Comment 20, no. 5 (October 1984): 3049. See also Patrick Raynal, 'Ecran blanc pour la serie noire,' Cahiers du cinema, no. 490 (April 1995): 7781.
5. David Lodge, 'The Language of Modernist Fiction: Metaphor and Metonymy,' in Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 18901930, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 481.
6. For a discussion of the effect of World War I on literary language, see Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 2124.
7. Over the next two decades, Eliot's Dark City was to become a touchstone for British and American modernism, influencing Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby), Evelyn Waugh (A Handful of Dust), and W. H. Auden (The Age of Anxiety).
8. As Mike Davis has shown in City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), the 'noir generation' of European exiles and hard-boiled writers in Hollywood was powerfully critical of the Southern California boosters and real-estate developers who had created the myth of a sunny, missionstyle utopia. For filmmakers like Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, and Raymond Chandler, the American dream was at best a 'bright, guilty world.' (Hereafter, Davis's work is cited parenthetically in the text.)
9. Graham Greene quoted in Norman Sherry, The Life of Graham Greene, vol. 1 (New York: Viking, 1989), 597. Hereafter, this work and volume 2, published in 1994, are cited parenthetically in the text.
10. Joseph Conrad quoted in Tony Hilfer, The Crime Novel: A Deviant Genre (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 98; my translation from the French.
11. Henry James, 'The New York Preface,' The Turn of the Screw, ed. Robert Kimbrough (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), 120.
12. For example, Raymond Chandler's attack on Christie and Sayers in 'The Simple Art of Murder' is strikingly similar to Ezra Pound's attacks on Amy Lowell and the British establishment in the period before World War I. Chandler's essays and letters are filled with savage comments on the women consumers of popular literatureas when he writes that pulp magazines 'made most of the fiction of the time taste like a cup of luke-warm consomme at a spinsterish tearoom.' Dashiell Hammett sometimes used the same metaphors. In one of his early book reviews, he remarked that S. S. Van Dine's upper-class detective, Philo Vance, had the conversational manner of 'a high school girl who has been studying the foreign words and phrases in the back of her dictionary.'
13. Double Indemnity was budgeted by Paramount for $980,000 and was one of the most critically admired films of the year. Although it was not among the box-office champions of the decade, it was widely regarded as a new and important kind of product. As Boxoffice magazine reported, Indemnity was a 'precedent-setting, cycle-initiating hit' that elevated 'the cops-and-robbers melodrama to a new stratum of exhibition importance' (2 February 1946).
14. Almost every Hollywood director who wanted to do something 'deep' experimented with some variation of this style. Consider James Cruz (Beggar on Horseback, 1923), Josef von Sternberg (Underworld, 1927), King Vidor (The Crowd, 1928), Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur (Crime without Passion, 1934), and John Ford (The Informer, 1935).
15. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 19141991 (New York: Pantheon, 1994), 182. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.
16. The institutionalization of modern art went hand in hand with a widespread dissemination of Freudian ideas. During the 1930s and 1940s in America, highbrow psychoanalysis had split into two terrains, described by Russell Jacoby as a 'technical orthodoxy restricted to doctors' and a 'looser revisionism that encouraged cultural and moral theorizing' (The Repression of Psychoanalysis [New York: Basic Books, 1983], 153). Meanwhile, the Frankfort School settled in New York and California, Theodor Adorno wrote psychoanalytic studies of the Hitlerian personality, and Freudian-inspired literary criticism began to appear everywhere. Among the most influential examples of such writing in the 1940s and 1950s are the translation of Marie Bonaparte's study of Edgar Allan Poe, Edmund Wilson's interpretation of 'Turn of the Screw,' and Lionel Trilling's essays on Freud and art. As many commentators have shown, Freudian ideas pervaded Hollywood in the 1940s, affecting all the genres and stars to some degree: compare John Wayne in Stagecoach (1939) with John Wayne in Red River (1948); or compare Ginger Rogers in Top Hat (1935) with Ginger Rogers in Lady in the Dark (1944). For a discussion of actual psychoanalysts who worked in Hollywood during this period, see Stephen Farber and Marc Green, Hollywood on the Couch (New York: William Morrow, 1993).
17. Fredric Jameson, 'Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,' Social Text 1 (1979): 135.
18. Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 206.
19. I have discussed Hammett's career at greater length in an earlier essay, 'Dashiell Hammett and the Poetics of Hard-Boiled Detection,' in Essays on Detective Fiction, ed. Bernard Benstock (London: Macmillan, 1983), 4972.
20. Lee Server, Danger Is My Business: An Illustrated History of the Fabulous Pulp Magazines (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1993), 9.
21. Joseph T. 'Cap' Shaw quoted in Frank MacShane, The Life of Raymond Chandler (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1976), 46. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.
22. Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest (London: Pan Books, 1975), 39; The Maltese Falcon (New York: Vintage, 1972), 227; The Glass Key (New York: Vintage, 1972), 169. Hereafter, these works are cited parenthetically in the text.
23. Blanche Knopf quoted in Diane Johnson, Dashiell Hammett: A Life (New York: Random House, 1983), 70. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.
24. David O. Selznick, Memo from David O. Selznick, ed. Rudy Behlmer (New York: Viking Press, 1972), 26.
25. Stephen Marcus, introduction to The Continental Op, by Dashiell Hammett (New York: Random House, 1974), xvii.
26. Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man (New York: Vintage, 1972), 12. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.
27. Andrew Sarris quoted by Tom Milne in Mamoulian (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), 36.
28. James Agee quoted in Patricia King Hanson and Alan Gevinson, eds., American Film Institute Catalog: Feature Films, 19311940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 782.
29. I have discussed James Agee's comments and examined the 'male myth' underlying the film in 'John Huston and The Maltese Falcon,' reprinted in The Maltese Falcon, ed. William Luhr (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 14960. That volume contains a continuity script of the film and other useful material. For additional background on Huston, see Gaylyn Studlar and David Desser, Reflections in a Male Eye: John Huston and the American Experience (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), where my essay on Falcon is also reprinted.
30. Jonathan Latimer's best novel, Solomon's Vineyard, is a synthesis of The Maltese Falcon, Red Harvest, and The Dain Curse. It was written in 1940 but was not published in the United States in an unexpurgated trade version until 1988. It deserves to be placed alongside Paul Cain's Fast One (1933) as One of the toughest, most sadomasochistic Hammett imitations of all time.
31. The myth that Hammett was a relatively simple stylist, together with the myth that he did not write about a world in which 'gangsters can rule nations,' seems to have been generated by Raymond Chandler in 'The Simple Art of Murder.' Critics have seldom noted that Hammett was also to some degree a typical southern writer (he was born in Maryland). He could render wild landscapes with the accuracy of a man who has lived outdoors, and he must have loved dogs, because his books contain several beautifully observed descriptions of canine
