Narratives of the Underworld

Abstract

Dashiell Hammett’s work redefined crime fiction. His stories, which first appeared in Black Mask magazine in the early 1920s, mark an obvious shift from the classical, mostly British,⁶⁹ detective story in which the detective is the main crime solver and the events take place in middle-class suburban houses, libraries, and drawing rooms, to an urban space in the United States where organized crime, gangsters, and corruption pervade the city. Hammett’s work also took detective fiction from the puzzle formula, where the “who” and the “how” of the crime are the main components of the ratiocination with which the detective is preoccupied, to a “hardboiled” formula which proffered a character study of the criminal himself or herself. Hammett’s stories introduce criminal femmes fatales who, I argue, constitute the point of connection between hardboiled crime fiction and criminological discourses on crime and policing. Below I will examine the components of Hammett’s intervention in the genre by looking at two of his novels The Dain Curse (1929) and The Maltese Falcon (1930). These components include Hammett’s narrative world, full of violence and disorder, and the social realities of the Depression, Prohibition, gangsterism, and the attendant shift in policing and criminological discourses in the United States, all of which shape the imagined underworld in which the criminal femmes fatales function as active agents.

Hammett wrote at first (and almost to the end) for people with a sharp, aggressive attitude to life. They were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there. Violence did not dismay them; it was right down their street. Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish.

(Chandler 1973: 12)⁶⁸