water' — these mere sights — that transform the 'modern young woman of materialistic mind' into an 'American woman,' dedicated to a life in the home. Grey's 'purple prose,' in competition with cinematic culture, might be understood foremost as a way of arresting the image, keeping it within the reader's 'view' in order to effect a transformation such as Carley's. While science fiction adheres to the logic of adventure despite its espousal of modernization, the Western's most explicit antimodernism all but abandons that logic: only the land itself, an enduring frontier, stands as the unchanging hero.
While the objective in and of The Call of the Canyon is to redeem modern woman, in the hard-boiled detective novel she appears unredeemable, threatening the very life of the hero. Only the rejection of women, as opposed to any union with them, provides the sense of an ending. Even in more classical versions of the genre, a 'really good detective never gets married,' as Raymond Chandler said, with characteristic bluntness. In part, this results from the seriality of the form, the need to maintain the static character of the hero from one adventure to the next: Erle Stanley Gardner, who wrote voluminously for the pulps in the 1920s, created Perry Mason in 1933, with The Case of the Velvet Claws, and the extraordinary popularity of the novel prompted eighty-one further cases (more than fifteen bestsellers in the 1930s), most of which portray the lawyer defending a young and naive woman. They thus present a paternal figure who can -371- protect female innocence against crime, the idiosyncrasies of the legal system, and the general chaos of the Depression. Obviously, being married would complicate Mason's physical attraction to his clients, just as any romantic involvement beyond that attraction would compromise his role as the good father who rescues his clients from the wiles of bad men. To survive, the Perry Mason formula mandates its hero's celibacy.
The hard-boiled detective novel brought 'adventure' to the heart of the modern city in the 1920s, and it transformed the cerebral art of classical detection into physical action. In a world of gambling and drinking, political corruption and organized crime, it is female sexuality, 'woman' as signifier of sex, that functions to generate peripeteia, distracting the hero and thus retarding the process of detection, conflating the pleasures of reading with the hero's sexual pleasure. Only the renunciation of this sexuality can prompt a satisfactory denouement, the end of desire, most severely represented by Mickey Spillane's late contributions to the hard-boiled formula. In I, the Jury (1947), the title of which proclaims its hero's monomania, Mike Hammer finds himself the irresistible object of women's lust; he falls in love with, and he hopes to marry, Charlotte Manning, the woman who turns out to have murdered his partner. The novel's famous closing pages syncopate his sequential revelation of the crime to her, on the one hand, and, on the other, an account of her 'selfrevelation' to him, a striptease performed before the.45 he points at her, that performance, the relationship, and the novel itself reaching their consummation as she reaches out to him and he shoots her in the stomach. The scopic regime of the detective formula has become violently scopophilic. Pathological as I, the Jury may seem, it has remained one of the most popular American detective novels, a fact that may stem from its very celebration of an erotics of reading, or its simple, pornographic equation of knowledge and power. But this is only the most extreme version of a misogynist gender code that pervades both the hard-boiled detective novel and Hollywood's film noir, where the crisis of the city is ultimately locatable in the chaos that is 'woman.'
Before discussing the emergence of this code in the 1920s, I want to point out that 'hard-boiled' detective fiction — admired by Sartre and Camus, associated stylistically with Hemingway, and champi-372- oned for its urban realism — has virtually become synonymous with 'American' detective fiction and has thus obscured important variants. Mary Roberts Rinehart, for instance, one of the century's most prolific and popular writers, produced the first American best-selling detective novel, The Circular Staircase (1908), quickly followed by The Man in Lower Ten (1909) and The Window at the White Cat (1910). The spinster who assumes the role of amateur detective in the first of these foreshadows Agatha Christie's Miss Marple (English, of course, and considerably older), but she herself harks back to Amelia Butterworth, the heroine of Anna Katherine Green's That Affair Next Door (1897), a 'lonely and single' woman, living in Gramercy Park, who 'discovers herself' by joining the murder investigation headed by Detective Ebenezer Gryce. While solving the mystery, Rinehart's heroine rescues her sister's orphaned children from suspicion, enables them to marry the individuals they love, and secures their (matrilinear) inheritance. As a vicarious mother, she preserves the components of the familial institution while asserting an ego that does not depend on that institution but on her public rivalry with male professionals. Not only does The Circular Staircase provide an alternative to such celebrations of motherhood as Kathleen Norris's Mother (1911), indebted to Louisa May Alcott and Susan Warner; it also foregrounds its heroine's status as an independent and rational woman by intertextually embracing other genres of 'women's fiction,' providing, for instance, a miniature sentimental plot in one woman's 'sad and tragic' story of being abandoned, pregnant, by her worthless husband. The single woman's independence from men, which is an independence from that story, grounds her ultimate power over them.
Despite the proliferation of detective pulps in the 1920s (Flynn's, Clues, Dragnet Magazine, Detective Tales), the original venue for hard-boiled detection, Black Mask (1920), began eclectically, not specializing until the end of the decade, at which point it emerged not only with a generic focus but also with a recognizably spare style, cynical hero, and sordid urban scene. The stories of Carroll John Daly and Dashiell Hammett inaugurated these features in 1923, and their private investigators, Race Williams and the unnamed Continental Op, eventually appeared in serialized novels that took book form in Daly's The Snarl of the Beast (1927) and Hammett's Red Harvest (1929). Unlike the aristocratic amateur — who remained a -373- best-selling favorite in the 1920s, in the form of S. S. Van Dine's scholarly Philo Vance, 'sedulously schooled in the repression of his emotions' and 'aloof from the transient concerns of life' — the hardboiled private-eye works for a living, talks tough, carries a.45, and typically tells his own story. In The Simple Act of Murder (1950) Raymond Chandler locates this new hero, who 'talks the way the man of his age talks,' within a democratic vision: 'He is a common man or he would not go among common people.' And in The Big Sleep (1939), Chandler's detective, Philip Marlowe, must explain this new, pedestrian heroism to a client: 'I'm not Sherlock Holmes or Philo Vance…. If you think there's anybody in the detective business making a living doing that sort of thing, you don't know much about cops.' Likewise, in Hammett's The Maltese Falcon (1930), Sam Spade must explain that his 'way of learning is to heave a wild and unpredictable monkey-wrench into the machinery.' The detective formula's faith in the powers of reason finds itself abandoned for an urban existentialism. 'It's what you do,' Race Williams concludes.
The lack of narratological distance (of the sort provided by mediating commentators like Holmes's Dr. Watson) combines with an effacement of cultural, psychological, and class distance to the point where the hero's very distinction from the criminal world he inhabits becomes suspect — this, despite his fidelity to individualism. In Red Harvest, the Op enters 'Poisonville' (Personville) in the aftermath of labor hostilities that the city czar (owner of the mills) has resolved only with the help of organized crime, and this class conflict (the novel's 'past') gets transposed into the detective's refusal to obey both his client's commands and the detective agency's regulations. But this violation of the rules readily becomes absorbed into a world without rule: rather than trying to 'swing the play legally,' the Op finds it both 'easier' and 'more satisfying' to provoke the gangsters to kill one another until the city erupts into a 'slaughterhouse.' Foremost, the transcription of 'Personville' into 'Poisonville' signifies this disappearance of 'the person,' the hero's inability to establish his own autonomy.
His opening description of Poisonville — 'an ugly city of forty thousand people, set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains,' with 'a grimy sky that looked as if it had come out of the smelter's -374- stacks' — is generally taken to crystallize the distinction between hard-boiled and classical detective fiction. But, more exactly, it is the difference between this opening panorama and the rest of the novel that makes those distinctions clear, for once the Op enters the city, the very possibility of vision, of a perspective that depends on exteriority, disappears: the hotel lobbies, hospital rooms, and abandoned warehouses produce a claustrophobic interiority from which there is no relief. The pursuit of crime continues to take place according to a logic of the gaze, but a logic where intense perception prompts no totalizing vision. The 'iron-legged, tile-topped tables outside under the striped awning,' the 'quilted gray chenille' of a Packard interior — these remain part of the accumulation of detail without gestalt. Chandler triumphantly described the new American style as 'emotional and sensational rather than intellectual,' expressing 'things experienced rather than ideas.' But the style triumphs only at the traditional formula's expense: while Poe's Dupin explained, in the 1840s, that 'the necessary knowledge is that of what to observe,' no such discretion controls the proliferation of detail in the hard-boiled novel. And the most salient
