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Popular Culture Review
John Cawelti’s 1976 study of “formula stories” remains one of the most
ambitious attempts to identify and describe common patterns that structure
diverse categories of popular fiction, including the hard-boiled detective story.
Cawelti organizes a wide variety of detective heroes into the category of “hardboiled” partly on the basis of certain recurring character traits and plot elements,
among them the detective’s wise-cracking style, his personal commitment to the
pursuit of justice, and the physical hazards of his investigation. Cawelti
identifies the latter as one of the hard-boiled detective’s most significant
differences from his classical counterpart, but he also notes that the hard-boiled
detective does not sustain the kind of wounds that might “spoil his function as a
fantasy hero” (161).
The nature of the hard-boiled detective-hero’s appeal was well understood
by the writers themselves. Dashiell Hammett, in his introduction to the 1934
Modem Library edition of The Maltese Falcon, described Sam Spade as a
“dream man [...] able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best
of anybody he comes in contact with” (105), and Chandler drew his own hardboiled detective as a kind of urban knight errant, a “man of honor,” but one who
will take “no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge” (18).
Tony Hilfer comments on this basic invulnerability of the hard-boiled
detective in his 1990 study, The Crime Novel: A Deviant Genre, in which he
identifies hard-boiled traits— an “alienated posture,” emotional detachment,
“sardonic knowingness”—as markers of individual “control” (8-9). The
appalling physical abuse to which the hard-boiled detective is sometimes
subjected actually serves to underscore this control, to demonstrate that the
detective “can take it” (33). Even when plunged into a world of violence, he
exhibits a large degree of insulation from terror, hope, agony, and sorrow.
Brackett was a great admirer of Chandler and Hammett, adopting the hardboiled mode in much of her writing, and populating her stories with jaded toughguy investigators, but her protagonists do not exhibit the same degree of
psychological insulation as their predecessors, and the violence to which they
are subjected is of such greater frequency and severity as to be different in kind.
For example, the protagonist in Brackett’s 1944 story, “I Feel Bad Killing You”
is an ex-police detective investigating his own brother’s murder, and his
investigation is greatly impeded by his paralyzing fear of fire. This fear dates
back to an episode in which he was tortured by gangsters—the same gangsters
who now mockingly threaten him with matches, causing him to tremble and
scream. He ultimately prevails, but he spends a good part of the story terrorstricken, physically bound, or unconscious. In Brackett’s 1957, “So Pale, So
Cold, So Fair,” the protagonist, an investigative journalist, has developed the
nervous compulsive habit of fingering the scars on his face—scars resulting
from a brutal beating at the hands of racketeers who objected to his reporting.
To the extent that these stories do not succeed with readers, it may be that
they set up expectations with their hard-boiled investigators that are then
disappointed when these protagonists are, in spite of ultimate success, depicted