Hard-Boiled: Working-Class Readers and Pulp Magazines

Rating:
Summary: A MUST FOR THOUGHTFUL FANS OF THE MYSTERY GENRE
Review: In "Hard Boiled," Erin A Smith's study of detective fiction, she quotes a review of a book of ghost stories, written by an academic: "There is nothing of the usual professor's dullness about them." The same could be said of her witty, provocative book.

What began life as a doctoral dissertation about the so-called hard-boiled detective novels of the first half of this century (Hammett, Chandler, et. al.) has been turned into an entertaining, thoughtful look at who read potboilers and what they learned from them. Smith argues pursuasively that hard-boiled readers, most of them male and blue collar, unwittingly picked up lessons about culture, masculinity, even how to dress and talk to women, from the books they bought at the drug store because they cost a dime and had pictures of loose women on the cover.

For me, the best chapter is the one in which Smith compares a hard-boiled novel to a British let's-have-tea-on-the-lawn-shall-we? mystery. Both novels are set on trains, but they have little else in common and Smith's discussion of the class, sociological and stylistic differences between the two books almost convinced this lover of both kinds of mysteries that the hard-boiled ones are more fun (almost; I'll still take my murder in the drawing room, preferably with a snoopy old biddy in the house next door, just dying to solve it).

Smith is an engaging writer (her dry description of the almost impenetrable plot of "The Big Sleep" is hilarious and cogent), whose wit, enthusiasm and gift for spotting the revelatory detail is on every page of "Hard-Boiled." Her descriptions of the novels and stories she discusses are so vivid that you understand what they're about, even if you haven't read them. And her grasp of the technique of writing pulp fiction is so strong that some of the writers, especially "Perry Mason" creator Erle Stanley Gardner, emerge as characters (somebody really needs to write a book about him, based on the evidence here).

Near the end of "Hard-Boiled," Smith suggests how that genre of fiction continues to influence today's writers, who are broadening the scope of mysteries to investigate gender, race. Obviously, it's a genre that deserves more study and Smith's work is a convincing, eminently readable place to start.

Rating:
Summary: A MUST FOR THOUGHTFUL FANS OF THE MYSTERY GENRE
Review: In "Hard Boiled," Erin A Smith's study of detective fiction, she quotes a review of a book of ghost stories, written by an academic: "There is nothing of the usual professor's dullness about them." The same could be said of her witty, provocative book.

What began life as a doctoral dissertation about the so-called hard-boiled detective novels of the first half of this century (Hammett, Chandler, et. al.) has been turned into an entertaining, thoughtful look at who read potboilers and what they learned from them. Smith argues pursuasively that hard-boiled readers, most of them male and blue collar, unwittingly picked up lessons about culture, masculinity, even how to dress and talk to women, from the books they bought at the drug store because they cost a dime and had pictures of loose women on the cover.

For me, the best chapter is the one in which Smith compares a hard-boiled novel to a British let's-have-tea-on-the-lawn-shall-we? mystery. Both novels are set on trains, but they have little else in common and Smith's discussion of the class, sociological and stylistic differences between the two books almost convinced this lover of both kinds of mysteries that the hard-boiled ones are more fun (almost; I'll still take my murder in the drawing room, preferably with a snoopy old biddy in the house next door, just dying to solve it).

Smith is an engaging writer (her dry description of the almost impenetrable plot of "The Big Sleep" is hilarious and cogent), whose wit, enthusiasm and gift for spotting the revelatory detail is on every page of "Hard-Boiled." Her descriptions of the novels and stories she discusses are so vivid that you understand what they're about, even if you haven't read them. And her grasp of the technique of writing pulp fiction is so strong that some of the writers, especially "Perry Mason" creator Erle Stanley Gardner, emerge as characters (somebody really needs to write a book about him, based on the evidence here).

Near the end of "Hard-Boiled," Smith suggests how that genre of fiction continues to influence today's writers, who are broadening the scope of mysteries to investigate gender, race. Obviously, it's a genre that deserves more study and Smith's work is a convincing, eminently readable place to start.