[In the following essay, Pettengell contends that hard-boiled detective fiction is part of the Naturalistic literary movement in American literature because it emphasizes common experiences and everyday life.]

Although Naturalism as a literary type of American fiction is defined by the work of a relatively small group of writers spanning a short period of time; the influences and implications of the movement branched out (much like Norris' “Octopus”) into almost every artistic endeavor of the twentieth century.

It is not surprising that the ideas of these, for the most part, elite writers filtered down into popular art. It is again no surprise that these ideas which dealt with the realistic squalor of life, the unexplainable violence of man-against-man, the unforeseeable hand of fate, and the unimportance of man in the universe should surface roughly ten years after the demise of the elite movement in popular literature. As these ideas began to take hold within the popular consciousness, they were fictionally resurrected in the form of hard-boiled detective fiction which seemed to belch forth like steam out of a sewer. Years later, when Americans were experiencing the pessimism of a World War, Naturalism again crept into mass consciousness (though it had hardly been lying dormant) in the form of Film Noir.

Hard-boiled detective fiction was born in December 1922 when Carroll John Daly's “The False Burton Combs” was published in Black Mask. As an offspring, it is far from perfect. And as is most often the case with a new species, it had evolved—in this case, from a mutant strain of adventure story which had been appearing for some time in the pages of the Black Mask pulp. If the origins of hard-boiled fiction are not as glorious as some would have hoped, the movement would soon reach fruition in the writings of Dashiell Hammett. Because Hammett is proclaimed by those who followed him as the crown prince of the tarnished city, it is necessary to consider his accomplishments and their relevance to Naturalism; however, even before Hammett took control of the form, this new type of writing was affecting a revolution with the printed word much like that attempted by the Naturalistic writers.

Pulp magazines had been flourishing since the turn of the century and would continue to gain readers until complications arose during World War II. The critical attitude towards these magazines was, as might be expected, negative. Margaret MacMullen wrote in Harper's (July 1937): “The steady reader of this kind of fiction is interested in and stirred by the same things that would interest and stir a savage” (qtd. O'brien 45). This description fits in nicely with both the philosophy of the Naturalists and the worldview of the hard-boiled writers. These popular artists were rebelling not only against the elite aesthetics of so-called literary “high brows” but against the rather lifeless fiction found in many of the middle-class monthlies. Frank Norris is quoted as stating that literature of the genteel tradition is as “safe as a graveyard, decorous as a church, as devoid of immorality as an epitaph. … They can be safely placed in the hands of any young girl in the country” (qtd. Cowley). Writers like Hammett were similarly anti-genteel. Raymond Chandler describes Hammett as “giv[ing] murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons … and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish” (“Simple” 16). Hammett took crime out of the drawing room and put it on the “mean streets” and gave a glimpse of the world for what it was, a corrupt and danger-infested place where, in the tradition of Darwin's teachings, only the fittest survive. Immediately there is a connection between what the Naturalists were attempting to do and the raging manifesto of the hard-boilers.

Within this new code of ethics there is one addition to a basically very Naturalistic point-of-view. There was never a hero like Sam Spade or Phillip Marlowe in the Naturalism school. Perhaps the dog, Buck, from Call of the Wild, would be his closest relative in that they both need to understand their environment and adapt to it in order to survive. Neither Spade nor Marlowe pretend to right the wrongs of the world, but both place a high value upon honor. The pulp magazine Black Aces describes the detective hero in animalistic terms:

Since the first mists of time the man who ran out of the pack has been a front page story. … He is the Lone Wolf. Beyond the temptation of money or place he meets the criminal on even terms.

Although he is uncharacteristically moral, the force that derives him is considerably naturalistic. The detective must use violent means to be successful. These actions, and the knowledge that these actions are inevitable, work to metamorphasize the hero from human to animal. In a world which functions according to the rules of Darwin, it is this adaptability which both saves and condemns. In the Maltese Falcon, a book which uses description sparingly, Sam Spade is repeatedly described as wolfish. In the first paragraph his face is described: “his chin a jutting V under the more flexible V of his mouth. … His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal” (3). The brute force which the hero must utilize for his survival brings with it animal passion, or in Freudian terms, the Id. A prime example can be found in James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice:

I took her in my arms and mashed my mouth up against hers. … “Bite me! Bite me!”

I bit her. I sunk my teeth into her lips so deep I could feel the blood spurt into my mouth. It was running down her neck when I carried her upstairs.

(15)

As in Postman, this passion leads the characters to their destruction.

Raymond Chandler, in his famous essay “The Simple Art of Murder,” describes the detective hero rather poetically: “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid” (20). This popular notion of heroic morality is somewhat overly romantic, in that in order to survive in his world, the hero must become a part of that world—to embody enough grime to function effectively in a dirty society. Although he could not endure the pages of a purely Naturalistic novel (if there is such a creature), the hero's potentially opposite characteristics of Romance and Realism fuse together, a trait which is acceptable within Naturalism. It is just such a combination which makes him both “saint” and “satan” and endears him to generations of detective fiction readers.

Although the detective hero may represent a break with Naturalism in terms of his morality, the environment in which he acts and the world within which he must make his moral decisions is firmly grounded in the Dreiser/Norris tradition. The Maltese Falcon, for instance, is based primarily on historically accurate sights. The hard-boiled writers saw the city as a mirror of the post WW I American soul. It is a clouded reflection of corruption and evil which can be found within the marrow of the highest political official and the lowest bowery bum. Mickey Spillane may have described it best two decades later in his book Kiss Me, Deadly:

I sat there for a while, staring at the multicolored reflections of the city that made my window a living, moving kaleidoscope. The voice of the monster outside the glass was a constant drone, but when you listened long enough it became a flat, sarcastic sneer that pushed ten million people into bigger and better troubles, and then the sneer was heard for what it was, a derisive laugh that thought blood running from an open wound was funny, and death was the biggest joke of all.

(33)

The prominence of the cityscape (both thematically and physically) marked a definite split between Hard-boiled and Golden Age (popularized by Doyle, Christie, Sayers, and others) fiction. No longer is the setting a perfectly ordered universe where the detective hero acts as savior. In the world of Hammett, Chandler, Cain, and others society is a cancer whose temporary remedy is violence. Like many Naturalistic writers, they chose to tell their story in a place much like the dark alley Maggie listlessly stumbles down in Crane's fatalistic novel.

The detective's world of violence and passion is mirrored in the style and jargon of the text. Like the Naturalistic writers, hard-boilers used a unique blend of gothicism and common language to tell their tale. Shocking and grotesque scenes became even more effective, as in Chandler's The Lady in the Lake:

The thing rolled over once more and an arm flapped up barely above the skin of the water and the arm ended in a bloated hand that was the hand of a freak. Then the face came. A swollen pulpy gray white mass without features, without eyes, without mouth. A blotch of gray dough, a nightmare with human hair on it.

(40)

In this clipped yet imaginative wording, the detective/narrator's words rivet the reader like machinegun fire. Common language elevates the detective's pessimistic worldview to high tragedy as it fuels the narrative flame, as in Chandler's The Big Sleep:

What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now. …

(38)

This dark attitude toward life, which leaves the hero down and out and staring into a half-empty liquor bottle at the conclusion of most hard-boiled novels, is yet another connection between the Naturalist elitists and these popular fiction works.

The social climate following WW I, like that of every war, was one of disillusionment. The “war for democracy” accomplished very little, and so artists, both popular and otherwise, began to question major American beliefs and values, such as material success and individualism. In short, the “Roaring Twenties” decade saw the American dream as a distorted perversion. For a time, hope was drained out of the American wishing well leaving only a couple of slimy pennies. Chance and Fate loomed over the individual while Alger's “Pluck and Luck” shivered in the shadows. The importance of Chance is evident in three specific works of the period, Hammett's “Bodies Pile Up” and Maltese Falcon and Chandler's “Red Wind.”

“Bodies Pile Up,” first published in Black Mask in 1923, is a story which illustrates the importance of chance in the hard-boiled canon. The Continental Op (the first nameless detective—and an interesting comment upon American individualism) is assigned a job by chance; two men are killed not because they are criminals, but because of a chance mistake made by a gangster seeking revenge. The tragedy of this story, and of much of the work which follows it, is that the crime is solved but the corruption continues to engulf society. The Maltese Falcon, perhaps the most well-known hard-boiled detective novel is another pessimistic portrait of American life. The characters search in vain for an object which may or may not exist. Romantic love—a crucial myth of American society—is revealed also to be unobtainable, and even though Sam Spade has learned by his experience, his life profits very little because of this knowledge.

Chandler's “Red Wind” is interesting in that the hot, dry, lifeless wind which permeates the story defines the inner qualities of the characters. This element of environmental determinism, found frequently within the canon of Naturalistic literature, portrays Nature as a controlling and unaltering force among the characters in the story. Again, the ideal love is proven to be worthless, and the most important crime in the story (the murder in the bar) is revealed as happenstance.

Like many of the Naturalistic writers, Hammett and other hard-boilers were interested in social matters—many becoming involved in the socialist movement in America, Hammett being jailed in 1951 for refusing to name names for the HUAC committee. This concern for society at large is dealt with in their writing, although at times a sense of nihilism engulfs the story, as in Cornell Woolrich's Night Has a Thousand Eyes:

Death has begun. Darkness has begun, there in the full jonquil-blaze of the dinner-table candles. Darkness. A spot no bigger at first than that spilled drop of consomme. Growing, steadily growing, by the days, by the weeks, by the months, until it has blotted out everything else. Until all is darkness. Until there is nothing but darkness. Darkness and fear and pain, doom and death.

(qtd. O'brien 91)

Although he did not publish again after 1934, Hammett had started a revolution in detective fiction. His work was published by the prestigious press of Alfred A. Knopf and soon after made it into the cinema. Although it may have softened a bit over the years, hard-boiled fiction and its influence is still prominent in the fiction market today in writers like Stuart Kaminsky and Kinky Friedman. It is no surprise that the energy and freshness of such writing would interest filmakers in Hollywood, especially during and following WW II when disillusionment would again run high. The movement which most keenly felt the sharp prod of hard-boiled fiction and which would magnify those sensibilities shared by the Naturalists—exposing them to the world on the giant motion picture screen—was Film Noir.

The term “film noir” is French for “black film” and refers to films made in America roughly between 1941 and 1957. The storyline of these films is characteristically dark in plot as well as in physical texture. The setting, like the hard-boiled school of fiction is the city—an environment where possible danger and/or death lurks behind every corner. The characters lie, deceive, and even kill in a struggle to avoid their fate, which is usually brought about by a chance occurrence and biological drives. As in Naturalism, the characters seem to walk in a world they have no control over. They create a pattern from which there is no escape. First written about by Nino Frank in 1954 (he was attempting to critically come to grips with the influx of American films coming into France after WW II), Film Noir is not a genre but a type of film. Although most of the films in this category deal with law enforcement or crime as a central theme, noir films have shown up as screw-ball comedies and Westerns. In crossing this genre line, they are very similar to Naturalistic novels. Norris could write about the railroad, Dreiser about big business, and London about conflicts within nature—but the ideological basis is labeled as Naturalism. The defining aspects of Film Noir are much the same. Foster Hirsch describes the typical noir film as incorporating a harsh, “dog-eat-dog” world where stories of obsession and self-destruction are enacted in a kind of vacuum—a sealed off environment of airless rooms, and of threatening, lonely streets (9). Whether they take place on the open plains, the confined space of a cluttered office, or between towering skyscrapers, the camera angles, use of setting, and abundance of shadows create a sense of claustrophobia on film.

Clearly, the hard-boiled writers were an influence on those directors who created Film Noir, but there were other major influences worth noting. Filmakers in Berlin in the 1920s were developing a style they had borrowed from earlier German theatre called “expressionism.” The aim of this technique was to distort reality and suggest the psychological state of the characters through manipulating sets and acting styles. A film like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) uses sets created at odd angles to reflect the nightmarish deeds of the sinister sonambulist. Nosferatu (1922) makes use of shadows to develop the fiendishness of the first feature vampire on film. As Hitler began to gain power in Germany, many expressionistic directors emigrated to America. Among them were Fritz Lang, who had recently directed Peter Lorre's screen debut in “M” (the German title being, The Murderer among Us) and would go on to feature Edward G. Robinson in two ground-breaking noir films, Scarlet Street and The Woman in the Window; Otto Preminger, perhaps most noted for directing The Man with the Golden Arm, a film starring Frank Sinatra showing detailed footage of drug addiction; Billy Wilder, who would team up with Raymond Chandler in creating the film version of Cain's Double Indemnity; and the cult figure, Edgar G. Ulmer, who was able to make artistic films with almost no budget and in a matter of days, his masterpiece being the noirish Detour (1945).

The second major foreign influence on the emergence of Film Noir was Italian Neorealism. After WW II the studios in Italy were found to be destroyed beyond use. The Italian filmakers took to the streets to make their pictures. This added a documentary feel to the films which had been absent before. Also, this association with real people and events had been developing since the Naturalistic writers had first dealt with the “dirtiness” of life and living. Location shooting of this type would show up in films like D.O.A. (1949) and Phil Karlson's Pheonix City Story (1955), the latter being a violent crime drama based on an actual occurrence and even including interviews with those involved.

Although the foreign influences were important, earlier American films were also influential in establishing the noir trend. Gangster and horror films from the 1930s helped solidify character roles and filming techniques. The fated protagonist of the gangster film and his perverted rise to riches comes close to noir sentiments (represented in Naturalism by Drieser's monomaniacal Cowperwood), while the gothic shadows and desolate castles found in many early horror films need just a touch of imagination before they become the treacherous cityscapes of the 40s and 50s films. This rich heritage of film noir is interesting in itself, but one of the greatest differences between these films and those of the pre-war studio years is the highly unconventional male and female lead roles.

The protagonist in Film Noir is either a tortured heroic figure, like Sam Spade with his Flitcraftian insight, or a sensitive and frightened victim, like Chris Cross, unable to find his niche in American society. He is, indeed, at the mercy of his environment, much like the hero of the Naturalistic novel. Often it is this normal “Joe's” momentary laps of control over the Id (i.e. passion) which leads him to destruction. In Double Indemnity, Walter Neff is an insurance salesman who because he drops by a client's house when the wife is alone, and because he sees her wearing nothing but a towel (and an anklet with her name on it which “cuts” into her leg), he gets involved with a scheme that leads him “right down the line … to the cemetery.” Perhaps Tom Neal said it best in Ulmer's Detour, “That's life. … sometimes, for no reason at all, Fate sticks out its foot to trip you.”

Of course, the protagonist might just survive unscathed if not for that sinister black widow of a woman, the Noir Female. These “bitch goddesses” are emissaries of Fate who use sex as a lure. Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) in Double Indemnity entangles Neff into killing her husband; she had earlier murdered the husband's first wife by leaving the poor, sick woman in front of an open window during a particularly cold, wintery night. Joan Bennett in Scarlet Street not only signs her name to Robinson's paintings after bleeding him dry of available cash, she laughingly tells him how ugly and repulsive he is to her. Of course, she does meet with a rather gruesome encounter with an ice pick, but even then continues to haunt the protagonist to the point of suicide. These characters may well reflect society's fear of the sexually aggressive and free woman which developed during the war and then was expected to return to the kitchen immediately afterwards. This view of female breaks the normal Hollywood stereotype and attempts to bring real life motivations to the screen, in a sense, another attack of the genteel.

Both of these character types interact in a world confined within the menacing city. At times the protagonist may attempt to rid himself of the grime and filth of his environment, but this action is usually unsuccessful and leads to the character's death. A good example of this can be found in The Asphalt Jungle (1950) where Sterling Hayden, a good natured hoodlum, makes it back to “Hickory Ranch” but dies in the pasture of a bullet wound. There are those who argue that it is necessary in Film Noir to have an unhappy ending, but there are a number of ambiguous closing scenes which may be at odds with the typical Hollywood finale and still offer some solace to the hero. On Dangerous Ground (1951) is a case in point. Robert Ryan becomes contaminated by the city in his job as police-detective and leaves the violent and corrupt environment to get away from the “garbage”; “How do you do it? How do you live with yourself?” he asks his partner. In the country he meets the rural equivalent of himself in Ward Bond—perhaps enabling him to see more clearly his savage shadow self. Through the care of a blind woman he is given insight into himself. It is not, however, the country that saves him; there is no mythical, rural land free from corruption. The scenes are dreamlike studies of mud and snow, poverty and ignorance. As in Naturalism, the “dirt” is exposed and the myth and accompanying value system is deflated. By seeing into the darkness—the darkness of the blind woman and the darkness trapped within him—and adapting to it, Ryan is able to survive. This may seem rather hopeful, but before the movie ends the blind woman's brother (a mentally ill killer for whom the men are searching) commits suicide. Whether the woman's blindness will eventually be cured remains unanswered.

Film Noir as a movement died out around 1958 because Hollywood began to rely on the epic spectacle films to regain the audience television was stealing from them. The obsoletism of the “B” movie and the advent of color helped hasten its demise. Also, many of the writers, directors, and actors who had been working in Film Noir were black-listed during the same HUAC sessions that imprisoned Hammett. Movies returned momentarily to an overly optimistic and sentimental view of the world. In summing up the real nucleus of meaning which worked to weave together the movement as a whole, Jon Tuska states that

Film Noir is a darkling vision of the world, a view from the underside, born of fundamental disillusionment perhaps, but also invariably the result, no matter how timid, of a confrontation with nihilism.

(135)

In summation, it is possible to see that attitudes, ideas, and objectives of the Naturalistic school in literature reflected and expanded in the popular fiction and motion pictures that followed it. Both attempted to get at the essence of life through the common experience. The naturalists' view of language was certainly similar to that of the hard-boiled writers. Seeing the world as violent and uncaring, and life as potentially beyond one's control is continually emphasized both in the fiction and in Film Noir. The exploitation of the common man by a society eaten through with corruption is as much as a concern of the noir director John Huston as it is with Hammett, Dreiser, and Zola. What is different is that hard-boiled fiction and Film Noir were products of artistic content that were appreciated by much of the population. Where the earlier writers had somehow failed to gain mass appeal, Hammett, Chandler, and the Noir movement succeeded.

Works Cited

Cain, James M. The Postman Always Rings Twice. New York: Grosset, 1934.

Chandler, Raymond. The Lady in the Lake. (1943) New York: Vintage, 1976.

———. The Simple Art of Murder. (1950) New York: Vintage, 1972.

Goulart, Ron. The Dime Detectives: A Comprehensive History of the Detective Pulps. New York: Mysterious Press, 1988.

Gregory, Sinda. Private Investigations: The Novels of Dashiell Hammett. Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 1985.

Hamilton, Cynthia S. Western and Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction in America: From High Noon To Midnight. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987.

Hammett, Dashiell. “Bodies Pile Up.” (1923) Reprinted in William F. Nolan The Black Mask Boys: Masters in the Hard-Boiled School of Detective Fiction. New York: Mysterious Press, 1985.

———. The Maltese Falcon. (1929) San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984.

Hirsch, Foster. Film Noir: The Dark Side of the Screen. New York: Da Capo Press, 1981.

Johnson, Diane. Dashiell Hammett: A Life. New York: Random House, 1983.

Layman, Richard. Shadow Man: The Life of Dashiell Hammett. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1981.

Nachbar, Jack. “Film Noir,” in Handbook of American Genres. Ed. by Wes D. Gehring. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988.

O'brien, Geoffrey. Hardboiled America: The Lurid Years of Paperbacks. New York: Van Nostrand, 1981.

Selby, Spencer. Dark City: The Film Noir. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1984.

Spillane, Mickey. Kiss Me, Deadly. New York: Signet, 1952.

Tuska, Jon. Dark Cinema: American Film Noir in Cultural Perspective. New York: Greenwood Press, 1984.

———. In Manors and Alleys: A Casebook on the American Detective Film. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988.