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Barbara Foley, HardBoiled: WorkingClass Readers and Pulp Magazines. By Erin A. Smith. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000. xiv, 215 pp. Cloth, $64.50, isbn 1-56639-768-5. Paper, $19.95, isbn 1-56639-769-3.), Journal of American History, Volume 88, Issue 3, December 2001, Pages 1126–1127, https://doi.org/10.2307/2700501
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Extract
Erin A. Smith has produced an informative account of how hardboiled detective fiction both reflected and compensated for the gender, class, and racial anxieties of its white, male, and workingclass readership in the period between the wars. Examining littleknown contributors to pulp magazines such as Black Mask as well as canonical writers in the g enre such as Erle Stanley Gardner, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler and deploying a theoretical apparatus drawn from Michel de Certeau, Judith Butler, Pierre Bourdieu, and David Roediger, Smith makes various inferences about that readership.
Not only did detective pulp fiction present heroes marked by physical prowess, fluid movement between classes, and control over their conditions of work; the accompanying advertisements offered commodities—from clothing to vocabulary lessons to courses in body building—that presumably enhanced the status of readers lacking both cultural capital and prospects of upward mobility. Hardboiled fiction also spoke to the anxious men in increasingly sexintegrated workplaces as “hemen,” even while it caused “gender trouble” by portraying sexual identity as “performance and masquerade.” Moreover, this fiction both reproduced and critiqued “timeandmotion” discipline in the industrial workplace, as well as the Taylorized conditions under which pulp authors themselves labored. Largely through identification with cynical heroes who bogart their way through class barriers in plots of dizzying complexity, as well as through selective reading practices—“poach ing”—that subverted the domination of formalist, enddirected plots in genteel detective fiction, proletarian readers beset by a “nostalgia” for a lost world of white male worker “autonomy” were thus afforded compensation for their loss of power in the workaday world.
