![]() ![]() McCann makes clear early that all detective fiction is concerned with the structures of “liberal” society because it investigates (if only implicitly) the tension between the free individual and the social collective. Gumshoe America advances the argument that hard-boiled crime fiction, more than just a spawn of mass media consumerism, provided a “symbolic theater where the dilemmas of New Deal liberalism could be staged” (5). ![]() The degree to which these three historical frames intersect and clash – which McCann argues is a high degree – reflects the political timbre of hard-boiled crime fiction. And the third is technological, the growing prevalence of mass media. The second is political, a swelling awareness of social injustice. The first is aesthetic, the modernist impulse toward avant-garde style. To do this, McCann positions the detective stories of Hammett, Chandler, Thompson, Hines and others between three easily identifiable, sometimes incompatible, but nonetheless simultaneous historical frames. Those who enjoy hard-boiled crime fiction might raise an eyebrow at this: essentially McCann takes a genre with little obvious political weight and places it in conversation with one of America’s most contested cultural movements. As the title suggests, McCann’s Gumshoe America explores the relationship between hard-boiled crime fiction (novels specifically) and FDR’s “New Deal” politics of inter- and post-world-war America. ![]()
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