American Crime Fiction, 1st ed. 2016 A Cultural History of Nobrow Literature as Art

Peter Swirski looks at American crime fiction as an artform that expresses and reflects the social and aesthetic values of its authors and readers. As such he documents the manifold ways in which such authorship and readership are a matter of informed literary choice and not of cultural brainwashing or declining literary standards. Asking, in effect, a series of questions about the nature of genre fiction as art, successive chapters look at American crime writers whose careers throw light on the hazards and rewards of nobrow traffic between popular forms and highbrow aesthetics: Dashiell Hammett, John Grisham, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Chandler, Ed McBain, Nelson DeMille, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

The Most Ossified Popular Genre of All—Of the Standard of Taste—Flogging a Dead Horse—Damned If You Do and Damned If You Don’t—Heads I Win, Tails You Lose—Vice and Its Victim—Beachbooks for Intellectuals—Sex, Money, and Revenge

CHAPTER 2. Briefcases for Hire: Dashiell Hammett and John Grisham

The Pauper and the Prince—The Toast of Hollywood—Waldron Honeywell—Who Framed Roger Rabbit?—Pow, You Are There— Seven Thousand Liquor Cases—Vacant Niche in the Market—The Banzhaf Bandits—Worst of Pages—Exhibit A— One Part Hammett, Two Parts Grisham

Good God, I Can’t Publish This—Guts and Genitals—Southern Gothic—Murder Capital of the United States—Sanctuary Much—Worse than Dresden—Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?—.38 Police Special—The Great American Paradox

CHAPTER 4. The Not So Simple Art of Murder: Raymond Chandler

CHAPTER 5. The Urban Procedural: Ed McBain

Big Lights, Big City—Salvatore Albert Lombino—Graphic and Photographic—The Worst in Christendom—Colonel Mustard and Lady Buxom—M*E*T*R*O*P*O*L*I*S*—Nothing but a Woman—Mischief—The N Word—Behind the Thin Blue Line—Crime and the City

CHAPTER 6. Take Two: Nelson DeMille and F. Scott Fitzgerald

Eppolito and Caracappa—Jack Cannon—Trouble Brews in Happy Valley—All Its Watches Limp—Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia—The Most Dangerous Country in the World—Take Two—We Keep You Clean in Muscatine—American Dream

Peter Swirski is a Canadian scholar and literary critic featured in Canadian Who's Who. Specialist in American literature and American studies, and Amazon's #1 Bestseller in American Literature, American History and Criticism, and Canadian Literary Criticism, he is the author of sixteen award-winning books, including the staple of American popular culture studies From Lowbrow to Nobrow (2005); a trio of bestsellers on American literature, culture, and politics: Ars Americana, Ars Politica (2010); American Utopia and Social Engineering (2011), and American Political Fictions (2015); and a tour de force on thinking and creative computers From Literature to Biterature (2013).

Comprehensively spans the entire twentieth-century, touching upon modernism all the way through contemporary crime writers like Nelson DeMille

Pioneers a larger discussion about the importance of lowbrow crime fiction, or what Swirski calls nobrow, within literary studies

Presents its argument through highly accessible yet engaging prose that will appeal to audiences of all kinds