Thu 9 Jun 2011
Reviewed by Curt Evans: LEONARD CASSUTO – Hard-Boiled Sentimentality.
Posted by Steve under Reference works / Biographies , Reviews[24] Comments
Leonard Cassuto’s Hard-Boiled Sentimentality:
The Secret History of American Crime Stories
by Curt J. Evans
Over the last twenty years feminist literary scholars have leaped into the field of mystery criticism with great energy and enthusiasm; and they have had a remarkable impact on it. In Great Britain, such academic authorities as Gill Plain, Susan Rowland and Merja Makinen have written perceptive revisionist studies on British Golden Age “Crime Queens†(Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh), defending them from the traditional (usually male) criticism, dating back to Raymond Chandler and Edmund Wilson in the 1940s and prevalent through the early Marxist-influenced academic monographs of the 1970s, that their work is insipid, reactionary drivel, in contrast with the admirable, socially progressive and genre transcending American hard-boiled fiction most famously associated with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler himself.
This scholarly feminist emphasis on the Crime Queens, while important in revising earlier masculinist views of these authors, has led to the elevation of an increasingly commonplace view within academia, namely that the mystery genre in Britain during the Golden Age was essentially feminine, representing a purportedly distinct and uniquely female set of values, such as the privileging of feelings and intuitions over material detail (i.e., psychology over footprints and timetables), a preference for cerebration over fisticuffs as the way of reaching solutions to problems and an emphasis on domestic detail and the inter-connectedness of individuals. “All in all,†emphatically concludes Susan Rowland in a representative statement from a recent essay, “the golden age form is a feminized one.â€
Thus portrayed, “feminine†English Golden Age detective fiction starkly contrasts with the “masculine†hardboiled form that frequently has been taken to represent American detective fiction during this period (roughly 1920 to 1939) — though the critical estimation of English Golden Age detective fiction (or, to be more precise, the four women authors often portrayed as nearly entirely representing it) has been considerably raised.
However, another feminist literary scholar — this time an American, Catherine Ross Nickerson — has pointed out in an important 1998 study, The Web of Iniquity: Early Detective Fiction by American Women, that detective fiction in the United States was not actually a strictly masculine preserve, a playground for the tough guys. Rather, Nickerson has shown, an indigenous American tradition of female-authored crime fiction existed well back into the nineteenth century.
One of the writers she discusses, Mary Roberts Rinehart, was active and extremely popular in the United States all though the Golden Age (indeed, she was much more significant at this time than Raymond Chandler, who only published his first novel in 1939, at the very tail-end of the Golden Age, confining himself before that to pulp short stories).
But although Professor Nickerson helped remind her academic colleagues that women mystery writers with their own narrative style and literary concerns not only existed but were much read in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, it remained for Professor Leonard Cassuto to do something that no other academic had yet done: perceive the American hardboiled detective novel itself as feminized.
Leonard Cassuto’s Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Stories (Columbia University Press, 2008) is one of the most highly praised academic crime literature monographs of the last decade. “Superb…fresh insights on every page,†declares Alan Trachtenberg of Yale University.
Not to be outdone is crime writer Julia Spencer-Fleming, who provides a blurb that is surely one to die for: “Hard-Boiled Sentimentality is a nonfiction epic that reads like the best genre fiction, tracing the bloodlines of crime fiction from Sam Spade to Hannibal Lecter. Cassuto’s scholarship is impeccable; his narrative voice magnetic. A must-read for every student of genre fiction and the go-to source for the evolutionary history of the genre.â€
Whew! Is it really as good as all that? In my view, not quite; though Cassuto makes an interesting (if not invariably persuasive) argument and his writing is comprehensible and refreshingly jargon-light, not something that can be said for many of the academic monographs in this field. Hard-Boiled Sentimentality often is quite insightful and for those interested in hardboiled fiction it should make rewarding reading.
Leonard Cassuto contends that rather than being “masculinist†tales of unfeeling lone tigers prowling in the asphalt jungle, hard-boiled novels in reality are closely related to women’s sentimental domestic fiction of the nineteenth century, which “celebrates the reliable and nourishing social ties that result when people extend their sympathy to others around them.â€
In Cassuto’s view, hard-boiled tales “engage with a domestic sentimentalism born of a specific historical period†and it is this “engagement with the nineteenth-century sentimental†that “shapes the history and evolution of the hard-boiled from its inception to the present day.†“Inside every crime story is a sentimental narrative that’s trying to come out,†declares Cassuto provocatively. “Sentimentalism invented the American crime novel.â€
Over the course of his study, which extends from the 1920s to the present day, Cassuto explicates the key role he sees sentimentalism as having played in the shaping of the American crime tale. Chapter One deals with the influence exercised on the hard-boiled school of crime writing by mainstream novelists Theodore Dreiser and Ernest Hemingway.
Chapter Two looks at Dashiell Hammett. Relying on his reading of The Maltese Falcon (and to a lesser extent Red Harvest and The Dain Curse), Cassuto argues that Hammett portrays “sentimentalism in ruins: a world of self-interested individuals cut loose from family ties and family obligations, who have abandoned sympathy to chase the dollar.â€
However he emphasizes that in The Maltese Falcon tough-as-nails detective Sam Spade struggles between “self-interest and sympathy†and that in The Dain Curse the Continental Op “shows genuine concern for his young charge [Gabrielle Leggett].â€
Chapter Three sees Cassuto taking on “Depression Domesticity,†primarily through James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce and Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep and The High Window.
With its family saga of a deluded mother and her deceiving daughter, writes Cassuto, Mildred Pierce allows James M. Cain to bring “the sentimental and the hard-boiled into the same house.†It offers readers “the key to the hard-boiled engine-room.â€
Chandler’s detective Philip Marlowe, for his part, is in Cassuto’s view driven primarily by a need to put broken houses back together, restoring families to that portion of harmony still possible in 1930s America. As an author, asserts Cassuto, Chandler was “in quixotic pursuit of a family ideal that was being threatened during the Depression, when financial hardship broke many families apart.â€
Chapter Four, which takes us past World War Two and into the 1950s and the Cold War, sees Cassuto considerably expanding his analytical net, taking in a wider range of novels, including those by Chandler, Mickey Spillane, David Goodis, John D. MacDonald, William P. McGivern, Wade Miller, “John Evans†(Howard Browne), Gil Brewer and Cornell Woolrich.
“Working from the model provided by Raymond Chandler,†explains Cassuto, “postwar crimefighters become passionate and involved defenders of home and hearth.†Cold War paranoia and the desire to restore traditional gender roles after global conflagration had menaced world order combined to create the fetching but fearsome femme fatale, a creature in Cassuto’s view that is most notable for her refusal to accept what was seen as her natural role in the social order, that of domesticated wife and mother.
“A veritable army of unpredictable femmes fatales, armed and dangerous and set to destroy home and community, swarms out of the crime stories of the 1950s,†Cassuto writes colorfully. He is especially interesting here on the hard-boiled novel’s treatment of lesbians and transsexuals, who represented the ultimate in “female†transgression.
Even Cassuto’s creativity at finding sentimentality in every hard-boiled cavity he searches is stymied by those deviant and demented darlings of modern critics, Patricia Highsmith and Jim Thompson, however; and in Chapter Five, “Sentimental Perversion,†he shows how these compellingly idiosyncratic authors subversively undermined sentimentalism at every opportunity.
To be sure, sentimentality makes a considerable comeback in Chapter Six, where Cassuto looks at the work of Ross Macdonald, John D. MacDonald and (to a much lesser extent) Robert B. Parker. Anyone familiar with Ross Macdonald’s novels knows they changed over time, as Macdonald shook off the influence of Chandler (who was quite cutting in his appraisal of the younger man’s work) and allowed his own personal preoccupations to take hold of his narratives.
Making use of Tom Nolan’s fine biography of Macdonald, Cassuto is able to show how the author’s family problems meshed with the therapeutic culture of the 1960s to lead Macdonald to produce book after book on household dysfunction and the generation gap, with Macdonald’s series detective, Lew Archer, acting as a sort of family therapist (or as Cassuto writes, “a kind of walking vessel for collective guilt†and “an everyman of sympathyâ€).
For Cassuto Ross Macdonald “stands as perhaps the most sentimental of all hard-boiled novelists because he understands family ties in the same way the sentimental writers did a century before him.†Similarly, Cassuto believes the robust if offbeat home life (aboard a Fort Lauderdale houseboat called the Busted Flush) of John D. MacDonald’s detective Travis McGee firmly affiliates this author’s work with the sentimental side of life, since his detective is not office-centered like Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe.
Dealing with, respectively, female private eyes and race in the hard-boiled novel, Chapter Seven and Eight feel somewhat tacked on, but Cassuto returns in full force with a discussion of the serial killer and the crime novel in his monograph’s final chapter. Contrary to what we might think, serial killer novels also reflect sentimentalist hegemony, according to Cassuto. The serial killer should be understood as “an anti-family man,†Cassuto declares. “He is purely anti-sympathy, anti-domesticity, anti-sentimentality.†And opposing him is the increasingly sensitive and domesticated detective.
At one point in his book, Cassuto forcefully criticizes scholars’ “static and stereotyped conception of hard-boiled masculinity.†He rightly notes that this conception has arisen to a great extent from ingenuous readings of Raymond Chandler’s polemical 1946 essay, “The Simple Art of Murder,†which stridently emphasizes the tough masculinity of hard-boiled heroes by “feminizing the genteel detective story tradition.â€
To be sure, other critics before Cassuto have discerned a certain amount of hollow chest-beating bravado in Chandler’s essay. The great centenarian scholar Jacques Barzun, for example, noted forty years ago in the introduction to his and Wendell Hertig Taylor’s A Catalogue of Crime (Harper & Row, 1971) that Chandler in notable ways was himself a “sentimental [emphasis added] tale spinner†(p.11), whatever claims he made to the contrary in “The Simple Art of Murder.â€
Still, in forcefully challenging the “static and stereotyped conception of hard-boiled masculinity†with his lengthy study Cassuto deserves our praise. Nevertheless, I think that his admirable zeal to revise error sometimes pushes Cassuto to overstate his case, rendering an over-sentimentalized (or overly-feminized) interpretation of the hard-boiled crime novel.
Cassuto’s coverage of hard-boiled fiction in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s is sparser than I would have expected from an author advancing such an ambitious, overarching thesis. A number of significant tough crime writers of the period are short-shrifted (Raoul Whitfield) or ignored entirely (Jonathan Latimer).
Despite his fine discussion of Mildred Pierce, never does Cassuto convince me that James M. Cain’s admired novel truly is “the key to the hard-boiled engine room†(on the other hand, it is the work that most strongly supports his thesis). Does Mildred Pierce unlock Jonathan’s Latimer scabrously humorous The Lady in the Morgue (its repertoire includes necrophilia jokes about the lady missing from the morgue), for example?
While Cassuto provides some analysis of how James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity (as well as Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?) fit into his thematic structure, he largely omits consideration of the short stories of Hammett and Chandler, as well as Hammett’s novels The Glass Key and The Thin Man and Chandler’s novels Farewell, My Lovely, The Lady in the Lake and The Little Sister. (Playback is not here either, but who can really complain about that.)
These are significant omissions when one considers the small output of novels from the hard-boiled twin titans. In his entry on the novel in 1001 Midnights, Francis M. Nevins has written of The Glass Key that “its third-person narrative voice … is so objectively realistic and passionlessly impersonal that it seems to draw an impenetrable shield between character and reader.â€
Does Cassuto find sympathy in The Glass Key? In regard to Chandler, are his novels Farewell, My Lovely and The Lake in the Lake, published about the same time as The Big Sleep and The High Window, about Marlowe as a fixer of broken families? It would have been nice to see Cassuto’s thoughts on how these particular novels develop his themes.
In Hard-Boiled Sentimentality, Chandler’s The Big Sleep is discussed on a dozen pages, The High Window on a half-dozen and The Long Goodbye on three, while Farewell, My Lovely is mentioned once (and this only in reference to its 1940s sales) and The Lady in the Lake and The Little Sister no times at all.
While doubtlessly The High Window better illustrates Cassuto’s sentimental domesticity thesis than, say, Farewell, My Lovely (where in my reading the strongest sentimental feelings are directed at single men), The High Window certainly is not inherently a more “important†book in the Chandler canon than Farewell, My Lovely. (Indeed, most critics clearly deem Farewell, My Lovely to be markedly superior to The High Window as a piece of literature.)
Similarly, Cassuto discusses Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon on nearly thirty pages, Red Harvest on seven and The Dain Curse on six, while failing to mention the highly-praised The Glass Key. Certainly The Glass Key is considered a richer work than The Dain Curse, which is almost universally regarded as Hammett’s poorest novel.]
Further, Cassuto’s attribution of causality for the way the narratives develop in the Hammett and Chandler novels he does write about sometimes is debatable. For example, Hammett’s vivid fictional world of grasping, self-interested and self-regarding individuals may owe more to the author’s engagement with Karl Marx than with Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Similarly, it seems to me that much of the thematic content in Chandler’s novels is derived from his marked resentment (personal, not ideological) of the idly wealthy and his deep sense of masculine honor. In my view, Marlowe’s sympathy in The Big Sleep is reserved for old General Sternwood, not his corrupted daughters.
Any repairing of the General’s home necessarily involves driving the insanely murderous and nymphomaniacal Carmen Sternwood from its precincts. (It is important to recall here the famous image of the stained-glass window in the Sternwood home depicting the knight battling the dragon, i.e., serpent — the serpent in the Sternwood home is Carmen, who even hisses at one point.)
As the critic Clive James has perceptively noted, “Carmen is the first in a long line of little witches that runs right through the [Chandler] novels, just as her big sister, Vivian, is the first in a long line of rich bitches who find that Marlowe is the only thing money can’t buy.â€
Marlowe (who assuredly represents his creator) does not expend a lot of sentiment or sympathy either on the little witches or the rich bitches, those fallen temptresses and potential destroyers of men.
Certainly Chandler’s little witches are those les belle dames sans merci of hardboiled mystery, the femmes fatales (they appear — quite memorably — in Farewell, My Lovely and The Lady in the Lake as well, novels Cassuto does not discuss).
This fact alone leads me to question Cassuto’s assessment of the femme fatale primarily as a 1950s phenomenon. Cassuto himself admits that The Maltese Falcon offers a prominent example of the femme fatale, but the willful creature also rears her lovely head, as indicated above, numerous times in the works of Raymond Chandler, not to mention forties film noir, as well as other hard-boiled tales by the many 1940s writers not discussed by Cassuto.
Surely the explosion of the femme fatale phenomenon in this period was set off in part simply by the paperback revolution and the dramatic discovery that more explicit sexualization of women helped sell hardboiled books to male readers. In his book Hard-Boiled America, Geoffrey O’Brien perceptively highlights the impact of World War 2 in this context:
In short, sometimes hardboiled fiction surely engaged more directly with sexuality than sentimentality. (Certainly the lurid paperback covers did.) In Chandler’s case, the continual resort to the device of the femme fatale appears to have arisen more out of personal issues than national social and economic concerns (as does the distaste for homosexuals Chandler expresses though Marlowe in The Big Sleep), so once again Cassuto’s approach (e.g., traditional family rhetoric and the Cold War made them do it) seems overly mechanistic.
It should be noted that where it supports his thesis that a given hardboiled author is sentimental (Ross Macdonald in this case), Cassuto does resort in part to personal biography for answers as to why the author wrote as he did. Doing so makes his argument more persuasive (indeed, the Ross Macdonald section is one of the strongest in the book).
Sometimes Cassuto can be heavy-handed in his approach to causal factors. Could The Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep have come into existence without Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, which observed the role self-interest played in guiding human endeavor, or his The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which analyzed sympathy?
Apparently they could not have, according to Cassuto. “Adam Smith may be considered the founding father of both sympathy and the hard-boiled attitude at the same time,†Cassuto rather breezily pronounces. “Smith published perhaps the foundational hard-boiled text, The Wealth of Nations, in 1776…. But Smith was already an expert on sympathy at the time he wrote his anatomy of capitalistic individualism; in 1759 he wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments.â€
Such speculation led me idly to wonder how it is that Adam Smith never wrote a hardboiled crime novel. Had he done so, it inevitably would have been called, one imagines, The Invisible Hand.
Despite these criticisms on my part, I think Cassuto has a valuable thesis overall. Academic analysts have tended to overly polarize male hard-boiled authors and female crime fiction writers (as well as traditional male detective novelists).
Thus I would recommend the perusal of Hard-Boiled Sentimentality by those interested in better understanding crime fiction. Yet I must also add a few more criticisms of the book that are of a different nature, stemming from Professor Cassuto’s evident lack of familiarity with the history of the mystery genre on certain points. (He is by no means alone among academic scholars in this regard.)
First, although he references Catherine Ross Nickerson’s The Web of Iniquity, rarely does Cassuto mention women crime writers before 1970 (Patricia Highsmith is the notable exception). In her review of Hard-Boiled Sentimentality, Sarah Weinman criticized Cassuto’s omission of Dorothy B. Hughes’ In a Lonely Place (1947) as “particularly startling†because “this novel seems to prove Cassuto’s thesis conclusively.â€
I understand that Cassuto presumably wanted to focus on male hard-boiled writers rather than female ones, because the response to the inclusion of such a writer as Dorothy B. Hughes might well have provoked the response, “of course she wrote with sympathy, she was a woman!â€
Yet the omission of so many women writers does leave a sort of vacuum on those occasions when the author makes rather sweeping statements. When Cassuto writes that the “male heroes of most fifties crime novels … assume the protective role that women played in sentimental fiction of the previous century,†I could not help wondering what was going on in the fifties crime novels written by women. (In the works of women writers of 1950s “psychological suspense,†for example, one cannot always be sure of those “male heroes.â€)
Second, Cassuto, like most academic literary scholars, perpetuates the myth that Raymond Chandler cared nothing for plotting. In doing so he ironically relies mostly on Chandler’s “The Simple Art of Murder†essay, though elsewhere, as noted above, he chastises other scholars for unquestioningly accepting it. (He also digs up the old chestnut about Chandler not knowing who killed the chauffeur in The Big Sleep when questioned by Howard Hawks and William Faulkner, who were adapting the book to film).
Chandler “rejects the puzzle-whodunit because it’s unrealistic†and “turned away from the intricate plots of the likes of Ellery Queen and S. S. Van Dine because they’re too intellectual to activate the power of sympathy,†asserts Cassuto.
In a 2006 article in the Wall Street Journal, Cassuto is even blunter on this matter. “Raymond Chandler was the rare mystery writer who didn’t care whodunit,†Cassuto peremptorily pronounces in the first sentence of the article. Near the end of it, he asserts that “Chandler’s artistic impulse turns on his rejection of the puzzle mystery.â€
Though Cassuto is hardly alone in diminishing Chandler’s interest in the puzzle mystery (indeed, both Chandler’s biographers do it), he is wrong in doing so. Chandler read and enjoyed the traditionalist British detective novelists R. Austin Freeman and Freeman Wills Crofts (though he hated the debonair gentleman sleuths of the British Crime Queens and thought Agatha Christie was unfair to the reader), envied the plotting skill of Perry Mason creator Erle Stanley Gardner and composed, in the same decade as he wrote “The Simple Art of Murder,†a set of rules for writing mystery fiction that in many respects is as orthodox as those famously devised by Englishman Ronald Knox.
Further, for someone who purportedly “didn’t care whodunit†and rejected the puzzle mystery, Chandler perversely composed several well-plotted detective novels — praised by the orthodox critic Jacques Barzun — including Farewell, My Lovely, The High Window and The Lady in the Lake.
To be sure, The Big Sleep, his first mystery novel, does have, as scholars so often note, its share of plotting problems (I have never been too sure about that pesky chauffeur’s demise either); but that does not take away from the fact that several of his other novels are impeccably plotted. Chandler found plotting hard to do and groused about doing it, but he never rejected it and he often performed it admirably.
He notes that Chandler “often came close to the ‘whodunit’ style of English mystery….than he cared to admit†(p. 104). For more on this subject see my forthcoming essay, “‘The Amateur Detective Just Won’t Do’: The Straight Dope on Raymond Chandler and British Detective Fiction.â€]
Third, Cassuto misunderstands the economics of book publishing in the years before the consummation of the paperback revolution. In Hard-Boiled Sentimentality, Cassuto describes The Big Sleep‘s selling of 12,500 copies as a “rocky debut.†(In his Wall Street Journal article, he earlier characterized such a sale as “meager.â€)
Riffing off this point, he concludes that the novel did not “find an audience†until 1943, when it was published in paperback and sold nearly a half-million copies. But in actuality, hardcover sales of a mystery novel title totaling to 12,500 copies was quite impressive in that era, a time when frugal people mostly borrowed mystery fiction (as opposed to “serious literatureâ€) from rental libraries.
Since presumably libraries purchased a great many of those 12,500 books sold, many thousands more than that number would have read the book in the four years that elapsed before The Big Sleep was published in paperback.
Finally, Cassuto’s references to the classical, puzzle-oriented detective novels of the Golden Age tend to be slighting and misinformed. Cassuto, who so forcefully critiques stereotype in the portrayal of hard-boiled fiction, tends himself to reach for stereotypes when using traditional detective fiction as a foil for the tough (yet tender) stuff.
“Hammett’s detective novels departed from genre tradition by presenting a story — and a set of social problems — unenclosed by a drawing room, a country estate, or any other discrete space,†writes Cassuto, relying on the well-worn but overstated notion that the narratives in traditional detective novels of the Golden Age are invariably confined within what are essentially enclosed stable spaces, usually country houses or villages.
Elsewhere, Cassuto passingly declares that hard-boiled novels “supplanted†puzzle-oriented Golden Age mysteries. While admittedly it is true that the rise of the hard-boiled school was one of the factors that helped break the puzzle’s hegemony over Golden Age crime literature, when (or even whether) hard-boiled tales “supplanted†puzzle mysteries is another question.
To state the most obvious example, the puzzle mysteries of Agatha Christie retain immense global popularity even today. Further, as stated above, the plots of many hardboiled novels in fact feature complicated puzzles. Novels like Raymond Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake or Jonathan Latimer’s The Dead Don’t Care have at their hard-boiled hearts fiendishly clever puzzle plots that would have graced even the diabolically ingenious tales of Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen.
All these matters aside, Cassuto has produced a worthwhile and interesting book. The splendid cover illustration of a steely gun and a beribboned red heart tells it all: the tough and the tender often manage to co-exist in the hardboiled novel.
Although Cassuto at times over-tenderizes the tough crime tale and I am not convinced that his engagement-with-domestic-sentimentalism thesis is the master-key that unlocks the hardboiled engine room (however much it helps reveal to us Mildred Pierce), I personally found in Hard-Boiled Sentimentality many fascinating points to engage me.
June 9th, 2011 at 12:52 pm
An interesting point about the femme fatale is raised here. The character type is derived from the 18th century Gothic novels and Romantic poetry. Curt even alludes to one of the earliest – Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” who is the embodiment of the evil temptress found in the influential Italian flavored work of Radcliffe, Lewis, and others. She can also be found in abundance in Victorian sensation novels (Lydia Gwilt in Armadale, and several characters in Braddon’s novels come to mind as excellent examples) and throughout the early part of the 20th century as well in numerous pulp serials. She is simply not a 1950s phenomenon at all. She was perhaps more noticeable then because of the filmed versions of these popular crime novels.
BTW – that cover illustration looks like it came from a tattoo parlor. Even more fitting than the metaphorical imagery. Wonder if it was purposely designed that way.
June 9th, 2011 at 2:51 pm
Curt:
Nice job of analyzing Cassuto’s scholarly thesis. Have to say, though, that given the passages you quoted and the caveats you mentioned, the review makes me NOT want to read the book. It also makes me sure that he and I would not hit it off in the unlikely case we were ever to meet. Posturing academics and working professional writers have entirely different takes on, and understanding of, the nature of hardboiled fiction and its history and practitioners.
June 9th, 2011 at 3:46 pm
Here’s my reply to Curt when he sent this review to me:
“My first reaction is (as usual) that when academics start talking about genre fiction, they almost always have no idea what they’re talking about, and it takes a lot to convince me otherwise.
“More convincing than usual in this case, I think, but what I really think is that you went out of your way to be fair in your coverage of the book, pointing out strong points as well as weak ones.”
I thought I was overstating the case against academic writing up there in my first paragraph, but given Bill’s reaction, perhaps not.
Reading through the review in more detail as I was formatting it to post, the more and more it struck me that Cassuto was “cherry picking” his examples, using the novels that supported his thesis, and ignoring those that did not.
Books like this provide food for thought, however, and I’m willing to listen. I’ve ordered the book in its paperback format — much cheaper than the original hardcover!
June 9th, 2011 at 3:51 pm
PS. I forgot to mention — although I’m sure that you’ve already noticed! — that this review is more than twice as long as any previous post on this blog. If you’re down here in the comments, then I’ll assume you’ve taken the time to read it most if not all of the way through, for which both Curt and I thank you.
If there’d been a way to break it down into smaller chunks, I might have, but there wasn’t, nor was there a way to edit the full version down without removing something essential.
June 9th, 2011 at 4:58 pm
All this makes me want to ask : ‘How bad is it?’
literature critic and theory are less my genre, and those trying hard against reality to prove some ideological point…..
Let’s say, in the same time I can read a LOT of books.Real books.
June 9th, 2011 at 5:30 pm
I make an attempt to buy just about all books that discuss and study detective, SF, and genre fiction. However, over the years I have been so disappointed in the academic studies, that I often buy the book and put off reading it. I see that I bought this book a couple years ago but I still haven’t read it.
This review may convince me to give the book another look.
June 9th, 2011 at 6:50 pm
John,
Yes, I thought about Miss Gwilt when I was writing this, she’s such an impressive creation.
I thought Cassuto was stretching a point trying to posit the femme fatale as more a product of the Cold War–an instance of someone perhaps getting too caught up in theory. The femme fatale was fantastically visible then, with films and those incredible colorful, sleazy paperbacks; but she certainly wasn’t new or even uncommon before that.
I think Cassuto’s book reflects the huge impact feminist studies has had on academic work on crime genre fiction. The idea has been that hardboiled American was “male” and “cozy” British “female.” I agree with Cassuto that that is a simplistic approach, but I just don’t accept that idea that the best way of understanding hardboiled crime fiction is seeing it as a response to sentimental women’s fiction, though that may well be the best way of understanding Mildred Pierce (notice he picks the one book with a female protagonist, which makes it rather atypical right from the start).
June 9th, 2011 at 6:54 pm
Steve, Bill,
thanks for the comments. Yes, I think it’s fair to say that academics typically are not nearly as well-read in the primary sources as they should be. Cassuto probably is more so than most, but there were some odd omissions. When you are advancing a new, overarching thesis like this, I think it really should be completely marinated in the primary literature. It made me feel that books that were more challenging for his thesis were not being confronted like they should have been.
John,
good point about the tattoo, I hadn’t noticed it!
June 9th, 2011 at 9:02 pm
The author speaks:
I don’t usually enter conversations like this because I think my writing should speak for itself. But let me thank you for the deeply engaged review. It’s always valuable to be taken seriously, and I hope that the objections that Curt raises to my argument can provoke further discussion—because starting conversations is what critics are supposed to do. In my own defense to some of the criticisms from commenters, I would say, well, to please read the book and decide for yourself.
But I have to say that it rankles me to be described as “posturing academic.†I write for non-scholarly audiences because I care about reaching them—and Bill, some of my best friends are crime writers. I hope we do meet sometime; I enjoy your work.
–Lenny Cassuto
June 9th, 2011 at 11:22 pm
Lenny
Thanks for stopping by. As I guess you can tell, academics writing about our favorite kind of fiction are pretty much viewed with skepticism by those of us who are readers and fans (and in one case, a writer who overlaps into the previous two categories).
I hope overall you aren’t too rankled by the discussion that’s gone on so far, but since Curt is the only one who’s actually read your book, and the rest of us are only reacting to his comments, maybe you have some right to be.
I think Curt’s review was entirely fair, though — and if you’d had a longer one, I’d certainly like to read it! — and speaking for myself here, but hopefully some of the others as well, I’ve bought a copy of your book, and I do intend to read it.
— Steve
June 10th, 2011 at 12:26 am
The reviewer responds:
Lenny,
Welcome, nice to hear from you. Discussion here, you’ve noticed, is uninhibited! First, let me restate that I found your book interesting and accessible. I enjoyed reading it and I likely will draw on some parts of it in the future. I recommend it to others.
I strongly believe that it is an important thing for publishers to be receptive to new ways of looking at old debates.
You probably have the most charmingly done personal dedication page I have ever come across, by the way.
I would also recommend to others Bill Pronzini’s and Jack Adrian’s “Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories” (Oxford University Press, 1995). The introduction (which I believe was written by Bill) to this impressive collection has an interesting account of the origins and development of the hard-boiled tale. Emphasis is given to frontier folk heroes and folk tales, the dime novels and the pulps.
June 10th, 2011 at 1:12 am
Lenny:
I apologize for the “posturing academics” reference since by your own testimony you’re not one of the breed. And a breed it is; I’ve encountered them and their works all too often over the years and I admit to a rush to judgment when confronted by what appears to be yet another. In the interest of fairness, I’ll read your book after all with what I hope will be an open mind.
Some of my best friends are crime writers, too. I’d be willing to bet that most if not all of them share my opinion of academic encroachment into the genre that not only provides our bread and butter but for which I’ve had an abiding passion for half a century.
Maybe we would hit it off after all, were we to meet. I say that for the above reason, not because you enjoy my work (though of course I’m pleased that you do).
June 10th, 2011 at 1:56 am
Perhaps my biggest complaint currently with academic writers is in my own specialized mystery field, the Golden Age British detective novel. It’s the way it’s now taken for granted that it was “feminized.”
Susan Rowland, in the essay I briefly quoted above (which, to be quite frank, I do not admire), even analyzes Freeman Wills Crofts as a “feminized” writer because he has a couple books (she cites one of them) where his wife’s “notions” help him solve the case. “Feminine intuition” trumps male material investigation, see? This is the man for decades considered one of the most “masculine” writers in the field because of his emphasis on alibi breaking and timetables.
But has Susan Rowland read any other Crofts book besides Inspector French’s Greatest Case (conveniently reprinted bu Hogarth)? I suspect not.
There’s the passage in Lenny’s book where he noted that Chandler in “Simple Art of Murder” had rhetorically feminized the English Golden Age detective novel as a way of emphasizing the masculinty/toughness of the hard-boiled books. Lenny wants to challenge the way Channdler represented the hard-boiled novel. That’s okay by me. But the same thing really needs to be done for the ostensibly “feminized” British Golden-Age detective novel.
Academics need to recognize that “The Simple Art of Murder” was by Chandler’s own admission a deliberately polemical piece of work and it’s not even his own last word on his aesthetic views. They need to quit relying on Auden’s “The Guilty Vicarage” so much (by the way, Auden said this essay was about the kind of detective novel he enjoyed reading most–the village mystery–not that all English detective novels were like this).
And they need to recognize that the lay scholar has something to contribute besides best-of lists. I’ll just be blunt and say that I learned more of real use over the years from Howard Haycraft or Bill Pronzini (phenomenally well-read and a compelling writer) than, say, Dennis Porter.
That said, I have the very highest opinion of some academic works. Probably the top spot on my list would by Alison Light’s treatment of Agatha Christie in her Forever England. That really helped shape my thinking about the genre.
But some academic work is going in the wrong direction, in my view. The feminization thesis, though it has served some use, is being carried too far. Ellery Queen and Rex Stout and Erle Stanley Gardner seem to be getting written out of the genre. There’s no reason why these authors should not have been incorporated into academic studies that I can see, but that they don’t seem to fit into the currently fashionable theories about the genre.
So it’s an exciting time in mystery genre history in some ways, but frustrating in others.
June 10th, 2011 at 6:56 am
Thanks for the welcome, everyone. I feel the need to speak up for “encroaching” academics. The encroachment metaphor merits scrutiny, I think, because it suggests that invaders are squeezing residents out of their space. But the “encroachers” aren’t taking over the territory–they’re expanding it.
More criticism increases the number of readers interested in the stories that we all (even professors!) enjoy–and (dare I say it?) the sales of those stories. Is all of the academic criticism good? Of course not. All fields are filled with work that won’t stand the test of time. (Nor is it all bad, though Curt is right about the kinds of faults that tend to plague it.) But my point is that the extra attention is something that the community ought–by my lights, anyway–to welcome. Unless I’m missing something, more people in the pool means a bigger pool.
Cheers, Lenny
June 10th, 2011 at 11:50 am
I’ve heard any number of times Lenny’s defense: how academic attention expands interest in the genre, benefits writers by creating sales, etc. Do academic studies generate increased interest in Hammett, Chandler, all the other icons covered in his book and dozens of others, the revered ones whose lives and works are continually being subjected to studies and analyses? I doubt it. Do they create sales, expand readership for me and 95% of my contemporaries in the field? Hell, no. Nor except rarely do they call attention or give proper credit to the works of scores of undeservingly neglected writers who have made smaller but no less important contributions to the development of the genre; whose work in some cases is the equal of that of their famous counterparts in quality, innovation, and entertainment value. These are my main objections to the academic encroachment (a word for which I make no apologies) into the genre. And that’s the last I’m going to say on the subject.
June 10th, 2011 at 1:47 pm
I have to agree with Bill that there’s a tendency on the part of academic scholars to confine studies too much to the same “chosen” people: on the American side, Hammett, Chandler and a few other hardboiled people and on the English side the four Crime Queens (sometimes five when Tey is thrown in). This is an ahistorical approach, casting out American and British writers who didn’t write quite in the way theory says they should have written.
I’m certainly not saying these Big Name writers aren’t important, they certainly are. But there are other people whom they don’t necessarily represent. Ellery Queen and Rex Stout were hugely popular writers in their day. Wouldn’t it be interesting to have penetrating academic analyses of their work?
Yet in Queen’s case there hasn’t been a serious book-length study of his work in nearly forty years, and that is one by a lay scholar. The lack of interest in Rex Stout is similarly baffling. Jacques Barzun found Stout’s Archie Goodwin one of the most authentically American characters since Huckleberry Finn. But apparently Queen and Stout aren’t hard-boiled enough to draw much academic interest (the recent Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction didn’t even deem them worthy of listing on the genre milestone page or Ellery Queen worthy of mention in the text).
Similarly, important English writers (not all male) receive very little or no attention, because they are not part of the canonical four (or five) Crime Queens. If academics really would look at some of these other writers, they might find their tidy analytical construction for the Golden Age English detective novel is a little off-kilter
In Lenny’s defense I will say he cast a broader net than many of his colleagues, notably in the fifties section. One reviewer, Sarah Weinman, mildly criticized him for covering “forgettable, out-of-print work by Robert Finnegan and Harold Browne.” I commend him for including these authors. Too many academic studies have been done (and have attained great influence within academia) basing broad, conclusive theories on too little supporting evidence (there are key studies from the 1970s–still being cited today–that base their analyses of the English detective solely on a few works by Agatha Christie).
I’d be interested in how most academics came to reading mystery and crime fiction. Was it through classroom study or discovery as kids (the way it should be)? I started reading Agatha Christie and Conan Doyle when I was in elementary school. Later on, works like A Catalogue of Crime by Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor (academics, but huge enthusiasts for the genre since they were teenagers back in the 1920s) and 1001 Midnights and Gun in Cheek showed me what an amazing wide fictional world it was out there. There was also Doug Greene’s biography of John Dickson Carr (another author who inexplicably receives little serious attention from academics). Greene’s an academic as well, but he’s also deeply well-read and informed about the genre.
Some academics (I’m not suggesting this of Lenny, by the way) just seem to be using the genre as an avenue down which to parade pet theories about gender, say. They really could be writing about anything. I find the effect of such work stultifying.
June 10th, 2011 at 10:02 pm
Quoting Curt: “One reviewer, Sarah Weinman, mildly criticized him for covering ‘forgettable, out-of-print work by Robert Finnegan and Harold Browne.’ I commend him for including these authors.”
Assuming she meant Howard Browne, I second that statement wholeheartedly, as anyone who’s followed this blog knows full well — along with its predecessor website, and the printed Mystery*File in all its incarnations before that. Finnegan and Browne may be forgotten, but their work is not forgettable. Sarah’s an insightful critic and reviewer when it comes to the current world of crime fiction, but this time I think she’s wrong.
June 11th, 2011 at 6:03 am
Steve, yes, she did mean Howard Browne (I guess she really did find him forgettable!). I should have caught that! I get a kick out of the fact that his old paperback editions are attributed to his pseudonym, “John Evans,” that being my father’s name.
June 11th, 2011 at 6:24 am
Bill Pronzini on “forgettable” Howard Browne:
Browne’s detective Paul Pine is “one of the best of the plethora of tough-guy heroes from that era [the 1940s]. Although the Pine novels are solidly in the tradition of Raymond Chandler, they have a complexity and character all their own and are too well crafted to be mere imitations.”
June 11th, 2011 at 7:01 am
This discussion reminds me of an experience I had in college. I did an oral report on Edgar Allan Poe which was received favorably until I started to talk about his possible influence on Lovecraft, Bradbury, Clark Ashton Smith. I even passed around a copy of a 1935 issue of Weird Tales.
I was criticized for discussing “sub-literary” writers and given a lower grade.
June 11th, 2011 at 2:29 pm
This discussion has been very interesting and informative.
But one aspect seems misleading.
One gets the impression from previous comments that professional mystery writers are skeptical of academia, and value fandom.
But their actual behavior is just the opposite.
Organization like the Mystery Writers of America are eager to shower Edgar nominations and awards on books by academics.
Leading mystery writers give them blurbs. Professional mystery publications review them. Commercial mystery writers do everything possible to enhance the careers and reputations of academics who write about mystery fiction.
By contrast, professional mystery writers usually refuse to do any of the above for fans. Fan works are “self-published”, usually, and hence off limits to commercial mystery writers. Mystery web sites, for example, are NOT eligible for submission to the Edgar for Best Biographical or Critical Work. It’s as if they “don’t exist”.
Apparently, professional mystery writers seen fans as offering little of value to the mystery world.
June 11th, 2011 at 2:51 pm
Walker,
what year was that, if I may ask? I seem to recall reading that Ross Macdonald’s dissertation committee held it against him that he was a mystery writer. The late Carolyn Heilbrun, a Columbia University literature professor, uses a pseudonym, Amanda Cross, to publish mysteries, which she did not acknowledge until the 1970s.
Now Columbia University is publishing books like Lenny Cassuto’s, studies of genre fiction.
Mike,
yes, web criticism really should be recognized. Some academics are getting into that game too. The internet has been an incredibly helpful source to me, producing as it does material like yours.
Lenny’s book had blurbs from the following crime writers, by the way:
Joseph Finder
S. J. Rozan
Julia Spencer-Fleming
Sometimes crime writers are especially knowledgeable about their genre, other times not. I’ve learned a lot from Bill and Robert Barnard, for example (I know Bill’s mystery criticism is a small piece of his work, but he was a big influence on me in the late 80s and early 90s when I started getting interested in mystery literature again as an adult).
On the other hand, I’ve challenged a lot by Julian Symons, Colin Watson and P. D. James. There are a lot of people, to be honest, who could have written better informed histories of the crime genre than P.D. James; but she got the big publisher. And of course more people will in fact buy her book, because of her name and prestige (and she is a good writer), which is somethign a publisher naturally is going to care about in making publishing decisions. And as much as I disagree with much of Symons’ perspective, I think Bloody Murder remains the best genre survey out there, forty years after it was published.
June 11th, 2011 at 8:25 pm
Curt, it was in 1964 or 1965 and I originally wanted to do the paper on the WEIRD TALES school of authors and their influence on supernatural fiction. But I was forced to change the subject to Edgar Allan Poe who had a standing in the literary community.
The funny thing is I even attempted to engage the professor in a discussion about my favorite mainstream novelists. I figured since he knew nothing about Lovecraft, etc, maybe he could give me some ideas about established writers. I was stunned when it became evident he had not read Saul Bellow, Roth, Updike, etc. He was not up on contemporary literature at all. However, he did teach the best course I took in college: a summer course on Shakespeare.
June 12th, 2011 at 3:12 pm
I do think it’s a great thing that academia is more welcoming now to the subjects.
Halo in Brass probably is the best known Browne book now (it’s the one Cassuto talks about), because of a specific subject it addresses!