white masculinity in hardboiled fiction and film noir.
M Abbott
[Place of publication not identified], Palgrave Macmillan
2016
Introduction --;"I can feel her" : the White male as hysteric in James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler --;"Another soft-voiced big man I had strangely liked" : containing White male desire --;The woman in white : race-ing and erace-ing in Cain and Chandler --;"Nothing you can't fix" : hardboiled fiction's Hollywood makeover --;"The strict domain of whitey" : Chester Himes's coup.
This book considers a recurrent figure in American literature: the solitary white man moving through urban space. The descendent of nineteenth-century frontier and western heroes, the figure reemerges in 1930s-50s America as the tough guy." The Street Was Mine looks at the tough guy in the works of hardboiled novelists Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep) and James M. Cain (Double Indemnity) and their popular film noir adaptations. Focusing on the way the tough guy negotiates racial and gender "otherness," this study argues that he embodies the promise of an impervious white masculinity amidst the turmoil of the Depression through the beginnings of the Cold War.
Detective and mystery films -- United States -- History and criticism.
Detective and mystery stories, American -- History and criticism.
Film noir -- United States -- History and criticism.