modernist leopards were safely ensconced in the temple, and serious art was expected to create an atmosphere of toughness, darkness, and alienation.16 There is a sense, however, in which modernism and mass culture had never been quite so far apart as we imagine. Fredric Jameson, who defines modernist art in terms of its resistance to the culture industry, notes that there were also 'profound structural relations' between modernism and the new economy.17 A text like Heart of Darkness, for example, is both an experimental narrative and an adventure story derived from the 'sensation' literature of the mid-Victorian period; as, Jameson has remarked, Conrad's work in general reveals 'the emergence not merely of what will be contemporary modernism . . . but also, still tangibly juxtaposed with it, what will variously be called popular culture or mass culture, the commercialized discourse of what, in late capitalism, is often described as media society.'
The contradiction Jameson observes is especially apparent in the Hollywood film noir, which is both a type of modernism and a type of commercial melodrama. I refer not only to the melos of the Hollywood style, but alsomore importantlyto the 'moral occult' of tales in which the forces of good battle violently against the forces of evil. Especially in Hollywood, melodrama is a conservative or sentimental form associated with stalwart heroes, unscrupulous villains, vivid action, and last-minute rescues. Certain attributes of modernism (its links to high culture, its formal and moral complexity, its disdain for classical narrative, its frankness about sex, and its increasingly critical stance toward America) threatened this kind of film and were never totally absorbed into the mainstream. High modernism and Hollywood 'blood melodrama' nevertheless formed a symbiotic relationship that generated an intriguing artistic tension.
By way of illustrating this phenomenon, let me now turn to three case studies that provide evidence of a link between modernism and mass culture on the grounds of noir narrative. The first involves Dashicll Hammett, who is widely recognized as the founder of the hard-boiled detective novel; the second deals with Graham Greene, who, according to Borde and Chaumeton, 'played a role in the birth of film noir (This Gun for Hire), in the acclimatization of noir in England (Brighton Rock), and in its international development (The Third Man)' (18); and the third centers on the Billy Wilder-Raymond Chandler adaptation of James M. Cain's Double Indemnity, which is arguably the definitive film noir of the 1940s. Each of the writers I discuss brought an intense awareness of modernist literature to the making of criminal adventures, and each gained money and fame from the Hollywood studios. Taken together, their work demonstrates how a certain kind of 'art thriller' could be critical of the institutions that supported it; but at the same time, their careers reveal that the movie studios needed to lighten or ameliorate the darkness of modernism and mute its intensity.
The earliest and most radical of the popular modernists was Dashiell Hammett, a working-class author who began his career in the pulps and soon crossed over to the prestigious firm of Alfred A. Knopf. During his most productive years, Hammett managed to reconcile some of the deepest contradictions in his culture: he was an ex- Pinkerton detective who looked like an aristocrat, and a writer of pulp mysteries who was treated as an authority on language by none other than Gertrude Stein. The most important innovator of popular detective fiction since Edgar Allan Poe, he was also at various points an advertising man, a Hollywood hack, a drinking partner of William Faulkner, a writer for a comic strip, and a committed Marxist. 19
Hammett's early stories and novels were published by a factory of cheap, all-fiction periodicals that provided melodramatic fantasy to an audience of millions in the days before paperbacks and television. Historian Lee Server remarks that in their heydaychiefly the 1920s and 1930sthe pulps were 'held accountable to few standards of logic, believability, or 'good taste.'' Whenever they exhausted the possibilities of standard characters or genres (science fiction, western, spy, South Seas adventure, or modern romance), they spawned new formulas and strange hybrids (sword-and-sorcery, 'weird menace,' gangster, superhero, or masked avenger). The detective story was among the most popular of the pulp commodities, and it came in every variety: 'spicy' detective, cowboy detective, occult detective, and so on. Like all the other genres, it was packaged behind lurid, brightly hued covers depicting half- dressed women and men frozen in violent tableaux.
Pulp authors were paid so little that they usually specialized in a kind of automatic writing. By contrast, Hammett was a painstaking craftsman, and he became a fairly well paid star. Together with fellow Black Mask writer Carroll John Daly, he seems to have 'invented' the tough detective sometime around 1923, in clear reaction against the amateur, puzzle-solving sleuths descended from Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In keeping with the general atmosphere of Black Mask, his early stories and novels have as much speed as a Keystone Cops movie and more dead bodies than an Elizabethan tragedy. Sometimes the hero's toughness is exaggerated to the point of burlesque: at one point in Red Harvest (1929), the Continental Op spends all night drinking gin with a blond floozy, takes a cold bath, and has a fight with a killer, whom he overpowers and hauls to the police; he then takes another cold bath and has a fight with two killers, knocking one out and beating the other to the draw; soon afterward, having been grazed on the wrist by a stray bullet, and without even the benefit of another cold bath, he captures an escaped convict and solves a murder mystery that has baffled the local police for years.
But Hammett also had high literary aspirations and serious political convictions. Red Harvest vividly describes corruption in the Wild West during a period of murderous labor struggles, White House scandals, and Prohibition-style gangsterism; never overtly tendentious, it is nonetheless a deadpan expose of union busting and police violence, filled with cataclysmic bloodshed and raw exploitation of the weak by the strong. ths title is a pun, referring not only to gory violence but also to the potential rise of the Communist International. Equally important, its protagonistthe fat, fortyish, but incredibly tough Continental Opis quite different from the hypermasculine figures on pulp covers, and from the sort of hero that Black Mask editor Joseph T. 'Cap' Shaw seems to have imagined for his readers. Shaw was a man of action who clearly had a great deal to do with the birth of hard-boiled fiction; in his editorial statements, however, he sounded like a disciple of Teddy Roosevelt. The ideal consumer of Black Mask, he wrote, 'is vigorous-minded, hard, in a square man's hardness; hating unfairness, trickery, injustice, cowardly underhandedness; standing for a square deal and a fair show in little or big things . . . ; not squeamish or prudish, but clean, admiring the good in man and woman; not sentimental in a gushing sort of way, but valuing true emotion . . . and always pulling for the right guy to come out on top.' 21 In contrast, Hammett's Op is a faceless employee of a factory (more like an actual reader or writer of the pulps), and the violence he experiences makes him feel 'blood simple.' At one point, he thinks he might even have stabbed a woman while he was drunk or drugged.
Throughout the novel, Hammett reveals a sophisticated awareness of current literary trends. From the first sentence ('I first heard Personvillc called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte'), it is clear that he is making art out of the vernacular. All of his later protagonists would speak in this unorthodox style, and they bring a new voice to the detective story. It isn't quite the voice of Reason, as with Dupin or Holmes, because it has less to do with solving puzzles than with exposing falsehood or naivete; nor is it quite the voice of Metaphysics or Morality, as with Father Brown, because Hammett is skeptical of absolutes and his heroes are not virtuous. It sounds more like the voice of Male Experience, addressing seductive women or mendacious crooks after a period of knowing silence. When an aging capitalist in Red Harvest tells the Op that he wants a 'man' to 'clean this pigsty of a Poisonville for me, and to smoke out the rats, little and big,' the Op replies, ''What's the use of getting poetic about it? If you've got a fairly honest piece of work to be done in my line, and you want to pay a decent price, maybe I'll take it on.' When Brigid O'Shaunnessy in The Maltese Falcon tells Sam Spade that he can't turn her over to the police because he loves her, he comments, 'But I don't know what that amounts to. Does anyone ever? . . . Maybe next month I won't. . . . Then I'll think I played the sap.' Such a voice can't be taken in by abstract appeals to morality or even love, and while it usually situates itself on the side of the Law, it is too honest to give the usual reasons for being there. As Ned Beaumont says in The Glass Key, 'I don't believe in anything.'' 22
Interestingly, Hammett was a writer of verse as well as detective stories, and before turning to pulp fiction he published a story and an essay in H. L. Mencken's Smart Set, the most sophisticated 'little magazine' in America, which also featured work by James Joyce and the leading modernist authors. Although
