Two days off of work last week due to the extreme cold let me get to a book that has been on my shelf for awhile: Cynthia S. Hamilton’s Western and Hardboiled Detective Fiction in America: From High Noon to Midnight. Those acquainted even briefly with ClimbingSky know why a book about Westerns and Hardboiled fiction would catch my eye.
Hamilton, who is Professor Emerita of American Literature and Cultural History at Liverpool Hope University certainly knows her stuff. She begins by placing Westerns and Hardboiled fiction squarely within the context of the Adventure-story tradition. This understanding particularly changes how she looks at Hardboiled literature. Next she looks at both the historical and marketplace context in which they were born. All this is done with an eye toward America’s unique worship of individualism.
She then looks at the basic structure of both genres and the traditional critiques of each. She make a compelling case for how critics have gotten much wrong in analyzing both genres. Again this especially true with regard to Hardboiled fiction growing out of the Adventure tradition and not the Mystery tradition.
Finally, she looks in-depth at four writers, two central/formative writers for each genre:
- Zane Grey
- Frederick Faust (Max Brand)
- Dashiell Hammett
- Raymond Chandler
Reading Hamilton reminded me of my experience reading another book I reviewed briefly here, West of Everything by Jane Tomkins. The fact that the two best books I have read about Westerns (and now Hardboiled fiction as well) are written by women may at first blush seem surprising. But if you consider the fact that both the Western and Hardboiled fiction are definitively masculine in theme and content, it seems only reasonable that a woman would be the best “objective” critic of either genre. The fact that Hamilton is also apparently British, only pushes this point further.
As a writer and a reader, books like this are helpful for me because they provide me with new categories and ways of thinking about something familiar. While familiarity can– as they say– “breed contempt”, it is my experience that it more often breeds complacency. We become numb to the thing we think we know in its entirety already.
I have tried over the years here at both MontanaWriter and ClimbingSky to say what it is that I love about Westerns and Hardboiled fiction, and what I think they are and are not, and what makes them good when they are good and bad when they are bad. Hamilton’s wonderful book (like Tomkins’s) helps me do that.