I stumbled across this tonight: Jay Hopler's "Watching the
Detectives: Reading Dime Novels and Hard-boiled Detective
Stories in Context" (Journal of Social History, Winter 2002),
which is available free at
http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m2005/2_36/95829290/print.jhtml
It's a book review of four books, including HARD-BOILED:
WORKING-CLASS READERS AND PULP MAGAZINES by Erin A. Smith
(2002), which looks like the most interesting of the three
academic titles mentioned (though I just picked up MECHANIC
ACCENTS: DIME NOVELS AND WORKING-CLASS CULTURE IN AMERICA, by
Michael Denning (1998), which the review mentions, and that's
how I found it).
Hopler riles us immediately by saying he paid no attention to
hardboiled pulp, then, when he did, didn't like it. He gets
into some fancy talk about critical theory, but the quotes
from Smith's book look interesting:
| Black Mask ads and fiction were presented as almost
seamlessly
| connected. Ads urged readers to become skilled, well-paid
workers;
| hard-boiled heroes knocked heads with clients and agency
owners over
| their workplace autonomy. Ads urged readers to remake
themselves into
| real men; Black Mask fiction gave them role models. Ads
focused readers'
| attention on the wrinkles in their clothes, the errors in
their speech,
| and the vulgarity of their manners; the magazine's heroes
offered
| instruction in reading how class, gender, and power
relationships were
| embodied in dress and bearing.
The entire review is worth a look. Have any rare birds read
Smith's book? It hasn't been mentioned in the archives.
Bill
-- William Denton : Toronto, Canada : http://www.miskatonic.org/ : Caveat lector.
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