Jess,
Re your question below:
> Does anyone know of a good critical study on
the
> origins of hard-boiled,
> especially the genre's 19th century dime
novel
> roots? I'm looking for a study
> which examines the influence of the Old
King
> Brady/Old Cap Collier/Nick Carter
> genre of dime novels on the early hard-boileds.
Is
> there such a thing?
There are books which talk about how dime novels eventually
transformed into pulp magazines. However, thay emphasize the
changes in the magazine publishing indutry. Aside from the
fact that Carroll John Daly was clearly influenced by the
melodrama he'd grown up with, I think you'd find that the
influence of dime-nvel detective stories on their
Prohibition/Depression-era descendants would be negligible.
The social phenomenons that contributed most to the rise of
the hard-boiled crime story was, first of all, World War I
which desensitized readers, particularly men, to violence,
second of all, Prohoibition and the rise in gangsterism and
corruption that accompanied it, and, finally, the Depression,
which solidified the cynicism that had been growing all
through the '20s.
If anything, you could argue that hard-boiled influenced the
dime novel characters. When Nick Carter first appeared in the
19th Century, he was a
"Great Detective" more or less in the tradition of Sherlock
Holmes (for all that he preceded Holmes by perhaps a year).
When he resurfaced in his own pulp magazine in the 1930s,
he'd become a more or less hard-boiled private eye. Thirty
years later, changes in what was popular in mystery fiction
(and what wasn't) caused him to metamorphisize yet again into
the "American version of James Bond" for a series of
paperback orignals by various writers (including our own Bill
Crider).
JIM DOHERTY
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