Crime narrative topology

Opening words

13 or 14 years ago I started writing The Killers, a novel in which violent action prevailed. I wanted it to be a first-rate literary novel that reflected the nature of the Colombian criminal. At the end of 2021, after many versions, the novel was published by a prestigious publisher. As happens during the elaboration of creative works, during those almost 14 years of work I was not fully aware of what I had written. After I had finished the text, my editor asked what genre it fit into. I questioned several people knowledgeable about literary things who had read my manuscript – my writing does not seek to be inscribed in some thematic genre – and no one knew with certainty what to answer. The only certainty is that it was not a detective novel. I told my editor that, by commercial offer, I would list it in the black genre template. But I was clear that The Killers was not twinned with the classic works of American or European hardboiled or in any of the subgenres, which abound. I couldn’t locate it anywhere.

Investigating what has been produced in my country about the black and police genre, I found that there was very little information, yes many studies on foreign authors, and only one book on the black genre in Colombia. This is La novela policiaca en Colombia, by the well-known German critic Hubert Pöppel, published in 2001 by the University of Antioquia, when he taught there. Getting the complete book was quite difficult (on the Web there are only a few chapters) since the University of Antioquia did not publish it again and the author left the country. I finally made contact with Dr Pöppel at the Universität Regensburg in Bavaria, at the end of 2021. After my assurances that the use of his book would be for essay purposes, he very kindly sent me the rough draft of his book, chapter by chapter.

So I have it in full pdf. Pöppel’s work tracking the origin, reception and development of this genre in Colombia is of enormous value, and is virtually unknown. It is an essential guide for those who wish to expand their field of study of the noir and detective genre, so precarious and fragmentarily studied in our country.

On the other hand, after listening to some interviews with well-known Colombian authors in Spain in 2019, who were questioned in some of those conversations about the state of the crime novel in our country, I realised that they were not clear about what the thing was about, or who had written significant books. They were more lost than I was, to the point of giving the idea that the police-detective genre and the hardboiled are one and the same. Does the crime novel exist in Colombia? At the time I write these words, April 2023, no satisfactory answer has been given to this question, nor is it clear whether there is a ‘development and consolidation of the novel genre’ in our country, which henceforth I shall call “novelistic”. Or if rather, as I propose in this work, what there has been is a certain specific and general continuity in the elaboration of a criminal story, which goes beyond the detective and the noir, which have had, since the second half of the nineteenth century, small developments. However, as A. Carpentier pointed out in 1964, “A great novel can be produced in an epoch, in a country. This does not mean that at that time, in that country, the novel really exists. To talk about the novel it is necessary that there be a novelistic”¹ (italics of the author).

Before continuing, I must make it clear that this is not a work that pretends to do some archaeology, development or state of the detective – police – noir genres in Colombia; far from it. It is focused on giving some historiographical response to a creative act that, over time, extended to one of my concerns when writing any of my books: what is the origin of violence in Colombia, and by and why are we so violent? As these are excessively broad questions, the answers to which are multifactorial, in the long run they became tutelary guides that were connected, in a very strange way, with the literary/narrative creative act. Not in poetic art, which is governed by a different statute even though the narrative comes from the universe of poetry.

In this literary exploration of narrative creativity, I have tried to understand, from classical and contemporary thought, what is the act of writing; what is literature; what is language; what is the story; what the detective – police – noir genres, and what is criminal, not only from my experience (confronting the other, otherness) and my experience as a narrator (entering the other, to be part of that other)², but by turning to philosophy as an autonomous act of knowledge, to its history and its context in the Western world. Trying to understand some complexities such as those mentioned above, in my case, in this book, moves definitively away from maieutics and peripatētikós and the dialectic of Aristotelian lineage that ponders on a par with the master. Very little of what is elaborated in this work has been discussed with the experts in these topics orally. My writing is my way of organising and shaping the shapeless mass of the kháos and leaving the text as clean as possible.

Relevant authors related to this essay:

Germán Gaviria Álvarez

Juanita
Juanito

Index

Opening words

Part One. Genre, intention, fusion

1. Genre

2. Discussion: gender, form, creativity

3. Intention of realistic criminal, police, hardboiled, etc. story: merged

4. Intentions

4.1 Zero intent

4.2 First intention

4.3 Second intention

4.4 Third intention

4.5 Fourth Intention

5. Fusion

Part Two. Origins

1. Almost a starting point

2. From Dime novels to Pulp

3. From Pulp to Noir (Criminal)

Part Third. Understanding the Criminal

1. Thinking the act of writing

2. From Dime Novels to Pulp

3. From Pulp to the noir (criminal) genre

4. Coda

References

Primary sources

Secondary sources

Second Part

Origins

3. From Pulp to the noir (criminal) genre

In view of its failure as a children’s magazine, Argosy was aimed at an adult audience; it was a decisive step. Not only the themes included ‘underground’ material ‒homosexuality, explicit sex (Spicy & Saucy), heinous crimes, foul language, indecent situations—but was, for the first time, aimed at primarily adult male readers. That is a hallmark of the noir ‒ police genre of the time, and is still classified as macho.¹⁶³ ¹⁶⁴Especially Black Mask,¹⁶⁵ which in 1927 adopted the subtitle He ‒ Man’s Magazine [Magazine for men.]. That is, the detective story (especially this publication), was not aimed at women. In 1933, Shaw, the editor of the magazine, described the typical male reader in an editorial: “Strong of character and ready to the call of danger, well acquainted with the sound of bullets.” (Lemaitre, p.379) “You’re a damned good man, sister,” he said and went out.”, Sam Spade tells Effie, for being a ‘good girl’ in following his orders to handle the third murdered man. (Hammett, e‒ book, 2018, p.123) When Hammett lived with the writer Lillian Hellman, he told her: “What I have longed for most has been a docile woman, and look what I have.”¹⁶⁶

This, like many other cultural forms of the time, entrenched the idea that male heroism (moral, sexual, physical, intellectual and economic dominance over women) had to be epic to be celebrated, which has also contributed to the decline of the genre, noir ‒ detective.

However, the idea of heroism as a masculine attribute began to decline with the feminist movements, studies on sexuality and the liberalisation of women that emerged after the Second Great War. Paradoxically, the great writers of entertainment crime novels were very prolific women: (D. Sayers, A. Christie, J. Tey, M. Millar, D. du Maurier, M. Allingham, Barbara Vine ‒pen name Ruth Barbara Grasemann). With the relative decline of the feminist movements at the end of the 1990s, machismo was transformed, it renewed its physiognomy, mutated, but it did not disappear. Since the Second Great War¹⁶⁷ the role of female heroines gradually increased. Hence the childish call of Borges who cries out for the hegemonic force of a father. Hence the so-called Giardinelli epigonal.

What is really important here is that, from the 1850s, in the United States, a culture of urban folk origin developed, with a folk language, with folk stories of its own. It was not treated, as was the case with the French Bibliotéque Bleu from the 16th – 18th centuries, of ‘adapted’, ‘summarised’ books that came from high culture as an instrument of oppression of the lower classes. Here, no crumbs of literate (bourgeois) culture descended on the plebs. At the end of the 18th century, crime in France, for example, went from being a mass crime to a marginal one, reserved for ‘professionals’. Foucault, in this regard, makes the following metaphor: “Tout se passe donc comme s’il y avait eu une progressive baisse d’étiage ̶un désamorcement des tensions qui règnent dans les rapports humains,… un meilleur contrôle des impulsions violentes […]”¹⁶⁸ The American case was the other way around. Violent impulses developed, took hold, took various forms due to the expansion of control over large territories. Paraphrasing Foucault, it went from a crime of fraud to a crime of blood (p.80), which has been recast to this day, for the economy of the illegal is restructured with the development of capitalist society (Keep an eye on and punish., p.89). The diversity, the volume of publications attest to this. Perhaps this is another reason why the origin and development of the detective novel ‒ noir (one of the first figures of the non-English detective can be traced in the newspaper Fireside companion, 1867 ‒ 1869¹⁶⁹ ), which took place in this country, not another. The agent, the private investigator capable of using violence to “hunt”¹⁷⁰ the delinquent. The bodyguard of good height (minimum 6 feet), tough, crude, aggressive, macho, well-fed, ready to act according to a situational morale, is an archetype created by the Pinkerton Detective Agency beginning in 1850, in Chicago . They needed people like that for the activities they carried out.¹⁷¹ This is also the time, at the beginning of the 20th century, of the scientific study of Durkheim’s sociology, of Freud. From behavioral and abnormal psychology, which began to be applied systematically in the prosecution of criminals. That is to say, in the North American social environment, there was a very important accumulation of knowledge coming from Europe, as well as their own. Likewise, it is the time of the continuous, diverse, expansive exercise of a written literature; of cultural decantation, so that the transition to a realistic literature ‒ black ‒ robust detective (Faulkner, Hammett, Cain) that collected the heritage of the Pulp, and created a new genre. As I said above, frontline literature creates genres, it doesn’t imitate any. The noir genre engendered dozens of sub subgenres. The American detective stories from the 1870s definitely move away from frontier stories, from the western as such. They move the action to the cities that were growing rapidly, along with industrial development, which led to new forms of moral ‘density’. To new forms of relationship of people in society. Durkheim notes:

But cities are always the result of the necessity that pushes individuals to keep up with each other in a constant way, in as close contact as possible. They are the cities as points where the social mass becomes closer than in other places. They cannot, therefore, multiply and spread if the moral density does not rise. We will see, moreover, how they are recruited by way of imagination, which is only possible to the extent that the fusion of social segments advances.¹⁷²

Later:

If labour becomes more divided as societies become larger and denser, it is not because external circumstances are more varied; it is because the struggle for life is more arduous.¹⁷³ The detective as social and communal hero,¹⁷⁴ as a restorer of social and legal ‘justice’.

Like a chaos computer towards a new state of affairs. As a social demiurge. Like the hero hardened by the adverse circumstances of life. Like the one who does not let himself be defeated, he is a figure inherited from the cowboy of the western, of the detective dime novels from the years 1867 onwards, and of the railroad. For this reason the designations were also coined hard ‒ boiled novels, tough story, crook story, and many others of that style. Epithets that are covered by a single concept: realistic literature made with the intention of narrating a story centered on evil, whose manifestation is crime, punishment, and the restoration of social order. Street stories whose protagonists were thieves, characters of dubious morality, cheats, women, violent men, adventurers, all submerged in a precarious city economy that was beginning to structure itself into criminal gangs. Those that would begin to wreak havoc from the promulgation of the Prohibition to the present day. People who came from the base of society; a society that no longer lived deep in the country (the exception being Faulkner). These stories also arose as a corollary to industrialisation, to the new urban configuration. The town ceased to be a village. It became a whole city where industry and accelerated mechanisation prospered (see supra, Durkheim). Those who wrote these stories (in street language), belonged to the new working class, the new proletariat. The narrative material that circulated, as in the case of the dime novels, was known to all. With the staging of the crime novel, or, as it has been called, black ‒ detective novel, a new ἦθος is created êthos: ‘custom’, ‘character’. An ethos diegetic that narrated a vast conjunction of traits, attributes, ways of being, behaviours. An ethos that openly exposes the identity of society. This surveyed society turned out to be criminal, dirty, abject, macho, lustful, snobbish, stupid, empty. As Chandler noted: “It’s not a very fragrant world, but it’s the world we live in.” (p.11)

It was the black detective series ‒ of the American 1920s which strengthened the development of the type of films mentioned by Borges above. And he did it because the directors who were looking for realistic stories of daily life with which the general public could identify, found, in the short novels of the western and others, little or no verisimilitude. According to the new rationalism of the positive science of the time, they seemed mediocre, unreal, ridiculous. Stories that no longer entertained, since the public, better trained filmically and culturally, was more demanding. Film directors wanted stories

taken from real life. And the real life of ordinary people, both in the city and in the countryside, is full of action, of events that express life, conflict, risk. All action cinema, and even American adventure comedy, as we know it today, began with works that talked about life on the street, without makeup, revealing the existence of social classes and their problems. Life even without love, paraphrasing Borges, without epic components, although it is full of courage; full of appetite for masculine action, which causes autoeroticism in the viewer. A narcissistic dialogue, as we saw above, of identification. The narrative structure of the crime novel ‒ the first crime novel – has been used countless times to energise countless Hollywood films since the 1920s, the vast majority of which are entertainment. These structures, in turn, have been and are shamelessly copied by filmmakers from all over the world.

That is to say, it was detective literature ‒ black, not always epic, it has to be emphasised. There is nothing epic in Red Harvest, nor in The Maltese Falcon nor in The Curse of the Dain, nor in Sanctuary, except for being the novels that they are‒, the one that inspired those stories of cowboys and gangsters during the golden age of the western (1940 ‒ 1960) of which Borges speaks. It was thanks to the agility, the speed, the accuracy, the economy, the forcefulness of the language, and, especially, of the dialogue, that this type of Literature had so much influence in the cinema of the time.¹⁷⁵ “[J.] Shaw, director for some 7 years of Black Mask neatly summarized the fundamental features of this genre that will soon be called hard boiled: “hard, cutting; maximum exploitation of the possibilities of dialogue; authenticity of characters and action: very fast pace…”¹⁷⁶ André Gide, who considered Hammett “a great teacher of writers”, was of the opinion that a good number of French writers should (sic) learn to write dialogues with him”. (Lemaitre, p.196)

Roger Caillois says about Hammett:

On est revenu au roman pure et simple, déréglé et foisonnant, sans inversion du temps, ni construction logique, ni reconstitution d’un événement passé. Le récit n’a de commun avec le roman policier que d’en être évidemment issu, par l’exagération de son aspect sensationnel, par le rôle qu’y jouent bandits et détectives, par le place qu’y tiennent les morts violentes et les assassinats prémédités. Ce qui était prétexte et point de départ est devenu essentiel. De nouveau l‘émotion prime la réflexion. La peinture de la violence submerge l’effort abstracte.¹⁷⁷

(Translation:) We returned to the pure and simple novel, disordered and abundant, without time inversion, nor logical construction, nor reconstitution of a past event. The story has nothing in common with the detective novel except that it obviously stems from it, by the exaggeration of its sensational aspect, by the role played in it by bandits and detectives, by the place occupied by violent and premeditated assassinations. What was a pretext and a starting point has become the essential. Once again, emotion takes precedence over reflection. The painting of violence overwhelms the abstract effort.

According to the rules of the detective genre dictated by S. S. van Dine in 1928, the love and family life of ‘normal’ people are forbidden to the detective, not only because the risks of his trade prohibit it, but because he is self-sufficient. If you need to eat, there’s a shabby cafeteria open at all hours, where there is also a pretty waitress and an accommodating and reliable owner. If he needs information, he knows exactly where to go, usually to the underworld, or to the billionaire’s house. If you want a drink, apart from the half-filled bottle at home, there are the trusted bars, where the bartender is also a consultant. If you need sex, there are hundreds of beautiful, easy girls, ‘dolls’: objectified women, who surrender to their masculine power. The ‘North American doll’ is the genesis of a grammar of women as disposable plastic. Hence the rise of inflated plastic dolls. The physical, mental empire of the man is imposed by right on the physical, moral, emotional and intellectual attributes of the woman. A woman who, when she is not a bitch, a murderer, a manipulator, and always a lover of money, by far, is loyal, she is shrewd. Number 3 of van Dine’s commandments, rules (paradigms), says: “The true detective novel must be exempt from love drama. If love were introduced, the strictly intellectual mechanism of the problem would be upset.¹⁷⁸ Van Dine’s claim is that this genre of novel by, and for men, is clearly ‘intellectually’ inspired, for cultivated, intelligent, clever, sophisticated writers: those who know how to play poker, chess. Van Dine leaves out the woman, because for him she lacks sufficient intelligence. He also ignores the inspiration, the illumination, the extraction that he makes of himself, the will of the writer and, therefore, of the literary form; like the poetic, the poiesis, as if it were a mere game of logos; direct inheritance of positive scientism. Perhaps these are some of the many reasons why the vast majority of English-inspired American crime novels made a heterogeneous mixture with the so-called black novels, hard boiled, etcetera, throughout more than almost six decades, until well into the 1980s. The famous representative of this ‘mixture’ was Chandler. Chandler heterogeneously mixed the diegesis of the American crime novel with that of the English detective. The result: not a new type of steel, but a metal that over time can bend and rust. Although within the official history of the noir genre, Chandler is a kind of god, the truth is that his works (he always claimed that they were literary works) have not withstood the passage of time. They are full of rust. They have fallen apart.

On the other hand, we must not lose sight of Hammett’s way of working with respect to the English detective:

By 1924, he was becoming the emerging voice of Black Mask, in which he increasingly favored violent realism over classic detective investigation and it was the largest in the field of newsstand crime magazines now being mined by Hammett, the new publisher of The Black Mask. Phil Cody hailed Hammett as “one of our most popular authors.” (Ward, p. 130) (italics mine)

And later:

[..] the editors of The Black Mask¹⁷⁹ were raising the quality of the magazine and focusing it on some kind of action-driven story, a standard inspired by the work of Hammett himself. (Ward, p.132) (italics mine)

Thanks to this new ‘certain kind of story’, this way of thinking about the noir ‒ detective story by publishers, who increasingly wanted to reach a larger audience, writers like Hammett, Earl S. Gardner or Carroll J. Day, in need of money, followed his policies and adapted to them. ¹⁸⁰ Now there was, for the writers of the time, more than an editorial guideline dictated for economic reasons, a new element to think about the detective story. Few times, in the history of Literature, has there been a more penetrating and intelligent guide between editor and writer. An editor of the time like Joseph Shaw, who actually had no experience editing magazines (he had been a journalist, a fencing champion), but did have a fascinating idea of what a magazine should be, knew how to see the social drama with incisive acuity and transfer his vision to the writers. For Shaw, writers had to learn to think in different terms; they should delve not only into the form of the narrative (poiesis, logos, praxis), but also into their being in relation to what is written. This is what happens to Hammett with his increasingly long stories (editorial request). The first stories ‒more and more extensive, it must be emphasised‒ functioned as an apprenticeship throughout the 1920s. With the writing of Red Harvest,¹⁸¹ its author finds an ‘interior that he was unaware of’.

Rilke expresses it as follows:¹⁸²

I learn to see. I don’t know why, everything penetrates me more deeply, and does not remain where, until now, everything always ended. I have an interior that I was unaware of. That’s how it is from now on. I don’t know what’s going on.

In addition, the writers had to, with ordinary language (another editorial requirement), transfer to paper the intense criminal variety that prevailed in the streets. Life that, in turn, was a reflection of a society where the active man of modern life developed. It was a man from the countryside or an immigrant, around that time in the 1920s, generally of Irish or Italian origin.¹⁸³ To highlight the crime that takes place in a society is also to highlight its ethical and moral values that are being structured (Durkheim), since they are dynamic, along with the new social structures. It is about configuring an ethos that develops. It is to begin to delineate the diverse, changing features, traits that cause evil to evolve diachronically and synchronously.

It is thanks to these initiators (writers, editors) that the development of written narrative structures took place that were repeated and continue to be repeated over and over again. The schema: committing a crime/ingenious solution to the problem/punishing the perpetrator, restoration of the social order, has been anchored to the Manichean/quietist/continuist moral schema. As if crime, and the modalities of crime itself, did not evolve as people evolve, as society evolves, in accordance with new technologies, with new norms and with new styles of relationship and social interaction. That is to say, with the increase of the social density and, therefore, of the moral density. From the foregoing it can be concluded that the writer who has the intention In order to elaborate a text whose theme is evil or criminal, is obliged to understand the evolution of the concept, the modalities, the functions, as well as the expression of evil in the society to which he belongs. Why necessarily in the first instance to ‘the society to which it belongs’? Well, because as Wittgenstein stated, “The limits of my language, signify the limits of my world” (italics by the author).¹⁸⁴ It is also true that only through deep knowledge of the mother tongue (see supra) it is possible to know the context adequately, its ethos, and the complex dynamic structures that have developed and are developing before your eyes. Neither Faulkner nor Hammett, for example, needed to read any philosophical, sociological or other treatise to understand properly and interpret their environment, simply because they lived through it and scrutinised it intensely.

Back with Mr. Giardinelli and the book, from the title and the subtitle he presents the same idea of the black detective novel ‒ that was had in the 1920s: that they are mimetic; that there is synonymy; that they are interchangeable, commutable. They are not at all. In none of the three senses. Simply, from their beginnings, these were fused, not differentiated by critics or writers. Red Harvest is an example of this chemical fusion.¹⁸⁵ Since the 1920s, critics ‒including the 2013 Giardinelli, T. Todorov, Boileau ‒ Narcejac, R. Chandler,¹⁸⁶ Borges, Piglia and others, did not see and have not clearly seen the difference. For the previous authors, the detective story has to be framed within the traditions that began with the first English Gothic novel, as many authors have already pointed out (The Castle of Otranto, 1764, by H. Walpole), and then with Poe (“The Murders of the Rue Morgue”; the first detective story is from 1841). Cemented by Wilkie Collins with The Lady in White, 1860 and Moonstone, 1868. Although the police = detectives acting in the name of the law according to Poe’s rationalist canon, it began as the leitmotif with Collins. By 1935, the investigator or the detective did not exist as the protagonist. Nor is it spoken from the point of view of the ‘good’, ‘the one who follows the rules’ according to Durkheim’s concept of normativity vs. anomie. By this date, the criminal already narrates the story himself. It is the case of the short novel They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? by Horace McCoy (1935), which is an interesting development because it’s a counterpoint to the law-defying hero. However, what is important here is that Hammett, Cain, and Faulkner, all from the American lower class, wrote novels without following the traditional rules of literature. As we have seen, an editor like J. Shaw did not have a literary or professional training in publishing. The original intention of these storytellers, perhaps without knowing it or without caring, was to write crime novels within certain generic rules, appropriating a tradition they knew very well. But, even more, using their street experience, as detectives, and as sharp actors and observers of the environment.

This way of writing literature is just one more element to take into account for the analysis of literary creativity, creativity that is also based on the writer’s ability to merge his inside Rilkean who struggles to preserve the balance with the outside that is part of the Kháos.

Footnotes

Opening words footnotes

Carpentier, Alejo. “Problemática actual de la novela latinoamericana”, en: Tientos y diferencias. Barcelona: Plaza y Janés, [1964] 1987, p. 7. ↑
Han, Byung ̶ Chul. Topología de la violencia. Barcelona: Herder, 2016, p. 49. ↑

Part 2. Chapter 3 footnotes

Galindo, Juan Carlos. “The feminist leap from crime fiction: reality or missed opportunity?” Madrid: El País, retrieved [16. 07. 2018] from: elpais.com/cultura/2018/07/14/actualidad/1531584623_669755.html ↑
Golubov, Nattie. “Masculinity, femininity and crime fiction”. In: Modern Letters Yearbook. Mexico: Autonomous University of Mexico, vol. 5, 1991 ‒ 1992, p. 99 ‒ 121. ↑
See note 123. ↑
Hammett, D. Blood Money. Introduction by Lillian Hellman, Barcelona: Bruguera, 1977, p 27. ↑
The Wonder Woman definitively breaks with the scheme of the masculine hero. It was created as a widely circulated comic only until 1941. ↑
“It is as if there had been a progressive drop in the water level, “a deactivation of the tensions that reign in human relationships, a better control of violent impulses””. Translation is mine. Cf. Foucault, M. Keep an eye on and punish. Birth of the prison. Paris: Gallimard, 1975, p. 78. ↑
Recovered [02. 03. 25] of: http://john ̶adcock.blogspot.com/2011/11/boy ̶detectives.html. The Boy Detective; or, the Chief of Counterfeiters, by S. W. Pearce, ran in the Fireside Companion from issues No.200, Aug. 28, 1871, to No. 207, Oct 16, 1871. This was followed by a melodrama advertised in the Memphis Sunday Appeal on 14 April 1872, which states that the dramatist H. A. Weaver adapted his play from the Fireside Companion story. The Boy Detective preceded Harlan Page Halsey’s Old Sleuth detective stories which did not begin until 10 June 1872 with Old Sleuth, the Detective; or, the Bay Ridge Mystery. ↑
The expression ‘hunting’, typical of the 19th century, understood as hunting animals, has been extended to the present day to refer to the hunting of man by man. ↑
The Pinkerton agency is known for anecdotes of having frustrated more than one plot against Abraham Lincoln, as well as of having trained a woman to protect him during his train journeys during the Civil War. Also, the agency’s detectives became famous for ‘breaking or busting strikes’. This “busting strikes” was, neither more nor less, intimidating with physical attacks and even death, the heads of the unions and prominent strikers. Pinkerton agents provoked outrages, clashes with law enforcement officers, or allied with them to generate violence during demonstrations. D. Hammett worked as a detective with this agency between 1915 and 1922. For many years he told the anecdote that he was offered US$ 5,000 to assassinate a union leader, which does not appear to have been true. Cf. Ward, N., p.29 ‒ 97. ↑
Durkheim, E. The social division of labour. Retrieved [11. 09. 2021] from: https://aulavirtual4.unl.edu.ar/pluginfile.php/7100/mod_resource/content/1/Durkheim%2C%20Emile%20 ̶ %20Division%20del%20trabajo%20social.pdf, [1893] vol. 1, p. 196. ↑
Ibid., p.201. ↑
“[…] community is a lasting and authentic life in common; society is only a fleeting and apparent common life. With this, it coincides with the fact that the community itself must be understood as a living organism, and society as an aggregate and mechanical artifact. Tönnies, F. Community and society. Buenos Aires: Losada, 1947 [1887], p.21. ↑
From the 1930s until today, it has been the themes and structures of the crime novel that have fed action cinema. The vast majority of writers in these and other genres, such as intrigue, espionage, were Hollywood screenwriters, such as Hammett, Cain, Faulkner, Chandler, Goodis, etc. However, today the opposite is happening. The trivialisation of entertainment books has reached such a point today that writers assemble their texts on pre-established cinematographic schemes. ↑
Cf. Benoit Tadi is quoted by Lemaitre, p.379. ↑
Caillois, Roger. Detective novel. Buenos Aires: Éditions des Lettres Françaises, 1941, p.65. ↑
Van Dine, S. S. “Les vingt règles du roman policier”. En: American Magazine, vol. 106, 3 septembre 1928, et en version française dans Mystère Magazine, No. 38, mars 1951 [1928]. Reproduit en Quebec français, no. 141, 2006, p.60. Online: [http://id.erudit.org/iderudit/50235ac]. The translation is mine. ↑
“[…]a man named Joseph Shaw took the helm of The Black Mask. He Immediately removed the “The» of the title and began to request collaborations for the autumn of 1926 […]” (Ward, p. 146) ↑
When Shaw made these ‘requests’ to Hammett, our author was simply ‘delighted’, ‘just what I was thinking’. Cf. Ward, p.147. ↑
Hammett wrote around the same time The Maltese Falcon and The Curse of the Dain. Between 1927 ‒ 1933 he produced the best of his work, including The Crystal Key. The Slender Man (two versions) and the unfinished Tulip do not have the literary stature of their predecessors. Hence, at some point Hammett affirmed that, by 1935, the genre had already been exhausted. ↑
Rilke, R. M. Los cuadernos de Malte Laurids Brigge. Buenos Aires: Losada, 1968 [1910], p.12. ↑
Op. cit. “Democratisation, totalitarianism, democracy”, in: Mob Story, Salvatore Lupo, p.264 ‒ 363. ↑
Op. cit., p.105, § 5.6. ↑
One of Hammett’s great achievements with this novel is having created a genre of fiction with the literary quality of Sanctuary. Hammett lets the play impose its own form, its own aesthetics, its own narrative rules, as Caillois pointed out in Detective Novel. Like the vertiginous ‘field subtractions’ (voluntary omission of facts. ‒diegesis what is supposed to be what the writer should have narrated, but his Storyteller, a narrator out of G. Genette‒ omitted. The field subtraction technique rushes the reader from one action to another, many times overlapping it, making abrupt changes of character, of sequence, of scenery. Being Literature, in Red Harvest detective investigation, explicit violence, uncouth behavior, street language come together. The action (is the first thriller in Literature), the profiling of criminality as a way of social life, the narrative structure based on the plot; an action in the here and now, in which digression and analepsis have been outlawed. The aesthetics, the morality, is that of the criminal underworld. The problem of the Prohibition Law mentioned above. Labour, employer and social conflicts. The consolidation of the ‘tough’ character that borders the limits of morality, etc. In other words, such is the literary richness of this work that, up to now, it has not been successfully made into a film (there is a 1930 version entitled Roadhouse Nights, that it was a complete failure, see Ward, p. 182). ↑
See: Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Killing”. ↑

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Ensayo

Crime narrative topology – Part 2. Chapter 3

Opening words