Creatures of darkness: Raymond Chandler, detective fiction, and film noir

2001 ◽  
Vol 39 (01) ◽  
pp. 39-0169-39-0169
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Film Noir ◽  
Raymond Chandler

scholarly journals The Labyrinth and the Non-Solution: Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase and the Metaphysical Detective

MANUSYA ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-89
Author(s):  
Rhys William Tyers
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Search For Meaning ◽  
Detective Novel ◽  
Raymond Chandler ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
Guiding Principle ◽  
Wild Sheep ◽  
Detective Stories ◽  
Definition Of

Many of Murakami’s novels demonstrate his appropriation of the terminology, imagery and metaphor that are found in hardboiled detective fiction. The question of Haruki Murakami’s use of the tropes from hardboiled detective stories has been discussed by scholars such as Hantke (2007), Stretcher (2002) and Suter (2008), who argue that the writer uses these features as a way to organize his narratives and to pay homage to one of his literary heroes, Raymond Chandler. However, these arguments have not adequately addressed the fact that many of Murakami’s novels fit into the definition of the metaphysical detective story, which is “a text that parodies or subverts traditional detective-story conventions” (Merivale & Sweeney 1999:2). Using this definition as a guiding principle, this paper addresses the issue of the metaphysical detective features apparent in Murakami’s third novel, A Wild Sheep Chase, and, more specifically, looks at his use of the non-solution and labyrinth as narrative devices. The main argument, then, is that Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase fits in with the metaphysical detective novel and uses the familiar tropes of the labyrinth and the non-solution to highlight our impossible search for meaning.

War Noir

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Trott
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
War Trauma ◽  
Traumatic Experiences ◽  
Raymond Chandler ◽  
Lost Generation ◽  
Philip Marlowe ◽  
Literary Figure ◽  
American Society ◽  
War Experience

Hard-boiled writer Raymond Chandler created his detective Philip Marlowe not as the idealisation of heroic individualism as is commonly perceived, but as an authentic individual subjected to real psychological frailties resulting from his traumatic experiences during World War One. Marlowe’s characterisation goes beyond the traditional chivalric readings and can instead be interpreted as an authentic representation of a traumatised veteran in American society. Substituting the horror of the trenches for the corruption of the city, Chandler’s disillusioned protagonist and his representation of an uncaring American society resonate strongly with the dislocation of the Lost Generation. Consequently, it is profitable to consider Chandler as both a generic writer and a genuine literary figure. This book re-examines important primary documents highlighting extensive discrepancies in existing biographical narratives of Chandler’s war experience, and unveils an account that is significantly different from that of his biographers. Utilizing psychological behavioural interpretation to interrogate Chandler’s novels demonstrates the variety of post-traumatic symptoms that tormented Chandler and his protagonist. A close reading of his personal papers reveals the war trauma subconsciously encoded in Marlowe’s characterisation. This conflation of the hard-boiled style and war experience – a war noir – has influenced many contemporary crime writers, particularly in the traumatic aftermath of the Vietnam War. This work offers a new understanding of Chandler’s traumatic war experience, how that experience established the traditional archetype of detective fiction, and how this reading of his work allows Chandler to transcend generic limitations to be recognised as a key twentieth century literary figure.

2. The modernist crime novel and Hollywood noir

2019 ◽  
pp. 19-47
Author(s):  
James Naremore
Keyword(s):  
Film Noir ◽  
Entertainment Industry ◽  
American Film ◽  
Graham Greene ◽  
Potential Threat ◽  
Raymond Chandler ◽  
Multiple Points ◽  
Dashiell Hammett ◽  
Crime Novel ◽  
Points Of View

‘The modernist crime novel and Hollywood noir’ considers how an atmosphere of ‘modernism’ in 1940s American film noir is largely due to the ‘thriller genre’ in literature. Many aspects of modernity—the interest in subjectivity and multiple points of view, the unorthodox handling of time, the stripping away of genteel rhetoric, the critique of modernity, explicit sex, and fears of women—came together in film noir, but were a potential threat to the entertainment industry. The tension was evident in Hollywood adaptations of four influential crime writers and major contributors to film noir—Samuel Dashiell Hammett, Graham Greene, James M. Cain, and Raymond Chandler—whose work needed to be lightened or ameliorated.

Noir Fiction and Film

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lee Clark Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Film Noir ◽  
Noir Fiction ◽  
Detective Films ◽  
Withholding Information ◽  
Do So

The argument of Noir Fiction and Film is curiously counterintuitive: that in a century of hard-boiled fiction and detective films, characteristics that at first seemed trivial swelled in importance, flourishing into crucial aspects of the genre. Among these are aimless descriptions of people and places irrelevant to plot, along with detectives consisting of little more than sparkling dialogue and flippant attitudes. What weaves together such features, however, seems to be a paradox: that a genre rooted in solving a mystery, structured around the gathering of clues, must do so by misdirecting our attention, even withholding information we think we need to generate the suspense we also desire. Yet successful noir stories and films enhance that suspense through passing diversions (descriptive details and eccentric perspectives) rather than depending on the centerpieces of plot alone (suspected motives or incriminating traces). As the most accomplished practitioners have realized, the “how” of detective fiction (its stylistic detours) draws us in more insistently than the “what” or the “who” (its linear advance). The achievement of recent film noir is to make that “how” become the tantalizing object of our entire attention, shorn of any pretense of reading for the plot, immersing us in the diversionary delight that has animated the genre from the beginning.

Hard-Boiled Intimations

2021 ◽  
pp. 9-32
Author(s):  
Lee Clark Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Two Dimensional ◽  
Critical Perspective ◽  
Raymond Chandler ◽  
Dashiell Hammett

The opening chapter explains the sudden advent of hard-boiled writing in the 1920s, to clarify why this curious genre emerged when it did, and what continues to beguile readers as much formally as narratively. If that hardly frames a new critical perspective, the questions are still worth reviewing to show why sociological, historical, even formalist interpretations so often misunderstand the appeal. A more productive approach that focuses on strategies of early hard-boiled writing discloses how it anticipated later, genuinely accomplished detective fiction, which diverts readers’ eyes seductively away from plot and psychology. The most celebrated of early writers—Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James Cain—indelibly stamped the genre by deflecting attention from plot to the interest objects hold in themselves. As well, they created fictional heroes notable for garish self-expression rather than credible character, and who thus finally (if paradoxically) remain winningly two-dimensional.

scholarly journals Trump and the Resurgence of American Noir

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 90-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Virginia Newhall Rademacher
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
American Politics ◽  
Film Noir ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The Political ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
Political Expediency ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Media

This essay examines the political persona of Donald Trump as mediated by the imagery of hardboiled detective fiction and film noir. By evoking and distorting noir’s challenge to the status quo, its suspicion of systems of power and questioning of dominant norms, Trump has fashioned his political persona in ways that deliberately revise the popular conception of the hardboiled hero as brash-talking rebel at the margins of a corrupt system. Reading Trump’s persona through the mediating function of noir exposes how Trump’s rhetoric plays on, and benefits from, a theme of citizen estrangement while simultaneously reinforcing political expediency and self-interested power. Moreover, it is not only Trump who uses noir imagery provocatively to shape his political image. The media have also participated in crafting images of Trump as either entertaining disruptor or more darkly destabilising. As responses to crises of capitalism, corruption, and social fracture, noir narratives provide critical ways of investigating periods of disequilibrium and their resurfacing in the present. Analysing the production, expression, and reception of Trump’s political persona through the historical and discursive structures of noir underscores the salience of the study of persona to reveal underlying fissures in current American politics and society.

scholarly journals Zbiorniki ze stęchłymi ściekami: przekład specjalistycznej terminologii w powieści detektywistycznej, przełożyła Joanna Sobesto

2020 ◽  
pp. 105-129
Author(s):  
Daniel Linder
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Oil Field ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Raymond Chandler ◽  
Used Oil ◽  
Language For Specific Purposes ◽  
Technical Accuracy ◽  
Technical Translation ◽  
Literary Devices

Greasy Scummy Sumps: Translating Specialized Terminology in Detective Fiction Fictional texts containing specialized terms pose a challenge for literary translators. Rooted in raw factual accuracy, terms can nonetheless be used in extremely expressive ways. Raymond Chandler used oil industry terminology (bull wheel, derrick, oil field, scum, walking-beam, and especially the term sump) in his first novel The Big Sleep (1939) within intentionally artistic phrasings involving alliteration, parallel structuring and repetition. The novel was (re)translated into Spanish many times (El sueño eterno 1947, 1948, 1958, 1972 and 2001), offering a view into how different translators met this challenge. Though the published translations reveal lower frequency of repetition in all cases, inconsistent co-textual use of the terminology and usage of non-terms, omissions and errors, these instances were qualitatively compensated with creatively reproduced alliterative elements and added literary devices. This study of a seldomly explored aspect of literary translation shows how professionals are aware of the importance of language for specific purposes in literature and how effective balances between technical accuracy and literary expressiveness can be attained. For theorists who might believe that literary and technical translation are separate worlds of translatorial action, the results of this study show that literary translators tend to bridge this gap proficiently with both accuracy and literary flair.

The Public Eye of Raymond Chandler

1980 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 423-441
Author(s):  
David Smith
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Public School ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Raymond Chandler ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Public School Education ◽  
Big City ◽  
Private Eye

When the “hard-boiled” private eye of American detective fiction hit the streets in the late 1920s it was not altogether surprising that he should take his complicated path down Californian streets. Not because they were notably meaner than those of big-city crime in New York or Chicago but rather because his essentially private quest for the unravelling of an individual's tortuous truth would find more quarry in the Southern Californian mixingbowl. Each fresh start or re-made life came trailing the spoor of the past. The private eye became expert at detecting the tarnished metal beneath the glittering paint, at offering a wry sympathy to those cheated at the edge of the last frontier. However this “new” society was no more detached from a past that shaped its public form than were its denizens free to make themselves anew. In the hands of one or two writers the mystery was then deepened in ways that replaced the discovery of facts by the probing of relationships between the fixed individual and his forming society. The private eye then required a writer with a public gaze to give him vision.In 1888 an Irish-American boy of Quaker parentage was born in Chicago. After boyhood summers in sleepy Plattsmouth, Nebraska, and the tortured adolescence of a public-school education in Edwardian England the twentyfour-year-old Raymond Chandler, trekking slowly through the Mid-West, arrived in Los Angeles.

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