (filmed at least four times to date), and Mildred Pierce were turned into 1940s classics, and a sudden vogue for Thompson produced several adaptations in the 1980s and 1990s, the most successful probably being Coup de Torchon (Clean Up, Bertrand Tavernier, 1981), based on Pop. 1280, which, despite being set in French colonial Africa rather than the American South, brilliantly captures the sleaze, cynicism, and nihilism of the novel. Woolrich, under both that name and William Irish, wrote the original story that Hitchcock filmed, much altered and expanded, as Rear Window (1954), and also the novels on which Hitchcock’s admirer François Truffaut (1932–1984) based La marié était en noir (The Bride Wore Black, 1968) and The Mississippi Mermaid (1969), as well as providing the source for such films noirs as Phantom Lady (1944). Truffaut also filmed, with considerable fidelity, Goodis’s despairing Down There as Tirez sur le pianiste (Shoot the Pianist, 1960).

However, for its recent evolution, foreign film Noir had a different fate. In term of production, American films are still present everywhere and far outnumber films from other Western countries. It is even more true since the eighties, due to declining numbers of foreign productions for diverse reasons (one of them being the continuous shrinking number of spectators in theatres, all over Western Europe). This leads to the spread the modern American HB/Noir film styles to foreign countries during the recent years, filling the increasing absence of equivalent foreign productions.
It remains a fact that American cinema continues to be an important vehicle for promoting the evolution of the genre. We are even inclined, personally, to think that American cinema shows a better continuity for the genre, today, than the corresponding American popular literature (especially for the more Hard-Boiled oriented stories). But this could change if local and foreign HB/Noir contemporary literature finds a better audience in the USA in the coming years.
Whatever the issue will be, the cross-fertilization between the two media, books and films, is and will remain an important factor of evolution for the genre. It is impossible to dissociate them when looking at the present-day achievements of the HB/Noir genre.
Film is here to stay as a major vehicle for the survival of the HB/Noir genre. Early in this period, the gangster film evolved toward a more realistic presentation of crimes and villains. At the same time, it slipped from the pure gangster story toward detective and crime-fighting plots, to finally be mixed with elements taken directly from the works of the emerging American hard-boiled writers. Violence had a purpose, and characters leaned to a more existentialist attitude regarding life, social relations and… crime.
At the time, film technique moved toward a more graphic representation of moods and ambiance due to light and camera effects, as often seen previously in the Expressionist cinema of pre-war Germany. During the end of the thirties, the influx of European cinema technicians, writers and directors into the USA was, on the other hand, bringing Hollywood a fresh set of approaches to cinema as a technique and as an art form.
It is a fact that, with the development of film Noir, this period is one of the best for creativity in Hollywood, going beyond the usual escapist pastime their production usually was. Ironically, the best films of the period were (and still are, with very few exceptions) those black gems found in stories inspired by popular literatures, giving an account of the street life in America, but also going deeper in depicting the human weaknesses and the general corruption than what was usual in films at the time.
A consequence was that the best cineastes of that era came from that arena as well and kept those qualities in the more mainstream productions they later came to, forming the core of what America harboured as the best cinema creators of its history. They really shined amid the ocean of mediocrity and vulgarity that was the daily bread of Hollywood.

6 SITUATION OF DETECTIVE NOVEL NOWADAYS

The detective novel as literary genre hardly exists nowadays because it has turned into multiple versions generally known under the name of thriller. There is a great abundance of works in the market which presents a great variety of authors, topics, characters and styles and some of the reasons for the incredible success of this genre are the accessible language to catch the attention of any kind of public and the sense of escapism that transports the reader from daily routine to spheres of strong emotions.

Thrillers often overlap with mystery stories, but are distinguished by the structure of their plots. In a thriller, the hero must thwart the plans of an enemy, rather than uncover a crime that has already happened. Thrillers also occur on a much grander scale: the crimes that must be prevented are serial or mass murder, terrorism, assassination, or the overthrow of governments. Jeopardy and violent confrontations are standard plot elements. While a mystery climaxes when the mystery is solved, a thriller climaxes when the hero finally defeats the villain, saving his own life and often the lives of others. In thrillers influenced by film noir and tragedy, the compromised hero is often killed in the process.

In recent years, when thrillers have been increasingly influenced by horror or psychological-horror exposure in pop culture, an ominous or monstrous element has become common to heighten tension. The monster could be anything, even an inferior physical force made superior only by their intellect (Saw), a supernatural entity (Dracula, Christine books, The Amityville Horror, The Ring), aliens (H. P. Lovecraft‘s Cthulhu mythos books), serial killers (Halloween, Friday the 13th, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Psycho), or even microbes or chemical agents (Cabin Fever, Richard Matheson’s The Last Man On Earth, 28 days later). Some authors have made their mark by incorporating all of these elements (Richard Laymon, F. Paul Wilson) throughout their bibliographies.

Similar distinctions separate the thriller from other overlapping genres: adventure, spy, legal, war, maritime fiction, and so on. Thrillers are defined not by their subject matter but by their approach to it. Many thrillers involve spies and espionage, but not all spy stories are thrillers. The spy novels of John le Carré, for example, explicitly and intentionally reject the conventions of the thriller. Conversely, many thrillers cross over to genres that traditionally have had few or no thriller elements. Alistair MacLean, Hammond Innes, and Brian Callison are best known for their thrillers, but are also accomplished writers of man-against-nature sea stories.

With regards to the plots the thriller presents: imitations of the hard-boiled school in modern settings; medical field and biological menace; mob stories or spy stories in the way of James Bond´s accounts; legal or psychological thrillers; historical thrillers, that is to say intrigues set up in a Medieval, Victorian or Edwardian context. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Ecco or Death in Windsor Castle by C.C. Benison which deals with Queen Victoria as a detective helped by her maid Jane Bee, or the character of the nun Fidelma created by Peter Tremayne who investigates the crime of Canterbury´s archbishop in the VII century.

According to Bourgeau in The Companion of Mystery Lovers, we are living a second golden age of crime fiction, since more than a 40% of best-sellers in the New York Times´ lists belong to the thriller genre. International Thriller Writers, Inc., was founded October 9, 2004, at a meeting at Bouchercon World Mystery and Suspense Conference in Toronto, Canada. Six months later, some 150 authors with more than one billion books sold worldwide had joined the organization as founding members.

Co-founders Gayle Lynds and David Morrell are co-presidents. Its membership includes Clive Cussler, Faye Kellerman, Jonathan Kellerman, John Lescroart, Steve Berry, David Baldacci, Dale Brown, Sandra Brown, Tess Gerritsen, Lee Child, M. J. Rose, David Dun, Joseph Finder, Gregg Hurwitz, M. Diane Vogt, Raelynn Hillhouse, Ridley Pearson, Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child, Lisa Gardner, Brian Garfield, Katherine Neville, R. L. Stine, and Stuart Woods.

This is the first professional organization for thriller authors. The first thriller festival for readers was held in June 2006 in Scottsdale, Arizona, at which the International Thriller Writers Awards for outstanding work in the field were announced. The first anthology of all-original thriller short stories entitled Thriller, edited by James Patterson, was released in June 2006 by Mira publishers.

Notable thrillers that have made an impact both as novels and as films include Frederick Forsyth‘s The Day of the Jackal, Tom Clancy‘s The Hunt for Red October and successive Jack Ryan stories, Thomas Harris‘ The Silence of the Lambs and related novels, Michael Crichton‘s Jurassic Park and Congo, and Dan Brown‘s The Da Vinci Code.

7 STUDY GUIDE

The mystery story was born as a way of expression of the emotion of fear, fear that sometimes is manifested as simple curiosity for the unknown and some other times as terror itself.

The first manifestation we find are those ones transmitted by the Egyptians that told about the Great Sphinx which were collected by the Grecian Sophocles in the IV century B.C.

This new style was introduced by the books of Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961), who started his literary career in the 20s. Hammett left school at 13 and worked at a variety of low-paying jobs before working eight years as a detective. He served in World War I, contracted tuberculosis, and spent the immediate post-war years in army hospitals. In the 20s he started to publish his short stories in popular magazines. He is given the credit for the invention of the genre of hard-boiled fiction, which he introduced for the first time with the story Fly Paper, that appeared in 1929. Then came his famous novels and his famous detective Sam Spade.

Hammet wrote more than 80 short stories and five novels. The first of Hammett’s detective novels was Red Harvest (1929), followed immediately by The Dain Curse. His masterpiece is generally believed to be The Maltese Falcon (1930), which introduced Sam Spade, played by Humphrey Bogart in a classic film version directed by John Houston (1941), which became a classic of its genre. He also wrote The Glass Key (1931) and The Thin Man (1932), his most successful story, which initiated a motion picture and later a television series built around a couple of detectives, Nick and Nora Charles, the latter being inspired on Lillian Hellman. Sam Spade, his most famous detective, is hardened by experience, showing no feelings. He knows that the whole world is corrupt but tries to avoid that corruption following his personal code of honour.

Chandler began writing stories for crime fiction magazine Black Mask, which also published Dashiell Hammett‘s stories. He is best known for his tough but honest private detective Philip Marlowe, the name originating from the English 16th century writer Christopher Marlowe, who had a violent temper. As representative and master of hard-boiled school of crime fiction, Chandler criticized classical puzzle writers for their lack of realism. His most famous target in much quoted essay The Simple Art of Murder (1944) was A.A. Milne‘s The Red House Mystery.

The Successors to Hammett included Raymond Chandler (1888-1959). From 1896 to 1912 Chandler lived in England with his mother, a British subject. Although he was an American citizen when World War I began, he served in the Canadian army. Having returned to California in 1919, he prospered as a petroleum company executive until the Great Depression, when he turned to writing for a living. His first published short story appeared in a popular magazine in 1933.

Chandler wrote seven detective novels: The Big Sleep (1939), Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The High Window (1942), The Lady in the Lake (1943), The Little Sister (1949), The Long Goodbye (1953), and Playback (1958). He also published numerous short-story collections. From 1943 he was also a Hollywood screenwriter and some of his novels were also taken to the cinema. The most popular film versions of his work were Farewell, My Lovely (1945) and The Big Sleep (1946), starring Humphrey Bogart, both film noir classics.

On the other hand, Charles Dickens was tempted to write a detective story, although his sudden death interrupted the project (he only wrote six of the twelve instalments planned). The title was The Mystery of Edwin Drood and tells the story of the choirmaster of the cathedral at Cloisterham. Before this work and similarly, Dickens in Bleak House (1852-1853) also wrote about a murder where circumstantial evidence pointed to one party and an arrest of the actual culprit.

One of the greatest names in detective fiction is Sherlock Holmes. It appeared for the first time in A Study in Scarlet, and there was no sequel until 1890, when his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, wrote for an American magazine The Sign of Four.

In the middle fifties the name of a woman started to be popular as detective-story writer, she was Phyllis Dorothy James. She grew up in Cambridge. Her formal education ended at age 16 and she was thereafter self-educated. She worked in hospital administration and became later a civil servant in the criminal section of the Department of Home Affairs. In 1962 she published her first novel. She retired from government service in 1979 to devote full time to writing. She was named a life peer in 1991.

During the forties, the protagonists of gangsters films are no longer public persons, according to the evolution of the heroes portrayed by the hard-boiled school, they are characters who try to run away from the hostile environment that traps them.

Good examples are The Maltese Falcon by John Huston, The Big Sleep by Howard Hawks or the wonderful Laura by Otto Preminger.

As we have already seen, many writers worked themselves in Hollywood as scrip-writers, although sometimes the project was unsuccessful.

The detective novel as literary genre hardly exists nowadays because it has turned into multiple versions generally known under the name of thriller.

There is a great abundance of works in the market which presents a great variety of authors, topics, characters and styles and some of the reasons for the incredible success of this genre are the accessible language to catch the attention of any kind of public and the sense of escapism that transports the reader from daily routine to spheres of strong emotions. On the other hand, the success of the thriller guarantees the success of its cinematographic version, that is the reason why many thriller films are based on their literary counterpart (The Silence of the Lambs, Seven or any of Stephen King´s novels).

8 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beams Falling: The Art of Dashiell Hammett by Peter Wolfe (1980)

Shadow Man: The Life of Dashiell Hammett by Richard Layman (1981)

Dashiell Hammett: A Life by Diane Johnson (1983)

World Authors 1900-1950, ed. by M. Seymour-Smith and A.C. Kimmens (1996) –

The World of Raymond Chandler, ed. by M. Gross (1977)

Raymond Chandler: A Descriptive Bibliography by Matthew J. Bruccoli (1979);

Raymond Chandler by J. Speir (1981)

Chandlertown: The Los Angeles of Philip Marlowe by Edward Thorpe (1983)

Hardboiled Burlesque by K. Newlin (1984)

Encyclopedia of World Literature, vol. 1, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999)

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tema 60 inglés secundaria

Topic 60 – Northamerican hard-boiled novels: Dashiell hammett and raymond chandler. Detective english novel: p.d. James

Topic 60 – Northamerican hard-boiled novels: Dashiell hammett and raymond chandler. Detective english novel: p.d. James

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