American Crime Fiction: A Cultural History of Nobrow Literature as Art [Hardcover]

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 AllOf the Standard of TasteFlogging a Dead HorseDamned If You Do and Damned If You DontHeads I Win, Tails You LoseVice and Its VictimBeachbooks for IntellectualsSex, Money, and Revenge

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

The Pauper and the PrinceThe Toast of HollywoodWaldron HoneywellWho Framed Roger Rabbit?Pow, You Are There Seven Thousand Liquor CasesVacant Niche in the MarketThe Banzhaf BanditsWorst of PagesExhibit A One Part Hammett, Two Parts Grisham

Good God, I Cant Publish ThisGuts and GenitalsSouthern GothicMurder Capital of the United StatesSanctuary MuchWorse than DresdenBrothels(