PE R PL E X I NG

PL OT S

FILM AND CULTURE

FILM AND CULTURE
A series of Columbia University Press

Edited by John Belton

For a complete list of titles, see page 493

PE R PL E X I NG PL OT S

Popular Storytelling and

the Poetics of Murder

DAVID BORDWELL

Columbia University Press

New York
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bordwell, David, author.
Title: Perplexing plots : popular storytelling and the poetics of murder /
David Bordwell.
Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2022. | Series: Film and
culture series | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022008825 | ISBN 9780231206587 (hardback) |
ISBN 9780231206594 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780231556552 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Detective and mystery stories, American—History and
criticism. | American literature—20th century—History and criticism. |
Narration (Rhetoric)—History—20th century. | Popular culture—United
States—History—20th century. | Detective and mystery
stories—Authorship. | Motion picture authorship. | Motion picture
plays—Technique. | United States—Civilization—20th century.
Classification: LCC PS374.D4 B67 2022 | DDC 813/.087209—dc23/eng/20220525
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022008825

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent

and durable acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America

Cover design: Elliott S. Cairns

Cover image: 20th Century Fox/Photofest
For James Naremore
Man of letters and
man of the cinema
There are thirty-two ways to write a story, and I’ve used every one,
but there is only one plot—things are not as they seem.

—Jim Thompson
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction: Mass Art as Experimental Storytelling 1

PART I
1. The Art Novel Meets 1910s Formalism 29
2. Making Confusion Satisfactory: Modernism and Other Mysteries 55
3. Churn and Consolidation: The 1940s and After 81

PART II
4. The Golden Age Puzzle Plot: The Taste of the Construction 119
5. Before the Fact: The Psychological Thriller 157
6. Dark and Full of Blood: Hard-Boiled Detection 194
7. The 1940s: Mysteries in Crossover Culture 235
8. The 1940s: The Problem of Other Minds, or Just One 261

PART III
9. The Great Detective Rewritten: Erle Stanley Gardner and Rex Stout 285
10. Viewpoints, Narrow and Expansive:
Patricia Highsmith and Ed McBain 318
11. Donald Westlake and the Richard Stark Machine 336
12. Tarantino, Twists, and the Persistence of Puzzles 357
13. Gone Girls: The New Domestic Thriller 382
Conclusion: The Power of Limits 405

Notes 413
Index 467
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T
his book goes back sixty years in my life. In high school I started
reading mysteries, modernist fiction, and literary criticism while
I was also getting interested in film. College and graduate school
intensified my curiosity about all of the above. A full list of debts would go on
for a very long time. Here are the prime ones.
Claude Held, eminent bookseller of Buffalo, kindly filled orders sent in cash,
sometimes coins, from a fourteen-year-old. I still have the books he mailed
to our farm. I also owe a debt to my teachers, particularly Fred Silva and Pat
Ward of the State University of New York at Albany and Angelo Bertocci of the
University of Iowa.
As usual, I’m grateful to my stimulating colleagues in the University of
Wisconsin–Madison Department of Communication Arts: Ben Brewster,
Kelley Conway, Erik Gunneson, Meg Hamel, Jim Healy, Michele Hilmes, Eric
Hoyt, Vance Kepley, Lea Jacobs, Mike King, J. J. Murphy, Ben Reiser, James
Runde, and Ben Singer. Hours of talk with Jeff Smith, fellow mystery addict and
connoisseur of popular fiction generally, improved this book immeasurably.
On other campuses, I benefited from audiences responding to ideas I tried
out in lectures. So thanks to Dan Morgan and colleagues and students at the
University of Chicago, to Sean O’Sullivan and colleagues and students at the
Ohio State University, and to members of the Society for Cognitive Studies of
the Moving Image at our 2019 conference at the University of Hamburg.
As usual, archives have given me more than I can properly acknowledge.
At the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, Mary Huelsback
 xii Acknowledgments

and Amanda Smith were ever ready to answer my questions and find obscure
material. At George Eastman House, old friends Paolo Cherchi Usai and Jared
Case of the Moving Image department helped me view The Gangsters and
the Girl, a real discovery conserved by the late James Card. Thanks as well to
Stéphanie Cudré-Mauroux of the Archives Littéraires Suisse for assistance with
Patricia Highsmith’s collection.
At the Library of Congress John W. Kluge Center, I benefited enormously
from holding the Chair of Modern Culture in early 2017. I enjoyed my time with
other fellows and Ted Widmer, the director, as well as Mary Lou Reker, Dan
Turello, Travis Hensley, and Emily Coccia. Ensconced in the Motion Picture,
Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division, watching movies by the hour,
I was helped at every turn by Greg Lukow, Mike Mashon, Karen Fishman, Alan
Gevinson, Dorinda Hartmann (supreme Nero Wolfe expert), Zoran Sinobad,
Josie Walters-Johnston, and Rosemary Hanes.
My debt to the Kinematek of Belgium, under both Gabrielle Claes and
Nicola Mazzanti, remains overwhelming. Through the decades its lively staff
have made working there a profound pleasure. In Antwerp, I developed some
of the book’s ideas in lectures at the Summer Film College. Thanks as ever
to Bart Versteirt, Tom Paulus, Anke Brouwers, Steven Jacobs, David Vanden-
bossche, Stef Franck, Cristina Álvarez López, Adrian Martin, and all the other
cinephiles who make this annual gathering delightful.
For permission to reproduce published material, I’m grateful to Sarah Baxter
of the Society of Authors, Denis Kitchen, and Carl E. Gropper of Will Eisner
Studios, Inc.
Brian Boyd, Peter Brooks, Charlie Keil, William Luhr, Jason Mittell, Geoffrey
O’Brien, and Amanda Shubert offered detailed suggestions on specific chapters,
and Malcolm Turvey provided acute commentary on the first half of the book.
In addition, I much appreciate information, advice, and support provided by
Adam Burr, Charles Barr, Maria Belodubrovskaya, Guy Borlée, Tim Brayton,
Peter Cowie, Jim Danky, Gian Luca Farinelli, Kaitlin Fyfe, Sidney Gottlieb,
Sabine Gross, Mike Grost, Tom Gunning, Gregory Hartig, Scott Higgins,
Glenn Kenny, Richard Koszarski, Casey Long, Paul McEwan, John McCartney,
Michaela Mikalauski, Mark Minnett, Richard Neupert, David Pierce, Predni-
sone, Phil Rosen, Murray Smith, Kat Spring, Janet Staiger, Geoffrey Warda,
Sarah Weinman, and Joseph Wiesenfarth.
Two pen pals have had their own parts to play. Martin Edwards, supreme
expert on the history of mystery, kindly shared early access to his extraordinary
The Life of Crime: Unravelling the Mysteries of Fiction’s Favourite Genre (2022).
Meir Sternberg’s Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction (1978)
and his magisterial articles on narrative poetics have shaped my research for
decades. Correspondence with him has been one of the great pleasures of my
academic life.
 Acknowledgments xiii

Going beyond the call of friendship, Jim Naremore read the entire manuscript.
Twice. He offered the best thing a writer can get: generous encouragement laced
with precise criticism.
Series editor John Belton, another old friend, vigorously supported the book
and drew on his deep knowledge of film history to help sharpen my case. Philip
Leventhal, senior editor, handled this project with a care and dispatch rare in
publishing. Thanks as well to Monique Briones. Columbia University Press
should be proud of them all.
My sisters Diane Verma and Darlene Bordwell, two tough femme fatales, grew
up loving mysteries as much as I did. (Special thanks to Diane for steering me to
Laura Lippman.) My wife Kristin Thompson enjoys mysteries too. Although she
supported this project with love and good humor, she must at times have wanted
the author to finally close the damn case.

✳✳✳

Madison, Wisconsin
Spring 2022
Portions of chapters 8, 9, and 11 have appeared on www.davidbordwell.net, but
they have been revised and updated for publication here.
PE R PL E X I NG
PL OT S
 INTRODUCTION
Mass Art as Experimental Storytelling

It’s not a trick; it’s flair.

—Jonathan Gash

“A hhh! ”
It was Friday, October 14, 1994, and my first encounter with
Pulp Fiction was coming to a close. The two hitmen were relax-
ing in a diner discussing the virtues of pork products. One went to the toilet;
one remained behind (fig. 0.1). Suddenly the scene exploded (fig. 0.2).
Abruptly the audience (me too) realized that the meandering story lines we’d
been tracking were knit into an earlier scene. The collective Ahhh came because
we had seen the beginning of that scene about two hours ago (fig. 0.3). We had
totally forgotten about it.
Why had we forgotten? Openings should be memorable. But the scene was
fairly brief; it came before the credits; it wasn’t alluded to again; the hitmen
weren’t shown as being present; and we had a lot to keep track of in what
followed. So we had the pleasure of finishing off a form that had been left sus-
pended. The movie had a better memory of itself than we did.
Since that Friday night, I’ve become more aware of how popular cinema
has found ways to engage us in nonlinear storytelling. Time juggling and
shifting viewpoints and replayed scenes have long been associated with literary
0.1 Pulp Fiction: While Vincent goes to the toilet, Jules broods on his decision to quit the
criminal life.

0.2 Abruptly, Pumpkin and Honey Bunny leap out of their booth and launch the robbery.

0.3 At the end of the prologue, Pulp Fiction freezes the frame on Honey Bunny screeching
out orders, leaving the action suspended.
 Introduction 3

modernism and the avant-garde. When such formal strategies show up in pop-
ular media, they’re usually treated as being pilfered from highbrow sources.
Sometimes that’s the case, but just as often we find that mass-market narra-
tives have tried in their own ways to push storytelling off the linear path for
several centuries. One task of this book is to show that writers and filmmakers
haven’t shrunk from the search for unpredictable ways to satisfy our narrative
appetites.
Satisfaction is essential. Popular narrative won’t aim at the severity, the
downright difficulty, that we associate with High Modernism. Hollywood
doesn’t have a Woolf or a Faulkner, but neither does most of literature. Much of
what we find among “ambitious” literature and drama reveals efforts to stretch
boundaries, play with conventions, and revise traditional devices in ways that
yield new but not thoroughly disorienting pleasures.
I think that was part of what audiences admired in Pulp Fiction. Apart from
the clever dialogue, the shocking situations (all that heroin, all that blood),
and the self-conscious pop-culture citations, there was an effort to surprise
us through formal ingenuity. Start with the replayed diner scene. A simple
readjustment does the trick. Pull something out of the climax, slide it to the
beginning of the movie, and just let it sit there for a couple of hours. The plea-
sure is that of a piece clicking into place: the pleasure of artistic form, with the
audience given a burst of insight into how the contraption worked. The Ahhh
was in part a recognition that we were abruptly completing the movie’s shape,
collaborating with the filmmakers in refocusing the experience.
This book is about how that process works—about how storytellers in the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries have coaxed audiences into collaborating
with them in filling out form in unusual ways. I hope to show how stories at all
levels of appeal have prompted readers and viewers to acquire skills in grap-
pling with narrative innovations. One genre in particular devotes itself almost
wholly to cultivating an appreciation of formal artifice. That genre rests on the
promise of murder.

An Age of Complex Narratives

Pulp Fiction’s suspension of the diner opening wasn’t the only thing that could
flummox viewers. The film’s labeled chapters introduce us to a batch of charac-
ters whose relations are revealed only gradually.
A more linear and omniscient version of the story action would start with
the two hitmen, Jules and Vincent. They kill nearly all the preppy punks who
have stolen Marcellus Wallace’s briefcase. After Vincent accidentally shoots
their captive Marvin, they clean their car at Jimmie and Bonnie’s home. Then
they visit the diner and interrupt the holdup launched by Pumpkin and Honey
 4 Introduction

Bunny. The following night, Vincent takes Marcellus’s wife Mia out to dinner
and saves her from a heroin overdose. On a later night, Butch Coolidge flees
the prizefight he was to have thrown for Marcellus. The next day, returning to
get his watch from his apartment, Butch finds Vincent there. He shoots Vincent
and flees but then runs into Marcellus. Both men are captured by the sadistic
Zed and Maynard. Butch manages to rescue Marcellus and earn his forgiveness
for not throwing the fight. Butch and his girlfriend Fabienne leave town.
This story world presents a fairly dispersed social network, sixteen people
connected by love, acquaintance, work, or mere accident. But the screenplay
by Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary complicates our access to that world.
Chapter titles tag each episode, although not always at the beginning. There’s
no clearly defined single protagonist; each chapter attaches us to a different
character or pairing of characters. In addition, the plot we encounter scram-
bles the order of events; for instance, scenes showing Vincent alive follow the
scene in which he’s killed. Thanks to time juggling, portions of incidents—the
killing of the preppies, the opening dialogue of Honey Bunny and Pumpkin—
are replayed.
For all its novelty, the film draws on techniques of storytelling that have
been around for millennia. The choices are basic. One protagonist, two, or
several? What story world do the characters inhabit? (Here, the petty under-
world; disorganized crime, we might say.) These are choices about the “what”
of our tale.
But there’s also the “how” of storytelling: How shall we order the story events
in the plot we put before our audience? How shall they be narrated? How shall
we segment the plot into parts (scenes, chapters, time periods)? At the most
fine-grained level, how shall we handle style—the use of language in prose, the
panoply of techniques of the theater, the images and sounds of film? On top
of this, how self-conscious should we make the narration? Should we, as Pulp
Fiction does, tease the audience to assemble the story parts, to play the game of
form with some awareness?
Every filmmaker has to decide on all these matters. Tarantino’s choices
revealed an array of options that other filmmakers took up. The Usual Sus-
pects (1995), The Matrix (1999), Memento (2000), Adaptation (2002), Primer
(2004), and many other films of the 1990s and 2000s signaled a trend of “new
narrative complexity” in American cinema. They had counterparts elsewhere,
as in Chungking Express (1994) and Run Lola Run (1998). Nonlinearity became
a badge of honor; viewpoint breakdowns were welcomed; twists came to be
expected. Form, people started to say, was the new content.1
These films and others changed what storytellers thought a movie (or TV
show or comic book or novel) might be. By 2010 Linda Aronson’s plump man-
ual, The 21st Century Screenplay, could lay out a dizzying menu of narrative
options.2 Beyond “conventional narrative structure” the book distinguishes
 Introduction 5

among parallel narratives, tandem narratives, multiple-protagonist narratives,

double-journey narratives, flashback narratives, consecutive story narratives,
and fractured tandem narratives.
Aronson’s categories can be contested, but her effort marks an important
historical change. Although many eras hosted a wide range of narrative strate-
gies, the very idea of mounting such a baroque taxonomy seemed to have been
demanded by the sheer diversity of recent developments. What made her book
possible was the dazzling range of storytelling possibilities that became promi-
nent in mainstream American cinema.

High, Low, Middle, and Everything in Between

These options weren’t absolutely new. Every fresh wrinkle has precedents. The
fronting of the Pumpkin/Honey Bunny dialogue looks less unusual when we
recall Philip Macdonald’s novel The Rynox Mystery (1933), which begins with
an epilogue and ends with a prologue, or Richard Hull’s Last First (1947), which
presents the book’s last chapter at the beginning. The fracturing of viewpoint,
the replay of key events, the shuffling of temporal order, and the deployment of
flashbacks all have precedents in films, plays, and novels, particularly in stories
of mystery and crime. Just as Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs drew on the heist novel
Clean Break (1955) and the movie The Killing (1955), so Pulp Fiction owes a debt
to the hard-boiled experiments of Richard Stark.
In an earlier book I traced some cinematic sources. The Way Hollywood
Tells It argued that the innovations of the 1990s were a crystallization of possi-
bilities that had been floated throughout American studio filmmaking.3 I sug-
gested in passing that the 1940s was another such era of coalescence. Eventually
I devoted another book, Reinventing Hollywood, to making the case for the
breadth of storytelling experiments in that era.4
While writing the 1940s book, I started to realize that I was tracking an
energy that rippled far beyond cinema. There was a vein of intriguing nar-
rative experiment surging through other mass media. The overall effect was
to create a tradition that informed popular culture in ways I hadn’t seen
acknowledged.
I use the term “popular narrative” to refer to stories that belong to “mass art.”
This is the name Noël Carroll assigns to a cultural production that is created for
large audiences, usually by mechanical reproduction, and that exhibits a high
degree of accessibility.5 It is “exoteric” storytelling, as opposed to the “esoteric”
modes we find in avant-garde literature, film, theater, and kindred media.
In the twentieth century, a long-entrenched story posited esoteric story-
telling, most evident in High Modernism of the 1920s, as the cutting edge of
literary value. The ambitious work, seeking to expose new aspects of the world
 6 Introduction

and complex states of mind, needed techniques more complex than traditional
methods. The thousands of other novels, short stories, and plays were genre
pieces, mass literature, or “lowbrow” art. In cinema, it’s the split between art-
house films and multiplex fare: Three Colors: Blue (1993) versus Jaws (1975). The
distinction encouraged critics to divide their labor. If they paused to examine
an exoteric novel or play or film, they usually focused on its social significance,
as a reflection of cultural attitudes or anxieties. Form and style went unexam-
ined or were ritually denounced as pat formulas.
“They wanted literature to be difficult,” complained J. B. Priestley of the
interwar modernists.6 Some will reply that popular writers want literature to
be too easy. The disparity goes back very far and was spelled out in responses
to nineteenth-century British sensation literature; call it the Collins test. An
anonymous reviewer wrote this of The Woman in White: “Mr. Wilkie Collins is
an admirable story-teller, though he is not a great novelist. His plots are framed
with artistic ingenuity—he unfolds them bit by bit, clearly and with great
care—and each chapter is a most skillful sequel to the chapter before. . . . The
fascination which he exercises over the mind of his reader consists in this—that
he is a good constructor.”7 This distinction between artist and mere storyteller,
the serious book and the page turner, true artistry and facile ingenuity would
haunt critical commentary ever after.
Yet it’s not hard to find examples that fall in between. For example, admirers
of reflexive form, or stories that self-consciously point to their own artifice,
might look to André Gide’s Counterfeiters (1925), an account (among other
things) of a young man’s efforts to write a novel that may be the one we are
reading. But we can find something similar in Arnold Gingrich’s Cast Down the
Laurel (1935). Part 1 consists of a dossier of background material a writer has
supplied to his friend. Part 2 consists of the friend’s finished novella. In Part 3,
the first author criticizes the use the novelist has made of his notes.
Cut-rate Gide, some might say. And bargain-basement Pirandello might be
the accusation slung at All Star Cast, a 1936 novel by Naomi Royde Smith. The
entire action takes place during the performance of a play: The viewpoint is
that of a critic in the audience, but the scenes are rendered as if in a novel. We
remain attached to the critic during the intermissions, when he grabs a drink
and chats with other playgoers. The novel ends with him, exulting in his first
chance to publish a review, reflecting on whether criticism can do justice to the
thrill of the stage. The publisher announced that All Star Cast was a novel “in a
new form.”8
These works are, we might say today, quirky. They require a little getting
used to, and they call attention to their mildly daring forms. But they aren’t
formidable. Their path between hard and easy is usually characterized as mid-
dlebrow. For some purposes, this concept can be helpful, but for my purposes
here, it’s too confining.
 Introduction 7

For one thing, the idea of middlebrow emerged most fully in Anglo-
American mass culture debates of the 1940s. (I trace some implications of that
in chapter 3.) The broader application of the term has increasingly seemed
problematic. The more we explore the actual output of storytelling in all
dimensions—high, low, middle—the less helpful the three-bin model seems.
For one thing, the middlebrow is rather hard to define in terms of narrative
form. It’s more plausible as a description of audience appeal and the forces that
shape taste cultures.9 One scholar, for instance, has defined “the feminine mid-
dlebrow novel” as addressed to a middle-class woman reader.10 Worthwhile
research into the middlebrow register has studied the rise of the Modern
Library, the Book-of-the-Month Club, literary magazines, quality paperbacks,
the British Broadcasting Corporation, and other institutions of distribution
and “aspirational” marketing.11
Part of the problem is our tendency to think with vivid prototypes. The
monumental cultural status of Ulysses, The Waves, and The Sound and the Fury
can lead us to elevate only one model of modernism. But after reading dozens
of novels and plays from the 1900s through the 1930s, I confess that I am unable
to draw firm lines with less forbidding texts. Is the “human fugue” of Aldous
Huxley’s Point Counter Point (1928) middlebrow? Sensed as modern, if not
modernist, at the time, it certainly affords us the comfort of satire.
Staying with literature, how about Evelyn Waugh or Kay Boyle or even F.
Scott Fitzgerald, whose Great Gatsby (1925) is far less fragmentary on the sur-
face than This Side of Paradise (1920), with its embedded playscript? What of
The Grapes of Wrath (1939), the best-seller that deploys John Dos Passos’s mon-
tage principles in less abrasive ways? Or is perhaps Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy
itself a doorstop-sized lump of middlebrow? Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936)
is a modernist classic, but it seems to me to be closer to The Good Soldier (1915)
than to Ulysses. The clipped diction and opaque psychology of Henry Green’s
Party Going (1939) are a little forbidding, but the novel’s action can be grasped
as a revision of the converging-fates network of Grand Hotel (1929).
In short, avowedly modernist works are often more dependent on main-
stream appeals than we notice. Inversely, some exoteric works possess more
intricacy and imagination, not to mention delight, than we find in “difficult”
but pedestrian modernist clones. As Carroll puts it, not wholly as a wisecrack,
what’s so great about difficulty in itself?12
The problem is even more acute if we want to understand cinema. Main-
stream films are made for a larger audience than all but the biggest-selling
novel can hope for, so we should expect that novels considered middlebrow
such as The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and The Godfather (1969) can yield
accomplished movies. And when we get to the pulpy fictions behind Pulp
Fiction, when we look closely at Clean Break and the Stark novels, we realize
that fascinating storytelling strategies are at work there too.
 8 Introduction

I should admit that I succumbed to a version of the three-bin model in my

1940s book, invoking an idea of “middlebrow modernism” prevalent in the mass
media from the 1920s on. It was useful for characterizing certain works, but
now I find it lacking in the nuances I want to pursue here. A better model for
Perplexing Plots, I came to realize, was supplied by the film critics I wrote about
in The Rhapsodes: How 1940s Critics Changed American Film Culture (2016).
In the midst of the high-and-low debates, these writers largely sidestepped
the problems of defining mass culture and high art. Through unusually close
attention to the films’ look and sound, their plots and performances, the crit-
ics could reveal the skill and power of Hollywood cinema. James Agee could
show the achievement of Chaplin in Monsieur Verdoux (1947) without worrying
whether Chaplin had declined from being a popular artist to one straining for
something higher. Otis Ferguson on The Little Foxes (1941) and Manny Farber on
John Huston’s films exposed undisclosed nuances of form, style, and theme in the
Hollywood product. In a series of dazzling readings, Parker Tyler, a homegrown
Surrealist, played with the high/low/middlebrow distinction by showing that
studio cinema harbored aesthetic resources of a wildness not easily available to
avant-garde work. These critics, committed to finding artistry in popular forms,
left it to the reader to decide what label to apply, if any. Why should we feel any
more constrained by the lumpy categories that have hung on for eighty years?
For such reasons, drawing a bright line between popular narrative and its
Other(s) isn’t as useful for my purposes as analyzing congruence and differ-
ence along particular dimensions. The task calls to mind Ludwig Wittgenstein’s
famous effort to specify the concept of “game”: “a complicated network of sim-
ilarities overlapping and criss-crossing.”13 We can trace threads of this network,
find nodes and knots, tease out fine-grained differences. Those analytical dis-
coveries, not gross categorization, can yield the subtlety we should seek. Study-
ing popular narrative through the varying demands of immediate problems
and long-range traditions should lead us to expect a lot of blurred boundaries
between the esoteric and the exoteric. For the sake of clarity, I employ the
modernist label when sketching patterns of change, but I try to sustain a sense
of affinities and creative choices that make such a label provisional or partial.
Everything may not be a mash-up, but as the web slogan suggests, there are a
great many crossovers.

Welcome to the Variorum

Let’s assume, then, that many stories in all media are unusual but not intimi-
dating, “challenging” but still “accessible.” To clarify the situation, we can ask,
“Through what storytelling strategies do all narratives elicit understanding?” In
other words, what can make stories difficult?
 Introduction 9

I’ll assume that one prototypical plot presents characters with traits, dispo-
sitions, bodies, and other equipment. The characters formulate goals and plans,
and they encounter obstacles and conflicts in the course of their efforts. Other
characters serve as adversaries, onlookers, judges, helpers, or meddlers. The
plot resolves into a fairly stable situation but not necessarily a happy ending. By
default, the incidents proceed in chronological (linear) order, and the presen-
tation of the whole narrative, in prose or pictures or audiovisual media, coaxes
us to infer a coherent plot, transmitted reliably. Phases of the action are broken
into well-defined portions (a novel’s paragraphs and chapters, a play’s acts, a
film’s sequences).
The result is what we might call the easiest narrative. It’s an ideal type, not
a primal source. A great many narratives across the world conform to its prin-
ciples, and it’s by no stretch lacking in power. Turning against the critical tra-
ditions that favor roundabout storytelling, Meir Sternberg has shown that this
model of narrative offers abundant opportunities for rich, complex experi-
ences.14 For my purposes, this norm serves as a convenient point of reference
for tracing creative options open to storytellers.15
Of course easiest narratives aren’t all that common, especially in an age of
complex storytelling. All the parameters I’ve mentioned are manipulated by
many of the stories we encounter.16 We can meet characters whose goals are
obscure, whose plans are ineffectual, and who shrink from conflict and turn
into their own worst enemy. The plot may end ambiguously, and we may be
denied information about why things turned out that way. Scenes can be jug-
gled out of order, presented from different viewpoints, or floated as imaginary
or hypothetical. Some of these options are common enough to constitute a
menu of alternatives, at least for some periods or genres. And those in turn can
be rejigged to become more or less difficult.
It’s essential to acknowledge that popular narrative has its own experimental
wing that is not beholden to modernism. When we find some novelty in an
exoteric narrative, especially one labeled middlebrow, we usually think we’re
seeing techniques swiped from the avant-garde but also dumbed down. Cast
Down the Laurel and All-Star Cast, published in the 1930s, seem to exemplify
a calculated repurposing of 1920s modernist techniques for easy assimilation.
But I argue that if we attend to technique we find innovations in genre fiction
that constitute fresh strategies for making stories—strategies built on the con-
ventions of the genre.
Just as the modernist was pushed to challenge the public, exoteric art has its
own pressures toward novelty. Like the avant-garde, our mass-market storytell-
ers have always played with form, and they have been keenly aware of the power
of structure and style. The evidence is in the works, as well as in testimony from
the creators. Genre artists are often more probing and precise about technique
than are academic commentators. Dorothy Sayers, Patricia Highsmith, and
 10 Introduction

Raymond Chandler are acute analysts of their craft. Their comments point us
directly toward an approach that treats storytellers as posing problems shaped
by immediate purposes, weighing means against ends, and finding pragmatic
solutions that can be points of departure for other artisans. Thus does a drive to
novelty fuel a broader tradition.
This book is about how that tradition has changed in Anglo-American pop-
ular storytelling in the twentieth century. To keep things manageable, I look at
the three broad strategies I’ve mentioned in regard to Pulp Fiction: the temporal
structuring of the plot, the use of point of view, and the segmentation of the
narrative into more or less explicit parts. How are the incidents arranged—
chronologically or not? How is story information transmitted (or withheld) via
narration?17 How does the film or play or novel articulate its parts to present
a sharply contoured pattern?18 Examining these matters of form and style can
help explain how storytellers delineate character, build conflict, and arouse our
emotions. Broaching them explicitly will expose, I hope, not only some basic
resources of all storytelling but some distinctive menus of options favored in
certain genres, periods, or places.
By focusing on craft options, we’ll find support for the idea floated by many
scholars in recent years that what was called modernism borrows at least as
much from popular forms as exoteric storytelling takes from prestige narra-
tive. I argue that some modernist innovations in literature, such as nonlin-
ear plotting or dispersal of viewpoint, rework conventions already abroad in
mass-audience fiction. To understand the array of narrative options open to
creators, we must consider that storytelling at all levels of access, from esoteric
to exoteric, relies on techniques of form and style that are revised to yield new
experiences. Some have argued that Ezra Pound’s command for modern writers
to “Make It New” presupposes that the “it” is nothing less than tradition.19
When revisions of tradition proliferate, they create what I call a variorum,
a sort of menu of favored and less-common options. If the easiest narrative
operates as a default, the sanctioned alternatives fan out into a variorum. Linda
Aronson’s 21st-Century Screenplay is in effect an account of the contemporary
screenplay variorum. The variants we find will, inevitably, explore the possi-
bilities of linearity, viewpoint, and other craft strategies charted long ago by
academic thinkers and self-aware practitioners.
Popular narrative can innovate on several fronts. Most of the variety in both
exoteric and esoteric storytelling probably comes from devising fresh themes,
subjects, and story worlds. The narrative artist can treat a subject of current
concern, for example, illegal immigration in the United States, or a fresh theme,
such as the tensions of racial identity, or an unfamiliar setting, such as an immi-
gration post on the Southwest U.S. border. The storyteller will be alert for what’s
sometimes called the zeitgeist: ideas and images floating through the culture.
These can become material for plots and characterization. For Loves Music,
 Introduction 11

Loves to Dance (1991), Mary Higgins Clark realized that a social trend, personal
ads seeking romance, could be the basis of a serial-killer plot.20
Such new material is often enough to sustain a story on its own. The popu-
lar storyteller can use familiar norms of technique to throw the new material
into relief. We “read past” conventions of structure and style to the charac-
ters, settings, and ideas that seem fresh. For example, Nella Larsen’s Passing
(1929) focuses on a woman reflecting on whether a fascinating, manipulative
friend is loyal to her. This situation gains new force by activating conflicts
specific to a community in which some Black women must choose whether
to pass for white.
Inversely, the more esoteric work can use subjects, themes, and new story
worlds to reward us for grappling with more difficult devices. Would Joseph
Conrad’s experiments in time jumping and viewpoint have found a wide read-
ership if they weren’t presenting seafaring adventures set in exotic locations?
It’s probably not accidental that the “art films” of the 1950s and 1960s such as
Hiroshima mon amour, L’Avventura, and À Bout de souffle flaunted sexuality
while exploring unusual formal strategies. Which impulse was the alibi for the
other? My concern is mostly with technique, but throughout what follows I
try to show how that interacts with subject matter, themes, and story worlds to
seize audiences.
Clearly, technical innovations can come from within popular storytelling—
the variorum supplied by the medium or adjacent popular media. Alterna-
tively, we expect that popular storytellers will sometimes innovate by adapting
techniques from “higher” arts, particularly those identified with modernism
or the avant-garde. Those techniques, we say, will be made “accessible.” Part
of my task is to show some concrete ways in which that happens. But we’ll
also find that creators of those more prestigious stories are borrowing from
popular sources as well. It’s all a big swap meet, resulting in a vast number of
hybrids and crossovers as narrative artists seize on and reshape whatever they
find to fulfill their purposes.

Weren’t We Always Smart?

All that from the side of the storyteller. What about the reader or spectator?
The rise of complex stories raises the obvious question of how we learned to
understand and enjoy them.
Steven Johnson has argued that popular culture became “smarter” after the
1970s, as exemplified in the difference between All in the Family and The Simp-
sons.21 Several factors enabled audiences to keep up with the new narrative
demands. There was a rise in IQ scores, a new intellectual flexibility born of
computer games such as Tetris, and a sense that the old popular culture of TV
 12 Introduction

sitcoms and ordinary movies no longer offered much intellectual challenge.

Johnson points to other conditions as well, such as an escalation effect provided
by the internet, which coaxed consumers to dig deeper into the music and sto-
ries they loved.
I find a lot to agree with in Johnson’s case, but historical evidence suggests
that we’ve managed tricky story techniques in many genres for a long time.
In the film Memento (2000), Johnson finds a “blisteringly complex narrative,”
presumably not just because it’s a mystery but because it presents story events
in reverse order. Yet as early as 1914, a drama critic asked why no writers had
pursued the possibility of telling a story backward.22 A little later, several writ-
ers did. Zoë Akins’s play The Varying Shore (1921) begins with the death of a
woman and moves back through her life, ending with her at age seventeen. The
chapters of Rex Stout’s novel Seed on the Wind (1930) follow reverse order in
telling of a woman who wants to bear children outside marriage. In 1934 W. R.
Burnett published the novel Goodbye to the Past, and George S. Kaufman and
Moss Hart staged their play Merrily We Roll Along. Both depended on 3-2-1
chronologies.
The evidence is overpowering that at least since the nineteenth century large
segments of Western audiences could track fairly complex narratives of many
sorts. Maybe long before: Icelandic sagas offer vast genealogies and intricately
braided plots akin to what’s on display in The Lord of the Rings.23 In any case,
in chapter 1, I show that a good deal of early twentieth-century storytelling has
offered the kind of challenges to easy, linear presentation that Johnson finds in
recent years. If we look just at the examples I’ve mentioned, we have to conclude
that some authors in all registers and at many times have made demands not
alien to what we find in Indie Cinema and Peak TV. Yes, people nowadays have
learned to cope with complex narratives. My claim is that across history they’ve
done that before, again and again—provided that certain conditions are met.
What conditions? The story I’d tell, in brief, would go like this.
A storytelling innovation typically must be balanced by cues for comprehen-
sion. The avant-garde artist deprives us of a lot of those cues, but the exoteric
artist can’t afford to do so. Christopher Nolan speaks for this breed when he
says that his first feature, Following (1998), “had structural complexity that they
could understand.”24
To give viewers that understanding, novelty needs a strong dose of famil-
iarity. We know that mass-market storytelling must be accessible to broad
audiences. One task I undertake here is to show some principles of narrative
that can ease audiences’ engagement. I want to “operationalize” accessibility,
to show how concrete technical options, in particular historical circumstances,
have made stories user-friendly.
Access doesn’t equal mechanical predictability. No form is utterly a for-
mula; every story has to be minimally different from others. A mass market in
 Introduction 13

narrative demands novelty, the variorum I mentioned. To generate that variety,

and in response to the pressures of a given task, the storyteller takes from tradi-
tion a schema, a pattern of action or presentation, and revises it in certain ways.
This way of explaining stability and change is pretty common in the arts.
Charles Rosen notes that Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven recast the cadences
of Baroque music by inserting new material that strengthened the process of
key modulation.25 Ernst H. Gombrich, from whom I borrow the term schema,
shows that pictorial patterns serve as inherited points of departure in visual art,
with the revisions of these schemas yielding stylistic differences.26 The “type-
scenes” analyzed by biblical scholars, such as the betrothal, and the folktale
formulas studied by anthropologists, such as the three-wishes tale, function
as recurring patterns that get reworked for the purposes of a particular story.27
Schemas include but aren’t limited to what we usually call influences. Influ-
ences tend to be one-off inputs, but schemas form a body of options felt as part
of tradition.28
Most storytellers are content to replicate their schemas with minimal alter-
ation. If the storyteller wants to revise a schema more drastically, other sche-
mas need to be left untouched. For instance, it’s not accidental that mystery
stories are drawn to tricky shufflings of viewpoint or chronology. A plotline
built on a detective’s present-time inquiry into past events helps us under-
stand when the order of events is rearranged or character perspective changes.
Knowledge of the genre facilitates accessibility, which in turn throws any new
wrinkle into relief.
Genres often rely on story schemas familiar from folktales and fairy stories.29
The road movie embodies the journey schema; the romantic comedy activates
prototype stories of courtship. Memento is a variant of the quest, as is the “Gold
Watch” episode of Pulp Fiction. Other sections of Tarantino’s film incorporate
the prototype of the raid (the hitmen’s invasion), the rescue of the princess
(Vincent’s saving Mia’s life), and the recourse to a wizard to solve a problem
(help from Mr. Wolf in “The Bonnie Situation”). This is not to subscribe to the
supreme power of an Ur-narrative or archetype, such as that of the Hero’s Jour-
ney.30 It’s instead to propose, as the literary theorist Victor Shklovsky suggested,
that storytellers grab schemas opportunistically, weaving them in or bolting
them on to fill out their plots and provoke particular responses.31
Along with genre conventions and familiar action prototypes, a story’s more
distinctive design features can lead us to grasp the novelty. Repetition, empha-
sis, and other aspects of structure and style can make the unfamiliar aspects
of a film or novel manageable. Because beginnings are privileged moments,
Nolan christens Memento with a Polaroid photo decomposing from a clear
image back into a blank surface. Our first encounter with the film announces a
reversed time scheme. Nolan says he asked himself, “How can I help the audi-
ence watch this movie?”32
 14 Introduction

Pulp Fiction helps us in similar ways. At one point, the plot concludes the
Butch story by showing him driving off with Fabienne. We are shifted back
to an earlier story line, the one in which Jules and Vincent seize the briefcase
from the fugitive preppies. At this point, we have to grasp the jump back as part
of the film’s narrational norm. How to firmly establish such a shift? Usually,
through repetition.
Tarantino could simply have cut back to show the fourth preppy popping
out of the bedroom and firing at Jules and Vincent. This is the crucial “miracle”
that will lead to Jules’s decision to give up gang life. Instead, before that assault
Tarantino replays a stretch of the earlier scene in which Jules torments Rex
and delivers his scriptural declaration of vengeance. Now, however, he’s heard
off-screen while the concealed preppy feverishly listens and decides whether to
intervene (figs. 0.4 and 0.5).

0.4 During the interrogation of the preppies, Jules tells his target, “Yes, you did, Rex. You tried
to fuck Marcellus Wallace.”

0.5 At the beginning of the replay, that line and the rest of Jules’s speech is repeated off-
screen as the panicky hidden preppy listens and wonders what to do.
 Introduction 15

Genre factors surely govern this repetition. We can grasp what’s going on
because we know about gunplay in crime movies. But the replay fulfills local
functions too. For one thing, it reminds us of Jules’s reliance on his recitation as
a rote vindication of his crime career. (That reminder will be fresh in our minds
when, in the diner, he reinterprets the biblical passage as a sign to give up the
criminal life.) In addition, there’s suspense. Tarantino could have simply rerun
the earlier scene in the main room and let us be surprised by the concealed
preppy bursting in. Instead, the film gains tension by revealing that there’s
another man in the apartment, attaching us to his viewpoint, and letting us
wonder if he’ll dare to attack. Surprise has been discarded in favor of suspense.
The replay yields a more basic benefit. By repeating the earlier scene,
Tarantino firmly links this moment to what we’ve already witnessed. We can
master the jump back in time—showing us Vincent alive after we’ve just seen
Butch kill him—because it provides continuity with the gunfire we’ve seen
suspended before. Extending the replay reassures us that we are filling in a
coherent line of action.
Repetitions like this help anchor us elsewhere in the film, as when in the
diner climax we hear “Garçon!” somewhat before Pumpkin and Honey Bunny
start their holdup. The more general principle is that genre conventions and
specific choices about story and style, such as redundant cueing, can help us
make sense of fresh revisions of storytelling schemas. The mass-audience sto-
ryteller balances the need for novelty with enough familiarity to ease compre-
hension. When many fictions in many media find ways to do this—when a
variorum takes shape—audiences of any era can keep up. Apart from the diffi-
culties of measuring human intelligence by IQ, the abilities it tries to track are
probably less important than experience with the norms and forms of popular
storytelling at different periods.
The urge to revise inherited devices is part of the tradition. What Holly-
wood screenwriters baptized as the “switcheroo” was the tweaking of a famil-
iar device. In comedy, it was “a new different gag based on an old one.”33
More broadly, popular storytellers search for new ways to achieve established
purposes. In lighting Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman (1947), the cinema-
tographer Stanley Cortez sought to convey the heroine’s disorientation with-
out recourse to subjective imagery. “I didn’t want to do the cliché thing and
show her distorted impressions, but convey her thoughts with abstract play
of lights alone.”34
After innovations are assimilated, they can become familiar and can anchor
fresh novelties. By 1994, Tarantino’s time jumps were accessible to viewers
because of the previous development of storytelling norms in film and other
media. As novelists, playwrights, and filmmakers expand their powers of nar-
rative experiment, audiences become more aware of the variorum. They can
grasp tweaks and twists on what they’ve seen before.
 16 Introduction

Once we understand that chunks of story action can be rearranged, we can

tolerate the absence of certain cues. For example, Memento could have tagged
its episodes with titles emphasizing the reverse chronology, but it doesn’t.
Instead, Nolan resorts to the sort of repetition/redundancy that Tarantino
applied. When we return to a previously suspended scene, Nolan activates our
memory by replaying the tail end of the earlier fragment, with a bit of repeated
sound. Without those overlaps to orient us, the film would have been far harder
to grasp.
Similarly, Nolan complicates his task by incorporating a forward-moving
story line as well. ABC scenes are sandwiched in between the 3-2-1 ones. To
make the parallel structure more comprehensible, the forward-moving time
line is in black-and-white, whereas the retrograde one is in full color. By with-
drawing some cues but supplying fresh ones to compensate, the pleasurably
difficult film teaches us how to watch it.

Intrinsic Norms: Teaching Us the Rules

This process extends across history. Johnson rightly indicates that we learn
as readers and spectators. Once Hill Street Blues encouraged viewers to track
multiple story lines, he suggests, later shows such as The Sopranos and The Wire
could be more elliptical and fragmentary. Whether or not we got smarter, we
did master new skills.
In fact, we’ve all been learning for a long while. Perhaps narrative complexity
builds in waves across history and eddies out in different media at different
rates. For example, although most Hollywood films of the 1930s had resolutely
linear plots, a few films—The Power and the Glory (1933), The Sin of Nora Moran
(1933), and Dangerous Corner (1934)—played with time more daringly.35 By the
1940s, those films’ innovations had become far more common, even deplored
as routine. Their schemas could be further revised by overseas filmmakers such
as Resnais and Godard.
If audiences learn, so do storytellers. After all, they’re part of the audi-
ence. The dynamic give-and-take has been well described by Luis Buñuel’s
screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière: “The makers of films, who are themselves
viewers of films made by others, have a rough idea of whether or not they
will be understood by their contemporaries. The latter, for their part, adapt
(unwittingly, often unconsciously) to forms of expression which briefly seem
daring but quickly become commonplace. . . . It was through the repetition
of forms, through daily contact with all kinds of audiences, that the language
took shape and branched out.”36 The storyteller’s craft includes an awareness
of the “how” cultivated by wide experience of reading, watching, and listen-
ing to narratives.
 Introduction 17

The process again highlights the similarity between exoteric and esoteric
narratives. Popular storytellers, often driven by competition and an urge to
display ingenuity and virtuosity, balance some formal innovations with familiar
schemas. The story more or less explicitly teaches us how to read it through
repetition, structural parallels, tagging, genre conventions, and broad back-
ground knowledge. The process creates what we might call “intrinsic norms,”
patterns we come to expect as typical of this particular story.37 We learn to
expect the retrograde movement of Memento, as well as forward-moving epi-
sodes sandwiched between the 3-2-1 scenes. We get accustomed to the chapter-
ing of Pulp Fiction, so we’re likely to be thrown off when a scrap from early in
the film reappears untagged in the climax.
Meanwhile, avant-gardists also compete to show bold originality. How?
They may digress, take description beyond the requisite sketching of weather
and scenery, or try for greater ellipses. The results may demand of the audi-
ence a keener attention, greater patience, and more recondite knowledge (e.g.,
Ulysses’s recasting the plot of the Odyssey). Still, these strategies steer us toward
comprehension. Like their exoteric counterparts, esoteric storytellers create
intrinsic norms of plot structure, narration, and segmentation to guide us. But
they reserve the right to violate those norms for the sake of creating the diffi-
culty that Priestley deplores.
Like Nolan, modernists help us to understand the story, but after we get
adjusted—after the texture has thinned out a bit—the narrative is likely to
rethicken, to shift the norm and complicate our understanding. In writing
Ulysses, Joyce explained the technical task he set himself as “writing a book
from eighteen different points of view and in as many styles.”38 The polystylistic
impulse was carried on by William Faulkner in As I Lay Dying, which not only
let disparate voices pass the story to and fro but also refreshed the mix with new
“rules”: variations on applying italics, a numbered list, and a sketch of a coffin.
The storyteller may not only transmit changing story events and situations but
also modulate the manner of telling. Sometimes that means contrasting one
mode of narration with another, as when a film shifts from color to black-and-
white imagery. Other times the result can be more demanding, as when Ulysses
destabilizes its intrinsic norm by unpredictable methods of presentation.
The dynamic of schema and revision, intrinsic norms established and played
with, crosses media in part because some narrative techniques are available
to filmmakers, novelists, and playwrights alike. It’s apparent that moviemak-
ers borrowed devices from literature and the stage; flashbacks and alternating
viewpoints emerged in those media long before film was invented. Reciprocally,
in the twentieth century, film techniques found their counterparts in other
media. We often find playwrights and novelists mimicking crosscutting and
voice-over commentary, and even trying for a cinematic style of narration in
dialogue and descriptions of action. I don’t want to push things too far, finding
 18 Introduction

equivalents of “close-ups” in literary details or spotlighted faces on the stage.

But my survey of norms will sometimes point up this two-way traffic between
film and adjacent media. Ideas borrowed from filmmaking remain current in
popular fiction: today’s manuals for aspiring novelists explicitly adopt ideas of
“story arc” and “three-act structure” that screenwriting gurus have popularized
since the 1970s.39
Whatever the medium, the balance of innovation and convention, of schema
and revision, of novelty and familiarity isn’t simply a matter of formal games or
one-off gimmicks. Manipulations of viewpoint, time lines, and segmentation
make a difference in our experience. To see Honey Bunny and Pumpkin return to
the story after a long absence creates a sense of formal neatness. To grope along
Leonard’s backward trajectory through Memento is to undergo an experience
approximating the starts-and-stops of his amnesiac state. The embedded novel in
Cast Down the Laurel is a satire on pretentious fiction, and the surrounding com-
mentary unwittingly mocks the idea that art should faithfully reflect life. All Star
Cast, with its play-within-a-novel, suggests the impossibility of squeezing down
the magic of the theater, with all its incandescence of staging and performing,
into a critic’s few banal column inches. (And the glory is evanescent: a departing
critic sneers, “I give it three weeks.”) These themes aren’t simply stated; they’re
enacted in the very tissue of the artworks and registered by the reader or viewer.
We shouldn’t overrate larger significance, though. Often the theme of a work
of popular narrative is pretty banal. A received opinion or a commonplace idea
may serve as a pretext for a new wrinkle in viewpoint or style.40 Indeed, the
very familiarity of the work’s “message” may keep us comfortable with formal
twists and turns. In Pulp Fiction, Jules Winfield’s conversion is a captivating
touch, but the figure of a reformed bad man goes back at least to early cinema,
to cowboy William S. Hart and crooks deciding to go straight. Tarantino’s more
original triumph is that Ahhh! I shared with others twenty-five years ago.
We won’t fully understand mass storytelling if we don’t grant the power of
sheer, abrupt sensation. The storyteller is ruthlessly opportunistic, seizing on
any pretext to vary a schema or, in the optimal case, produce a tour de force.
Popular narrative aims to provide us with striking experiences; it often leaves
deep meanings to the literati.
Which is not to say that the result is necessarily superficial. Many of the
major issues of great literature are treated with intensity and intricacy in popu-
lar stories. The anxieties of family life are rendered with subtle power in Alfred
Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943), and the tensions of loyalty and betrayal
are finely developed in the spy novels of John le Carré. Much of the mass-audi-
ence storytelling that endures stretches the imagination (Alice in Wonderland),
enlarges the moral compass (Uncle Tom’s Cabin), and demands complex judg-
ment of motive (Hamlet). These qualities depend, nevertheless, on the writer’s
command of craft. That’s my main concern in what follows.
 Introduction 19

The Poetics of Murder

What’s all this got to do with murder? The second main contention of Perplex-
ing Plots is that mystery-based storytelling has cultivated just the sort of inno-
vations I’m tracking. Avant-garde works perplex us by being difficult; popular
stories confound us with puzzles. What I call the “investigation plot” is one of
the most common schemas in fiction and film. We’re urged to follow a char-
acter who is asking what happened or who did what to whom or how a guilty
party may be exposed. A more general pressure of mystery, the way a story
makes us notice that something important is unknown, extends far beyond the
investigation plot. Dickens, Balzac, Henry James, Fitzgerald, and other major
writers invested their stories with enigmas.
Everybody has secrets, and storytellers can handle them in various ways. If
we know all the secrets that the characters are keeping from others, we have
classic melodrama. We wait for the wronged wife to learn of her husband’s infi-
delity. Alternatively, we may not know that there’s a secret, and it gets revealed
by accident—the melodramatic reversal or recognition, such as when the hero
discovers who his father is.
But sometimes we’re nudged to realize that there are secrets but not told
what they are. As Shklovsky suggested, we know there’s something we don’t
know. If a character has the task of discovering the secret, we have a classic
mystery. It might be a detective story or a thriller in which a person in dan-
ger must seek out the source of the threat. Sometimes the mystery involves
following a character bent on committing a crime; in that case, the question
is whether the effort will succeed. In most of these plots, murder is not far off.
Thrillers and detective tales, I maintain, were a major way in which popu-
lar culture allowed ambitious storytellers to experiment with narrative. They
became a training ground for audiences’ development of sophisticated skills
in understanding and enjoying complex fictions. Readers and viewers learned
to grasp unusual patterns of plotting, shifts of viewpoint, nonlinear time lines,
and unusual ways of breaking up parts. From Edgar Allan Poe through Arthur
Conan Doyle to Dashiell Hammett and beyond, writers of crime and detective
fiction have created a rich body of conventions that audiences have mastered,
and those have resurfaced in plays, films, and other media.
Why focus on mystery plots rather than on romances or westerns or tales
of horror or fantasy? Those genres can harbor mysteries, but they don’t have
to do so. Their conventions bear chiefly on the story worlds they present. A
prototypical romance, no matter how it’s told, centers on the vicissitudes of
a couple in love. A western presents life on a frontier, with all the hopes and
dangers that affords. A fantasy or horror story may involve a mystery, but it
need not. In many cases, straightforward quest tales or adventure scenarios
will do the trick.
 20 Introduction

In contrast, a mystery story, because it’s predicated on announcing that

there’s something we don’t know, puts the act of storytelling at the center of
its concerns. A mystery is defined not by its story world but by something
structural: the presence of a “hidden story” that must be brought to light.
Matters of form are fundamental to the genre; the how of storytelling is its
central convention. Novelty and innovation will come through exploring that
convention. Mystery novels are ingenious, Ben Hecht points out, “because
they have to be.”41
Often, the ingenuity is flaunted. Above or behind a mystery story’s narration,
we’re often prompted to posit the figure of a duplicitous author. This sense is
the basis of what the mystery novelist John Dickson Carr called “the Grandest
Game,” as conducted by “the old serpents, the gambit-devisers and trap-bait-
ers.” “It is a hoodwinking contest, a duel between author and reader. ‘I dare you,’
says the reader, ‘to produce a solution which I can’t anticipate.’ ‘Right!’ says the
author, chuckling over the consciousness of some new and legitimate dirty trick
concealed up his sleeve. And then they are at it—pull-devil, pull-murderer—
with the reader alert for every dropped clue, every betraying speech, every
contradiction that may mean guilt.”42 The author becomes a genial but crafty
puppeteer daring us to see the strings.
At the limit, there may be rewards for playing the game. Rereading the
book or replaying the DVD may yield a surprise that rewards fan connois-
seurship and celebrates the storyteller’s virtuosity. How many first-time view-
ers noticed that Pulp Fiction’s climactic diner encounter was teased in the
backgrounds of decentered shots (figs. 0.6 and 0.7)? The first can hardly be
called a hint because a first-time viewer has no reason to pay attention to that
white T-shirt; the foreshadowing could hardly be more inconspicuous. The
later shot could have made the couple far more visible, but I suspect most
viewers don’t notice them.43 Such all but undetectable details are the opposite
of the redundancy that smooths our passage through the plot. As enticing
fillips, they enable popular storytelling to deepen the bond between creator
and public.
Does every mystery reader enter fully into this meta-game? Probably not.
But the game premise shapes the very construction of the story. The demands
of the genre push storytellers to be clever even if not every reader or viewer
will appreciate all the flash and filigree. As one screenwriter put it, “It’s not
necessary that every viewer understand everything, only that everything can
be understood.”44 Part of that understanding involves the awareness that the
author is hovering over the text waiting for us to fail. This tension need not be
part of the contract we sign with other genres.
Mysteries’ emphasis on formal innovation suggests a larger argument about
what’s valuable in popular literature. Critical tradition tends to split character
from plot and valorize works that explore personality, as we say, “in depth.” To
 Introduction 21

0.6 During the prologue, while Honey Bunny questions Pumpkin, Vincent can be glimpsed
in the background making his way to the toilet. At this point we have no idea who he is.

0.7 In the climactic diner scene, the couple is dimly visible in the lower left when Vincent
leaves Jules. Spectators are probably concentrating on Vincent’s gesture and are unlikely to
notice the out-of-focus background figures. But Tarantino has “played fair,” and viewers
can check back to figure 0.6 to see what they missed.

treat characterization as being shaped by the pattern of incidents and the strat-
egies of disclosure seems to do violence to what we prize about people. Yet plot,
conceived as a dynamic process of guiding our attention and expectations, fur-
nishes an experience of intrinsic power too. Ever since Aristotle argued for plot
as the overarching dynamic of our engagement with narrative, we’ve realized
that a well-wrought plot has its own artistic value. By studying the architecture
of a story’s action, its trajectory and its breakup into parts, and our gradual
access to it through techniques of narration, such as point of view, we can better
understand the enduring appeal of popular storytelling. Again, mystery plots
offer a very convenient access point.
 22 Introduction

One more reason I’ve focused on the mechanics of this genre bears on influ-
ence. Mystery techniques have benevolently infected all other modes of story-
telling, and at all levels. In the 1940s, Hollywood was especially prone to build
plots around mystery. The biography Citizen Kane (1941) is framed as an inves-
tigation. A suburban novel about infidelity (Letter to Five Wives, 1948) became
a movie whodunit, or rather a who-was-it-done-to.45 The psychological drama
Sunset Boulevard (1950) begins by showing a corpse floating in a swimming
pool. These and hundreds of other fictions make the study of mystery-based
storytelling one road to understanding the dynamics of popular narrative gen-
erally. Today, when prestigious novels unashamedly build their plots around
crime and detection, the study of this tradition seems especially worthwhile.
Tarantino borrows a lot from pulp fiction, but so, it turns out, does nearly
everybody else.
It’s for this reason that the bulk of this book provides a selective survey of
conventions and innovations in mystery-based storytelling across the twentieth
century. In the classic whodunit, the suspense thriller, and the hard-boiled
detective story, we find ample evidence for the versatility of popular story-
telling. These traditions foster skills that have enabled readers and viewers to
understand and enjoy Pulp Fiction and other examples of the new narrative
complexity and as well as scores of other stories. In addition, the three story
types I concentrate on display family resemblances, the overlapping affinities
that Wittgenstein picked out. The classic sleuth story, premised on an inves-
tigation, became the basis of a different sort of tale, the hard-boiled mystery.
Likewise, the thriller often relied not only on mystery but on active investiga-
tion, especially when the viewpoint is focused on the killer’s would-be victim.
Critical tradition distinguished these three traditions through differences in
historical period and national circumstances, but these genres, or subgenres if
you like, have freely mingled with one another, which has boosted our ability to
master their narrative techniques.
No two of us have read all the same novels, seen all the same plays, watched
all the same movies. But thousands of films and books and plays have amassed
a body of conventions that each of us has tapped into from our own points of
entry. At certain points in history, those conventions have accumulated in a
body of options and expectations, creating a critical mass available to lots of
viewers. Through schema and revision, we all gain access to these conventions.
The variorum lives in us. Whether youngsters first meet “multiple-draft” nar-
ratives in Groundhog Day (1993) or Run Lola Run (1998) or Source Code (2011)
or Happy Death Day 2U (2018) or Palm Springs (2020), viewers are developing
skills in understanding nonlinearity. An older fan might have encountered the
same possibilities in Dangerous Corner (1932).
Someone might argue that still other genres have laid down storytelling
innovations that have become central for our time. Science fiction and fantasy
 Introduction 23

would seem to be just as important today as the mystery story. I agree, and
studies of those popular traditions in this light would be very welcome. But
I’ve excluded them from my survey because, as with the romance and the
western, most challenges proffered by these mega-genres are based on world
making. Science fiction tales motivate time travel or parallel realities by pos-
iting some speculative technology operative in the story world. Similarly, the
breaches of causality or time in a fantasy are created by magic, the work of wiz-
ards, witches, or enchanted objects. In contrast, only mystery-based plotting
takes as a sine qua non the fundamental manipulations of time, viewpoint, or
cause and effect.
This isn’t to say that duplicitous narration is ruled out of these other genres;
the film Arrival (2016) and its source (“Story of Your Life,” 1998) show some
possibilities. But again, such maneuvers derive from the mystery tradition. On
the whole, surprise in science fiction and fantasy depends centrally on imagi-
nation and awe; surprise in mystery-mongering relies on realizing that you’ve
been had.

✳✳✳

This is an essayistic book. That term usually translates as “I haven’t read all
the literature,” and it certainly holds good here. What follows is, first, an effort
to chart some major principles of popular storytelling. Then I trace how the
mystery-based plot and its variants have enlarged the techniques available to
authors and the skills cultivated by audiences. I range across novels, plays, films,
and radio drama because these media show important exchanges in forms and
stylistic options.
My concern is less with interpreting the books, plays, and movies I encoun-
ter than in revealing their design. In an age that puts a premium on finding
hidden meanings, especially cultural significance, my study of craft practices
might seem plodding. For most academic critics, stories seem largely made of
ideas, often objectionable ones. For me, they’re made primarily of patterns—
patterns of events, patterns of particles of the medium (words, shots). Ideas
come along, of course, sometimes as materials that can provoke our interest.
Throughout, however, subjects and themes are sculpted by the pressures of
design choices. I treat storytellers as narrative engineers, subject to the con-
straints and compromises facing every artificer. I hope to show that analyzing
technique is a useful way to understand how popular narrative wins the hearts
and minds of its public.46
The book begins with three chapters that survey some major Anglo-Ameri-
can narrative strategies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ini-
tially, I trace how some prime techniques developed from prose fiction through
the “proto-modernists” James and Conrad. My account can’t do justice to the
 24 Introduction

subtleties of these writers’ work; I simply try to show how a schema/revision

account sheds light on their contribution to the tradition I’m tracing. Alongside
these canonical figures, chapter 1 traces the parallel development of idiosyn-
cratic popular narrative forms, focusing on the “formalist” streak that emerged
strongly in 1910s mass culture. D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) is my principal
example in film, but there are many others in adjacent media.
In chapter 2, I discuss assimilations and diffusion of some storytelling strate-
gies identified with the “High Modernism” of Joyce, Wolfe, and Faulkner. Again,
I can’t do justice to the richness of these writers’ achievements. I simply try to
show some of their efforts to complicate easy understanding, and I point out
ways narrative artists seeking a broader audience modified the innovations—
call them “tactics of accessibility.” At the same time, I propose that modernism
owes a good deal to earlier traditions, and I try to show some concessions made
by even the most demanding modernists to comprehensibility—an angle of
analysis that’s often neglected. I end by pointing out some ways that modernist
aesthetics merged with popular genres during that period.
In chapter 3, I focus on the 1940s and argue that these years consolidated
narrative conventions in ways that would drive innovation in later decades.
Many strategies of plotting and narration, along with mystery-based storytell-
ing, were now established as traditions that could be recast by a wide range of
artists—and were, from the 1950s onward. Examples from novels, plays, and
films (e.g., Citizen Kane) illustrate the lively exchange of nonlinear techniques
across media. As before, my survey includes little-known works as well as mile-
stone ones.
Throughout I use the fundamental categories of temporal linearity, point of
view, and segmentation—all enduring concepts of narrative analysis that were
brought to explicit awareness during this period. The second part of the book
surveys these dimensions as they were mobilized in three major genres of mys-
tery fiction during the interwar years.
Those genres are the “Golden Age” whodunit (chapter 4), the suspense
thriller (chapter 5), and the hard-boiled detective story (chapter 6). I sketch
each genre’s narrative conventions before going on to show how innovations
in technique have fulfilled and deepened them. My analysis of form and style
reveals the achievements of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Mary Roberts
Rinehart, Alfred Hitchcock, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and other
well-known figures. At the same time, I survey many lesser-known plays, nov-
els, and films. As with “literary” novels such as Seed on the Wind and All Star
Cast, we can find mysteries that offer intriguing experiments that reveal the
versatility of popular storytelling.
Chapters 7 and 8 focus on the changes in the three major mystery genres
during the 1940s, along with consideration of how their new versions consol-
idated premises for later storytellers. Both chapters consider mystery writers’
 Introduction 25

efforts to merge conventions of the whodunit, the thriller, and the hard-boiled
tale, resulting in crossovers similar to those that chapter 3 traces in popular
storytelling generally.
The first two sections of the book run on parallel historical tracks. Writers
and dramatists and filmmakers of the turn of the century crafted new storytell-
ing norms and bolstered those with a stated “method” that defined best prac-
tices. Workers in the emerging genres of mystery fiction did the same thing.
While modernist authors defined extremes of experimentation and declared
new premises for advanced storytelling, writers of detective stories and sus-
pense thrillers were likewise pushing for trickier but still ingratiating exper-
iments in the poetics of murder. By the 1940s, High Modernism was on the
wane, and the most prestigious authors and playwrights aimed at some degree
of accessibility. Creators attuned to a wider audience cast about for novelty in
a competitive mass culture. Accordingly, storytellers in the mystery genres put
forth blends of many traditions that created a dizzyingly pluralistic storytelling
ecosystem. That era, I argue, laid the foundations for the “crossover culture” we
now inhabit.
Part 3 samples later developments in the mystery genre through a string of
case studies. Most of these are acknowledged classics of the postwar period,
and they demonstrate the formal richness of a tradition’s variorum. A compari-
son of Erle Stanley Gardner and Rex Stout (chapter 9) sheds light on how verbal
style can create experiments in narration. Setting Patricia Highsmith alongside
Ed McBain (chapter 10) shows the powers of restricted and unrestricted view-
point, the latter being illustrated in the development of the police procedural
subgenre. Chapter 11, on the heist plot, allows us to appreciate the bold intri-
cacy of the Parker novels by Richard Stark (né Donald E. Westlake), which play
variations on geometrical plot structure.
Funded by the wealth of creative options on display in these case studies,
chapter 12 returns to the complex narratives of the 1990s and after. Tarantino’s
work stands at the center of that inquiry because he explicitly borrows from
canonical 1950s crime stories, but many other films from the last twenty-five
years both invoke and reactivate the traditions I’m tracing.
The last case study considers yet another genre transformation, the changes
in the domestic thriller in the late 2000s and since (chapter 13). In the churn of
schema and revision, in the quick branching out that Carrière mentions, Gone
Girl as both book and film is exemplary. It shows that the investigation plot
can be merged with the woman-in-peril schema and subjected to the play of
deceit and unreliability set in motion a hundred years earlier by the Golden Age
detective story. Reciprocally, Gone Girl set off a burst of gynocentric thrillers
that invited a reading public to play complex narrative games. The contem-
porary thriller shows that tricky strategies of playing with time and viewpoint
and chopping the plot into bits are still thriving. This trend furnished mass
 26 Introduction

storytelling with a variorum that continues to engage audiences in the sort of

fan connoisseurship that has always sustained the mystery genre.
My tour of mystery fiction, drama, and films is far from comprehensive.
It couldn’t hope to compete with the classic in-depth histories of the genre
offered by Howard Haycraft, Julian Symons, and most recently and compre-
hensively Martin Edwards.47 Nor can my account of the mystery literature rival
the many useful surveys of contemporary research.48 My aims are tailored to
other concerns. I want to delineate some core conventions of mystery-driven
storytelling—its poetics or “principles of making”—and trace how those have
drawn on some basic narrative methods and how, in certain times, that poetics
has shaped adjacent genres.49
A brief conclusion points toward some current evidence of the enduring
appeal of the techniques of popular storytelling while also indicating the con-
tinued vitality of the poetics of murder. I’ve been asked whether I think that
classics of mystery fiction and film are “as good as” the masterpieces of James,
Conrad, and their successors. I’d argue that the best works of popular storytell-
ing are good of their kind. In turn, decisions about what kinds are superior to
others will depend on weighing various criteria, such as thematic implication
versus direct emotional appeal. In addition, we ought not to ignore the role
of playful delight. In all the arts, our canons make room for wit, surprise, and
sparkle: Petrushka as well as Le sacre du printemps, Rauschenberg as well as
Anselm Kiefer, P. G. Wodehouse as well as Theodore Dreiser. If we welcome the
thrill of artifice and the virtuosities of assured craft, the best of popular story-
telling more than measures up.
PART I
 CHAPTER 1

THE ART NOVEL MEETS

1910s FORMALISM

B
lanche Warren has learned that Hugh Sainsbury, who’s about to
run off and marry Blanche’s sister, is already married. She con-
fronts Hugh in the forest; they quarrel; he’s shot. Now Blanche is
on the run and has taken refuge in the office of her sweetheart Harlan Day. Day,
a lawyer, is determined to defend her and reveal the true murderer.
This is the premise of Ralph E. Dyar’s 1919 play, A Voice in the Dark. Although
it ran for half a year in New York, the script was never published and only a
fragment of the film version survives.1 Still, this forgotten potboiler can teach us
a fair amount about the resourcefulness of popular storytelling at a particular
point in history.
In Day’s law office, three witnesses recount what they know, and flashbacks
set off by blackouts reenact past scenes for the audience. First, Mrs. Maria Lyd-
iard tells of the quarrel between Blanche and Hugh in the forest glade. Hugh is
shot, and Blanche foolishly picks up the pistol before dropping it and running
away. After Mrs. Lydiard leaves, Blanche tells Day her version of events, and
that is replayed as well. Finally, the shabby Joe Crampton, who sells newspapers
at the train station, tells of overhearing a brother and sister meeting there; the
woman confesses to killing Hugh. Thanks to Joe’s testimony, the real murderer
is revealed.
Dyar saw his play as part of a trend employing “the ‘cut-back’ technique of
the cinema.”2 He added a formal premise given in the play’s original title: Look
and Listen. The first witness, Mrs. Lydiard, is deaf. As a result, the flashback
scene of Blanche and Hugh in the forest, ending with his death, is replayed
 30 PA RT I

without dialogue. The players’ lips move, but the audience does not hear what
they say.
The second replay, Blanche’s testimony to Harland Day, is given as a full
reenactment. After her quarrel with Hugh, he is shot down behind some rocks.
Unfortunately, neither we nor Blanche can see the killer.
At the climax, the third flashback is recounted by Joe Crampton, the news-
paper seller. Joe happens to be blind. The reenactment of his scene at the rail-
way station is played out on a darkened stage. We in the audience can only hear
the conversation between a man and his unnamed sister. Who is she? When
we return to Day’s office in the present, the killer is revealed as Amelia, Mrs.
Lydiard’s caregiver and Hugh’s first wife. She’s arrested, and Blanche and Day
are united as a couple. The play ends with a chorus from the two witnesses who
can’t fully grasp the scene we’re witnessing: “If I could only see!” “O, if I could
only hear!”3
A Voice in the Dark displays strategies of storytelling that are central to the
traditions I am considering. For one thing, it presents a nonlinear time, thanks
to flashbacks from present-time occurrences, but that was not unique. The
flashback that was common in film and prose fiction had been exploited on
the stage in Innocent and On Trial (both 1914) and elaborated in DeLuxe Annie
(1917) and Yes or No (1917). In 1919 alone, there was Smilin’ Through; For the
Defence, another trial play with reenactments, and Moonlight and Honeysuckle,
in which a woman courted by three men tells each one a different story about
her past. One critic was already complaining about “those modish second acts
that take place before the first.”4
The broken time line is motivated by another fundamental technique: pat-
terning narration, or the flow of story information. Dyar conceives it as a mat-
ter of restricted point of view. The events in the present, the witnesses visiting
Day’s office, are observed objectively. But Dyar revises the emerging flashback
schema by making the embedded testimony strongly subjective. Characters’
dreams had been exhibited on the stage before, and characters had often
reported what they witnessed. But A Voice in the Dark dramatizes sensory dif-
ferences in the witnesses’ accounts. Stagecraft makes palpable incidents as seen
by a deaf woman and as heard by a blind man.
Dyar’s play also shows the importance of overall organization. The play’s
basic structure is familiar to us: an investigation into past events, building to
a crisis, and a revelatory climax. Many schemas fulfill this pattern: the police
interrogation, trial testimony, examination of written records, and so on. The
story arc, its internal structure of incident, might be packaged in various ways.
The hidden story might be brought into the present in small bits, bigger chunks,
or large-scale scenes. Internal divisions into scenes and episodes can be accen-
tuated by external segments, such as an “exoskeleton” provided by parts or
chapters in a book or large-scale acts in a play.
 The Art Novel Meets 1910s Formalism 31

Dyar has tidily segmented his plot. A Voice in the Dark frames the replays as
symmetrical blocks, each act designed for a specific response. The pantomime
reenactment of the murder coaxes the audience to imagine what the characters
might be saying. The central flashback, presenting both sight and sound, biases
us toward assuming that Blanche is innocent. It gains further interest by con-
firming or disconfirming what we thought was said in the silent flashback.5 The
final reenactment presenting what Joe overheard in the station uses the dark-
ness to delay revealing the killer’s identity. The audience must listen keenly for
any clue—most likely a voice we’ve heard in earlier scenes.
A Voice in the Dark is no masterpiece, but it shows that workers in popular
media were prepared to self-consciously tinker with basic resources of nar-
rative. Techniques of narration, time structure, and segmentation had been
brought to the consciousness of all storytellers, not just the most ambitious or
prestigious novelists and playwrights. For instance, Dyar’s play embodies issues
of point of view explored by Henry James and Joseph Conrad and articulated
in 1910s literary criticism. Proscenium theater could not exactly render a single
angle of vision as a painting or film shot could. It couldn’t evoke a character’s
sensory awareness through rich prose. By making one witness deaf and another
blind, and then subjecting the audience to those conditions, Dyar offers an
approximation to a novel’s restricted viewpoint. For all its obviousness, the play
tries to present three Jamesian “centers of consciousness” on the stage.
In its willingness to experiment with basic storytelling techniques in a clear-
cut, accessible manner, A Voice in the Dark reveals some prospects of popular
narrative and is surprisingly typical of many such experiments at the time. And
creaky though it looks today, A Voice in the Dark isn’t wholly alien to us. Its play
with point of view looks forward to a century of other popular experiments.
Mrs. Lydiard’s first, silent version of the crime anticipates Rear Window (1954)
and Blow-Up (1966) in teasing us with ambivalent action viewed at a distance.
The later blacked-out scene, with only dialogue guiding our understanding,
has its descendants in the audiotaped replays of The Conversation (1974) and
Blow-Out (1981). One could almost imagine a contemporary film adapting the
play, using silent and blank-screen episodes. Popular storytelling is a tradition
constantly revising familiar schemas and reviving even offbeat ones.

The Dangers of Baggy Monsters

The second half of the nineteenth century saw a huge growth in the reading
public in the United States and the United Kingdom. Responding to this new
audience, publishers produced vast amounts of fiction. Magazines and newspa-
pers published not only short stories but serialized novels, which fostered long-
form plotting.6 Serialized stories as well as original ones could be printed in a
 32 PA RT I

two- or three-volume edition and sold to lending libraries and rented to eager
readers. That edition might then be reissued in a single volume. By the turn of
the century, many novels had sold hundreds of thousands of copies, with some
reaching sales of a million.7
Henry James worried that the dominance of “the voluminous prose fable”
was a danger to the novel as an artistic form.8 The average novel was shapeless,
offering “a vast formless featherbediness.”9 He was not evidently thinking of the
wildness of Moby-Dick (1851), which constantly violates Ishmael’s viewpoint
and adds in travelogues, encyclopedic accounts of whaling technique, and
scenes in playscript form. Far more sedate works attracted his censure. James
attacked Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd as “a simple ‘tale,’ pulled and
stretched to make the conventional three volumes.”10 Eliot’s Middlemarch was,
despite arresting details, “an indifferent whole,” and an Arnold Bennett novel
displayed “a great dump of its material.”11 James famously placed War and Peace
in the company of the “large loose baggy monsters.”12 If such venerated masters
failed in organization, what would one say about the run-of-the-mill three-
decker, with its seesaw plots, endless authorial interjections, and shameless
padding? One author obliged her publisher by throwing in a train accident.13
It’s a premise of popular narrative that form follows format. A TV network
sitcom builds its plot within a fixed running time and plans peaks of action
around commercial breaks. Similarly, a three-decker book might use the vol-
umes to mark major segments; Pip’s great expectations develop in three stages.
Some authors imposed a local pattern on the narration. Dinah Maria Craik’s
A Life for a Life (1859) is throughout a “he said/she said” account, alternating
extracts from a woman’s diary with the laboratory journals of the man she
loves. Dickens used a more daring alternation in Bleak House (1852), with chap-
ters in first-person narration from Esther Summerson followed by chapters
presenting a more omniscient account told in third person.
Much of this output consisted of variants of sentimental and Gothic fiction.14
These strains fed into what was called sensation fiction, novels of secrets and
suspense filled with looming threats to innocent, ordinary, bewildered people.15
The prototypes were devised by Wilkie Collins, whose The Woman in White
(1860) and The Moonstone (1868) were intricately plotted to fill out three vol-
umes and end each volume on a strong cadence. Reviewers and readers were
particularly engaged by Collins’s disciplined handling of what we might call the
dossier form.16
The epistolary novel as pioneered by Samuel Richardson in Pamela; or, Vir-
tue Rewarded (1740) provided a robust schema that Craik and others exploited
and revised. A story told through an exchange of letters became a common
resource of the novelist. Collins went further in creating the “casebook,” a novel
presented as more or less sworn testimony, written out by a witness or partici-
pant. It offered opportunities for a virtuoso turn.
 The Art Novel Meets 1910s Formalism 33

While devising distinctive voices for multiple narrators, the author could
arrange the shifting viewpoints to intensify mystery. Clues could be dropped
in minor characters’ casual mentions, and incidents could be repeated from
different viewpoints, growing in significance or uncertainty as they reappear.
Collins’s viewpoint characters have no privileged purchase; as a reviewer noted,
the narrators are as befuddled as the readers.17 The casebook format could also
spring perspectival surprises. At a crucial point in The Woman in White, Mar-
ian Halcolmbe’s diary is besmirched by a note from the villain, Count Fosco.
We are startled to learn that he’s been reading it “along with us.”
Collins’s two dossier masterpieces immensely influenced mystery fiction.
For example, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) uses an array of documents to create
suspense, with diary and letter extracts sometimes skipping back in time to
delay certain revelations. The casebook model endured into the twentieth cen-
tury in works by Dorothy Sayers, Vera Caspary, and many writers of domestic
thrillers. The casebook provides both a superficial realism and a clear-cut exo-
skeleton, but its rigidity grated on some. Anthony Trollope famously deplored
“the taste of the construction” in Collins’s work.18 But Collins understood that
a taste for felt construction, for flagrant artifice, was something audiences
enjoyed about mysteries. It is there, however ostentatiously, in Dyar’s A Voice
in the Dark. Treating a mystery as a playful experience of form would become
central to popular storytelling.
James, although passionate about literary construction, was among the doubt-
ers. Although admitting Collins’s ability to show terror in ordinary surround-
ings, he saw The Woman in White, with its “general ponderosity” as offering a
modern version of the endless letters in Richardson’s Clarissa; or, The History
of a Young Lady (1748). Collins’s novels were “monuments of mosaic work,” not
tightly designed compositions.19 James admired Flaubert and Turgenev for the
compact control of their stories. They showed that the novel could display the
subtle rigor of a painting, James’s reference point for exacting artistry.
Whether recounted in first or third person, whether split into documents
or simply rendered in chapters, the great run of novels left James convinced
that a more organic, less mechanical approach to form would lift prose fic-
tion to a higher artistry. Every idea required its own expressive strategies. The
artist-novelist needed a “method,” a “ruling theory,” a set of principles that
guided handling of unique données, or story germs.20 In his work and his crit-
ical writing, James proposed an explicit poetics of fiction. That includes some
rich reflections on narration, particularly as it involves point of view and ideas
about structure and segmentation. Storytellers had been using these techniques
intuitively for centuries, but in the 1910s Anglophone writers became conscious
of them to a new degree.
The “scenic picture,” as James sometimes called it, demanded that the
writer wring all the dramatic and emotional potential out of a situation. Both
 34 PA RT I

summaries of action and specific scenes, or “discriminated occasions,” could

gain point and purpose if treated with the concreteness of actions on the stage.
“Dramatise, dramatise!” he urged.21 And like a painting, the writer’s scenic pic-
ture was inevitably rendered from a chosen viewpoint, a character who acts as a
“center of consciousness,” a perspectival stance on the action. The moment-by-
moment intensity of a play could on the page become a drama of psychological
pressure, giving access to character interiority denied to the theater. The choice
of that center of consciousness could yield delicate effects not yet achieved by
the fiction of the day.
James’s 1898 novella, “In the Cage,” from one angle is the story of a clandes-
tine affair between Lady Bradeen and the out-of-pocket Captain Everard. Most
novelists would have concentrated on the love triangle and its effects on the
lovers, perhaps through a third-person moving-spotlight treatment shifting
among the couple, the unsuspecting husband, and servants and other periph-
eral characters. Alternatively, because the couple communicates through tele-
grams to friends who help arrange their secret meetings, the dossier schema
could give us shifting first-person accounts of action. James, however, focuses
the action through the unnamed young telegraph clerk behind the counter in
a caged corner of a grocery shop who prepares the messages that the lovers
send to their enablers. She has her own life, populated by a helpless mother,
an older female friend striving to serve high society, and Mr. Mudge (no first
name given), a grocer who expects the heroine to marry him when his pros-
pects improve.
The young woman becomes fascinated by the glimpses she gets of the affair.
She enjoys helping it along, sharing a complicity with Everard, and compar-
ing the affair judiciously with the romances in popular fiction. She comes
from poverty and is sensitive to the couple’s careless wealth, but she neither
denounces them nor feels particularly envious. She haunts the street Everard
lives on, and one evening he sees her there and they have their first conver-
sation outside the shop. She blurts out, “I would do anything for you” before
acknowledging that helping him expands her world. “All I get out of it is the
harmless pleasure of knowing.”
Whether the knowing is altogether harmless is for the reader to judge. The
protagonist is admirable in her sensitivity, even in her rashness, but she fails
to know certain things. It’s a sort of mystery story, with her as the investigator
working with tantalizing “clues” (James’s word) that yield only vague outlines,
even at the end. By then, marriage with Mr. Mudge looms.
It might seem that this character’s restricted knowledge would be best ren-
dered in a first-person account, like that of the barber in Ring Lardner’s short
story “Haircut.” And James’s method has often been taken as an urge to muffle
the voice of an external, “authorial” narrator. In reaction to the chatty com-
mentary of Fielding or Thackeray, some critics wanted the author to present
 The Art Novel Meets 1910s Formalism 35

things with great detachment. Stephen Dedalus declares his commitment to

this emerging premise when he says that the author, like God, “remains within
or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence,
indifferent, paring his fingernails.”22 At the limit, the narration could become
the “camera eye” that would be associated with Ernest Hemingway and the
hard-boiled school.
James and his acolytes will not go so far. The third-person narration of “In
the Cage” avoids moralizing, but it does widen our understanding by describ-
ing the minute fluctuations of the situation in ways the clerk couldn’t. The
encounter in the street, as tense as any playwright could wish, is saturated with
emotional implication. When Everard promises to visit her cage every day, she
remonstrates with him, “How can you?” James renders the moment in words
that she couldn’t summon up if she were telling the tale. “He had, too mani-
festly, only to look at it there, in the vulgarly animated gloom, to see that he
couldn’t; and at this point, by the mere action of his silence, everything they
had so definitely not named, the whole presence round which they had been
circling became a part of their reference, settled solidly between them.”23
What that “whole presence” exactly is (obligation? the risk of exposing him?
the temptation of love? a fantasy of conspiracy? her recognition of his fumbling
gratitude?) remains unspecified. The emotional resonance is as mysterious as
the causes and consequences of the couple’s affair itself. Perhaps the woman
can’t grasp the unnamed presence; perhaps the narrator can’t. But we know it’s
serious. She follows up with a trembling, “Your danger, your danger—!” No
wonder Jacques Barzun called James a melodramatist. Yet Barzun recognized
that James invested emotionally fraught situations with a haze of uncertainty
quite different from the thumping contours of sensation fiction and the coup
de théâtre.24
Narration and point of view require finesse. Once the telegraph clerk is
picked as a focal point, the storyteller has to consider all the implications to
be squeezed out of the blending of her life and job with her oblique inferences
about the high-society lovers. “In the Cage” lays out that merger in marked
parts, some twenty-seven numbered chapters, undergirded by a severe archi-
tecture. The street scene, composing chapters 15 through 17, sits, in page lengths,
at the dead center of the tale. In the first block, the initial three chapters set the
scene, building to the discriminated occasion that launches the plot. Lady Bra-
deen, then nameless, pushes a draft telegram across the counter. The second
block ends the tale with three parallel chapters in which the young woman’s
friend, moving into society by marrying a manservant, fills in some, but not all,
patches in the picture.
James’s taste for niceties of construction is evident in this heightened aware-
ness of segmentation. Neatness and symmetry called out to him. Under the
pressure of serial publication, he worried about a book having unequal halves
 36 PA RT I

or a “makeshift middle.”25 The Golden Bowl (1904) is divided into two books,
“The Prince” and “The Princess,” of twenty-four and twenty-three chapters,
respectively. The Awkward Age (1899) consists of a dozen “books,” a layout
modeled on a play’s division into acts that give each segment “a divine dis-
tinction.”26 James planned the twelve parts as a ring of lamps lighting different
aspects of the central situation. Long after the fashion for triple-deckers had
waned, he divided The Wings of the Dove (1902) among three major charac-
ters. “There was the ‘fun’ . . . [of treating them as] sufficiently solid blocks of
wrought material, squared to the sharp edge, as to have weight and mass and
carrying power; to make for construction, that is, to conduce to effect and to
provide for beauty.”27
Does anybody but James put “fun” in quotation marks? His sensitivity to
the fine-grained effects of every unit, from scenes and summaries to chapters
and large parts (“books”), was captured in one critic’s observation that James
exemplified a broader pride in the “well-made” novel, in which balance, pro-
portion, and tidy symmetries ran counter to the excesses of romanticism and
realism alike.28
For all his originality, James relied on schemas circulating in his milieu. He
contemplated writing an epistolary novel alternating letters between a mother
and her daughter, “giving totally different accounts of the same situation.”29
Surprisingly, Collins’s aesthetic wasn’t completely out of tune with James’s
preferences. Collins anticipated James’s “dramatic method” by modeling his
scenes on stage dialogue and business, and he created “centers of conscious-
ness” in a dossier, gathering many characters vying to understand the truth.30
You could argue that the casebook schema made it thinkable for James to
design The Awkward Age as a ring of strategically angled viewpoints. The dos-
sier format also suppressed that voice of the all-knowing narrator that James
wanted to hold in check.
The other canonized innovator of the period, Joseph Conrad, can be seen
as revising schemas as well. Like James, Conrad wanted scenic vividness. His
task, he wrote, “is . . . before all, to make you see. . . . to hold up unquestioningly,
without choice and fear, the rescued fragment before all eyes in the light of a
sincere mood.”31 To an unusual degree, Conrad created quick, intense visual
impressions. The image of Heyst in Victory (1915) standing by a chair, his face
and shoulders “lost in the gloom above the plane of light in which his feet
were planted,” might be a shot from a chiaroscuro film of the period (fig. 1.1).32
A passage in Chance (1913) is devoted to one character’s vision through a gap in
a curtain as he watches fingertips slowly being revealed.33
Just as important, Conrad followed James in recasting plot structures.
A long-standing narrative device is the story within the story, an account
embedded in a situation of reading or listening. Don Quixote (1605, 1615)
incorporated many substories into the knight’s adventures. Frankenstein (1817),
 The Art Novel Meets 1910s Formalism 37

1.1 The Circus Man (1914): David bends over Christine

in a bold chiaroscuro composition.

Wuthering Heights (1847), and many other novels absorbed letters, manu-
scripts, and oral reports within a larger frame. With characteristic nuance,
James had revised the discovered-manuscript convention in “The Turn of the
Screw” (1898). The bulk of the tale is told by the unnamed governess, but her
account arrives at several removes. We enter the story via the first-person
narration of a Christmas guest, who hears his host read aloud the governess’s
manuscript (itself written after the ghostly events she reports). The shock of
the ending is magnified by James’s refusal to return to the holiday framing
situation, with the governess’s final words providing harsh closure: “His little
heart, dispossessed, had stopped.”
Conrad multiplied narrators in Lord Jim (1900), but instead of laying them
out in a row he let the fragmentation shuffle story chronology. The novel
begins with an omniscient third-person voice recounting Jim’s background,
his thoughts while aboard the Patma, and the beginning of court testimony,
as witnessed by Marlow. Why did Jim abandon ship in a momentary crisis?
Then Marlow commandeers the narration. Over a long, unspecified evening at
a much later point, speaking to an unidentified listener, he recounts the trial’s
progress. Marlow’s account is interrupted by flashbacks to pretrial events, antic-
ipations of later actions, and an embedded story involving another character.
The familiarity of the courtroom schema allows Conrad to try some risky
revisions of the casebook principle. Once Marlow embarks on his own investi-
gation, the novel presents not testimonies committed to paper but conversations
prey to interruption and digression. Marlow has reunited with Jim at intervals
and has run into other characters who provide information about Jim’s past and
his efforts to recover personal honor. The book’s final section is a compressed
dossier: a letter from Marlow to an unidentified correspondent, followed by a
text in which Marlow reports a conversation tracing what led to Jim’s death.
 38 PA RT I

Like James’s circle of lamps in The Awkward Age, Conrad’s dispersal of

observers creates a “prismatic” form as characters’ varying judgments of Jim
highlight facets of his personality. Marlow confesses the very opposite of autho-
rial omniscience: “I don’t pretend I understood him. The views he let me have
of himself were like those gleams through the shifting rents in a thick fog—
bits of vivid and vanishing detail.”34 In a gesture that would recur throughout
twentieth-century fiction, the novel replaces the puzzle at the center of The
Moonstone—how was the diamond stolen? who stole it?—with the mysteries
of character.
Lord Jim interweaves incidents, shuttling us back and forth across Jim’s life.
Chance shows that a more modular, boxes-in-boxes organization can also com-
plicate a time line. An unnamed “I” narrator encloses accounts that enclose
other accounts, creating seven distinct time periods.35 Chapter divisions pro-
vide a clear-cut exoskeleton, although the embedded conversations are some-
times interrupted by flashbacks or flash-forwards. Some moments are narrated
more than once, from different viewpoints. A contemporary reviewer saw the
prismatic possibilities: the characters of Chance are seen by “lights thrown on
them from different angles.”36
The tales of James and Conrad are not always easy reading, and critics of
their day admitted as much. Some complained, but others found the result
rewarding. Arthur Quiller-Couch preferred narration that was more straight-
forward but confessed a fascination with these writers’ ability “to weave a situ-
ation round with emotions, scruples, doubts, hesitancies, misunderstandings,
understandings, half-understandings; cutting the web sometimes with the
fiercest of strokes; anon patiently spinning it again for another slice; and always
moving with the calmness of men entirely sure of their methods, and confident
that the end of the tale will justify them—as it always does.”37
The qualities ticked off apply not only to the characters, with the hesita-
tions and uncertainties of Lord Jim and Henry James’s telegraph clerk, but to
“half-understandings” that pervade the narration itself. Marlow knows Jim,
he confesses, only through glimpses. The narration of “In the Cage” cannot
pin down the mysterious “whole presence” sensed by the young woman and
Everard. These authors not only rely on existing schemas but roughen them,
retaining enough cues to keep us engaged but withdraw some and blur others.
For the sake of psychological realism and nuanced readerly response, including
a distinct brand of suspense, they turn the prototypical “easiest narrative” into
something more perplexing.
In their fiction and their pronouncements on technique, James and Conrad
built the major modern Anglo-American poetics of narrative. Over the same
years, more obscure figures were widening the horizons of the storytelling craft.
Dyar’s Voice in the Dark is only one example of how popular writers introduced
audiences to unorthodox strategies of narration, structure, and time shifting.
 The Art Novel Meets 1910s Formalism 39

Some of these writers were doubtless influenced by the masters, but others
seem to have arrived at an experimental attitude simply through the churn
of schema and revision, the pressure of competition, and the urge to display
ingenuity and virtuosity—all forces that characterize mass-market storytelling
up to today.

Innovation Within Limits: Pushing the Variorum

Historians tracing the rise of modernism in the arts have taught us to look to the
1910s as an era of almost delirious ferment. The major compositions of Strauss,
Mahler, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Ives, Stravinsky, Satie, and Debussy marked
the dissolution of tonality and the development of new musical forms. Proust,
Joyce, Eliot, Yeats, Gertrud Stein, Lawrence, Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, Wyn-
dham Lewis, Ford Madox Ford, Paul Valéry, the Russian Cubo-Futurists, and
many other authors began to create what would be identified as modernist lit-
erature. Picasso, Matisse, Gris, Kandinsky, the Italian Futurists, and the painters
of the Armory Show were redefining pictorial representation. At a less avant-
garde level, Willa Cather, Robert Frost, Katherine Mansfield, Edgar Arlington
Robinson, Sherwood Anderson, and Sinclair Lewis found wide reading publics.
World theater was in tumult thanks to the innovations of Stanislavsky, Meyer-
hold, Tairov, Reinhardt, Kaiser, Strindberg, Apollinaire, the Pitoeffs, and the
Ballets Russes. Another measure of this turn toward formal awareness was seen
in the rise of analytical criticism among the Russian Formalist literary scholars,
Schenkerian music theory, and critics of painting such as Roger Fry.
Less remembered than my roll call of Great Names are the experiments in
storytelling and style carried out before the eyes of millions. The 1910s saw a
keen self-consciousness about form in the Anglo-American popular arts. G. K.
Chesterton and H. G. Wells carried on their fascination with artifice through-
out that decade and were joined by other talents, notably in the detective story.
In music there was the aggressive pull of ragtime, cabaret and music-hall song,
and Tin Pan Alley. In graphic narrative we had the triumph of George Her-
riman’s zany Krazy Kat, along with Rube Goldberg’s precariously engineered
machines and Cliff Starrett’s quasi-Surrealist Polly and Her Pals.
Mass-market experiments borrowed “modern” methods to some extent, but
popular storytellers had their own traditions to draw on as well. Pressed to find
gimmicks, stunts, twists, and new wrinkles, they probed narrative strategies
in many directions. They made overt engagement with technique part of the
entertainment package. That quest put on their agenda the narrative strategies
made explicit by James, Conrad, and other more prestigious writers.
Novelists at all levels of appeal continued to explore fresh possibili-
ties of viewpoint, time shifts, and plot structure. One Arnold Bennett book
 40 PA RT I

(Clayhanger, 1910) presented a story from the viewpoint of the hero, followed
by another book tracing the same incidents as experienced by the heroine
(Hilda Lessways, 1911). Joseph Hergesheimer gained notoriety by block shifting
perspectives among men of three generations in Three Black Pennys (1917), then
among nine characters in Java Head (1919). In Clemence Dane’s Legend (1919),
the main character is dead when the story opens, and the action takes place in
one room during one night. By decade’s end, Somerset Maugham could win a
large readership with The Moon and Sixpence (1919) in which the hero’s story
unfolds through an acquaintance who encounters him intermittently. Such
novels domesticated the methods of James and Conrad while adjusting older
traditions to modern tastes.
Academics and belletrists helped assimilate these techniques. In 1874, the
critic George Lathrop had fielded ideas similar to James’s strictures on organic
unity and limited viewpoint.38 Brander Matthews’s Columbia University courses
on modern literature widened interest in what was coming to be called story-
telling “method.”39 Matthews’s student Seldon Whitcomb surveyed a huge range
of possibilities in the 1905 textbook The Study of a Novel. The exploding market
in book publishing and the vast expansion of magazine circulation—the closest
thing to a national medium in England and the United States—encouraged
aspiring writers to try to break into print. There followed manuals with titles
such as Writing the Short-Story (1909) and The Art and Business of Story Writing
(1913). Writing tips and market trends could be found in periodicals such as
The Writer (“A Monthly Magazine for Literary Workers”) and other periodicals.
A consensus emerged about literary artistry. The modern novel would purge
itself of the digressions of triple-decker plots. Characters could be narrators,
and impersonal external commentary should be discreet. The author needed
what Lathrop called “a unifying and creative view” that could create “the mod-
ern dramatically organized novel.”40 Likewise, short stories should follow the
precepts of concentration laid down by Poe and exemplified by Maupassant,
Kipling, and O. Henry.
Before the 1910s, critics had seldom discussed the implications of viewpoint,
but now it was seen as a central creative decision. Manuals spelled out the
differences between character viewpoint and authorial viewpoint, objective
rendering and subjective coloring, limited view versus omniscience, single per-
spective versus multiple perspectives.41 The “angle of narration,” in the phrase
of one manual, might be that of the protagonist or of a bystander or of someone
at a great remove from the action.42 Authors were urged not to vary viewpoint
within a scene or chapter.43
All of these possibilities had been tacitly available long before James and
Conrad, but the new methods and the public’s growing appetite for fiction gave
writers an incentive to chart their choices systematically. For example, the epis-
tolary novel was a long-established form, but now authors were asked to weigh
 The Art Novel Meets 1910s Formalism 41

the advantages and drawbacks of building a book out of scraps of memoirs,

journal jottings, even telegrams. Stunts like Brander Matthews’s short story
“The Documents in the Case,” which consisted wholly of news clippings, IOUs,
and court reports, were debated as valid models for literary narration.44 Sim-
ilarly, flashbacks were nothing new to literary construction, but now authors
had to be aware that straight chronology had both advantages and drawbacks.
A 1919 manual offers a rich array of options of what to skip over, how to fill gaps,
and how to shift blocks of action to maximize curiosity.45 It might almost be a
recipe for A Voice in the Dark, which was mounted in the same year. Highbrow
or lowbrow, writers faced a new self-consciousness about means and ends.
At the limit, writers eager for secrets of success could ransack The Thirty-Six
Dramatic Situations, a 1916 translation of Georges Polti’s 1895 French study.
Like the folklore researchers of the era, Polti was trying to disclose universal
units of narrative action. What he came up with was a catalog of basic “situ-
ations,” each with characteristic agents, that was at once a recipe book and a
Borgesian catalog. “The Avenging of a Slain Parent or Ancestor” (Third Situa-
tion, subset A1) counts as different from “Vengeance Taken for Kindred Upon
Kindred” (Fourth Situation). “Enmity of Kinsman” (Thirteenth Situation) is
somehow radically distinct from “Rivalry of Kinsman” (Fourteenth Situation).
Long before Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey,” Polti had offered an amateur
anthropology of world narrative.
Americans of an entrepreneurial cast turned Polti’s scheme into a literal
machine. Wycliffe Hill, author of the surprisingly brief Ten Million Photoplay
Plots (1919), manufactured the Plot Genie, a pinwheel of cardboard discs.
Rotating them dialed up numbers that correlated with situations tabulated in a
book. Now the author could generate new stories on demand. Some pulp writ-
ers claimed, perhaps shamefacedly, that the Polti compilation and the Genie’s
random ways could spark story ideas.46
Operating with more analytical delicacy was Clayton Hamilton, another
Brander Matthews protégé. He made his name with the textbook Materials and
Methods of Fiction (1908), followed by The Manual of the Art of Fiction (1918).
As a lecturer and a critic of literature and drama for literary weeklies, Hamilton
dissected both classics and commercial work.47
Hamilton became one of America’s most prescient analysts of narrative con-
ventions. He was sensitive to nuances of viewpoint, arguing in advance of Percy
Lubbock that “the entire tone and tenor of the narrative” depended “directly
on the answer to the question, Who shall tell the story?”48 He noted the virtues
of “limited omniscience,” moving the spotlight from character to character
for different scenes or chapters.49 More than his peers, Hamilton understood
that most fiction had nonlinear dimensions, as when a multistrand plot must
skip back to supply exposition as a new character enters. At a broader level,
Hamilton maintained that breaking chronology was justified if it showed the
 42 PA RT I

logical connection among events. As early as 1914, he proposed that a plot could
arrange its incidents in reverse order, a strategy that would soon surface in
various media.50
Hamilton probed the emerging innovations in theater as well. British dra-
matists had adapted the French well-made play to middle-class tastes for real-
ism but retained many of its devices—the carefully prepared situation; the
“obligatory scene” that brings the conflict to a head; and in between the misun-
derstandings, eavesdropping, secrets, discovered letters, and other devices that
would persist throughout popular storytelling. After Ibsen, European drama
underwent changes somewhat parallel to those seen in post-James fiction. The
plots of Ibsen’s social dramas relied on “well-made” principles but proposed a
sharper organic development and greater psychological realism. British and
American playwrights began to replace sensational melodrama with plays
of character and “dramas of ideas.”51 The variety was sustained in the United
States with a boom in production; throughout the 1910s, each Broadway season
boasted between 87 and 162 new plays.52
Commentators strove to keep up. Hamilton’s Theory of the Theatre (1910)
and Problems of the Playwright (1917) were accompanied by William Archer’s
Play-Making (1912), George Pierce Baker’s Dramatic Technique (1919), and other
manuals. These treatises sorted out the new impulses in the post-Ibsen theater
and suggested ways they could be made comprehensible to a broad audience.
An older model of dramaturgy was based in Gustav Freytag’s “pyramid,” in
which a midpoint climax leads to a “falling action.”53 The turn-of-the-century
writers jettisoned this schema and saw most modern plays as tracing a rising
arc of conflict and tension.54 The major turning point should come at the end of
the penultimate act, one manual advises, following smaller climaxes that have
ended earlier ones.55
This smoothly rising pattern gives a play something like the trajectory of
modern novels and magazine stories. Hamilton had suggested that every plot
should build to a culmination about three-quarters along, a rule that would
govern both a play and a conventional novel.56 Indeed, in an inversion of the
Jamesian impulse, Hamilton suggested that the drama of the future would
move closer to the compact intensity of fiction. It would also invest heavily in
subjectivity, indulging in imaginary sequences and dream interludes. Hamilton
was intrigued by The Phantom Rival (1915), in which the heroine’s dream shows
us her lover as being quite different from the man we see in the final act.
As critics outlined a poetics of the modern drama, they assigned a central
role to segmentation. Tradition demanded that each act be a distinct block, set
off by intervals. There were many conventional strategies for packing each act
with incident, and commentators surveyed feather-duster exposition, piled on
complications, turning points, stinging curtain lines, and the “quiet curtain.”57
Writers also considered varying the rhythm by breaking up the act, perhaps
 The Art Novel Meets 1910s Formalism 43

giving the plot a novelistic fluidity of time and space. During this period, Euro-
pean stagecraft was beginning to experiment with abstract sets and turntable
staging, and soon the single drawing room set would emerge as merely one
option among many.
The heightened awareness of technique promoted by critics, academics, and
writing gurus reflected what was on the stage. As if in dialogue with the com-
mentary, playwrights competed for ingenuity in structure, viewpoint, and time
shifting. In The Silent Voice (1914), scenes are played out as registered by a lip
reader. Coat-Tales (1914) shows the fate of a missing fur coat through flash-
backs. Above the proscenium hangs a giant clock, its hands moving forward or
back to specify the time period. Another flashback play, The Unknown Purpose
(1918), presents a second act that takes place at the same time as the third act.
Clayton Hamilton’s request for a narrative run backward was fulfilled by Zoë
Akins’s The Varying Shore (1921). Alternative futures weren’t ruled out either.
Revising a schema Dickens used in A Christmas Carol, Eyes of Youth (1917)
charts a woman’s three possible fates as predicted by a fortuneteller, and a 1918
play adapted O. Henry’s crossroads story “Roads of Destiny.”
As for subjective point of view, Sophie Treadwell’s Eye of the Beholder (1919)
offers a “prismatic” play. Scenes reveal a woman as seen by her husband, her
lover, the lover’s mother, and her own mother. On each occasion, the protag-
onist’s demeanor and costume change. Overtones and Any House (1916) goes
further by showing characters accompanied by their alter egos.
The suppressive flashbacks and perceptual variations of A Voice in the Dark
look less odd if we recognize the variorum flowering on the Anglo-Ameri-
can stage in the 1910s. Outré techniques could yield surprise and amusement.
A famous example is George M. Cohan’s perennially popular Seven Keys to
Baldpate (1913). A successful author of sensational novels has bet that he can
crank out a serious book in twenty-four hours. He settles down in an inn that
is closed for the winter. Immediately Baldpate is invaded by gangsters, corrupt
politicians, a femme fatale, a crooked sheriff, a hermit, and a young woman
professing to be a reporter. The hero’s literary efforts are disrupted by hug-
ger-mugger, seductions, and a murder.
Last act, first twist: The hero’s betting partner arrives and explains that he has
staged the whole thing. The bet was a scheme for mocking the trash the hero
usually writes. Curtain. Pause. Epilogue and second twist: At rise, the hero is
finishing his novel, which is the entirety of everything we’ve seen, including the
previous twist. He has won the bet, and he has contributed to serious literature
by composing what we would now call a metafiction sending up his pet genre.
Subtitled “A Mysterious Melodramatic Farce,” Seven Keys to Baldpate show-
cases an enduring feature of experiment in popular narrative: comedy can help
the audience adjust. The same effect appears in Stranger Than Fiction (1917),
in which a playwright concocts a story around people he has just met, and in
 44 PA RT I

Pay-Day (1916), in which a melodrama is revealed to be the imaginary script

of a film. The most knowing variant, however, comes from Clayton Hamilton
himself, in collaboration with A. E. Thompson.
In The Big Idea (1914), Dick needs to save his father from financial ruin, so
he starts to write a play. At the encouragement of Elaine, who thinks and talks
faster than he can, he decides to write up his family crisis as it has developed.
They start drafting Act I of his play. Elaine dictates: “The curtain rises,” as the
curtain comes down on our first act. In Act II, complications pile up, and Dick
struggles to insert them into the script he’s banging out. Because of the time
pressure, Act II ends with Elaine dragging Dick off with their play unfinished,
an action duly recorded in his manuscript.
At the office of a theatrical producer, Dick and Elaine offer him the script, but
he balks when he sees that the third act is missing. They point out that the pitch
they’re presenting right now is the plot’s resolution. Only if the producer buys
the show can they include the happy end he demands. He relents, with the con-
dition that he gets to play his role himself. He demands to appear at the begin-
ning of the performance, explaining that everything the audience will see really
happened. Of course that very prologue opened the performance we’ve seen.
The Big Idea satirizes “heart interest,” the grim look of stage food, and other
conventions. It occasionally jabs at the manuals. (“The essence of drama is strug-
gle,” Elaine insists.) Teasingly, the play shifts back and forth between the act of
writing and the text being written. When Dick confesses he’s falling in love with
Elaine, she congratulates him on a nifty plot point. Needless to say, Hamilton
and Thomas didn’t miss a chance to game the system. In a newspaper interview,
they reconstructed their quarrels during the composition of the play.58
Again, comedy proves to be one way to familiarize audiences with narrative
innovations. To put it too simply, popular theater, at least in its light vein, was
Pirandellian before Pirandello, and Brechtian well before Brecht. Of course,
these masters added philosophy and politics, as well as certain complications. It
fell to popular storytellers who drew on these writers to smooth out what they
had roughened, while retaining cues that teased audiences with their manage-
able novelty. This is the way of the tactic of accessibility.

The Book Inside the Play Inside the Movie

How much popular storytellers were directly influenced by the elevated ideas
of James or the more widely available ones of Hamilton and his peers is hard
to say. And, of course, some of these creative options were available long
before this time; the dossier novel provided an enduring model for shifting
viewpoints. The important point is that storytellers of the 1910s had access
to fresh ideas drawn from “advanced” literature and theater, tips promoted
 The Art Novel Meets 1910s Formalism 45

in writing manuals, and schemas lingering from the nineteenth century and
before. This mix created a rich variorum. Guided by the need for a strong
plot, external action, and quickly comprehensible narration, popular drama-
tists and fiction writers could make patterning more salient and create a new
consciousness of form.
Dyar’s acknowledgment of borrowing the flashback schema from movies
points up another example of expanding narrative options at the period. As
middle-class entertainment, cinema became the chief rival to theater, reducing
the demand for touring companies and forcing many houses to convert to film
projection.59 How-to manuals, progenitors of Aronson’s 21st Century Screen-
play, promised to help writers break into this booming market.60
As fiction films became feature-length stories running an hour or more,
they absorbed techniques from adjacent arts. Filmmakers often modeled set
design, performance, and scene construction on techniques of proscenium
theater. Principles of perspective painting were also applied because the cam-
era lens created a playing space very different from that of the stage (fig. 1.2).61
When filmmakers began to break up scenes, they approached the flexibility of
“novelistic” narration. Time could be adjusted through brief flashbacks, that
“cut-back” that inspired A Voice in the Dark. Films could interrupt a present
scene to remind the viewer of a bit of earlier action or to indicate the drift of
a character’s memory (figs. 1.3–1.4). More daringly, The Gangster and the Girl
(1914) incorporates hypothetical alternatives (figs. 1.5–1.6). And by breaking the
tableau into closer views from varying angles, filmmakers gained a great many
ways to channel character knowledge (figs. 1.7–1.8). They found equivalents for
literary shifts of viewpoint (figs. 1.9–1.14).

1.2 1910s “tableau” staging in film creates a perspec-

tival space akin to that of classic painting (Ready
Money, 1914). Because of varying sight lines in an au-
ditorium, such a packed composition would not be
feasible on stage.
1.3 In Alias Jimmy Valentine (1915), the reformed safe- 1.4 The flashback inserts shots of Jimmy’s elation
cracker’s old partner stirs his fond memories in hopes during an old robbery.
of coaxing him back to the gang.

1.5 The Gangsters and the Girl (1914): A young wom- 1.6 . . . or trying to stop the gang herself.
an imagines informing the police . . .

1.7 The Bargain (1914): At a barroom roulette table, 1.8 A cut to a close view shows the croupier pressing
the gamblers gather and the croupier stretches his the button that controls the wheel. As in prose fiction,
hand under the table. the narration reveals what the characters don’t know.
1.9 The Masked Heart (1917): A mysterious masked 1.10 Her viewpoint is approximated by a high angle
woman peers through a curtain above the partyers. and stressed by the iris masking.

1.11 A return to her reinforces our anchoring with her. 1.12 Reciprocally, a closer view of Philip shows him
noticing the masked woman.

1.13 A new angle, carefully differentiated from 1.9 1.14 Again, a return to the initiating shot of him con-
and 1.11, approximates his view. firms the interlocked viewpoints.
 48 PA RT I

This wider range of knowledge might stretch beyond a single setting. Alter-
nation of locales wasn’t unknown on the stage, but it was far easier to cre-
ate through film editing. Crosscutting, also known as parallel editing or the
“switch-back,” could carry the viewer to and fro among different lines of action,
as omniscient narration did in a novel.62 Identified largely with D. W. Griffith,
crosscutting became a standard tool for building an exciting denouement. A
crosscut chase or a rescue driven by a deadline could be amplified by making
shots shorter as the tension rose. The technique could draw conceptual com-
parisons as well. In A Corner in Wheat (1909), Griffith alternates views of a rich
man’s banquet and his financial schemes with shots of desperate people waiting
in line for bread.
Throughout Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), crosscutting weaves the
fates of two families into the social upheaval of the Civil War. Griffith pushes
the technique to a paroxysm in the climax. Across nearly thirty minutes, the
narration shifts among dozens of settings and four clusters of characters.
The action culminates in two accelerating rescues: the Ku Klux Klan saves
Elsie Stoneman from rape and then saves the Cameron family from the Black
militia. These passages show that Griffith intuitively understood that cross-
cutting recasts time as well as space. All things being equal, alternating shots
are assumed to be unfolding simultaneously, but the duration of a ride to the
rescue is usually compressed while the dangerous situation runs on a slower
clock (figs. 1.15–1.18). Rapid alternation of story lines would become a basic
technique of world cinema, and many filmmakers exploited crosscutting’s abil-
ity to stretch or squeeze duration.
Strategies of segmentation shaped films’ plot structures. The first films were
very short, less than a minute or two, so narrative action had to be brief and
anecdotal. As films lengthened, form followed format. The single-reel film,
lasting twelve to fifteen minutes, favored narratives akin to short stories or
vaudeville “playlets.”63 When films ran to two, three, or more reels, plotting had
to integrate more incidents, complex lines of action, and psychological explora-
tion.64 Some filmmakers took the reel to be a distinct “act” or “chapter” within
the larger film. An ambitious film might be divided into still larger blocks.
Across twelve reels, The Birth of a Nation presents a prologue, two epochs (war,
then Reconstruction), and an epilogue.
Griffith mapped a comparable framework onto his mammoth production
Intolerance (1916). A long prologue is allotted four reels, a first “act” takes four
more, and the second act lasts five. As if following current playwriting advice,
Griffith ends each segment with a powerful climax. Act II attaches an epilogue
similar to that of The Birth of a Nation, a vision set in a phantasmic future in
which “perfect love shall bring peace forevermore.”
The eccentric innovations on display in this ramshackle masterpiece
epitomize that formalist streak running through 1910s popular art. One critic
 The Art Novel Meets 1910s Formalism 49

1.15 The Birth of a Nation (1915): While the southern 1.16 . . . the Klan, miles away, rides to rescue them.
families are besieged in the cabin . . .

1.17 Cutting back to the cabin, Griffith shows the 1.18 Suddenly the Klansmen arrive at the cabin,
families in danger. and the marauding soldiers flee. Crosscutting has
stretched out the moments of the assault while com-
pressing the ride.

declared Intolerance “the most incredible experiment in storytelling that has

been tried.”65 It’s not much of an exaggeration. No one in any medium had
percussively alternated scenes from different eras for the sake of conceptual
parallels. The film stands as a powerful instance of how much narrative audac-
ity can be poured into popular forms. It also shows how extreme novelty calls
forth extreme pressures toward comprehensibility.66
Intolerance presents four historical episodes illustrating its title theme. In
ancient Babylon, Belshazzar’s worship of the goddess Ishtar arouses the jealousy
of the priests of Bel, who conspire with hostile forces to seize the city. Jesus,
criticized by the Pharisees and condemned by Pilate, is shown in incidents lead-
ing up to the crucifixion. The massacre of the Huguenots ordered by Catherine
 50 PA RT I

de Medici illustrates state-initiated religious oppression. Today, reformers sup-

ported by industrial capitalism force workers to conform to pinched standards
of morality. All four stories include a romance plot as well. It’s minor in the
Christ episode; he presides over the Wedding at Cana. In the modern and the
French stories, seducers target the innocent, and in the Babylon story a lover
betrays his beloved and the king she adores.
This “drama of comparisons,” as the title calls it, invites block construction.
Giving each period its own distinct chapter was the schema favored in later
films such as Carl Dreyer’s Leaves from Satan’s Book (1920) and Buster Keaton’s
comedy The Three Ages (1923). While Griffith was preparing Intolerance, ‘Twas
Ever Thus (1915) was released, a comedy that traced woman’s roles through seg-
ments set in prehistory, the Civil War, and modern days.67
No one knows when or how Griffith decided on the more radical formal
option of crosscutting the four periods. He saw that the technique he had used
for creating conceptual parallels and building suspense within a single story
world could be mapped onto epochs. The result would be an ever-shifting
trans-historical grid of likenesses and contrasts. In addition, accelerating the
cutting pace allowed Griffith to create a virtuoso climax, with rapid crosscut-
ting both within stories and among them. Now wholly independent story lines
would converge only on the screen.
The problem, particularly at this early period of film history, was compre-
hension. A stanza in Whitman’s poem “A Passage to India” could glide across
history and the globe, and a novel by Conrad could shift time frames in a
paragraph. But a film that jumped among epochs, with no ghosts or time trav-
elers to link them, risked incoherence. In addition, cinema poses a particular
problem of comprehension. The reader of a book can pause and skim back to
earlier pages to get oriented, but film viewers can’t. As in theater, the spectacle
sets the pace. Whisked from a factory strike to a Babylonian celebration and
then to the French court, Intolerance’s viewer had to grasp action on the fly.
To that end, Griffith used tactics of accessibility we’ve seen at work throughout
popular narrative.
For one thing, the four episodes exemplify genres established in theater
and historical fiction. Early filmmakers had produced dozens of passion plays,
historical pageants, tenement dramas, and spectacles of antiquity including
Damon and Pythias (1914), The Sign of the Cross (1914), and Griffith’s own
Judith of Bethulia (1913). Then the juxtaposition of these genres could be
stressed in publicity. Advertisements for Intolerance reiterated both the basic
premise—“four separate stories, each with its own set of characters”—and the
method of construction. “Following the introduction of each period,” the pro-
gram explained, “there are subsequent interruptions as the different stories
develop along similar lines, switching from one to the other.”68 A program for
one roadshow presentation previewed the ending in purely formal terms: the
 The Art Novel Meets 1910s Formalism 51

four stories are “drawn swiftly close together and they go rushing on to the four
smashing climaxes.”69 The film’s formal audacity was proclaimed not only as a
salable novelty but as a guide for comprehension.
The film’s design features reinforce the differences. Of course, costume and
setting identify each story, and distinct color tints help. So too do familiar plot
patterns, not least the last-minute rescue, which Griffith incorporates into three
episodes. (Only one rescue succeeds.) He goes further, though. He endows his
film with a massive exoskeleton that relies on verbal tags, a hierarchy of interti-
tles that redundantly orient the viewer to the shifting action.70
Most obvious, opening titles announce the four stories and the method of
shifting from one to another (fig. 1.19). In addition, Griffith provides the image
of a book called Intolerance. It opens at the beginning of each story and remains
open afterward. As an image, it moves the plot from epoch to epoch, and a
superimposed title signals the transition (fig. 1.20). We might expect the book’s
text to introduce the historical action we’ll be seeing in each sequence to come,
but instead the paragraphs hammer home the film’s form as the program notes
had. Every shot of the book reveals identical facing pages, starting with “The
book of this play is arranged in four parallel plot threads or lines of action,”
and ending with “How true it is that intolerance ever cloaks itself in the garb
of righteousness that it may the more easily impose on the minds of men.” For
further clarity, when we move to a different era, an expository title reasserts
time and place, not only in language but also in a background image keyed to
the period (fig. 1.21).
Apart from all the verbal transitions, Griffith provides the celebrated figure
of the woman at a cradle, with the Three Fates quietly sitting behind (fig. 1.22).
As a mongrel-mythology emblem of eternal recurrence, the image is anchored
by an intertitle citing, uncredited, Whitman’s “Out of the cradle, endlessly rock-
ing.” In the prologue and Act I, the cradle and the book appear in tandem
whenever the plot introduces an era. By the early stretches of Act II, either the
book or the cradle suffices to signal the time switch. We’re assumed to have
learned the rule.
Griffith, a man of the theater, claimed that cinema as “the motion playhouse”
would surpass “the speaking stage,” but Intolerance doesn’t so much turn away
from theater as swallow it up.71 It dubs itself “A Sun-Play for the Ages” and
splits into segments not unlike the author’s early play War (1906–7). Griffith
found a more comfortable analogy in literature because cinema was “a nov-
elizing, or storytelling form; it is epic rather than dramatic.”72 Acknowledging
his debts to fiction, he attributed the switch-back to Dickens and hoped that a
film could achieve a poetic quality reminiscent of Browning and Tennyson.73
Intolerance’s persistent narrating voice provides commentary, adds footnotes,
and takes the liberty of renaming some individuals as types (“The Boy,” “The
Friendless One”).
 52 PA RT I

1.19 Intolerance (1916): An opening title explains the 1.20 The Book of Intolerance: The two open pages
film’s structure. are identical and reiterate that this image marks a
pause and a shift to a new era.

1.21 Expository intertitles for each epoch reinforce 1.22 The rocking cradle, the mother, and the Three
the time shift by a graphic design behind the text. Fates: the linking image signals a change of epoch and
suggests eternal recurrence of situations. In some im-
ages, the cradle contains flowers.

Having locked in an intrinsic norm of language, graphic design, and mov-

ing images, the film can become more elliptical as it goes along. The novelistic
discourse of the titles eventually drops away. Imagistic intertitles become rarer,
and after the Boy of the modern story is given the Last Sacrament on his way
to the gallows, the book device is discarded. Thereafter, only the cradle, an
occasional expository title, or a simple propulsive cut (figs. 1.23–1.24) carries us
from era to era. The climax presents film as the ultimate synthesis of storytell-
ing resources. In its constantly changing viewpoint, its ability to skip to and fro
in time, and its fracturing of blocks of history, the cinema draws from theater
and literature but also exploits its own resources to create a turbulent rush of
expressive images.
 The Art Novel Meets 1910s Formalism 53

1.23 By the end of the film, Griffith can omit the tran- 1.24 . . . gives way to the modern story.
sitions and cut directly from one era to another. Here
the Babylonian story . . .

The critic who called Griffith’s film an incredible narrative experiment

added: “He will never again tell a story in this manner. Nor will anyone else.”74
True, no surviving films of the period seem to have rivaled the ambitions of
Intolerance. Filmmakers who wanted to achieve a historical panorama treated
the epochs more simply, in block-by-block surveys such as Dreyer’s and Keaton’s
films. Eventually, however, Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983), Michael Cun-
ningham’s The Hours (1998), David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2002), Gregory
Blake Smith’s The Maze at Windermere (2018), and other novels would employ
the strategy of intercutting distinct periods to create their own “dramas of
comparisons,” and these wouldn’t resist the quasi-supernatural implications
Griffith welcomed. Similar strategies would be activated in films based on
some of these books. Griffith’s idea that crosscutting could be a productive
macro strategy was reinforced by Christopher Nolan, whose films toggle
between stretches of time that overlap one another (Dunkirk, 2017) and inter-
weave simultaneous dreams (Inception, 2010).75
Griffith’s outlandish film did more. It made apparent a principle of construc-
tion going far back in the history of narrative. A story is predicated on chrono-
logical cause and effect, so we’re inclined to map it as a line. But it can also be
reconfigured as a grid, a form more spatial than temporal. Once story lines are
brought together, even if you switch rapidly between them, they can be con-
sidered as columnar, a geometrical array of big blocks or smaller chunks. Four
sealed-off eras, each with its own story world and cast of characters, nudge
us to think in terms of what we now call a spreadsheet. This quasi-geomet-
rical notion of narrative would emerge in modernist fiction but also in tales
designed for mass audiences.
 54 PA RT I

✳✳✳

Some historians have seen in Griffith’s achievement, and in early American

cinema generally, a response to “modernity”—the bustle of the city, the com-
pulsory rhythms of mass production, the fleeting sensations of the distracted
window-shopper.76 These “distal” factors, I’ve argued elsewhere, provide at
best broad preconditions rather than delicate explanations.77 If we consider
the problem from the standpoint of the creator rather than the audience, we
don’t need to posit modernity as a brand new epoch in which people’s sensory
experiences were radically overhauled. We can see this as an era in which story-
tellers faced an expanding variorum and the pressures of mass production and
large-scale competition.
Workers in the narrative arts cast about for fresh ways to exploit both emerg-
ing forms and those from earlier days that can be refreshed. The churn we talk
about in modern media was evident then as well. Pressing himself to outshine
The Birth of a Nation, Griffith created a more ambitious counterpart to A Voice
in the Dark, a play that not only borrowed the “cut-back” from current cinema
but also mapped traditional novelistic viewpoint shifts onto the apparatus of
the playhouse. This sort of balancing, I think, is what storytellers tend toward.
They adjust forms both old and new to their immediate purposes. In the pro-
cess, they do not so much mimic the real world, modernizing or not, as create
distinct story worlds.
The task, then, is to guide us through them. Critics who see Intolerance as
akin to the experiments of Joyce and other modernists have a point, but it goes
only so far.78 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) doesn’t resort to a
redundant exoskeleton to help us grasp the formation of Stephen’s conscious-
ness. Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914) simply declares, take it or leave it: “A sad side
a size that is not sad is blue as every bit of blue is precocious.” In the formalist
1910s, a great many popular storytellers believed that we needed explicit tag-
ging, judicious redundancy, and a firm grip on conventions of genre and style if
we were to enjoy a wild ride. Dyar, Griffith, and their peers obliged. Joyce, Stein,
and a few other storytellers realized that they could snap off the trainer wheels
and subject us to something more vertiginous.
 CHAPTER 2

MAKING CONFUSION SATISFACTORY

Modernism and Other Mysteries

As we know now sixty years after the publication of Ulysses, the difficulties
of experimental writing like that are not so great as they seem. . . . Joyce
loves mysteries but does not like them to go on too long. . . . He is not al-
ways easy, but is never impossible.

—Anthony Burgess

B
ill Sidney is a successful businessman deformed by his history with
women. As a teenager he was initiated into sex by the good-na-
tured Mrs. Davis. He had a brief affair with Millicent, a maid in his
college dormitory. He enjoyed a sentimental, chaste romance with the aspiring
singer Lucy. He has settled into a loveless marriage to the brittle socialite Erma,
but he harbors a disturbing attraction to his sister Jane. These liaisons fuel
his impulses and fantasies. A passive man easily dominated by Erma and his
business partner Dick, Bill struggles to make a decisive change in his life. Now,
threatened by a scandal that will wreck his career, he is poised to act. He will
commit murder.
How Like a God, the novel recounting Bill’s story, begins just before the cli-
max. An unnamed man armed with a revolver is slowly walking up a staircase
to a woman waiting in a third-floor apartment. His ascent is interrupted by
chapters that review his life in a “limitless network of appeals, facts, memories
that darted at him and through him.”1
 56 PA RT I

The result is a double-entry structure, two crosscutting story lines. One is

simple, concrete, and brief: Bill’s few minutes on the staircase. The other story
line is more diffuse. Most of the sixteen backstory chapters present events in
roughly chronological order, with an early group devoted to Bill’s youth and the
last to events leading immediately up to his visit. Other chapters alter chronol-
ogy, gathering scenes showing Bill’s relation to this or that woman and incorpo-
rating flashbacks and replayed scenes as well.
The novel revels in mild difficulty and somewhat eccentric technical choices.
Instead of identifying the past segments with dated chapter tags, the book
proposes an odd exoskeleton. Each moment on the staircase in the present is
printed in italic type and assigned a title consisting of a letter of the alphabet.
The segments run from A to Q, which becomes the final scene of the novel.
These single-page bits are recounted in third-person narration and in the past
tense. In contrast, the long chapters set in the past are printed in roman type
and given Roman numerical titles from I to XVI. Instead of flatly informative
dating, the typography and alphanumeric tags create a unique tabular layout.
Even more curious, the past blocks are recounted in the second person, as if
Bill is addressing himself in an inner monologue: “You walked all the way home
in the mild September night.” This rare technique suggests a stage soliloquy
(hence perhaps the title’s reference to temporizing Hamlet) as well as a portrait
of extreme solipsism. This man internalizes everything and upbraids himself
for failure at every turn.
Steven Johnson might find this book an anticipation of the demanding sto-
rytelling so widely seen today. We often encounter a plot that introduces a
moment of crisis and then breaks away to show flashbacks leading up to it.
But the schema apparently posed no great problems for 1929 readers, in part
because the novel’s design features ease our access to it. The contrasts of typog-
raphy and tagging in the two tracks redundantly mark out present and past, the
immediate moment versus the flux of years. Within that framework, the narra-
tion helps us track the small cast of characters. We come to the book knowing
the schemas of a man’s career trajectory and of futile love story plots like that
informing Of Human Bondage (1915). Scenes are invariably introduced with
the usual specifiers, such as “Two days later” and “The months in New York,
stretching to over a year.” In all, a patient reader can construct a coherent time
line, but the fact that we’d consider trying to do so is a measure of the moderate
challenge the book offers.
The staircase segments contribute their own user-friendly effects. By begin-
ning at the crisis, the plot creates both suspense and mystery. We have to won-
der if Bill will actually kill the woman waiting for him. Moreover, the narration
doesn’t specify who the victim might be. As we continue through the book
and meet the women in Bill’s life, we are coaxed to ask, “Which of them will
become Bill’s target?” The narration frankly holds something back. Again, the
 Making Confusion Satisfactory 57

suppression is motivated by the second-person monologue; Bill knows whom

he intends to kill, so he has no need to mention her name.
The reader quickly masters the to-and-fro alternation, but the novel varies
this intrinsic norm. As the narration goes along, it knits the moments on the
stair more tightly to the chapters set in the past. A past episode ends with Bill
saying, “For god’s sake, Mil!” and the staircase follow-up starts with an echo of
that phrase. As the climax approaches, the two time lines mingle, not unlike
Griffith’s crosscutting at the peak of Intolerance. In the present, Bill thinks,
“You’re just plain scared.” Cut to the inner monologue track: “And not only
because you’re standing here on the stair.” Thanks to the second-person address,
past and present have converged. A refrain, “Go on in,” bounces from the P
track to chapter XVI, the last “you” chapter that brings us up to the moment of
his entry to the room.
A second variation of pattern comes midway through the book. All of the
previous chapter chunks have been devoted to Bill’s past life, but in chapter
VIII, provoked by the landlady’s call to him on the staircase (“Are you going
to answer her or not?”), Bill’s inner monologue replies, “You might as well”—
suggesting not just answering her but also killing the woman who waits. The
chapter now skips ahead to the very recent past and then speculates about the
future. Bill reviews his plan for the crime and imagines how the investigation
might proceed. Anticipating police questioning, he starts to design an alibi.
This effort provokes him to consider what clues to his presence he will need
to destroy. After this hiatus, which introduces the possibility he’ll commit sui-
cide, the past-time chapters return to filling in the months leading up to the
climax. Soon the identity of the waiting woman is revealed, and pure suspense
takes over.
How Like a God was published in September 1929, a month before Wil-
liam Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. It was declared brilliant, not only
for its original technique but its probing of a respectable man’s psychosexual
dark side.2 It was compared to Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point (1928) and,
somewhat later, to Faulkner’s Sanctuary (1931).3 One critic placed the author,
Rex Stout, in the company of Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, and John Dos Pas-
sos.4 No wonder: Stout had spent some years in Paris immersed in modernist
writing and had met James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. The same critic saw the
compression of an entire life into a few moments of tangled memory as the cul-
mination of new experiments in stratified time in Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather,
and Sherwood Anderson.5
Read today, the book seems not just modernist but modern. It could easily
be turned into a film script, so familiar are we with nonlinear time schemes
framed by an impending crime. It could also be said to anticipate a “micro
narrative” such as Nicholson Baker’s novel The Mezzanine (1986), a first-per-
son account of a man’s lunchtime saunter across a mall lobby and up an
 58 PA RT I

escalator. Fastidious descriptions of soda cans and knotted shoestrings give

way to unwittingly revealing memories of childhood and office routine, all
hectored by footnotes. A nouveau roman rewritten by an OCD nerd, The Mez-
zanine summons up schemas of action and mental life not so far from those
in Stout’s novel.
How Like a God, as unknown today as Ralph Dyar’s play A Voice in the
Dark, can also stand as an example of experimentation in more or less main-
stream media. By 1929, complex storytelling had found a welcome in literary
culture. The Jamesian principles of perspective and geometrical construction
had reached a new explicitness, not to mention market visibility. Readers and
critics, tutored by High Modernism, were smart now. They were attuned to
nonlinearity, slippery viewpoint tactics, and eccentric segmentation. How Like
a God, with its teasing narration and overt structure (even violations of its own
norms are clear-cut), showed ways in which avant-garde experiments could
be retooled for more accessible storytelling. Those ways often relied on the
mechanics of mystery.

Onward to Ultraism

Percy Lubbock, who published editions of Henry James’s letters and his
two unfinished novels, presented a systematized version of 1910s poetics in
The Craft of Fiction (1921). The book takes James’s works, in particular The
Ambassadors, as the prototype of the modern novel, a showcase for the
“scenic” approach and of subtle modulations of point of view. In an unwitting
echo of the Russian Formalists, Lubbock adds that the best case for any book is
made by the critic who revealed “how the book was made.”6 Lubbock was not
directly associated with the New Critics, but his attention to “method” marked
a shift toward the “close reading” that would dominate criticism for the rest of
the century.
Full awareness of craft options opened new vistas for the novel: “There are
unheard-of experiments to be made.”7 We can be sure that Lubbock didn’t
include in that prospect the laconic objectivity of Ernest Hemingway’s “The
Killers” (1927) or Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key (1931). He warned that too
strict an adherence to the “dramatic method” eliminated the possibility of evoc-
ative atmosphere of the sort that James wrapped around the telegraph clerk of
“In the Cage.” We can be equally sure that Lubbock wouldn’t consider Joyce’s
Ulysses, published a year after The Craft of Fiction, to fit the bill. This founding
work of modernist literature seemed a repudiation of the trim, well-made novel
of James, Conrad, Willa Cather, Ellen Glasgow, and others. Ulysses was fol-
lowed by the canonical works of Dos Passos, Woolf, Hemingway, and Faulkner.
Like their counterparts in other countries, these Anglophone writers seemed
 Making Confusion Satisfactory 59

to be rejecting the new developments that had sought to enrich the heritage of
nineteenth-century storytelling.
What caused the change? One explanation has predominated. Older modes
of expression could not capture the convulsive changes in science and culture
since 1900, or as Woolf famously specified, December 1910. “When human
relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics,
and literature.”8 New forms arise to capture the contemporary world more ade-
quately. In the process, they attack the inherited forms. Stability of character,
causal connections among events, linear time, the coherence of mental life—all
these presuppositions of “realist” art, either Naturalist or Flaubertian/Jamesian,
need to be overthrown. These premises might be subverted through breakup
and dismantling or simply rejected. The result, however difficult it might seem
in comparison with more transparent storytelling, strives to represent the shat-
tering dislocations of modern life.
Yet this explanatory effort offers its own version of realism. Modernism is
said to faithfully “reflect” the world we live in and our responding sensibil-
ity. The question I’m pursuing here—how we may understand the forms that
emerge in popular storytelling across the twentieth century—suggests another
angle of approach. That relies on the idea of schema and revision, reworking a
received pattern to fulfill a particular function.
Nothing comes from nothing. Just as James, Conrad, playwrights, and film-
makers such as Griffith revised earlier storytelling techniques, their succes-
sors can be seen doing something similar. Modernist strategies of nonlinearity,
ambivalent narration, subjective plunges, and puzzling segmentation don’t
utterly abandon inherited narrative schemas. To a large extent, they rely on
them. Mr. Bloom, for all his errant psychic ways, satisfies many conditions of
fictional personhood. He moves through the world as an individuated agent,
and once we get used to the ways in which his thoughts are rendered, we can
make some fair guesses at his motives and impulses. If a novel challenges
received procedures, it must first invoke them.
Granted, the process poses difficulties for the reader. Just by dropping quo-
tation marks, Ulysses creates a slight slippage between external action, inner
monologue, and authorial commentary.9 Yet we manage, thanks in part to
precedents. Anthony Burgess has pointed out early versions of stream of con-
sciousness in Dickens’s Little Dorritt.10And Joyce does retain some cues from
traditional schemas for reported thought.11 For these reasons, I suggest we think
not of rejection, or even subversion, but of creative transformation, a recast-
ing of prior conventions so that both novelty and familiarity stand out clearly.
Instead of Ezra Pound’s “Make it new” we often find “Remake it new.”
We’re likely to conceive the process of schema and revision as conserva-
tive, operating within a stable tradition, managing minimal change. In con-
trast, we aren’t used to thinking of “advanced” artistry as preserving some
 60 PA RT I

features of the past, except as citations or ironic jabs. We like our revolutions
totalizing.
Yet “breakthrough” works often achieve striking effects through judicious
reworking of what they surpass. Charles Rosen has traced how Haydn, Mozart,
and Beethoven recast large-scale symphonic organization by incorporating
patterns of thematic development from musical drama. The composers then
mapped the symphonic schemas back onto opera, thereby endowing plot
action with a more dynamic form.12 Richard Taruskin has argued for a compa-
rable process in the emergence of modern music, with Mahler’s “maximalism”
expanding the procedures of the classic symphony using several strategies, such
as revising the extent and substance of the second theme of a movement.13
Something similar can be said about the visual arts. Ernst H. Gombrich
suggests that the incompatible views in a Cubist still life rely on familiar
forms (violins, bottles, fruit bowls) carefully juxtaposed according to classic
principles of centering and balance.14 More broadly, Kirk Varnedoe consid-
ers Western pictorial modernism as a process of drawing on “a fluid set of
established conventions.” He lays out the prospect that artists’ works can be
considered

the product of individual decisions to reconsider the complex possibilities

within the traditions available to them, to act on basic options that were,
and remain, broadly available and unconcealed. This kind of art is conceiv-
able only within a system that is in crucial senses unfixed, inefficient, and
unpredictable—a cultural system whose work is done by the play within it,
in all senses of the word, in a game where the rules themselves are what is
constantly up for grabs.15

With respect to narrative, those basic options include the tools I invoke
throughout this book: chronological sequence, narration and viewpoint, and
segmentation. For popular narrative, those rules, although fairly firm, can be
renegotiated if authors have ingenuity and pluck and are spurred on by compe-
tition with their peers.
What of modernism’s engagement with the surrounding culture? Certainly
subject matter and themes are prime materials for storytelling; current con-
cerns can hook an audience. The most common innovations we find in popular
storytelling likewise consist of absorbing new themes and subject matter into
received forms, positing a fresh story world rather than a fresh way of present-
ing it. Often an unfamiliar what is given through a familiar how.16
If the tradition is in perpetual renewal, then we must allow some weight-
ing to form and style as conditioning our responses. At the limit, perhaps the
modernist narrative project serves less to reflect conditions in the outer world
than to give us new experiences of story worlds. From this angle, social or
 Making Confusion Satisfactory 61

political commitment, as well as memes and cultural flotsam, can motivate

design features. For the modernists, themes of fragmentation and alienation
could operate as alibis for formal innovation. Bill Sidney’s disordered state of
mind in How Like a God justifies jumbling temporal order. If in all dimensions—
form, style, theme, subject—nothing comes from nothing, we can study how
particular storytellers rework what they borrow from their predecessors when
revising the rules for particular purposes.
The idea that literary modernists often took inherited devices as points of
departure was broached by Joseph Warren Beach, a critic of the period. He
suggested that James had reduced the range of story action very considerably
before Joyce and Faulkner found deeper psychological currents in the “infinite
expansion of the moment” and the “silent monologue.”17 More obviously,
modernist plots rely on traditional devices such as adultery, private letters,
accidental deaths, suicides, secrets, and coincidental moments in which some-
one witnesses a revelation. In Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915),
Leonora imagines belaboring Nancy with a riding whip in brisk melodramatic
fury. Stream of consciousness, so strongly identified with modernism, was
a nineteenth-century notion, articulated not only in Les lauriers sont coupés
(1887) but by William James in his treatise Psychology of 1890.18
Needless to say, any debts to convention are often warped by structure, ver-
bal style, and viewpoint refraction. A modernist storyteller can do what James
and Conrad, as “proto-modernists,” did: equivocate, skip over, or invert the
importance of an action that the easiest narrative would put to the forefront.
Most novels would play up the death of a major character, but To the Light-
house (1927) reports it in a parenthetical shrug.19 In such ways High Modernists
roughed up the basic techniques that normally let us smoothly assimilate the
plot action. To get a better sense of this more aggressive schema revision and
the difficulties it triggers, let’s look at a canonical Faulkner novel.
The Sound and the Fury consists of four blocks, narrated by three charac-
ters and then a noncharacter voice. Most baldly, the array is comprehensible
as a version of the multiple-character accounts in Collins’s dossier novels. The
anonymous voice of the fourth part, readable as traditional third-person nar-
ration, recalls the omniscient chapters of Dickens’s Bleak House. The second
and third sections are flashbacks, not unlike the embedded flashback blocks in
Conan Doyle’s Holmes novels. And like the classic dossier, The Sound and the
Fury helpfully labels its blocks with dates: April 7, 1928; June 10, 1910; April 6,
1928; April 8, 1928. Those days are shot through with recollections and refer-
ences to earlier times, but the plot would be much more difficult to follow if the
tags were omitted.
The narration we first encounter represents the thoughts of the mentally
deficient Benjy Compson. Almost as disjunctive are the fraught musings of
the second part, attributed to Quentin Compson in the lead-up to his suicide.
 62 PA RT I

We’re rewarded with a good deal more clarity in the third section, as Jason
Compson takes up the story, and the fourth part, narrated objectively, anchors
us firmly in the story world. Nonetheless, unlike Collins, Faulkner doesn’t
provide a framing situation for the blocks of narration. The characters aren’t
giving testimony or writing their memoirs. By this point in literary history, a
first-person character narrator did not need to specify the overarching story-
telling situation; The Great Gatsby (1925) and A Farewell to Arms (1929) were
notable examples. Faulkner extended this convention to his multiple narrators
and went further, suggesting that these sections were variously akin to solilo-
quies, stream of consciousness on the Joycean model, or what Dorrit Cohn calls
“memory monologues.”20
The narration of the first two parts is fragmentary and nonlinear, shifting
among events that are sometimes barely indicated. Benjy’s narration is in its
own way utterly objective, forcing us to infer characters’ motives and circum-
stances. It makes building up the story even more difficult. Yet the texture
isn’t impenetrable—again, thanks to Faulkner’s selective schema revision. For
example, in reporting speech, Benjy replaces commas with periods: “ ‘Listen at
you now.’ Luster said.”21 This idiosyncratic choice becomes part of the intrinsic
norm for Benjy’s section, and although it has an expressive effect, creating a
choppy rhythm, a reader quickly learns to “read over” it.
The time shifts in Benjy’s account are rendered without tagging and in the
most minimal way possible, through paragraph breaks. Many shifts to earlier
events are presented in italics. On a single page, there might be three crosscut
scenes drawn from different points in the story action, with one italicized
and the others not. Having established an intrinsic norm of narration, Faulk-
ner then strategically violates it, expanding its purview while refusing to let
us feel that we have wholly mastered it.22 This exemplifies the thinning and
rethickening strategy I mentioned in the introduction. As we adapt to initial
difficulties, new ones crop up.
Faulkner originally wanted the time fragments printed in color-coded
inks, not so far removed from the varying tints Griffith assigned to different
epochs in Intolerance.23 This option indicates an urge to help us over the bumps
(although the narration might have gone on to sabotage this pattern too). As
the book stands, our sense of the ongoing action in different periods is our
most reliable compass for navigating the time shifts, with paragraphing and
italics serving as supplementary cues.
Quentin’s first-person account in the second part bristles with new varia-
tions and obstacles. Quotations are punctuated in the standard way, but many
passages have no punctuation, or even capitalization, and italics may roll out
in a long block of text or erupt in bursts. The free flow of Quentin’s narration
flattens normal exposition, recalling Gertrude Stein’s remark: “When I began
 Making Confusion Satisfactory 63

writing the whole question of punctuation was a vital question. . . . The comma
was just a nuisance.”24

“I adore Canada,” Miss Dangerfield said. “I think it’s marvellous.”

“Did you ever drink perfume?” Spode said. with one hand he could lift her to
his shoulder and run with her running Running
“No,” Shreve said. running the beast with two backs and she blurred in the
winking oars running the swine of Euboeleus running coupled within how many
Caddy
“Neither did I,” Spode said. I don’t know too many there was something ter-
rible in me terrible in me Father I have committed have you ever done that We
didn’t we didn’t do that did we do that
“and Gerald’s grandmother always picked his own mint before breakfast,
while the dew was still on it. . . .”25

The italicized interjections suggest an earlier encounter crosscut with the cur-
rent scene, but that quasi-flashback is distressed by a stream of consciousness
(“beast with two backs”) and fragments of classical education and halting,
incestuous confession. Even here, however, a few standard cues survive: para-
graphing, the consistent shift to italics, and commonplace action schemas for
running and speaking with others. (Thanks, Quentin, for naming Caddy.)
Even so we hit some bumps, especially at moments when the intrinsic norms
are violated and we have to consider why this or that passage is treated excep-
tionally. If nothing else, modernist writing demonstrates how massively redun-
dant everyday storytelling is. As we struggle to grasp minimal cues, Faulkner
reminds us of the prompts that steer us to understanding easier books such as
How Like a God, which neatly segregates italic from roman type, third-person
from second-person narration.
By subtracting some reliable cues—time tags, cogent transitions between
scenes, sourced character commentary—and by setting up unusual intrinsic
norms, Faulkner is typical of his modernist peers. He teaches us how to com-
prehend his book. The gaps and frustrations must themselves be patterned, as
they are here: gathered in distinct sections, laid out in teasing bits, coaxing us
to master a fluctuating process of structure and narration. The early chapters of
Ulysses introduce us to stream-of-consciousness narration in gradual doses, but
Faulkner’s opening has confronted us with the book’s most difficult stretches.
Then he rewards us by making the third and fourth sections far easier to follow.
After reading the last two parts of The Sound and the Fury, we’re invited to
return to the first two sections to discover what we missed.
Faulkner later helped his readers much more. When his reputation was reha-
bilitated in the mid-1940s, he wrote an appendix that supplied both a Compson
 64 PA RT I

genealogy and rich biographies of the characters (Of Benjy: “Gelded 1913.”).
Perversely, in some editions of the novel, this appendix served as a preface, a
decision that helped readers navigate what followed.26
Well before then, however, Faulkner had counted on other aids. Modern-
ists were aware that literary institutions could help readers appreciate difficult
work. For one thing, publishers could guide reception. The jacket copy for The
Sound and the Fury helpfully announced that the opening segment drama-
tized the mind of “the idiot son” and traced how he “reverts to his childhood
routinely at a sound, a smell, a sight.” There was also the expanding power of
literary commentary. By 1929, Faulkner could count on press accounts easing
readers into his book.
Again and again reviewers identified the major characters, explained that
the book traced the decline of a family, laid out the four-column grid of nar-
rators, and dwelled on the peculiarities of Benjy’s and Quentin’s styles.27 One
critic speculated that Quentin imagines himself responsible for Caddy’s death.28
Another suggested that he breaks his watch “to put himself outside time.”29
Even unsympathetic critics could set expectations, as when Clifton Fadiman
deplored the book’s demand for “puzzle-solving” and objected to “one hundred
pages of an imbecile’s simplified sense perceptions and monosyllabic gibber-
ings.”30 Novelists could hope that gatekeepers and tastemakers would acquaint
audiences with the most striking innovations on display. Today’s media critics
avoid spoilers, chiefly ones pertaining to the story’s twists or ending, but they
feel free to prepare viewers for unusual formal strategies.31
Eventually, academics would exhaustively plumb modernist classics in
monographs, class lectures, and introductions to critical editions. The Faulkner
revival brought forth The Portable Faulkner (1946) and the beginning of a vast
analytical literature that would prepare generations of readers for The Sound
and the Fury. (If you haven’t read the book, I’ve done my part too.) When Joyce
was asked to share the conceptual scheme undergirding Ulysses, he withheld
it, arguing half-seriously, “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will
keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the
only way of insuring one’s immortality.”32
The Sound and the Fury can stand as a convenient example of the sort of
bold schema revision proposed by many modernist texts. It shows how inno-
vation can arise from block construction, nonchronological plot arrangement,
and gaps and frictions in voice and viewpoint. It also shows that the innovation
relies on recasting, not simply rejecting or subverting, traditional schemas.
From the audience’s viewpoint, the partial presence of those schemas help us
grasp the story action and appreciate the power unleashed by the innovation.
The novelty stands out against a blurred background of familiarity, and the
innovation is grasped by principles of pattern specific to the particular work—
and sometimes by helpful critical commentary.
 Making Confusion Satisfactory 65

The High Modernist canon weaponized (as we might say today) virtually
every technique of standard storytelling.33 Many innovations are intelligible as
more or less elaborate revisions of schemas inherited from more mainstream
traditions. For example, the intersecting plots of the triple-decker found a new
concentration in Mrs. Dalloway’s dual-track story lines riddled with dreams,
memories, and hallucinations. The “city mysteries” of Dickens and Eugène Sue
use crisscrossing intrigues to survey levels of society, and this formal strategy
was recast in Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer (1925), which also provides a
variant of the alternation schema on display in Waldo Frank’s City Block (1922).
Dos Passos fully embraced a montage aesthetic in his USA trilogy (1930–1936).
That effort built on Manhattan Transfer and Joyce’s city epic by incorporating
“Newsreel” and “Camera Eye” blocks and splintering the sort of quasi-fictional
social reportage mapped out by Upton Sinclair.
More pervasively, the multiplying viewpoints and voices of modernist fic-
tion rework the dossier tradition. Through conversational inquiry, Conrad
“vocalized” witnesses’ testimony that would have been written out in the epis-
tolary and casebook formats. But the witnesses’ accounts remain embedded in
a frame story. Modernists could revise the schema by dropping the frame and
turning characters’ accounts into inner speech, as Woolf does in The Waves
(1931), which dissolves the narration into six phantasmal voices. As I Lay Dying
(1930), which Faulkner dubbed his “tour de force,” provides a mosaic of mono-
logues, including one issuing from a corpse, all complicated by tense shifts
and stream-of-consciousness interruptions.34 Seven interlaced narrators in
Absalom, Absalom! (1936) fragment Conrad’s collective storytelling schema,
generating page-long sentences and untagged chapters embellished with new
habits of punctuation and typeface. In the theater, Eugene O’Neill recast the
traditional soliloquy as a polyphonic stream of consciousness in the nine-act
Strange Interlude (1928).
Ulysses, the prototypical novel of English-language High Modernism, is at
once a city novel, an impressionistic rendering of consciousness, a collage of
perspectives, and a reworking of an ancient narrative schema, with the chapter
blocks matching the books of the Odyssey. Any narrative can be laid out on a
grid, but Joyce’s monument teemed with leitmotifs (colors, arts, bodily organs)
that he charted on a spreadsheet.35 Made public by critics, the table became an
emblem of the density of symbolic patterning sought by modernist ambitions.
When Joyce invoked the virtuosity and hard work demanded by writing
in many points of view and styles, he added that these were “all apparently
unknown or undiscovered by my fellow tradesmen.”36 In declaring that his
peers have missed out on his discoveries, Joyce sums up the ambitions of what
Harry Levin has called “Ultraism”: “that reshaping spirit which must contin-
ually transpose its material and outdistance itself in a dazzling sequence of
newer and newest manners.”37 Beginning The Sound and the Fury with Benjy’s
 66 PA RT I

daunting narration exemplifies this effort to surpass prevailing norms. Joyce’s

table of motifs is in the same spirit, carrying Henry James’s demand for rigor
and density into the fine grain of each segment. The ultimate Ultraist work may
have been Finnegans Wake (1939), which for all its urge to hurl itself out of the
orbit of literature remains the story of a dream, a schema of ancient lineage.
I don’t mean to minimize the shock of the new. All the priming of the critics
can’t fully domesticate the reader’s unruly, moment-by-moment experience
of The Sound and the Fury. Just as Webern will never be elevator music, it’s
extremely unlikely that a reissue of Tender Buttons or The Waves or Absalom,
Absalom! will outsell the next Stephen King release. Booth Tarkington mocked
Faulkner, but his description is apt: He, like other modernists, is “satisfactorily
confusing in ways that demonstrate greatness”38
The shock of the new is sometimes still the shock of the very old. As the
Russian Formalist critics put it, the son can resemble the grandfather.39 Any
storyteller draws judiciously on prior traditions, even marginal or unfashion-
able ones. Some schemas are preserved to facilitate pickup; some are reshaped
through reconfiguring their patterns or infusing them with new implications.
From the audience’s standpoint, even radical innovations stand out against a
background, however hazy, of recognizable landmarks. The experimental nar-
rative needs some anchoring, however wobbly, in tradition.

Ghastly Italics and Friendly Exoskeletons

“The tactful part of boldness,” Jean Cocteau remarked, “is knowing how far is
going too far.”40 Perhaps the Ultraists were more bold than tactful, but other
storytellers shared Cocteau’s caution. They seized on techniques of modernism
while aiming to create something accessible to wide audiences.
After all, the new techniques were detachable. Once Joyce had shown how
to write stream of consciousness, others could try it. Virginia Woolf had con-
trasted the new methods to the “conventions” that had preceded them, but
the novelties became conventions in their turn.41 The rapid turnover of popu-
lar forms described by Jean-Claude Carrière required novelty from whatever
source could be found. Modernist techniques were absorbed and assimilated
by authors less committed to difficulty. The trick was to turn forbidding stories
into enticing ones while keeping some tang of the difficult.
For instance, after we’ve been steadily restricted to a Somerset Maugham
protagonist, if the third-person narration abruptly shifts to supply the back-
ground of a new character in a crisp, implausible depth, has Maugham slipped
back to the old nineteenth-century omniscience? No, because the bulk of the
story continues to take advantage of the protagonist’s limited knowledge; no
Tolstoyan panoramas here. Any lump of exposition we get is presented as a
 Making Confusion Satisfactory 67

condensation of information the protagonist was given on this or several occa-

sions. Gore Vidal has suggested that Maugham’s one-off violations of restricted
viewpoint aim at quick pickup. They are “a lot better than having someone sit
down and tell you the story of his life, in quotation marks, page after page.”42
Maugham trims the bulkiness of Conrad’s boxes-within-boxes structure, which
does often yield birds’ nests of single and double quotation marks, while still
profiting from tantalizing Conradian time gaps and uncertainty about new
situations.
In these ways, Anglo-American literature selectively absorbed the new
methods. Exhibit A: Before writing How Like a God, Rex Stout steeped himself
in Wilder, Dos Passos, Joyce, Proust, Gide, Faulkner, Huxley, Woolf, and D. H.
Lawrence.43 Like them, he exposed his plot’s structural axis, a geometry not
visible in the prototypical easy story. Louis Bromfield’s 24 Hours (1930) blended
the day-in-the-life time span of Ulysses with the cross-sectional survey of Man-
hattan Transfer, but without the montage frictions: it became a popular play
and film. Something similar happened with Vicki Baum’s novel Grand Hotel
(1929). Intersecting lives, and a geometrical blocking-out of them, were the
basis of Thornton Wilder’s Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927).
Faulkner’s multiple-narrator method in As I Lay Dying became an influen-
tial model but was smoothed out in works such as William March’s Company
K (1933). Kenneth Fearing’s The Hospital (1939) ushers in as narrators doctors,
nurses, patients, switchboard operators, laundry attendants, even a tugboat.
As Gide had revised the embedded manuscript schema for The Counterfeiters
(1925), Arnold Gingrich could recast Gide’s reflexivity for his satiric book-with-
in-a-book Cast Down the Laurel (1935).
In some of these cases, we might want to accuse popular culture of preying
on high culture. But the modernists had already appropriated many devices
from popular sources and roughened them up. In response, assimilators had
to repolish the schemas. They had to put back what was taken out, provide
instructions for understanding, reiterate the patterns, and tag things less cryp-
tically. To see these tactics of accessibility at work, consider italics once more.
By and large, Anglo-American texts reserved italic type for titles of artworks
and phrases to be stressed. (“They all like me, me.”44) But modernists recruited
italics for more mysterious purposes. Italics distinguish the single-page “chap-
ters” sandwiched between the stories of Hemingway’s In Our Time (1925). Man-
hattan Transfer, The Waves, and Jean Toomer’s story “Esther” (1923) employ
italics in passages that open chapters, with the effect of marking parallel blocks.
Writers had tried various ways of quoting inner monologue, with most
opting for no punctuation at all or for enclosing quotation marks.45 Waldo
Frank’s Rahab (1922) goes a bit Joycean, using the “dialogue-dash” for thoughts
and reserving quotation marks for uttered speech. In Manhattan Transfer,
Dos Passos assigns italics to song lyrics that creep in as “sound effects” or bits
 68 PA RT I

of memory. “From the next room comes the wheezy doublebarreled snoring
of her uncle and aunt. Somebody loves we, I wonder who. . . . The tune is all
through her body, in the throb of her feet, in the tingling place on her back
where he held her tight dancing with her.”46 Another 1925 novel moves toward
a flat pile-up without markers. C. Kay Scott’s Siren introduces us to its method
early: “Belle went obediently from the room. They don’t like me, I can’t help
kissing babies, they smell good, I could eat them up, she felt helpless.”47
It doesn’t take much imagination to see how to tidy this up. The more main-
stream Christopher Morley provides an instruction kit in Thunder on the Left
(1925).

Her mind ran beside her, like a questing dog, while she tried to steer their
talk into some channel of reality. Her thoughts kept crowding massively under
her uneasy words, pushing them out before they were ready, cutting into her
speech like italics in a page of swarthy Roman type.
“We could all eat too much in hot weather, I dare say. Oh, if I could only
write him a letter I could make him understand. He’s so sophisticated.”48

Morley assures us that these are Sylvia’s thoughts, not only through the type-
face but also by shifting to the present tense and by having her call Martin
“him” and “he” rather than “you,” which might have implied speech. From this
point on, Sylvia’s dialogue alternates with passages in italics reliably indicating
her thoughts.
Faulkner accepted the emerging convention of using italics to signal charac-
ters’ inner lives. But the Benjy and Quentin sections of The Sound and the Fury
delete Dos Passos’s contextual cues and Morley’s explicit guidance and, as we’ve
seen, push toward much greater fragmentation. The italics allow Faulkner to
create a jerky alternation of past and present less marked in Rahab and Siren.
Faulkner continued his play with typography through the 1940s (even adding
parentheses within parentheses), as if trying to outrun the emerging main-
stream convention. He risked looking silly. Vladimir Nabokov complained
about Faulkner’s “absolutely ghastly italics.”49
Meanwhile, some popular writers smoothed out the device, being careful to
tag it and mark it off more plainly than Morley had. “There, thought Millicent, is
Joe and his family ten years from now. And I suppose he thinks he’s going to turn
me into that woman. She shuddered delicately at the thought.”50 By the 1940s, the
reader could presume that direct address in italics would not be voiced, and the
“you” could be included without risk of misunderstanding. “Strangely enough,
she had been the strong one then. Roger going all to pieces. Remember that,
Roger. Your wife was strong, stronger than you, stronger than Addie could ever have
been.”51 Pulp stories picked up the convention.52 When paperback publishers
of the 1940s reprinted novels of earlier eras, they sometimes reformatted inner
 Making Confusion Satisfactory 69

monologues as italicized passages.53 This strict marking of objective action

from subjective response coincides with the emergence of character voice-over
as a common film and radio technique.54
“Roger going all to pieces” in the previous example indicates how popular
storytelling repurposed stream-of-consciousness techniques as well. Although
manuals and how-to articles seldom encouraged aspiring authors to push
toward modernist disorientation, many handbooks were quite systematic in
laying out viewpoint options. A 1934 guide discussed how contemporary writ-
ers had exposed the “subconscious” through free association. Techniques pio-
neered by Joyce, Faulkner, and Woolf were said to be embraced by “the popular
new literature of today,” like the best-selling Anthony Adverse (1936).55 Ten years
after Woolf ’s Jacob’s Room (1922), a history of the English novel could remark
that shifting stream of consciousness among characters posed little difficulty
for average readers.56
The firm regulating of italics and roman type, of inner speech and dialogue,
appears to have become one stylistic norm of popular literary narrative.57 Com-
parable tactics emerged in American radio drama, which was coming into its
own in the 1930s. A show’s many vocal strands—an announcer, the characters,
and increasingly a narrator—needed to be distinguished. As radio plays began
incorporating flashbacks and inner monologues, the creators stratified auditory
registers. A voice close to the microphone could suggest not only spatial prox-
imity but also action in the present, as opposed to more distant reverberant
action in the past.58 Filters would signal dialogue over the telephone. Sound
could cut in abruptly or fade in gradually, each difference signaling changes in
locale or time periods. Orson Welles’s 1937 adaptation of Dracula is a montage
of texts—journal entries, news reports, telegrams, conversations, monologues,
memories—delivered with widely varying pitch, pace, and volume, providing
an auditory equivalent to the dossier structure of the original novel.
Writer-producer-director Arch Oboler became famous as the champion of
stream of consciousness in radio. Oboler’s technique relied mostly on inner
monologue rather than Joycean fragmentation, but it still demanded scrupu-
lous channeling to orient the listener. Just as Faulkner employs spacing and
typeface to cue shifts in time and viewpoints, Oboler’s auditory mix carries
us into characters’ heads. In “Baby,” broadcast in 1939, the sounds are layered
to present a woman walking in the present (traffic, footsteps on the sidewalk)
while an inner voice, closely miked, meditates on her pregnancy and leads
to crisply focused dialogue from past conversations with her husband. In
England, a similar “novelistic” transformation of radio drama took place under
the auspices of the BBC.59
Throughout popular media fairly daring techniques operate in a give-and-
take with cues that provide accessibility. The popular storyteller, we might say,
re-revises the modernist version of classic devices. This dynamic is apparent in
 70 PA RT I

the predictable alternation and signposting of How Like a God. It’s there as well
in Dalton Trumbo’s novel Johnny Got His Gun (1938), which carries Jamesian
restriction and internalization of viewpoint to a harsh extreme. A first-person
narration recounts the waves of awareness engulfing a soldier surviving loss of
arms, legs, and face. Joe Bonham, confined to a hospital bed, recalls his life in
flashbacks and calculates how to make his sacrifice show the public the futility
of war. As often happens, a theme circulating in cultural discourse is endowed
with new vividness by a bold but accessible narrative strategy. Oboler turned
Trumbo’s book into a disturbing radio monologue in 1940.60
A more genteel example of crossover is the best-selling The Late George
Apley (1937), whose subtitle declares it “A Novel in the Form of a Memoir.”
Mr. Willing has been asked to compile a posthumous biography of a pillar of
Boston society. He draws upon letters, diaries, college essays, private lectures,
and his own acquaintance with Apley—a classic dossier premise. In addition,
in recruiting Willing for the task, Apley’s son alludes to scandals and family
secrets. A memoir, it seems, benefits from a novelistic whiff of mystery.
Willing’s chronicle shuffles time periods in good modernist fashion. Early
on, we jump from 1912 to 1902 to 1916 and then to 1883. The gears shift smoothly
thanks to Willing’s commentary, and there are explicit chapter tags (“Harvard
Days”). But our compiler is no Walter Hartwright, trustworthy editor of the
documents in The Woman in White. Mr. Willing is pompous and is satisfied
offering anodyne praise of a secretly unhappy man. The chapters’ blandly pre-
tentious subtitles (“The Establishment of a Beloved and Challenging Insti-
tution”) show that Willing is oblivious to Apley’s descent into melancholy.
The result gestures toward the “prismatic” possibilities of Conradian tales.
A reviewer observed that Apley emerges as both “tender husband and father
and the veriest snob.”61
In a more mystical version of Grand Hotel, The Dark Glass (1935) by March
Cost proposes multiple protagonists and several layers of time. The guests and
servants in a genteel boarding house are living through All Souls’ Eve and All
Souls’ Day 1929. They gather for meals and then disperse to their routines and
appointments. In the course of twenty-four hours, some face crises and all
recall episodes from their past, which are presented by third-person narration
and out of chronological order. The faded actress remembers her glory days;
the young novelist hopes his brother approves of his new manuscript. Occa-
sionally there’s a dream too. But Cost adds another dimension: some of the
characters are transported ahead to the parallel day in 1930. What motivates
the time travel is a mysterious new mirror installed in the hallway, as well as
the belief that All Souls’ Eve is the moment when the living confront the dead.
One character discovers that in 1930 she will be a ghost.
With dozens of characters and decades of time to be traversed, The Dark
Glass might have become a slurry of confusion. Woolf or Faulkner would have
 Making Confusion Satisfactory 71

reveled in the chance to let character voices and scenes mingle indeterminately
in this house. But Cost provides firm guardrails. The Dark Glass’s table of con-
tents supplies an exoskeleton that lays out the structure of the book. The whole
is doubly framed: a prologue and epilogue describe a massive flight of birds, and
introductory and closing sections center on the woman who runs the boarding
house. Within the double frame, six blocks of chapters are labeled by the day’s
clock, the viewpoint character, and the action played out. As with the intertitles
in Intolerance, the time shifts are constantly signposted.
A tabular structure like this lies behind dossier novels such as The Moon-
stone; a more rigorous geometry was hinted at in James’s The Awkward Age and
was exposed by Conrad’s chapter layout in Chance. Joyce used a more intricate
grid for Ulysses but concealed it. The Dark Glass, laying bare its architecture
to guide the reader, relies on the symmetrical blocks that we find in mystery
fiction from Anthony Berkeley to Richard Stark. Such grids became central to
domestic suspense in the 2000s, when novels label time, place, and character
while, as we’ll see, heightening the uncertainty by omitting a table of contents.
Part of the suspense now depends on confronting unexpected tagging as we
turn the page.
Can the mainstream novelist avoid such explicit signposting? With its cryp-
tic alphanumeric tags, How Like a God tries to do so. So does George Cronyn’s
Fortune and Men’s Eyes (1935), whose family saga stretches across thirty-five years.
It is articulated in five parts consisting of fifty-five chapters tagged with teasing,
uninformative titles such as “The Thousandth Man” and “Umbilical Digression.”
Relying on shifts of viewpoint, multiple narrators, and jumps across time, the text
needs other ways of orienting us. It finds them by establishing a stable intrinsic
norm of alternating voices, framed by a clinical situation.
After a prologue tells of a clergyman’s sexual adventure in Manila, Fortune
and Men’s Eyes launches into a first-person report of Byron Peirce, the minister’s
son. Gradually we realize that he is recounting this to Dr. Bedell, a researcher
into men’s sexuality. Byron’s account in the book’s first part culminates in a
flashback from the narrating situation to a recent disaster: his brother Max has
committed suicide. This mystery teases us to ask what led up to it. Thereafter
the book presents chronological third-person accounts of the careers of Byron,
Max, and their brother Clyde, alternating with Byron’s first-person recollec-
tions, which move a little more freely through time. First- and third-person
chunks are carved into distinct chapters—not, as in Absalom, Absalom!, dis-
solved together. Passages from Dr. Bedell’s journal interpreting the case are
supplemented by other inquiries he has made into the family.
In all, we have a sleek update of the dossier format, in which the tags can be
omitted because there are only two character narrators (plus an external voice
expanding our access to other scenes). A reliable rhythm of alternation fits
within the framing situation of the talking cure. Needless to say, the last word
 72 PA RT I

falls to the authoritative Dr. Bedell, and he is able to assure a happy ending to
the surviving brothers and the women they love. Meanwhile, the reader has
learned to read the book.
Even writers with modernist aspirations learned to adjust. Julian Shapiro
had tried Joycean stream of consciousness in The Water Wheel (1933), but
Seventy Times Seven (1939), published under the pseudonym John Sanford,
judiciously guides readers through a fragmented story of two men’s paral-
lel lives in a rural town. The novel starts with objective, external narration
presenting Aaron Platt finding a bum half-frozen in his barn. Platt takes up
the story in first person, recounting events to an unidentified listener who
interjects questions. Running alongside Platt’s account is a soliloquy from the
dying tramp Paulhan, in a first-person narration that hovers between lyrical
inner monologue and speech. Both men’s discourses contain flashbacks, often
italicized. As the novel continues, the personal linkages between the men are
revealed, and we gradually realize that Platt’s account is his inquest testimony
after Paulhan’s death. By the end of Seventy Times Seven, the external narration
returns to confirm the stability of the situation, and the classic trial schema has
been revised but not rejected.
Compromises and blends like these offer a good reason to avoid “middle-
brow” as the best blanket term for in-between cases. Granted, critics have posited
characteristic middlebrow themes and subjects. Again and again we confront
problems of individual consciousness, weakness of will, social identity, feeble
political resistance, middle-class family life, and the passing of the old ways.
The Late George Apley seems resolutely middlebrow in its fascination with the
decline of an entitled patriarch, whereas the efficacy of psychological research
in Fortune and Men’s Eyes can be seen as promoting support for new sciences
of mental health, not least the vogue for pseudo-Freudian psychoanalysis.
How Like a God could be a case history of repressed incestuous desires: all the
women Bill meets fail to measure up to his glorious sister Jane, who won his
heart as a child when she gave him a cookie.
The themes and subjects of these books could have been treated in a much
less zigzag fashion. Are the formal maneuvers simply clever bids for liter-
ary legitimacy? Not entirely. They govern our immediate uptake of the book.
Although these stories don’t radically call identity or social life into question,
they aren’t as complacent about motive and our understanding of it as they
might be. Their construction nuances our experience in ways that a more
straightforward rendering wouldn’t. Their eventual reversion to the prototype
of the easiest narrative retains the tang of transgression. So it isn’t a waste of
time to consider their tactics of accessibility. We can analyze how form and
style are manipulated, thickened and thinned, in the overall architecture and in
items as minute as typography and chapter titles.
 Making Confusion Satisfactory 73

Bringing the Children

The vast variorum of Anglo-American storytelling early in this century has

forced scholars to expand the boundaries of modernist writing beyond the
narrow canon of earlier times. A recent academic survey considers hard and
soft modernism, high and low modernism, African American modernism,
Imperialist modernism, Marxist modernism, reactionary modernism, transna-
tional modernism, glamour modernism, queer modernism, feminist sublime
modernism, and even podiatric modernism.62
Yet another zone, especially important for Anglo-American storytelling,
seems worth charting. Henry James put “fun” in quotation marks, but other
modernist works aimed for fun unadorned. Sometimes these less imposing
works harbor more intricacy and imagination, not to mention delight, than we
find in “difficult” but pedestrian avant-garde work. The shock of the new need
not be a lightning bolt; it might be an aggressive tickle. Consider what hap-
pened on May 18, 1917, at the Théâtre du Chatelet.
That night bohemian Paris mingled with the well-off to witness Parade, a
spectacle very much in the modern mood. On stage a barker offered previews
of a carnival tent show. The attractions included a Chinese magician who spit
fire, an American manager encased in a ten-foot-high skyscraper, a dancing
horse, and a Little American Girl who pranced to ragtime while performing
movie pantomime. Despite appearances, it was no amateur hour. It boasted sets
by Picasso, choreography by Diaghilev’s lead dancer, and exuberant music by
Erik Satie. The whole spectacle was overseen by Jean Cocteau.63
As Cubist paintings had cut up newspaper ads, the “realist ballet” Parade
gleefully flung together bits of circus, fairground, cabaret, movies, and jazz. The
score offered, as Alex Ross puts it, “a new art of musical collage.”64 Today some
would say it’s all a mash-up, but we might as well call it light modernism.65 Its
motto might be what one distressed spectator confessed: “If I’d known it was so
silly I’d have brought the children.”66
Apart from Joyce, High Modernism isn’t usually associated with comedy, but
as we’ve seen, comedy can make formal innovation user-friendly. French exam-
ples from Parade’s era come easily to mind: Apollinaire’s Mamelles de Tiresias
(1917); Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du soldat (1917) and the wrong-note Pergolesi of
Pulcinella (1920); the paintings of Picabia and the films of René Clair; the music
of Les Six, with Satie as innocently naïve inspiration. Light modernism became
Cocteau’s brand, from his opera Oedipus Rex (1925), with a narrator in evening
clothes, to his late films such as Le Testament d’Orphée (1960). Parallels can be
found in the Brecht/Weill collaborations, the stage productions of Meyerhold,
and Shostakovich’s opera The Nose (1928).67 In the United States, the paintings
of Stuart Davis give a lilt to Cubism and anticipate Pop Art, and Philip Furia has
 74 PA RT I

argued that rag-pulsed Tin Pan Alley songs of the interwar years produce stac-
cato verse forms akin to those of William Carlos Williams and e. e. cummings.68
A comfortable home for light modernism is theater. Extroverted and exhi-
bitionistic, stage comedy can sweeten offbeat experiments. Luigi Pirandello,
for instance, insisted on calling his plays comedies, despite the ontological and
epistemic problems they seemed to raise. From one angle, Six Characters in
Search of an Author (1921) debates the philosophical implications of uncertain
identity and false appearances. Characters the playwright has cut out of his
script invade a rehearsal and demand to have their stories reintegrated. Once
they become part of the text, they will live eternally. Hard luck for the actors,
though; they will die. From another angle, Six Characters is self-parody. The
play in rehearsal is written by one Luigi Pirandello, whose works, the Manager
says, “require a ‘highbrow’ to understand them and never satisfy the actors, the
critics, or the public.”69
Six Characters won success around the world and led Pirandello to a Nobel
Prize for Literature. He bequeathed modernism a trilogy of plays that laid
bare paradoxes encompassing all the participants in the theater: the creator,
the interpreter, the audience, and the critic.70 Again, the schemas he activated
weren’t entirely new; they harkened back to The Rehearsal (1671), Sheridan’s
The Critic (1779), and other satires on stage life. But Pirandello’s frame-breaking
and fragmentation, his emphasis on indeterminacy of motive and conse-
quence, were in the High Modernist spirit. So too was his view of theater as a
bitter showcase of illusion. We deeply misunderstand ourselves, he maintained.
We wear masks to hide our ignorance and unhappiness. “This is funny, if we
stop to think of it.”71
In the Anglo-American stage tradition, light modernism is perhaps most
visible in the works of two authors forever branded as middlebrow. Both had
successful novels in the 1920s but found their greatest fame as playwrights. J. B.
Priestley was gripped by a very modernist concern with the mysteries of time.
Dangerous Corner (1932) posits a forking-road, or butterfly-effect plot: change
one detail, and an alternative future opens up. Time and the Conways (1937)
reverses the chronological order of acts II and III without the alibi of a flash-
back, and I Have Been Here Before (1937) shows characters who know the future
and are trying to avert it.
Wilder, believing that the theater had clung too long to novelistic conven-
tions of realism, embraced Pirandello’s efforts at serious fantasy.72 In synchro-
nization with a broader movement toward “Theatricalism,” Wilder sought to
return to the bare Elizabethan stage, with all its freedom to evoke an abstract
time and space.73 The Long Christmas Dinner (1931) shows a single meal stretch-
ing across ninety years, in which generations of family members replace one
another at the table. The Skin of Our Teeth (1942) sets cave dwellers living in
modern New Jersey.
 Making Confusion Satisfactory 75

Wilder modernized the return to the empty playing space through reflexiv-
ity: the inclusion of an impresario addressing the audience and steering the story
back and forth in time. The stage manager of Pullman Car Hiawatha (1931) draws
a plan of the train car, Dogville fashion, and presides over a chorale of inner
monologues from the sleeping compartments. Yet Wilder’s brand of Theatrical-
ism also turned the stage more literary, with the stage manager offering the sort
of omniscience and fluctuating viewpoints favored by narratives in prose and
verse. In Our Town (1938), the narrator introduces the newsboy by explaining
he’ll die in the war to come, and the threnodies of the dead in the cemetery recall
Edgar Lee Masters’s monologues in Spoon River Anthology (1915).
Pirandello, Priestley, and Wilder, however playful, aimed at a degree of
artistic gravity. Less prestigious entertainments explored novelty in ways remi-
niscent of 1910s formalism. Flashbacks were now common in Broadway’s com-
edies, thrillers, and musicals. Two Seconds (1931; film, 1932) showed a man’s
life racing past him as he is electrocuted. Sometimes the flashbacks were not
chronological; at the limit, the whole plot could be in reverse order (The Varying
Shore, 1921; Merrily We Roll Along, 1934). Three Waltzes (1937) and other plays
used blocks to parallel different couples in different eras, as the film spinoffs of
Intolerance had. A West End vehicle by Ivor Novello, Symphony in Two Flats
(1929), featured simultaneous action in two apartments. Three Times the Hour
(1931) went further by presenting parallel action on three different floors of a
mansion; the device of ending each act with a gunshot synchronizes them and
anticipates Jim Jarmusch’s film Mystery Train (1989).
Other innovations included subjectivity and reflexivity. Made for Each Other:
A Switchback Comedy (1924) presented three versions of a bridegroom’s reason
for not appearing at the altar. If Booth Had Missed (1932) proposed alternative
history. In an echo of The Big Idea, The Last Warning (1927) made the last act
of this play furnish the first act of a fictitious one. A schema that was to prove
durable in film and fiction was laid out in These Few Ashes (1928). After a man
has died, three women visit the urn holding his remains, and flashbacks present
each one’s conflicting impressions of him.
The Pirandello vogue encouraged reflexive entertainments that replaced
his bitterness and relativism with straight comedy and more explicit fantasy.
On Stage (1935) shows an author dreaming that his characters refuse to be in
his production; in Knickerbocker Holiday (1938) the author steps in as a deus ex
machina. The Schemers (1924) assembles critics to discuss a play they’ve seen,
a premise reworked in the novel All Star Cast (1936), mentioned in the intro-
duction. There were plays within plays, including a comedy showing amateurs
fumbling their production of Hamlet. Shakespeare himself appears, along with
Francis Bacon, in Good Theatre (1926). As the authors loiter in the lobby during
a performance of something called Your Money or Your Life, the doorman sum-
marizes the plot in iambic pentameter. Did Tom Stoppard read this?
 76 PA RT I

In the same vein, but more aggressive, was the manic Hellzapoppin’ (1938).
The Marx brothers had brought mayhem to The Cocoanuts (1925; film, 1929)
and Animal Crackers (1928; film, 1930). In Hellzapoppin’ comedians Ole Olson
and Chic Johnson added to Marxian non sequiturs a fusillade of running gags,
few funny in themselves but most wearing down resistance through escalation.
As a punitive bonus, the action invaded the auditorium.

Their stooges are clamoring the aisles and hanging out of the boxes and their
audiences have to sustain a barrage of eggs (harmless), bananas (real) and
spiders and snakes (simulated). The distractions are a fundamental part of the
evening’s brawl. During half the evening a sharp-voiced harpy wanders up and
down the aisles calling “Oscar, Oscar” until she has to be shot. A desperate
messenger tries to deliver a plant that grows alarmingly bigger every time
he appears. Pity the ill-fated magician who not only fails to wriggle out of
a strait-jacket in the five seconds allotted to his act but fails to wriggle out of
it all evening.74

Audience members weren’t spared during the intermission. Clowns harassed

them.
A down-market counterpart to Parade and other Parisian spectacles, Hellz-
apoppin’ recycled virtually every gimmick of popular theater as Broadway-friendly
burlesque. It played the huge Winter Garden Theatre for three years. It was made
into a movie, which lost the interactivity of live theater but allowed film technique
to take the goofiness in fresh directions (figs. 2.1–2.2).75 Light modernism and
its vaudevillian cousins suggest yet another overlap between severe, demanding
narratives and something more accessible, sometimes charming and sometimes
annoying. The shock of the new can be a poke in the ribs.

2.1 Hellzapoppin’ (1941): A dust-up in the projection 2.2 Hellzapoppin’: Kane’s sled turns up in a movie set.
booth makes the film slip out of frame. The characters “I thought they burned that.”
adjust.
 Making Confusion Satisfactory 77

Crossing Over, from Both Sides

As Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and others strained to go further and “take the next
step,” they were competing with their prior work and each other’s achieve-
ments. At the same time, all the melds, mergers, sports, and hopeful monsters
in the 1920s may have goaded them on as well. The Ultraist impulse could out-
run the Hergesheimers and Wilders, the “middlebrow” domesticators of High
Modernist techniques. Faulkner, in particular, seems to have made each of his
1930s and 1940s novels a tour de force of fresh difficulty and hectic virtuosity.
The variety of all the in-between accomplishments flummoxes our best
efforts to sort them into the three bins of high, low, and middle. The best I can
offer is a current, conveniently vague label. Recognizing the High Modernist
canon as the core of a blurred circle, or the looming tag in a cloud network,
I’ll just call all the middling cases crossovers. The term is usually used when
two genres are combined (e.g., Westworld) or characters from one established
fictional world visit another (Godzilla meeting King Kong). I’ll use it to sig-
nal plots that blend techniques often associated with modernism with others
associated with mainstream narrative. The term dodges a lot of questions, but
at least it coaxes us to recognize that because many cultural levels blend and
nourish one another we should examine specific strategies at work in each case.
We can find this crossover impulse in the proto-modernists Henry James
and Joseph Conrad. Their mature periods coincided with the emergence of the
detective story as a distinct novelistic genre. James’s middle phase runs alongside
Doyle’s tales of Holmes and Watson, and Conrad’s Chance (1913) was published
the same year as E. C. Bentley’s Trent’s Last Case. Playing with time and viewpoint
inclined James and Conrad to build plots around tantalizing secrets that attract
bystanders. The half-hidden affair in “In the Cage” and the trail of clues in “The
Turn of the Screw” lead the stories’ protagonist on, as do the marital deceptions
of What Maisie Knew (1897) and the puzzle of mismatched couples in The Sacred
Fount (1901). The Other House (1896) revolves around a murder, and in “The Fig-
ure in the Carpet” (1896) James transposes the investigation plot into an inquiry
into literary creativity. Conrad, one contemporary noted, “enjoys keeping you
in doubt as much as any writer of detective stories.”76 The Secret Agent (1907)
was inspired in part by a police officer’s memoir and has the contours of a sus-
pense thriller. In other books Marlow pursues investigations, aided in Chance by
a co-narrator who reveals that the entire plot hinges on a double meaning of the
word “Ferndale.” These affinities shouldn’t surprise us because many of the plot
schemas and narration strategies James and Conrad revise were employed in
Gothic and sensation fiction and the nineteenth-century “city mysteries.”
Among the modernists proper we find a frank fascination with popu-
lar culture as a whole and tales of mystery in particular.77 Jorge Luis Borges,
another avatar of fantasy-skewed modernism, admired Doyle, Chesterton, and
 78 PA RT I

American whodunits. T. S. Eliot compared Wilkie Collins favorably with Dick-

ens and found the Collins test misleading: “We cannot afford to forget that the
first—and not one of the least difficult—requirements of either prose or verse is
that it should be interesting.”78 Eliot famously pilfered a passage from a Holmes
story for a play that he gave a faintly pulpish title, Murder in the Cathedral (1935).
Perhaps the biggest fan was Gertrude Stein. What enticed her about myster-
ies wasn’t the puzzle element: “I like somebody being dead and how it moves
along.”79 She also liked the inevitable repetition arising from witnesses being
questioned: “No matter how often the witnesses tell the same story the insis-
tence is different.”80 When she visited the United States in 1942, she was keen to
meet Dashiell Hammett because he had a proper appreciation of death. Stein
avidly followed American murder cases, and during her stay in Chicago she
rode with police patrols. In the following year, she wrote probably the most
eccentric entry in the genre, Blood on the Dining-Room Floor. Characters are
seldom identified, there seems to be no detective, the victim isn’t named until
the end, the murder apparently goes unsolved, and the narrators are as baffled
as the reader. As the book is closing, we confront:

Lizzie do you understand.

Of course she does.
Of course do you.81

Lizzie Borden isn’t a character in the book (I think), but Stein occasionally
dropped the name into her texts as an homage.
Stein’s novel is a crossover from the avant-garde side, a phenomenon that
goes back to Surrealist appropriations of Fantômas and Charlie Chaplin and
to Soviet films’ pillaging of imagery from Hollywood silent comedy. Traffic in
the other direction, as we’ve seen, shows up when exoteric storytellers revamp
modernist devices. We should remember, however, that if a particular tech-
nique has been made salient by modernism there’s a good chance that it’s a
roughened revision of a device already available to popular storytellers. In turn,
the venturesome popular storyteller will smooth out some of the bumps while
retaining a sense of disruption.
A straightforward example is supplied by Horace McCoy. Known chiefly
as a pulp writer, he found critical recognition with They Shoot Horses, Don’t
They? (1935). Fragments of a judge’s pronouncement of sentence are crosscut
with an inner monologue of the prisoner recalling a grueling dance marathon.
The scenes in the past aren’t tagged by chapter titles, but the chronology is sig-
naled by the running total of the hours that couples spend hauling themselves
across the floor. Italics, boldface type, and expanded fonts are used in staccato
escalation until the finale: “may God have mercy on your soul.” The suspense
is driven less by mystery than inevitability; we expect that the protagonist will
kill the woman he meets, and so the question is chiefly how that comes about.
 Making Confusion Satisfactory 79

Cora Jarrett had more genteel literary ambitions than McCoy, so she
declared Night Over Fitch’s Pond her “psychological and emotional novel of
married life.”82 But it opens with a death in questionable circumstances. Despite
Jarrett’s claim that it was not a “guessing game,” the plot of love among academ-
ics did have detective-story overtones.83 The title is sinister, the narrator invokes
“a sense of riddles unsolved,” Poe’s “Oblong Box” is referenced, and the action
has a classic investigative arc.84 It’s almost as if The Great Gatsby began with
Nick bending over Gatsby’s corpse floating in the pool.
A professor has drowned during a summer holiday, and his colleague
Walter sits vigil over the body. In first-person narration, he broods on what
led to this . . . accident? suicide? murder? “Through the brain-chamber of my
heavy head, pictures flickered and melted into one another, like a cinema.”85
Flashbacks as recounted by Walter, the deeply invested but limited onlooker,
reveal tensions and infidelities among couples in the lakeside cabins. A second
death is discovered, and Walter gradually comes to realize what has happened
behind the scenes.
Along the way the narration refreshes the intrinsic norm through paral-
lel couples, flash-forwards, and a stretch of hypothetical action in playscript
format. As in How Like a God, present and past moments increasingly mingle
in the protagonist’s mind as his narration moves toward the climax. Again, a
reader could map out a coherent time line quite easily. Jarrett doesn’t use chap-
ter titles to signpost the shifts, but the flashbacks within chapters are marked off
by triple spaces and the usual specifiers of time and place.
Reviewers treated Night Over Fitch’s Pond as a blend of mystery and serious
fiction. There were complaints that the solution did not play fair, an indica-
tion that critics were applying the rules of the whodunit in spite of the novel’s
aspirations.86 The book’s crossover potential was exploited by its publisher,
who took out an advertisement insisting that the book was more than a mystery
but still ripe with suspense, “a tense psychological novel.”87 Jarrett’s next novel
was an unabashed mystery story.
C. H. B. Kitchin enjoyed the literary laurels Jarrett sought; his detective
stories were published by Hogarth Press, owned by Leonard and Virginia
Woolf. Kitchin’s crossover fame rests on Birthday Party (1938), a round-robin
quadruple-narrator account revisiting an apparent suicide within a wealthy family.
The eight chapters create a four-by-two grid enclosing scrambled flashbacks that
are conveyed through diary entries and inner monologues. The climax arrives
when the family meet to celebrate the heir’s birthday. The reader is guided by an
initial notice—“The name at the head of each chapter is that of the narrator”—
and by transitional tags that introduce the flashbacks. The book’s affiliations are
marked when one character tells another she seems destined “to live in a detec-
tive story”—a gesture of reflexivity conventional in the mystery genre.88
Some would say that mystery crossover reached a limit with Cameron
McCabe’s The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor (1937). The narrator purports
 80 PA RT I

to be the author himself, as well as a prime suspect in the murder of a movie

actress. The book begins with a parody of legalese warning against libelous
attacks on the author, and it ends with a fake critical essay summarizing the
reviews that the novel received and meditating on the conventions of murder
fiction. The story is told by McCabe across nineteen chapters, then told again
by another character, and then retold by McCabe in a new version. Eventually
there are nine versions of the action, a situation that the essayist interprets,
with the zeal of a modernist critic, in good reflectionist fashion. “Nothing is
firmly fixed, nothing steadfast, nothing solidly established. Everything is in the
process of change, demolition, decay: an exact picture of the man and his age.”89
The multiplicity of story versions perversely becomes the book’s intrinsic norm.
Something of a novelistic equivalent of Pirandello, with a movie studio
standing in for a stage milieu, The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor employs
reflexive comedy with affinities to Hellzapoppin’ as well. Recent editions carry
an afterword in which the author, émigré Ernest Borneman, admits that the
book was written under the influence of Proust, Joyce, Dos Passos, and other
modernist masters. It’s not too much to see parody of them alongside mockery
of mystery conventions.90
My opening example for this chapter constitutes another crossover case
study. In 1919 A Voice in the Dark had dramatized a criminal investigation
through modular “cut-backs” and stage techniques mimicking sensory depri-
vation. Ten years later in How Like a God, Rex Stout embeds a story of erotic
frustration and a quasi-modernist play with time and viewpoint within a thriller
framework. “The suspense in which the reader is held as he tries to guess which
of the five women ‘you’ are to murder is of the detective-story order,” noted an
unsympathetic reviewer.91 In a few years, Stout would forsake literary prestige
and turn to writing mysteries. He would soon show that detective fiction could
harbor verbal and narrative pirouettes reminiscent of modernist ones.

✳✳✳

There is a self-congratulatory side to avant-garde innovation not far removed

from the cleverness we savor in genre storytelling. We call one genius, the other
ingenuity. One yields discomfiting engagement, the other ingratiating audacity.
Which is another way of saying that modernist storytelling is itself a tradi-
tion, wide-ranging and exploratory but still pledged to its own conventions of
viewpoint, segmentation, and the patterning of time. That tradition is open to
raids from many storytellers with other purposes, just as modernists seized and
transformed resources of popular tradition, mystery chief among them. By the
1940s, the modernist tradition of satisfactory confusion had largely been super-
seded by something more accessible that would become the basis of our era of
perpetual crossover.
 CHAPTER 3

CHURN AND CONSOLIDATION

The 1940s and After

T
he British film The Woman in Question (1950) begins when Agnes
Houston, a blowsy fortune-teller and gold digger, is found stran-
gled in her down-market London flat. Superintendant Lodge
immediately questions several suspects. Each interrogation frames a batch of
flashbacks, and these are presented in eighteen chunks (more like the to-and-
fro movement of How Like a God rather than the three long blocks in A Voice in
the Dark). Often a single brief flashback is interrupted by an abrupt cut back to
Lodge pressing for more information.
The time frame is further complicated. Within each character’s account, the
flashbacks are chronological, but because each character has interacted with
Agnes at varying points over the last ten months, we encounter the past scenes
out of chronological order. For example, the first flashbacks, rendered by the
landlady Mrs. Finch, start in the previous winter and proceed to the night of
the murder. The flashbacks later presented by the out-of-work magician Bob
Baker start earlier, in September. Those reported by the sailor Michael Murphy
start even earlier in the summer. The result is a mosaic of episodes, a “spatial
form” that could be laid out on a grid.
We’re oriented to the overall focus of the action through scenes repeated in
whole or in part in different characters’ testimony. This replay strategy had been
used in A Voice in the Dark and other popular narratives. The novelty of The
Woman in Question on this front is twofold.
First, to a degree unusual in popular filmmaking, the narration strictly con-
fines itself to what the reporting character knows. The most striking example
 82 PA RT I

is an apparently damning incident on the night of the murder. Agnes’s sis-

ter Caroline and her fiancé Bob have been embroiled in an explosive quarrel
with Agnes. On the staircase, Caroline and Bob threaten her: Bob calls Agnes
rotten, Caroline says only killing Agnes would stop her, and Bob agrees he’d
enjoy doing that. Three versions of this exchange are presented in the film,
first in Mrs. Finch’s flashback, then in Bob’s, and finally by Mr. Pollard, the
owner of the bird shop across the street The first and third versions, confined
to Mrs. Finch and Mr. Pollard, don’t reveal what the quarrel is about because
these characters see only the aftermath on the stairs. Only Bob’s version reports
on what triggered the threats. This restriction of character knowledge is carried
down into stylistic patterning, as director Anthony Asquith provides approxi-
mations of characters’ optical viewpoints. (figs. 3.1–3.4.)
The disparities in characters’ positions in the illustrations hint at the second
novelty in the film’s narration. The replays disagree about what happened in

3.1 The Woman in Question (1950): In Mrs. Finch’s 3.2 . . . see a dignified Agnes threatened by Catherine
testimony, she and Mr. Pollard . . . and Bob.

3.3 The replay of the quarrel, as narrated by Catherine, 3.4 . . . and a provoked Bob bridling at her threat to
presents a shrieking Agnes . . . destroy the couple.
 Churn and Consolidation 83

a scene. Some anomalies are outright lies; Mr. Pollard’s testimony, for rea-
sons that will become clear, is partially false. (In this same year Hitchcock
released Stage Fright, with its famous “lying flashback,” and the Japanese film
Rashomon gained fame on similar grounds.) Other anomalies are justified, in
retrospect, as faulty memory. No two versions of what Agnes, Catherine, and
Bob say on the stairs are exactly the same. Lodge himself excuses this, men-
tioning at one point that he can’t quite recall what words a particular witness
used. But more significant disparities stand out in the film’s effort to disclose
what type of person Agnes was.
For decades storytellers had dreamed of the “prismatic” narrative, the one
revealing contrasting or conflicting sides of a character through various view-
points. Conrad’s portrayal of Lord Jim was considered a model, and Sophie
Treadwell’s play Eye of the Beholder (1919), though little known at the time,
came to be another example. The title of The Woman in Question suggests that
the central mystery hovers around Agnes, and the varying testimonies aim to
make her contradictory facets vivid.
To Mrs. Finch, Agnes is a dignified lady who resists the efforts of Bob to
seduce her. To Catherine, her sister is a drunken slattern, disloyal to her hus-
band who is dying in hospital. Bob presents Agnes as a woman bent on seduc-
ing him, who then becomes vindictive when he and Catherine plan to marry.
(The staircase quarrel is the result of Agnes’s threat to ruin Bob’s impending
divorce.) To Mr. Pollard, Agnes is the sweet, soft-spoken woman he wants to
marry. Michael Murray’s Agnes is treacherous and unfaithful, refusing to give
up her promiscuous ways. The accounts crystallize at the climax when Lodge’s
questions about the real Agnes are sharpened in a flurry of single-shot flash-
backs of four versions we’ve seen.
If this were simply a meditation on the ultimate mystery of human per-
sonality, we could leave it at that. But the genre demands greater certainty.
Lodge assures us that ruling out inaccurate versions of Agnes will help solve
the mystery.
That solution is aided in part by the overall organization of the action. How-
ever rosy Mrs. Finch’s view of Agnes is, and however strong the “primacy effect”
of presenting that view as our introduction to the character, it is soon enough
challenged. Lodge warns us not to take Mrs. Finch’s account as wholly reliable.
From the start she is shown as a preening busybody, and subsequent flashbacks
undercut her portrayal of Agnes.1 These scenes consistently show a predatory
woman providing her intimates with ample motives for murder. Moreover,
although Catherine is presented as a shrew in Mrs. Finch’s account, during
Lodge’s questioning, she is kindly and soft-spoken, willing to admit her own
mistakes. Her frankness is suggested by a sudden frontal close-up when she
addresses the camera (fig. 3.5). Likewise, the Bob of Mrs. Finch’s story is a hard-
edged grifter, not the hesitant ne’er-do-well we meet in Lodge’s questioning.
 84 PA RT I

3.5 Learning that Mrs. Finch accused her of being

in love with Agnes’s dying husband, Catherine pivots
sharply to Lodge and to the viewer: “Well, let me tell
you the truth!”

Bob and Catherine are far more sympathetic outside Mrs. Finch’s flashbacks
than within them, and we are invited to assume that her elevation of Agnes has
led her to caricature the couple.
A comparable deflation occurs in Mr. Pollard’s account. In his flashbacks,
Agnes is utterly sweet and demure. But he is in love with her. His portrait,
Lodge points out, “is entirely unlike any of the others. . . . He has built an
ideal world around a woman.” Coming after we have seen Agnes as lustful and
vindictive, it’s easy to grasp his account as utterly romanticized. In Michael’s
account, we’ll learn that Agnes has played up to Pollard to extract favors and
money. Watching Pollard’s flashbacks, we’re required to imagine that the scenes
he reports did probably take place but that her gentle demeanor in them is a
projection of his imagination.
The smaller disparities among the accounts offered by Catherine, Bob,
and Michael are explainable as something else: Agnes’s cunning role-playing.
Alone with Catherine, having no need to pretend, she lets her sour cynicism
out fully. With Michael, who promises money and excitement, she can play
someone more acquiescent, although there might be a degree of his projec-
tion in the flashbacks showing her demurely willing to remain chaste during
his time on the sea. It’s Bob’s version that shows most clearly how Agnes plays
roles. She can seem ladylike at one moment and turn virago in another. Taken
together, the accounts offered by Catherine, Bob, and Michael present a char-
acter driven by the urge for money, sex, and control over those who come
into her ken.
The “prismatic” effect has been a pretext for sustaining the mystery, not a fully
achieved result. Although Agnes’s character turns out not to be multifaceted,
 Churn and Consolidation 85

the disparate versions of her help solve the murder. Lodge takes over the filmic
narration in the denouement by visiting Pollard and proposing that the sailor,
Michael, killed Agnes. Now we get the detective’s hypothetical flashback to that
scene, with his voice-over explicating how Michael might be guilty. As if in a
trance, Pollard agrees.
But then the flashback resumes with Lodge’s voice-over putting Pollard in
Michael’s place. The old man finally sees Agnes as she is. Her grande dame
graciousness is gone, and she sneers, “Well, what do you want?” After she
mocks Pollard’s marriage proposal, he lumbers forward to kill her. The detec-
tive’s multiple-draft replay has been a trap, consistent with the way that his
role as raisonneur has recast the off-key flashbacks as the projections of the
parvenu Mrs. Finch and the yearning Mr. Pollard.
By 1950, a mass-audience movie could present a fairly fragmented plot as
recounted by five witnesses, using methods associated with “advanced” literary
traditions.2 The mildly experimental slant of the film is confirmed by split deci-
sions in its reception. One U.S. reviewer worried that it would be too difficult
for some American audiences, but another thought that it would “gratify the
clever customer.”3 Other critics in both England and the United States claimed
that it was too obvious and repetitive.4
Although Rashomon leaves its search for truth suspended in uncertainty,
and Stage Fright counts on viewers forgetting exactly how they were misled, The
Woman in Question mobilizes explicit cues for reliability that counterbalance
its tug toward relativism. Thanks to the familiar contours of the investigation
plot and some redundant design features (characterization of the witnesses,
Agnes’s consistent behavior in the most trustworthy flashbacks), the multiple-
viewpoint schema could be revised to yield a final clarity—the accessibility
typical of popular narrative.

The Case of the Missing Modernists

The opportunities open to Anglo-American fictional storytelling, both eso-

teric and exoteric, widened considerably across the first half of the twentieth
century. The year 1910 was the peak in U.S. book publishing in sheer number
of titles and editions. Output dipped during the Depression, but by the 1940s
the American market was flourishing again, and the British one, although less
robust, was facing strong customer demand. Despite wartime restrictions on
paper supplies, the book trade benefited from a new interest in reading.5 If
fewer titles appeared, many more copies were sold—more than 400 million
in the United States in 1945.6 American publishers benefited from practices
established in the 1930s, such as book clubs, heavy promotion of top sellers, and
particularly the new possibilities opened by paperback publishing.7
 86 PA RT I

Cheap paperback editions had been issued in earlier eras, but the Penguin
imprint in Britain in 1935 and Pocket Books in the United States in 1939 began
to revolutionize the literary market. Most of the paperback houses that sprang
up in their wake relied on reprints of hardback editions released by established
presses. The many paperback originals also supported expansion of mystery,
romance, western, and other popular genres. Paperbacks benefited from distri-
bution outside the relatively small number of bookstores; they could be bought
in drugstores, on newsstands, and at railway and bus terminals. By 1948, Pocket
Books alone was producing 180 million units a year, and a first paperback print-
ing of a novel would routinely run to 150,000 copies.8
Magazines boomed as well. “Pulps,” printed on cheap woodpress, contin-
ued to favor the genres of crime, horror, fantasy, science fiction, and romance.
“Slick” magazines catered to family and women’s audiences, mixing journalism,
essays, advice, and reportage with fiction. As in earlier decades, the Saturday
Evening Post, Collier’s, Liberty, and the American Magazine were hospitable
to short stories, novellas, and novels that could be serialized. The expanding
circulation of magazines, especially in the postwar years, gave writers new
incentives.
At the same time, comic books were pervading popular culture. In Britain
most such books were reprints of newspaper strips, but American companies
developed long-form stories based around children such as Little Lulu, funny
animals such as the Disney characters, and most prominently superheroes.
Superman, created in 1938, was by 1941 joined by Batman, the Flash, Captain
America, Captain Marvel, Aquaman, and Wonder Woman. Soon there were
hundreds of comic book titles of all types. The market reached its peak between
1947 and 1952.9
Anglo-American performing arts enjoyed similar success. Although Lon-
don’s West End suffered under the blitzkrieg, Broadway did well. The 1944–45
season was the most financially successful in years, with eighty-three new plays
and a quarter of those considered hits. American films triumphed even more
spectacularly. From 1944 to 1947, more than eighty million people went to the
movies every week, a record that has never been equaled. British movie going
hit its own peak at the same time. Although Broadway, Hollywood, and UK
filmmaking went into a slump in the late 1940s, as did most leisure industries,
dozens of plays and films of the decade remain landmarks. The Glass Menag-
erie, Death of a Salesman, Oklahoma!, South Pacific, and the operas of Benja-
min Britten were as powerfully influential as were Citizen Kane, Casablanca,
Rebecca, The Red Shoes, A Matter of Life and Death, Henry V, and the crime
thrillers called film noir.10
Radio, the most pervasive performing arts medium of the period,
revealed that narrative could attract huge audiences.11 Emerging in the
1930s, radio drama had initially favored popular genres such as crime and
 Churn and Consolidation 87

domestic melodrama (“soap operas”). It soon became more ambitious. The

British Broadcasting Corporation invested in scripts written by major liter-
ary figures, and American networks embraced “highbrow” projects such as
the Columbia Workshop.12 Work by Val Gielgud, Orson Welles, Arch Oboler,
Norman Corwin, Lucille Fletcher, and other major figures demanded a con-
centrated attention quite different from the casual overhearing of a news or
music program. Attentive listening in turn encouraged radio writers to create
more complex narrative effects. By 1940, radio was a mature vehicle of popular
storytelling.13
The general widening awareness of creative options about plotting, view-
point, linearity, and segmentation is evident in the advice given to novices. The
two major magazines aimed at aspiring authors, The Writer and Writer’s Digest,
broadened their purview to discuss how to prepare salable material to all the
modern media. Screenwriting manuals, which had flourished in the 1910s and
1920s, had died off as the Hollywood studio system consolidated in the sound
era. Now, however, two major book-length guides to writing films appeared,
and screenwriter John Howard Lawson updated his earlier treatise on playwrit-
ing to include motion pictures.14 In the same period, Lajos Egri’s How to Write
a Play (1942), republished in 1948 as The Art of Dramatic Writing, became the
standard work on plotting for the stage.
How to Write a Novel (1950), by the midlist author Manuel Komroff, offers a
synthesis of major tendencies in literary composition since the nineteenth cen-
tury. Komroff ’s wide range dwarfs the skimpy manuals of the 1910s and 1920s.
He borrows ideas of dramatic compactness from James, and he goes beyond
Lubbock in developing no fewer than eight creative choices of viewpoint, com-
plete with a diagram.15 Komroff reviews stream-of-consciousness techniques
and gives advice about shuffling time sequence (make flashbacks chronological
to ease comprehension).16 He draws dozens of examples from classic fiction
(Tristram Shandy, Madame Bovary), proto-modernism (Lord Jim), modernism
(Joyce, Kafka), and what many would consider middlebrow or lowbrow work
(Of Mice and Men, Rebecca, The Bridge of San Luis Rey). The massive industri-
alization of literary narrative in the 1940s finds its most complete user’s manual
in this work.
Meanwhile, modernism in its most demanding forms waned, and writers
associated with it had already retreated considerably from its peak purity. Eliot
embraced verse drama, Picasso returned to figurative painting, and Stravinsky
declared himself a neoclassicist. For all the admirable qualities of The Years
(1937) and Between the Acts (1941), The Waves remains the bold pinnacle of
Woolf ’s work. Finnegans Wake (1938) was an extreme that no one was prepared
to go beyond. Joyce and Woolf died in 1941, and it was easy to assume that
Ultraism, that urge to create one formal breakthrough after another, died with
them. Faulkner stopped writing novels for six years after The Town (1940); by
 88 PA RT I

then, only the sensational Sanctuary was in print. His shorter pieces shifted into
a somewhat more user-friendly register; “The Bear” first saw publication in the
Saturday Evening Post.
What replaced the classics of high modernism seemed less challenging. In
France, the rappel à l’ordre, the call to curb avant-garde excesses, had already
begun in the 1920s. George Orwell observed that the English and American
writers of the 1930s were far more concerned with politics than with form; their
focus was subject matter, not technique.17 A central example was André Mal-
raux’s Man’s Fate (1933).
America’s “Popular Front Modernism,” as identified by Michael Denning,
employed some experimental devices to promote labor issues and social jus-
tice.18 Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration drew on techniques of mon-
tage in shows such as Triple-A Plowed Under (1936). Waiting for Lefty (1935),
played on a bare stage, presented a debate about a taxi strike, with the produc-
tion pulling in participants from the audience. In contrast with proletarian
realism, these works were daring, but they weren’t radically disruptive. For
example, Lefty’s integration of the audience had been anticipated by murder
plays such as Eye-Witnessed (1926), which planted actors among the spectators.
In radio, “epic” works such as Archibald MacLeish’s Fall of the City (1937) owed
a good deal to oratorio and cantata forms.
Later researchers would seek traces of a “postmodernist” or “late modernist”
turn in prose fiction in the 1930s and 1940s, but writers of the time seem to
have been more inclined to see the end of an era.19 In Enemies of Promise (1938),
Cyril Connolly posed the problem facing a young writer. Caught between
the now-fading New Mandarins (Joyce, Woolf, Proust) and the “Vernacular
Realists” (Hemingway, Maugham), the writer had to choose between leftist
advocacy and mere journalism aimed at “the middle-class best-seller-making
public.”20
The latter option was arguably fulfilled in those books that did become con-
temporary classics: The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Native Son (1940), The Power
and the Glory (1940), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), Dangling Man (1944),
Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), and The Naked and the Dead (1948). Com-
mentators worried that ambition was waning and that the novel might be
dying.21 Similar worries appeared in the world of the theater where entertain-
ment seemed to have swamped artistry. “Today,” wrote one critic in 1945, “it
is almost inconceivable that any drama could satisfy the canons of the most
exigent criticism and also be popular.”22
You could argue that Anglo-American intellectuals didn’t realize that the
modernist impulse in fiction was simply in a holding pattern. Avant-garde
work was resurging in Abstract Expressionist painting, serial music, and exper-
imental film. Quite soon avant-garde movements emerged elsewhere as the
Nouveau Roman, Brechtian theater, and the Theatre of the Absurd. An austere
 Churn and Consolidation 89

“neo-modernism” would be revealed in the work of Beckett, and a playful one

in the writings of Nabokov and the Oulipo circle. However, the relative accessi-
bility of most Anglo-American storytelling exposed an embarrassing possibil-
ity: that the reign of implacable narrative difficulty, the Ultraist aspiration, was
a brief episode, running from around 1920 to 1935 or so. Thereafter storytellers
were unlikely to experiment with narrative as radically as the edgiest High
Modernists had. There was a reversion to the mean, and the mean was con-
trolled heterogeneity, shrewd appropriation—in other words, crossover in all
media and at all levels of taste.

A Wider Variorum

The variorum in popular narrative expanded along the lines indicated by Jean-
Claude Carrière. Audiences learned new wrinkles, storytellers (who were part
of the audience) strove to replicate or revise innovations that emerged, and
competition for innovations (aka switcheroos) intensified. Techniques of seg-
mentation, viewpoint, and plotting time frames diversified swiftly, sometimes
deliriously.
The explosion in mass media encouraged adaptations. Novels were turned
into plays, films, and radio shows; films became radio plays; and a perennially
popular radio play became a major film (Sorry, Wrong Number, 1948). This
cross-fertilization encouraged storytellers to swap techniques. Egri’s handbook
on play construction resists Aristotelian models and favors a post-Jamesian
conception of structure, in which the plot traces the psychological evolution
of a character. A manual on radio writing urges beginners to study the parallel
stories in Wilder’s Bridge of San Luis Rey, the film Tales of Manhattan (1942),
and Priestley’s play Dangerous Corner (1932).23 The freewheeling time jumping
of Christopher Morley’s novel Kitty Foyle (1939) yielded a 1940 film version that
experiments with flashbacks and a doppelgänger who, living in a mirror, inter-
rogates the protagonist.24
Film provided models of narration (crosscutting, montages) that could be
imported into fiction, radio drama, and even plays, such as the early dramas
of Tennessee Williams. In turn, first-person literary subjectivity could be con-
veyed on radio through voice-overs, music, and auditory effects such as echo
and distortion. Orson Welles, Arch Oboler, and other radio artists had been
a bit ahead of moviemakers in injecting subjectivity into objective scenes by
layering dialogue, inner monologue, music, and effects. Soon, however, Holly-
wood caught up and created richly subjective sound mixes.
In general, if 1930s films were largely “theatrical” in their reliance on external
behavior and stage technique, 1940s Hollywood became more “novelistic” in
trying to present characters’ inner lives. The Woman in Question inherits the
 90 PA RT I

same impulse. It’s not hard to imagine each witness’s flashback as a chapter in
a detective novel, with first-person accounts framed by Superintendant Lodge’s
running commentary.
By now certain formal options seen in the 1920s and 1930s were solidly estab-
lished and ripe for revision. Flashbacks were common in the novel, but writers
tried to give them new vividness. Harking back to Virginia Woolf, Rumer God-
den’s Take Three Tenses: A Fugue in Time (1947) interweaves past, present, and
future events pulled out of chronological order, assigning a different verb tense
to each zone. Robert Penn Warren does something less clearly marked in All
the King’s Men (1946), varying the past segments not only through changes of
tense but by the narrator’s descriptions of himself in the third person during
certain scenes.
Flashbacks were now often seen on stage, with major plays such as I Remember
Mama (1944), Home of the Brave (1945), and Death of a Salesman (1949) giving
them a cinematic fluidity through area lighting, rotating sets, and other staging
techniques. Williams initially wrote The Glass Menagerie (1944) as a movie script.
Radio made extensive use of the flashback, often starting the plot at a point of
crisis and then skipping back to show what led up to the present.25 Comic books
could develop distinctive forms of nonlinearity thanks to the “splash panel” at the
beginning of the story. It might show the story’s opening scene or serve as a char-
acterizing bit or present a summary tableau presenting hero and villain facing off
in an abstract graphic space. The splash panel could also skip forward to a point
of tension or combine several time frames into one (fig. 3.6).
Hollywood filmmakers caught up with their peers and eagerly embraced
nonlinearity. Before the 1940s, flashback construction was looked down on as
being too difficult for audiences to follow. Influential films such as Wuthering
Heights (1939), Citizen Kane (1941), and How Green Was My Valley (1941) con-
vinced filmmakers otherwise, and so the decade filled up with time jumping
movies. In The Big Clock (1948), Madame Bovary (1949), and The Great Gatsby
(1949), linear novels became films built around flashbacks. After just a few
years, the convoluted chronologies of Beyond Glory (1948) and Backfire (1950)
had exhibitors worrying that audiences would be baffled. The Woman in Ques-
tion makes its own contribution to this developing menu of options. Like the
wilder variants on display in American film noir, it looks ahead to nonlinear
stratagems explored by Tarantino’s generation.26
Sharply differentiated multiple viewpoints were now a primary novelistic
technique. Meyer Levin’s proletarian novel Citizens (1940), for example, lets
untagged chapters carry the general story but intersperses those with flashback
biographies of the ten men killed in a strikers’ demonstration. The strategy was
expanded across books by Joyce Cary, whose trilogy (Herself Surprised, 1941;
To Be a Pilgrim, 1942; The Horse’s Mouth, 1944) gives each of three characters a
chance to tell the story that involves them all.
3.6 This page from a Spirit adventure, “Visitor” (February 13, 1949), presents a stream of events three
times, both vertically (in text and in two sets of images) and horizontally. The different graphic styles on
display in the snapshots and the changing “camera angles” on the investigation provide an occasion for
Eisner to display his virtuosity, not that he needed one. Source: Copyright 2021 Will Eisner Studios, Inc.
THE SPIRIT and WILL EISNER are trademarks owned by Will Eisner Studios, Inc., and both are regis-
tered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
 92 PA RT I

Multiple-viewpoint construction migrated to radio and to cinema, most

notably in Citizen Kane, but also in comedies such as The Affairs of Susan (1945)
and in dramas such as In Which We Serve (1942), Three Strangers (1946), and
Three Secrets (1950). In these instances, our attachment to one character for
part of the plot may be accompanied by a voice-over reflection that makes
the viewpoint character a subsidiary narrator. Shifting viewpoints were more
difficult to convey on stage, although Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller
tried. One of the strangest of these efforts was Philip Barry’s play Foolish Notion
(1945). Each character was assigned an imaginary scene, which was to be sig-
naled when the actor came onstage walking backward.
The Woman in Question’s flirtation with a “prismatic” presentation of its
murder victim wasn’t unique. An American film, Pilot No. 5 (1943), applied the
same approach as friends of a pilot off on a mission compare their disparate
judgments of him. The technique was more common in the novel, for example,
when Wright Morris’s The Man Who Was There (1945) provided constantly
shifting appraisals of a man never shown independently to the reader. The
most elaborate literary effort may have been Ben Ames Williams’s The Strange
Woman (1941), which provided seven viewpoints of men who knew Jenny
Hager, who is dead at the beginning of the book. As with other efforts in this
quasi-Conradian vein, the reader has no unfiltered access to the central figure.
When a faceted tale spans many years, as here, we can ask whether the angles
we’re given capture genuine contradictions in the main character or instead
sample moments in a process of character change.
Innovation in popular narrative typically centers on fresh subjects or themes
rather than on experiments with form. Unusual settings and characters are
treated through familiar plot patterns and stylistic techniques. The process was
sharply in evidence as storytellers in all media drew on World War II as mate-
rial to engage audiences. It’s not surprising to find battlefield stories working
with crossover forms that had been cultivated in earlier decades.
Segmentation by time is a common strategy in war novels. Howard Hunt’s
Limit of Darkness (1944) shows a single cycle of a bombing platoon’s routine
across twenty-four chapters, each covering a single hour and tagged with a
picture of a clock face. The first block of The Cross and the Arrow (1944), Albert
Maltz’s account of a conscience-stricken Gestapo investigator, labels its chap-
ters with times over a single night and day before flashing back to reveal prior
action over several months; the third part resumes on the initial morning.
More original is the verse novel Beach Red (1946), which traces the capture of a
Japanese-held island by means of a strict formula. Each ten-word line measures
a second, each sixty-line chapter covers a minute, and the whole book covers a
single hour.
Although most war films were resolutely linear, Passage to Marseille (1944)
offers one of the most complex Hollywood films of the era, with flashbacks
 Churn and Consolidation 93

within flashbacks and multiple narrators filling in story gaps. John Horne
Burns’s novel The Gallery (1947) yields a more space-based structure, in which
a Neapolitan arcade frames “portraits”—third-person short stories built on
the wartime experiences of citizens and soldiers. Several of these segments are
linked by “promenades,” first-person memoirs of an American recalling his stay
in Naples. The result is something of a collage akin to that composed by Marc
Blitzstein in his Airborne Symphony (1946). Guided by an omniscient narrator
(“The Monitor”), the listener is given episodes from the history of aviation,
culminating in experiences of aviators in modern war. The chorus takes on the
role of bombing crews and of Nazi youths chanting phrases of hatred. Blitzstein
exploits the opportunity to shift styles; one section gives the aviators a comic
barbershop quartet.
The Naked and the Dead (1948), the best-selling war novel, epitomizes the
pluralism of popular storytelling options of the period. Incorporating a great
many characters, the narration unashamedly flits from mind to mind, between
and within scenes. This reversion to nineteenth-century omniscience is coun-
terweighted by inserts recalling Dos Passos’s USA trilogy. “The Time Machine”
segments provide capsule biographies of the men, complete with inner mono-
logues. Blocks tagged as “Chorus,” which assemble the platoon for chow or
bull sessions, are treated as playscript exchanges with stage directions. These
sections give the book an abstract geometry, breaking up the mostly linear
account of taking a Pacific island. There is even a trace of comic book exu-
berance in the battle scenes: “A clod of dirt stung his neck. BAAROWWMM,
BAA-ROWWMM.”27
Almost anywhere we turn in the 1940s, we find storytellers consolidating
and refining strategies from the 1910s on. In this context, The Woman in
Question looks typical. By relying on multiple perspectives, dispersed but
systematic sampling of different time periods, and expressive subjectivity
(Agnes as each witness perceives her), the film samples the expanding menu
of options. In addition, the film’s suggestion of an underlying grid of alter-
natives lined up in blocks exemplifies another tendency, one we might call
pattern plotting. It’s not unique to the period, but it’s a crossover technique
that would persist into the 2020s.

Russian Dolls and Grids

A clear instance of pattern plotting is the “Russian doll” structure, the schema
that sets one story within another. In verbal arts, that comes down to character A
writing or speaking about events that character B has recounted. In books such
as The Decameron, the embedded story pertains to characters not in the frame
story, but many stories also used character testimony, letters, or other sources
 94 PA RT I

to fill out a unitary plot. In addition, the embedded story typically entailed a
time shift, so it was likely to be a flashback. The flashbacks of The Woman in
Question are simple instances of embedding.
Embedded stories with a unitary cast of characters were a common strat-
egy of popular narrative in the nineteenth century, not least in epistolary and
casebook novels. Conrad took the strategy to extremes. Chance (1913) is framed
overall by a narrator (“I”), who learns the story from Powell and Marlow. But
each of their accounts incorporates the narration of others, whose accounts
frame still other voices. For example, Marlow reports the versions told to him
by Powell, who bases his version on earlier accounts, presented successively
from two other characters.
Complicated embedding of this sort was usually avoided in popular media,
but novels might insert brief news clippings or diary entries. In the play Joan of
Lorraine (1946), Maxwell Anderson presents a rehearsal session interrupted by
long passages of the play to be performed. Other stage works, evidently under
Pirandello’s continuing influence, found ways to frame alternative versions of
the action (e.g., A Strange Play, 1944; A Story for a Sunday Evening, 1950). Most
ingeniously, Orson Welles moved toward more complex strata of embedding in
his radio shows.
Welles’s narrative techniques centered on manipulation of viewpoint, encap-
sulated in his slogan “First Person Singular.” He replaced the role of radio
announcer with a narrator who might be the character (and thus a vessel of
inner monologue) or who might be a witty external voice commenting on the
action. Welles’s interest in point of view techniques made him a confirmed
Conradian. He created a radio version of Heart of Darkness and planned a film
version as his first Hollywood project. In it, the camera would have represented
Marlowe’s impressions, both visual and mental.28
On the radio, “first-person singular” often turned into something more
plural. In 1938, Welles recreated the dossier format of Dracula through a bar-
rage of news stories, telegrams, journal entries, and spectral voices drifting
into earshot. More neatly segmented was the notorious “War of the Worlds”
broadcast. It begins with Professor Pearson’s narrating frame, explaining that
Earth was a target for the Martians. We move to the past via a montage of
news bulletins, snatches of music, and radio transmissions, culminating in the
Martians’ successful attack. The second part is centered on Professor Pearson,
writing his notes of the event. These shift from present-tense descriptions of the
devastation to the past tense in his concluding reflection on the elimination of
the threat. Framing all this is the CBS announcement of the show, which con-
cludes with Welles’s saying that the whole project was merely Halloween fun.
Citizen Kane (1941), which harnessed flashbacks to an investigation plot,
presents a startlingly symmetrical set of embedded modules. A prologue
showing Kane’s death is balanced by an epilogue taking us out of Kane’s estate.
 Churn and Consolidation 95

These sequences frame the entire film’s action. The opening “News on the
March” newsreel, as a survey of Kane’s career, is matched at the end by the
camera movement that recapitulates his life backward, as a single shot moving
over his memorabilia to settle on his boyhood memento. The scene launch-
ing Thompson’s mission, the assignment to track down “Rosebud,” finds its
enclosing mate in the scene among the rueful reporters who abandon the
search. And within those frames are cradled five extensive flashbacks that
enact phases of Kane’s career, as recounted by his guardian Thatcher, his busi-
ness manager Bernstein, his friend Jed Leland, his second wife Susan, and his
butler Raymond. Each of those flashbacks is framed by the interview situation
set up by Thompson.
Boxes within boxes, within boxes. Welles and screenwriter Herman
Mankiewicz created the “News on the March” sequence as an overture that
plants the action to come, not simply as backstory on Kane’s career but also
as a miniature model of the film’s design. Like the film, the newsreel begins
by showing Kane’s death and the immensity of his estate. It proceeds to reveal
background on his mother and his early newspaper career (covered in Thatch-
er’s papers), his building of a journalistic empire (Bernstein’s account), his first
marriage and his disastrous political campaign (Leland’s recollection), Susan’s
failed opera career and the couple’s reclusive life in Xanadu (Susan’s account),
and Kane’s last years (Raymond’s curt report on his saying “Rosebud”). As a
mise-en-abyme, the newsreel coils within itself both the substance and the
form of the central modules. This media montage goes beyond “The War of the
Worlds.” It not only serves as exposition, presenting the public image that will
be modified by the testimonies, but also helps teach us how to watch the film.29
These niceties of pattern plotting aren’t always obvious, but they are,
I think, sensed to some degree by the viewer. In particular, Kane’s segmenta-
tion, with strongly marked sequences and flashbacks emphasized as parallel
to one another, inclines us to see the film as composed of weighty blocks,
even a grid of alternatives (Susan’s story versus Leland’s, the initial entry to
Xanadu as opposed to our final withdrawal).
Of course, with sufficient ingenuity, you can chart any narrative as a grid,
but some stories call for it more than others. Grid layouts were implicit in
nineteenth-century fiction, particularly in dossier novels. They became more
explicit in High Modernism, with Joyce’s infamous chart for Ulysses and the
parallel chapters in Woolf ’s novels. We can easily grasp the grid underlying
Intolerance as well: four time periods mapped across phases of the unfolding
film, with the shifts between “columns” coming faster and faster.
In the 1940s, tendencies toward pattern plotting were enhanced when
block construction created strong parallels of time period, location, or view-
point. The most self-conscious example of this tendency I know comes in
Philip Toynbee’s short novel Prothalamium (1947). A woman has assembled
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seven guests at a tea party. The novel gives each one a solid, labeled block of
first-person narration. The guest’s narration is rendered in inner monologue,
with running commentary on both the ongoing party and incidents in the
past. Events and lines of dialogue are replayed from different viewpoints.
Toynbee could have presented the party through a linear, omniscient narra-
tion, a spotlight rapidly shifting among the characters’ minds as each responds
to unfolding events. Instead, encountering each character’s experience of the
party en bloc, we’re obliged to construct the chronology of the party through
back-and-fill reading. We must as well contrast character reactions by recalling
orienting points, replayed bits of speech and action.
The geometry of this layout is brought to the reader’s attention. Each nar-
rator’s segment is broken into two-page units, each bearing an alphanumeric
tag reminiscent of the partitioning of Stout’s How Like a God. The entire party
consists of twelve units, but some guests leave early and so don’t get the full
ration. Tom Ford’s section, for example, is labeled B1–B12 because he stays to
the end, whereas Doug Tillett comes late (so his commentary starts at C2) and
leaves early (at C7).
Only after modernism could a novel be published with this hermetic struc-
ture. Its self-conscious geometry was recognized as a bid for avant-garde cre-
dentials; one review compared Toynbee to Joyce and Woolf.30 Toynbee diluted
the novel’s force, however, by prefacing it with a chart that mapped the nar-
rator’s episodes across time, enabling the reader to see how the characters’
experiences overlapped. “Page A7 covers the same period as pages B7, C7 and
so on, but each is the experience of a different person.” We are instructed that
passages in italics are “overheard by the narrator, but said neither by him nor
to him.”31
This apparatus offers the sort of reassuring skeleton key that Joyce and Woolf
kept back. It would be as if excerpts from Stuart Gilbert’s gloss on Ulysses were
printed, complete with spreadsheet, as an introduction to Joyce’s text. And
because Prothalamium’s story is essentially simple, the chart reduces the book to
an elaborate puzzle. The structure isn’t hermetic after all, merely a clever variant
on principles of viewpoint, segmentation, and temporal linearity familiar from
the nineteenth century on.
The technique was seldom exposed as blatantly as Prothalamium does, but
several of the novels I’ve mentioned depend on readers registering an abstract
pattern cued by the book’s exoskeleton. In the war novels, time or place is often
supplied by chapter titles. A tabular structure can also be implied by tracing
characters’ fates across a narrow time frame. Gore Vidal’s novel In a Yellow
Wood (1947) follows a young Wall Street stockbroker across twenty-four hours,
with the chapters split up geometrically. In a block tagged “Day,” five chapters
make Robert Holton our viewpoint figure, and the next four spread across
people who have come in contact with him—a waitress, a secretary, an army
 Churn and Consolidation 97

acquaintance, an envious fellow broker. “Night” scenes portray a party and

Robert’s wanderings afterward. The cascade of events faces Robert with a choice
about whether to change his life by marrying or becoming a sculptor. “In a Yel-
low Wood,” set at the start of the next day, resolves the matter. Its two chapters
condense the prior plot layout, with one focused on Robert going to work and
the next assembling other characters’ viewpoints as he returns to his routines.
The time frame and viewpoint shifts of Shadows at Noon (1943), by Martin
Goldsmith, are even more strict. The book imagines a Nazi air raid on Man-
hattan. Divided into three blocks—tagged as 11:45, 12:00, and 12:15—it assigns
one chapter per part to a character caught in the crisis, resulting in twelve seg-
ments. The four characters are remotely linked, but most never meet, although
in the seventh chapter a chance encounter leads two of them to a bout of sex.
A thirteenth chapter, surveying the damage done to the city, summarizes all
their fates with a mixture of pathos, resignation, and hope.
Goldsmith’s metropolitan network narrative has a suburban counterpart
in John Klempner’s Letter to Five Wives. Presented as a novella in the slick
magazine Cosmopolitan in 1945, it was published at novel length in 1946. Both
versions have a similar structure, but the book develops it more fully. The plot
centers on five couples living in the same town. The action is presented through
the viewpoints, in alternation, of the five women. All of their husbands have
had some relation with the town flirt Addie Joss.
The first five chapters set up the couples through shifting viewpoints from
woman to woman, each talking with her husband or a friend while recalling
Addie’s predations. In the sixth chapter, the women gather to draw up a report
of their club’s war effort. The meeting is disrupted by a letter from Addie declar-
ing that she has run off with one husband. “Unfortunately I could take only one.
Some day I may make the rounds. But which one this time? . . . Pretend that it
couldn’t possibly be yours, and know in your heart that it could.”32
The rest of the plot shows each wife weighing the possibility that some epi-
sode in her marriage could have led to her husband’s defection. Flashbacks
reviewing each couple’s history proceed, round-robin fashion, interrupted by
the present-time business of the meeting. The suspense is accentuated by some
women trying to call the men. Eventually the meeting ends, and the women,
all putting up a brave front, go home. A final string of five chapters reveals the
outcome.
The almost clinically neat structure can be laid out on a grid (table 3.1).
Klempner has made his plot accessible partly through the predictability of the
modular structure. The shift among characters is established as an intrinsic
norm we quickly come to expect. The movement is impelled by a mystery, but
without anyone being assigned the role of investigator. Instead, the flashback
“testimonies” of the key “witnesses” spread suspicion among the husbands and
invite the reader to look for clues.
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Table 3.1 Grid outline of chapters and couples in John Klempner,

Letter to Five Wives (1946)

Lora May & Martha & Deborah &

Rita & Josh Gerry & Gil Porter Roger Brad

The couples 1, 4 1, 3 2 3, 4 5
(chaps. 1–5)

Wives gathering; letter arrives

(chap. 6)

Flashbacks 10 7 11 9 8
(chaps. 7–11)

Wives’ report
(chap. 12)

Flashbacks 14, 18 13 17 15 16
(chaps. 13–18)

Wives’ meeting ends

(chap. 19)

Fates of the 24 20 21 22 23
couples
(chaps. 20–24)

Our search is assisted by a bias within the imperfectly symmetrical struc-

ture. Rita benefits from being the first wife introduced in chapter 1. She gains
our sympathy at the outset by being the only one in the circle, other than Addie,
who has been divorced. She has struggled to build a new life as a writer and a
wife to Josh, who is oblivious to her and easily flattered by Addie’s coy atten-
tions. Another likely candidate for the role of abandoned wife is Deborah, the
socially awkward newcomer, and in the last array of flashbacks, she becomes a
second figure of sympathy.
Rita gains further prominence by being assigned one extra flashback
(chapter 18), breaking the book’s intrinsic norm. There she realizes she’s
unhappy, she’s not deeply in love with Josh, and she faces a drab future, even if
her stories sell to those women’s magazines that purvey “blissful romance . . .
pure fiction.” Rita recalls Josh’s dismissive response when one of her stories
earned a substantial check. This leads to a quarrel over money and his ominous
remark: “My private life is run on a strictly cash basis.”33 So it’s not a complete
 Churn and Consolidation 99

surprise when we learn in the penultimate chapter that Josh has run off with
Addie. Rita is shattered.
Chapter 24’s long italicized inner monologue ends with Rita returning
home and contemplating the shame of confronting her friends. But Josh is
there before her, brooding in his easy chair. He left Addie. Rita realizes that
Addie had to gloat over her power and that this would wound Josh’s manful
pride. Now Rita has something to build on. After Josh said he’s sorry, “she
pulled her hand away gently, and went out into the kitchen.”34
When we’ve stopped shuddering at this last line, we might recognize how
Klempner has made his plot easy to assimilate. An arresting premise is turned
into a mystery through manipulation of point of view, which allows him to
chop the action into short stories, each endowed with extra tension based on its
place in the macrostructure. Every husband’s past behavior will be scanned for
hints about his intentions with respect to Addie. This tactic exemplifies a wider
tendency of the 1940s: to inject crime, enigmas, and thriller-level danger into
nondetective genres, even “serious” fiction.35
It may be that the trend toward highly patterned plotting flows organically
from composing novels with many characters, viewpoints, or time frames.
Manuel Komroff recommended that the novelist prepare charts to help keep
track of such matters.36 In addition, perhaps earlier models, such as As I Lay
Dying and heavily tagged 1930s novels such as The Dark Mirror, encouraged
writers to neatly tabulate multiple story lines. This sense of abstract structure
behind certain plots might also have shaped academics’ emerging notion of
“spatial form.”37 In any event, as mainstream storytellers consciously explored
modular units that could be embedded in one another or laid out on grids, we
can say that one modernist impulse lived on in crossover guise.

Close Reading and a Battle of the Brows

Modernism, high or not, lingered in other ways. For one thing, its canon
became a central reference point for quality. The work of four men—Eliot,
Joyce, Picasso, Stravinsky—was routinely treated as the apex of twentieth-
century Western art. Moreover, and less obviously, the literary modernists
opened paths in academic literary study. The “New Criticism,” usually dated
from the publication of I. A. Richards’s Principles of Literary Criticism (1924),
was emerging as a powerful force in universities and literary quarterlies. Like
Shakespeare and the metaphysical poets, the masterpieces of proto-modernism
and High Modernism demanded “close reading.” The 1940s revival of interest in
Henry James and Faulkner depended on recasting literary criticism as rigorous
analysis of form and theme. After James, a serious novelist needed a “method.”
Now a serious critic needed one too.
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The critic was no longer an elegant, gentlemanly essayist. The academic

critic, as committed to precision as the scientist, dissected a text to display its
ambiguities and ironies, its richness of allusion and implication. As American
university departments grew after World War II, professors of English became
less committed to teaching historical research methods and more focused
on giving undergraduates a sensitive appreciation of style and meaning,
and on training graduate students in the vocation of subtle interpretation.38
“Technique as Discovery,” the title of a 1948 essay by Mark Schorer, summed
up the new focus. What technique “discovered” was an intricate play of mean-
ing and an enduring value that belletristic writers did not dream of. “The
writer capable of the most exacting technical scrutiny of his subject matter
will produce works with the most satisfying content, works with thickness and
resonance, works which reverberate, works with maximum meaning.”39
Soon such “intrinsic” analysis was challenged by critics who asserted that
the poem, play, or novel could not be easily split off from other realms. Inspired
by Freud, Frazer, and Marx, some critics argued that the deepest meanings of
the work could be plumbed by methods borrowed from the social sciences.40
The ghosts in Henry James’s tales can be considered projections of the author’s
Oedipus complex; Thomas Mann’s Joseph novels are transpositions of virtually
all myths known by modern anthropology.41
Just as High Modernism had encouraged close reading, it gave license to
the emerging studies of literature as myth, ritual, and psychodrama. Eliot had
invoked ancient ritual in The Waste Land and had disclosed the mythic foun-
dations of Ulysses.42 Joyce’s and Woolf ’s plunges into the psyche had invited
reflection on personal identity and inchoate desires. Faulkner had brought to
regional literature a tangle of sexual neuroses, along with overt echoes of bib-
lical legend. Many modernists, as heirs of Symbolism, encouraged critics to
probe their texts for ever-wider implications.43 In what observers were calling
“the age of criticism,” intellectual boldness was revealed less in new artworks
than in dazzling explications.
The complexity and human significance laid bare by critics’ patient scrutiny
of the canon made the hollowness of mass culture all the more enraging. And
that stuff was flooding every newsstand, movie theater, and radio network. As
if in reply to Pound’s “Make it New,” Irving Howe poignantly described the
1940s situation as “the Decline of the New.”44 After the achievements of High
Modernism, intellectuals strove to understand what had happened.
There ensued Americans’ version of the “Battle of the Brows,” which had
emerged in interwar Britain.45 Q. D. Leavis, aided by journalists, had made the
highbrow/lowbrow/middlebrow triad prominent in cultural discourse, leading
to Virginia Woolf ’s famous diatribe against middlebrow culture.46 In contrast,
in 1920s America, slightly before high modernist precepts had firmly taken hold
of the intelligentsia, Gilbert Seldes had championed movies, comic strips, and
 Churn and Consolidation 101

other forms of popular art as a welcome alternative to genteel culture.47 But the
Joyce-Eliot cohort set a new standard for demanding artistry, and the explosion
of mass media in the 1930s and 1940s provoked American intellectuals to take
up the battle against vulgarization with punitive force. Writers who had initially
admired Soviet communism came to believe that popular and middlebrow art-
works were comparable to the banalities of Stalinist socialist realism.48
Critics of mass culture tailored the three categories to developments on
the American scene.49 High art demands training, concentration, and a
willingness to be confounded, especially in its avant-garde manifestations. It is
the province of museums, concert halls, and libraries of serious literature, but
also of bohemian galleries, “little magazines,” and shoestring theater troupes.
It encompasses both revered classics and avant-garde experimentation. High
culture obliges us to confront unpleasant truths in the hope that by doing so
we are better equipped to live.
Popular culture, as opposed to folk culture, springs from modern urban soci-
ety. It is better called mass culture because its producers conceive the audience
as bonded by their desire for predictable experiences. Like other commodities,
it’s produced on an industrial model, with division of labor and systematic strat-
egies of marketing. Mass culture flourishes in movie houses, Broadway theaters,
Tin Pan Alley, radio, television, and bookstalls selling genre fiction. Perhaps in
the days of Shakespeare or Dickens popular art was fresh and valuable, but by
the twentieth century mass production has made it formulaic and regressive. It
creates a synthetic substitute for folk art, addressed not to an organic community
but to one unified by tastes imposed by modern capitalism. It aims to distract and
reassure. It offers no problems it can’t solve, and no solutions that don’t gratify our
preconceptions. It keeps its audience in diverted, comfortable passivity.
The high art/mass art duality is in effect a more detailed and accusatory
version of the Collins test, the split between art and entertainment. But where
does “middlebrow” art fit? Some cultural products in a mass society mimic
high art but rest finally on appeals characteristic of mass culture. “Middlebrow”
came to mean the art that appeals to the aspirational bourgeoisie, suburbanites
who want to be thought sophisticated. By joining book clubs, subscribing to
the right magazines, taking courses in art appreciation, and buying compila-
tions of the world’s greatest symphonies, the middlebrow struggles to achieve
cultural capital. But in the end, declared Woolf, the middlebrow thrills to art that
promises “money, fame, power, or prestige.”50 The media industry is happy to
oblige. It produces prestige films (The Best Years of Our Lives, 1946; Brief Encoun-
ter, 1946), “serious” music (Gian Carlo Menotti, Rachmaninoff), and “import-
ant” theater (anything by Arthur Miller).
It’s hard for us today to understand how deeply wounded the intelligentsia
was by the barrage of popular and middlebrow art. Robert Warshow declared
that the “mere existence” of mass culture “was a standing threat to one’s
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personality, was in a sense a deep personal humiliation.”51 The fake artistry

on display in middlebrow work was perhaps even more dangerous. A 1948
Partisan Review symposium skipped over the problem of mass culture in order
to ask this: “Do you think that American middlebrow culture has grown more
powerful in this decade? In what relation does this middlebrow tendency stand
to serious writing—does it threaten or bolster it?”52
Where did the controversies leave popular storytelling? Most critics simply
deplored it and considered it beneath scrutiny. Although the Jamesian poetics of
the novel and comparable accounts of theater were widely known, and although
the story gurus explicated craft conventions for the benefit of amateurs, the
littérateurs did not apply these tools to mass or middlebrow culture. When cul-
tural observers did study popular narrative, they usually wielded the “extrinsic”
social science methods recently adopted by literary studies. Myth interpretation
and psychoanalysis confirmed the assumption that the products of the culture
industry reflected the audience’s desperate need to evade contemporary life.
Film was a favored target for these interpretations.53 For instance, two social
psychologists sought to show how character types in Hollywood movies bore
traces of cultural anxieties. A “good-bad girl” like Gilda in the 1946 movie of that
name or Vivian Sternwood in The Big Sleep (1946) appears initially to be promis-
cuous but turns out to be virtuous. The character resolves the tension between the
male need for a sexually attractive woman and society’s conception of a respect-
able marriage partner.54 Siegfried Kracauer undertook an examination of Ger-
man mass culture in his book From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of
the German Film (1947), which argued that the society’s unconscious urge to be
ruled by a tyrant predated the Third Reich. “Germany thus carried out what had
been anticipated by her cinema from its very beginning.”55 The Nazi example, like
that of Stalin’s Russia, showed that mass culture could be deeply dangerous.
A particularly clear-cut skirmish in the battles over mass culture focused
on mystery and detective fiction. The genre’s popularity and esteem made it a
big target for anyone anxious about the decline of high art, but it also offered
its defenders opportunities to show the powers of popular narrative. Perhaps
surprisingly, the debate offered a path out of the mass culture impasse, and it’s a
path that has remained well-trodden ever since.

Murder for the Masses

By 1946, mystery stories made up one-quarter of all fiction published in the

United States and a third of prime-time radio programs.56 In Hollywood the
B-level detectives Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto gave way to A-level productions
featuring Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. Prestigious thrillers won box office
rewards and Oscar nominations. Weekly magazines teemed with serialized and
 Churn and Consolidation 103

abridged versions of novels by Rex Stout, Mignon G. Eberhart, and their peers.
Dick Tracy, Rip Kirby, and The Shadow had their own comic strips, and comic
books asserting that crime doesn’t pay popped up on newsstands.
Murder made its way to Broadway in Ladies in Retirement (1940), Arsenic
and Old Lace (1941), Ten Little Indians (1944), An Inspector Calls (1947), adapta-
tions of Rebecca and Laura, and many lesser items. (Meet a Body of 1944 finds
homicide in a funeral home.) Angel Street, as the play Gas Light (1938) was reti-
tled, ran for almost 1,300 performances.
The war years gave Americans bigger incomes, and book and magazine
publishers stoked readers’ demands. Because best-sellers were not predictable,
editors developed “category” publishing, a business plan devoted to acquir-
ing massive numbers of romances, westerns, and mysteries. These could yield
steady returns, especially from rental libraries. Mysteries proved to be the
dominant category.57 Publishers launched dedicated lines such as Doubleday’s
Crime Club and Simon & Schuster’s Inner Sanctum Mysteries.
Mystery authors could be top sellers, as Ellery Queen, Erle Stanley Gardner,
and Mickey Spillane proved. Each sold millions of copies. Agatha Christie,
then on her way to international popularity, was offered $15,000 from Good
Housekeeping for a novelette; that is $220,000 in 2021 currency.58 A novel-
ist today, who is lucky to sell 10,000 books, would be depressed to learn that
a now-forgotten lightweight such as See You at the Morgue (1941) could sell
40,000 copies in hardcover alone.59 When the paperback revolution arrived,
the most numerous titles on top-selling lists were mysteries.60 In 1941, Ellery
Queen’s Mystery Magazine was founded and soon began awarding prizes and
mounting yearly anthologies. In 1945, authors founded the Mystery Writers of
America (motto: “Crime does not pay—enough”).
Mystery novelists would long labor under a sense of inferiority and strive
to find ways to make their work more “literary.” Yet their work already had a
cerebral cachet missing in other genres. Whodunits were said to be the pre-
ferred leisure reading of professors and presidents. The New York Times, the
New York Herald Tribune, the Saturday Review of Literature, Harper’s, and other
publications devoted regular columns to reviewing mystery novels. In 1941,
a major New York publisher issued the first significant history of the genre:
Howard Haycraft’s Murder for Pleasure. This coincided with the Modern
Library’s publication of Ellery Queen’s flagship collection of mystery short
stories: 101 Years’ Entertainment. The press treated the more obsessive fans with
bemused affection. As critics produced admiring surveys of Sherlock Holmes’s
career, The Baker Street Journal, a pseudoscholarly investigation of The Canon,
began publication in 1946.
Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925) was the rare instance of a major lit-
erary figure employing thriller and courtroom conventions. By the 1940s,
other prestigious writers had been attracted to mystery techniques. Vladimir
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Nabokov’s Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) used an investigation plot to

parody literary biography and riddled its text with references to classic detec-
tive fiction. The suspense genre held an attraction for well-regarded writers
such as Robert Coates and Kenneth Fearing. Richard Wright produced two
man-on-the-run novels transformed by assigning them Black protagonists. The
best-selling Native Son (1940) details Bigger Thomas’s unintended killing of a
white woman and his attempt to flee. Wright’s Dostoevskian The Man Who
Lived Underground, unpublished until 2021 but written in 1941–42, follows an
innocent Black handyman as he escapes the police who have tortured a murder
confession out of him. Hiding in the city sewers, venturing out to rob basement
offices and storage rooms, he discovers a wild sense of freedom, as well as a hal-
lucinatory detachment from his identity and the everyday world.
Graham Greene gave the genre credibility in a more orthodox fashion.
Accepting the Collins test, he distinguished his serious fiction from the harsh
pursuit thrillers he called his “entertainments”: This Gun for Hire (1936), The
Confidential Agent (1939), and The Ministry of Fear (1943). Critics, impressed by
the “straight” novels, declared that even these yarns had literary quality. Recip-
rocally, Greene invested his more prestigious works with crime and suspense.
In Brighton Rock (1938), often considered his first significant exploration of
Catholic guilt, the gangland setting allows signals of literary seriousness to sit
alongside virtually pulp prose. “He trailed the clouds of his own glory after him:
hell lay about him in his infancy. He was ready for more deaths.”61
Greene had never been a hard-core modernist, but Faulkner had, and he
too adjusted to the growing demand for whodunits. Always drawn to mystery
situations, he made county attorney Gavin Stevens the investigator in six short
stories, collected as Knight’s Gambit (1949).62 Stevens also played a role in what
Faulkner called his “blood and thunder mystery novel,” Intruder in the Dust
(1948).63 His plots had often been driven by the revelation of family secrets,
but here his sprawling and sidewinding sentences and barely cued shifts across
years delineate a conventional murder situation, tightly restricted to a sensitive
boy’s viewpoint. The puzzle relies on straightforward clues: bullets from differ-
ent guns, bodies swapped in and out of a grave. More reader-friendly than most
Faulkner novels, Intruder in the Dust boosted his public standing, thanks largely
to paperback sales.64 The film adaptation proved fairly prestigious as well.
Given the genre’s growing respectability, intellectuals wondered why murder
seemed so delectable. In 1944–45, in a series of polemics, the question gained
a new intensity. Did the mystery story harbor artistic possibilities, or was it
just another instance of mass or middlebrow culture? If something so beloved
of literary tastemakers could be shown to be vacuous, then the rest of popular
fiction was surely even more suspect.
Edmund Wilson’s New Yorker essay, “Why Do People Read Detective
Stories?” (October 14, 1944), became the best-remembered contribution to the
 Churn and Consolidation 105

debate. It was preceded by “The Time of the Assassins,” in the Nation (April 22,
1944) by Louise Bogan, who was soon to become Library of Congress Poet
Laureate. Wilson’s critique was immediately countered by Jacques Barzun,
Joseph Wood Krutch, and Bernard DeVoto in the pages of magazines identified
with middlebrow tastes. In January of 1945, Wilson supplied further comments
under the memorable title, “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?”65
These writers didn’t explicitly invoke the categories of low or middlebrow
art, probably because it’s rather difficult to assign the mystery genre to one
category or the other. Nonetheless, Wilson was clearly warning that this
corner of publishing was vulgar and stupid, and his essays and the replies
sketch out lines of attack and defense that would dominate thinking about
popular narrative for years to come.

1. Popular art is formulaic and predictable. Wilson: Rex Stout’s Nero

Wolfe books are simply Doyle’s Holmes stories in modern dress, but without
Doyle’s imaginative atmosphere of fog-encased London.
Counter 1: High art has its own formulas. Krutch: Classic storytellers
have always worked within a tradition, and that furnishes formulas, better
called conventions.
Counter 2: Popular art’s conventions vary across history. DeVoto:
Those who know their Doyle, and what came after, realize how much Rex Stout
has transformed his heritage.
2. Popular narrative is unrealistic in characterization, plot, and world-
view. Wilson: Lord Peter Wimsey is “a dreadful stock Englishman of the casual
and debonair kind,” and Ngaio Marsh fills her book with “a lot of faked-up
English country people.”66
Counter: Popular genres adhere to other criteria than those of tra-
ditional literary realism. Barzun: Detective fiction is comic make-believe,
always aware of its stylized worlds. The outrageousness of some devices, like
the locked-room murder, puts us firmly in the realm of artifice. In later years,
Barzun would argue that the detective story is a modern incarnation of not the
novel but the tale, both in folk literature and in the nineteenth-century work
of Poe, Hawthorne, Stevenson, Twain, and others. It continues a respectable
artistic genre not dependent on the realism of the novel after James (who also
wrote tales).67
3. Popular narratives are stylistically pedestrian, or worse. Wilson:
Agatha Christie has a “mawkish” style. A Margery Allingham book is “com-
pletely unreadable.”68
Counter: In all storytelling, style may be overridden by other compo-
nents. Krutch: The mystery story’s characteristic force needs only a functional
style. DeVoto: Wilson “would hardly require Theodore Dreiser to write grace-
fully. . . . Some first-rate mysteries are written in tolerably bad prose.”69
 106 PA RT I

4. Popular genres constrain creativity. Wilson: A mystery must subordi-

nate all literary values to a puzzle, and the solution to that often turns out to be
disappointing. The conventions of the genre prevent the writer from achieving
artistic merit.
Counter: Each genre opens up specific artistic possibilities of subject
and form. Krutch: “The acceptance of a tradition and with it of certain fixed
themes and methods seems to release rather than stifle the effective working of
the imagination.”70 Bogan: The detective story incorporates areas of experience
forbidden to other genres, such as the struggle between logical reasoning and
sensational violence. Barzun: The detective story’s artistic strength lies in its
focus on the mundane world around us. The interpretation of clues obliges us
to recognize “all the little unregarded details of daily life.”71 Like a scientist, the
detective subjects them to rigorous analysis and logical inference.
5. Popular storytelling’s predictability lets its audience sink into mind-
less, repetitive torpor. Wilson: Mystery readers have “lax mental habits.”72 All
the talk about literary values in the detective story is an excuse for an addiction.
Counter: There are consumers, and there are connoisseurs. Barzun: A
true admirer of detective stories knows the tradition, spots mechanical recy-
cling, and appreciates clever variants on standard ploys. As an outsider, Wilson
can’t recognize what’s valuable about the classics he castigates.
6. Popular art is a reflection of its times, or of universal concerns. Wil-
son: Why do people read detective stories? The interwar years have inculcated
a diffuse worldwide “fear of impending disaster.”73 Readers welcome a detective
who can pin guilt to a particular source.
Counter: All art reflects its moment and more widespread concerns.
Like other literature, the detective story may reveal something about the
collective mind. So Bogan, probing for “archetypal subconscious themes,” can
find an underlying religiosity in the detective story, with a cult of investigation
and Sherlock Holmes as a priest.74

One further line of defense mooted by these writers isn’t a reply to Wilson
so much as a larger reflection on literary history. Popular narrative may satisfy
appetites that more prestigious storytelling, in the wake of modernism, has
ignored. Earlier writers had used the mystery story as a cudgel to beat modern-
ist writing. In 1926 E. M. Wrong declared that the “economy, tidiness, and com-
pleteness” of detective stories were “conspicuously lacking in some forms now
much cried up.” A 1929 article asserted that mysteries were in revolt against
“sophomoric” psychological novels that withheld the appeals of plot. For its
readers, the genre offers “escape not from life, but from literature.”75
In the 1944 controversy, critics revisited this complaint. Krutch and Bogan
note that mystery novels yield a clarity of plot and motive, a solid structure,
and a finale promising poetic justice. These are time-honored literary values
 Churn and Consolidation 107

neglected by modernism and its followers. DeVoto asserts that the mystery
novel is popular because “it is the only current form of fiction that is pure
story.”76
In his rejoinder, Wilson defends modernism as redefining what counts as a
good story. Proust, Joyce, and Woolf tell tales, but they give us more. They have
designed their books with an exceptional “intensity”—owing, presumably, to
their Symbolist leanings—so their occasional longueurs are worth the cost. The
art novel subordinates plot in the conventional sense to through-composed
organic form, as James had advised.77 Wilson might have added that the appeal
of “pure story” dominates westerns and romance novels too, yet defenders of
the detective story don’t endow those genres with literary stature.
Wilson’s strictures created terms for further debate. In 1946, as if pleading
guilty to Wilson’s accusations, W. H. Auden admitted that he was a detective
story addict and that the genre had nothing to do with art. He presented it as
a secular myth of the fall from Eden.78 John Dickson Carr, a writer of classic
mysteries, defended the genre as “the greatest game in the world,” lifting the
puzzle element to the level of an intellectual struggle: the battle of wits between
criminal and detective is mirrored by that of author and reader.79 Marshall
McLuhan, eventually to become a guru of media studies, took to the pages of
a literary quarterly to “provide the sleuth with a pedigree” stretching back to
Renaissance drama.80
Wilson sharpened the battle lines by granting that psychological thrillers
and stories of espionage had a better claim to literary status, so Graham Greene
escapes his sanctions. He also largely exempted the hard-boiled tale, a gesture
that left an opening for an unexpected entry in the discussion.

Reforming the Roughnecks

Raymond Chandler’s reputation had been growing since publication of The Big
Sleep (1939), and Knopf (publisher of not only Faulkner but also Dashiell
Hammett, James M. Cain, and other hard-boiled writers) had promoted the
novels strongly. The editor of the Atlantic Monthly, often considered a solid
middlebrow monthly, was a Chandler admirer and invited Chandler to write
an article on the detective story. “The Simple Art of Murder” appeared in
December 1944 in the midst of the debate about mysteries that Wilson had
touched off.81 Although Chandler makes no reference to any of the disputants,
he had read their entries.82 His article amplifies Wilson’s critique of the classic
whodunit and offers the hard-boiled detective story as a form of detective
fiction of genuine literary merit.
Through amusing demolition of several interwar whodunits, Chan-
dler supports Wilson’s objections. The classic puzzle is fatally unrealistic in
 108 PA RT I

characterization (“cardboard”), plot (riddled with implausibilities and contra-

dictions), and worldview. “If the writers of this fiction . . . wrote about the kind
of murders that happen, they would also have to write about the authentic
flavor of life as it is lived. And since they cannot do that, they pretend that what
they do is what should be done.” The demands of the puzzle are a creative strait-
jacket. “If [the story] started out to be about real people . . . they must very soon
do unreal things in order to form the artificial pattern required by the plot.”83
The classic detective story comforts its readers rather than challenging them.
Chandler pledges himself to realism. In his 1946 revision of the essay,
the version best known, he adds a defiant opening: “Fiction in any form has
always intended to be realistic.”84 So are there realistic detective stories? There
are, and Dashiell Hammett wrote them. Chandler devotes the last stretch of
the essay to an appreciation of Hammett’s version of the hard-boiled detective
story. Hammett’s novels display all the virtues that the whodunit lacks: plau-
sibility, sharp character drawing, originality of form, vividness of style, and a
commitment to portraying contemporary reality. Hammett depicts the world
of crooked politicians and ruthless mobsters—the sordid city that the refined
English writers refused to confront.85 “It is not a fragrant world, but it is the
world you live in.”86
“The Simple Art of Murder” nowhere mentions Chandler’s own novels, but
in praising Hammett he is providing a rationale for his own aesthetic. This
becomes especially clear in the article’s final paragraphs, with the admission
that hard-edged realism is not enough. There has to be hope. That’s provided
by the hero, a man of honor who is “neither tarnished nor afraid,” who paces
the “mean streets” in quest of righteous adventure.87 He is, in short, private
detective Philip Marlowe. This urban knight-errant is the one element of arti-
fice Chandler seems to allow, but that is because, in all fiction, realism needs
tempering by redemption.
Chandler later told a correspondent that his essay was merely a polemic.
“I could have written a piece of propaganda in favor of the English detective story
just as easily.”88 But by offering an ambitious alternative to the classic whodunit,
the essay helped make Chandler a salient figure in literary culture. In early 1945,
a month after the piece appeared, Edmund Wilson’s second diatribe against mys-
teries praised Chandler as the only writer in the genre who displayed the gift of
storytelling. Knopf, quick to capitalize on notoriety, ran a full-page New York
Times advertisement announcing that Chandler was now being recognized as “a
truly great writer.” Festooned with quotations from critics, the copy insisted that
he was more than a mystery-monger. He was a novelist, “a part of contemporary
American literature, along with . . . Hammett, Cain, O’Hara, Burnett.”89
As if on cue, the Atlantic Monthly took up the cause. An article in early 1945
bestowed on Chandler “an artistry of craftsmanship and a realism that can rank
 Churn and Consolidation 109

him with many a famous novelist.”90 Later that year the Times carried a piece
called “Raymond Chandler, and the Future of the Whodunits.” In reviewing
Knopf ’s well-timed release of an omnibus collection of Chandler’s four novels,
the critic declared that if these books hadn’t been pigeonholed as detective
stories they would have been best-sellers.91 Thanks to such accolades, and the
praise showered on Double Indemnity (1944) and other films indebted to his
work, his career rose to new heights.
In the short term, “The Simple Art of Murder” did more for Chandler’s rep-
utation than that of the hard-boiled school. The pulpish Mike Hammer novels
ruling the best-seller lists were difficult to defend as serious writing. Admirers
of the classic puzzle form pointed out that hard-boiled fiction was no model
of verisimilitude.92 The tough detective is knocked unconscious several times
per volume, voluptuous women crave him, and he miraculously recovers from
frightful beatings, only to handily remember the one definite lie someone told
that will give the game away.93 Yet these conventions passed muster thanks to
high art assumptions that grim drama is more realistic than the essentially
comic rhythm governing the prim puzzle.
From the 1960s on, however, Chandler’s rationale would be successfully
applied to the entirety of hard-boiled literature and film noir. “The Simple Art
of Murder” offered a path out of the 1940s impasse between elite art and mass
culture. Yes, High Modernism was over. But there was a vernacular idiom of
modern American writing, developed by Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Ander-
son, and Ernest Hemingway, that fed into Hammett’s achievement.94 This was
the pedigree of the best of the hard-boiled school. Thematically, exposing the
corruption of the capitalist city is one way to fulfill modern literature’s effort
to criticize what Josiah Strong calls the “storm-centers of civilization,” where
politics, class struggle, and sexual tensions erupt.95
At least one form of popular storytelling devoted itself not to peddling day-
dreams and distraction but to forcing its audience to face an uncomfortable
reality. Wilson and Chandler conveniently ignored the elements of social crit-
icism, particularly the emphasis on class inequities, to be found in many Brit-
ish whodunits. For defenders of the hard-boiled school, the artificial world of
the English puzzle story simply reflects a realm of bourgeois comfort slightly
knocked awry but put right by a figure of authority. The hard-boiled story, like
proletarian fiction and the novel of social criticism, shows that popular narra-
tive can knowingly reflect its moment. This bleak, confrontational worldview
could never be confused with the consolations of mass culture.
James Naremore labels the leading hard-boiled writers “popular modern-
ists” because they occupy a space between high art and mass art.96 Eventually
they proved to be a compelling crossover form not only for mass audiences but
for generations of intellectuals.
 110 PA RT I

Experiments Everywhere

In the 1940s, Anglo-American popular storytellers built the foundations for

decades to come. Crossovers appeared in the 1920s and 1930s, but the wan-
ing of hard-core modernism left the field wide open. Now almost any innova-
tive book, play, film, radio show, or comic book had to provide some degree
of accessibility. Novelty of form and style tended to be the result of revising
schemas from the classic tradition, from modernism, or from the blends and
hybrids of recent years. The buffet was laid, and the menu could be expanded
by judicious experimentation with inherited recipes.
Resistance to mass culture subsided, and nearly every intellectual found
something to admire and enjoy. Detective fiction had already made forays
into that audience, and soon science fiction, horror, and fantasy would count
among their fans people who would have been called highbrows a generation
before. Many of the mass-culture critics admitted they had been too pugilistic:
their conception of the “mass” was undiscriminating.97 By relegating every-
thing that was not avant-garde to the category of mass culture, critics in effect
swept into the same bucket Our Town, His Girl Friday (1940), and paintings
of poker-playing dogs. And perhaps the consumers of popular art were not
all being gulled. David Riesman pointed out that many pop music fans were
discerning connoisseurs.98
Film was perhaps the mass medium easiest to grant some artistic poten-
tial. Many intellectuals were already hospitable to the idea; they had praised
Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, Walt Disney, and German and Soviet directors of the
silent era. The Hollywood studio cinema was a softer target and easily carica-
tured as an assembly line and a dream factory. But the most original Ameri-
can film critics of the 1940s, I’ve argued elsewhere, bypassed the mass-culture
debates and showed that mainstream movies had their own realm of artistic
achievement.99
With consolidation of the forms and techniques of popular narrative in
the 1940s, the mystery gained new prominence, and many “literary” nov-
elists turned to the genre. This trend persisted throughout the decades, as
prestigious fiction writers and playwrights reworked mystery-based schemas.
Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Donna
Tartt, Paul Auster, and many others found in the investigation plot and the
suspense thriller fertile ground for artistry. In more oblique ways, the genre
shaped prestige storytelling. Vladimir Nabokov claimed to detest mysteries,
but Lolita (1958) is an amalgam of suspense plots. Pale Fire (1962), Nabokov
declared in an interview, “is a combination of scholarly work, a poem, and a
mystery thriller.”100
This recognition of mystery-driven storytelling after the 1940s was part of
the Anglo-American intelligentsia’s wider acceptance of popular culture as
 Churn and Consolidation 111

a source of artistic vitality. In the 1960s, Pop Art burst onto the gallery and
museum market as Pauline Kael was celebrating the rise of a “New Hollywood.”
Even the staunch Partisan Review had abandoned the barricades. It published
Susan Sontag’s sympathetic account of Camp and Richard Poirier’s defense of
the Beatles as “very great” artists, proof that “the arts really do not need to be
boring.”101 Poirier’s case echoed Gilbert Seldes’s 1922 book, The Seven Lively Arts,
which defended vaudeville, Tin Pan Alley, comic strips, and slapstick movies.
Seldes had assaulted an age of genteel taste, but Poirier went further. However
liberating the High Modernists had been, they and their academic enablers had
suffocated pleasure. Poirier asked a basic question: “Is this any fun?”
Ever since then, esoteric storytelling has become, to one degree or another,
exoteric. Choosing novels more or less at random: Wilkie Collins could rec-
ognize Special Topics in Calamity Physics (2008) as a variant of the dossier
novel whose offspring, the As I Lay Dying model, had never gone out of style.
Ghostwritten (1999) uses multiple narrators to reconstruct a terrorist attack,
and A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014) does the same for an assassination
attempt. Lost Children Archive (2020) offers documents and a novel-within-a-
novel framed by a road trip.
Without daring to sum up decades of storytelling variants, let me end
this survey with a final example. If I had to pick a figure who epitomizes the
dazzling swirl of the crossover currents shaping Anglo-American popular
narrative since World War II, that would be Stephen Sondheim. Beginning
in the 1950s, he poured an astonishing range of cultural materials into music
and movies that exemplify the vivacity of popular storytelling.
His work can be situated in the fondness for stage games found in “light
modernism.” One trend in British theater fused aspects of modernism (Pinter,
Beckett, Ionesco) with the comedy of P. G. Wodehouse and The Goon Show.
Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) showed that
what was “offstage” in one story could constitute the amusingly doom-laden
plot of another.
Alan Ayckbourn dedicated his career to formal experimentation with
space (three bedrooms as one in Bedroom Farce, 1975) and time (simultaneous
action in How the Other Half Loves, 1969). Intimate Exchanges (1983) spreads
forking-path plots across eight separate plays and sixteen possible endings.
House and Garden (1999) consists of two plays performed simultaneously
in two auditoriums, with actors dashing between them. Ayckbourn’s most
famous cycle of pattern plotting, The Norman Conquests (1973), displays a grid
structure; each play gathers all the action taking place in one location, and the
audience must reconstruct the order of story events.
Michael Frayn’s virtuoso Noises Off (1982) probably owes something to
Stoppard and Ayckbourn, but it offers its own switcheroo. The opening scene
of a sex farce is rehearsed in the first act, comes off skillfully in the second,
 112 PA RT I

and collapses during the third. Crucially, the smooth show of the second act
is presented to us in a backstage view displaying the intricate timing involved.
Again, an abstract formal concept is mapped onto a conventional scenario, the
comedy of a bungled stage production.
Not surprising, this trend had a nodding acquaintance with mystery genres.
Ayckbourn plotted some plays as quasi-thrillers, and Stoppard’s The Real
Inspector Hound (1968) is a parody of the country house murder. Stoppard
undercuts the mystery by a Pirandellian device: two critics down in front are
commenting as the performance unfolds. This gives Stoppard a chance to mock
pretentious reviewing language. The standard whodunit device of reenacting
the murder transforms into a replay of the opening act, with the critics now
taking the roles of detective and victim.
Also not surprising, both Ayckbourn and Stoppard declared themselves to be
influenced by cinema, a reliable mark of crossover in modern media. Ayckbourn
plays were adapted, with ingratiating wit, to film by Alain Resnais, and Stoppard
wrote several scripts, most famously Shakespeare in Love (1998), which if the term
means anything must count as defiantly middlebrow entertainment.
Sondheim was on the same frequency as these comic talents but had
greater bandwidth. He plunged into cinephilia more deeply. His early musical
influences were Hollywood scores, notably that for Hangover Square (1945);
Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979) was his tribute to
Bernard Herrmann.102 A Little Night Music (1973) and Passion (1994) were
adapted from films. Many of his songs refer to movies, and he composed
music for Stavisky (1974), Dick Tracy (1990), and other films. He was even a
clapper boy for John Huston on Beat the Devil (1953).103
Instead of parodying mysteries, Sondheim was deeply committed to them.
Detective fiction was his favorite reading, and as a puzzle addict he spent
hours devising murder games. “I have always taken murder mysteries rather
seriously.”104 Both Company (1970) and Follies (1971) were initially planned as
mysteries, with the latter concerned not with “whodunit?” but with “who’ll do
it?”105 Sweeney Todd is a paradigmatic revenge thriller; in planning the song
plot, Sondheim consulted Peter Shaffer, author of Sleuth (1970). Asked by
Herbert Ross to write a film, Sondheim and Anthony Perkins (another admirer
of “the trick kind” of mystery practiced by John Dickson Carr) came up with
The Last of Sheila (1973).106 Directed by Ross, it is a blackly comic, cleverly
structured whodunit—And Then There Were None as if redone by a Condé
Nast gossip columnist. With George Furth, Sondheim wrote a thriller play,
Getting Away with Murder (1996), and planned the unproduced Chorus Girl
Murder Case, an homage to 1940s Bob Hope movies. The clues would be hid-
den in the songs.
Sondheim’s zest for film and mystery fiction reflects a deep admiration for
popular culture. It’s one thing to enjoy it, as Ayckbourn and Stoppard clearly do,
 Churn and Consolidation 113

while also poking fun at its silliness. It’s something else to appreciate its artistry
in depth and try to master the conventions yourself. Despite learning “tautness”
from the austere avant-garde composer Milton Babbitt, Sondheim took as
his mentor Oscar Hammerstein II.107 Tin Pan Alley, with its finger-snapping
rhythms and suave wordplay, pushed him toward a brisk cleverness. The vir-
tuoso rhymes in his bouncy “Comedy Tonight” (A Funny Thing Happened on
the Way to the Forum, 1962) inevitably bring a grin: Panderers! Philanderers!
Cupidity! Timidity! . . . Tumblers, grumblers, bumblers, fumblers!
While executing these pirouettes, the song provides a Cliffs Notes guide to
Roman New Comedy. No tragedy tonight; weighty affairs will just have to wait.
Sondheim similarly lays bare an inherited schema in the unproduced movie
script Singing Out Loud, in which the couple gradually learn that it’s okay to
express emotion in song. “They have to learn to overcome the unreality of it
and break into song in the conventional manner of all musicals.”108
By taking fun seriously, by embracing the dynamic of schema and revision,
Sondheim found in popular storytelling a vast arena for experimentation. He
was crucially influenced by Allegro (1947), an ambitious Rodgers and Ham-
merstein musical he considered “startlingly experimental in form and style.”109
Hammerstein was “the great experimenter” who used the verse sections of
songs to explore possibilities of structure, melody, and harmony.110 Allegro also
played daringly with overall structure and subjective viewpoint, techniques
that Sondheim would take up. In his invaluable creative memoirs, Finishing the
Hat (2010) and Look, I Made a Hat (2011), Sondheim shows how he sought out
problems that could be solved through formal innovation that suited the sub-
ject and genre. Who else would decide to write all the songs for A Little Night
Music in triple time, with each one in a different dance form?
His first major experiment was Company (1970), which consists of flash-
backs framed by the protagonist Robert’s thirty-fifth birthday party. Sondheim
claimed it offered “a story without a plot.”111 The flashbacks don’t supply a
goal-directed character arc and instead sample Robert’s bachelor lifestyle and
its effects on his three girlfriends and the five married couples in his circle. The
resulting compare-and-contrast pattern relies on principles of parallel con-
struction going back to Intolerance. Complicating things further, bits of action
are accompanied by a choruslike commentary from characters not in the scene.
Still, there is a certain progression to the whole, indicated by Robert’s disillu-
sioned but hopeful final song, “Being Alive.”
The nonlinearity of Company indicates how much Sondheim’s innovations
owe to the techniques I’ve been considering. Likewise, Assassins (1990) moves
freely back and forth across a hundred years and shows off a Joycean “polysty-
lism,” integrating popular musical traditions from vaudeville to melodrama.
(Sondheim strongly admired Ulysses.) In Follies, characters argue with their
former selves. Sunday in the Park with George (1984), built on parallels between
 114 PA RT I

two painters, assigns inner monologues to both artist and model; characteris-
tically, Sondheim expresses jumbled thoughts by avoiding the rhymes he nor-
mally strives to maintain.
Several plays utilize a narrator, who may take a role or converse with the
characters. The Narrator of Into the Woods (1987) dies fairly early in the story
he tells. The play’s overall structure is a virtuoso braiding of classic folktales
into a single plot. A different experiment in narration informs Passion, which
Sondheim created as an epistolary musical. Characters writing or reading
letters render the emotional climaxes as “read rather than acted.”112
Sondheim’s appetite for innovation drove him to revisit techniques accumu-
lated over the century. Turning the 1934 Kaufman and Hart comedy Merrily We
Roll Along into a musical in 1981, he happily tackled the problems of its 3-2-1
chronology. He signaled time shifts with recurring tunes sung by a chorus.
Different productions experimented with ways of reinforcing these musical
tags, such as a synoptic slide show reminiscent of the “News on the March”
sequence of Citizen Kane. The inverted chronology also shaped the musical
texture. In a linear plot, fully vocalized melodies are given reprises, shorter
versions recalling the original number. Here, Sondheim had the reprises come
first, as appetizers for songs yet to be fully heard, “undercurrents of memory”
whose source would be revealed in later (that is, earlier) scenes. Similarly, one
friend’s leitmotif became accompaniment for another’s main theme. Working
in musical theater allowed Sondheim to infuse each moment with the density
of allusion and recall sought by the modernist novel.113 The puzzle addict tries
to fit everything together.
Pacific Overtures (1976), a chronicle of Japan’s engagements with the West,
has the structure of a portmanteau film composed of distinct episodes. It too
has a narrator, the Reciter, and its experiments include turning renga linked
verse into a passed-along song. The most formally daring scene, “Someone in
a Tree,” stages the March 1854 signing of the treaty opening Japan to U.S. ships.
We do not see the ceremony, which is held in a secure house. The Reciter ques-
tions an old man who claims that as a boy he watched the negotiations from a
tree. During their dialogue, a boy clambers up the tree, and he and his older
self collaborate in reporting the event he sees but cannot hear. Then the Reciter
discovers a samurai guard hiding beneath the floorboards, and he reports what
he hears but cannot see.
As the singers’ accounts intertwine, history is assembled through partial
perceptions, both in the moment and in recollection. In a Conradian ges-
ture, the story, incomplete as it is, becomes accessible only through multiple
viewpoints. “I’m a fragment of the day./ If I weren’t, who’s to say/ things would
happen here the way/ that they’re happening?” In adapting novelistic schemas
of viewpoint to the stage, Pacific Overtures spontaneously revives and revises
the sensory-deprivation experiment of A Voice in the Dark.
 Churn and Consolidation 115

✳✳✳

“The old avant-garde has passed,” wrote Dwight Macdonald in 1960, “and left
no successors.” Midcult, middlebrow culture had bled high art dry. By this
account, the storytellers we’ve encountered in this chapter are part of “the
agreeable ooze” of midcult.114 Sondheim had a fondness for the pastiche of pop-
ular forms, “Brechtian” songs, a willingness to pitch TV scripts while admir-
ing Laurie Anderson and Marguerite Duras, and a shameless appropriation
of Seurat and Japanese traditions—was this man not the ultimate middlebrow
entertainer? What can you do with someone who declares no split between
light and serious art? As Sondheim remarked, “I put Phyllis McGinley right up
there with Keats and Shelley.”115
Judged by the standards of High Modernism, much mass art will appear
compromised. But I’ve argued that modernism can itself be considered a more
or less demanding revision of schemas to be found in prior narrative traditions.
I’ve also suggested that the purist peak of that effort, Ultraism, enjoyed a fairly
brief moment.116 What we have seen, in great plenitude, is Anglo-American
narrative as largely a crossover phenomenon, a swirling blend of classic, pro-
to-modernist, hard-core modernist, and modified-modernist schemas. And
very often we find admirable skill, not to mention sheer enjoyment, in the
crossovers. If Macdonald can, in all seriousness, favorably compare Fellini’s
“delightfully obvious masterpiece” 8 ½ (1963) to Mozart’s Magic Flute, surely
Sondheim deserves his day in court.117
In treating so many narratives, current and vintage, as revisions of inherited
schemas, I might seem to be denying the notion of originality. Not entirely.
I ask simply that we think of originality in exoteric media and in many eso-
teric works as a striking addition to tradition. We can see it as a play between
freshness and familiarity, a confirmation that certain storytelling techniques
that have come down to us are not absolutely rigid and can, when flexed or
stretched, yield rewarding artistic experiences. Creative anachronism, skipping
back to earlier works for inspiration, can be as artistically valid as “taking the
next step” (which never seems obvious at the time). It’s a conception of origi-
nality closer to some non-Western art making than to the Western bias toward
upsets and breakthroughs. Forms can be gamelike and playful, as in Japanese
court poetry. Virtuosity can discover unexpected possibilities within estab-
lished schemas and rules. Tradition can be additive and constantly enriching
itself through borrowings. Devices can be endlessly rediscovered.118
The qualities promoted by the New Critics—irony, symbolism, ripe ambigu-
ities, the palpitations of consciousness—were characteristic of High Modernism
as were the mythic/psychoanalytic resonances disclosed by cultural critics from
the 1940s until today. But these perspectives may not be best adapted to appre-
ciating the range and power of popular narrative.
 116 PA RT I

I’ve sketched some rationales for this appreciation in summing up critics’

responses to Edmund Wilson’s attack on detective stories. Barzun, DeVoto,
Krutch, and the others didn’t need to assert that popular storytelling is ulti-
mately “as good as” more rarefied forms. That judgment will depend on the
criteria we apply across the board. If we demand that profound philosophical
meditation on the human condition is necessary for greatness, much of mass
art won’t qualify (but then neither will much of prestigious art). Defenders of
the mystery genre or other popular forms need only argue that these narratives
fulfill worthwhile functions, and some of them will be very good of their kind.
This line of defense remains in force today. An adroit thriller can, all things
being equal, be a more worthy artistic endeavor than a muddled novel of psy-
chological angst. In cinema particularly, many supreme achievements, from
Hitchcock’s suspense films to Ozu’s domestic dramas, are “transcendent” genre
pieces, wholly derived from mass storytelling traditions.119
The 1944 defenders of mystery proposed that innovative work can be
found in all areas of culture. They suggested that we take seriously experts’
and fans’ efforts to gain intimate acquaintance with craft. They urged us to
treat popular narrative as part of a history of forms and genres that have their
own integrity.
We have the right tools available: awareness of craft norms, sometimes made
explicit by practitioners themselves; historical information about institutions
that produce and distribute mass culture; and not least, fundamental concepts
of narration, viewpoint, segmentation, and temporal linearity. If we can reveal
what Robert Hughes called “the spectacle of skill,” we can enhance our under-
standing and enjoyment of popular narrative.120
The 1944 defenders of mystery stories were right to touch on some of nar-
rative’s basic human appeals, such as curiosity. The experimentalism on view
in a play such as A Voice in the Dark, a novel such as How Like a God, and a
film such as The Woman in Question will often pose questions about crimes
completed or about to be committed. For a great deal of all popular story-
telling, pleasure in story values is the reward, but the lure is mystery. That
lure has inspired storytellers, and it has brought readers and viewers a bonus
of enhanced skills in story comprehension. I’ll try to convince you that the
traditions of mystery storytelling helped audiences of all brows become more
sensitized to the potential of narrative form and style. We learned to like the
taste of the construction.
PART II
 CHAPTER 4

THE GOLDEN AGE PUZZLE PLOT

The Taste of the Construction

I
n all media, popular storytellers from the 1910s onward found that
mystery plotting encouraged tricky techniques. We confront a
mystery, as critic Victor Shklovsky indicated, when the narrative
announces that we don’t know something.1 If the action is focused on revealing
that something, we can call the result an investigation plot. That plot must both
track the inquiry and take us back to events leading up to the present.
As investigation plots became common, audiences grew adept at enjoy-
ing them. That engagement would, by the logic of the variorum, encourage
innovation, even when the novelty seemed a little arbitrary. Anthony Trollope
deplored “the taste of the construction” he felt after reading Wilkie Collins.2 But
that taste, actually a taste for felt construction, for flagrant artifice and sensed
pattern, informs much of what audiences enjoyed about mysteries. Treating a
mystery as a playful experience of form became central to popular storytelling.
It wasn’t alien to more exalted writing either. “Psychological mystery sto-
ries” one critic called James’s experiments in viewpoint, and Conrad’s novels
were compared to detective stories.3 Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier
becomes the written record of a husband’s investigation of his wife, revealing
a murder scheme and supplemented by cryptic questions to the reader about
what characters might have been up to. (Ford, a fan of detective stories, went
on to write the 1936 thriller Vive le Roy.) Most famously, William Faulkner’s
obsessive, circuitous inquiries into his characters’ pasts, along with dark hints
about their secrets, had obvious kinship with investigation plots. Faulkner’s
detective story Intruder in the Dust (1948) is the most obvious manifestation
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of an impulse that Conrad Aiken found in the very fibers of his style: “the
whole elaborate method of deliberately withheld meaning, of progressive and
partial and delayed disclosure, which so often gives the characteristic shape
to the novels themselves.”4
In this Faulkner was joining a popular tradition that crystallized in the 1910s
and 1920s. Those years saw the emergence of three large-scale mystery genres,
all developing in relation to one another. Each has a fairly distinct identity, yet
they all have precedents. The storyteller aims to instill what we might call the
mystery attitude, a perplexity that ignites curiosity, sustains suspense, and ends
in surprise.5
The whodunit can be traced back to the Gothic novel and sensation fiction
of the nineteenth century, but with the proviso that the mystery is solved by
someone playing the role of detective. The puzzle is resolved, not through acci-
dent or quasi-supernatural means but by systematic inquiry and more or less
logical analysis, often aided by intuition. The plot is driven by curiosity. We ask
not just what comes next, a question basic to all narrative engagement, but what
has already happened. In reconstructing those events and relationships, we are
placed in suspense about how the solution of the mystery resolves the plot. That
solution/resolution, if it’s to pay off the perplexity, has to come as something of
a surprise—a satisfying one, at that, showing how bits of information dovetail
into a unitary pattern of causes and effects, accident and intention.
The psychological thriller, also an inheriter of the Gothic and sensation
trends, emphasizes the roles of victim and perpetrator. The buildup to the
crime, or series of crimes, forms the bulk of the action, and the protagonist may
be the person under threat or the character plotting the crimes. The viewpoint
may be restricted to one or the other, or it may alternate between them. Investi-
gation may play a role, but it is likely to be offstage or taken up by the potential
victim. In all, suspense is central to the thriller, which depends on a threat of
future danger more intense than is usual in the whodunit. Narration thus plays
a central role in distinguishing the genres and their dominant effects.
By putting an investigation plot in the foreground, the exploits of Sam Spade
and Philip Marlowe and their peers offer a variant of the whodunit. The hard-
boiled story restricts its narration to the investigator, usually a private eye, who
may recount the story in first person. What sets the hard-boiled school apart,
according to critical tradition, is the writers’ resistance to the genteel milieu and
manners of the classic British and American versions. Nearly all mystery stories
involve some degree of adventure—patterns of risky quest and chase—but that
quality dominates the hard-boiled mystery. It typically offers a conflict-filled,
often violent urban adventure involving professional criminals and malfea-
sance at all levels of society. It has roots in Sir Walter Scott’s historical romances
and Fenimore Cooper’s frontier stories of wilderness tracking and hunting. The
hard-boiled plot balances our curiosity about the source of the mystery with
 The Golden Age Puzzle Plot 121

suspense deriving from the dangerous urban setting: the investigator is likely
to be in peril.
There’s good reason to begin our exploration with the whodunit. Whatever
their distant sources, the modern psychological thriller and the hard-boiled
story have largely been defined by creators’ efforts to distinguish their work
from the so-called Golden Age detective story. The chief creators in that body
of Anglo-American fiction were Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Anthony
Berkeley Cox, S. S. Van Dine, Ellery Queen, and John Dickson Carr. Although
most Golden Age authors are little read today, their contributions to popular
storytelling shaped a good deal of what we encounter today, and not just in
mystery genres.

From the Great Detective to the Golden Age

We tend to think of artistic movements, such as Symbolism or Surrealism, as

being confined to the avant-garde. Literary historian LeRoy Lad Panek has
shrewdly suggested that we can treat the Golden Age group as a literary move-
ment too.6 Most of its members knew one another. The most prominent English
practitioners formed the Detection Club, which met in London restaurants
to share ideas, collaborate on projects, and promote their work.7 Many had
prestigious literary agents; Cox’s agent handled Hillaire Belloc, J. B. Priestley,
and Evelyn Waugh. Through imitation and competition their novels gained a
collective identity: the classic “whodunit.” At the same time, these writers com-
posed essays and reviews promulgating their ideas of the genre.
Detectives, amateur or professional, had appeared in fiction and drama
throughout the nineteenth century.8 Sensation novels such as Wilkie Col-
lins’s The Woman in White (1859) and The Moonstone (1868) took crime out
of haunted castles and concentrated, as Henry James put it, on “the mysteries
that are at our own doors.” The plot set both professional investigators and
interested parties to solving puzzles arising in “the cheerful country house
and the busy London lodgings.”9 But Collins tended to spread the detective
role among several characters. In contrast, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in
the Rue Morgue” (1841) made the detective the central figure, an introverted
genius with immense powers of reasoning. Comparably charismatic investi-
gators emerged in Emile Gaboriau’s novels, and most powerfully in the stories
of Arthur Conan Doyle. Sherlock Holmes, who made his bow in A Study in
Scarlet (1887), remained a titanic literary force well beyond his last story, which
was published in 1926.
By the 1910s, readers expected most mystery plots to revolve around a
“Great Detective.” Authors eagerly adopted the conventions Doyle had con-
solidated, not least because a striking figure could be the basis of a series of
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stories. A continuing hero could engage fans, aid world building, and not
least highlight experiments. A familiar detective and milieu could serve as a
comforting background against which the writer could introduce novelty. Late
stories in which Sherlock Holmes narrates the case would be far less striking
to a reader who didn’t know the role of Dr. Watson in earlier entries. Agatha
Christie’s posthumous Curtain (1975) carries much more weight as the culmi-
nation of the Hercule Poirot saga than it would as a stand-alone.
The aspiring writer was urged to create a memorable detective through
mannerisms, habits, dress, and tastes.10 The “transcendent detective,” as the
hero came to be called, might be a forensic scientist (Dr. Thorndyke), a blind
man (Max Carrados), a severe logician (the Thinking Machine), a pious Yankee
(Uncle Abner), or a soft-spoken, surprisingly worldly priest (Father Brown).
Like Holmes, transcendent detectives were given memorable eccentricities. The
Old Man in the Corner solved mysteries from a tea shop booth while knotting
and unknotting pieces of string.
Earlier traditions weren’t wholly abandoned, as is shown by the work of
Mary Roberts Rinehart. Although enormously popular, Rinehart’s mysteries
never earned respect from the Golden Age grandees.11 She relied on coinci-
dences, she put the romantic couple at the plot’s center, and she bypassed the
transcendent detective convention by assigning that role to an involved partic-
ipant. The Circular Staircase (1908) followed the sensation novel in centering
on threats to a familiar middle-class world. The intricate relations among the
characters, most of them harboring secrets, recall Collins’s plotting. Rinehart
likewise revamped the Gothic convention of the heroine set loose in an omi-
nous house. At the climax, the heroine is locked in a concealed room and at the
mercy of the murderer. Rachel Innes became a model for the emperiled women
in the domestic thrillers of Mignon G. Eberhart and later writers.12
Rachel is the driving force of an investigation plot. She must assemble evi-
dence and work around the police. She opens The Circular Staircase with a side-
long challenge to the male supersleuth: “This is the story of how a middle-aged
spinster lost her mind, deserted her domestic gods in the city, took a furnished
house for the summer out of town, and found herself involved in one of those
mysterious crimes that keep our newspapers and detective agencies happy and
prosperous.”13 This sprightly heroine’s personal stake in solving a murder gives
her an energy quite different from the detachment of the “consulting detective”
or observers such as Father Brown. If the series-based Great Detective came to
define the genre, there was room for a minor line of threatened amateurs forced
to take up the investigator role. These relatable, accidental detectives would
propel suspense thrillers for years to come.
A remarkable body of commentary on the principles underlying the pure
detective story grew up during the same period.14 While followers of James
and Ibsen were proposing new methods for fiction and drama, some literary
 The Golden Age Puzzle Plot 123

essayists were doing the same for their favored genre. Most comprehensive and
incisive was Carolyn Wells’s Technique of the Mystery Story (1913), one of the
most subtle writing manuals of the period.
Wells and her contemporaries noted that the investigation is launched
when a crime has taken place. Therefore the plot must move forward, as the
inquiry proceeds, and backward, as the causes of the crime are reconstructed
through documents, testimony, and clues. Chronology may be manipulated
through flashbacks that may both clarify and complicate our sense of the
sources of the crime.
But not just any crime. Already the mark of the teasing whodunit was the
baffling crime, the extraordinary one that challenges you to play with hypoth-
eses, offer alternative solutions, and speculate about motive. What does this
dying message mean? The more the crime flouts common sense, the better.
Matters of whodunit could be clouded by matters of “howdunit,” as Poe had
already shown in the Rue Morgue case. How could someone be murdered in a
room locked from the inside? The “impossible crime” offers many benefits to
the investigation plot. It automatically puts the crime beyond plodding police
routine, affords a chance for the Great Detective to show off, and has its own
aesthetic interest—a what-if prospect that stirs the storytelling imagination.
The 1910s commenters agreed that the genre’s primary appeal resides in intel-
lectual curiosity. The story’s resolution is the puzzle’s solution, preferably with
a surprise. As Poe had demanded of the short story, everything in the detective
tale aims at a final startling effect. At the same time, the puzzle plot is also a
game. Carolyn Wells suggests that the reader is playing against a “diabolically
artful” author who will wrap the tale in deception.15 Nevertheless, the game isn’t
rigged. The author is expected to play fair in supplying all relevant information
to solve the mystery.
In addition, the story must display ingenuity in both the crime and the solu-
tion. Wells writes: “The reader is thus turned into an analytical observer who
not only delights in the mental ingenuity exhibited by the detective, but actually
joins him in working out the intricacies of a problem which, though at first
seemingly insoluble, is at length mastered entirely. Thus his admiration for the
‘investigator’ is happily coupled with his own delight in unraveling the skein
which the author has woven expressly for the purpose.”16 The Great Detective
serves as a guiding figure. Most readers probably don’t seriously try to solve the
puzzle, but they enjoy following the hero’s efforts. Typically the investigation is
viewed by the detective’s friend, and many writers followed Doyle’s example in
making that figure the source of first-person narration: a Watson.
No other popular genre attracted the serious critical reflection devoted
to the detective story. But the growing awareness of craft principles raised
a question: Could detective stories acquire literary value? Wells noted that
the genre had ties to folktales, riddles, Greek myth, and other reputable
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precedents. The mystery’s “fixed form,” she suggested, had something of the
stylized abstraction of heraldic devices and Middle Eastern embroidery. The
best detective stories might be as worthy of respect as any “character stud-
ies, problem novels, society sketches or symbolic romances.”17 Many mystery
writers accepted the Collins distinction between “great writer” and “story-
teller,” but some hoped to pass beyond the category of mere entertainment.
The lure of literary respectability would tempt writers in all mystery tradi-
tions for the next century.
Many of the younger authors of the 1920s followed the Great Detective
model and made their protagonists larger than life. Christie gave us Hercule
Poirot, Carr the Chestertonian Dr. Gideon Fell, and Van Dine the languid aes-
thete Philo Vance. Other writers reacted against the towering eccentricity of
Holmes by humanizing their protagonists. E. C. Bentley conceived the protag-
onist of Trent’s Last Case (1913) as the untranscendent detective. Offended by
fictional characters who are “ostentatiously unlike life,” Bentley made Trent a
lively young artist of good breeding and no peculiarities. “Trent’s Last Case is
not so much a detective story as an exposure of detective stories.”18
Trent became the prototype of a new breed of masterminds; relaxed and
bantering amateurs included Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey, Margery Allingham’s
Albert Campion, and Berkeley’s Roger Sheringham. At times indulging in the
silly-ass babble of Bertie Wooster, they were akin to the Bright Young Things
in the fictions of Michael Arlen and Evelyn Waugh. Sharply portrayed, they
might also edge the mystery story toward the novel of manners, a genre of some
literary repute.19
Golden Age writers were heir to many technical devices. Apart from the
resources of Gothic fiction, sensation novels, and melodrama (disguise, secret
passages, double identities), investigative plots around the turn of the century
laid out a rich menu. There were alibis genuine and faked, dying messages,
locked-room murders, blackmail as a primary motive, ciphers to be analyzed,
false or misleading clues (footprints were a favorite), the least likely culprit,
even the possibility that the detective is the guilty party. There was reflexivity as
well, as we saw in Seven Keys to Baldpate (1913).
Golden Age writers inherited two particular problems from their 1910s
predecessors. First, how much adventure should be included? In Poe’s “The
Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (1842), C. Auguste Dupin solves a murder wholly by
reading news accounts, but his two other cases supplement the puzzle with
scenes of the detective intervening in the action to expose the culprit. As usual,
Doyle took Poe a step further. Any story titled “The Adventure of the . . .” sug-
gested that Holmes’s reasoning would lead to some exciting action. Doyle typi-
cally built his plots toward a chase, a hunt, or a suspenseful ambush as in “The
Speckled Band”: “The game is afoot!” An excursion into danger helped thaw
the chilliness of a pure chess-game exercise.
 The Golden Age Puzzle Plot 125

The Great Detective writers who followed Doyle freely mixed ratiocination
and adventure. But Golden Age writers were at pains, at least in their public
rationales, to play down tendencies toward physical action. A book’s title would
proclaim itself a Mystery or a Case or a Problem. Disdaining the thriller, authors
insisted that theirs was the only genre that could display the free play of the
gifted mind, the excitement of logic wedded to imagination.
In practice, most writers weren’t so austere. As Panek points out, few of
them adhered to the idea of the pure puzzle.20 Love interest, worrisome as a
distraction from reasoning, could enter when suspects became romantically
involved. The supernatural could be invoked, as Chesterton and Carr did, as
long as it didn’t prove to be the solution. Derring-do wasn’t ruled out either.
Sayers provided an airborne last-minute rescue to resolve Clouds of Witness
(1926), and Ellery Queen, who billed each book as “a problem in deduction,”
turned the last stretch of The Egyptian Cross Mystery (1932) into a cross-country
race against time.21
Patches of adventure-driven action could also help with a second problem
writers inherited from sensation fiction and the Great Detective tradition. Poe
and Doyle showed that the puzzle-based detective story was suited to the short
story. The boom in magazine publishing at the turn of the century encouraged
writers to showcase their Great Detective in the short format. But what to do
about the novel? Collins developed intricate plots suitable to the three-decker
novel, but even Doyle had problems sustaining interest in the non-Holmes
stretches of A Study in Scarlet (1887), The Sign of Four (1890), and The Valley of
Fear (1915).
In popular narrative, form often follows format. Carolyn Wells and others
argued that a novel-length plot needed felicitous elaboration. Writers had to
integrate more suspects, more crimes, more atmospheric descriptions of set-
ting, and more twists to keep building to the ending. And great skill was needed
to keep that ending vivacious; a chapter-long anticlimax was much harder on
the reader than the brief windup of a short story.
Changes in publishing allowed Golden Age writers to create comparatively
compact books, running 70,000 to 80,000 words.22 Yet scaling up remained
daunting, especially for those purists who disdained bursts of exciting action.
In S. S. Van Dine’s The “Canary” Murder Case (1927), a woman is found
strangled in her apartment. Did her last guest, one of her lovers, kill her? She
was heard screaming and talking in her apartment long after he left. But her
lover did kill her. Before he left, he switched on a phonograph record of her
voice he had prepared, and he recruited a witness to join him in listening to
it in the hallway.
This is essentially a short-story idea, so it needs padding out. Van Dine,
a believer in the purely logic-driven plot, fills the book with Q&A sessions
featuring witnesses and suspects. There are seven potential culprits, each with
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motives to be exposed and alibis to be broken. Revelations spur more inter-

views. The police back the wrong solution, and the transcendent detective Philo
Vance expounds on the psychology of crime to anyone who will listen. Van
Dine adds to the cast a sneak thief who witnesses the murder while hiding in a
closet. Said thief also devises a gadget that lets him leave the crime scene while
locking the door behind him—a red herring that occupies several pages. The
crucial clue, the phonograph record, is discovered at the climax during a fresh
search of the apartment , thus flagrantly disobeying fair-play demands.
A more dramatic way to fill out the novel was tested by Bentley in Trent’s
Last Case. Halfway through, the hero’s explanation is revealed as mistaken.
The false solution, which had the benefit of making the protagonist attrac-
tively fallible (and here prey to romantic influence), became a convention of
detective plotting. Another Queen novel, the virtuoso Greek Coffin Mystery
(1932), proffers four false solutions, two of them engineered by the murderer
himself. True Golden Age bravado on this front is displayed in the title of J. J.
Connington’s Case with Nine Solutions (1928). At the same time, a parade of
imperfect solutions placed great weight, however unearned, on the last one.
What came at the end was truth—by convention, if not fully by conviction.
One more strategy for expansion would prove to have a long legacy. Instead
of starting the plot with the principal crime, typically the discovery of a mur-
der victim, the investigation could be launched by a pretext crime. Raymond
Chandler noted that “the most effective way to conceal a simple mystery is
behind another mystery. This is literary legerdemain.”23 In The Nine Tailors
(1934), for example, Sayers delays the central murder puzzle by teasing Wimsey
and the reader with a tale of jewels stolen twenty years earlier. Hard-boiled
writers would use pretext crimes as a bait and switch to draw the private detec-
tive and the reader into a complicated character network.

Puzzles, Rules, and Ingenuity

“Low-brow reading,” fretted two British writers commenting on the interwar

period, “was now dominated by the detective novel.”24 Whatever lowbrows
thought, the genre was a favorite of the middle class as well. Across the inter-
war period, an estimated eight thousand mystery novels were published in the
United States and the UK.25 Juvenile readers were courted with the adventures
of the young detectives Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys.26
When the venerable Scribners publishing house sold hundreds of
thousands of copies of S. S. Van Dine novels, it was an acknowledgment that
detective fiction could be legitimate. Soon every major publisher had a stable
of mystery writers, and some developed imprints devoted to the genre. Unlike
romances and westerns, mystery novels were reviewed in the London Times,
 The Golden Age Puzzle Plot 127

the New York Times, and other significant press outlets, as well as in magazines
such as Bookman and the Saturday Review.
This broadening support encouraged Anglo-American mystery writers
to coalesce as a self-conscious movement. They announced their goals and
defended their creative choices. Their voluminous writings about the genre,
built on the poetics articulated in the 1910s, served as manifestos for a distinct
literary form. In both precept and practice, they tried to deepen and enrich a
genre that was beginning to achieve respectability. Their strategies for doing so
left a permanent legacy for popular narrative.
With a single-mindedness that would have done credit to a Jamesian,
many of these writers wanted a new form of self-conscious artistry. Every
book tried to be a tour de force. The plot should baffle, of course, but beyond
that the division into chapters, the manner of narration, and details of style—
even layout and typography—should tease and perplex. With a thoroughness
a modernist might appreciate, writers weaponized all the resources of story-
telling to enhance curiosity and surprise. Appreciation of ingenuity became
the watchword of the genre. Techniques were bent toward creating an admi-
rable artifice.
Central to that artifice was the puzzle aspect. Given an extraordinary crime,
the rule makers insisted, mere physical action was a distraction. “Emotion,
wonder, suspense, sentiment, and description” had no place here, according
to Willard Huntington Wright (aka S. S. Van Dine), probably the most severe
puzzle adherent. “These qualities are either subordinated to ineffectuality, or
else eliminated entirely. The reader is immediately put to work, and kept busy
in every chapter, in the task of solving the book’s mystery.”27 The novel might
have a bustling climax, but a long concluding chapter would trace the detec-
tive’s reasoning blow by blow. Ellery Queen went so far as to accompany a 1932
book with a pamphlet, “How to Read the Queen Stories.” He suggests that the
novels have only two types of readers: those who don’t use logic but merely
guess the culprit, and those who seek “the intellectual stimulation which my
analytical-deductive method provides.”28 For both sorts of readers, the puzzle is
central and all other appeals are secondary.
Golden Age writers sought ways to intensify puzzle conventions. Clues—
traces of the criminal’s identity left at or near the scene—proliferated. Carr’s
Arabian Nights Murder (1934) furnished eleven enigmatic items—from coal
dust to false beards—that needed explaining. Elaborate alibis needed to be bro-
ken by patience and careful routine, skills embodied in Freeman Wills Crofts’s
tireless Inspector French.
Clues didn’t need to be purely physical. Poe had endowed his detective with
psychological insight, as when Dupin reads the narrator’s mind or realizes that
the Minister in “The Purloined Letter” (1843) is the sort of man who would
conceal something by putting it in the most obvious place. In solving one case,
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Vance’s reasoning rests on his belief that studying the “colossal, incommensu-
rable concepts” of mathematics gave the murderer “an enormous contempt for
human life.”29 Even psychoanalysis was flirted with. On the whole, however,
physical clues and questions of motive and timing remained key to a solution.
Any strong urge to probe characters’ mental lives would steer writers away
from pure detection and toward the psychological thriller.
Another convention was helpful in delaying the answer to the puzzle. Thanks
to what Father Brown recognized as a “half-memory,” the detective realizes that
something seen or heard earlier would help at the moment, but he or she can’t
recall it.30 The detective’s half-memory is in effect a signal to us that fair play
is in force. If we scan previous pages, we could in principle discover what the
detective is struggling to remember.
The revelation of the answer comes in two phases: the detective solves the
mystery, and then he or she explains this solution to others. When we’re given
access to the first phase, the plot provides the eureka moment. We’re told that
the detective grasps how a clue or a cluster of them solves the puzzle. We’re not,
however, given the actual solution until the final explanation; before that, the
answer is hinted at cryptically.
Surprisingly, for a genre priding itself on ineluctable logic, the moment
of insight is often triggered by accident—a casual remark by someone, or a
glimpse of something that can be associated with the solution. Despite the
emphasis on logic and reasoning in Golden Age dramaturgy, the unraveling
may owe something to chance.
Not that the plot immediately explains the eureka moment. One advantage
of a Watson was that the Great Detective could announce that he would not
reveal his thinking until he had enough evidence to prove his conclusions.
This delaying device could be stretched to book length by complications. The
detective’s tentative solution might be challenged by a contradictory clue or a
fresh murder. Eventually, however, either through explanation or a foray into
adventure, the detective provides a complete solution.
The Golden Age writers likewise outstripped their predecessors in pushing
further the idea that the mystery was a game. Like the puzzle, the game anal-
ogy was often more rhetorical than real. The novel is already complete when
we pick it up, and the author can’t respond to our “moves.” At best, reading
the book would be like replaying a chess match that was already completed.
Nevertheless, writers dramatized the process as a battle of wits. Carr declared
it as “a hoodwinking contest, a duel between author and reader . . . with the
reader alert for every dropped clue, every betraying speech, every contradic-
tion that might mean guilt.”31 Not only do we weigh what characters say and do,
but we try to read the mind of the cunning author.
By calling the story a game, defenders of the genre could suggest that rules
could stimulate ingenuity. In the 1920s and 1930s, writers enunciated a body of
 The Golden Age Puzzle Plot 129

doctrine as fierce in its Thou Shalt Nots as the demands of any literary avant-
garde. No love interest for the detective, no homicidal butlers, “no Chinamen,”
no last-minute introduction of the guilty party, no clues withheld from the
reader, no twins or doubles, no accidental or supernatural solution to the
mystery—these were laid down as inviolable. There should be only one detec-
tive who solves the case and only one guilty party. For a novel, the most suitable
crime is murder. If a professional criminal enters the plot, he or she cannot be
the killer. There can be no poisons unknown to science, and no more than one
secret passage per book.32 Members of the Detection Club swore an oath to
avoid “Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo-Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery,
Coincidence, or Acts of God.”33 What had been guidelines in the 1910s became
self-imposed restrictions that enabled writers to show their skill.
Similarly, Doyle had thought of fair play principally as a matter of avoiding
accidents or coincidences that revealed the solution. “The detective ought really
to depend for his successes on something in his own mind.”34 But by the 1920s,
Golden Age authors conceived fair play as making all clues and hints discover-
able in principle by the reader. The test: If you reread the book, you could find
everything necessary to the solution there, buried or flaunted in the flow of the
prose. This demand made detective novels more difficult to write than other
sorts, but it also invited creative use of the constraints. “Once the evidence
has been fairly presented,” noted Carr, “there are very few things that are not
permissible.”35
The sheer artificiality of the puzzle and game components invited deeper
reader involvement. Some novels were published with the last chapters sealed,
daring buyers to resist curiosity and return the book for a refund. A novel such
as The Long Green Gaze (1925) might tuck clues into crossword puzzles that the
reader had to solve. The original editions of Sayers’s Five Red Herrings (1931)
generously left a page blank so the reader could jot down what Lord Peter must
have asked the police to search for at the murder scene.36 Books came packaged
with jigsaw puzzles (The Jig-Saw Puzzle Murder, 1933; Murder of the Only Wit-
ness, 1934). “Murder dossiers” such as File on Bolitho Blane (1936) assembled
facsimile documents accompanied by strands of hair, bloodstained scraps of
fabric, and other physical clues. The party game of Murder, in which guests
were assigned roles of victim, culprit, witnesses, and detectives, became a craze
and was, naturally, incorporated into novels (Hide in the Dark, 1929).
Likewise, murder plays became more interactive than A Voice in the Dark
had been. The Last Warning (1922) recruited spectators (played by actors) into a
play-within-the-play. Murder in the Astor Theatre (1922) and The Radio Murder
(1926) locked the audience in and hauled suspects onstage to be interrogated.
Eye-Witnessed (1926) warned patrons of danger during the performance; sure
enough, a spectator is murdered and police arrive to find the killer. A similar
premise informs Murder in Motley (1934). Most famously, The Spider (1927)
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turns the auditorium into a vaudeville house in which newsreels, stage acts, and
mind-reading stunts lead to a killing.
The demands of puzzle and game called forth that ingenuity that the 1910s
critics had prized. Carr, a specialist in “impossible crimes,” took pride in the
cleverness that was needed. “Strokes of ingenuity make the game worth playing
at all.”37 In a crowded field, with a new mystery novel rolling off the press nearly
every day, pressures of the variorum mounted.
Exploring new settings was an obvious option. Murder could move out of
the country house or apartment into a department store, a hospital, a museum,
an advertising agency, an airline cabin, a movie studio. Rudolph Fisher’s The
Conjure-Man Dies: A Mystery Tale of Dark Harlem (1932) cast a whodunit
wholly with Black characters and provided a backstory set in Africa. Each fresh
locale presented challenges of technical detail, insider knowledge, and special-
ized routine that the writer would have to master. The schemas of the Great
Detective period had to be upgraded too. Dying messages became more com-
plex, or perhaps inauthentic, and impossible crimes proliferated. Murders in
locked rooms were joined by murders in an empty street, trackless stretches of
snow, and on a pristine tennis court.
The urge for ingenuity made fair play a pretext for self-congratulatory arti-
fice. As if to help the reader solve the puzzle, the novel might include a list
of characters, with identifying phrases for easy reference. There were maps,
floorplans, and diagrams. One large-format novel includes pages with clue-
filled photographs purportedly taken by the detective.38 The mind-bendingly
elaborate Obelists Fly High (1935) includes a cast list, a seating plan of an air-
plane cabin, two schedules (one of “reported movements,” the other of “actual
movements”), and a “Clue Finder” that guides the reader to the exact pages
indicating “the murderer’s mistake” and “the time of the victim’s death.” If you
peek at the Clue Finder before finishing the story, you’re reprimanded: “Isn’t
there enough cheating in the world without this sort of thing?”39
These ingratiating gestures toward fair play opened the way for further
duplicity. The Great Detective tradition had introduced the ingenious criminal
and the ingenious sleuth. The Golden Age novelists thrust forward a figure that
had been somewhat more discreet in those days: the ingenious author. To the
clues in the Great Detective plot were added flagrant hints in the narration.
Any feature of a physical book could create overt misdirection. The cast
list might drop hints about suspicious characters. Indications of day and time
at the beginning of chapters could be helpful, but they could also leave tell-
tale gaps, so the reader would need to page dutifully through all of them to
check.40 Before the story begins, the table of contents could flaunt cleverness,
as when the first letters of the chapter titles spell out the title of the book
(The Greek Coffin Mystery), or when the chapter titles form part of the tease.
Golden Age authors amplified the tantalizing section titles occasionally found
 The Golden Age Puzzle Plot 131

in nineteenth-century novels.41 One book’s parts are headed: “Prologue: What

Might Have Happened”; “The Old Bailey: What Seemed to Happen”; “Epilogue:
What Really Happened.”42 Or an epigraph could drop a hint, as when a quota-
tion from Chesterton tips the wary reader to recall a suspect’s height.43
Once the story gets rolling, footnotes can certify that a piece of testimony is
trustworthy. Joseph Shaw, magisterial editor of the hard-boiled magazine Black
Mask, complained that notes were a feeble gesture toward realism.44 Yet these
marginalia might serve as feints and diversions. One Van Dine footnote, citing
a book published by a suspect after the case was closed, appears to clear him.
At the climax, we learn that the suspect is guilty and the book was published
posthumously. John Dickson Carr excelled at using footnotes that seem frank
and fair but only increase the mystery. One note-studded Carr novel is called
The Reader Is Warned (1939).
Most detective stories in any era pause late in the plot, and the reader senses
that the revelation is coming. It was typical of the Golden Age that Ellery
Queen introduced an explicit Challenge to the Reader, an announcement by
the narration that at this point the careful reader ought to be able to solve
the puzzle. Pivoting the genre’s canonical moment of discovery to aim at the
reader, the Challenge invites us to plunge back into the labyrinth. Meanwhile
the writer celebrates the rules of the game and flaunts his ability to create nov-
elty within them.
Despite all this help, the reader’s chances of solving the puzzle are slim. If
you managed to guess the culprit, could you actually reconstruct the detective’s
reasoning? One member of the Queen collaboration admitted, “We are fair to
the reader only if he is a genius.”45
As with other devices, the main effect is to demonstrate the writer’s clev-
erness and the plot’s intricate design. Philip MacDonald’s The Rynox Mystery
(1930) takes a premise suitable for a not very unusual short story and smashes
it to pieces. A mogul is killed, as in Trent’s Last Case, but this crime novel lacks
a detective, preferring to refract the effects of the murder through dozens of
viewpoints and documents. The book begins with an epilogue and ends with
a prologue set before the main action. That main action is in turn fragmented
into short scenes, accompanied by brief pendants labeled “Comment.” The
circumstances of the crime are presented through a barrage of letters, police
reports, floor plains, memoranda, parodic news stories, an inquest transcript,
and minutes of corporate meetings. The last section consists of a letter written
by the victim on the brink of death, and like a detective at a denouement he
obligingly ties together everything, even providing a timetable. All the struc-
tural obfuscation makes The Rynox Mystery as showy a performance as any-
thing produced in the period.
Ingenuity took subtler forms. Detective narration had long relied on
vagueness of description (shadowy figures, hands clutching doorknobs) and
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elliptical presentation of crucial events (skipping over time, restricting view-

point). Golden Age writers carried the urge to perplex and misdirect into the
very texture of their prose. Consider two examples from a period in which
Golden Age principles had fully ripened.
Many writers filled out their plots to novel length by incorporating the
courtship of a romantic couple. John Dickson Carr frequently used the pair as
viewpoint figures, as well as targets, witnesses, and allies of the Great Detective.
But in “The House in Goblin Wood” (1946), Carr invokes the convention only
to dismantle it.
Bill Sage and Eve Drayton execute a murder under the transcendent sleuth’s
very nose. Leading up to that revelation, Carr plays scrupulously fair. He never
gives us access to the couple’s minds. He keeps them offstage for most of the
story and attaches us to detective Henry Merrivale. To maintain the surprise,
however, Carr mustn’t let us consider them as plausible suspects. Throughout
“Goblin Wood,” Carr steers our attention toward their intended victim, a teas-
ing woman who has already pulled a disappearing act.
Most boldly, Carr’s narration boldly aligns us with Bill and Eve from the start:

In Pall Mall, that hot July afternoon three years before the war, an open saloon
car was drawn up to the curb just opposite the Senior Conservatives’ club.
And in the car sat two conspirators.46

This opening locks in the romantic couple convention and will soon suggest
that we are to take them as allies of H.M. The passage sets up a stylistic norm
of chatty informality, a narrating voice that’s a bit indulgent toward its charac-
ters. We take “conspirators” to be a light-hearted description of an attractive
young couple planning to rope their cantankerous friend into a picnic. Only on
rereading do we realize that the narration has been brutally frank: they really
are conspiring, at homicide.
After Carr has presented this cheerfully disguised tipoff, he can sprinkle
in further ones. “ ‘Look here, Eve,’ muttered the young man, and punched
at the steering wheel. ‘Do you think this is going to work?’ ”47 In retrospect
we can see Bill’s nervousness and Eve’s reassurance as hints of their scheme.
As Carr noted: “Once we think an author is skylarking, a whole bandwagon
of clues can go past unnoticed.”48 We can only imagine his glee at mentioning
the “conspirators” again, rubbing our noses in his audacity.49 With a single
word choice, “The House in Goblin Wood” weaponizes Carr’s jaunty style.
As so often in Golden Age stories, genre connoisseurship demands that
we scrutinize verbal texture.
Such fine-grained cleverness wasn’t typical of earlier writers. In Melville
Davisson Post’s 1913 story, “The Act of God.” Uncle Abner discovers that a let-
ter purportedly written by a deaf mute has the wrong kind of misspellings for
 The Golden Age Puzzle Plot 133

someone with that infirmity. But we are never shown the letter. Like many
authors of the period, Post doesn’t play fair. In contrast, Agatha Christie’s
A Murder Is Announced (1950) exposes a similar cluster of clues, but ensures
that we probably won’t notice them.
The crucial moments come casually. A scatterbrained neighbor seems to be
misspeaking when she refers to Lotty rather than Letty. She’s actually invoking
a nickname we’ll later learn belongs to a different character. The error, which
might be registered merely as a misprint, is swallowed up in a story brim-
ming with chiming character names and nicknames.50 There is a Julian and two
Julias, a Philip and a Philippa (but which is called Pip?). Given the plethora of
proper nouns, it takes a while to sort out who’s being referred to. (Cunningly,
the book lacks a table of dramatis personae.) The elusiveness of identification
is laid bare in dialogue: “Just a couple of names. . . . Nicknames at that! They
mayn’t exist.”51 The reader becomes accustomed to passages that seem a bit hazy
about which character is being discussed.
To play fair (but also to be ingenious), Christie elsewhere warns us by slip-
ping in the difference between “enquiries” and “inquiries.” As with the names,
a single letter of the alphabet becomes a clue. Christie stretches the formula
without destroying it. More generally, the Golden Age writers put the rules and
fair play in service of the puzzle. But those very constraints forced them to what
French Structuralists would years later call textual duplicity, verbal feints that
fans were invited to admire.

Weaponizing Watson

Choice of viewpoint might be routine in a romance story or a western, but it

is critical in the mystery. While the James-Conrad-Lubbock strain of literary
theory was defending a rigorous narration, the detective plot was moving
toward a comparable self-consciousness.
Poe acknowledged the importance of restricted viewpoint in the first-person
account in his 1844 story “ ‘Thou Art the Man!’ ” At first the unnamed narrator
seems to be a gullible eyewitness, and the naïve praise he lavishes on Charley
Goodfellow leads us to suspect that Goodfellow could be the villain. At the
climax, we realize that the narrator hasn’t been taken in at all. He has suspected
Goodfellow and rigs up a grisly trap for him. His account has shown how easily
the townsfolk could be hoodwinked—and how ready we are to assume that we
are a jump ahead of a narrator’s understanding.
More orthodox are Poe’s three Dupin stories, narrated by the detective’s
close friend. Doyle followed Poe in creating Watson as a hearty Jamesian center
of consciousness. In the two cases in which Holmes acts as his own narrator, the
detective grudgingly acknowledges what Watson had brought to their literary
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partnership. For one thing, Watson’s external view could suppress Holmes’s
inferences. In “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier,” Holmes’s narration
feels obliged to tell us the odor of a telltale glove, whereas Watson could have
reported only that Holmes sniffed it. “It was by concealing such links in the
chain that Watson was enabled to produce his meretricious finales.”52
Not least, the sidekick furnishes adoration. “I miss my Watson,” Holmes
confesses. “By cunning questions and ejaculations of wonder he could elevate
my simple art, which is but systematized common sense, into a prodigy.”53 The
false modesty shouldn’t fool us; Holmes knows how Watson’s rhetoric gave him
heroic stature. The same reflected glory was evident in other Great Detective
tales refracting the story through a trusting onlooker.
Ambitious Golden Age writers sought alternatives to Watson. Acknowledg-
ing the influence of Percy Lubbock, Dorothy Sayers outlined four possibilities:

1. “The detective’s external actions only are seen by the reader.”

2. The middle viewpoint: “We see what the detective sees, but are not told what
he observes.”
3. “Close intimacy with the detective, we see all he sees, and are at once told his
conclusions.”
4. “Complete mental identification with the detective.” Presumably this involves
interiority given through inner monologue, stream of consciousness, and the
like.

Sayers illustrates how a single passage from Trent’s Last Case jumps among the
first three registers, from reporting Trent’s behavior, to registering his percep-
tion, and finally to letting him announce his inferences.54
Poe and Doyle had shown that funneling narration through an observing
character justifies limiting what we know about the sleuth’s thinking. For this
reason, Sayers calls the first option, the detached and objective one, “the Watson
viewpoint.” Later Watson figures might be barely characterized. The S. S. Van
Dine novels presented a narrator who is virtually a phantom, almost never join-
ing discussions or helping the investigation. At the other extreme is Rex Stout’s
Archie Goodwin, whose conversational gambits and asides to the reader make
him no less a protagonist than transcendent detective Nero Wolfe.
Agatha Christie’s debut, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), had given
Poirot a chatty, highly opinionated Watson in Captain Hastings. She went on
to deviously exploit the device in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926). Percy
Lubbock noted in The Craft of Fiction that if you make the killer the narrator
you would be obliged to divulge the character’s thoughts.55 Christie solves
the problem in a shrewd way. At the beginning of the book, she establishes
the Sheppard style—the narration’s intrinsic norm—as bland and soporific.
“Mrs. Ferrars died on the night of the 16th–17th September—a Thursday. I was
 The Golden Age Puzzle Plot 135

sent for at eight o’clock on the morning of Friday the 17th. There was nothing
to be done. She had been dead some hours.”56 Actually, this skates over the
doctor’s involvement in a blackmail scheme aimed at the dead woman. Shep-
pard isn’t lying, but he is, as Poirot says in an understatement, reticent. “It’s not
unfair,” Christie notes in her defense, “to leave things out.”57
What she leaves in presents Sheppard as a reliable fellow. He admits things
that put him in a bad light. Twice on the first page he writes the phrase “to tell
the truth,” and throughout the book he confesses to minor duplicities. When
Poirot challenges him, Sheppard admits to holding back a piece of informa-
tion, and Poirot seems satisfied. Indeed, Poirot explicitly turns Sheppard into a
replacement for his trusted Captain Hastings.
After becoming accustomed to Sheppard’s plodding style and acquiring a
degree of trust in him, we are ready to be gulled by the most famous passage in
Golden Age detective fiction.

Now Ackroyd is essentially pigheaded. The more you urge him to do a thing,
the more determined he is not to do it. All my arguments were in vain.
The letter had been brought in at twenty minutes to nine. It was just on ten
minutes to nine when I left him, the letter still unread. I hesitated with my hand
on the door handle, looking back and wondering if there was anything I had
left undone. I could think of nothing. With a shake of the head I passed out and
closed the door behind me.58

This is Sheppard’s report on killing Roger Ackroyd. Christie, in the spirit of

leaving things out, might have simply stopped the paragraph with the sentence
“It was just on ten minutes to nine when I left him, the letter still unread.”
Instead, she generously dwells on Sheppard’s departure and even plants a hint
that he has “done” something. We read right past it all.
Moreover, a diabolical use of tenses misleads us by blurring our sense of
the time of Sheppard’s telling. The default assumption behind a Watsonian
account is that it has been written after the mystery has been solved. At vari-
ous points, Sheppard suggests that this is the case here. “Miss Ganett is one of
the chief of our newsmongers” implies that village life has continued into the
time of writing.59 But in the key passage when Sheppard asserts that “Ackroyd
is essentially pigheaded,” that’s an anomaly. If Sheppard were writing after the
case was closed, the accurate description would be “Ackroyd was essentially
pigheaded.”
Few readers will pause over a mere word. But much later Sheppard will
casually mention that he has written his chronicle as events unfolded, more
or less day by day. So in the crucial passage, presumably composed soon after
Sheppard’s departure on the fatal night, the use of the present tense hints
that he left Ackroyd alive. We no longer have an innocent Sheppard writing
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long afterward but a culprit engaged in covering his tracks. By later reveal-
ing Sheppard’s actual method of composition, Christie is playing completely
fair. When we learn of it, it’s up to the sporting reader to revisit the pres-
ent-tense passages and entertain the possibility that they were composed in
the moment, to leave a false scent.
Sheppard’s thudding, banal sentences aren’t as breezy as Carr’s skylarking
mention of “conspirators” in “Goblin Wood,” but both stylistic stratagems glide
over a frank pointer to guilt. “The English,” Chandler complained, “may not
always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull
writers.”60 Roger Ackroyd, like other Christie books, weaponizes the flat style for
which she was often criticized.

Spreading Suspicion

Apart from Watson figures such as Sheppard, side participants can become
focal points for narration. Writers could bring love interest smoothly into a
detective plot by making a young couple conduits for story information—the
strategy that enabled “The House in Goblin Wood” to fool us. In the standard
case, the lovers stand at a distance from the irascible detective, who can conceal
his thoughts from the couple, and from us.
But such restricted viewpoints are rare in both films and stage plays. Inves-
tigation plots in these media gravitate toward a broader narrational compass.
Even adaptations of Watson-centered stories became more wide-ranging.61 This
strategy was identified by Lubbock as “panoramic” or omniscient. Older writers
shifted viewpoint within scenes, often many times, yielding a truly godlike range
of knowledge. In the modern era, omniscience was less overt and free-ranging.
The preferred option was a roaming-spotlight method, shifting our attachment
among characters scene by scene or chapter by chapter.
Typically the moving-spotlight strategy, whether in prose or in cinema,
relies on an objective, third-person baseline. Then the narration can pause
on a character and enrich the moment by optical or auditory subjectivity—
what she saw or heard—and by reports of impressions, feelings, and memo-
ries. This sense of subjectivity in a prose tale could be approximated on film.
Indeed, it’s possible that the investigation plot pressured filmmakers to adopt
subjective techniques. In The Sign of the Spade (1916), a detective tailing a
gangster uses a hand mirror to spy on him (figs. 4.1–4.2), providing a techni-
cal flourish rare at the time.
Yet for detective stories, on paper or on the screen, subjective plunges run
a risk. Intimacy might reveal too much, so there had to be new rules. Ronald
Knox warned that the criminal “must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader
has been allowed to follow.”62 A Watson or the detective, as in Sayers’s four
 The Golden Age Puzzle Plot 137

4.1 The Sign of the Spade (1916): The detective Harmon 4.2 An unusually exact close-up approximates his
uses a mirror to get a view of his quarry. viewpoint.

registers of viewpoint, can be given a mental life, but the narration can never
plumb a suspect’s mind. Why not? Under the doctrine of fair play, as Lubbock
had noted, access to characters’ minds would force the writer to reveal who was
the killer.
But Golden Age writers did more than obey the rules; they competed to
bend them for the sake of a brazen literary performance such as Sheppard’s
duplicitous narration. Such audacity was prized by Golden Age writers as
part of ingenuity. Thus Knox’s viewpoint rule could be creatively bent. Sayers
and Christie provide subtle examples—one plunging into characters’ minds
to open the puzzle plot to social commentary, and the other aiming, in typ-
ical Christie fashion, to let our assumptions about conventional narration
mislead us.
Dorothy Sayers admired sensation fiction in the hands of Dickens and
Collins. They achieved genuine literary quality with absorbing stories, vivid
characters, and lively style—all the while embedding mystery in a sweeping
social panorama. “The criticism of life was not relegated to incidental obser-
vations and character sketches, but was actually part of the plot, as it ought to
be.”63 In Murder Must Advertise (1933), Sayers sought to enrich an investigation
plot with portrayal of a milieu and its manners, to merge mystery with what
Carolyn Wells had called the “problem novel” and the “social sketch.”
Murder Must Advertise presents an advertising firm as not only a piquant
setting for a crime but also an institution with unique rules and roles. The
result is a much thicker description of a business than Ellery Queen’s account
of a Broadway theater, a department store, and a hospital in novels of the same
period.64 Sayers staffs Pym’s Publicity with an astonishing three dozen named
characters: managers, copywriters, illustrators, sales agents, stenographers,
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typists, custodians, and office boys. These are supplemented by another eigh-
teen outsiders caught up in the investigation.
Pym’s staff is presented in a perpetual bustle. Many scenes read as if scripted
for a film, with brief descriptions, snappy overlapped conversations, and breezy
transitions from room to room, with movement compressed into dialogue. In
the era of Grand Hotel, Sayers lays out a chattering social network confined to
a single space.
Putting so many characters in close quarters enables her to recast one of
the core conventions of the mystery: the serial questioning of witnesses. Lord
Peter Wimsey, pretending to be Pym’s new hire, investigates the death of Victor
Dean, who has fallen down a steep iron staircase. Instead of attaching our-
selves to Bredon as he insinuates himself into the firm, the narration refracts his
inquiry through the reactions of the staff. He becomes an object of gossip and
speculation, and his offhand questioning is rendered from the standpoints of
the witnesses he pumps. As a result, Sayers widens the social range of her story,
indulges in some Dickensian caricature and, not incidentally, diverts us from a
rather simple crime committed by what one chapter title admits is “an unskilled
murderer.”65
In a parallel story line, Wimsey as Bredon investigates Dean’s involvement
with a crew of brittle socialites who indulge in drink, drugs, and wild parties.
Again, his probing of the group is rendered from the angle of a character react-
ing to him. Dean’s former girlfriend, Dian de Momerie, is attracted by Bredon’s
masquerade as a mysterious Harlequin figure. The busy Pym chapters and par-
ty-going scenes are set alongside more sedate conversations in which Wimsey
and his brother-in-law, Chief Inspector Charles Parker, review the evidence.
They come up with the possibility that the agency and the Bright Young Things
are linked by drug trafficking.
Bredon’s shuttling between the two worlds contrasts the driven office work-
ers with the idle rich, but there’s an affinity as well. “As far as I can make out,”
Parker says near the end of the novel, “all advertisers are dope-merchants.”66
The theme is worked out at the level of imagery too. The dope gang wraps its
cocaine in cigarette papers. This ploy finds an echo in Bredon’s ad campaign for
Whifflets cigarettes, which threatens to turn every Briton into a chain-smoker.
(“We want to get women down to serious smoking. Too many of them play
about with it.”67) Hard drugs for the rich, gaspers for the working stiffs: the
motifs run in tandem and yield the broader theme of advertising as a colossal
cultural fantasy arousing perpetually unfulfilled dreams in the masses.
Sayers’s panoramic survey is rendered in a narration that freely, sometimes
sardonically, comments on character behavior and milieu. This voice coyly
announces that Wimsey will be called Bredon during office hours, and it skips
over Wimsey’s visit to an unnamed woman because it “is in no way related to
this story.”68
 The Golden Age Puzzle Plot 139

We’re introduced to this suavely confident narration early on. When the
supervisor appears, the lounging employees scatter.

At Mr. Hankin’s mildly sarcastic accents, the scene dislimned as if by magic.

The door-post drapers and Miss Parton’s bosom-friend melted out into the
passage. Mr. Willis, rising hurriedly with the tray of carbons in his hand, picked
a paper out at random and frowned furiously at it. Miss Parton’s cigarette
dropped unostentatiously to the floor. Mr. Garrett, unable to get rid of his
coffee-cup, smiled vaguely and tried to look as though he had picked it up by
accident and didn’t know it was there. Miss Meteyard, with great presence of
mind, put the sweep counterfoils on a chair and sat on them. Miss Rossiter,
clutching Mr. Armstrong’s carbons in her hand, was able to look businesslike,
and did so. Mr. Ingleby alone, disdaining pretence, set down his cup with a
slightly impudent smile and advanced to obey his chief ’s command.69

This narration sees everything at once, while the voice passes judgments on
skillful or clumsy cover-ups. We cannot doubt that Mr. Willis chose a carbon
at random, or that Ingleby is the sort of fellow who responds calmly to a crisis.
The comedy is enhanced by the omniscience.
The big cast, the breezy and all-knowing narration, and the emphasis on the
staff ’s reaction to Bredon pose Sayers with a new problem—that of concealing
the killer. She believed, with Ronald Knox, that the gospel of fair play extended
to detectives as well. “Once they are embarked upon an investigation, no epi-
sode must ever be described which does not come within their cognisance.”70
Yet Murder Must Advertise plunges us into the minds of no fewer than two
dozen characters. Are they thereby eliminated from suspicion? Largely, yes.
Based on opportunities and a timetable, Bredon arrives at two lists of main sus-
pects. Few of them are rendered from inside, so they are solid Knoxian candi-
dates. The inner lives of two other listed suspects are developed at some length,
but fairly comically. A third suspect’s mental life is sketched more briefly. He
turns out to be the culprit.
Sayers justifies her breach of Knox’s rule, I think, because she wants us to
have some sympathy for this clumsy killer before he confesses to Wimsey. He
explains that he has worked hard to support his wife and child but has been
bled dry by Victor Dean’s blackmail scheme. Our glimpses of his mind show
a frustrated, pathetic figure struggling with his duties and his hatred of life at
the agency.
Still, to keep him out of the spotlight and broaden the book’s horizons, Sayers
accesses the minds of many characters who don’t turn out to be suspects. That
stratagem fulfills Sayers’s urge to embed a puzzle plot within a social milieu
and push the genre toward the novel of manners. Here, as she recommended,
“larger issues are at stake than the precise method by which the arsenic is
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administered, and the strings are pulled by a more awful puppet-master than a
Chief Inspector of Scotland Yard.”71
In Murder Must Advertise, the puppet master is commercial culture. Say-
ers chronicles the grinding routines of satisfying the corporate client Nutrax,
whose managers inevitably spoil slogans and taglines with foolish alliterations.
Still more broadly, the narration reveals Wimsey’s new awareness of scrabbling
consumerism, “a sphere of dim platonic archetypes. . . . the Thrifty Housewife,
the Man of Discrimination, the Keen Buyer and the good Judge . . . perpetually
spending to save and saving to spend.”72
Moving beyond Wimsey’s consciousness, the narration presents a cityscape
crammed with pulsating signs (NUTRAX FOR NERVES—CRUNCHLETS
ARE CRISPER), and in the book’s final moments its “criticism of life” becomes
a parody of consumer catchphrases.

Tell England. Tell the world. Eat more Oats. Take Care of Your Complexion.
No more War. Shine your Shoes with Shino. Ask your Grocer. Children Love
Laxamalt. Prepare to meet thy God . . . Flush your Kidneys with Fizzlets. Flush
your Drains with Sanfect. Wear Wool-fleece next the Skin. Popp’s Pills Pep you
Up. Whiffle your Way to Fortune. . . .
Advertise, or go under.73

This declamatory montage, reminiscent of Dos Passos, ends a novel whose title
suggests that even murder will go unremarked without a publicist.
If Sayers breaks Knox’s rule about mental access gently, Agatha Christie
casually neutralizes it. When Knox formulated it, he added that he had to be
tentative “in view of some remarkable performances by Mrs. Christie.”74 He was
probably thinking of Roger Ackroyd, but a neat later instance is Death in the Air
(aka Death in the Clouds, 1935).
A woman is murdered during a flight from Paris to London. The narration
is initially attached to Jane Grey, a beautician who has spent her modest lottery
winnings on a getaway. During the flight and the investigation, Jane forms an
attachment to Norman Gale, the young man she met at a roulette table. He will
turn out to be the killer. Christie’s task is to surprise us with this revelation,
stretching a genre convention.
Norman is already an unlikely culprit. He’s the love interest for Jane, our
sympathetic and principal viewpoint character. Moreover, Hercule Poirot
seems to trust him enough to recruit him to help the investigation. But Chris-
tie goes further by using narration to make Norman an exceptionally unlikely
suspect. She bends Knox’s precept by giving us some access to the thoughts of
virtually all the characters—major and minor, suspects and investigators.
The dosing starts at take off. “As the plane roared above France on its way
to the Channel the passengers in the rear compartment thought their various
 The Golden Age Puzzle Plot 141

thoughts.”75 The spotlight moves from Jane to Norman, and then to other pas-
sengers. Any of them might turn out to be the killer. But none reveals any
(obviously) murderous thoughts.
After probing the passengers’ minds, the narration returns to Jane’s con-
sciousness and then Norman’s, then Jane’s and again Norman’s. Apart from
signaling their mutual attraction, the alternating access so early in the book sets
them up as the plot’s romantic couple. The pattern is reinforced in many chap-
ters that follow, with the narration providing information about Jane’s and Nor-
man’s thoughts. No other characters are given so much psychological depth.
Like Carr in “Goblin Wood,” Christie turns the convention of the love-interest
subplot against the reader. But Carr did not dare, as she has, to break out of
external, objective presentation.
Initially, Norman seems more sympathetic than other characters whose
minds we plumb. As with Dr. Sheppard, though, once we know that Norman
is guilty, we can turn back to his inner monologues and disclose the blandly
equivocal hints they harbor. “I’m going to marry her . . . Yes, I am . . . But it’s no
good looking too far ahead. I’ve got to have some good excuse for seeing her
often. This murder business will do as well as anything else.” And later: “What
a strange business murder is! . . . And I can’t have her—yet . . . A damnable
nuisance.”76 On the first pass, these thoughts are taken as his fear that his failing
dental practice will make it impossible to marry Jane. In retrospect, we know
that they represent his scheme to bring her into his murder plans.
By exposing every character’s mind at least once, Death in the Clouds levels
the playing field. Christie doesn’t eliminate Norman as a suspect; if any of the
others might be guilty, he might be too. Christie could have suppressed every
character’s inner life, but then we wouldn’t have an experiment in narration
that is at once “democratically” distributed and tacitly biased—in effect, an
attempt at flexing the rules.

Broken Time Lines and Sharp-Edged Segments

Important as point-of-view modulations were, Golden Age writers elevated

other formal possibilities too. In his preface to The Second Shot (1930), Anthony
Berkeley cited an unnamed reviewer (perhaps himself?) noting that the mys-
tery writer is now trying to “make experiments with the telling of his plot, tell it
backwards, or sideways, or in bits.”77 We can’t be sure exactly what the critic has
in mind, but his phrasing seems at least to point to manipulations of time and
strategies of segmenting the plot.
The classic investigation plot is inherently nonlinear. Even the most step-
by-step investigation must skip back in time through testimony, traces at the
crime scene, and speculation about motives and incidents buried in the past.
 142 PA RT I I

Nineteenth-century writers altered chronology in nonmystery plots, and by

the time of Conrad and Ford, distinctly broken time lines were part of nov-
elistic craft.
The formalist critics of the 1910s were sensitive to temporal manipulations.
Recall that in 1914 Clayton Hamilton mused on the prospect of “building a play
backward,” arranging the acts in reverse order. Although strictly 3-2-1 plotting
like this wouldn’t emerge until a bit later, Hamilton’s article inspired one play-
wright to adapt the idea to a mystery tale. After all, an investigation plot’s raison
d’être is to expose the past under the pressure of the present.
Elmer Rice read Hamilton’s essay and decided to try the reverse chronology
structure on stage, but he thought it would be anticlimactic unless some action
also moved forward, toward a resolution.78 Trained as an attorney, he settled
on framing the central story by a trial. A man charged with murder refuses to
plead innocent, and his testimony describing the crime is dramatized. Then a
defense witness is called and testifies to action preceding the killing, yielding
another flashback. A third witness tells of a scene that took place many years
before, which provides a final flashback. Back in the present, the jury now
understands what led up to the murder, and the defendant is acquitted.
This is a good example of schema revision tuned to accessibility. The fairly
difficult narrative device of reverse chronology is rendered more comprehen-
sible by being embedded in an ongoing present-time plot, and the reverse
chronology is motivated by the characteristic mystery search for the “hidden
story.” Although Rice’s investigation plot avoided the radical possibilities of
pure reverse construction, Hamilton admired the way Rice had turned a trite
story line into suspenseful drama.79
The success of On Trial (1914) led to a vogue for plays dramatizing court-
room conflict. The crucial innovation was the reliance on flashbacks for the
plot’s basic architecture. Critics claimed to see the influence of cinematic flash-
backs in Rice’s technique, but he denied it.80 The premise had at least one prec-
edent in Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1868–69), but that exceptionally
long verse novel included more than a dozen viewpoint characters.81 On Trial
had a simpler contour and a cogent central situation, which suited the demands
of proscenium theater.82
Flashbacks framed by a Q&A situation became a common option for fic-
tion, plays, and films. The schema was revised to allow the central crime to be
reiterated from different viewpoints, as in the first two flashbacks of A Voice
in the Dark.83 In the trial film The Woman Under Oath (1919), the discovery of
the crime is replayed, each time calibrated to the account offered by a witness
(figs. 4.3–4.5). The replays in the film The Witness Chair (1936) create ellipses
that conceal the identity of the culprit. Testimony during a police investiga-
tion could also be dramatized in flashbacks, as in the film Affairs of a Gentle-
man (1934) and the play I Killed the Count (1938). The interrogation leading to
 The Golden Age Puzzle Plot 143

4.3 The Woman Under Oath (1919): We’re introduced 4.4 The hotel switchboard operator testifies that he
to the clerk Jim O’Neill at the murder scene, looking found Jim standing over the corpse.
guilty.

4.5 In a replay, Jim’s testimony portrays him as enter-

ing the room and finding his employer’s corpse.

flashbacks would become a common strategy in later films such as Murder, My

Sweet (1944) and Mildred Pierce (1945). Films could also flash back to the crime
to dramatize the detective’s solution, as in The Woman in Question (1950). The
film versions of Trent’s Last Case (1929), The Canary Murder Case (1929), and
The Kennel Murder Case (1933) are examples in early sound cinema.
Three of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novels had used large-scale flashbacks to
explain the circumstances leading up to the crimes Holmes had solved at the
book’s outset. These blocks were widely felt to be compromises, efforts to fill out
the story to full length. Golden Age authors tried to integrate past and present
more smoothly, so revelations of past events could build curiosity and suspense.
For instance, in William Sutherland’s Death Rides the Air Line (1934), an odi-
ous publisher is stabbed during a flight from Boston to New York. After some
preliminary police inquiry in the first part, five parallel flashbacks provide the
 144 PA RT I I

backstory of the principal suspects, tracing each from youth to the moments
leading up to boarding the plane. These chapters fill in motives and estab-
lish connections to the victim and other passengers. Here the converging-fates
structure of Wilder’s Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) is revised for an orthodox
investigation plot. Sutherland’s opening section is balanced by a concluding set
of chapters showing how the police inquiry reveals the murderer.
Another murder-in-the-clouds novel seems more daring. C. Daly King
begins Obelists Fly High with an epilogue, and ends it with a prologue. What
comes between, however, is a fairly linear buildup to that opening situation.
The prologue action is akin to the sort of “crisis” opening of many films today,
a kind of flash-forward to an action peak that will be revisited after we learn
what led up to it.
The ultimate challenge to linear order came with the curio Cain’s Jawbone:
A Novel Problem (1934). It’s an almost avant-garde acknowledgment of the
overlap between Golden Age mystery and puzzle pastimes. The novel’s one
hundred pages were printed out of order, and the reader was challenged to find
the only true sequence. Although the scenes do move forward, the instructions
warned that “the narrator’s mind may flit occasionally backwards and forwards
in the modern manner.”84
The parallel sections of Death Rides the Air Line and the epilogue/prologue
inversion of Obelists Fly High point to another distinctive feature of Golden Age
mysteries. Many writers signaled their experiments with viewpoint and time
shifting by highly patterned segmentation. The geometrical rigor proposed by
James, Conrad, Woolf, and others and taken up by Hergesheimer, Stout, and
other crossover writers found a popular counterpart in many investigation
plots. The result was an explicit modular layout in the spirit of James’s “solid
blocks of wrought material, squared to the sharp edge, as to have weight and
mass and carrying power.”85
Act divisions in traditional stagecraft provide blocks automatically, a feature
exploited to create the three parallel flashbacks of On Trial and A Voice in the
Dark. A novel could likewise be divided into big chunks, as in Freeman Wills
Crofts’s The Cask (1920): “London,” “Paris,” and “London and Paris.” Carr’s The
Hollow Man (1935) consists of “The First Coffin,” “The Second Coffin,” and “The
Third Coffin.”86
A block can constitute the bulk of the book. In Berkeley’s Second Shot, a
prologue consists of a newspaper account of a murder, followed by a prelim-
inary report to a police commissioner. There follows a lengthy manuscript by
one Cyrus Pinkerton recounting how a house party turned homicidal. The first
half of Pinkerton’s manuscript flashes back to the events presented in the police
report. The second half picks up the police investigation and the intervention of
amateur detective Roger Sherington. The murder is judged an accident, but in
an epilogue, Pinkerton reveals what really happened.
 The Golden Age Puzzle Plot 145

Sometimes the blocks are presented as discrete chapters, markedly differing

in source or texture. Bernard Capes’s Mystery of the Skeleton Key (1919) daringly
alternates chunks of a first-person manuscript account with third-person nar-
ration of a murder inquiry. A similar strategy is put to work in Agatha Christie’s
Man in the Brown Suit (1924). In both, we are led to suspect that the character’s
written record is withholding important information.

Testimony on the Page or on the Stand

Large or midsized tagged segments can create an exposed structure, an exo-

skeleton that guides reader uptake. This strategy can be regarded as a domes-
tication of the macrostructures mobilized by Woolf (To the Lighthouse) and
Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury; As I Lay Dying). But in many instances, it’s
also a revival of that dossier format that had been cultivated by Wilkie Collins,
Bram Stoker, and others.
The document collection offers many storytelling advantages. The blocks,
tagged with titles, ease comprehension. The format plausibly motivates shifting
viewpoints, and it opens up gaps between them that can be creatively exploited.
Absorption in one character’s account can be broken when the frame shifts to a
contradictory document, or to a sudden widening of the knowledge frame. For
instance, Kay Cleaver Strahan’s Footprints (1929) presents a block of letters that
Judith Quirt receives from her sister Lucy, followed by another block from her
brother Neal. These constitute the evidence that, in the frame story, the “crime
analyst” Lynn MacDonald will use to study a horrendous death twenty-eight
years earlier.
But Lynn is scarcely the protagonist. Her solution is announced indirectly,
as an account that the family doctor passes along to Judith and then, in dif-
ferent form, to Neal. This quasi-Conradian refraction puts the emphasis on
the doctor’s coping strategy and on Neal’s eventual reaction, which supplies a
final piece of information that corrects Lynn’s account. In this detective novel,
the detective is pushed almost entirely offstage and is somewhat mistaken in
the bargain.
Footprints doesn’t distinguish much between Lucy’s and Neal’s idiolects, but
Michael Innes’s Lament for a Maker (1938) is boldly polystylistic. The first and
last sections, the recollections of a shoemaker, are in a thick Scots style, and
other blocks contrast a city slicker’s glib mockery with dry lawyerly rumina-
tions and the more poetic reflections of Inspector John Appleby. The novel’s
unabashed Gothic situation is rendered self-consciously literary through the
clash of styles, which bear as much on class differences as on regional ones.
Lament for a Maker implies that the written narratives supplied by the
characters are assembled for some official purpose, but Philip MacDonald’s
 146 PA RT I I

The Maze (1932) is more explicitly in the “casebook” mold. This format com-
piles testimony, reports, and other documents, usually submitted for offi-
cial consideration. MacDonald presents the complete transcript of a two-day
inquest with no mediating narrator, no plunge into characters’ minds, and no
enclosing present-day frame. The preface justifies this as fair play carried to
the limit: “The reader has had his information in exactly the same form as the
detective—that is, the verbatim report of evidence and question. This is a fair
story.”87 The book’s final block, the detective’s explanation in a private letter,
balances the initial letter inviting him to review the dossier.
Just as indebted to Collins is Dorothy Sayers and Robert Eustace’s Docu-
ments in the Case (1930).88 Its dossier offers a more dense array of clues than
Footprints and stronger social commentary than The Maze. The months leading
up to George Harrison’s death are introduced in letters from a woman living
with him and his wife. Her correspondence goes on to alternate with letters and
statements from John Munting, a young writer sharing an adjacent flat with the
painter Lathon.
In the course of the book’s first part (“Synthesis”), Munting’s liking for his
flatmate Lathon fades and his disdain for Harrison, apparently a perfect bour-
geois fathead, gives way to respect for his dull decency. After Harrison’s death,
the second section (“Analysis”) introduces his son Paul, who suspects that his
father has been cuckolded, and eventually murdered, by Lathon. Paul takes up
the role of investigator and shares narrating duties with Munting as the who-
dunit becomes a howdunit, a Sayers specialty.89 Like Murder Must Advertise,
The Documents in the Case aims at “criticism of life” through showing up the
moral weakness of bohemian youth. These would-be artists who claim to know
the human heart revel in snobbishness and remain oblivious to stolid virtues.
The dossier format took on performative dimensions when the Detection
Club launched its eccentric collaborations. The British Broadcsting Corpo-
ration aired two radio series, “Behind the Screen” (1930) and “The Scoop”
(1931), in which Sayers, Christie, Berkeley, and others read the installments
they had composed. Hoping to earn enough money to establish a permanent
meeting room, club members carried the idea into print with The Floating
Admiral (1932).
This “round-robin novel” asked each author to add a chapter and pass the
story along. Each author had to have a definite solution in mind, while taking
into account all the problems left by the predecessors. By the time Berkeley got
to the final chapter, he had a great many clues to reconcile and false solutions to
demolish.90 As in the radio installments, the need to differentiate each author’s
contribution to The Floating Admiral demanded explicit block construction.
The book’s appendix further spelled out the solution each author had in mind;
Sayers’s ran to twenty pages. Once more, the puzzle and the game became a
pretext for displaying literary virtuosity.
 The Golden Age Puzzle Plot 147

The diversity of dossier novels of the period is impressive, but the spacious-
ness of the creative menu of the time is even more evident in the fortunes of
the trial plot. A trial offers automatic opportunities for block construction,
with the parade of witnesses and discrete days in session. The courtroom situa-
tion can play with time, manipulate viewpoint, and provide ongoing analytical
commentary about the crime. There’s also the challenge of building tension
from a tightly circumscribed locale and duration. With considerable ingenuity,
novelists, playwrights, and filmmakers turned investigations into courtroom
confrontations.91
Rice’s On Trial had shown the power of concentrating stage action in a
court hearing supplemented by flashbacks. British and American playwrights
explored the options further, offering For the Defense (1919), also with flash-
backs, followed by a cycle of courtroom dramas: The Woman on the Jury (1923);
Accused, Appearances, and Chivalry (all 1925); Scarlet Pages and Ladies of the
Jury (both 1929); Dishonored Lady and Room 349 (both 1930); and Inquest
(1931). In The Trial of Mary Dugan (1927), Bayard Veiller turned the theater
audience into courtroom spectators, and a character in Nightstick (1927) offered
his attendance at Veiller’s play as an alibi. Ayn Rand’s The Night of January 16th
(1934) selected the onstage jury from the audience.
Frances Noyes Hart adapted the theatrical premise to the novel in The Bel-
lamy Trial (1927), which confines the action wholly to the courtroom. The
viewpoint is focused on two nameless reporters registering the stream of sordid
revelations. Mary Roberts Rinehart, characteristically putting romance at the
plot’s core, lets the defendant’s lover narrate The State vs. Elinor Norton (1934).
More starkly objective is The Trial of Vivienne Ware (1931), a dossier novel
interleaving news clippings and the trial transcript, with no viewpoint charac-
ter or editorial commentary. Similarly, Percival Wilde’s Inquest (1940) frames
sessions of questioning with embedded diary entries and trick testimony, such
as that of a deaf witness. The Brighton Murder Trial: X v. Rhodes (1937) carries
the transcript format into an alternative future. The “editor” Bruce Hamilton
presents a 1940 trial set in “Soviet Europe” and creates a pastiche of the Notable
British Trials records. The case, which involves a communist killing a fascist, is
prosecuted as the first murder verdict based on political sympathies.
Filmmakers picked up on the trial premise; Hollywood adapted On Trial
three times. Courtroom dramas were suited to early talkies, so there were
screen versions of The Bellamy Trial (1929), The Trial of Mary Dugan (1929),
and The Trial of Vivienne Ware (1932), the last boasting snappy flashbacks and
voice-over radio commentary. The Night of June 13 (1932) found clever ways for
flashbacks to represent lying testimony: some are replays omitting key inci-
dents, and others are revised on the fly (figs. 4.6–4.8). By the 1940s, the use
of flashbacks for trial testimony had become so common that a review of The
Paradine Case (1947) could praise Hitchcock for avoiding them.92
 148 PA RT I I

4.6 The Night of June 13 (1932): In voice-over the 4.7 Through a dissolve, Curry appears on the plat-
prosecutor asks Morrow if, while leaving the train, form.
he saw John Curry on the platform. We see Morrow
alone as he hesitates in his testimony.

4.8 “Yes,” says Morrow, as we see the two men walk

off. The dissolve has visualized Morrow’s impulsive lie.

Once the full-length trial premise had been explored, novelists could vary
it. One option was to embed the trial, either as drama or transcript, within a
larger narrative frame. Carter Dickson’s The Judas Window (1938) encloses the
trial proceedings between a teasing opening and the master detective’s expla-
nation. A trial constitutes the first half of The Dear Old Gentleman (1935), and
the second half traces a reporter’s investigation of the crime filtered through
the awareness of the newspaper publisher who discovers the reporter’s notes.
Less flagrantly, Erle Stanley Gardner incorporated lengthy trial episodes into
his Perry Mason novels as a brand trademark. The television series based on
the books commonly devoted extensive running time to solving the mystery
through courtroom theatrics.
Alternatively, the trial could be chopped up and intercut with other action.
This strategy was pursued in Richard Hull’s novel Excellent Intentions (1938),
 The Golden Age Puzzle Plot 149

which alternates trial testimony with flashbacks to the investigations of Scot-

land Yard detective Fenby. These, in turn, are filled out with further flashbacks
presenting witness recollections. This complicated three-track structure sus-
tains the whodunit puzzle in an original way: constantly switching time frames,
the narration does not reveal who is standing trial until the summing up, which
finally puts Fenby’s evidence in order.
Novelists were far from exhausting the variorum possibilities of the trial
premise, as they showed by turning attention to the jury. In the manner of
the later Twelve Angry Men, Eden Phillpotts’s The Jury (1927) lays out the case
during jurors’ lengthy deliberations. This schema was tweaked in The Jury Dis-
agree (1934), in which jurors review the case systematically, with each one sum-
marizing evidence around one point (motive, time factor, and so on). Although
pledged to be neutral, the jurors begin to float alternative solutions and partisan
defenses. The unity of time and place is broken by a surprise finale in which one
juror discovers her hidden connection to the defendant. In effect, she becomes
the investigator of last resort.
With that exception, the characters in The Jury Disagree are presented super-
ficially; they’re identified merely by profession, not by name. In contrast, Gerald
Bullett’s cross-sectional novel The Jury (1935) explores intimacies. In the first
block, “The Twelve Converging,” moving-spotlight narration introduces each
juror in private life before he or she is summoned to court duty. “The Twelve
Listening” presents, in transcript form, the court proceedings. Once the jury is
sequestered (“The Twelve Debating”), the narration jumps from one juror to
another, larding their conversation with flashbacks to incidents in their pasts.
In another approach to breaking time lines, Raymond Postgate’s Verdict of
Twelve (1940) displays a different form of omniscience. Each of twelve segments
starts with the Clerk of the Assize administering the oath and passes quickly to
a chunk of backstory concerning the juror. An ensuing block presents chapters
moving back to dramatize the crime, the investigation, and the decision to
charge a suspect. The trial is summarized, omitting some details we’ve encoun-
tered in the previous section, and the jury’s meeting is covered very quickly. As
in The Jury Disagree, a final twist reveals information that was not part of the
court record.
The dossier novel and the trial plot show how smoothly Golden Age writers
could use a realistic framework to integrate varying viewpoints presented in
letters, written confessions, or legal testimony. That is exactly the sort of frame-
work that the Ultraist phase of High Modernism jettisoned. No overarching sit-
uation encloses the monologues of Benjy, Quentin, and Jason Compson in The
Sound and the Fury or the dissolving soliloquys of the characters in The Waves.
Odd to say but Poe had pointed in this direction. The rantings of the “I” in “The
Black Cat,” like the friend’s reports of Dupin’s triumphs of reasoning, are not
anchored as diary entries or speeches to a listener. In the mystery field, it was
largely the hard-boiled school that reinvigorated Poe’s strategy. The Continental
 150 PA RT I I

Op, Nick Charles, and Philip Marlowe need no pretext for passing their stories
directly to us.
Golden Age reliance on framing situations might seem too beholden to
nineteenth-century realist conventions, but embedded narration enhanced the
books’ efforts to magnify mystery. By turning their first-person accounts into
testimony and documents, writers opened opportunites for ellipses, discor-
dant replays, deception, and interrogation by other voices. Once first-person
accounts become texts, they become as suspect as anything at the crime scene.

Comparative Detection and Combinatorial Explosions

If dossier novels and trial plots show the variorum in wide compass, one classic
whodunit illustrates how kaleidoscopic multiplicity can arise from a very sim-
ple situation.
Sir Eustace Pennefather receives a box of chocolates at his club. Annoyed,
he offers it to another member, Graham Bendix. Bendix takes it home to his
wife. Bendix eats a couple of chocolates and falls violently ill. Mrs. Bendix eats
several and dies. The candy has been poisoned. The police conclude that it’s the
random work of a madman.
Author Roger Sheringham has founded the Crime Circle, a group of ama-
teur criminologists. They agree to tackle the case. After a week of investiga-
tions, they meet on six consecutive nights to hear each member’s conclusions.
The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929) might seem the ultimate in arid puzzle-
mongering. The characters are superficial types, the descriptions minimal.
There’s no effort to invoke specifics of time or place; the conversations in the
circle take place in a virtual vacuum. There’s no adventure. Although the detec-
tives are free to pursue leads offstage, we move almost completely in the realm
of reasoning. The narration yields old-fashioned omniscience, shifting among
characters’ minds as if Sayers and Knox had never tut-tutted about confined
viewpoint. But Anthony Berkeley’s manipulation of Golden Age conventions
makes a bare-bones premise an epitome of the self-conscious artifice of the
Golden Age, as well as a witty critique of the genre itself.
The Poisoned Chocolates Case is an almost maniacal exercise in block con-
struction. Each evening session consumes two chapters, with only a couple of
detours into Roger’s daytime inquiries. This stringent focus sets a rhythm that
the reader comes to expect: every evening will replay the central convention of
a detective denouement, the sleuth’s explanation. But here the solution will be
subject to objection, correction, and rejection. The false solutions, six in all, are
not mere filler but the very spine of the book.
The last detective in the queue, Mr. Ambrose Chitterwick, arranges the
prior solutions into a table (table 4.1). This “lesson in comparative detection,” as
Table 4.1 Mr. Chitterwick’s chart, The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929)

Method of
Solver Motive Angle of View Salient Feature Proof Parallel Case Criminal

Sir Charles Wildman Gain Cui bono Notepaper Inductive Marie Lafarge Lady Pennefather

Mrs. Fielder- Elimination Cherchez la femme Hidden triangle Intuitive and Molineux Sir Charles
Flemming inductive Wildman

Bradley (1) Experiment Detective-novelist’s Nitrobenzene Scientific Dr. Wilson Bradley

deduction

Bradley (2) Jealousy Character of Sir Criminological Deductive Christina Woman unnamed
Eustace knowledge of Edmunds
murderer

Sheringham Gain Character of Mr. Bet Deductive and Carlyle Harris Bendix
Bendix inductive

Miss Dammers Elimination Psychology of all Criminal’s Psychological Tawell Sir Eustace
participants character deduction Pennefather

Police Conviction, or lust General Material clues Routine Horwood Unknown fanatic
of killing or lunatic

Source: Reprinted with permission of the Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Anthony Berkeley.
 152 PA RT I I

Mr. Chitterwick calls it, creates a clear-cut variorum within a single volume.93
Turning blocks into a grid also neatly illustrates the thrust of Golden Age
mysteries toward geometrical layouts akin to modernist notions of spatial
form. It isn’t far-fetched to recall the chart of times and motifs in Ulysses that
Stuart Gilbert published a year after The Poisoned Chocolates Case. Unsurpris-
ingly, Berkeley subtitled the book “An Academic Detective Story.”
Focusing the plot around the nightly meetings seems to violate fair play
because each investigator brings to the table new evidence discovered offstage.
Yet there’s a perverse sense of fair play across the whole. The evidence “unfairly”
amassed by one detective is available “fairly” to the next one in line, and to the
reader. The last solution must take into account earlier facts and inferences. In
effect, the timid Mr. Chitterwick, who solves the problem, is in the position that
Berkeley himself was in when he had to wrap up the round-robin novel The
Floating Admiral.
There are puzzles aplenty. Obviously, we wonder who’s the criminal. In the
course of the evenings, several suspects are added to the initial trio. We’re also
asked to wonder “Who was the intended victim?” Presumably, Sir Eustace. But
was perhaps Mrs. Bendix the target? And, as each night unfolds, another ques-
tion emerges: Who’s the best detective?
Roger’s club consists of the barrister Sir Charles Wildman, the playwright
Mrs. Fielder-Fleming, avant-garde novelist Alicia Dammers, mystery writer
Morton Harrogate Bradley, and self-effacing hobbyist Mr. Chitterwick. Taking
the Trent’s Last Case device to the limit, Berkeley makes his series hero humili-
atingly wrong, and unlike Trent Roger gets no redemption.
In effect, Roger’s failure is dictated purely by structure. What comes at the
end must be the truth, so his position on the fourth night dooms him. Putting
Mr. Chitterwick at the end permits Berkeley to expose the arbitrary power of
a finale. The plot exploits the device of the least-likely-suspect, and thanks to
sheer patterning, Mr. Chitterwick, looked down upon by the other circle mem-
bers, becomes the least likely detective.
This guying of the Great Detective as charismatic hero recurs throughout
Golden Age stories. In Leo Bruce’s Case for Three Detectives (1936), pastiche
figures of Poirot, Lord Peter, and Father Brown compete to solve a grisly mur-
der, only to be outdone by uncouth Sergeant Beef. Ask a Policeman (1933), the
Detection Club’s second round-robin novel, made fun of sacred cows by assign-
ing authors to write about others’ sleuths. Berkeley twitted Wimsey, and Sayers
pushed the reliably fallible Roger Sheringham into new blind alleys.
The Poisoned Chocolates Case applies the same sort of satiric expansion to
Golden Age plotting. Six armchair detectives are pitted against one another,
and the action consists largely of their ability to persuade or pontificate.
Although the book might be considered an inbred parody of the whodunit, it’s
much less heavy-handed than the spoofs with which Berkeley began his Punch
 The Golden Age Puzzle Plot 153

career.94 The poisoning gives him an opportunity to mock the harrumphing

jurist, the brittle theater celebrity, the jumped-up non-U novelist, and the dis-
dainful avant-garde author. Each nightly speaker preceding Mr. Chitterwick
exhibits a self-regard soon punctured by the scornful skepticism of the others.
Mastermind performance turns into cruel comedy.
The battle of wits is largely a battle of the books. Bookishness is central to
the Golden Age novel. Someone is sure to compare the crime at hand with what
usually happens in a mystery story, and the cast often includes one or more
writers, often authors of detective stories. Wimsey’s lover Harriet Vane writes
thrillerish tales, and Ellery Queen signs the books in which he appears. Cita-
tion comes in too, as when the killer in Five Red Herrings has read a novel by a
Sayers confrère and hides his copy from Wimsey.
More radically, a mystery story can be embedded in the book, as is the man-
uscript in The Second Shot. Barnaby Ross’s Tragedy of Y (1932) depends on dis-
covering a plot outline that uncannily matches the murder case at hand. At the
limit, the book that’s cited can be the very one we’re reading. At the close of The
Egyptian Cross Mystery, Ellery admits that his “sometimes impulsive erudition”
led him to mistakenly believe there was an Egyptian motif in the case. Still, he
gives the book a misleading title, just to fit the series brand and to cover his
expensive road trip: “Let the public pay for it!”95
The Poisoned Chocolates Case doesn’t have such a brazen address to the
reader, nor does it wedge in other tales in dossier fashion. But it’s bookish in its
own way. Each detective’s disquisition is in effect a short story, and the debates
dwell on problems of mystery writing craft.
The circle’s conversations touch on the rhetoric of the arrogant detective,
the reliance on selective evidence, closed versus open sets of suspects, the most
unlikely suspect, the parallel to real-life murders, and the appeal to material
clues (risky) and to psychology (even riskier). Throughout, the participants
muse on the detective’s reliance on coincidence, not only in Sir Eustace’s giving
the chocolates to Bendix, but also in the lucky encounter that triggers Roger’s
eureka moment—dependent, no less, on a play called The Avenging Chance.
The book’s narration adds its own commentary on fictional conventions. “Miss
Dammers was indeed to plume herself on the fact that she had no sense of con-
struction, and that none of her books ever had a plot. . . . Stories, as Roger as a
fellow-craftsman ought to have known, simply weren’t done nowadays.”96
Is Berkeley making Miss Dammers’s taste an echo of Trollope’s dislike of
Collins’s “unpalatable” construction? The passage anticipates Bernard DeVoto’s
riposte to Edmund Wilson: detective story craftsmanship is an antidote to the
modernists’ abandonment of appealing narrative.
This blatant acknowledgment of artifice is central to the Golden Age. It’s
seen at its most stark in the famous “Locked Room Lecture” in John Dickson
Carr’s The Hollow Man (aka The Three Coffins). There Dr. Fell reviews, again in
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outline form, all possible solutions to murder in a “hermetically sealed cham-

ber.” “We’re in a detective story, and we don’t fool the reader by pretending
we’re not. Let’s not invent elaborate excuses to drag in a discussion of detective
fiction. Let’s candidly glory in the noblest pursuits possible to characters in a
book.”97 Of course this transparency is only a gesture. The solution of the mys-
tery must fall into one of the types Dr. Fell surveys, but Carr has arranged the
categories to make that difficult to see. This frank layout of a mini-variorum
serves as well to flaunt the author’s prodigious invention, along with his virtu-
osity in hiding the correct answer from us.
Less overt but no less dazzling is the combinatorial explosion that follows
from the false solutions in The Poisoned Chocolates Case. Mr Chitterwick
points out that in detective fiction a clue is usually assumed to point in only
one direction, but it’s actually multivalent. The Crime Circle’s proliferation of
solutions stems from alternative interpretations of only three pieces of physical
evidence. Psychological clues are just as unstable. Night after night, the debates
rewrite the motives and reinterpret the characters’ traits. Victim becomes vil-
lain, a loving wife becomes a cheat, a cheating husband an innocent.
To this collapse of certainty the detective novelist Bradley responds:

“I’ll write a book for you, Mr. Chitterwick. . . . in which the detective shall
draw six contradictory deductions from each fact. He’ll probably end up by
arresting seventy-two different people for the murder and committing suicide
because he finds afterwards that he must have done it himself. I’ll dedicate the
book to you.”
“Yes, do,” beamed Mr. Chitterwick. “For really, it wouldn’t be far from what
we’ve had in this case.”98

The indefinitely large number of solutions exposes an arbitrariness at the

heart of the genre. As one explanation is mounted, heartily embraced, and
then briskly demolished, Berkeley shows that the process could go on forever.
(Two more solutions were published ninety years later.99) And for all the genre’s
claims of ineluctable logic, plot coherence is constantly threatened by chance
(accident, half-memory, the eureka moment) and brute linearity (what comes
last is true, regardless of plausibility). Even the murders in the Rue Morgue
became a locked-room case by accident.
Arbitrariness and chance must be tamed by rules and best practices. The
writer displays ingenuity by finding new and sporting ways to trim back the
tangle of possibilities. For instance, in agreeing with Bradley’s multiplication of
deductions, Mr. Chitterwick casually prunes the possibilities with a hint about
the solution he’ll propose (a detective who is guilty). Many doors are opened,
but most are quickly closed, more or less by fiat. How comforting is this? On the
last page, Roger asks what they should do next: “Nobody enlightened him.”100
 The Golden Age Puzzle Plot 155

This vision of indeterminate and ramifying interpretation, a value central to

“literary” fiction from James to Kafka, is rarely made so explicit in Golden Age
writing.101 But it hovers over the very project of the investigation plot. The con-
ventions of that plot, the rules of the game, exist to manage the indeterminacy.
Fortunately, that can be done more or less ingeniously. The reader is invited to
become a connoisseur who can admire how a fresh, formally tidy package can
give contingency the illusion of necessity.

✳✳✳

Faulkner declared that he intended As I Lay Dying to be a tour de force.102 The

most ambitious writers of the Golden Age tried for the same thing. Mobiliz-
ing all the techniques available in fiction and theater, storytellers reworked
the investigation plot in elaborate ways. They competed with one another in
building a puzzle, playing the game (while finding weak spots in the rules), and
above all flaunting ingenuity of structure and style. Endowed with a heritage of
sensation fiction and Great Detective sagas, they brought the narrative subter-
fuges of 1910s formalism, modernist experiments, and traditional techniques of
mystification to bear on the popular genre most hospitable to them.
Dorothy Sayers believed that a detective story that honored the tradition of
Dickens and Collins could attain literary greatness.103 Yet the Golden Age writers
didn’t achieve the prestige they sought. Their rarefied artifice, as playful as that
on display in a Tudor masque or a Restoration comedy, was not welcomed by
critical tastes favoring social statement, psychological realism, and thematic
complexity. Today, with nonlinear narrative all around us, we can better recog-
nize the value of weaponizing any technique at hand for the sake of mystification
and displays of virtuosity. Caricatured as a reliquary of dusty devices—tranquil
villages, courtroom shenanigans, corpses in private libraries—the Golden Age
oeuvre today looks far more varied than we might expect.
The mechanics of classic detection are still available for retro recycling in
Christie adaptations, Holmes pastiches, BBC series, and clockwork exercises
suh as Knives Out (2019). But this tradition, which includes A Voice in the Dark
and The Woman in Question, along with the casebook format and the trial
premise, has had a wider impact. For one thing, the ingenuity of plot and nar-
ration yielded a glimpse of formal horizons beyond the demands of orthodox
realism. To experimental artists, the investigation plot offered a rich menu of
techniques for more or less avant-garde reworking. Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel
Butor, and other writers of the 1950s and 1960s nouveau roman school, as well
as more accessible authors such as Umberto Eco and Donna Tartt, found in
the rules of the game many expectations that could be fruitfully overturned.
They realized that the sheer appeal of mystery could attract readers who might
be disinclined to swallow rarefied approaches to technique. As with other
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crossover work, familiar elements threw into relief the more unusual aspects of
form and style, but also made them seem less formidable.
There’s an even more pervasive effect, though. The formal intricacies of the
whodunit introduced a broad public to experiments—some mild, some more
demanding—in narrative time, viewpoint, authorial address, and genre expec-
tations. While inducing audiences to play the game, whodunits trained readers
and spectators in a repertory of comprehension skills. These works’ legacy
lingers in our “puzzle films,” “Complex TV,” and more generally throughout
today’s mass-market crossover storytelling.
We always knew we couldn’t always trust the characters. After James and
Conrad, we learned not to trust the narrator. The investigation plots of the
1920s and 1930s taught us not to trust the author.
 CHAPTER 5

BEFORE THE FACT

The Psychological Thriller

I like a good detective story. . . . But, you know, they begin in the wrong
place! They begin with the murder. But the murder is the end. The story
begins long before that—years before sometimes—with all the causes and
events that bring certain people to a certain place at a certain time on a
certain day. . . . Even now . . . some drama—some murder to be—is in
course of preparation.

—Agatha Christie

A
s Christmas approaches, Mr. and Mrs. Bunting sit brooding in
minor-key despair. No longer able to find work as servants, they
have bought a house and tried to rent out rooms. But the place is
empty, and they’re near starvation. Outside, boys hawk newspapers reporting the
latest atrocity committed by “The Avenger,” a stalker who dismembers women.
The doorbell rings. The caller, a gaunt, nervous man, carries only a leather
bag. He decides to rent a floor, but because he needs solitude and quiet for his
“experiments,” he pays extra to be the only guest. The Buntings are jubilant.
He says his name is Mr. Sleuth.
The Lodger (1913) was published as a short story in 1911, then turned into
a novel. Marie Belloc Lowndes was already a well-known author, but this
became her most popular work. It was the basis for a play and five films. It’s an
 158 PA RT I I

exemplary piece of 1910s formalism, and it set a standard for a major genre in
popular narrative for the next century.
A novel about a Jack-the-Ripper figure could have been a sensation-driven
pursuit or a tale of rational detection. This one is a tale of suspicion seeping
through a lower-middle-class household. Despite moments when Mrs. Bunting
tries to discover what’s in Mr. Sleuth’s bag, The Lodger doesn’t build its action
around active investigation. There’s a mystery, but all the detecting is done off-
stage. During this period, story manuals were acknowledging that major action
could be filtered through a bystander, and stories like James’s “In the Cage”
showed how it could be done. James had presented a furtive affair refracted
through the limited awareness of the telegraph clerk who helps the lovers along.
Belloc Lowndes traces a serial-killer investigation through a couple who in their
willfully blind way safeguard him. The Lodger carries out principles of oblique
viewpoint and spatial concentration—James’s beloved “scenic method”—with a
precision remarkable in mass-audience narrative.
Although the novel’s narration briefly strays to the minds of others, it
gains its force by concentrating on Mr. and Mrs. Bunting. The murders
and the police investigation are presented through their reading of news
accounts and the excited reports from Joe Chandler, an ambitious young
cop and a friend of the family. The emphasis falls on the couple’s growing
suspicion that Mr. Sleuth is the Avenger, which puts them and their daughter
Daisy in peril.
To the restriction of viewpoint, The Lodger adds other forms of confinement.
The plot unfolds over a few weeks, with flashbacks yielding background on the
Buntings’ marriage. Spatially, nearly every scene takes place in the parlor, the
kitchen, the couple’s bedroom, or Mr. Sleuth’s quarters. When the Buntings
leave, we usually don’t tag along. The few excursions we witness—to Scotland
Yard’s Black Museum, to the inquest, to Madame Tussaud’s—stand out against
a rhythm of household routines.
The confinement finds acute expression in the emphasis on hearing sounds.
Every night the Buntings are assailed by a frenzy outside. “ ‘The Avenger again!’
‘Another horrible crime!’ ‘Extra speshul edition!’—such were the shouts, the
exultant yells hurled through the clear, cold air. They fell, like bombs, into
the quiet room.”1 Mrs. Bunting is alert to Mr. Sleuth’s pacing above them, and
more ominously to his footfall on the stairs as he slips out of the house after
midnight. Alone in the kitchen, she becomes terrified at his approach. Soon
she finds herself listening to what her husband and Daisy are saying in the next
room. Mr. Bunting’s ears become sensitive as well, as he starts to wonder what
his wife is up to when she is furiously cleaning the staircase after one of their
lodger’s nightly excursions.
The result is the sort of psychological probing that some Golden Age writers
had hoped to bring to their puzzle tales. Mr. Bunting, defeated in his search
for work as a servant, has ceded control of the household to his wife. For most
 Before the Fact 159

of the book, she becomes the center of consciousness, and her emotions are a
turbulent mix.
At first she’s relieved that they have a generous paying guest, but she
becomes more apprehensive when she learns of his quirks, such as turning
pictures of women to face the walls. Is he the Avenger? Should she confide her
worries to Mr. Bunting? If the lodger is arrested, will the family be charged
with harboring him? If he leaves, won’t they slip back into destitution? If
he learns of their suspicions, will he kill them? And Daisy is keen to meet
Mr. Sleuth. Could she become his next victim? To Belloc Lowndes’s credit,
these questions aren’t ever articulated so bluntly; they are implicit in Mrs.
Bunting’s fretful behavior. But such underlying uncertainties maintain our
interest in a very different way than do questions about motive, method, and
opportunity that propel the whodunit.
The pressure of the situation terrifies Mrs. Bunting, but she’s oddly solicitous
as well, transferring her concern for Daisy and Mr. Bunting to the lodger. It’s
as if by mothering him a little she can assure herself that he’s innocent. Worse,
during this ordeal she becomes as obsessed with the murders as her husband
is, even longing for new ones that may rule out Sleuth as a suspect. Her feelings
oscillate between fear and dismissal of fear. When Daisy is invited to spend a
few days with her aunt, Mrs. Bunting is relieved.

If anything horrible was going to happen in the next two or three days—it was
just as well Daisy shouldn’t be at home. Not that there was any real danger that
anything would happen,—Mrs. Bunting felt sure of that.
By this time she was out in the street again, and she began mentally count-
ing up the number of murders The Avenger had committed. Nine, or was it ten?
Surely by now The Avenger must be avenged?. . . .
She began hurrying homewards; it wouldn’t do for the lodger to ring before
she had got back. Bunting would never know how to manage Mr. Sleuth, espe-
cially if Mr. Sleuth were in one of his queer moods.2

Mrs. Bunting’s relations with her family start to crumble. She is driven to lie
about her secret visit to an inquest, and she lets her long-standing resentment
of Daisy surface, a reminder of her husband’s first wife.
We’re given access to Mr. Bunting’s thoughts less often, and these brief
reports provide another perspective on his wife’s regression. She demands,
almost hysterically, that they talk about the killings. “Bunting, staring across
at his wife, felt sadly perplexed and disturbed. She really did seem ill; even her
slight, spare figure looked shrunk. For the first time, so he told himself ruefully,
Ellen was beginning to look her full age. Her slender hands—she had kept
the pretty, soft white hands of the woman who has never done rough work—
grasped the edge of the table with a convulsive movement.”3 This tale of terror is
no less a portrait of a quietly collapsing marriage.
 160 PA RT I I

Because Mrs. Bunting tends to Sleuth while Bunting reads his newspapers,
he comes to her realization late. In the early stretches of the book, his fascina-
tion with the murders matches the morbid excitement of the public. But on the
day the newspaper publishes an image of the Avenger’s footprint, Bunting finds
Sleuth outside changing his shoes. As they go into the house together, Bunting
sees blood smeared on Sleuth’s coat.
Bunting becomes as worried as his wife, but they don’t discuss their appre-
hensions. Eventually, when they accidentally leave Daisy alone with the lodger,
the drama of divided knowledge reaches its proper pitch. “As they stared at
each other in exasperated silence, each now knew that the other knew.”4 The
revelation of their passive complicity is as powerful as the risk of exposing the
Avenger’s identity.
On the threshold of Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors, the tension
breaks. Believing that Mrs. Bunting has informed on him, Mr. Sleuth flees. He
is never caught. The murders cease. Joe and Daisy marry. The central couple
restabilizes, a situation rendered with a quietness characteristic of the whole
book. At a few points, the narration has called Mrs. Bunting “the lodger’s
landlady,” as if her relation to him had replaced her marital status. By the end,
however, the narration tells us of “Mr. Bunting and his Ellen.” We’re told with
ironic tact that they “are now in the service of an old lady, by whom they are
feared as well as respected, and whom they make very comfortable.”5
Like most mystery stories, The Lodger makes passing reference to the
puzzle-based genre, thereby reasserting its own claim to “reality.” There are
mentions of Gaboriau and plots containing lots of clues. Mr. Bunting is fond of
detective stories, and his wife reads them to help her sleep. When a serial killer
names himself Mr. Sleuth, we might suspect that he’s knowingly mocking the
plots we encounter in Great Detective fiction.
Here, though, the obligatory citations aren’t just inside jokes. Belloc Lown-
des invites us to imagine another approach to mystery storytelling. The Lodger
shows how formal rigor can render inchoate feelings and arouse sympathy for
imperfect characters coping with moral quandaries—effects largely alien to
the Golden Age. The suspense story could shape viewpoint and narration as
skillfully as any detective story, but it could do something more. It could show
what fear feels like.6

Hidden Histories of Murder

Today we’d call The Lodger a thriller, but the label was applied somewhat dif-
ferently at the time. “Detective story” suggests a character and an activity,
whereas “thriller” tells you that emotion is paramount. In the 1910s and 1920s,
“thriller” often implied extravagant display. Scary carnival rides and parachute
 Before the Fact 161

stunts were called thrillers; so were theatrical melodramas and adventure

paperbacks aimed at boys.7 By 1920, critics used the term to refer to novels
by Sax Rohmer, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Edgar Wallace, and “Sapper,” cre-
ator of freebooting Bulldog Drummond. A thriller boasted master criminals,
hypnosis, hidden passages, sinister Asians, and other conventions of interna-
tional intrigue. If mystery was invoked, the thriller plot tended to be based,
according to one author, on “a vast amount of rushing to and fro of detectives
or unofficial investigators in motor cars, aeroplanes, or motor boats, with a
liberal display of revolver or automatic pistols and a succession of hair-raising
adventures.”8
For this reason, Golden Age writers vociferously denied that proper detec-
tive stories, tales of reasoning and fair play, should be considered thrillers.9
Many of the rules posited by these writers were designed to purge sensational
elements. The Detection Club’s constitution demanded that the initiate could
not qualify for entry with “adventure stories or ‘thrillers’ or stories in which
detection is not the main interest.”10
While Golden Age authors were building the tradition of the modern
whodunit, other writers were creating tales of crime and mystery that lacked
preposterous villains and dashing heroes. These came to be called psychological
thrillers. The term appeared in the late 1920s and moved into general currency
in the following decade. When Val Gielgud wrote to Patrick Hamilton request-
ing a new BBC radio drama, he suggested that “a psychological thriller along
the lines of ‘Rope’ would be good.”11 Reviewers began using the term, and it
was recruited to advertise novels, plays, and films. The label served to differ-
entiate calmer works from the blood-and-thunder sensation of Wallace and
the globe-trotting of John Buchan. If the “pursuit thriller” was based on an
international chase, the psychological thriller was usually based in households,
either middle-class or higher. This “domestic thriller” centered on homebound
wives and white-collar husbands, professionals, artists, and students—neither
adventurers nor professional crooks or investigators.
Narration and viewpoint were distinctive as well. Whereas the whodunit
focused the action on the detective and associates, the psychological thriller
favored the viewpoint of the criminal or victim. The Great Detective’s exploits
were likely to be filtered through a Watson or a bystander, but first-person
accounts voiced by the target or culprit or both in alternation were more com-
mon in the thriller. The investigation plot was concerned with a buried story,
but as Milward Kennedy described it, the new sort of thriller gives us the major
crime as yet to happen, a lead-up to “the ‘hidden history’ of the murder itself.”12
If there is an investigation, it might be offstage, as in The Lodger, or it could be
undertaken by the threatened victim.
Examples were being published while Golden Age whodunits were appear-
ing. Isabel Ostrander’s Ashes to Ashes (1919) tells of a business executive who
 162 PA RT I I

murders his wife and then a college chum. We dwell almost wholly within the
killer’s mind as he alternates between panic and exultation. The plot of The
House by the River (1920), by A. P. Herbert, might have come out of Patricia
Highsmith. A writer strangles his maid during a sexual assault, then induces his
weak friend to help him dump the body. He offhandedly allows the friend to be
suspected of the crime.
Before C. S. Forester found success with novels of nautical adventure, he
wrote two bleak psychological thrillers. Payment Deferred (1926) centers on a
short-tempered bank clerk in genteel poverty who murders his nephew and
then ruins his family through profligacy and alcoholism. In Plain Murder
(1930), three advertising copywriters conceal a bribery scheme by killing their
supervisor and then turning on one another. Forester uses the genre to reflect
on the cruelties and delusions of the lower middle class.
Given the standard viewpoint options—perpetrator, victim—the bystander
perspective of The Lodger stands out. This running side-story concentrates on
the emotional effects of Mr. Sleuth’s activities on those around him, some of
whom might become victims. This unusual formal choice looks forward to
Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943).
As novelists explored possibilities of the psychological thriller, similar plots
were creeping onto the English and American stage. The major vogue seems to
have come in the late 1920s, as a New York Times correspondent put it, when
London suffered “a theatrical crime wave . . . owing to a deluge of mystery
plays and ‘thrillers.’ ”13 That wave included Interference (1927), The Letter (1927),
Spellbound (1927; no relation to Hitchcock’s film), People Like Us (1928), Black-
mail (1928), and other “murder plays.”14 Hitchcock’s film versions of The Lodger
(1927) and Blackmail (1929) showed that the premises of the thriller—playing
down investigation and playing up tension and guilt—were now part of popu-
lar storytelling in other media.
In these plots, critics realized, revealing the criminal’s identity at the begin-
ning doesn’t slacken interest.15 One wrote the following about A. A. Milne’s play
The Fourth Wall (1928):

Though we saw the murder, we do not know what little slip Carter may have
made in the arrangement of the room or the concoction of his own and
Laverick’s alibi. Thus while Susan continues her investigation we do not know
what clue she will discover or how she will arrive at the truth; nor when she has
a part of the information in her hands do we know how she will force Carter to
reveal the rest.
Here is scope for action enough, and not for action only but for as much
drawing of character as is possible in the course of a narrative so full of
events. The first act, which shows the murder, is admirable in its suspense
and surprise.16
 Before the Fact 163

Similarly, in the A Murder Has Been Arranged (1928), the audience sees an
heir kill his rival and then try to evade exposure. The first moments of Patrick
Hamilton’s Rope (1929), based on the Loeb-Leopold case, show two young men
stuffing a body in a chest and then laying out a buffet on top.
By 1930, the Golden Age puzzle was at something of a crossroads. Writers
who were becoming bored with convoluted deductions and mechanical clue
planting were wondering how to deepen the emotional appeal of their stories.
At the height of the puzzle story’s prestige, Dorothy Sayers had argued that “it is
better to err in the direction of too little feeling than too much.”17 The most
famous statement to the contrary came from Anthony Berkeley in 1930: “There
is a complication of emotion, drama, psychology, and adventure behind the
most ordinary murder in real life, the possibilities of which for fictional pur-
poses the conventional detective story misses completely.”18 Very soon Sayers
was admitting that an emphasis on psychology and the circumstances leading
up to the crime had created worthwhile “studies in murder.” She realized that
Ashes to Ashes and the Forester novels challenged detective writers to forge
“a completely new technique.”19
Well, this technique was not completely new. For one thing, Mary Roberts
Rinehart had arrived at a method of blending detection with the domestic
thriller. She showed that the action could move the protagonist, definitely not a
Great Detective, from onlooker to investigator and then to target. This pattern
of deepening involvement had proved very popular with the public, but the
Golden Age adherents preferred fewer neo-Gothic trappings and more stress
on the puzzle. “The interest of pure detection,” wrote Berkeley, “will always
hold its own.”20 Sayers wanted a formula that gave greater weight to serious
psychology, creating “a puzzle of character rather than a puzzle of time, place,
motive and opportunity.” The Documents in the Case (1930) and Gaudy Night
(1935) were among her efforts toward “a novel with a detective interest” rather
than a “detective story pure and simple.”21 Ideally the Great Detective would still
play a role.
One model of a hybrid had already been put forth by R. Austin Freeman’s
short-story collection The Singing Bone (1912). Freeman uses the first part of
each tale to recount the commission of the crime, chiefly from the criminal’s
point of view. Part two traces the efforts of criminologist Dr. John Thorndyke to
solve the mystery. Despite being far more linear than the back-and-fill plotting
of the whodunit, Freeman’s tales came to be called “inverted” stories.
With the killer’s identity revealed at the outset, Freeman’s narration must
generate curiosity and suspense around Thorndyke’s effort to discover the
truth. Dr. Thorndyke’s segment typically begins with him as a more or less
pure reasoner, pondering anomalies in the case. Soon he questions witnesses
and brings out his bag of instruments, his tweezers and reagents and portable
microscope, to rake over the crime scene.
 164 PA RT I I

The scientific side of the plot demanded that Freeman not only exploit the
conventions of motives, alibis, timetables, and the like but also supply the
details of environment. He decided that an inverted arrangement could plant
clues as firmly and unobtrusively as could the traditional format. “I calculated
that the reader would be so occupied with the crime that he would overlook the
evidence. And so it turned out. The second part, which described the investi-
gation of the crime, had to most readers the effect of new matter. All the facts
were known; but their evidential quality had not been recognized.”22 Freeman’s
formula provides the suspense and surprise that the critic found in Milne’s
Fourth Wall.
Most readers probably expect that a few particular traces of the crime will
prove damning, but Freeman packs in so many details that Thorndyke’s dis-
coveries reconstruct the entire episode. In Freeman’s founding story of the
form, “The Case of Oscar Brodski,” the giveaways include not only obvious
ones such as blood smears and an iron bar but also cigarette papers, rare
tobacco, shards of a wine glass, biscuit crumbs, string, fibers of a tablecloth,
and a burned hat. Most of these are casually presented during the first part’s
fatal encounter. The second part patiently shows how each item contributes to
the investigator’s solution.
Thorndyke’s inferences are corroborated by our memory of the tale’s opening
section; after all, we were witnesses. But once we’re familiar with the inverted
formula, we can be on our guard from the beginning. Freeman’s unfolding
crime scenes invite the sort of close reading promoted by the narration and
dialogue of Christie, Carr, and their peers. Freeman’s challenge to the reader is
heightened because his perpetrators try to conceal their crimes. We must gauge
how Dr. Thorndyke contends with the false scents and red herrings laid across
the trail.
This three-way battle of wits becomes the basis of Mr. Pottermack’s Oversight
(1930). As is common in the genre, Freeman’s problem is extending a short
story premise to novelistic length. Mr. Pottermack is given an extensive past,
dramatized in a prologue and fleshed out in an extended flashback. He is also in
love with a local widow, who has her own past with the murdered blackmailer.
Dr. Thorndyke is gradually brought into the case through scenes inserted
between blocks of chapters devoted to Pottermack. Pottermack’s strategy devel-
ops across the book as he manipulates faked footprints, then stolen banknotes,
and eventually a substitute corpse. The title suggests a nontraditional source of
mystery. What was the oversight we witnessed but did not grasp? As tradition
dictates, the detective’s summary scene yields a new revelation—not who did it,
but how the crook bungled.
The inverted formula earned the respect of the Golden Age writers. Despite
calling himself an “aged Victorian,” Freeman was welcomed into the Detection
Club and participated in collaborations.23 Rope and other murder plays use his
 Before the Fact 165

model, with the audience first viewing the crime and discovering the culprits.
Much later, a strict adherence to the inverted format would become familiar in
the television series Columbo.
Few Golden Age writers exploited the inverted plot in pure form, but
some ingeniously inserted the “hidden history” of a crime into more intricate
puzzle-driven patterns of plotting and narration. This is a neat instance of
schema revision. The “pure” detective story was recast to assimilate features of
the inverted tale, but in ways that preserved some elements of investigation,
uncertainty, and surprise.
The simplest strategy was to present the criminal’s viewpoint without iden-
tifying him or her. Mystery could arise from an unnamed first-person account,
as in the diary excerpts of Philip MacDonald’s X v. Rex (aka Mystery of the Dead
Police, 1934). Here, as elsewhere, block construction proved especially useful
in marking off the crime portions from the investigation sections. A more
straightforward example was provided by Freeman Wills Crofts. Most of his
novels were attached to Inspector French in his inquiries, but Crofts modified
the Pottermack model in The 12.30 from Croydon (1934).
The novel begins with a poisoning during a plane trip and then flashes back
to the origins of the crime, which is told in third person attached to the identi-
fied murderer. The early phases of Inspector French’s inquiry are rendered from
the killer’s perspective as well, but they appear quite late in the novel. After the
spotlight shifts to French, he provides a monologue wrapping things up. In the
standard investigation plot, the “recovered story” is the crime; here the hidden
story is the process of detection, which is kept from the reader’s view.
In homage, Crofts makes his culprit well read in mystery fiction. He med-
itates in prison: “Somehow, alone there in the semi-darkness, the excellence
of his own plans seemed less convincing than ever before. Stories he had read
recurred to him in which the guilty had made perfect plans, but in all cases
they had broken down. Those double tales of Austin Freeman’s!”24 Detective
stories conventionally refer to other detective stories, apparently assuring us
that the one we’re reading is more “real” than its counterparts. Usually this
gesture works to cite traditions that the reader enjoys recalling. The 12.30 from
Croydon acknowledges that Freeman’s formula made salient the possibility of
a new mystery: How will the criminal err in committing and concealing the
crime? Crofts exploited the inverted format further in Antidote to Venom (1938)
and later novels.
A more light-hearted exercise in presenting a crime’s hidden history was
Richard Hull’s Murder Isn’t Easy (1937). In effect, it’s a recasting of Forester’s
Plain Murder. Forester’s murder scheme drew together three advertising agents,
before one, fearing betrayal, tries to kill his mates. The story is told in com-
pact, linear scenes. His narration is unashamedly omniscient, skipping among
all the characters’ thoughts within scenes and sometimes within paragraphs.
 166 PA RT I I

This traditional method yields a reliable, sometimes moralizing narration that

lays bare the fluctuating emotions felt by the men, their employers, and their
fellow employees.
In contrast, Hull’s Murder Isn’t Easy refracts its plot of ad-agency homicide
through strictly constrained narration. Each of three partners has an urge to
eliminate the other two, and each man is given a block of chapters in which to
write up his scheme. But eventually we realize that the first account is untrust-
worthy, and the second one is incomplete. A third, no less misleading manu-
script introduces the detective, one Inspector Hoopington. In a fourth block,
the firm’s secretary supplies an accurate wrap-up. After explaining Hooping-
ton’s solution, she follows his suggestion that publishing the documents could
make up for losing her job.

So that’s how I came to take up a literary career, and while murder may not be
easy, I must say I think writing is. You just go straight on.
I’m beginning to simply adore it.25

Plain Murder had taken killing as a serious outgrowth of workplace bullying

and shabby suburban routine. Murder Isn’t Easy treats crime as an occasion for
social satire. Male vanity is punctured, and as in Murder Must Advertise, the
publicity game is relentlessly mocked. Three quarrelsome men stand revealed
as being as inept in homicide as they are in business.
Hull’s novel displays a self-conscious ingenuity quite alien to Forester’s. The
three manuscripts seed the buildup to the crime with outright lies, unobtrusive
ellipses, and events replayed from different viewpoints. Meanwhile, the barely
characterized Inspector Hoopington solves the case through old-fashioned clue
spotting and intuition. The puerile written accounts have diverted us from what
was evident to him. In its duplicitous structure and narration, Murder Isn’t
Easy offers an amusing synthesis of the psychological thriller and the virtuoso
whodunit.
Here and in other hybrid plots, block construction facilitates both mystery
and suspense because the segments can leave gaps in time or motive that will
need filling later. Anne Meredith’s Portrait of a Murderer (1934) is built of seven
sections attached to various members of a rich, vastly unpleasant family. The
first block reports the patriarch’s death and the reactions of his kin. In the
second, one son abruptly provides a first-person account of how he murdered
the patriarch. Later sections employ third person, shifting-spotlight narration
to show the killer’s efforts to frame an odious in-law. Only after the crime is
exposed do we learn the circumstances of the killer’s confession. Another book
would have maximized mystery and presented the confession as the solution,
but here the emphasis falls, Crofts fashion, on whether the schemer’s plan will
succeed—and why his crime is presented to us in his own words.
 Before the Fact 167

“I am going to kill a man. I don’t know his name. I don’t know where he lives.
I have no idea what he looks like. But I am going to find him and kill him.” The
first lines of Nicholas Blake’s The Beast Must Die (1938) thrust us into the world
of the psychological thriller. Yet the blunt confession gives way to a pirouette
typical of Golden Age artifice. “You must pardon this melodramatic opening,
gentle reader. It sounds just like a first sentence out of one of my own detective
novels, doesn’t it?”26
The keynote is set. The novel’s first block consists of the diary of a man
whose son has been killed in a hit-and-run accident. In emotionally wrenching
detail, he tells of turning grief into a vendetta. He plays detective and dis-
covers the driver’s identity. Frankly confessing his qualms and self-loathing,
he furthers his scheme by manipulating the killer’s mistress and young son. The
suspense of this section, however, is shot through with allusions to literature
(notably Hamlet and Macbeth), as well as clever remarks on detective-story
plotting. The writer, using his literary pseudonym Felix Lane, acknowledges
genre conventions, mocks literary clichés, and considers that his story might
suit John Dickson Carr or Anthony Berkeley. This is to be no less a literary
performance than any other Golden Age novel.
In good thriller fashion, the second segment of The Beast Must Die dra-
matizes the naked confrontation between Felix Lane and Rafferty, the mon-
strously unredeemable killer. Lane has lured him out in a sailboat with the
aim of drowning him, but Rafferty has a countervailing threat. This block is
narrated in third person, shifting the viewpoint rapidly between the two men.
Unlike Forester’s transparent omniscience in Plain Murder, this novel displays
the venerated literary technique as but one tool in the kit.

The positions were now reversed. Felix was in a state of pitiable nerves, fidget-
ing no longer, but his whole body rigid with misery: George had regained his
jocular tongue, his self-confident, supercilious, brutal attitude; or so it would
have seemed to one of those ubiquitous, omniscient observers of Thomas
Hardy, if such a one had been a third party in this bizarre voyage.27

Felix is defeated. Rafferty gloats and clambers onshore. The book is half over.
What next?
Enter Blake’s series detective Nigel Strangeways, the center of two more
blocks and an epilogue. In the gap between parts two and three, Rafferty has
swallowed poisoned medicine. Felix’s diary is discovered, making him the
prime suspect. Nigel attempts to defend Felix and find the real killer. His seg-
ments are dominated by his third-person perspective, but there are glimpses
into the minds of Felix and Nigel’s wife Georgia.28
Nigel is a model Golden Age figure, a genial snob given to quoting poetry
and, like Philip Trent and Roger Sheringham, fallible. As the gifted amateur
 168 PA RT I I

with upper-crust connections, he has license to tag along with Inspector Blount
on rounds of questioning. He offers the obligatory allusion when he warns his
wife Georgia that Rafferty’s mother is behaving like “the sort of frightfully high
red-herring that any detective-writer might draw across the trail,” adding that if
he were a detective in a book, he’d pick a different suspect than Felix.29 Despite
his belief that psychological analysis is his forte, Nigel relies on physical clues
such as a medicine bottle, on intuitions about what certain people are like, and
on serendipitous “half-memories” to jolt his inspirations. He duly produces a
false solution, and Blount tops him with an equally wrong answer (one that
the reader has probably considered). Eventually Nigel solves the case through a
close reading of Felix’s diary.
That solution accords with tradition by yielding the least likely culprit. But
Blake invests that revelation with a sense of waste and sorrow that wouldn’t
be there without the thriller-driven intimacy of the first part. The diary at
once supplies a cascade of unobtrusive clues and an emotional charge that
propels the routines of ratiocination. In Claude Chabrol and Paul Gégauff ’s
film adaptation (Que la bête meure, 1969), they dropped Strangeways alto-
gether and produced a tighter, purer psychological thriller. They thereby
eliminated the novel’s effort to corrode the image of the breezy, pedantic
Golden Age sleuth.30 Nigel’s whimsical insouciance at the beginning of part
three is chastened by his discoveries, and at the close of part four, he has
sunk into melancholy in response to what he calls in an epilogue “my most
unhappy case.”31
Whether satirical as in Murder Isn’t Easy, puzzling as in Portrait of a Mur-
derer, or somber as in The Beast Must Die, embedded first-person accounts
show that the suspense of a thriller could merge with the curiosity and surprise
propelling the straight investigation plot. Movie thrillers from the 1910s had
often intercut crook and cop, a strategy taken to bold extremes in Fritz Lang’s
Spione (1928) and M (1931). But such films seldom harbored deep puzzles. In
the 1930s, the juxtaposition of the crime’s hidden history with the ongoing
investigation became a live option for more or less pure whodunits.
From the 1940s onward, detective novelists grew comfortable with incor-
porating scenes from the criminal’s side of things. Ed McBain, Charles Will-
eford, Laura Lippman, and many other writers would habitually alternate the
viewpoints of police and culprit. Domestic thrillers of the 2010s would freely
multiply women’s voices, from both the present and the past. Usually these
tales violate Knox’s rule against entering the killer’s consciousness, but writ-
ers realized that there were still opportunities for switcheroos. Although the
novelist may widen the range of viewpoints, the disparate blocks harbor gaps,
ambiguities, and deceptions that sustain a puzzle. The hybrid whodunits of
the 1930s laid out a strategy that would pervade mystery storytelling in the
decades to come.
 Before the Fact 169

Protagonist as Culprit and Victim

Apart from adapting Freeman’s inverted strategy, the authors of hybrid stories
were responding to a sophisticated revival of the pure psychological thriller,
the plot concentrating on what Christie called a crime “in the course of prepa-
ration.” Anthony Berkeley Cox, founder of the Detection Club and a devout
believer in the puzzle form, had produced the bravura Poisoned Chocolates
Case. But he also had felt the need for a deeper psychology in explaining
literary homicide. Under the pseudonym Francis Iles, he published Malice
Aforethought: The Story of a Commonplace Crime (1931) and Before the Fact
(1932). They proved to be powerful models for tales of murder told completely
from the inside.
Malice Aforethought traces how philandering Dr. Edmund Bickleigh poisons
his domineering wife. In easy stages, he slips from the idea of murder to the
careful weighing of lethal means and the painstaking execution of the scheme.
Encouraged by his success, Bickleigh goes on to conceive of killing a would-be
mistress, a threatening husband, and other people who annoy him. But his
rational planning is accompanied by mood swings, as serene overconfidence
is swept away by pangs of uncertainty. Bickleigh muses that perhaps he has
turned to crime out of an inferiority complex, but soon he’s chortling over the
ease with which his superior intellect fools everyone.
The third-person narration restricts us almost completely to Dr. Bickleigh’s
mind, and we are nearly as surprised as he is when the police spring a trap.
(Granted, the ironic narration makes us a bit more cautious than Bickleigh is.)
The one major divergence from his range of knowledge comes at the book’s
midpoint, when an afternoon tea brings forth gossip that will lead to his second
wave of homicidal enterprise. This skillful chapter recapitulates events of the
year following his wife’s death and structurally balances another expository
node, the book’s opening tennis party scene.
That party and the ladies’ tea fully expose Iles’s satiric take on suburbia. One
guest’s “solid flesh did look as if it was doing its best to melt.” Miss Peavy is so
upset that she blurts out something “mostly in italics.” A mischievous young
woman provokes Bickleigh to annoyance. “Quarnian hugged herself. She was
far too much of an artist to overdo her effects.”32 Informationally the narration
confines itself to Bickleigh, but judgmentally it offers sardonic observations on
human nature and the byways of desire. The narration’s ironic murmur primes
us for the twists of fate that Bickleigh fails to foresee.
Like Malice Aforethought, Iles’s companion novel, Before the Fact, traces a
story that begins long before the investigation. Now, however, our perspective
isn’t that of an aspiring killer. “Some women give birth to murderers, some go
to bed with them, and some marry them. Lina Aysgarth had lived with her hus-
band for nearly eight years before she realized she was married to a murderer.”33
 170 PA RT I I

At the time, this opening must have been doubly shocking—the prospect of a
homicidal spouse and the offhand reference to copulation. Just as startling, the
narration admits at the outset what Gothic romances only teased, the prospect
that the bride’s enigmatic partner is lethal. No puzzle here, the narration insists,
only suspense. Will the bystander become a victim?
She will, but by small degrees. The plain but intelligent Lina is swept off her
feet by the charming sociopath Johnnie Aysgarth. Trailing a bad-boy reputa-
tion, he showers her with the praise neither her family nor other men have
offered. After their marriage, she learns little by little that he’s a rotter. He lies,
gambles, embezzles, steals from her and others, seduces women, fathers a child
by a servant, and stages the death of Lina’s father. All the while he convinces
everyone that he’s the most affable and generous man in town. Eventually John-
nie kills a dim, rich friend.
The book’s debt to Golden Age mysteries shows up in the inclusion of a
minor character, a mystery novelist whom Johnnie cultivates. Iles brazenly lets
the novelist discover that forbidden whodunit cliché, the poison that leaves no
trace. Johnnie learns about it, and he administers it to Lina.
Before the Fact traces Lina’s anxieties with almost Jamesian finesse. As she
learns little by little of Johnnie’s crimes, she wavers between condemnation and
acceptance, shock and rationalization. The recurring metaphor of the naughty
schoolboy makes him “Johnnie, her child,” the son she must protect. Without
his knowing, she becomes an accomplice, destroying evidence and supporting
his lies. She fears being alone and unloved, and she starts to share his convic-
tion that the deaths he leaves in his wake aren’t really murder. She catches a
passive version of his psychopathology.
Only by such fastidious preparation could a novel convince the reader that a
wife could let the scoundrel she adores serve her poisoned milk. Iles shrewdly
gives Lina a chance to save her dignity through self-dramatization. When she
realizes she’s next on Johnnie’s list, she takes up a literary role. “As tea went on,
Lina had an odd sensation that she was living a play. It was the middle of the
second act. The audience knew that at the end of the third act she was to be
killed, to bring down the curtain; she did not know it. She was to sparkle gaily
and nonchalantly right up to the end. Unconsciously she found herself acting
up to this nonexistent audience.”34 This burst of Golden Age reflexivity echoes
the book’s opening and acknowledges our position as readers. For the first 250
pages, we have watched an unwitting Lina arrive at the fate we knew from the
start. At last the enabler prepares to play the innocent victim.
To the end, she does sometimes consider choosing to live. After all, if
she dies, who will cover Johnnie’s further crimes? Yet when she realizes he
is determined to poison her, she proceeds to smooth his path by feigning
illness and faking a suicide note. She becomes an accessory before the fact
to her own death. She even mentally thanks Johnnie for freeing her of the
 Before the Fact 171

responsibility of protecting him. If murderers are made, she reflects at one

point, so are victims.
Malice Aforethought and Before the Fact became prototypes of the domes-
tic psychological thriller. They demonstrated how drama could grow out of
festering motives, middle-class frustration, and the dawning realization
that loved ones can’t be trusted. The Golden Age detective story, with its
least-likely-suspect convention, had relied on the idea that anyone could be a
murderer, but the domestic thriller developed this idea in depth. The theme was
doubtless accelerated by notorious murders committed by solid citizens such as
Dr. H. H. Crippen, Loeb and Leopold, and baby-faced Sidney Fox. These fic-
tions replaced the Napoleonic crimes of sensation thrillers with a sense that
humdrum life harbored lethal passions.

Raskolnikov’s Brothers

Iles’s two books demonstrated the strength of rigorously restricted viewpoint,

either that of the criminal or that of the victim to be. The first option had been
traditionally fulfilled by male protagonists, as in James Hogg’s Private Memoirs
and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), and Poe’s short stories “The Pit and
the Pendulum” (1842), “The Black Cat” (1843), “The Tell-Tale Heart (1843), and
“The Cask of Amontillado” (1846). Although Crime and Punishment (1866)
did not adhere to a single character’s viewpoint, Dostoevksy considered the
possibility: “Another plan: Narration from the author’s point of view, as if by
an invisible but omniscient being, but not leaving him [Raskolnikov] even for
a minute.”35 Later, Roy Horniman’s Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Crim-
inal (1907) presented a marginal heir trying to secure a legacy by purging his
family rivals. (It became the 1949 film Kind Hearts and Coronets.) Ostrander’s
1919 Ashes to Ashes continued in this vein of depicting the desperation of the
aspiring gentleman.
Iles’s witty social observation and the evocation of his protagonist’s mixture
of apprehension and bravado made Malice Aforethought distinctive. The book
signaled a renaissance in English novels exploring the mind of a man bent on
murder: Richard Hull’s The Murder of My Aunt (1934), Henry Wade’s Heir Pre-
sumptive (1935), Winifred Duke’s Skin for Skin (1935), Bruce Hamilton’s Middle
Class Murder (1936), and James Ronald’s This Way Out (1939). On the West End
stage, Rope had shown how to sustain a drama of drawing room criminality.
Theater pieces in this vein continued with the adaptation of Payment Deferred
(1932), Ten-Minute Alibi (1933), Without Witness (1934), Night Must Fall (1935),
The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse (1936), Poison Pen (1937), The Suspect (1937),
the Rope-derived Trunk Crime (aka The Last Straw, 1937), and a rare case of
a female killer, Ladies in Retirement (1939). Some of these made their way to
 172 PA RT I I

Broadway, along with homegrown exercises such as Riddle Me This! (1932) and
Nine Pine Street (1933), based on the Lizzie Borden case.
Murderous protagonists emerged in American fiction as well. Although
James M. Cain’s stories are stylistically affiliated with the hard-boiled school, in
plot and narration they are brawny working-class counterparts of the genteel
British thrillers. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), Double Indemnity
(1936), and “The Embezzler” (aka “Money and the Woman,” 1938) follow the
thoughts of losers who launch impulsive murder schemes. The less well-known
Don Tracy offered tales of men drawn into robbery and murder (Criss-Cross,
1934) or a lethal erotic triangle (White Hell, 1937). T. S. Matthews’s To the Gal-
lows I Must Go (1931) looked forward to Cain in presenting a woman enticing
a man to kill her husband. Elisabeth Sanxay Holding’s novel Death Wish (1934)
focused, in a Patricia Highsmith vein, on a man who decides to kill his wife
after realizing that a friend has dared to kill his.
In the criminal-centered psychological thriller, the protagonist is put under
pressure by money troubles, overbearing bosses or colleagues, a disagreeable
wife or blood relative, or lust for a woman. Murder arises as the most swift and
effective way out. The bulk of the action consists of the character’s plans, his
execution of them, and his reactions to threatening situations. In most stories,
the psychological development plays out as a series of anticipations and mem-
ories. The protagonist imagines best and worst outcomes, and he must react to
new circumstances that put him in jeopardy.
The plot traces a conventional zigzag of emotions, from the heights of confi-
dence to the pits of terror. That emotional swing between fear and elation, and
the sense of superiority that comes with it, can be found in the prototypical
murder tale Crime and Punishment. While justifying murder as the province
of the superior mind, Raskolnikov is prey to the constant panic of being found
out. Dr Bickleigh’s elation at fooling his stupid neighbors, followed by his fear at
having blundered, is a bourgeois successor to Raskolnikov’s reactions.
In Elizabeth Sanxay Holding’s The Unfinished Crime (1935), the protago-
nist is filled with “an immense exultation. . . . He could and he would escape
from the bread-and-butter life.” Suddenly, on the same page he learns that his
scheme has faltered.

“This is the end,” he said to himself.

The end of all his plans, all his intelligence, the end of his one brief moment
of life. Despair was on him, and he was mortally stricken.

Two pages later hope is rekindled: “He had been strong and resourceful before;
he had met each danger as it came, and had triumphed. If he kept his head,
perhaps he could triumph even now.”36 Suspense in the psychological thriller
depends in part on the reader anticipating the protagonist’s reaction to the
 Before the Fact 173

inevitable mishaps that spoil his plan. The emotional ups and downs heighten
the stakes of his next decision.
This inner oscillation is easier to present in prose than on stage, unless the
playwright is ready to employ soliloquy. Patrick Hamilton found an ingenious
solution in Rope by splitting his protagonist in two. The swaggering Brandon
is supremely confident: having committed “immaculate murder,” he tells his
partner Granillo that he feels “truly and wonderfully alive.”37 But Granillo is
fearful and apprehensive. He gets drunk in the course of their party and is at
risk of exposing them. He externalizes the apprehensions that beset the divided
protagonist of other thrillers.
Carrying out a murder may take on an aesthetic tint, and more refined kill-
ers may invoke de Quincy’s “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.”
Israel Rank deplores the inartistic blunders that undo his schemes. The Unfin-
ished Crime’s protagonist imagines himself a Renaissance prince, “a man who
combined in himself a love of the arts, scholarship, and a capacity for swift
ruthless action.”38 The husband of The House by the River chronicles his crime
in an allegorical poem, and the culprit of Portrait of a Murderer immortalizes
the deed in a painting. Rope’s Brandon is in this dandyish vein, with Nietzs-
chean morality as another reference point. The narration makes the killer’s
moments of panic plausible responses to the tightening net, but we know that
the visions of superiority are mere fantasies. Like Raskolnikov, the killer is
bound to fail.39 The interest lies in how.
The plot will center largely on the criminal’s viewpoint, and in literary texts
the writer must choose how to treat that restriction. Third-person narration
offers the flexibility of straying occasionally to other viewpoints, a shift that
can build suspense by playing off degrees of ignorance and knowledge. An
external narrating voice also affords the chance for the dry comedy Iles, Hare,
and others enjoy wringing out of provincialism and class friction. Duke’s Skin
for Skin develops a more poignant vein. The narration shifts the spotlight
between the murdering husband and the neighbors who gossip about him.
When he escapes justice and tries to resume his old life, they spurn him and
make him regret his crime.
Alternatively, most first-person thrillers limit us to one narrating voice and
justify that as coming from diaries, letters, or testimony. Cain believed that
such motivation was necessary.40 The ending of The Postman Always Rings
Twice reveals that it’s a prison confession, and Double Indemnity is motivated
by a long suicide note. Not for some years would mystery writers emancipate
their character-narrators and simply let them speak outside of a storytelling
situation. An early example is Martin Goldsmith’s Detour (1939), which centers
on a hitchhiker on his way to meet his former girlfriend. He winds up faking
his own death and killing a woman who threatens to expose him. First-person
chapters from his viewpoint alternate with chapters recounted by his girlfriend,
 174 PA RT I I

who is clawing her way to success in Hollywood, and neither narrator explains
what has led them to tell their tales.
Detour, like the British thrillers, freely fills in the main characters’ psycho-
logical reactions, but Cain suppresses them. The Postman Always Rings Twice is
almost completely behavioral and objective in presenting Frank Chambers and
Cora Papadakis’s plot to kill her husband. Frank’s narration dwells on externals
of description and reported conversation. No inner debates about plans and
executions, no signs of caution or remorse disturb his staccato prose. But when
Frank finally senses the danger he’s in, he intermittently reveals a mind. He has
bad dreams, and he admits to suspicions that couldn’t be expressed in behavior.
“I was afraid if she got sore at me for something, she’d go off her nut and spill it
like she had that other time, after the arraignment. I didn’t trust her for a min-
ute.”41 Cain’s novels were called “doom stories,” and here the protagonist seems
to gain introspection only after his unthinking scheme has put him on the path
to disaster.

The Road to Manderley

Most criminal-viewpoint plots relied on male protagonists, but victim plots

were likely to center on women. Again there were distant precedents. The
Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and Jane Eyre (1847) were classics of romantic and
sensation fiction, and Mary Roberts Rinehart revived some of those Gothic con-
ventions while blending them with detection plots. The result, focused around
a woman’s viewpoint, carried more emotional punch than traditional puzzles. A
mystery would still propel the action, but investigation becomes part of a larger
dynamic of predator and prey. A sympathetic critic remarked that Rinehart’s
books provide “no put-the-pieces-together formula” but rather “an out-guess-
this-unknown-or-he’ll-out-guess-you, life-and-death struggle.”42
That the heroine will come through it safely is usually taken for granted. Rine-
hart begins The Circular Staircase with her protagonist writing this: “When I
look back over the months I spent at Sunnyside, I wonder that I survived at all.”43
This genre was sometimes mockingly called the “Had I But Known” (HIBK)
school because that phrase seemed to justify the risks the heroine unwittingly
takes: Had she known what awaited her, she wouldn’t have crept up to the attic.
Critics implied that these tales of inquisitive women have found their natural
audience. Decades later the misogyny was still there. “These are the first crime
stories which have the air of being written specifically for maiden aunts.”44
But the HIBK label captures something else. It suggests that these novels,
unlike most male-centered plots, have a retrospective air. The narration is often
looking back on a harrowing adventure from a superior point of knowledge.
When the protagonist isn’t narrating in the first person, these passages present
 Before the Fact 175

classic novelistic omniscience. “She did not know, then, that no power on
earth could have prevented her own entanglement with the murders at 18 East
Eden.”45
What eventually became known as “romantic suspense” was the most lucra-
tive mystery market in the United States. Slick magazines paid high fees for
stories of women in jeopardy. Rinehart’s chief rival, Mignon G. Eberhart, was
paid $2,500 for a novelette she sold to Redbook and $7,500 for a serial novel for
Ladies’ Home Journal. By 1939, her serials were garnering $15,000 each (over a
quarter of a million dollars in 2020 currency).46 Before the Fact and other pres-
tigious thrillers were in synchronization with this trend, but they—and, indeed,
mysteries in other genres—did not reap these rewards.
That popularity may have provided envious critics and whodunit writers
with additional reasons to dismiss the genre as HIBK frivolity. But the plot
schema proved robust. Stage versions of the woman-in-peril premise appeared
in London with The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1935), Love from a Stranger (1936), and
another Patrick Hamilton triumph, Gas Light (aka Angel Street, 1938). Broad-
way didn’t lag behind, importing such hits while adding Double Door (1933, an
anticipation of Rebecca), Invitation to a Murder (1934), and Kind Lady (1935).
Many of these plays were made into films.
A criminal-centered thriller often starts with the murderer already schem-
ing, but the victim-centered plot may take some time to make the protagonist
the target. Often she begins as a more or less innocent bystander. Lina Aysgarth
in Before the Fact doesn’t become Johnnie’s target until late in the novel. The
reader knows what she has yet to discover. Suspense arises from watching her
suspicions crystallize slowly, and then from wondering whether she will accept
the role of victim.
Alternatively, the protagonist’s involvement in an initial mystery may draw
her into jeopardy. Nan Bayne, the heroine of Eberhart’s The Pattern (1937),
is suspected of helping her former fiancé kill his wife. A police detective will
eventually solve the mystery and exonerate them, but the narration is attached
almost completely to Nan. She begins to receive mysterious phone calls. An
intruder escapes with her purse. Poisonous spiders scuttle around her house. At
the climax, the police wait in ambush elsewhere while she confronts the killer
on the beach. Like Belloc Lowndes in The Lodger, Eberhart turns a murder
puzzle into a suspense thriller by presenting an investigation from the stand-
point of a vulnerable bystander.
The purest woman-in-peril plots relied on the threat in Before the Fact: a
homicidal husband or lover. But most authors shrank from the harshness of
Iles’s climax and found ways to let the endangered wife escape. This was the
option taken by two British plays. In Martin Vale’s The Two Mrs. Carrolls, a
woman learns that her husband has been poisoning her, and she is saved at the
last minute by friends. Frank Vosper’s Love from a Stranger, adapted from an
 176 PA RT I I

Agatha Christie story, provided a more violent denouement. A woman trapped

with a murderous husband turns the tables by asserting that she is a murder-
ess who is trying to kill him. He collapses from a heart attack, and her former
fiancé arrives in time to console her. The rescuer is an underdeveloped version
of what film historian Diane Waldman has called the “helper male,” a figure
who assists the threatened woman in escaping a dangerous husband and who
can become a new romantic partner.47
The most famous example of a wife saved from a menacing husband came
in the play Gas Light. Jack Manningham has killed an old woman for her rare
rubies, but he has been unable to find them. Now, thanks to marrying well,
he has moved into the house and spends his nights searching for the jewels.
At the same time, he is systematically leading his wife Bella into believing she’s
delusional. Once he finds the rubies, he’ll commit her to a madhouse. But
Detective Rough has recognized Jack from years before and, with the help of a
dazed Bella, finds the gems and arrests Jack.
Early portions of the play restrict our knowledge to Bella’s, but she is off-
stage at some key moments, such as when Rough confronts Jack. The peak of
suspense arrives when her behavior makes us think that she has succumbed
to Jack’s plot. With Jack lashed to a chair and Rough allowing Bella to speak to
Jack in private, she at first tries to help him escape—proof that, despite every-
thing, she thinks he had her best interests at heart. But in fetching a razor to
cut him free, she finds a missing grocery bill, one of many items he concealed
to make her think she was losing her mind. She becomes bitter and taunting.
“If I were not mad I could have helped you—if I were not mad, whatever you
had done, I could have pitied and protected you! But because I am mad I have
hated you, and because I am mad I am rejoicing in my heart—without a shred
of pity—without a shred of regret—watching you go with glory in my heart!”48
The scene is a tour de force, giving the performer a chance to play a woman on
the edge of hysteria who can still grasp what her husband has done to her. Gas
Light’s helper male, the avuncular Rough, will not become Bella’s love interest,
but that role was filled when the play became an MGM film in 1944.
As domestic thrillers proliferated, variations naturally appeared. The woman
in peril might be presented from the viewpoint of her male partner, as in
Eberhart’s The White Cockatoo (1933). Authors began to explore unreliable nar-
rators, finding ways to incorporate mystery elements that could generate twists.
In Anita Boutell’s Death Has a Past (1939), several women are gathered at a
weeklong party. Their daily doings are intercut with blocks from a later, cryptic
confession that starts with the killing of one guest—but which one? The confes-
sion’s provenance and trustworthiness are put in question. It looks forward to
the unsourced voices that ripple through domestic thrillers of the 2010s.
In film, thriller conventions were invoked in the peculiar Poverty Row
production The Sin of Nora Moran (1933). But they were secondary to a
 Before the Fact 177

hallucinatory shuffling of narrative perspectives. In the present, a district attor-

ney is explaining to a friend’s widow the circumstances of the affair she dis-
covered in old love letters. Within his narrated flashbacks, we are taken first
into the memory and dreams of Nora, on Death Row for murdering someone.
(Who?) The film slides unpredictably between three time periods, with sus-
piciously neat visual linkages disguising disruptive switches of viewpoint. At
one point, Nora wakes up just before her execution to find her old friend from
circus days at her bedside, assuring her that she’s still dreaming.
Once we leave Nora’s mind, we learn of another letter, one written by her
lover Richard. Those sequences plunge us into his memories and hallucina-
tions, including a replay of their breakup, culminating in a posthumous visit
from her (fig. 5.1). At various moments in both Nora’s and Richard’s scenes,
there’s the suggestion that everything we witness might consist of her imag-
inary rewritings of what really happened to the couple. The elemental situ-
ation of the wrongly accused woman barely holds together stock footage,
overwrought montage sequences, and wandering voice-overs. The Sin of Nora
Moran inadvertently proved that nonlinear narrative techniques had made a
mark on American cinema.
At the other end of the prestige scale was Daphne du Maurier’s carefully
upholstered novel Rebecca (1938). Recounted by its unnamed protagonist, it
offered a mournful revision of Gothic conventions. At the beginning of the
book, Maxim de Winter and his second wife are quietly unhappy in a Medi-
terranean hotel, making the genre’s retrospective view unusually rueful. They
share a secret that the bulk of the book, in a long flashback, will expose. We
know that the protagonist will survive, but what took the joy out of their mar-
riage? The dead Rebecca, of course, whose memory is maintained with impla-
cable determination by the housekeeper Mrs. Danvers. The early stretches of

5.1 The Sin of Nora Moran (1933): Although Nora has

been executed, her apparition visits the man whose
career she saved.
 178 PA RT I I

the book emphasize the anxiety of class embarrassment as the new wife fum-
bles her efforts to fit into the household.
Initially, the second Mrs. de Winter is frightened less by her moody husband
Maxim than by Mrs. Danvers and all the neighbors and kin, for whom Rebecca
was the epitome of “breeding, brains, and beauty.”49 Slowly the conventional
pressures of an investigation plot build. The new wife questions servants and
neighbors about Rebecca’s life and the circumstances of her drowning. She
learns of gossip surrounding Rebecca’s relationship with her cousin Jack Favell.
After tricking the protagonist into disgracing herself before Maxim, Mrs. Dan-
vers urges her to suicide. What prevents this, and heals the breach in the cou-
ple, is the revelation that Rebecca’s body has been found in her sunken boat.
The last third of the novel is devoted to working out crime and punishment—a
criminal-centered plot grafted onto a victim-centered one. As victims tend to
do, the protagonist discovers the strength to survive.
“A Gothic is a story about a girl who gets a house.”50 Donald Westlake’s
observation holds good for many thrillers centered on vulnerable women,
and Rebecca made the lush estate of Manderley practically a character. The
novel, twice as long as the typical mystery, gained prestige in an era com-
mitted to doorstop volumes (Anthony Adverse, The Citadel, Gone with the
Wind). Du Maurier fills her canvas with minute descriptions of the manor’s
grounds, routines, cuisine, and social chitchat, all filtered through the ill-
at-ease new wife. The plot works out topographically, with Manderley radi-
ating grimness but also harboring Happy Valley, where azaleas flourish and
a path runs to the sea. The cottage where Rebecca entertained her lovers is
left to fill with dust, mold, and rats. Maxim tries to start a new life in the
house’s east wing, but Mrs. Danvers preserves Rebecca’s elegant west wing
as a perpetual shrine.
The protagonist longs to bestow that timelessness on the best moments of
her marriage. Her narration often fills in scenes with alternative futures, fanta-
sies of the children she would like to have, or reconstructions of how Rebecca
must have settled herself gracefully in the chairs that feel so awkward to a new-
comer. She can even imagine Maxim’s remembering the details of his wife’s
behavior. Like Lina in Before the Fact, she can envision herself as a character in
a play, masking her inadequacies with rote lines. By quietly fleshing out every
moment to suggest happiness or peril, echoes of earlier scenes and inferences
about others’ thoughts, the new wife’s narration yields the psychological density
sought by Golden Age writers.
For example, when the narrator curls up with Maxim under the chestnut
tree, her satisfaction is undercut by a comparison to the family dog:

I listened to them both, leaning against Maxim’s arm, rubbing my chin on his
sleeve. He stroked my hand absently, not thinking, talking to Beatrice.
 Before the Fact 179

“That’s what I do to Jasper,” I thought. “I’m being like Jasper now, leaning
against him. He pats me now and again, when he remembers, and I’m pleased.
I get closer to him for a moment. He likes me the way I like Jasper.”51

Her hunger for Maxim’s affection is mixed with her awareness that he feels
himself her master. Is this not a man who, if goaded by a woman, would lose his
temper and harm her? The menacing opacity of the powerful male, a premise of
the domestic thriller, is treated in understated strokes that evoke our sympathy
for the wife and our apprehensions about the husband.
The interiority of the HIBK school finds elaborate expression in the narrator’s
long inner monologues, with a dash of stream of consciousness. “He had followed
me up from the hall. Why did dogs make one want to cry? There was something
so quiet and hopeless about their sympathy. Jasper, knowing something was
wrong as dogs always do. Trunks being packed. Cars being brought to the door.
Dogs standing with drooping tails, dejected eyes. Wandering back to their
baskets in the hall when the sound of the car dies away.”52 A conventional
thriller would have simply reported Jasper’s nuzzling the heroine’s hand,
neglecting the continuing parallel between her and Maxim’s pet, but this book
aims at the emotional breadth of serious literature. As a bonus, the passage
prolongs the suspense.
No mystery novel since The Hound of the Baskervilles attained the cultural
status accorded Rebecca. It was the best-selling mystery of its day, and the film
version, despite drastic alterations, became a classic. Kept continuously in print,
the book routinely turns up on lists of best novels of the twentieth century, and
it has been scrutinized by academic critics for its gender politics and its debts
to sensation fiction. In its moment and thereafter, it showed that the modern
psychological thriller could, by recasting Gothic conventions, satisfy a broad
public and attain enduring literary distinction.

Letters of the Film Alphabet

If the investigation plot depends principally on curiosity—about past events,

about what clues mean, about motives and identities—the thriller depends heavily
on suspense. Of course, even the pure whodunit generates some general suspense
by virtue of asking what may happen next. But a puzzle plot lacks the element of
danger that is usually associated with a thriller. An impending threat, sensed by
either us or a character or both, shapes the fear that is central to suspense.
Perhaps for this reason the puzzle-centered plot seldom transferred well
to film and theater. Alfred Hitchcock pointed out that a thriller summons
up greater engagement from the audience than one finds in a whodunit. The
viewer will “participate” strongly in the action, Hitchcock believed, when “some
 180 PA RT I I

character who has the audience’s sympathy is involved in danger.”53 A play-

wright or filmmaker working in popular forms will often want the audience to
be passionately absorbed in the unfolding action—something that thrillers are
well-designed to trigger.
Another factor was hinted at by Dorothy Sayers. “In the thriller, our cry
is ‘What comes next?’—in the detective story, ‘What came first?’ ”54 The puz-
zle plot demands a good memory or a willingness to pause and reflect on
the implications of the clues and testimony. A challenge to the reader or the
detective’s cryptic allusions to overlooked details could impel a search through
earlier pages, even if few readers tried. But a play or a film doesn’t allow the
audience to stop or go back, so a pure puzzle on stage or screen would demand
a level of concentration that was uncommon in audiences. Again, Hitchcock
noticed this difference.55 And in the 1920s and 1930s, filmgoers could drop in
at a screening partway through, a practice that would ruin clue-dropping and
clever misdirection.
The distinction between the genres isn’t absolute. Detective stories can inte-
grate the emotional appeals of sympathy or comedy, as we’ve seen. And often a
thriller will proffer some mysteries, even one as trivial as the Hitchcock Mac-
Guffin, a puzzling pretext that launches the plot. It’s just that in the psycholog-
ical thriller the suspense arising from an impending threat will dominate the
plot development. “Curiosity, combined with emotional tension”: this, pro-
posed Val Gielgud, yields “a tremendous suspense quality.”56
In 1930s Hollywood, a Great Detective was likely to have a film series:
Charlie Chan, Mr. Moto, Sherlock Holmes, Philo Vance, Ellery Queen, and
others. Yet the pure puzzle didn’t find a comfortable niche in mainstream
filmmaking. Most U.S. detective films of the period were B-level products,
not top-budget features. Just as important, these films often introduced
an element of danger into the investigation. The films created suspense by
showing vaguely defined threats—groping hands, shadowy figures, infernal
machines—that took the detective as a target (fig. 5.2). A puzzle resolved by
exciting action, 1930s detective films often followed the hallowed tradition in
which reasoning gave way to adventure.
Pure thrillers enjoyed a significantly higher status. Stage hits were adapted
into films such as Payment Deferred (1932), Guilty as Hell (1932), Kind Lady
(1935), Night Must Fall (1937), and Love from a Stranger (1937), and these films
featured major stars such as Charles Laughton, Robert Montgomery, and Basil
Rathbone. In the 1940s, the psychological thriller would become a major genre
of American and British films, novels, theater, and radio.
The genre didn’t acquire the rich theoretical literature lavished on the detec-
tive story, but some reflections on stage dramaturgy proved relevant. Writers on
the theater had long recognized the power of the hierarchy of knowledge, the
disparity between what the audience knows and what the various characters
 Before the Fact 181

5.2 Mr. Moto’s Gamble (1938): Suspense within the

investigation plot: the detective in danger.

know. This is a matter of restricted versus unrestricted narration. Long ago, the
playwright Gotthold Ephriam Lessing had noted that a dramatist should not
rely too much on surprise. “By means of secrecy a poet effects a short surprise,
but in what enduring disquietude could he have maintained us if he had made
no secret about it!” An artist can create a “short surprise” by concealing infor-
mation, but a greater range of knowledge can become “the source of the most
violent emotions.”57
What Lessing calls enduring disquietude is usually called suspense. The
distinction between surprise and suspense recurs throughout writings on the
theater. In the 1910s, Brander Matthews, William Archer, George Pierce Baker,
and other theorists emphasized the duality. Playwrights had already realized
the relative power of each option, along with the possibilities of alternating
swiftly between them. In 1881, Matthews praised Hugo’s play Cromwell:

There is the familiar use of moments of surprise and suspense, and of stage-
effects appealing to the eye and the ear. In the first act Richard Cromwell drops
into the midst of the conspirators against his father,—surprise; he accuses
them of treachery in drinking without him,—suspense; suddenly a trumpet
sounds, and a crier orders open the doors of the tavern where all are sitting,—
suspense again; when the doors are flung wide, we see the populace and a
company of soldiers, and the criers on horseback, who reads a proclamation
of a general fast, and commands the closing of all taverns,—surprise again. A
somewhat similar scene of succeeding suspense and surprise is to be found in
the fourth act.58

The British theater doyen Henry Edwards applied the comparison to cinema.
In a 1920 article, he argues that suspense depends on the dread that something
 182 PA RT I I

awful will happen to the characters. “We must show the audience these dan-
gers, and keep our characters ignorant of them until the proper moment; and
it is the nearing of the danger to the blissfully ignorant character, making us
long to cry out and warn him, that give suspense.” Edwards’s example is a man
smoking in a shed and suddenly realizing that his match has ignited dynamite.
Alternatively, imagine that we’ve seen workers set down a box of dynamite
before he arrives. Now every gesture he makes prolongs the tension: Will he
be blown up? Edwards concludes his piece: “The letters of the film alphabet are
s-u-s-p-e-n-s-e.”59
Hitchcock popularized the surprise/suspense distinction. A 1939 lecture
recommended “letting the audience into the secret as early as possible. Lay
all the facts out, as much as you can, unless you are dealing with a mys-
tery element.” He claimed to have recast the plot of Jamaica Inn (1939) so
that “it became a suspense story instead of a surprise story.”60 He elaborated
these ideas throughout his career. Very likely he knew Edwards’s dynamite
example; his own version was his famous parable of the bomb under the
table. If you haven’t told the viewer that the bomb is there, you will get short-
term surprise. If you show the bomb, every gesture or line of dialogue builds
tension. “The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: ‘You
shouldn’t be talking about such trivial matters. There’s a bomb beneath you
and it’s about to explode!’ ”61
Surprise is usually the result of restricting our knowledge to a single
character. In literary thrillers, that can be achieved through first-person nar-
ration or third-person attachment. In other media, consistent attachment suf-
fices. Anyone who thinks that Hitchcock abstained from surprise has forgotten
one of the most striking shots in his work (fig. 5.3).62 Tightly restricted narra-
tion can yield suspense as well, such as when a car ignition fails to start and

5.3 The 39 Steps (1935): The professor’s incomplete

pinky finger reveals that he’s the man Hannay is
searching for.
 Before the Fact 183

the character can’t escape a murder scene. But suspense can just as easily be
fostered by what I’ve called moving-spotlight narration. We might be tied to a
character’s knowledge for a scene or so, but if the narration shifts us to other
characters, we’re likely to learn things that the first character doesn’t know. That
can generate the sort of suspense that Edwards and Hitchcock consider central
to engaging cinema.
Important as surprise is, most theorists assigned greater artistic power to
suspense. In preferring the well-made play, commentators reacted against pop-
ular melodrama, with its episodic construction, wild coincidences, and unfore-
seeable plot twists. The preference for suspense acknowledges the playwright’s
adroit shaping of the plot, preparing the revelations carefully but also creating a
steady arc of tension rather than a firecracker string of surprises. More broadly,
the play is artistically satisfying if we gain what William Archer calls “the glory
of omniscience. . . . The essential and abiding pleasure of the theatre lies in
foreknowledge.”63 In treating suspense as superior to surprise, Hitchcock was in
effect endorsing the artistically polished film.
In practice, few 1920s and 1930s plays and films presented tightly restricted
narration. Moving-spotlight treatment was far more common, and the two
media had different techniques for widening the viewpoint for the sake of
suspense.
In proscenium theater, bound to fixed sets and traditional act segments,
showing the audience that an unsuspecting character was in danger involved
calculated entrances and exits. When the heroine of Love from a Stranger is
offstage, we get hints that her husband is mentally disturbed. By the end of
Act 2, he’s alone and caresses a scarf before ripping it to pieces. Cinema, in
contrast, offers the ability to shift locales instantly, so the film version of Love
from a Stranger can follow the husband to the basement (never seen in the
stage version) and crosscut his “experiments” with the unsuspecting wife’s
activities upstairs.
Even without crosscutting, cinema can create suspense through staging that
transforms theater blocking. In the play Kind Lady, a sinister band of scofflaws
gradually takes over the heroine’s household, with the power dynamics played
out in the parlor. At a crucial point, when she has ordered the invaders to leave,
they ominously take up positions around her. In the staging instructions in the
playscript, as the heroine realizes the invaders’ intentions, she advances to the
footlights with her back to the audience. The actors spread out across the set,
and the leader strides steadily toward her along the central axis.64 In the film
version, the heroine stands in the center of the frame, more or less frontal. We
see the characters entering the frame one by one, blocking her escape before
she’s aware of their purpose (figs. 5.4–5.8). On the stage, an array in depth like
this wouldn’t be readable from all sight lines, but because the camera is our
surrogate eye, she becomes prey by a gradual tightening of the composition.
5.4 Kind Lady (1935): A hierarchy of knowledge is 5.5 We see her gradually surrounded, as she remains
revealed through staging. Mrs. Herries is unaware of oblivious.
the scheme of her “guests.”

5.6 Mr. Edwards seats himself, opening an exit route 5.7 The arrival of the gang’s leader completes the
for her. But in the background, the doctor descends. encirclement.

5.8 Only when Mrs. Herries turns does she realize

that she’s in the gang’s power.
 Before the Fact 185

These are moment-by-moment shifts, but the superior knowledge under-

lying suspense can create a wider arc of interest. The retrospective viewpoint
common in novels provides a general anticipation. At the beginning of Before
the Fact, we know that Lina will, after eight years of marriage, discover that
Johnnie is a murderer; but in the bulk of the book she is unaware of his cor-
ruption, and we wonder how she will eventually discover it. Similarly, Rebecca
begins with the couple’s marriage already gone flat. In the opening of To the
Gallows I Must Go, the narrator declares that he has committed murder, but
in the early phases of the action he presents himself as not knowing where his
illicit affair is leading. Very often, thriller suspense presses us to ask not what
would happen but how it will happen—and what might happen after that.

Showing Us the Bomb, or Not

Hitchcock’s interest in the principles of the thriller followed naturally from

his practice. He made an old-dark-house thriller (Number Seventeen, 1932), a
straight spy story (Secret Agent, 1936), chase thrillers from the standpoint of
the pursued (The 39 Steps, 1935; Young and Innocent, 1937), and a chase thriller
from the standpoint of the pursuers (The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1934). He
directed two bystander thrillers (The Lodger, 1927; The Lady Vanishes, 1938).
He could also tell a story largely from the standpoint of the guilty party (Black-
mail, 1929). Sabotage (1936) starts as a criminal-centered plot and becomes a
victim-centered one. Jamaica Inn (1939) is a historical thriller that incorporates
some pursuit and women-in-peril elements.65
By the time Hitchcock left England for Hollywood, he was thoroughly iden-
tified as a (if not yet the) “master of suspense.”66 An American critic observed
soon after his arrival: “More than any other director in motion pictures, Alfred
Hitchcock has staked his career on suspense. . . . Each of these British-made
thrillers that built up his tremendous reputation was a separate and unique
study in suspense.”67 In the United States, his debt to the British tradition
yielded adaptations of two woman-in-peril milestones: Rebecca (1940) and Sus-
picion (1941, drawn from Before the Fact). Later he would return to the English
psychological thriller canon for Rope (1948).68
One-quarter of 1930s British features were crime stories, and many talented
directors made them.69 Yet Hitchcock’s stood out, and they helped define what
the film thriller would be in years to come. He accepted all the strategies of the
genre: well-timed limitations on characters’ knowledge and close attachment to
them at moments of risk—all within a moving-spotlight narration that gave just
enough information to indicate dangers that the characters didn’t fully grasp.
One of Hitchcock’s accomplishments was showing how techniques of view-
point manipulation characteristic of the written psychological thriller could be
 186 PA RT I I

manifested in the fine grain of the film medium. From moment to moment, he
calibrated minute shifts among curiosity, suspense, and surprise. These strate-
gies were treated with a cinematic élan seldom seen in his contemporaries.
The first step was to center the story on more or less ordinary protagonists.
The people plunged into international intrigue aren’t spies. Hitchcock’s Richard
Hannay in The 39 Steps isn’t yet the professional he would become in the novels,
and Secret Agent’s Ashenden, a reluctant recruit, quits after his first assignment.
Adapting a convention of gynocentric thrillers, Hitchcock and his scenarists
go on to develop a romantic couple, the better to increase audience sympathy.
Hitchcock’s version of The Lodger created a love interest that exonerated Mr.
Sleuth and provided a happy ending. A plot of pursuit could throw a man and
a woman together (e.g., Young and Innocent), and a couple’s marriage might
be reaffirmed by their plunge into danger (The Man Who Knew Too Much) or
destroyed by it (Sabotage).
Similarly, Hitchcock believed that the thriller could engage audiences through
a range of emotions, so he usually included comic interludes. Some were mere
byplay, but some could be integrated into the action. In Murder! (1930), his one
foray into a straight puzzle plot, he enlivened the standard interrogation scene
by showing a policeman questioning actors waiting in the wings during a per-
formance. Obeying the principles of fair play, this scene plants crucial informa-
tion about the solution, but the actors’ business helps it slip by (fig. 5.9).
Likewise, the epilogue of Sabotage might have been grim. Mrs. Verloc’s little
brother has been killed, and she has slain her husband. But the final line is a
gag: a bemused police official can’t recall the evidence that would solve the case.
The last shot of The 39 Steps gives the conventional romantic reconciliation a
witty twist (fig. 5.10). Hitchcock’s tongue-in-cheek moments displayed the sar-
donic cheerfulness of Malice Aforethought and The Murder of My Aunt.

5.9 Murder! (1930): The testimony the actors supply

is swamped by their bustling on and off stage and slip-
ping into and out of their stage roles.
 Before the Fact 187

5.10 The 39 Steps: Hannay and Pamela clasp hands,

but the handcuffs remind us of their comic conjoin-
ing during their adventure.

Hitchcock was able to develop fine-grained techniques of narration by bor-

rowing schemas from the artistically ambitious silent cinema. Many filmmak-
ers, notably the French Impressionists, had showed how to build scenes around
subjective states. Hitchcock had no compunction about using optical point-of-
view shots, distorted perceptions, and mental imagery. The famous transparent
ceiling of The Lodger, aiming to convey the sound of Mr. Sleuth’s steps above, is
an outré example, but the later sound films still played with subjective states. In
Sabotage (1936), the hesitant spy Verloc imagines the devastating results of his
mission (fig. 5.11).
Just as important were passages of rapid or abstract cutting, a technique
refined by French directors such as Abel Gance and brought to a pitch of

5.11 Sabotage (1936): Verloc glances at an aquarium,

which he imagines as Piccadilly Circus collapsing un-
der the bomb he must deliver.
 188 PA RT I I

intensity by 1920s Soviet filmmakers. This aggressive editing could create pan-
oramic narration, such as the citywide montages opening The Lodger and Sab-
otage, or could plunge into subjectivity, as in Sabotage’s rapid shots of Verloc
and his wife glancing at the carving knife. Hitchcock’s debt to German cin-
ema showed up less in Expressionistic touches (although Number Seventeen
has them, and mocks them) than in the German “entfesselte” or “unchained”
camera. Many Hitchcock films contain vigorous camera movements, with the
most famous being the remarkable crane movement across a hotel restaurant
in Young and Innocent. It carries us away from the characters looking for a man
who blinks uncontrollably to an extreme close-up of the band’s drummer, just
as he starts spasmodically blinking. In effect, we have seen the bomb under the
table, revealed with an impresario’s pleasure in flaunting his skill.
Like other ambitious filmmakers, Hitchcock wanted to go beyond the
theatrical dialogue of the “talkies” and create complex audiovisual effects.
The “knife” refrain in Blackmail, another attempt to convey subjectivity, is the
most famous example, but Hitchcock often relies on music and noise, without
words. The Soviet filmmakers’ call for “audio-visual counterpoint” is realized
in scenes like that of Secret Agent’s alpine assassination, which is accompa-
nied by the sound of the victim’s dog whimpering back at the hotel, as if
mourning his master. This is “pure cinema,” achieving something possible in
no other medium.
Oscillating between subjectivity and objectivity, the narration can narrow
or expand our knowledge by small degrees. Early in the train trip of The Lady
Vanishes, Miss Froy writes her name on the window (fig. 5.12). Later, after
everyone has denied that Miss Froy was ever on the train, Iris and Gilbert sit at
the same table and her name remains visible (fig. 5.13). It confirms Iris’s story,
but will she notice it? This, another bomb under the table, is a subtle variant on
the use of the background figures in Kind Lady. The next few shots offer a les-
son in the swift suspense/surprise alternation that Brander Matthews admired
in Cromwell (figs. 5.14–5.18).
“Pure cinema,” of both sound and image, encouraged Hitchcock to seek
occasions to display technical virtuosity. The “knife” sound montage and the
suspenseful camera movement across the restaurant provide good examples.
The result was a cinema of flourishes and set pieces, detachable moments that
could become as famous as Eisenstein’s Odessa Steps sequence in Potemkin
(1925). Hitchcock often conceived a film as a series of high points, pinnacles
of emotion and cinematic technique. His virtuosity was akin to the ingenuity
flaunted by Golden Age puzzle novels.
But how to weave one-off effects and set pieces into a smooth story? Hitch-
cock’s scriptwriters were frustrated. Raymond Chandler complained: “He
directs a film in his head before he knows what the story is. You find yourself
trying to rationalize the shots he wants to make rather than the story. Every
5.12 The Lady Vanishes (1938): Mrs. Froy writes her 5.13 After Gilbert lowers the window, “Froy” remains
name on the window. visible in frame center. He looks beyond it, and Iris
doesn’t notice.

5.14 Hitchcock sustains the suspense for two minutes 5.15 Hitchcock delays a point-of-view shot with an
as Iris and Gilbert chat and flirt. Then Iris glances at insert of Gilbert reacting to her.
the window, stares a moment, and starts.

5.16 We get her point-of-view shot as Iris urges him

to look.
 190 PA RT I I

5.17 But the train goes into a tunnel . . . 5.18 . . . and the smoke wipes away the name before
Gilbert can see it.

time you get set he jabs you off balance by wanting to do a love scene on top of
the Jefferson Memorial or something like that.”70
Charles Bennett, who recalled that Hitchcock tended toward “a mosaic of
vignettes,” took on the role of “constructionist,” the collaborator who faced the
problem of “how the hell to get his ideas into the picture.”71 It’s likely that Alma
Reville Hitchcock and Joan Harrison, often uncredited decision-makers in the
process, also helped find ways to stitch together the set pieces.72
Whoever was responsible, most of the films have an organic shape, often
derived from simple itineraries. Adhering to the investigation plot, several of
the films follow a quest pattern. A master clue or a string of clues carries the
protagonists from one place to another. A mysterious message in The Man Who
Knew Too Much provides an itinerary taking us to a dentist, the temple of the
Rising Sun, and the Albert Hall. Young and Innocent has a clue sequence linking
a raincoat, a hat, a belt, and a matchbook. Each way station offers a possible
set piece: Hannay’s political speech in The 39 Steps, the invasion of a little girl’s
birthday party in Young and Innocent, and the plan for the assassination in
Secret Agent.
Something like this clue ladder is at work in the further development of the
Lady Vanishes intrigue. During the first scene at the table, Miss Froy had demanded
that the waiter make tea from her personal packet. In the sequence we’ve examined,
Iris’s recalling the lady’s tea order primes her to glance at the window and see the
FROY scrawl. Still later, Gilbert is glancing out the train window, and we swiftly
alternate between his viewpoint and our superior knowledge (figs. 5.19–5.25).
By now, a filmmaker can refine the point-of-view cutting schema developed in
1910s films such as The Masked Heart (see figs. 1.9–1.14).
The two major set pieces in The Man Who Knew Too Much depend on min-
ute adjustments in the flow of information. When Jill goes to the Albert Hall,
5.19 The Lady Vanishes: Gilbert happens to be near 5.20 Cut to the cook throwing out trash.
a window.

5.21 Cut to a shot of a train window, with the tea 5.22 Cut to Gilbert as he looks.
packet whirling up to stick on it. Does Gilbert see it?

5.23 A quick point-of-view shot shows the brand name.

 192 PA RT I I

5.24 Then it whirls away in the wind. 5.25 Gilbert notices. This confirms Iris’s story and puts
Gilbert firmly on her side.

she knows very little. We know that Ramon the assassin is to wait for a dramatic
pause in the score; it’s followed by a shattering choral outburst that will muffle
the pistol shot. We’ve been given a rehearsal of the passage in a gramophone
record, but we don’t hear the whole piece and can’t predict exactly when the
chorus will hit its peak. So we know more than Jill does, but not everything.
Hitchcock magnifies this uncertainty by letting the piece, Arthur Benjamin’s
Storm Clouds Cantata, play out in its entirety. It was composed for the film, and
its combination of lyrical and dramatic passages blend into a stream of music
that coincides with the emotional action on-screen. We have heard portions of
the score earlier when the spies played a recording, so we have some sense of
when the shot must be fired. Hitchcock goes on to structure the concert scene
using nearly every technique in the silent cinema playbook. We get dynami-
cally accentuated compositions, crisp point-of-view editing, subjective vision
(even blurring as Jill drifts into a panicky reverie), and suspenseful crosscutting
back to the gang holding Bob and Betty prisoner. All of these visual techniques
are synchronized with the musical structure of the piece. Most obvious is the
slow tracking shot back from Jill as the female soloist launches into “There
came a whispered terror on the breeze. And the dark forest shook.”
The techniques build to their own crescendo, with more and shorter shots
of Jill, the orchestra players, and the curtain concealing Ramon. As the climax
approaches, details of the players’ performance pass in a flash. Then Jill notices
the muzzle of Ramon’s rifle, and she realizes that the diplomat is the target. She
jumps to her feet and screams. A cut to the gang listening on the radio sup-
presses the result: Did Ramon’s shot hit home? The narration postpones telling
us for a time, dwelling instead on Jill’s leading the police in their pursuit.
The same rapid shifts between suspense and surprise take place during the
siege in the denouement. With Ramon edging out on the roof to grab Betty, the
 Before the Fact 193

police sniper doesn’t dare to fire. Hitchcock supplies a brisk set of interruptive
cuts, culminating in Jill bringing Ramon down. It’s no one-off flourish, because
this moment gives her a second chance at the rifle competition she lost in the
opening of the film (due, ironically, to Betty being distracting). The family is
reunited in a symmetrical ending. The film’s first line, “Are you all right?,” is
matched by the final moment of Jill reassuring Betty: “It’s all right.” The set
pieces are smoothly integrated in a larger narrative arc.73
Through self-conscious style and clever plotting, Hitchcock’s films became
models of suspenseful film narration. In England he relied mostly on tales of
pursuit and espionage, but he would soon provide prototypes of the domestic
thriller with Rebecca, Suspicion, and Shadow of a Doubt. Eventually he would
explore fine-grain fluctuations of rigorously restricted viewpoint in Rear Win-
dow (1954), a cinematic approximation of James’s “In the Cage.”

✳✳✳

Golden Age detective writers, at pains to elevate their genre, initially tended to
minimize the vigor of the psychological thriller. But from The Lodger through
Before the Fact to Rebecca, there was no denying the power and popularity of
a genre that wed mystery to suspense, curiosity to apprehension and peril. In
what Sayers called “studies in murder,” ordinary men and women, victimizer or
victim, faced danger and felt fear. All media welcomed these modern versions
of Gothic and sensation fiction.
As investigation plots inspired Faulkner and other “literary authors” to cross
over, psychological thrillers yielded access to wider audiences. Graham Greene’s
“entertainments” about paid killers and men on the run received serious atten-
tion. Nabokov, who had mocked the whodunit in The Real Life of Sebastian
Knight, deployed schemas associated with the thriller in Lolita (1955). The first
half parodies the murderous-husband plot, incorporating diary entries, court-
room theatrics, and hypothesized methods of murder (drowning, poisoning).
Here, though, the reward isn’t money or position but access to the wife’s preteen
daughter. When the treasure is attained, the tension doesn’t slacken: the novel’s
second half summons up a couple-in-flight schema. Pursued by the ominously
named Trapp, Humbert and Lolita traverse Highway America before a fateful
showdown with a mastermind. The protagonist’s confession, alternating between
reckless boasts and mental crackup and prefaced by the obligatory clinical fore-
word, echoes Horniman’s Israel Rank, Ostrander’s Ashes to Ashes, and other books
tracing a killer’s tortuous path to doom. American Psycho (1991) would take it
from there: an investment banker can be as terrifying as a pedophile.
By the end of the 1930s, the cerebral whodunit had a robust rival in the
thriller. At the same time, another rival flourished: the “impure” whodunit that
treated the investigation plot in a manner called hard-boiled.
 CHAPTER 6

DARK AND FULL OF BLOOD

Hard-Boiled Detection

I
t’s risky to look for watershed years, but the temptation is hard to
resist when considering Anglo-American writing in 1929. That year
saw publication of The Sound and the Fury, A Farewell to Arms, Dod-
sworth, Passing, The Blacker the Berry, Is Sex Necessary?, Flowering Judas, Look
Homeward, Angel, and the English translation of All Quiet on the Western Front.
Crime and mystery didn’t lag behind. In 1929 the play Rope and several
noteworthy novels appeared: Anthony Berkeley’s Poisoned Chocolates Case,
S. S. Van Dine’s Scarab Murder Case, Ellery Queen’s debut of The Roman Hat
Mystery, and W. R. Burnett’s Little Caesar. Count Rex Stout’s crossover thriller
How Like a God as well. Above all, there were Red Harvest and The Dain Curse.
These two books, and the three that Dashiell Hammett completed in the few
years that followed, would be as influential as anything signed by Faulkner or
Hemingway. They changed popular storytelling in ways that we are still learn-
ing to appreciate.1

Realism and Other Alibis

From 1922 on, Dashiell Hammett was chiefly associated with The Black Mask
(later just Black Mask). This American pulp magazine published western,
romance, and adventure stories but emphasized “hard-boiled” crime fiction.2
This version of the detective genre, editor Joseph Shaw explained, “embodies
mental and physical conflict in man’s most violent moods.”3 At a minimum,
 Dark and Full of Blood 195

a hard-boiled crime story would show tough protagonists battling police and
racketeers. Mystery might be played down. Carroll John Daly, initially the
favorite author of the magazine’s fans, made his hero Race Williams nominally
a private investigator, but Race declares, “Guns are my business—action my
meat.”4
As a result, hard-boiled private-eye fiction defined itself against the Golden
Age norms. Race Williams scorns “storybook detectives,” “these intellectual,
scientific detectives who catch their man with a microscope and dust pan.”5
Hammett wrote parodies of deduction-based mysteries. In one O. Henryish
exercise, a murderer thinks he’ll go free if he arranges evidence to make himself
the obvious suspect. Unfortunately, the cop had never read a detective story.6
Hammett had been an investigator for the Pinkerton National Detective
Agency, and his experience became a selling point for his work. When he wrote
reviews of detective novels, he usually dismissed them as ignorant of real-world
crime. He mocked the Great Detective as a showoff who more often than not
obstructed solid police work. For Hammett, fiction’s crimes should be solved by
modern procedures: tailing and stakeouts, questioning, bluffing, negotiation,
squeezing information from snitches, and relying on experience in judging
suspects’ behavior.
Two conceptions of realism circulated in the Black Mask milieu: realism as
the portrayal of gritty contemporary life, the urban jungle that Race Williams
swaggers through, and realism as a faithful rendering of modern methods of
lawbreaking and law enforcement. In 1946, Shaw’s introduction to an anthol-
ogy of hard-boiled stories invested the Black Mask school with a third notion of
realism, one that seemed out of the reach of puzzle plots.
Shaw claimed that as editor he had encouraged the portrayal of “character
and the problems inherent in human behavior. . . . recognizable human charac-
ter in three-dimensional form.”7 He was, I think, taking his cue from “The Sim-
ple Art of Murder,” the 1944 Raymond Chandler essay that proposed a poetics
of the hard-boiled private-eye story. Chandler mocks Golden Age conventions
as dull and deeply implausible. The characters are mere puppets for the plot.
“The gradual elucidation of character,” he notes, “is all the detective story has
any right to be about.”8
Shaw and Chandler were rewriting Black Mask history. It’s difficult to see
rich characterization in a Daly serial that Shaw praised in 1927 as “the best Race
Williams story he’s ever written.”

Two hands reached for my throat—and my right hand came up. Thick lips
snarled, great teeth parted—and his mouth opened for the shout of triumph as
those hands felt for my neck. And I fired my last shot—not into that generous
bulk that had tempted me before, but straight into that red, yawning mouth.
We’d see how his digestive system worked. . . .
 196 PA RT I I

He died funny. Yep, I got a laugh out of it; a weird, gurgling sort of laugh.
His mouth seemed to close upon the bullet, as if he tried the taste of it—his
arms still stretched toward me.9

Shaw added a macabre note: “You’ll fairly eat it up.”10 But he included no Race
Williams story in his 1946 anthology. By then Daly had fallen out of favor and
was eking out an existence in lower-grade pulps.11
For decades elite literary critics had demoted plot and elevated characteriza-
tion, “a certain concern with the psychological basis of action.”12 An appeal to
rich characterization in the mystery, launched when Hammett’s reputation was
strong and Chandler’s was on the rise, sought to endow hard-boiled writing
with artistic respectability. No less than the Golden Age writers, the most ambi-
tious Black Mask boys yearned for the respectability of belles lettres.
The publishing milieu helped them. The prestigious Knopf firm brought
out Hammett, Chandler, and other hard-boiled novelists. Hammett confided
to Blanche Knopf that he wanted to write a novel in stream of consciousness.13
Chandler declared that by quality of writing—not only characterization but
also linguistic style and a coherent, realistic worldview—the hard-boiled novel
could acquire literary value. Still later, Ross Macdonald would model his fiction
on current conceptions of myth and depth psychology and declare that he was
simply writing novels, not mystery stories.
In the long run, the hard-boiled school’s search for legitimacy succeeded, and
the puzzle makers never achieved the literary veneration bestowed on Hammett,
Chandler, and Macdonald. Academics began to study them, and their work
remained constantly in print. S. S. Van Dine and Ellery Queen did not become
canonized in the Library of America alongside Henry James and Saul Bellow,
but the “Big Three” did. Later writers in their tradition, from David Goodis to
Elmore Leonard, were accorded comparable prestige.
This legitimacy isn’t due only to the inherent quality of these books. Hard-
boiled fiction adheres to canons of psychological realism typical of the main-
stream novel. Told in homogeneous first or third person, playing few tricks
with time or viewpoint, avoiding the bookish lacework of the Golden Age
tale, these novels fit comfortably into the Hemingway or John O’Hara vein of
laconic American writing. In addition, the hard-boiled school evokes themes of
urban malaise and personal alienation long welcomed by the literati. Chandler
reminded the Golden Age writers that they lived in a corrupt city to which
they paid no notice. The hard-boiled dick confronts the grim America of Nat-
uralism. He exposes the social rot on display in Steffens’s Shame of the Cities,
Sinclair’s The Jungle, Dreiser’s American Tragedy, and proletarian novels. He
walks the mean streets consoled by the knowledge that, for all his vulnerabili-
ties, he is true to a moral code in a corrupt world. With no Watson to prompt
us to admire him, he must win our respect through that masculine version of
 Dark and Full of Blood 197

sentimentality presented as righteous professionalism. Chandler, more ready to

swagger than Hammett, sums it up in a title, “Trouble Is My Business.”14
In the Black Mask world, trouble meant a high body count. Race Williams’s
delight in punches and pistol blasts was the most celebratory version of a blood-
thirstiness at odds with Golden Age gentility. In Raoul Whitfield’s Green Ice
(1930), three people are shot dead in the first sixteen pages, five more by the end
of the book. Hammett’s “The Big Knock-Over” (1927) claims fifty-eight corpses.
Violence became a marketing tool, as when Knopf ’s advertisement for Red
Harvest asserted that its “constant gunplay and murder and sudden death” added
“an element of reality so harsh that it reads like the latest news from Chicago.”15
Daly’s description of shooting a man in the mouth shows that a more vis-
ceral appeal to brutal realism was operating as well. Hard-boiled writers dwelt
on the manner of death. The British preferred poison, throttling, or clean blade
work, but the hard-boiled Americans didn’t shrink from grisly damage.

Doolin could no longer see Halloran’s face. He watched the knife near
Martinelli’s chest, slowly.
Martinelli, some way, made a high piercing sound in his throat as the knife
went into him. And again as Halloran withdrew the knife, pressed it in again
slowly. Halloran did not stab mercifully on the left side, but on the right, punc-
turing the lung again and again, slowly. . . .
Halloran suddenly released Martinelli, stepped back a pace. Martinelli’s
knees buckled, he sank slowly down, sat on the floor with his back against the
wall, his legs out straight. He sucked in air in great rattling gasps, held both
hands tightly against his chest, tightly against the shaft of the knife.
He lifted his head and there was blood on his mouth. He laughed.16

A Van Dine novel, Hammett complained, completely misdescribed what would

happen to a man’s head when a .45 bullet hit it.17 Massacres and gore gained a
new saliency in American popular culture; the hard-boiled school left its legacy
in the free fire zones and blood geysers of The Wild Bunch (1969) and Reservoir
Dogs (1992).
Which is to say that, despite their realistic alibi, the hard-boiled tales created
their own conventions. The pro forma bloodbaths pull in corrupt plutocrats,
suave hoods, brash and sexy women, apelike bruisers, and other members
of the repertory company. Endless cigarettes are lit, gestured with, stared at
thoughtfully, and stubbed out; cigars too. Gallons of alcohol are consumed. The
Golden Age detective might stumble into a mystery by many routes, but the
private dick typically gets into the case by (a) visiting the client or (b) being vis-
ited by a client. Corpses are lying behind every door he might open, although
he usually manages to slip away before the police arrive. He is knocked cold
at least once per story, and despite doses of drugs and a few beatings he can
 198 PA RT I I

recuperate and survive the climactic gunfight. Hammett admitted that Sam
Spade was a fantasy figure, and Chandler acknowledged that when he was at a
loss to write a scene, he simply had a man with a gun walk in.18
One of the most striking conventions of the hard-boiled school is its mock-
ery of the way movies portrayed detection and gangland. Holmes, Craig Ken-
nedy, and other transcendent detectives stalked through 1910s cinema, as did
inquiry agents such as Nick Pinkerton. There were gangland films too, notably
Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912), Alias Jimmy Valentine (1915), and Underworld
(1927).19 Borrowing from Damon Runyon and O. Henry, moviemakers intro-
duced a wide audience to con games and crook slang. But the Black Mask boys
scoffed at these gestures. A 1926 Hammett story maintains that a man running
a motion picture theater has a distorted view of what actual crime is like. As
you’d expect, Race Williams pours contempt on movie stars who pretend to be
tough but actually rely on doubles to fight. By 1933, a character in Paul Cain’s
Fast One (1933) is astonished that a gunfight looks just like the movies, and a
tough woman warns a thug: “You’ve seen too many gangster pictures.”20
For all their authors’ disdain for the puzzle tradition, hard-boiled detective
stories rely on most of the conventions of the investigation plot. There is still a
mystery, usually several. Blackmail, theft, revenge, sexual jealousy, greed, and
fear of betrayal are the typical motives. Like the Great Detective, the hard-
boiled sleuth goes from place to place questioning suspects, although the trip
may be enlivened by atmospheric descriptions of rundown neighborhoods or
California rainstorms. There are faked deaths, misidentified corpses, false iden-
tities, dying messages, physical clues, red herrings, disguises, cryptic letters, and
least likely culprits. The fallible detective of Golden Age novels has a brother in
the private dick who loses the man he’s tailing or succumbs to a femme fatale
or trusts a treacherous friend. And despite the demands for realism, plenty of
coincidences are convenient. In a novel abounding in lucky accidents, Chan-
dler’s narrator accepts Aristotle’s precept of occasional implausibility: “I guess
it’s a genuine coincidence. They do happen.”21
The author will likely play fair by Detection Club rules, supplying all the
information necessary to solving the puzzle. There will be a eureka moment,
goaded by intuition and perhaps the half-memory of a hint that slipped by us.
But as ever the detective’s reasoning will be suppressed, even in a first-person
account. At the end, he will expose the perpetrators and reconstruct the crime.
Usually justice will be done, perhaps outside the law, when a final shootout may
spare the need for judge and jury.
The hard-boiled tradition justified its conventions as heightened realism. That
effect was helped by the downbeat romanticism and a criminal milieu different
from that of the Golden Age puzzle. (The professional crooks encountered by
Peter Wimsey and Philo Vance came as walk-ons among upper-crust suspects.)
In addition, the pervasive violence is motivated by the threatening city.
 Dark and Full of Blood 199

The hard-boiled hero is a good detective but he is not a Great Detective. Just
ask him. Hammett characterized the Pinkerton ideal as not “an erudite solver
of riddles in the Sherlock Holmes manner” but rather “a hard and shifty fel-
low, able to take care of himself in any situation.”22 As a result, he becomes less
primly virtuous than the Golden Age amateur or upright policeman. Anyone
pitting himself against the underworld is likely to be a bit rough-edged.
As with modern Robin Hoods such as Raffles and the Saint, hard-boiled
authors created a sliding scale of rogues. A 1933 article advised would-be pulp
writers to make the protagonist’s adversaries deeply wicked. “If the black is black
enough, the white can be soiled. . . . The narrative actors [heroes] need only
be forgivable to be acceptable for a ‘pulp’ story. Here, as in life, the motive is
what really counts.”23 The tough but temperate Continental Op, the cautious and
shrewd Sam Spade, and the ironically disenchanted knight errant Philip Marlowe,
for all their faults, are less aggressively amoral than the forces that threaten them.
Central to this characterization is sex. Couples live together out of marriage,
young people are on the make, and the hero is likely to sleep around. Hammett
once introduced the creators of Ellery Queen to an audience: “Mr Queen, will
you be good enough to explain your famous character’s sex life, if any?”24 Sam
Spade is having an affair with his partner’s wife, and he beds his new client
Brigid. In The Thin Man, after wrestling a woman suspect, Nick Charles admits
to Nora that he got “a little” erection from it.25 Publisher Alfred Knopf realized
that the scene helped sell the book and so ran a piously winking advertisement
denying that the scene had any impact on the book’s sales. “Twenty thousand
people don’t buy a book within three weeks to read a five word question.” Knopf
obligingly supplied the page number.26
Sex, like violence, enhanced realism, but it too became a convention. It
could be stylized through bantering dialogue, such as Nora’s question about
Nick’s arousal. Mickey Spillane would in the postwar era be called semipor-
nographic, but a vein of the pulps called “spicy detective” stories had already
featured steamier situations than did the more respectable Black Mask. Novels
of the late 1930s and early 1940s canonized the leering account of female
anatomy. Some samples:

There was something about the feel of her naked flesh that made my fingers
tingle. She let the front of her negligee come open pretty far. I could see plenty
of interesting things under the thin silk.
When she went limp he slipped his arm around her waist to keep her from
sliding to the floor; she hung there with her head back and eyes closed, her
breasts taut against the thin knit jacket of her sports outfit.
Her breasts were nippled sharply against a white middy blouse.
From the way her buttocks looked under the black silk dress, I knew she’d
be good in bed.27
 200 PA RT I I

With passages like these in the opening pages, the books promise something
more stimulating than ratiocination. By the 1950s, private eyes were forever
encountering women in lingerie, bikinis, and bubble baths, and hymns to
pulchritude became as compulsory as quatrains in a sonnet.
The American lone-wolf private-eye tale is driven by mystery, but its main
plot movement is that of an adventure. This premise was recognized by prac-
titioners quite early. A 1932 manual advises writers to “apply the technique of
a straight adventure story to the detective or mystery angle.”28 An adventure
turns an investigation into a quest, a search for a missing person or precious
object. Likewise, an adventure entails physical action—tailing, pursuit, combat,
capture, escape, and the inevitable knockout. The adventurer-hero is perpet-
ually in danger. Unlike the Golden Age sleuth, the hard-boiled detective con-
fronts harm or death directly and often. The man who comes in with a gun may
use it. This constant threat is another factor throwing sympathy to an imperfect
hero’s occasional transgressions.
Why are hard-boiled plots so hard to follow, let alone remember? In
part because of all the lying, but we get that in whodunits too. More mark-
edly, hard-boiled plots tend to abandon the Golden Age tidiness of physical
clues, timetables, and a closed circle of suspects. Instead we must keep track
of secrets shared among a vast cast spread across an urban milieu. Authors
revamped the nineteenth-century “city mystery” novel and the modernists’
montage version of it by presenting a network of characters who are entangled
in crimes large and small. Cain’s Fast One introduces more than fifty charac-
ters, most with names. Sometimes key players never come onstage; call it the
Floyd Thursby gambit.
Most novels in any genre tie the characters into an array of relationships.
But classic whodunits are likely to confine themselves to the groups around
a village (Roger Ackroyd) or in a workplace (Murder Must Advertise) or in a
country house. By and large the connections are those of friendship, work,
class, and kinship. The hard-boiled plot makes the network more contingent,
as befits the casual encounters of city life. The sprawling network allows for
happy coincidences, accidental moments of sighting a suspicious character or
overhearing a crucial conversation. When the whodunit expands its network,
most of the minor characters serve as witnesses or Jamesian ficelles (such as
the secretarial staff of Pym’s Publicity). In the hard-boiled story, apparently
minor or late-introduced characters may come to play central roles. Above all,
whereas the classic whodunit favored a single culprit behind all the crimes,
the hard-boiled network could multiply perpetrators. Unlike a Golden Age
tale, the hard-boiled plot is more likely to show lawlessness as pervading all
social relations. The formal principle of the diffuse network has a thematic
payoff: the wealthy and powerful are as corrupt as the gangsters they are tied
to, however remotely.
 Dark and Full of Blood 201

Without benefit of the city novel’s omniscient narrator or moving spotlight,

we enter this network narrowly alongside an investigator with incomplete
knowledge. He inches from one thread or node to another, and the confined
viewpoint allows enigmas to cascade. Initial problems turn out to be pretexts,
bait-and-switch devices leading to a larger, more dangerous puzzle. Thanks to
the network principle, side hustles distract from primary story lines, and appar-
ently unconnected characters get hooked up at the denouement. All of these
knotty affiliations must be picked apart by a man who is lied to at every turn.
Into this fog of mystification, moment-by-moment verbal texture injects
clear air. The plot may be complicated, but the style can be high school
simple. At its most spare, as in W. R. Burnett’s Little Caesar, the narration is
bare bones. In other hands, this objectivity yields flourishes in dialogue and
description. Laconic eloquence, wisecracks, and showy metaphors decorate
the hard-boiled page. Granted, such offhand filigree looks more artificial than
ordinary language. Chandler admitted that even the laconic Hammett offered
readers “the kind of lingo they imagined they spoke themselves. . . . When
[language] develops to the point of becoming a literary medium it only looks
like speech.”29 Yet Chandler was also right to suggest that the puzzle plot could
be revitalized with new stylistic conventions.

Networks and the Great Tradition

Novelists, editors, and critics have long stressed the originality of the hard-
boiled worldview, but this campaign seems to me to have obscured the books’
debts to tradition. Granted, the Race Williams strain sneers at the Golden Age
conventions: “There might be a hundred clues around and I’d miss them. I’ve
got to have a target to shoot at.”30
In contrast, Hammett’s stories follow the Conan Doyle model: the detec-
tive’s investigation of a mystery leads to exciting action. From 1923 to 1927, as
Hammett develops his craft in short stories, that action becomes even more
complex. He starts putting major action offstage and letting his sleuth fill in the
reader and his colleagues at judicious moments. “The Big Knock-Over” elides
key events and includes some reported flashbacks, the better to dramatize major
carnage at the climax, when the hero must fight his way through a speakeasy.
Despite the dynamic action, Hammett is at pains to include bouts of rea-
soning. His protagonist, the nameless Continental Op, explains that he enjoys
“catching crooks and solving riddles.”31 One Hammett story is called “The Tenth
Clew,” and an action-packed siege tale climaxes when the Op runs through
eleven inferences that led him to crack the crooks’ scheme. Nor did Hammett
dismiss the Golden Age rules. In his book reviews, he objected when clues
were suppressed and plotting went slack, and he appreciated The Roman Hat
 202 PA RT I I

Mystery as “a competent piece of work for those who like their detective stories
straight.”32 In his own work, Hammett wanted to preserve the investigation plot
within a new set of conventions, those roughly called realism.
Hammett’s novels provided a range of models for doing that. In the space of
a few years, he opened a treasure house of storytelling possibilities. Five diverse
novels crystallized templates that would be revived and revised in hundreds of
mysteries that followed.
The most spectacular of these templates is the cleaning-up-the-town
premise of Red Harvest (1929). Summoned to Personville, nicknamed Poison-
ville, the Continental Op learns that the man who hired him has been mur-
dered. The Op finds the city corrupt from top to bottom, and soon he vows
to wipe out the gangs that have flourished under the oligarch Elihu Person.
The Op solves the murder quickly enough, but in the rest of the book he sets
mobster against mobster by shifting his loyalty and gathering evidence against
them. Hammett had explored this scale of urban upheaval in some short
stories, but as a Black Mask serial, Red Harvest seemed somewhat choppy. His
editors at Knopf urged him to weave a more cohesive plot, so he tightened its
structure by setting up the gang combats as tit-for-tat reprisals. At one point
the Op assembles the adversaries in a fake peace conference, sowing suspi-
cions that should, he estimates, yield “at least a dozen killings.”
The Op’s schemes pull in nearly fifty characters, most of them named and
described. In gunfights, chases, bombings, and other bursts of wildly thrilling
violence, about twenty of the major players are killed, along with innumerable
walk-ons. The Op’s provocations in turn create ancillary mysteries. These are
clued in traditional ways: an ambiguous dying message, telltale bank checks
and blackmail letters, and a victim’s memo book full of secrets. As solutions are
revealed, multiple perpetrators come to light.
Hammett realized the narrative resources of the heavily populated plot.
News can travel along the network, so a detective can pick up information from
press reports or informers. Clues that Golden Age authors would concentrate
in a single crime scene can be scattered across the hidden network. Often the
detective solves the mystery by concluding that X must be guilty because he or
she has said or done something that’s out of keeping with X’s range of knowl-
edge. The Golden Age reader needs to be alert for physical traces and alibis,
whereas the hard-boiled plot demands that we keep track of who knows what,
and how she or he could have learned it.
In addition, sprawling networks foster convenient coincidences. The decen-
tralized plotting of many hard-boiled novels, with their expanding tendrils of
secret allegiances and kinship, demands scenes that bring characters together
fortuitously. In Red Harvest, when the Op isn’t headed to meet someone,
he hits the street or drops in at a pool hall and runs into someone who can
advance his cause.
 Dark and Full of Blood 203

At the center of the Personville web is the young Dinah Brand, whom the
plot gradually reveals as sexually involved with nearly all the men running the
city. The Op induces her to help him clean up the town, but she too is killed.
The Op finds himself the prime suspect in her death, and to expose the real
killer he must force a final showdown between the two surviving mob leaders.
In passing, the Op learns that his partner Dick Foley suspects he’s guilty. It is a
brief moment, but it initiates the theme of male trust that will become import-
ant throughout the following novels.
Hammett seems to have conceived the Op as the anti–Race Williams. He’s
chubby, forty years old, and a mere five foot six. He’s tough and shoots straight,
and he can punch, although sometimes clumsily. But he’s not sadistic and pre-
fers cunning to gunplay. Above all, he’s got qualms. As the bodies pile up in Red
Harvest, he confesses to Dinah that he’s going “blood-simple.” He could have
reasoned with the gangs, but instead he has betrayed his professional ethos and
set them to slaughtering each other. He’s enjoying it. “It’s easier to have them
killed off, easier and surer, and now that I’m feeling this way, more satisfying.
I don’t know how I’m going to come out with the Agency. The Old Man will
boil me in oil if he ever finds out what I’ve been doing. It’s this damned town.
Poisonville is right. It’s poisoned me.”33 After this confession, he passes out on a
mixture of gin and laudanum. He will wake up clutching an ice pick buried in
Dinah’s left breast.
As if Poisonville has purged him, the Op is comparatively chastened and
cautious in The Dain Curse (1929). The theft of some diamonds brings him into
contact with the Leggetts, whose daughter Gabrielle fears that she inherits a
homicidal madness from her mother’s bloodline. Everyone around her—father,
mother, husband, servants, guru—winds up killed or damaged. The Op’s urban
adventure leads to two car crashes, a kidnapping, several homicides, a bomb-
ing, and a protracted cure for Gabrielle’s morphine addiction. Harking back
to sensation fiction, a spiritualist temple plays host to hypnosis and menacing
ectoplasm.
Prefiguring Ross Macdonald’s compassionate Lew Archer, the Op must play
therapist. In a long scene, he tries to reassure Gabrielle that she’s not cursed
but rather the victim of a devious conspiracy. Ironically, there is indeed a sort
of curse: the conspirator turns out to be another Dain, and insane to boot. But
the book closes on a happy ending, with the suggestion that the Op’s treatment
has turned Gabrielle from a nearly feral girl into a woman ready for a mature
marriage.
The Dain Curse exploits the network principle with a vengeance. More
than sixty named characters generate multiple identities, delays, red herrings,
concealed pasts, a fake suicide, collateral killings, and widespread suspicions.
The network also permits several perpetrators to replace the single culprit,
although here they are mostly cat’s-paws. Again, Hammett’s editor had asked
 204 PA RT I I

that the sections of the Black Mask serialization be more smoothly integrated,
and Hammett obliged by providing a recurring character who connects all the
crimes and conceives most of them.34
As if to trim back the ramifying relationships, Hammett breaks the novel
into three blocks. This device lets him impose a strict pattern of new crimes
and false solutions as the Dain curse emerges in waves. Within each block of
chapters, the Op and other characters float several alternative explanations,
but answers seem to coalesce at the end of each block when the Op reviews the
action with the novelist Owen Fitzstephan. Each session seems to clear up the
mystery so far. It’s a more relaxed, hard-boiled equivalent of the stacked expla-
nations seen in The Poisoned Chocolates Case.35
Each of the three solutions turns out to be false. In the climactic chapter
“Confessional,” Gabrielle declares that she is the mastermind, putting her con-
fession in parallel with the two earlier bursts of explanation. But the Op dis-
misses her fantasy and turns to Fitzstephan, now maimed by a bomb blast.
Throughout the book, Fitzstephan has presented himself as the refined artist, a
witty expositor and eager helper. As a victim, he seems ruled out as a suspect.
But he’s the puppeteer, manipulating everyone to get sexual access to Gabrielle.
When the Op unmasks him in a fourth encompassing solution, Fitzstephan
immediately announces that he’ll plead insanity. The Op agrees that it’s the
right defense. The novelist is indignant: “It’s no fun if I’m really cracked.”36
Hammett’s commitment to the formal rigor of the genre emerges in other
ways. The exhumation of the Dains’ perverse past recalls Doyle’s lumps of back-
story in A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four. By making the killer the Op’s
confidante, the nearest thing he has to a Watson, Hammett pays tribute to the
least-likely-person convention. What adds the hard-boiled flavor is the per-
sonal betrayal: Fitzstephan has violated the code of male friendship.
Much more charismatic than the Op is Sam Spade, the “blond Satan.” Spade,
his author confesses, is a “dream-man,” an ideal of the Pinkerton agents Ham-
mett knew, and he has the profile of the cynical urban corsair.37 If Red Harvest
owes something to the classic scheming-servant plot, particularly Goldoni’s
Servant of Two Masters (1746), The Maltese Falcon (1930) shows the hard-boiled
school’s debt to primal quest stories. Ellery Queen pointed out that the search
for the Black Bird is a tough-guy updating of a treasure hunt, “as romantic as
The Moonstone or The Rajah’s Diamond.”38 The murders that launch the plot
are, like the murder at the beginning of Red Harvest, a call to adventure.
Spade’s partner Archer is shot on assignment. At first Spade is in no hurry to
investigate, but he falls under suspicion for the crime because he’s been having
an affair with Archer’s wife Iva. Since the cops can’t find Miles’s killer, he must.
In addition, the man Archer was shadowing, Floyd Thursby, has been killed.
After the client, Brigid O’Shaughnessy, spins a series of false stories, Spade dis-
closes her actual mission: the recovery of the jewel-encrusted falcon statuette.
 Dark and Full of Blood 205

In the distant backstory, Brigid was part of a gang aiming to steal the falcon
from its owner in Constantinople, but the gang split up and now her former
partners are after her. She has made arrangements for the bird to be brought to
San Francisco on a ship from Hong Kong, so she needs to stay safe until Cap-
tain Jacobi delivers it. He will be the third murder victim.
All of this is gradually revealed through Spade’s encounters with Brigid and
the gang: the jovial Casper Gutman, his daughter Rhea, Gutman’s gunman
Wilmer, and the dandy Joel Cairo. The searchers decide to cooperate and agree
to cut Spade in if he can help them get the treasure. Spade’s larger goal, because
he finds Brigid attractive, is to meet her demand to “save me from—from it
all.”39 So the quest includes a knightly effort to protect a fair lady—or rather, a
tarnished one.
The Maltese Falcon network is rather limited (only eighteen characters),
but Hammett keeps the action moving by shuttling between the investigation
of Archer’s death and the efforts to retrieve the statuette. This allows him to
juggle multiple suspects. Did Iva kill Archer? Did Wilmer? Thursby? And who
killed Thursby? Wilmer, Cairo, or someone else? The confinement to one view-
point allows Hammett to dole out information sparingly; not for many chapters
does Spade learn whether the same gun killed the two men. As if in deliberate
contrast to the first two novels, virtually all the violence and many important
scenes take place offstage. This puts the emphasis on Spade’s resourceful reac-
tions to changing situations, which include the possibilities that characters are
lying. Indeed, every major character, including Spade, lies to others. Eventually,
we learn that the two initial murders were committed by separate killers.
Again Hammett respects many rules of the game. A theater ticket and a
shipping list torn from a newspaper become clues. The book is padded with
a red herring, a gambler’s revenge scenario tied to Thursby’s past. Hammett
revises another convention when Spade plans to cast a fall guy for the police to
charge; in effect, the detective sets up the false solution.
Hammett also shows himself adept in hiding information in plain sight. In
a page thick with descriptions of Spade searching Brigid’s apartment, we get
this: “He did not find the black bird. He found nothing that seemed to have any
connection with a black bird. The only piece of writing he found was a week-
old receipt for the month’s apartment-rent Brigid O’Shaugnessy had paid. The
only thing he found that interested him enough to delay his search while he
looked at it was a double-handful of rather fine jewelry in a polychrome box in
a locked dressing-table-drawer.”40 The jewelry, although emphasized, is actually
not important, but the casually mentioned receipt is. Spade reveals at the cli-
max that Brigid had secured the apartment five or six days before she told him
she rented it. (Fair play at work: we have to remember the date she gave him.)
That allowed her to prepare to frame Thursby for the killing of Archer—or of
Spade, if he had been the partner who took her assignment.
 206 PA RT I I

Ultimately, the falcon quest proves futile, and the climax pivots on solving
the initial murders. Thursby was killed by Wilmer, and Archer was killed by
Brigid. Only one question remains: Will Sam turn Brigid over to the police?
Yes. He itemizes the reasons with forensic clarity. First, he owes fidelity to his
partner, if not out of liking then as a bond of professional conduct. Second, he
can’t trust her; she has lied to him ceaselessly. Third, he can live with losing
her. Mr. Flitcraft, in the parable Spade recounted early in the book, radically
changed his life but wound up adapting to new circumstances as mundane as
the life he gave up. Spade too will adjust. Finally, Brigid has counted on being
able to inveigle him, and others.
“I won’t play the sap for you.”41 No more important scene has ever been
played in the canon of detective fiction. Hammett’s plot has built to a statement
of an ethos grounded in professional duty and clear-eyed calculation of risk,
framed by a pragmatic recognition of the need to survive. The Pinkertons’
dream man is a cautious but principled hero. Spade’s statement of hard-boiled
morality rings through decades of private-eye sagas, and it would be elabo-
rated, lyrically and philosophically, by Chandler, Macdonald, and many others.
The plot of The Glass Key (1931) inverts the dynamic of Red Harvest. There
a murder triggered a gang war. Here the struggle for political power initially
sidelines the mystery of who killed young Taylor Henry in China Street. In the
Poisonville caper, an outsider turned a town upside down, but here an insider
does. Central to that process is the ethos of masculine loyalty.
Against the advice of his friend and fixer Ned Beaumont, the political boss
Paul Madvig seeks Senator Henry’s support. He also hopes to marry the sena-
tor’s daughter Janet. When Paul decides to attack his rivals just before the elec-
tion, Ned apparently breaks with him. Ned seems ready to join Shad O’Rory’s
gang, but he refuses to betray Paul’s plans. After some savage beatings that Ned
barely survives, he continues to defend his friend by blocking Shad’s efforts to
influence the local press.
Ned’s sacrifices seem in vain when Paul becomes the prime suspect in the
murder. But Ned declares he will defend him “no matter who he killed.”42 His
path becomes more difficult when Paul casually confesses to the murder. So
great is Ned’s trust that he refuses to believe him: If Paul had killed Taylor,
he would have told Ned sooner. This is the sort of behavioral reasoning that
hard-boiled authors hoped would replace traditional physical clues. “I’m only
an amateur detective,” Ned explains, but he insists that Paul must be protecting
someone else out of loyalty, as Ned has been protecting Paul. With Janet, who
has come to hate Paul, Ned investigates.43
The Glass Key’s teeming political and gangland conflicts, stretching across
more than fifty named characters, distract us from just how minimal the cen-
tral mystery is. Hammett shamelessly pads the puzzle plot with a bookie, a
mistress, and other ancillary suspects, as well as a string of poison-pen letters.
 Dark and Full of Blood 207

As in The Maltese Falcon, basic information is doled out slowly, with the central
crime coming into focus only halfway through. Some eyewitnesses step onstage
rather late, as does the least likely culprit. The mystery is solved thanks to the
paraphernalia of traditional whodunits. Ned spots two clues missing from the
crime scene, a hat and a walking stick, and he rouses a reliable half-memory
(“It’s been in the back of my head for a long time”).44
The braided plotlines keep returning to the unspoken forces binding two
men. Ned acknowledges his own corruption and solitude; Paul seems to be
his only friend. In the final scene, their friendship comes undone, yielding
the “novel of character” that many mystery writers hoped could transform the
mystery story.
Hammett called The Thin Man (1934) “the nearest thing to a straight detective
story I’ve done,” and it’s hard to disagree.45 Through his social circle Nick Charles,
retired detective, is drawn into a case of disappearance and murder. As narrator
and reluctant investigator, Nick is fairly passive, drifting at several removes from
the action. Only after being wounded by a gunshot and becoming a suspect does
he take action. Once he gets involved, he circulates as comfortably as Wimsey or
Poirot between suspects and police. He even has friends in the underworld.
After four novels, Hammett is able to map the network principle onto a
traditional whodunit situation. Nick and Nora are swept into a froth of wealthy
idlers and picturesque thugs. There are thirty-five named characters, seven
never seen. (To add to the confusion, two are called Alice.) The multiplicity
permits false identities and dead-ends to proliferate, as well as comic coinci-
dences. Eventually the circle of likely suspects is as tight as in a Christie coun-
try weekend, with Nick as the link among a half-dozen candidates. As in The
Dain Curse, Hammett exploits the tainted-family theme. The eccentric inventor
Wynant is considered insane, and his son and daughter worry about whether
their problems come from him. “They’re all sex-crazy,” Nick says.46
As a man of leisure, Nick is practically an armchair detective in the first half
of the book. The plot is driven by offstage action, delivered to him via newspa-
per bulletins, policemen’s reports, and an average of one phone call per chapter.
There are physical clues, notably a bloody watch chain and a bullet-shattered
phone receiver. There’s the standard reference to Golden Age conventions when
Nora asks how a detective solves a crime and Nick replies that the formula
doesn’t work in real life.
In obeisance to tradition, not only does Nick keep his conclusions to
himself, but he conceals the culprit through shrewd narration. The killer is
Herbert Macaulay, the attorney for the missing inventor Clyde Wynant. Nick
introduces Macaulay as a helper and provides an appealing first impression
of him. He is, Nick tells Nora, a pretty good guy, and the family dog Asta likes
him. When Nora rules out Macaulay as a suspect, Nick doesn’t correct her.
Very late in the plot, Macaulay tells Nora that Nick saved his life in army
 208 PA RT I I

combat. That seems to exempt him from suspicion but also provides a hint:
Nick knows that Macaulay is a poor marksman and could have accidentally
hit the phone receiver when he shot his confederate. The theme of the treach-
erous friend is made explicit in a long extract about cannibalism among men
in a Colorado expedition, a literary tipoff as self-conscious as any classical
citation in a British whodunit.
Nora calls Nick’s solution pretty loose, and the relaxed plotting backs her
up. But Hammett’s emphasis is on the flow of witty banter. With The Thin Man,
Hammett blends high-society mystery with sophisticated comedy. Interroga-
tion and reasoning are replaced by repartee, some of it fairly naughty, with
references to impotence, incest, and men chasing whatever is “hot and hollow.”
The crosstalk is blatantly theatrical, or rather cinematic. It’s easy to visualize
this taxicab trip in screenplay format.

Nora said: “That booze.” She put her head on my shoulder. “Your wife is drunk.
Listen, you’ve got to tell me what happened—everything. Not now, tomorrow.
I don’t understand a thing that was said, or a thing that was done. They’re
marvelous.”
Dorothy said: “Listen, I can’t go to Aunt Alice’s like this. She’d have a fit.”
Nora said: “They oughtn’t to have hit that fat man like that, though it must’ve
been funny in a cruel way.”
Dorothy said: “I suppose I’d better go to Mamma’s.”
Nora said: “Erysipelas hasn’t got anything to do with ears. What’s a lug,
Nicky?”
“An ear.”
Dorothy said: “Aunt Alice would have to see me because I forgot the key and
I’d have to wake her up.”
Nora said: “I love you, Nicky, because you smell nice and know such fasci-
nating people.”47

Hammett worked in Hollywood in 1930–31, when filmmakers were striving

to make snappy talking pictures. Inspired by the 1928 play The Front Page,
screenwriters sought to build scenes out of rapid-fire wisecracks and non sequi-
turs. Hammett would surely have noticed the verbal fireworks on display in
the adaptations of The Front Page (1931) and Grand Hotel (1932), along with
such risqué films as Rain (1932) and She Done Him Wrong (1933). Plays such
as Holiday (1928) and The Greeks Had a Word for It (1930) and films such as
No More Orchids (1932) brought together heiresses, glamour girls, gamblers,
and society gents in love affairs, sometimes complicated by gangland intrigue.
Similarly, the racy socialites of Thorne Smith, Noël Coward, and other writers
look forward to Hammett’s tipsy couples.48
Hammett’s talents suited him to the new trends, and his screenplay work
gained a reputation for ingenious plots and witty dialogue.49 He seems to have
 Dark and Full of Blood 209

designed The Thin Man to suit the current tastes in screwball comedy. Sev-
eral scenes, notably the fight in the Pigiron Club and the patter of the dumb
cop Flint, supply pure movie moments. Some of the salty dialogue (“There’s a
woman with hair on her chest”) was retained in the 1934 film version, and the
book’s description of Nick glancing at Nora over Dorothy’s shoulder gained a
comic topper (figs. 6.1–6.3).
Hammett’s five novels opened new horizons for popular narrative. Red Har-
vest provided a schema for the city-under-siege plot that would be recast in nov-
els such as Richard Stark’s Butcher’s Moon (1974) and films such as Yojimbo (1961)
and A Fistful of Dollars (1964). The Dain Curse offered an initial prototype of the
straight private-eye investigation and introduced the sort of tangled California
families on which Ross Macdonald would build his fame. With The Glass Key,
the mystery novel showed it could play host to the tensions between personal
obligation and political calculation characteristic of the “social novels” of Upton
Sinclair. The Thin Man yielded a model for dozens of stories in which amused
couples breeze through mayhem.

6.1 The Thin Man (1934): “Nora, coming in to answer 6.2 “I made a face at her over the girl’s head.”
the telephone, looked questioningly at me.”

6.3 The camera pans back to catch Nora making a

face too.
 210 PA RT I I

Most archetypal was The Maltese Falcon, which set in place enduring plot
schemas: the mysterious gang, the treacherous woman, the thugs’ invasion of the
detective’s office, the nocturnal visit to an alley or pier to find a corpse. A book’s
opening became as stylized as a minuet. Either an anxious client strolls into the
private-eye’s office (wry secretary optional) or, as in The Dain Curse, he arrives at
a wealthy home to fence with an overbearing client. Either way, the detective is
launched on an adventure far more dangerous than it initially seems.
More broadly, these books were bids for artistic legitimacy. After Red Harvest
was accepted by Knopf, Hammett vowed that he would “take the detective story
seriously. . . . Some day somebody’s going to make ‘literature’ of it, . . . and I’m
selfish enough to have my hopes.”50 Very soon those hopes would be realized.
The Maltese Falcon was rapturously reviewed, with one critic asserting: “This is
not only probably the best detective story we have ever read, it is an exceedingly
well written novel.”51 In 1934 the book was welcomed to the ranks of the Modern
Library series. André Malraux, visiting the United States, insisted on meeting
Hammett, and he recommended the novels to Gide, who read them with admi-
ration. At Malraux’s urging, a French publisher brought out translations.52
Hammett was aware that mystery plotting wasn’t off-limits for more elevated
fiction. In the letter to Knopf he noted, “Ford’s Good Soldier wouldn’t have need
[sic] much altering to have been a detective story.”53 But he also realized that
artistically ambitious novels demanded a rethinking of the role of language and
the very texture of narration.

First-Person Impersonal

By the late 1920s, Golden Age whodunits were paralleling mainstream fiction
in fracturing time lines and shifting perspectives. But the hard-boiled school
committed itself to linearity, the scenic method, and the singular viewpoint. In
his 1946 reflections on the trend, Joseph Shaw was as strict as any post-Jamesian
critic. Black Mask authors “gave the story over to their characters, and kept
themselves off the stage, as every writer of fiction should.”54 Hammett displays
the resourcefulness and ingenuity of tightly attached narration. In the process,
he brought to detective fiction strategies of radical objectivity that were part of
an austere strain in modern literature.
The pulp default option is, as ever, exemplified by Carroll John Daly’s pro-
tagonists. “The False Burton Combs” (1922), sometimes taken to be the earliest
instance of hard-boiled crime fiction, evokes Ring Lardner in its use of slang
and vernacular tense shifts. Soon enough, though, Daly carries first-person
prose to a nearly hysterical pitch. “As he turned the handle I give it to him
right through the heart. I don’t miss at that range—no—not me.”55 The Race
Williams stories that followed inflate the hero’s prowess while also letting us
 Dark and Full of Blood 211

in on his thinking, such as it is. Race’s inner monologues capture the turmoil
of his thoughts, with Daly’s much-loved dashes punctuating interruptions
and digressions.
Hammett had tried out many narrative strategies in his early stories for
magazines, both pulp and otherwise, but he established his authorial signature
with first-person accounts of the nameless Continental Op.56 This pudgy, pru-
dent, middle-aged bachelor talks a modest, conversational Americanese.

I am neither young enough nor old enough to get feverish over every woman
who doesn’t make me think being blind isn’t so bad. I’m at that middle
point around forty where a man puts other feminine qualities—amiability,
for one—above beauty on his list. This brown woman annoyed me. She was
too sure of herself. Her work was rough. She was trying to handle me as if
I were a farmer boy. But in spite of all this, I’m constructed mostly of human
ingredients. This woman got more than a stand-off when faces and bodies
were dealt. I didn’t like her. I hoped to throw her in the can before I was
through. But I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit that she had me stirred up inside—
between her cuddling against me, giving me the come-on, and the brandy
I had drunk.57

The Op’s nervous oscillation between temptation and suspicion is a polar oppo-
site to Race Williams’s braggadocio. The brandy is a bonus, in case he has to
justify succumbing to her.
The Op’s action scenes have a curiously bemused quality. He shoots a pistol
out of a man’s hand. Race would have celebrated his marksmanship, but the Op
reports: “Looks like a great stunt . . . but it’s a thing that happens now and then.”
He adds that he is only a fair shot, “no more, no less.” Violence is presented in
brisk, offhand glimpses. A man is blasted. “Dummy Uhl—all the middle of him
gone—slid down to the floor and made more of a puddle than a pile there.”
During a stairway shootout, the Op flees. “The other of the big man-eaters
caught me—caught my plunging hundred and eighty-some pounds as a boy
would catch a rubber ball.”58
The deflationary accounts of action match the Op’s sardonic sense of humor.

“The face she made at me was probably meant for a smile. Whatever it was, it
beat me. I was afraid she’d do it again, so I surrendered.”
“Hsiu sat on the bottom step, her head over her shoulder, experimenting with
different sorts of yells and screams.”
[Thrown from a horse:] I took my knees off my forehead and stood up.
[Facing a Chinese gunman who demands the Op’s pistols:]
“You give ‘em,” he said politely.
I gave ‘em. He could have had my pants.
 212 PA RT I I

The Op has a meta-awareness that Race quite lacks. He can address his reader
(“write the rest of it yourself ”), and he admits that this yarn-spinning owes
nothing to refined literature. “According to the best dramatic rules, these folks
should have made sarcastic speeches to me before they left, but they didn’t.”59
In the Black Mask stories, the Op freely shares professional tips and lets
us into his thinking, while still obeying the genre demand that he withhold
the clue spotting and reasoning that enables him to crack the case. One late
story, “The Gutting of Coffignal” (1925), looks ahead to Sam Spade’s profes-
sional ethos. In this tale of a ransacked city, the Op confronts the woman who
has engineered it all. She offers him money. He refuses to be bought. He likes
being a detective, “and liking work makes you want to do it as well as you can.”
She offers him more. “You can have whatever you ask.”

That was out. I don’t know where these women get their ideas.
“You’re still all twisted up,” I said brusquely, standing now and adjusting
my borrowed crutch. “You think I’m a man and you’re a woman. That’s wrong.
I’m a manhunter and you’re something that has been running in front of me.
There’s nothing human about it. You might just as well expect a hound to play
tiddly-winks with the fox he’s caught.”60

He’s right to be cautious. She has simply been stalling until her confederate
arrives. Like Brigid O’Shaughnessy, she can’t be trusted.
Having given us the detective as l’homme moyen sensuel, Hammett begins to
pull us away from his mental states. In the novels, the Op hides his inner life in
favor of neutrally describing the action around him. He keeps secrets from the
other characters and the reader, and usually we learn of his plans only when he
shares them in conversation. “A notion stirred in my noodle. To give it time to
crawl around, I said: ‘Sit down. This needs talking over.’ ”61 The Op’s confession
of going blood simple in Red Harvest and his explanation of how Gabrielle Leg-
gett could break her morphine addiction emerge as earnest announcement, not
inner monologue.
Instead of psychological analysis, the Op expends his verbal skills on per-
formance. Here are the wisecracks, the similes, and the sour descriptions
that Raymond Chandler would expand in baroque directions. A man puts
“a thumb as big as a heel on a tongue like a bath-mat.” A doper is “laudanumed
to the scalp.” “I didn’t think he was funny, though he may have been.” The Op’s
ironic self-awareness emerges in both action and report at the climax of The
Dain Curse. Mrs. Haldorn is taller than the Op, so he needs clever moves to
disarm her.

I tucked my head under her chin, turned my hip to her before her knee came
up, brought her body hard against mine with one arm around her, and bent
 Dark and Full of Blood 213

her gun-hand behind her. She dropped the gun as we fell. I was on top. I stayed
there until I had found the gun. I was getting up when MacMan arrived.
“Everything’s eggs in the coffee,” I told him, having trouble with my voice.62

The Op unblinkingly reports the maneuver’s somewhat clumsy finish as a

series of abrupt sentences. His wobbliness (fear? embarrassment?) is given not
through a confession but through an aside on his vocal delivery.
In Red Harvest’s most virtuoso gun battle, concrete actions—“trotted,” “third
step”—become crucial.

I was the first man out, with my eye on a dark alley entrance.
Fat followed me to it. In my shelter, I turned on him and growled:
“Don’t pile up on me. Pick your own hole. There’s a cellarway that looks
good.”
He agreeably trotted off toward it, and was shot down at his third step.63

The Op lightning-sketches a car casually loading up with gunmen, plowing

over a corpse, and hurtling toward an ambush.

The other machine slowed up for us to climb aboard. It was already full. We
packed it in layers, with the overflow hanging on the running board.
We bumped over dead Hank O’Marra’s legs and headed for home. We cov-
ered one block of the distance with safety if not comfort. After that we had
neither.
A limousine turned into the street ahead of us, came half a block toward us,
put its side to us, and stopped. Out of the side, gun-fire.
Another car came around the limousine and charged us. Out of it, gun-fire.
We did our best, but we were too damned amalgamated for good fighting.
You can’t shoot straight holding a man in your lap, another hanging on your
shoulder, while a third does his shooting from an inch behind your ear.64

With no time to spare for verbs (“Out of the side, gun-fire”), action is chopped
to bits. Precise syntactic parallels between events and paragraphs mark out the
phases of the fight. That “we were too damned amalgamated” exposes the Op as
one of the most brazen stylists of his century.
By draining first-person narration of psychological depth, by giving it
laconic neutrality, Hammett eliminated the need for a Watson. At the moment
when Sayers was advising writers to modulate external viewpoint to conceal
the detective’s thoughts, Hammett was showing that a detective could describe
his own actions blankly and objectively, as if seen by a dispassionate observer.
The bare fact that men jammed together can’t fight effectively is floated not as
an interesting idea but as a palpable tangle of laps, shoulders, and gun barrels
 214 PA RT I I

squeezed against ears. Well before Sartre’s Roquentin in La Nausée and Camus’s
Meursault in The Stranger, Hammett showed how first-person narration could
be disturbingly impersonal.
The easygoing flow of Nick Charles’s voice in The Thin Man has its own
chilly detachment. A few times Nick shares his physical sensations, like the
bump of getting hit by a bullet, but even more than the Op he’s committed to
being a recording machine. The taxicab fugue I’ve already mentioned is typical
of Nick’s deadpan reportage. Elsewhere, page after page consist of dialogue and
snips of physical business, with characters’ external expressions of emotions
described with clinical brevity.
In a way, Nick is the Op grown more close-mouthed, reluctant to confide
in us. Even his jokes depend on depersonalization. Nick carries his drunken
friend Quinn home, where Alice is waiting. “Bring it in,” she says wearily. Nick
reports: “I took it in and spread it on a bed. It mumbled something I could
not make out and moved one hand feebly back and forth, but its eyes stayed
closed.” This recycling of another character’s word will be carried to flamboy-
ant extremes by Archie Goodwin in the Nero Wolfe novels. But Archie would
never characterize someone as flatly as Nick describes Quinn as a man: “He’s
all right.”65
The noncommittal phrase reminds us that Nick’s externalized narration
functions in part to maintain suspicion. Nick’s judgment of Quinn doesn’t clear
him as a suspect. His later affirmation that Macaulay is a good guy is more
actively misleading. We may accept it, but that would entail forgetting that it
doesn’t come from the heart. It’s just something Nick tells Nora.
Given the power of this opaque first-person technique, why did Hammett
resort to third-person narration for what many regard as his two crowning
achievements? The Maltese Falcon presents Spade resolutely from the outside,
distancing the protagonist from us even more than the laconic reports of Nick
Charles do. Description that would seem overwrought coming from a charac-
ter narrator can form a quiet pattern of imagery. On the book’s first page, the
narration contrasts the eyes of Spade (“yellow-grey”) with those of his secretary
Effie (“brown and playful”) and those of Brigid (blue, matching her outfit).
Throughout, the narration is cautious, using “apparently” and “seemed” to relay
ambivalent information, even about the hero. “Spade did not seem offended.”
When Spade grunts, we’re told that it “probably meant yes.”66
We’re attached to Spade throughout, witnessing nothing he doesn’t witness,
but often we know less than he does. If the story were told in first person,
Spade would pass along what he is hearing in a phone call, but this narration
suppresses it. We are aligned with the protagonist spatially but not perceptu-
ally or psychologically. When Spade passes out from a drug in his drink, we
remain resolutely outside his head; his dulled eyes and wobbly gait are the signs
he’s collapsing. Instead of the usual “blackness enveloped him,” the narration
 Dark and Full of Blood 215

reports: “Once more he tried to get up, could not, and went to sleep.”67 Ham-
mett takes Captain Shaw’s objectivity axiom to an extreme.
For all that, a Maltese Falcon scene is typically rendered with a density that
we seldom find in the earlier books. Instead of writing “Spade rolled a cigarette,”
Hammett gives us more than a hundred words establishing Spade’s meticulous
concentration and smooth control over the act.68 We expect precise description
in a bout of physical action, but unlike the awkward maneuvers executed by the
Continental Op, the punching of Joel Cairo is rendered as machine-tooled chore-
ography, ending with a strong impression: “The pistol was small in Spade’s hand.”69
Perhaps most flamboyant is the adventure of Casper Gutman’s envelope,
which contains $10,000. Gutman tosses the envelope to Spade, who’s sitting on
the sofa. “Heavy enough to fly true,” it strikes Spade in the chest and drops to his
lap. Spade opens it and counts the bills. Gutman explains why there isn’t a larger
payment. “While Gutman talked Spade had tapped the edges of the ten bills into
alignment and had returned them to their envelope, tucking the flap in over
them. Now, with forearms on knees, he sat hunched forward, dangling the enve-
lope from a corner held lightly by finger and thumb down between his legs.”70
Soon Spade will “put the envelope aside—on the sofa,” ending this exercise in
the biomechanics of deal making. No wonder that John Huston is said to have
begun work on the film’s script by transcribing the novel as a series of shots.71
The Glass Key is even more unforgiving in its impassivity. There are no
extended descriptions of physical actions, as in Spade’s cigarette-rolling or Gut-
man’s byplay with the envelope. “He moved his shoulders a little,” we’re told, as
if it would be going too far to say he shrugged. Instead of telling us he shook his
head no, the narration reports “He moved his head slowly from side to side.”
Punched, Ned utters “something nobody could have understood.”72
As in Falcon, we never directly access characters’ mental states. Worse, their
faces are often expressionless or projecting false feeling. Hammett’s main,
somewhat reliable hint at characters’ thinking involves eyes. Ned is the central
example.

His dark eyes glared fiercely into Madvig’s blue ones.

A doubtful look had come into his eyes.
Ned Beaumont grunted derisively and blew cigar-smoke down at the decla-
ration, but his eyes remained somber.
He seemed amused, though there was a suggestion of anger difficultly
restrained in the glitter of his eyes.
His lean face, still bearing the marks of Jeff ’s and Rusty’s fists, was tranquil
except for the recklessness aglitter in his eyes.
His voice was light, but into his eyes, fixed on the log burning in the fire-
place, came a brief evil glint. There was nothing in his eyes but mockery when
he moved them to the left to focus on Mathews.73
 216 PA RT I I

Here is one gain Hammett derives from third-person narration: It would be

perverse to have a first-person narrator interpreting the look in his own eyes.
Descriptions of eye behavior are commonplace in popular narrative, suggest-
ing a folk belief that they reveal truth of the character. In The Glass Key, eyes
yield both a teasing glimpse of character emotion and a motif associated with the
watchful Beaumont, whose dark pearl in his shirt “was like a red eye winking.”74
The Glass Key goes still further in skimming the surface of the moment.
Ned’s friend, the private detective Jack Rumsen, is introduced early but not by
name. “The man was of medium height, young and dapper, with a sleek dark
rather good-looking face.” When Ned joins him, he says, “ ’Lo, Jack.” In effect,
Jack gets his name when Ned hails him. This is a common fictional technique.
But three chapters later, with Ned in the hospital, we encounter an almost hal-
lucinatory replay.

A man of medium size, young and dapper, with a sleek, dark, rather good-looking
face came in.
Ned Beaumont sat up in bed. “ ’Lo, Jack.”75

Did Hammett simply forget to revise or cut the repeated description?76 I’m
inclined to think that this passage betrays the narration’s stinginess. There is
simply nothing more to be said or known about Jack than this. The category
“flat character” might have been invented for him.
The Jack problem expands across the book as a whole. Jack almost has no
last name; it’s mentioned just once, when Ned phones him. The thug Rusty gets
no last name, and Jeff ’s last name, Gardner, is given only once. At the other
extreme, in one of the most peculiar gestures in the book’s narration, the pro-
tagonist is called Ned Beaumont, over and over.
Modernist writers occasionally played games with character names. Most
famously, The Sound and the Fury features two characters with the same name,
and one character with two names. And mystery novels commonly give char-
acters false identities or present the same character in two guises. But every
writer must decide how the narration will refer to the character. Calling a man
Stephen implies intimacy; calling another Bloom suggests a certain distance.
The Glass Key’s narration calls a Ned Beaumont pal Frank, and the welshing
bookie is called Despain. But what if you want the flattest, most noncommital
choice? Neither Ned nor Beaumont, the hero’s full name becomes an unmarked
form, a mere slot-filler.
The problem expands after the senator’s daughter enters the action. She’s
called “Janet” when Paul Madvig talks about her, but whenever she’s onstage,
she is Janet Henry. By a sort of contagion, the narration retreats to its low-affect
distance from the woman with whom Ned will eventually leave the city. Perhaps
this dry treatment tells us all we can expect from the future of their liaison.77
 Dark and Full of Blood 217

The withdrawal of the author’s voice that Joseph Shaw found salutary takes
on a severe, eccentric power in The Glass Key. Through these strategies Ham-
mett forces us to suspend judgment, locking us into the immediate moment
and presenting dialogue and action with very little guidance. Proposing the
scenic method as one option for the novel, Percy Lubbock had considered
Maupassant’s narration as a model of the discreet author: “The story appears to
tell itself.”78 Something like this goes on in The Glass Key, but Lubbock would
surely have worried about the willful opacity of a drama relying so heavily on
dialogue and minimal bits of behavior.
André Gide had contemplated writing a novel that offered “no sur-
face interest—no handhold. Everything must be said in the flattest manner
possible.”79 Hammett brought that strategy to the roman policier. You can
argue that the investigation plot makes the genre a natural for suppressing the
detective’s inner life, but most hard-boiled writers share some thoughts with
us. Hammett saw that the secretiveness demanded by mystery allows narra-
tion to push beyond the puzzle to deeper uncertainties about character motive
and reaction. For much of The Glass Key, we aren’t sure whether Ned’s offer to
work with O’Rory is a ploy or a genuine break with Paul. As Claude-Edmonde
Magny notes in discussing Hammett as a member of the “behaviorist” school
of American novelists, the result is an original kind of psychological fiction.
“Hammett thus succeeded in creating a new type of hero—one whose inner-
most being was unfathomable.”80 Beaumont is akin to Faulkner’s blank-slate
Popeye, who lies smoking on his prison cot while a priest prays for him.
To its very last line, The Glass Key keeps its protagonist opaque, and now
descriptions of eyes aren’t any help. “Janet Henry looked at Ned Beaumont.
He stared fixedly at the door.”81 Yet here as elsewhere the flatness gives the
moment a cinematic sharpness. Much Black Mask writing displayed the ner-
vous pulse associated with movies, but Hammett was exceptionally sensitive
to the filmic dimensions of hard-boiled storytelling. Years before he joined the
Hollywood studios, he reviewed Joseph Hergesheimer’s novel Balisand (1924)
as “a story that could be produced exactly as written. . . . Balisand is a mov-
ing picture.”82 In his stories, Hammett constantly prodded the reader’s visual
imagination, less through descriptions of setting than through gesture, as with
Gutman’s tossed envelope.
In fights, the Op’s single-sentence paragraphs yield fragments that mimic
cinematic shots.

When he crouched close above me I let him have it.

I patted his face with my gun as he tumbled down past me.
A hand caught one of my ankles.
Clinging to the railing, I drove my other foot back. Something stopped my
foot. Nothing stopped me. 83
 218 PA RT I I

The simplicity of the sentences, the unexpected word choice (was it really a
pat?), the reversal of sequence (face patted before the victim’s fall is reported),
and the repetitions and parallels (stopped/stopped, something/nothing) render
this as a fast-cut sequence. It recalls Joseph Shaw’s suggestion that movies “edu-
cated the public to quick reading.”84
Elsewhere, antiphonal dialogue could imply ongoing business.

“Who’s Reno?” I asked while she tied herself tighter in the apron by pulling the
strings the wrong way.
“Reno Starkey. You’ll like him. He’s a right guy. I promised him I’d show at
his celebration and that’s just what I’ll do.”
“What’s he celebrating?”
“What the hell’s the matter with this lousy apron? He was sprung this
afternoon.”
“Turn around and I’ll unwind you. What was he in for? Stand still.”85

The Op supplies the soundtrack, we supply the pictures.

Hergesheimer’s Balisand, however, is more than a movie. “Even as literature
it is not terrible.”86 Despite the whiffs of cinema, Hammett made the detective
novel a vessel of verbal artistry as that quality was understood by many in his
time. The only road to his protagonists’ mind is often a dream or embedded text,
heavy with symbolism (most notably, a door with a glass key). He understands
the post-Wagnerian, quasi-Joycean resources of verbal leitmotifs. Images of
fog and a merry-go-round drift through The Dain Curse, and Flitcraft’s being
hit by “a piece of the sidewalk” looks forward to Spade’s warning to Brigid that
she might be hit by her scheme’s “flying pieces.” The lightweight Thin Man has
a trim carpentry. In the first paragraph, Nick pronounces Dorothy Wynant’s
appearance “satisfactory.” In the book’s last paragraph, Nora complains that
Nick’s solution is far-fetched: “It’s all pretty unsatisfactory.”87
As a tagline, it could wrap up a stage comedy, but it also gives the connoisseur
of literary craft something to appreciate. More radically, the writer who enter-
tained the possibility of writing a mystery in stream-of-consciousness style went
to the opposite extreme. Hammett showed how a ruthlessly objective viewpoint
could bring an austere version of modern storytelling to a popular genre. It
fell to another writer to do something that surprisingly few earlier writers had
attempted: recount the investigation plot from deep inside the detective’s head.

Lonely Men Always Talk Too Much

After Hammett, what was left for a writer to do? He provided several schemas
that crystallized into a powerful prototype: the lone investigator probing
urban crime and going up against crooks, police, tycoons, and politicians.
 Dark and Full of Blood 219

The variorum principle had governed the tales in Black Mask, and something
like it began to shape the hard-boiled novels that were starting to be published
in the late 1930s.
Hammett had benefited from good timing; he entered the pulp market at its
peak. After the Depression, payment rates dropped, the number of magazines
thinned out, and writers turned out serials and freestanding books. Authors
struggled to differentiate themselves. The setting might be New York, Boston,
Los Angeles, Las Vegas, or Miami. The detective would usually be a private eye,
but he might be a news photographer, a Hollywood studio fixer, a newsman,
a lawyer, a hotel snoop, a department store detective, or a fire marshal. He
might not even be a he. Violet McDade was featured in pulp stories, Rex Stout
introduced Doll Bonner, and Erle Stanley Gardner, writing as A. A. Fair, gave
imposing Bertha Cool her own firm.
However varied these novels were, they locked into place many conventions
that would linger for decades. The investigator is summoned to a mission, if
not solving a murder then dealing with a family affair—blackmail, theft, disap-
pearance, gambling debts, or kidnapping—that will bring murder in its wake.
The ensuing adventure, played out in a treacherous city, features violence and
sex, often more graphic than the pulps permitted. Following Spade’s affair with
Brigid, gumshoes take clients and suspects to bed. There are mocking allusions
to the Great Detective and Golden Age puzzles. Crucially, whether the narra-
tion is in third person or first person, the viewpoint tends to be strictly limited
to the hero’s ken. Complex games with linearity or perspective are ruled out.
These conventions were coalescing as Raymond Chandler began his hard-
boiled career. By 1937, the “hero story” for the pulp magazine market could be
spelled out as a schema passed along to beginners.

The story is told from the viewpoint of the hero out to solve the murder and
capture the villain. A simple “who did it” puzzle is not enough. . . . To sell,
you must create a hero who is sympathetic, you must make your readers want
terribly for him to escape the dangers which threaten him and solve the case,
and you must make it seem that the villain is so dangerously clever that the
hero cannot win. Then, when your readers are ready to scream with suspense,
the hero must pull the solution out of his clever mind and, through the proper
interpretation of clues, back his proof with gunplay if necessary, and emerge
victorious.88

Chandler’s 1936 story “Goldfish” runs along these lines. Hired to recover stolen
pearls hidden by the thief, the detective Marlowe discovers the thief ’s partner has
been tortured to death. Other criminals are after the pearls, and when they find
Marlowe they drug him. Following a lead, Marlowe gains an ally, but in a burst
of gunfire, the ally and one of the criminals is killed. Marlowe pursues a clue that
takes him to the original thief, who is quietly breeding goldfish in a small town.
 220 PA RT I I

In another gunfight, the pursuers and the thief are shot. The thief mutters a dying
message that leads Marlowe to the pearls. They have been sewn into the bodies
of the goldfish.
Throughout the first-person narration takes us into Marlowe’s mind as he
reacts to the situation: “She started to fall. Slowly, like a slow motion picture,
she fell. There was something silly about it.”89 Terse descriptions of places and
people interlock with crisp dialogue and action scenes. Scenes run only two or
three pages, and Marlowe is constantly on the move, bluffing, striking deals,
and facing down men and women, a good number of whom walk in with guns
in their hands. If given a book-length format, the situation could be expanded
with fuller descriptions, more characters, plot complications, and passages in
which the protagonist reflects on his encounters. Chandler’s biographer Frank
MacShane rightly calls these stories “miniature novels.”90
Between 1933 and 1939, Chandler published twenty stories in Black Mask
and other pulps. In late 1938, a signed advertisement appeared on the cover of
Publishers’ Weekly.

In 1929 Dashiell Hammett

In 1934 James M. Cain
In 1939 Raymond Chandler

His first novel, The Big Sleep, will excite you as did The Thin Man and The Postman
Always Rings Twice. Please read it. Alfred A. Knopf.91

While aiming for a new best-seller, Knopf was constructing a lineage that
would endure to our day: Chandler is Hammett’s successor. Perhaps too, given
the publisher’s prestige, this debut would launch a new phase in the genre’s
search for cultural legitimacy.
Knopf had reason to hope. In a letter echoing Hammett’s ambitions of
a decade earlier, Chandler explained to Knopf that he tried to create a plot
“in which the mystery is solved by the exposition and understanding of a single
character always well in evidence, rather than by the slow and sometimes
long-winded concatenation of circumstances.” The action would be filtered
through the detective, not a Watson or a neutral authorial voice. Detection
would be a matter of registering Philip Marlowe’s thinking as he struggled
to find the truth behind a series of dramatic, even melodramatic encounters.
The emotional tone of the setting would be as important as the characters,
and the action, still “sharp, swift and racy,” would carry “a very vivid and
pungent style, but not slangy or overly vernacular.” The goal was “to acquire
delicacy without losing power.”92
Chandler declared that he would need at least three books to achieve this
goal. In a parallel with Hammett’s earlier pace of productivity, Chandler
 Dark and Full of Blood 221

followed The Big Sleep with Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The High Window
(1942), and The Lady in the Lake (1943). These novels secured his place as the
most prominent practitioner of the hard-boiled school and as a major influence
on later writers. They sought to differentiate him not only from the whodunit
but also from the pulp writers who had just graduated to the book market.93
Chandler’s education was in classical Greek and Latin, and he admired Flau-
bert, James, and Conrad.94 Taking an academic path to the pulps, he had prac-
ticed rewriting Erle Stanley Gardner stories. Donald Westlake noted that with
Chandler the private-eye novel moved to a phase of “ritual,” in which the “raw
material was not the truth but the first decade of the fiction.”95 Chandler revised
Hammett’s plot schemas, and at times he gave his detective the rueful self-dep-
recation of the Op. Like Hammett, he did not set out to leave the puzzle plot
behind, at least initially, but rather to incorporate it in fictions that achieved
literary value. Chandler rewrites the private-eye as an introspective, somewhat
altruistic intellectual who happens to be a tough man of action.
This amounts to recalibrating the very idea of action. Years later Chandler
explained that 1930s pulp editors were wrong to think that bursts of violence,
nakedly stated, were all that readers wanted, or that the genre deserved.

The things [readers] really cared about, and that I cared about, were the
creation of emotion through dialogue and description; the things they remem-
bered, that haunted them, were not for example that a man got killed, but that
in the moment of his death he was trying to pick a paper clip off the polished
surface of a desk, and it kept slipping away from him, so that there was a look
of strain on his face and his mouth was half open in a kind of tormented grin,
and the last thing in the world he thought about was death. He didn’t even
hear death knock on the door. That damn little paper clip kept slipping away
from his finger and he just wouldn’t push it to the edge of the desk and catch
it as it fell.96

Here are several sides of Chandler’s aesthetic: the dwelling on drab physical
detail, the idea that the vivid part commands more attention than the blurry
whole (scene, plot), and the sad shabbiness of death. We are in the realm of
James’s “discriminated occasion,” the precise rendition of a unique moment.
In the finished novel, the power and delicacy of such a scene would be filtered
through the awareness of a man endowed with a sour wit, a crafty intelligence,
and a stubborn commitment to honor.
Chandler’s artistic self-consciousness made him one of the great theorists
of the mystery writer’s craft. In his correspondence and notebooks, we find a
bounty of principles and, perhaps surprising, a clear-cut commitment to the
whodunit tradition. His “Twelve Notes on the Mystery Story” are as strict as
any of the Detection Club commandments. He insists strongly on fair play,
 222 PA RT I I

careful construction, and avoidance of a love interest, unless it can be made an

obstacle to the investigation.97
Chandler looked back beyond Hammett’s austere version of modern prose
to fuller-bodied literary traditions. By naming his hero Marlowe, Chandler
evoked the Elizabethan playwright and Conrad’s truth-seeking narrator. (He was
originally named Mallory, referencing Arthurian legend.) Coming to maturity
in the Edwardian era, Chandler took as a model the well-made novel of social
observation and psychological insight. Therefore, the detective writer should
try to sustain a puzzle without forcing characters to “do unreal things in order
to form the artificial pattern required by the plot.”98 Milieu and atmosphere
should be sharply observed. Most important was style, “all the virtuosities of
the writing.”99 He found these virtuosities not in Faulkner or Hemingway but in
Balzac, Maupassant, James, Conrad, and Max Beerbohm. He compared F. Scott
Fitzgerald to Keats.100 Stylistically, the detective story needed a richer texture
than even Hammett had provided. “In his hands [the American language] had
no overtones, left no echo, evoked no image beyond a distant hill.”101 Providing
these overtones, echoes, and images would be Chandler’s mission.
Chandler claimed realism of some sort as the basis of all storytelling, but he
granted that every genre has an element of fantasy. This admission may owe
something to Edwardian tastes. His work may be seen as accepting and recasting
G. K. Chesterton’s 1901 proposal that the detective story is ideal for presenting
“the poetry of modern life . . . the realization of a great city as something wild
and obvious.” The hero, who protects us through “a successful knight-errantry,”
possesses “the loneliness and liberty of a prince in a tale of elfland.”102 But Chan-
dler’s wild modern city is dangerous and corrupt, not charming, and his knight
is weary and disenchanted. Chesterton saw the police as the agents of virtue,
but now justice must be brought by the solitary loner. Still, romanticism takes
many guises, grim as well as fanciful. Los Angeles can be a malevolent fairy
kingdom, and the anti-hero can be heroic in a modern way.
Compromise with actuality is demanded by genre convention as well. The
urge for realism must adjust to the need for extreme emotions and improbably
compressed chains of action. “Although such things happen,” Chandler granted,
“they do not happen so fast and in such a tight frame of logic to so closely knit
a group of people.”103 If the writing could endow the characters’ encounters with
local color and plausibility, any problems of large-scale architecture would be
overlooked, or at least forgiven.
Although Chandler didn’t consider himself an adept plotter, he was fairly
adroit in handling the network principle Hammett had worked with. His short
stories are heavily populated, and when he built novels out of them, he found
ways to interweave one cast of characters with another. The Lady in the Lake
features twenty named characters, the other novels thirty or more. One way
Chandler stretched stories to book length was by naming and characterizing
 Dark and Full of Blood 223

even bit players. The opening chapter often alludes to people we won’t meet for
some time, suggesting phantom connections that will be confirmed or chal-
lenged in the plot to come.
A pretext crime based on theft or blackmail or disappearance brings Marlowe
into a murder plot. His investigation reveals unexpected links among charac-
ters of different classes. Usually a disguised crime in the more distant past will
come to light at the climax. The disappearance of Sean Regan in The Big Sleep,
the defenestration in The High Window, and the murder of Dr. Almore’s wife
in The Lady in the Lake are examples. A variant is to link two distinct cases
unexpectedly. In Farewell, My Lovely, one character’s dual identity splices the
Moose Malloy story line to a purported jade theft, both of which depend on
antecedent crimes.
For a man who disliked Trent’s Last Case, Chandler was remarkably depen-
dent on a string of false solutions. At intervals, every book schedules sit-down
scenes in which Marlowe and a confidant, usually a sympathetic cop, review
the case so far. These conversations speculate on the shifting links among clues
and crimes. Instead of clarifying the lines of inquiry, the play with alternatives
can leave the reader fairly flummoxed. (The proliferation of names doesn’t help.
One novel includes both a Morny and a Morningstar.)
Chandler confessed that his love for captivating scenes and dueling con-
versations led him to squeeze in material “that insists on staying alive,” but the
early novels find smooth ways to integrate it.104 The first chapters of The High
Window dwell on a minor character, the skittish Merle Davis, in what seems
to be a strained flirtation with Marlowe. But she will prove to be of pivotal
importance when the past crime is revealed. In the end, Chandler’s tangled plot
schemes, as critic Leroy Lad Panek points out, enable the detective’s solution to
be as intuitively convincing as anything in a Golden Age puzzle.105
Multiplying characters and intrigues, a characteristic of adventure plotting
in general, paid off in Chandler’s quest for literary legitimacy. For one thing,
his vast networks suggest the messiness of reality, the contingent connections
among people in the modern city. Marlowe warns himself against solutions that
have “the austere simplicity of fiction rather than the tangled woof of fact.”106
The presence of several murderers, acting independently and sometimes at
cross-purposes, makes the whole tangle more weirdly plausible, if more difficult
to comprehend, than the single mastermind of traditional detective villainy.
Just as important, network organization allows Chandler to suggest social
critique. When a distinguished family or an executive or a movie star is revealed
to be tied, however distantly or secretly, to gamblers, counterfeiters, and gang-
sters, you can’t escape a sense of pervasive corruption. Marlowe reveals the
handshake between the law and the lawless. Midway through The Big Sleep,
he scans the network and decides that everything he has revealed about three
murders will be covered up to protect the Sternwood family. A murderous
 224 PA RT I I

woman binds the homicidal cop of The Lady in the Lake to a doctor peddling
drugs, and the distinguished society wife of Farewell, My Lovely turns out to be
a fugitive showgirl ready to betray anyone who crosses her. In The High Window,
a family hanger-on kills two people, but his patrons, a wealthy widow and her
son, are also murderers. Pettier crimes like pornography or counterfeiting are
presented as side hustles for the decadent upper class. “To hell with the rich,”
says Marlowe. “They made me sick.”107
Other, pulpier hard-boiled novelists of the period might reveal similar con-
spiracies, but Chandler’s narration gives them a dense texture. His famous
descriptions of places, for instance, go well beyond the bare-bones accounts
we get from his contemporaries. What Hammett did not do for San Francisco,
Marlowe did for Los Angeles—evoking its weather, its smells, its vegetation,
and its neighborhoods. His Bunker Hill is as distinctly portrayed as The Great
Gatsby’s West Egg.
Specific spots are given a Vermeer-like exactitude. Here for comparison is
a casino from a 1940 novel by Brett Halliday.

Shayne clicked the dice gently in his big fist and rolled them out on the green
table. Under the soft diffused light they came to a stop showing a five and a
four up.
The houseman shoved them back to him with his ivory stick and Shayne
clicked them again, then sevened out. He lifted his shoulders with negligent
disapproval and relinquished the black-dotted cubes to the gambler on his left.
The gambling hall was long, low-ceilinged, richly carpeted. Brilliant
lights reflected on the tables from dark-shaded bulbs. Two crap layouts were
deserted, and of the three roulette tables, only one was in operation this early
in the evening.
Against a background of ornate furnishings, men in evening clothes and
women in backless gowns made no effort to dissemble feverish intentness as
the ivory ball jumped erratically around the spinning wheel. Sharply indrawn
breaths exhaled in an almost audible “ah-h-h” when the ball stopped in its
niche.108

The writing is serviceable but vague (“richly carpeted,” “ornate furnishings”)

and clumsy (“dissemble feverish intentness”). There also seem to be some respi-
ratory problems; how are “sharply indrawn breaths” released in almost audible
sounds? Still, the reader won’t dwell on the style, because the purpose of the
passage is just to sketch in the idle rich at play.
Chandler gives us not a sketch but a tableau, and he forces us to linger on it.

The room had been a ballroom once and Eddie Mars had changed it only
as much as his business compelled him. No chromium glitter, no indirect
 Dark and Full of Blood 225

lighting from behind angular cornices, no fused glass pictures, or chairs in

violent leather and polished metal tubing, none of the pseudo-modernistic
circus of the typical Hollywood night trap. The light was from heavy crystal
chandeliers and the rose-damask panels of the wall were still the same rose
damask, a little faded by time and darkened by dust, that had been matched
long ago against the parquetry floor, of which only a small glass-smooth space
in front of the little Mexican orchestra showed bare. The rest was covered by a
heavy old-rose carpeting that must have cost plenty. The parquetry was made
of a dozen kinds of hardwood, from Burma teak through half a dozen shades
of oak and ruddy wood that looked like mahogany, and fading out to the hard
pale wild lilac of the California hills, all laid in elaborate patterns, with the
accuracy of a transit.
It was still a beautiful room and now there was roulette in it instead of
measured, old-fashioned dancing. There were three tables close to the far
wall. A low bronze railing joined them and made a fence around the crou-
piers. All three tables were working, but the crowd was at the middle one.
I could see Vivian Regan’s black head close to it, from across the room where
I was leaning against the bar and turning a small glass of bacardi around on
the mahogany.109

The description sets the room between two phantoms, one in the past and one
in an alternative present: a mansion’s ballroom haunted by ghostly dancers
and a virtual high-tech casino (as if modern design, with its violent leather,
had sadistic intent). The continuity of old money and new criminality is given
through details of color, textures, and varieties of ripened wood. Such descrip-
tions, fulfilling Conrad’s charge to make the reader “see,” are Chandler’s efforts
to evoke the “overtones and echoes” that Hammett’s style lacked.
In addition, the room tells us about Eddie Mars, who’s smart enough to
realize that an ambience of faded elegance can give his game a veneer of
class. Halliday, writing in the third person, simply reports Shayne shooting
his black-dotted cubes (dice), whereas Chandler locks down the imagery
as Marlowe’s view from the bar. The paragraph caps its surprisingly static
tableau with his glimpse of Vivian, who is central to the upcoming scene.
This view is followed by a minute gesture, Marlowe calmly turning his glass
on a surface that reminds us of the rich flooring. Mike Shayne circulates,
but Marlowe stands off, reflecting on a moment of social history in which
apparent respect for old California is merely the tribute modern vice pays to
its forebears.
The description only seems to be objective; it is shot through with Marlowe’s
sensibility. In appraising him, commentators have probably paid too much
attention to Chandler’s figures of speech, which when they aren’t clichés (“her
eyes sparking fire,” endless variations on ice cold) can be maudlin (“dead
 226 PA RT I I

men are heavier than broken hearts,” “old men with faces like lost battles”) or
borderline surrealist:

The minutes went by on tiptoe, with their fingers to their lips.

Her face fell apart like a bride’s pie crust.
It went into his pocket with a sound like caterpillars fighting.
Suspicion climbed all over her face, like a kitten, but not so playfully.

These exaggerations don’t hide their comic side, and they form the basis of
some very funny passages, as when Moose Malloy becomes a lumbering crea-
ture out of a tall tale. There is quieter humor too, as with “a silvery ripple of
laughter that held the unspoiled naturalness of a bubble dance.” These bouts of
sour wit put us strongly on Marlowe’s side.110
Chandler descriptions, however colloquial, often carry moral judgments
in the manner of Edwardian novelists such as Forster or Lawrence. Mars’s
gambling parlor is a “night trap,” the “old rose” carpet reinforces the idea
of decayed glory, and the parquet carpentry owes its beauty to the pillage
of the California hills. Dead bodies can likewise exude visual and tactile
associations.

He lay smeared to the ground, on his back, at the base of a bush, in that bag-
of-clothes position that always means the same thing. His face was a face I had
never seen before. His hair was dark with blood, the beautiful blond ledges
were tangled with blood and some thick grayish ooze, like primeval slime.
The girl behind me breathed hard, but she didn’t speak. I held the light on
his face. He had been beaten to a pulp. One of his hands was flung out in a
frozen gesture, the fingers curled. His overcoat was half twisted under him,
as though he had rolled as he fell. His legs were crossed. There was a trickle as
black as dirty oil at the corner of the mouth.111

Here the metaphors are buried. The image of a man “smeared” into the earth,
rumpled like a laundry bag, his “ledges” of hair gooey with blood and brain,
is capped, as often in Chandler, by an anticlimax. Until the last sentence, the
victim has owned his parts, but at the paragraph’s end, his mouth has been
depersonalized, is now simply the mouth, and the oil is dirty, as if from a
crankcase. Chandler’s literary impressionism has traced how, in Marlowe’s
perception, a man has turned into a thing.
Dialogue is on the whole far more revelatory than in Hammett. Marlowe
gives other characters’ speech its due. “Man, that’s liquor. . . . Man, this stuff dies
painless with me.” Above all, Marlowe can characterize himself just by telling
us what he says. For all the wisecracks, many exchanges are close to the witty
 Dark and Full of Blood 227

repliques of the London stage. Some lines could come from musical comedy or
drawing-room farce.

“You’re not drinking.” “I’m doing what I call drinking.”

“Money sharpens the memory.” “So does liquor.”
“That’s really awfully kind of her.” “Oh hell and fireflies,” I said.
“For five I could start thinking.” “I wouldn’t want to make it that tough for you.”
“For ten I could sing like four canaries and a steel guitar.” “I don’t like those
plushy orchestrations.”112

Admitting that he couldn’t handle group scenes well, Chandler stated his prefer-
ence: “Give me two characters snotting each other across a desk and I am happy.”113
Dialogue is also the prime vehicle of Marlowe’s reasoning. He usually holds
back his solutions from us until he can bring them out in conversation with
cops or suspects. In approved hard-boiled manner, Marlowe marks his dif-
ference from the Golden Age, once giving his name as Philo Vance. When a
character suggests mockingly that the butler would make a good suspect, he
punctures the convention. “I inhaled some of my drink. ‘It’s not that kind of
story,’ I said. ‘It’s not lithe and clever. It’s just dark and full of blood.’ ”114 Yet
Marlowe incarnates many lithe and clever Golden Age conventions himself.
He plays chess and can quote Shakespeare with the assurance of Lord Peter. He
mentions Proust and Pepys and Browning (“the poet, not the automatic”) and
nicknames a cop Hemingway because he keeps repeating himself.115
Marlowe is characterized no less by others’ dialogue, and sometimes these
passages tip into hero worship. Women call him big and strong. A doctor calls
him a “shop-soiled Sir Galahad.” But Marlowe is usually there to deflate his
and others’ pretensions. “What you see is nothing. I’ve got a Bali dancing girl
tattooed on my right thigh.” Pumped full of drugs, he talks to himself: “ ‘Let’s
see you do something really tough, like putting your pants on.’ I lay down on
the bed again.”116
The deflation is intensified by Marlowe’s awareness that he’s often perform-
ing a literary role. Throughout the books, Marlowe displays typical Black Mask
scorn for cheap crooks who imitate what they’ve seen on the screen. But he
takes the convention up a notch by admitting that he’s playing a role as well,
and somewhat enjoying it. In one novel he grants he’s “just like a detective in a
book,” and in another he remarks that the answer is “elementary.”117 It’s tiresome
to play a tough dick, but it can be fun.

I said: “Go ahead and be heroes.”

I clicked the safety catch loudly.
Sometimes even a bad scene will rock the house.118
 228 PA RT I I

Naturally an awareness of performance leads to a reflection on the conven-

tions of hard-boiled storytelling.

“I’ve never liked this scene,” I said. “Detective confronts murderer. Murderer
produces gun, points same at detective. Murderer tells detective the whole sad
story, with the idea of shooting him at the end of it. Thus wasting a lot of
valuable time, even if in the end murderer did shoot detective. Only murderer
never does. Something always happens to prevent it. The gods don’t like this
scene either. They always manage to spoil it.”
“But this time,” she said softly and got up and moved towards me softly
across the carpet, “suppose we make it a little different. Suppose I don’t tell you
anything and nothing happens and I do shoot you.”
“I still wouldn’t like the scene,” I said.119

Inoculating his text against the charge of conventionality, Chandler appeals to

a high-literature criterion, reflexivity. We are not very far from John Dickson
Carr’s Dr. Fell, who introduces his locked-room lecture by admitting that he
and his colleagues are characters in a book. The difference is that Marlowe
momentarily undercuts the artifice with his final line, reestablishing his mortal
danger should the conventions fail. Of course they do not. Marlowe escapes
death. He is merely knocked out. Which is another convention.
Such self-consciousness depends on interiority, and Chandler pushed
further inward. The action of The Big Sleep culminates in a florid passage of
quasi-cinematic hallucination repeating, over and over, scenes that more or
less resolve the case as they drift “through waves of false memory.”120 Farewell,
My Lovely is saturated in subjectivity, and not only in the passages presenting
Marlowe under the influence of drugs. He slices open a Russian cigarette on his
desk. “I slit one down the middle. The mouthpiece part was pretty tough to slit.
Okay, I was a tough guy, I slit it anyway. See can you stop me.” Soon the scene
turns a bit Bloomian, moving from inference to loose association.

He must have forgotten it. It didn’t make sense. Perhaps it hadn’t belonged to
him at all. Perhaps he had picked it up in a hotel lobby. Forgotten he had it on
him. Forgotten to turn it in. Jules Amthor, Psychic Consultant.121

The fragmentation of sentences slips toward sheer impressionism, with the final
sentence becoming a refrain taken from Amthor’s business card. The eureka
moment in The High Window becomes a staccato mental montage triggered by
a photograph.

Well, perhaps the guy liked the picture, so what? A man leaning out of a high
window. A long time ago.
 Dark and Full of Blood 229

I looked at Vannier. He wouldn’t help me at all. A man leaning out of

a window, a long time ago.
The touch of the idea at first was so light that I almost missed it and passed
on. A touch of a feather, hardly that. The touch of a snowflake. A high window,
a man leaning out—a long time ago.
It snapped in place. It was so hot it sizzled. Out of a high window a long time
ago—eight years ago—a man leaning—too far—a man falling—to his death.122

Hammett told Blanche Knopf he wanted to give the detective a stream of con-
sciousness, but Chandler, in a few places at least, actually tried.123
There are, of course, limits. However deeply the narration moves inward,
the detective story cannot yield a full-throated solution. Marlowe’s window
epiphany needs further explanation.

Regardless of the candor of the first-person narrative there comes a time

when the detective has made up his mind and yet does not communicate
this to the reader. He holds some of his thinking out for the denouement or
explanation. He tells the facts but not the reaction in his mind to those facts.
Is this a permissible convention of deceit? It must be, otherwise the detective
telling his own story could not have solved the problem in advance of the
technical denouement.124

Sayers had tracked Bentley’s shift of third-person emphasis in Trent’s Last

Case, and Hammett had, in vain, envisioned allowing the solution to strike the
detective and the reader at the same moment. Chandler admits that the hard-
boiled tale is bound to classic detective conventions. As ever, artifice triumphs
over realism.
He struggled with these compromises, nowhere more visibly than in the
essay “The Simple Art of Murder.” He acknowledges that his ideal protagonist is
an intensely romantic, idealized one.125 However introspective and free of illu-
sion the hero may be, he will adhere to the code of detective tradition. Chandler
assures us that he will “protect the innocent, guard the helpless and destroy the
wicked . . . while earning a meager living in a corrupt world.”126 “Down these
mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished
nor afraid. . . . a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of
it and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a
good enough man for any world.”127 He is a fantasy figure, Chandler admits, but
at least he’s closer to reality, and more admirable, than the eccentric fop who
burbles about bodies in the bath.
This figure is elevated as much by the symbolic suggestions in the writing as
by his mythic dimensions. The Big Sleep’s famous recurring motif of the knight
errant isn’t undercut by Marlowe’s worry, as he shifts pieces on his chessboard,
 230 PA RT I I

that this case “wasn’t a game for knights.”128 He is as chivalric as he can be in

this tarnished world. A bug in Farewell My Lovely, ashtrays in The High Win-
dow, dreams in The Lady in the Lake all project symbolic resonance and signify
literary quality. Not for Chandler pulpish titles like Murder in the Madhouse or
Bullets for the Bridegroom. More respectable for the literati is a metaphor (The
Big Sleep) or an allusion (The Lady in the Lake).
Chandler believed that description, dialogue, character drawing, and atmo-
sphere, filtered through an alert, introspective observer and rendered in an
evocative style, could redeem a popular genre. His project, displayed in four
novels of undoubted quality, was welcomed by a literary culture newly sensitive
to the power of symbolism, social realism, and poetic imagery. Between 1939
and 1944, Chandler handed the detective story a dose of the cultural respect-
ability it had longed for since the days of Collins and Gaboriau.

Hard-Boiled Into Noir

Chandler’s 1944 essay “The Simple Art of Murder” endowed the hard-boiled
mystery with a usable past. Chandler demanded that the detective story, without
losing its identity as a mystery, be a realistic, character-driven, acutely written
piece of social commentary. The genre could achieve significance by addressing
its readers’ world, one where the pervasive corruption threatened the common
good and the guilty might defeat the innocent.129 Chandler denounced Golden
Age artifice while also criticizing most hard-boiled authors for mistaking bru-
tality for strength and flippancy for wit.
Apart from fortifying Edmund Wilson’s attack on the English whodunit,
“The Simple Art of Murder” was a natural step in forging Chandler’s literary
identity. “Perhaps as a result of my business training I always knew that a writer
had to follow a line with which the public would become familiar. He had to
‘type’ himself to the extent that the public would associate his name (if they
remembered it) with a certain kind of writing.”130 As I suggested earlier, we can
see this piece as justifying Chandler’s first four novels. The venue, the Atlantic
magazine, could define him for the literati as Hammett’s heir.
“The Simple Art of Murder” voiced the prospect that the mystery story,
focused on a detached contemplation of death, had no room for uplift. By the
essay’s end, however, Chandler suggested that his honorable detective provided
just that: “In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.”131
In offering a spark of light in a world shrouded in corruption, Philip Marlowe
might not merely save his genre; he might save popular literature.
Chandler gave tastemakers and gatekeepers a strong rationale for admitting
his books into the realm of serious art. J. B. Priestley and Somerset Maugham
appreciated them.132 W. H. Auden declared that “his powerful but depressing
 Dark and Full of Blood 231

books should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art.”133
An early academic article on Chandler set an agenda for decades of discussion:
his “taut sinewy prose” was said to present a dark world wholly appropriate to
the postwar landscape.134 Chandler’s conception of storytelling suited a literary
culture that favored the New Critics’ emphasis on verbal texture, the reassess-
ment of James and Conrad, and the modernists’ awareness of narrative arche-
types. “Philip Marlowe, private dick, is our myth,” declared one critic.135
The essay benefited from good timing, and not just in responding to the
East Coast debate about mysteries. Chandler had followed Hammett’s path to
Hollywood, and 1944 was his breakthrough year. Double Indemnity, written
with Billy Wilder from a novel by James M. Cain, was released to great acclaim,
and later that year Farewell, My Lovely enjoyed success as Murder, My Sweet.
These became canonical instances of the new crime film.136 In 1945 came The
Blue Dahlia, from an original Chandler script, and another acerbic Atlantic
essay, “Writers in Hollywood.” In 1946 The Big Sleep arrived on-screen, and in
the following year came film adaptations of The High Window (as The Brasher
Doubloon) and The Lady in the Lake. Chandler’s 1945 contract guaranteed him
a $50,000 annual salary whether or not he delivered any scripts, and Universal
gave him $100,000 for a script that was never produced.137
Although he published no new novel until 1949, Chandler’s name was
kept constantly before the reading public. The paperback boom fostered
seven collections of his early short stories, which were also sold to syndi-
cated newspapers nationwide. He figured prominently in the debates about
the artistic legitimacy of the detective genre. Outside the United States his
fame spread with Spanish and Nordic language translations. The Parisian
Série Noire collection published three of his books in 1948.
Hammett had long since stopped writing novels, but Chandler had competi-
tion from others. While he labored in the Hollywood trenches and lobbied for
the elevated possibilities of the private-eye novel, sensationalistic hard-boiled
novels poured from publishers. He raged against the “violence and outright
pornography” in Mickey Spillane, whose I, the Jury far outsold nearly any other
mystery. “Pulp writing at its worst was never as bad as this stuff.”138 He wasn’t
much kinder to the more genteel Ross Macdonald. Radio programs featuring
Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, and other hard-boiled heroes filled the airwaves.
The mean streets were crowded with wisecracking dicks, seductive dames,
pistoleros, suave gamblers, and crooked businessmen.
Chandler responded with three novels that in various ways adjusted Mar-
lowe to new circumstances. The Little Sister (1949), a bitter account of dec-
adence in the film studios, set forth an equally blistering view of heartland
America and its homegrown con artists. The Long Goodbye (1953) picked up
the Glass Key theme of testing a friendship. Marlowe’s loyalty to Terry Lennox
complicates his effort to keep watch on the suicidal, alcoholic writer Roger
 232 PA RT I I

Wade, who might have killed Terry’s wife. Playback (1958), a recasting of the
aborted Universal film script, pulled an aged Marlowe into trailing a duplici-
tous woman on the run. In all of these books, Marlowe gets a sex life, and in
the last one Chandler violates his own strictures against his detective moving
toward marriage.
Some familiar strategies are back. Although Playback is rather sparsely popu-
lated, The Little Sister has a cast of more than thirty characters, The Long Good-
bye more than forty. Each tangled plot demands four lengthy summaries before
the final explanation. Energy is lavished on descriptions; in The Long Goodbye,
a decadent restaurant gets four full pages, filled out by a disquisition on types
of blonde women. Marlowe is now even more self-aware, confessing that he’s a
romantic and acknowledging “the tired cliché mannerisms of my trade.”139
The word “tired” was common enough in the early books, but here it takes on
a new weight. Eyeing his office, Marlowe dwells on the “tired, tired telephone.”
Symbols of exhaustion and lassitude (a fly and dead moths in The Little Sister,
another drowsy moth in The Long Goodbye) lie alongside Marlowe’s confession
that his performance as hero is flagging: “I put the old tired grin on my face.”
He finds a doppelgänger in the writer Wade, who, uniquely in the novels, gives
us first-person access to another mind. His drunken note drips with Marlovian
self-laceration, brooding on similes and adjectives while admitting he too is
burned out: “Does this sentence make sense? No. Okay. I’m not asking any
money for it.”140
Like Wade, Marlowe and the other fadeaway men in the late novels can sum-
mon energy for rants. We get tirades on democracy, bad sandwiches, theater
chains, the historical novel, plutocracy, gamblers, God, and television ads. The
condemnations that were implicit in the description of Mars’s casino are spelled
out at length. Despite flashes of the old humor and some rote deprecation of
speechifying (“Lonely men always talk too much”), Marlowe’s insistence on
his noble solitude (“I just want to get off this frozen star”) suggests that these
books serve largely to hyperdramatize the program laid out in “The Simple Art
of Murder.”141 Late Chandler can seem to be desperately reasserting his primacy
in a tradition he helped found.142
By the end of the 1940s, that primacy had already changed the movies. The
voice-over commentaries in Double Indemnity and Murder, My Sweet became
models of auditory narration for hard-boiled film, radio, and television.
The technique wasn’t new to Hollywood, but it had tended to be used gen-
tly, for reminiscence (Lydia, How Green Was My Valley, I Remember Mama).
Filmmakers were attracted by Chandler’s approach of refracting imagery
through a jaundiced, free-associating wit, as if the voice were riffing on the
movie as we watched.143
Correspondingly, Chandler increased and expanded his novels’ inner
monologues. In a kind of fantasy sequence, Marlowe pictures Terry Lenox as
 Dark and Full of Blood 233

a Rotarian in a train’s club car. Without benefit of italics or quotation marks,

Chandler runs an awkwardly polite imaginary dialogue. The Little Sister has
a scene like the clinic nightmare in Farewell, My Lovely: Marlowe is drugged
and his wooziness is expressed in disjointed phrases. Later, Chandler experi-
ments with diaristic choppiness in an interlude beginning: “I ate dinner at a
place near Thousand Oaks. Bad but quick. Feed ‘em and throw ‘em out. Lots
of business.” For three pages, Marlowe’s mental flow mixes acid comments on
California culture with fragments recalling clues and plot twists. “I trundle
down to Bay City and the routine I go through is so tired I’m half-asleep
on my feet. I meet nice people, with and without ice picks in their necks.”144
The screenwriter for Murder, My Sweet recast the early novel’s commentary
as what he called “syncopated narration.”145 The Little Sister created its own
version of that rhythm in Marlowe’s semi-Bloomian reverie. The title of the
last novel, Playback, indicates the auditory shift Chandler registers: not only
a rerun of a crime in the past but a rewound voice now fractured by its relays
through many media.
On its side, Hollywood streamlined the hard-boiled conventions. In Chan-
dler’s first four novels, Marlowe was righteously celibate, but the film ver-
sions paired him off with women. Still, a lot of the distinctive qualities of
hard-boiled fiction survived their transfer to the screen. A prescient article
in a British film magazine saw the Chandler adaptations as opening a new
phase in American cinema. Atmospheric shots caught the desolation of his
cityscapes. The portrayal of Marlowe, for all the compromises of censorship,
was closer to the “natural man” than other Hollywood heroes. These films and
those that imitated them, the critic suggested, created a new genre that was as
indigenously American as the western and the musical.146 The French would
call it film noir.

✳✳✳

The creative choices made by Hammett and Chandler obliged audiences to

grapple with sharply defined narrative strategies. These authors staked out the
poles of restricted narration: the opacity of Hammett’s objective view versus the
Chandler protagonist’s restless commentary on everything around him. The pre-
sentation of elaborate networks trained readers to recognize diffuse, sometimes
misleading chains of affinity and action among characters. At the level of style,
and aided by the presence of a mystery puzzle, the writers encouraged readers
to go beyond the information given and speculate on character motivations and
thematic implications—masculine loyalty in Hammett, Los Angeles’s genealogy
of corruption in Chandler. More generally, the clipped syntax, brief paragraphs,
and in-depth dramatization of scenes made the stories more “cinematic” and the
plot contortions easier to accept, or just ignore. Considered the closest thing in
 234 PA RT I I

6.4 My Favorite Brunette (1947): Bob Hope wants to 6.5 The Great Piggybank Robbery (1946): The hard-
be the assistant of tough dick Sam McCloud (Alan boiled Duck Twacy intimidates the Great Detective:
Ladd in a cameo). “Scram, Sherlock! I’m workin’ this side of the street!”

the mystery realm to “popular modernism,” the hard-boiled tradition became

one vessel of mass culture acceptable to intellectuals.
Hammett, Chandler, and their counterparts discarded some schemas of the
classic mystery, retained others, and revised still others. Thanks to the network
principle drawn from the city-novel tradition, there could be many crimes and
culprits, permitting greater density of plotting. The webs of relationships slowly
revealed in Pulp Fiction, The Usual Suspects, Miller’s Crossing, and Memento rely
on viewers grasping intricate clusters of loyalty and deceit like those elaborated
by the hard-boiled school.
All these strategies, both old and freshly minted, were recycled throughout
mainstream media. The hard-boiled conventions became as familiar as those
of the Golden Age whodunit, and as vulnerable to parody (figs. 6.4–6.5). In the
process, those conventions underwent even more changes. During the 1940s,
storytellers would subject the hard-boiled world to some of the outré formal
strategies that had emerged in the puzzle plots and the thrillers. The three
main strains of mystery merged and transmogrified, producing fresh tactics
of nonlinearity, viewpoint, and segmentation. Under the pressure of mass pro-
duction, the teeming variorum of popular narrative burst out in rousing, often
delirious directions.
 CHAPTER 7

THE 1940s
Mysteries in Crossover Culture

M
ystery storytelling, central to popular culture for much of the
twentieth century, saturated English-language media in the
1940s. The entertainments of that era supply our most vivid
prototypes of crime and suspense. Consider the evocative magic of a few film
titles: The Maltese Falcon (1941), Double Indemnity (1944), Mildred Pierce (1945),
and The Big Sleep (1946). Hitchcock alone provides a panoply of examples,
from Foreign Correspondent (1940) and Shadow of a Doubt (1943) to Notorious
(1946) and Rope (1948).
When we want a model of the terrorized woman, we return to Sorry, Wrong
Number (1948) or Rebecca (1940) or Suspicion (1941). When we imagine that
a dead woman, especially captured in a portrait, can radiate a mesmerizing
image, Laura (1944) as either novel or film becomes the ultimate example.
When we want a term for a president who tries to blind us to the truth, we
borrow the term “gaslighting” from a 1944 movie about sanity under siege.
Although some of these classic sources predate the 1940s, the stories gained
their cultural power by circulating endlessly through many media in the 1940s.
These works represent the peaks, but if we dig deeper, we’ll find scores of other
mystery tales, many unjustifiably forgotten.
The sheer volume of production of mystery stories in every mass medium
did more than challenge gatekeepers such as Edmund Wilson and invite
distinguished writers to try their hand at the genre. The flood of mysteries
created an immense pressure to innovate, to expand the variorum through
assimilation of subjects and techniques from other media. Other innovations
 236 PA RT I I

stemmed from cross-fertilization among the versions of the investigation

plot I’ve been considering. Although all three subgenres retained distinctive
identities, the powerful merging of story schemas and formal options was
common in the 1940s. The hard-boiled model had an impact on the classic
whodunit, as you’d expect. Even more important was the way formal strat-
egies typical of Golden Age detection merged with story schemas in thriller
and hard-boiled tales.
Many of these narrative strategies were circulating in “serious literature” as
well, and by deploying them mystery storytellers probably gained some cultural
cachet. By drawing on unusual techniques already found in crossover works
adapted to a wide audience, storytellers could inject tales of mean streets and
women in peril with fresh excitement. They sustained the impulse of Golden
Age whodunits to make each work a tour de force, and along the way they
taught audiences new comprehension skills.

Darkening the Puzzle

The success of mystery stories in all media and at all levels of taste enabled the
variorum to flourish. Twists, thefts, borrowings, and switcheroos abounded.
Storytellers competed to find new wrinkles. Why not make your protagonist
a mystery writer? (Several books and movies did.1) Why not deny what you’re
doing? (“This is not a detective story,” maintains the hero of the film The Mask
of Dimitrios, 1944.) More broadly, why not expand the limits of mystery by
inventing new strategies or renewing older ones?
You might, for instance, humanize the puzzle plot. Dorothy Sayers had
sought to inject romance into her Peter Wimsey series, and some British
hybrids brought the panic of the thriller into pure detection. American writers
were pressed in this direction by the demands of the slick-magazine market.
Likewise, married couples could introduce banter typical of light fiction. In
novels, plays, films, and radio shows, Frances and Richard Lockridge created
the amateur sleuths Mr. and Mrs. North, nearly as sophisticated and screwball
as Nick and Nora Charles in the Thin Man films.
Magazine editors demanded less deduction, more characterization, and a
story line that began well before the crime.2 In the 1930s, Golden Age authors
had already shifted the narrational weight from the detective to secondary
players and had given the action a considerable buildup before the first killing.
Rex Stout had shrewdly recast the Holmes/Watson pairing as a partnership of
a mastermind and an insolent wisecracker, and the central crime might occur
only after a web of character relations was established.
The late 1930s novels of Ellery Queen had introduced love-interest ingredi-
ents to satisfy the slick market, a tactic that often gave the nominal protagonist
 The 1940s 237

a secondary role (and a girlfriend of his own).3 In a concession to the hard-

boiled trend, The Dragon’s Teeth (1939) impelled hyperintellectual Ellery
to start an agency in partnership with a tough guy private eye. But in the
1940s, authors Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee returned to playing with
form. They imposed a gamelike geometry on a mystery situation, a mild,
mass-market version of the “systems” Joyce used to structure Ulysses. There
Was an Old Woman (1943) is based on a children’s rhyme, The Scarlet Letters
(1953) on the alphabet, Ten Days’ Wonder (1948) on the Ten Commandments,
and The Origin of Evil (1951) on stages of Darwinian evolution. This strategy
echoed Christie’s nursery rhyme plotting, but Queen took the device in pseudo-
literary directions. Several of these conceit-books offered Chestertonian fantasy
set in artificial worlds created by rich eccentrics.
In another vein, Queen came up with murder novels that probed small-town
life: Calamity Town (1942), The Murderer Is a Fox (1945), Ten Days’ Wonder
(1948), and Double, Double (1950). In these novels, the detective is no longer a
detached brain. Ellery becomes intimately, sometimes tragically, involved with
the buildup to the crime, and this pushes him toward impulsive and often mis-
taken inferences. When the mystery is eventually cleared up, he must confront
his own failure to save lives. The Wrightsville books and their successors force
the Great Detective to realize that human passions can’t be wholly understood
through bloodless logic.
For example, Calamity Town thrusts a sordid drama of marital revenge into
an apple-pie New England community. The depiction of Wrightsville evokes
Our Town, not just in its folksy detail but also in its fluent mode of narration.
The late 1930s Queen novels had abandoned the restricted viewpoint of the
earlier books and now we’re fully in the presence of Lubbock’s panoramic tech-
nique. The narrating voice, a more urbane and ironic version of Wilder’s Stage
Manager, freely surveys the town’s response to scandal. The moving spotlight
catches a host of local characters, and the style plays with verb tense, stream
of consciousness, and even proper names. (Three characters, including Ellery,
have fake identities.) Here the superimposed pattern is that of holidays, from
Halloween to Mother’s Day, and the action, which culminates in the birth of a
child, takes nine months.
The result, however exuberant in method, is a gradually darkening land-
scape. When Ellery arrives to write his novel, he sees only calendar-perfect
Americana. Installed in a rented house in High Town, right next to the first
family, he can also explore Low Town, a mix of zesty ethnic types out of William
Saroyan. But when rough-edged Jim Haight returns to claim his bride Nora
Wright, a third Wrightsville is revealed, one teeming with gossip, disloyalty, and
hatred of the newcomer. Jim is accused of murder, and the town erupts. At the
end of the book, Ellery reflects, “There are no secrets or delicacies, and there
is much cruelty, in the Wrightsvilles of this world.”4 Ellery’s disillusionment
 238 PA RT I I

renders ironic the book’s first chapter title, “Mr. Queen Discovers America.”
Frederic Dannay claimed that the inspiration for Calamity Town was Edgar Lee
Masters’s mordant Spoon River Anthology.5
From the beginning, the Queen canon posited that Ellery has turned his
adventures into the fictions we consume. He is both author and protagonist,
rendered in third-person narration. This conceit is undeveloped in the early
books, but Calamity Town pursues its implications in ways recalling André
Gide’s Counterfeiters. We realize at the climax that the book we are reading is
the book Ellery is writing (in Writesville?). The hero’s disillusionment with the
town is captured by the narration’s shift from heartwarming appreciation to
bitter critique.
Not that the author’s account flatters him: despite knowing that a murder is
imminent, Ellery fails to prevent it. He witnesses the crime and draws obvious
but wrong conclusions. And he comes to realize that had he grasped one vital
fact, three deaths could have been prevented. He divulges the solution to the
mystery only by finishing his manuscript. “I’ve ended it, but it’s always easy to
change the last chapter—at least, certain elements not directly concerned with
the mystery plot.”6 The remark invokes genre conventions: Ellery has cracked the
case but he needs to wrap up the romantic story line. By confiding the truth to
the book’s central couple, he can help restore a shattered family.
Despite its dispiriting revelations about small-town life, Calamity Town
ends on an affirmative note. This can’t be said about the Queen books that
follow, which chronicle Ellery’s failures to prevent death or mete out justice.
He had been wrong in his salad days, in the second-guessing manner of E. C.
Bentley’s Trent, but now his errors are more costly and agonizing. The showoff-
ish brilliance of the young Ellery has turned into hubris. In another reflexive
gesture, Ten Days’ Wonder shows him taken in when a killer, a fan of his nov-
els, frames a man by erecting the sort of farfetched pattern that Ellery loves to
discover. The book was conceived by Dannay to be the protagonist’s last case.7
It wasn’t that, but at the end of Cat of Many Tails (1949) Ellery remains haunted
by guilt for all the preventable deaths, and he needs to be consoled by an old
psychoanalyst: “You have failed before, you will fail again. This is the nature
and the role of man.”8
The classic Golden Age puzzle had an insouciant indifference to pain
and mortality, but these Queen novels, along with their continuing use of
outré structural strategies, gave mystery plotting some of the brooding
self-consciousness and thematic ambitions of “serious” fiction. This impulse
might also be attributed to the growing prominence of hard-boiled tales;
Queen’s late novels are contemporary with Raymond Chandler’s sagas of
California morbidity. More than is usually realized, 1940s Ellery Queen is
another model for those later stories of sensitive private investigators devoted
to saving innocent people but tormented by a failure to play God.
 The 1940s 239

Hard-Boiled, Harsh or Sensitive

This hard-boiled stuff—it is a menace.

—Dashiell Hammett, 19509

Some authors darkened the puzzle-driven whodunit, and others expanded the
horizons of private-eye plots. Chandler established his reputation in the early
1940s, and his novels showed younger authors that they could shift from the
pulps to legitimate publishers. These writers had something their predeces-
sors lacked: acute awareness of a literary form, with recognized conventions,
acknowledged classics, and an emerging body of critical commentary. In 1946,
Howard Haycraft assembled the anthology The Art of the Mystery Story, which
showcased the most celebrated appreciations of the detective genre. In the same
year, a top publisher released Joseph Shaw’s Hard-Boiled Omnibus. The term
“hard-boiled,” once reserved for the writing of Hemingway and Cain, now
became identified with pulp crime.
Up-and-coming writers confronted the perennial need to differentiate
themselves from the competition. Ross Macdonald managed to do it through
making the detective a prober of ancient family crimes. Lew Archer, quiet and
introspective, lacks the detachment of Sam Spade and the disenchanted ideal-
ism of Marlowe. Modifying Chandler’s subjective account of the investigator’s
reactions, Macdonald created a sensitive central consciousness that went well
with a turn in academic literary taste.
Kenneth Millar, a PhD in English literature, found in Dashiell Hammett
“deep understated poetic and symbolic overtones.”10 Writing as Ross Macdon-
ald, Millar brought these qualities to the surface in a series centered on pri-
vate investigator Lew Archer. Chandler could name his protagonist Marlowe
in homage to the playwright and Conrad’s narrator, but now the detective tra-
dition could support an ingrown bookishness: Macdonald’s detective is named
after Sam Spade’s partner. But Archer is no coarse flatfoot. In his debut, The
Moving Target (1949), Archer recognizes a Kuniyoshi woodcut and compares
a woman’s body to an ancient terra-cotta sculpture. As Marlowe differentiated
himself from the effete intellectual sleuths, Archer distinguishes himself from
Marlowe. Asked if he wants a drink, he replies, “Not before lunch. I’m a new-
style detective.”11 The killer is a match for him; he quotes Kierkegaard.
Macdonald’s work bears the traces of 1940s literary criticism. His PhD dis-
sertation, “The Inward Eye,” traced Coleridge’s conception of psychology, and
his later essays on literature were committed to Romantic accounts of cre-
ativity. He thought his best books transmuted his childhood experiences into
art.12 While subscribing to New Critics’ ideas of symbolism and organic unity,
Macdonald drew ideas from other currents of modern criticism. Macdonald
 240 PA RT I I

referred to Greek myth and revealed Freudian tensions shaping characters’

fates. His novels developed Oedipal motifs, not least because he, too, “bore the
mark of the paternal curse.”13 He wasn’t immune to flights of interpretation,
speculating that the Maltese Falcon might “stand for the Holy Ghost itself, or its
absence.”14 Eventually he objected to being called a mystery writer at all.
As Chandler had sought to surpass Dashiell Hammett, Macdonald believed
that he could go beyond Chandler (an “uncultivated and second-rate” mind”).15
Chandler had filled his pages with deflating descriptions of locale and caus-
tic meditations on Los Angeles culture, but Macdonald, a lover of poetry and
Santa Barbara, described settings with a pointed lyricism. Chandler argued that
a vivid single episode was more important than the broader plot, a view suited
to a writer who built novels out of short stories. Macdonald, who admired The
Great Gatsby for its compact organization and resonant ending, was more com-
mitted to through-composed form.
Macdonald’s plan for gentrifying the genre emphasized overall design.
Unlike Hammett and Chandler, he didn’t face the problem of moving from
short stories to novels; he began as a long-form writer. A mystery novel’s struc-
ture, he argued, “must be single and intended”—that is, organically developed
from a single premise. Only then can it gain resonance so that the mystery’s
solution will “set up tragic vibrations that run backward through the entire
structure.”16 At the center of this structure is Archer, a sensitive prober of
motive. He “is less a doer than a questioner, a consciousness in which the mean-
ings of other lives emerge.” This conception of the hero as “the mind of the
novel” was, Macdonald thought, his most original contribution to the genre.17
The discipline of architecture, the unifying force of an observer’s sensibility:
Henry James is not far off.
The early Archer novels developed Macdonald’s method, but The Galton
Case (1959) affords an exceptionally clear example of his efforts to streamline
and dignify detective fiction. The puzzle conventions remain intact, with clues,
dual identities, false confessions, eureka moments, a big reversal, and a least-
likely culprit. To these are added the trappings of the hard-boiled private-eye
plot, not just a violent beatdown (Archer gets sprayed in the eyes with blue
paint) but also an intricate web enmeshing more than thirty characters.
These conventions, Macdonald explained in an essay, let him manage the
autobiographical material he poured into the book. Like other Archer stories,
the novel plays down the role of career criminals and emphasizes the shameful
secrets haunting families of the rich and the poor. Most of the action consists
of Archer’s patient exposure of the links between a missing heir and a lawyer’s
murdered servant. The network expands and shifts its weight. Who, finally, is
most responsible for the cascade of crimes that fracture seven families?
Nominally, Archer is the protagonist, but he is almost a blank slate, seldom
revealing his reasoning. He is less the wisecracker, more the pensive observer—
closer to Conrad’s Marlow than to Chandler’s Marlowe. Macdonald explained
 The 1940s 241

that his “semitransparent” narrator “is not the main object of my interest, nor
is he the character with whose fate I am most concerned.”18 As The Galton Case
goes along, Archer becomes a facilitator staging encounters, a therapist coaxing
out stories of betrayal and vengeance. One after another perpetrator confesses
to him, and in the final pages he elicits the traumatic memory of a father hold-
ing a bloody axe over a baby’s crib.
The Galton Case self-consciously endows detective story conventions with
literary value through imagery and structure. A book about class mobility
opens with Archer taking an elevator to an elegant office: “It gave the impres-
sion that after years of struggle you were rising effortlessly to your natural level,
one of the chosen.” A book about multiple impersonations includes a scene
in which Archer studies a photo of the missing son: “I began to have some
glimmering of the psychology that made him want to lose himself.”19The plot
depends on the fairy-tale motif of the abandoned prince seeking to recover
his birthright, then adds in strains of classical myth. One son’s symbolic killing
of his father foreshadows what Macdonald’s essay calls “the final catastrophe.”
“Like the repeated exile of Oedipus, the crucial events of my novel seem to
happen at least twice.”20
Macdonald’s books are jammed with characters sharing secret identities
and blood ties. A daughter may masquerade as her mother, or a young man’s
mother may turn out to be his wife. Apart from their mythic resonance, these
tactics are a natural extension of hard-boiled fiction’s revival of the conventions
of nineteenth-century city novels that depended on concealed pasts and unex-
pected blood ties. However, this tradition of sprawl is in tension with Macdon-
ald’s urge for tight organic form. He thrusts the tangled networks of Chandler
into a family’s past, but then sorts them out by means of an empathic protago-
nist and thematic parallels among couples and offspring.
At times, Macdonald’s erudition slides into archness, as when in The
Wycherly Woman (1961) we have this airport exchange:

She backed away from me with her fist at her chin. “What are you doing here?”
“Waiting for Godot.”
“Is that supposed to be funny?”
“Tragicomic. Where do you want to go?”

When she tells him the person she’s meeting is delayed, Archer replies: “Is
Godot travelling by plane these days?” You have to agree with the woman’s
reply: “Har dee har.”21
Dialogue like this can seem to confirm Chandler’s early accusation that
Macdonald is a shade too cute. In a letter, Chandler, ever alert to style, attacked
some similes in the first Archer novel, seeing them as straining to show off.
When you describe a car as “acned with rust,” the reader’s attention is directed
to “the pose of the writer.”22 In a late essay on Chandler, Macdonald drew the
 242 PA RT I I

distinction between them by restating his commitment to overall form. Chan-

dler’s “hallucinated brilliance of detail,” he maintains, lacks the “tragic unity”
of Hammett’s work. Characteristically, he swerves from Chandler’s commit-
ment to vivid turns of phrase. “I’m not just interested in a simile for the sake
of what it does in the sentence. I’m interested in what it does in terms of the
whole book. . . . Imagery is a structural element.”23 The image of the eye is a
commonplace in popular fiction, but one critic has argued that Macdonald
uses it symbolically within single works and across his oeuvre.24 As for the
hero, Macdonald objects to Chandler’s almost hero-worshipping commitment
to Marlowe. He insists that a novel’s redemptive quality inheres “in the whole
work and is not the private property of one of the characters.”25
The two writers float different conceptions of literary form, both well-suited
to upper-tier postwar tastes: poetic precision of texture and organic unity of
structure. Macdonald’s academic training in English Romanticism and New
Criticism kept him committed to a holistic aesthetic. By drawing on literary
techniques from Henry James onward, he aimed to give the hard-boiled tale
some up-to-date bona fides.26
That effort helped Macdonald achieve prestige, but very gradually. In the
popular market, he was overshadowed by another newcomer. In contrast to the
sensitive Archer, Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer was as subtle as his name.
Spillane reveled in blunt talk, sexual aggression, and the unflinching intimida-
tion of suspects. Avoiding the complex plotting of Chandler and Macdonald,
I, the Jury (1947) and the novels that followed reduced most scenes to a brutal
confrontation between Hammer and anyone who stood in his way. Hammer
reinvents Carroll John Daly’s Race Williams for the postwar equivalent of pulp
publishing, the paperback market. Other writers in the hard-boiled vein added
humor (as Richard S. Prather did) or simply increased sex and gore.
The explosion of paperback originals encouraged writers to develop vari-
ations on the Spillane model. Chandler ruefully reflected in 1958: “I think the
hardboiled dick is still the reigning hero, but there is getting to be rather too
many of him. . . . They are too numerous, too violent, and too sexy in too bla-
tant a way.” Perhaps fortunately he did not live to see hard-boiled story schemas
wildly amped up in subgenres such as “male action,” identified with the vast
and bloody Executioner series (1969–2017).27
The adventure-centered plots of hard-boiled novels made them natural
for adaptation in other media. In particular, Chandler’s widely praised books,
along with his contribution to the screenplay of Double Indemnity (1944),
helped push film toward greater expressiveness. Hollywood storytelling had
long committed itself to a limited omniscience, a moving-spotlight narration
that allowed us a wide range of knowledge. A film was seldom restricted to a
single character’s viewpoint. But The Maltese Falcon (1941) followed Hammett’s
third-person presentation by almost completely confining us to Sam Spade’s
 The 1940s 243

range of knowledge. Even more restricted is The Big Sleep (1946), which doesn’t
retain Chandler’s first-person commentary but does tie us tightly to Marlowe’s
experience.28
Radio adaptations such as the series The Adventures of Philip Marlowe (1947–
1951) easily turned first-person prose into voice-over narration. The same strat-
egy was used in The Brasher Doubloon (1947), a film based on Chandler’s High
Window (1942). Other films sought to render subjectivity more deeply. In Mur-
der, My Sweet (1944), adapted from Farewell My Lovely (1940), Marlowe tells his
tale to police questioners. In flashbacks, hallucinatory shots convey his mental
states when he’s drugged. At the extreme, The Lady in the Lake (1947), from the
1943 novel, presents Marlowe’s investigation wholly in point-of-view shots, with
the camera serving as his eyes. These flashback stretches are enclosed within
scenes of Marlowe in his office telling the story to us. None of these first-person
techniques was exclusive to crime films, but they came to be associated with
mystery and detection.29
Reciprocally, the new movie and radio conventions fed into books. A striking
early example is Steve Fisher’s hard-boiled innocent-man thriller I Wake Up
Screaming (1941). Told in first person by a novice screenwriter nicknamed Peg,
the book is filled with references to Hollywood stars and business practices. A
rapid-fire summary of a young secretary’s transformation into a starlet invokes
film technique explicitly. “In the movies they call it montage. Gaudy and noisy.
Scenes and bits of music; snatches of dialogue and laughter; the flash of cameras,
the clatter of typewriters. All of it building . . . building . . . building.” Carefully
signaled (“These are the things I remember”), a flurry of images and unsourced
speech reminiscent of Dos Passos traces Vicky’s rise. “Lunch at the Brown Derby
with Robin. Vicky being pushed through dramatic school. Open your mouth
wide. Now say Ah . . . Ah. . . . ah . . . ah. Put these stones in your mouth and talk.
Scream, please. Cry, please, your heart is broken, cry. No, not that way!” One
passage evokes the choral effect of radio through a barrage of voices, tagged only
by name, that offer incompatible versions of Vicky’s rise to stardom.

Hurd Evans: “Yes, I discovered her. She was singing with a band in Glendale . . .”
Vicky: “It was Mr. Evans who saw me first. It was a navy party in Coronado.”
The flack: “Hell, no she was never a secretary. Who ever said she was a secretary?
She never saw a typewriter in her life.”30

Later, when Peg finds Vicky murdered, fragmentary flashbacks burst into
his consciousness. They’re set off in parentheses, and italics give urgency to her
sister’s accusations in the present.

I didn’t say anything. I sat there not crying and my heart beating and my head
hot and cheeks hot and I didn’t say anything.
 244 PA RT I I

“You killed her!”

(We toasted her with champagne. We all stood there and toasted her, and
Vicky was on the kitchenette table, and she said this was the happiest moment
in all her life . . .)
“Peg, I’m going to kill you!”31

Throughout the 1940s, Cornell Woolrich and other novelists would strain to
evoke in prose the staccato force of storytelling in film and radio.

The Aesthetics of Fear

After Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) became a best-seller, the domestic

thriller, in which a woman is threatened by her husband, her lover, or a sinister
outsider, entered the mainstream of popular storytelling.32 Parallel to this devel-
opment was a tendency that transferred the man-on-the-run plot from espio-
nage tales to urban crime. The man in flight might be an innocent suspect, as in
Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear (1943), or a criminal stalking the city, as
in Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square (1941).
Many of these novels were turned into films, which made the thriller genre
even more accessible to audiences. Movie audiences encountered murderous
husbands (Suspicion, 1941), wives (Leave Her to Heaven, 1945), couples (Double
Indemnity, 1944), and young ladies (Guest in the House, 1944). The figure on the
run might be a woman (Woman in Hiding, 1950) or an innocent couple (They
Live by Night, 1949).
Unlike the Golden Age puzzle, the thriller lacked an explicit poetics. Patricia
Highsmith’s remark that suspense is best understood as “a threat of impending
violent action” was part of an emerging effort to articulate the genre’s creative
possibilities as they were opening up.33 In 1947, novelist Mitchell Wilson laid
out several precepts. Wilson noted that once the main character has secured
our sympathy, the plot typically calls forth two stages of action. First, the tar-
get must suffer escalating threats, which the writer must describe in terrifying
detail. At a certain point, the victim stops being passive and decides to fight
back, a process that ratchets up our fear for his or her fate. The witticisms of the
Great Detective and the wisecracks of the hard-boiled hero have no place here.
Every scene, Wilson maintains, must be suffused with the main character’s
anxiety.34 Wilson is thinking primarily of plots that make the protagonist the
prey. In his book None So Blind (1945), a woman, married to a blind man, draws
her lover into a murder scheme. (The novel became the film The Woman on the
Beach, 1947.)
Our sympathies get more of a workout when the protagonist is the preda-
tor: the spouse bent on uxoricide, the serial killer who takes us along, or the
adulterous couple preparing their escape. As we’ve seen, this situation had been
 The 1940s 245

developed in the British middle-class murder stories, and Cain intensified the
premise with his sordid scheming couples.
The culprit-centered plot coaxes us to fear the detection and capture of an
immoral figure we’re perversely rooting for. The emblematic moment may well
be that in Hitchcock’s film Rope (1948), derived from the 1929 play, when a maid
seems on the verge of discovering the victim’s body in the trunk. Even if we find
the two young killers loathsome, we suffer suspense in hoping that their crime
won’t be exposed—at least not quite yet.
As in the romantic thrillers of Mary Roberts Rinehart and Mignon Eber-
hart, fear doesn’t abolish mystery. An innocent target is often unaware of who’s
on the prowl and why, as in The Spiral Staircase (1946), The Ministry of Fear,
and Sorry, Wrong Number. The victim or a surrogate must turn detective to
discover the source of the threat. And Then There Were None (1945) puzzles us
about who might be the killer (and the final survivor). Merging the gynocentric
thriller with the hard-boiled detective film, overseen by experiments in view-
point and block construction, yielded Laura as book (1943) and film (1944).
In all, the aesthetics of suspense became central to popular storytelling
of the 1940s. The paperback boom carried suspense fiction into households
around the English-speaking world. Alfred Hitchcock’s arrival in the United
States helped the thriller become a major cinematic form, and the radio pro-
gram Suspense (1940–1962) set off a wave of comparable shows.
In later years, the psychological thriller had greater literary cachet than the
straight detective story. Edmund Wilson objected to puzzle stories, but perhaps
because of the canonical status of Stevenson and James, and the growing recog-
nition of Graham Greene’s grim “entertainments,” he did not find fault with “the
murder story that exploits psychological horror.”35 Soon enough Robert Coates,
Patricia Highsmith, and Meyer Levin attracted serious critical attention with
their thrillers. By 1955, a critic could note that the thriller had merged with the
mainstream novel: “If you’re interested in serious fiction, you cannot overlook the
literature published with the label of suspense.”36 The genre’s growing legitimacy
enabled writers of thrillers, along with those writing detective fiction both classic
and hard-boiled, to train audiences in unusual narrative technique.

Time Recaptured

During this period, the formal strategies typical of Golden Age whodunits—
casebook formats, block construction, unreliable narration, viewpoint
subterfuge—reshaped story schemas in neighboring genres. Psychological
thrillers became more flagrantly artificial, even delirious, and hard-boiled stories
were subject to complex reworking. The classic Black Mask plots were chronolog-
ical and single in viewpoint, but by the 1940s, private-eye adventures had some of
the same architectural complexity to be found in Christie, Carr, and Sayers.
 246 PA RT I I

True, British hybrids of detection and thriller schemas had already

emerged in inverted tales and in books such as This Man Must Die. But
in the United States in the 1940s, and especially in Hollywood, the hard-
boiled story underwent more radical surgery. Original stories that had been
linear and single-perspective (Double Indemnity, The Killers, Farewell My
Lovely, Mildred Pierce) became fragmentary, scrambled, multivocal movies.
The result would be called film noir. The process is most evident in the way
time is handled.
“I am sick of flashback narration and I can’t forgive it even here.”37 The Los
Angeles Times reviewer admired Billy Wilder’s film Double Indemnity (1944), but
his outburst was a response to Hollywood’s flashback binge. Between 1940 and
1943, more than fifty American features employed the device—probably more
than in the entire 1930s. Filmmakers had come to rely on it, and they would keep
doing so for decades; but like other narrative strategies, it needed variation to
keep audiences engaged. Once viewers had become familiar with the device, sto-
rytellers could push it in fresh directions. Arguably, the growing use of flashbacks
in films pressed storytellers in other media to extend the device.
James M. Cain, author of Double Indemnity, declared that the film adapta-
tion was refreshingly original. His novella presents Walter Neff ’s first-person
account as a straightforward, linear monologue. The opening pages don’t indicate
a present-time narrating situation, only a paragraph referring teasingly to “this
house of death that you’ve been reading about in the papers.” The final pages
reveal that Neff has been writing an extended suicide note. But the film begins by
showing us the fatally wounded Neff recording his testimony on a Dictaphone.
Cain admired this tactic: “I would have done it if I had thought of it.”38
The film’s opening sharply distinguishes present from past and frames
those flashbacks that annoyed the Times reviewer. By announcing Neff ’s failed
scheme at the outset, the film forgoes the surprise that closes the novella. As
compensation, it gives the action a fatalistic arc—“I didn’t get the money and
I didn’t get the woman”—in keeping with the doom motif of Cain’s novels.
Double Indemnity, cowritten by Wilder and Chandler, showed filmmakers that
they could replace uncertainty about what will happen at the story’s end with
another question: How did this ending come about?
Decades of modernist and mainstream experiments had made nonlinear
time schemes a standard narrative resource across all media. In film, flashbacks
crept into every genre, even westerns and musicals, and proved, as in Letter to
Five/Three Wives, to be a reliable way to imbue any drama with greater mystery.
But flashbacks came to be strongly identified with crime stories, in part because
two prototypical scenarios, the trial and the investigation, were already in place
in Golden Age mysteries. Each situation could motivate returning to events
that had taken place in the past.
Of the many films using the trial template, A Woman’s Face (1941) early in
the cycle treated it in a rather pure form. Like Rice’s play On Trial, it arranges
 The 1940s 247

its flashbacks out of chronological order. Other trial-based stories would rely
on such time shifting, with some variations, as when Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye
(1950) presents one witness launching the flashback and then returns to the
courtroom to show a different witness finishing the testimony.
Likewise, Citizen Kane (1941) made rich use of the investigation template,
with the added complexity of the “News on the March” summary. In the same
year, I Wake Up Screaming used seven flashbacks in its first twenty-five minutes
to present witnesses’ responses to police questioning. Murder, My Sweet (1944)
found an equivalent for Chandler’s first-person narration in Marlowe’s recita-
tion of scenes while in custody. In Dead Reckoning (1947), a veteran tracking
down a killer tells his story to a priest. And, as if to grant the value of Cain’s
concern for anchoring voice-over in a specific situation, the main action of The
Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) is revealed in an epilogue to be a flashback,
when we see Frank Chambers on Death Row completing his confession to the
prison chaplain.
Trials and investigations rely on flashbacks springing from recounting, the
act of telling something that took place in the past. The alternative is recalling,
presenting a character’s spontaneous memory of an event not told to others.
This technique had close affinities with literary time scrambling, as we’ve seen.
During the 1940s, filmmakers relied heavily on memory flashbacks, both brief
and extended. Often the longer ones are launched by a crisis situation. While
driving an armored car, the protagonist of Criss Cross (1948) recalls incidents
leading up to the robbery that will be taking place in a few moments. The Big
Clock (1948) begins with the hero pursued through a skyscraper and thinking
back on how he got into trouble.
Framed flashbacks, rare in the 1930s hard-boiled novels, became more com-
mon in postwar crime fiction. Geoffrey Holmes’s Build My Gallows High (1946),
which became the film Out of the Past (1947), alternates present-time scenes
with a chronological backstory and shifting attachments to characters. The same
shuttling between past and present governs another double-indemnity plot, Jim
Thompson’s novel Nothing More Than Murder (1949). A dimwit running a small-
town movie house has let his wife entice him into an insurance scheme that
will let him fake her death and marry the college girl he lusts for. In place of the
relentlessly linear march to doom Cain assigns his losers, Thompson’s first-per-
son narration flashes back in alternating chapters and interrupts the action with
dreams and hallucinations. Cain’s protagonists don’t reveal their inner states very
often, but Joe Wilmot shares every passing thought, thanks to italics.

Things had been coming at me too fast. I didn’t have anything left to fight with.
I had to do something quick or I knew I’d be yelling the truth at her. You’re
goddam right I’m afraid! You’d think I pulled you into this to get Elizabeth and me
out of a hole! You think I’d sell anyone out! You—
I got the cupboard door open and reached down the whisky bottle.39
 248 PA RT I I

In his fear that he’s being made a chump, the hero of Nothing More Than Mur-
der offers a hard-boiled equivalent to the panicky narration of thrillers devoted
to apprehensive wives and sweethearts.
A stricter lineup of time shifts was laid out by Bill S. Ballinger in Portrait in
Smoke (1950). Here a man pursuing a woman is allotted first-person narration,
and other chapters render her past life in third-person scenes. Each trace of
her that the man finds is explained in the flashback that follows. (Weirdly, the
events of the past are labeled “Part II,” and the present-time action is tagged as
“Part I.”) Ballinger employs the same sort of alternation in The Tooth and the
Nail (1955), The Longest Second (1957), and The Wife of the Red-Haired Man
(1957). The effect is to force the reader to imagine how the past line of action
could yield the present-time consequences.
Screenwriters and directors also tried out more complex time schemes. The
Killers (1946), Behind Green Lights (1946), Backlash (1946), and Backfire (1950)
shuffle flashbacks very much out of chronological order. These elaborate time
schemes recall the shifting blocks of Golden Age whodunits such as Hull’s
Excellent Intentions (1938) and domestic thrillers such as Boutell’s Death Has a
Past (1939).
The 1919 stage play A Voice in the Dark had replayed the crime from different
viewpoints. The replay device was revived occasionally in the years that fol-
lowed, but 1940s storytellers had a particular affinity for it.40 Filmmakers that
dared such repetitions usually made the plot hinge on contradictory testimony,
as in the B-film Thru Different Eyes (1942) and The Woman in Question (1950).
The “lying flashback” was better integrated into Crossfire (1947), which used
conflicting accounts to illustrate social prejudice. More covertly, Mildred Pierce
(1945) presents a misleading prologue that is corrected during the climax of the
flashback.41 Something similar goes on in Hitchcock’s Stage Fright (1950).42
Reaching back to Conrad’s embedded stories, a nested pattern appeared in
the psychological thriller The Locket (1946). On his wedding day, a bridegroom
is visited by a psychiatrist. The doctor explains that he married the bride-to-
be Nancy some years before and discovered she was mentally unstable. His
flashback includes a visit from a young painter who tells of his own troubled
romance with Nancy. And that flashback includes yet another one, Nancy’s
own account of her childhood trauma. Boxes within boxes, each one posing
the central mystery: Is Nancy really the sunny, unblemished woman she seems?
The Russian-doll structure suggests a geometrical symmetry, but Nancy’s
central flashback appears well before the middle of the film’s running time.
Most of what follows is devoted to elaborating the effects she has on her lov-
ers. Restricting our knowledge to the men, the plot traces each one’s growing
awareness of Nancy’s psychosis as it plays out in social settings. When we finally
return to the present-day wedding, there’s a new surprise: Nancy is marrying
into the family that wronged her as a child. After being restricted to what the
 The 1940s 249

men see and say, brief flashbacks now probe Nancy’s mind, yielding a swarm
of bad memories as she totters down the aisle. The Locket’s structural finesse,
unlike the leaky, misbegotten flashbacks in The Sin of Nora Moran, shows how
highly 1940s storytelling prized clear-cut patterns of time shifting.43
Probably the most intricate use of flashbacks in a mystery play of the period
was Eight O’Clock Tuesday (1941), by Robert Wallsten and Mignon G. Eberhart.
Although its structural gimmickry recalls A Voice in the Dark, the produc-
tion bore quasi-modernist trappings. Its source was an orthodox puzzle novel,
Eberhart’s Fair Warning (1936), but Wallsten claimed that it was transformed
by adapting techniques from Priestley’s Dangerous Corner, Wilder’s Our Town,
and the works of Pirandello.44
A rather unpleasant businessman has been murdered, and Inspector Wait
investigates. He asks the suspects to reenact their doings before, during, and
after the crime. Twelve flashbacks are presented out of order, with changes of
lighting and actor position signaling breaks in chronology. Throughout Eight
O’Clock Tuesday, Inspector Wait freely halts each reenactment to clarify a point,
much as Our Town’s Stage Manager interrupts the action he sets in motion.
Characters, one reviewer reported, are “speaking from their different pools of
light and on their various levels of time.”45 Eberhart admitted the difficulties
of making the fragmented action cohere, but once she had it sorted out, she
declared, in an echo of Cain on Double Indemnity, “I’m so MAD because I
didn’t think of it to use ages ago for the book!”46
J. B. Priestley exercised a more adventurous conception of narrative time in
the investigation play An Inspector Calls (1945). The prosperous industrialist
Arthur Birling hosts a family dinner with his daughter Sheila’s fiancé. Festiv-
ities are interrupted by Inspector Goole. He reveals that a young woman has
committed suicide, and her diary leaves clues to her motive. Under questioning
Birling admits sacking the woman two years before for organizing a strike. In
the aftermath, she lost a job in a shop because of the daughter’s vindictive treat-
ment of her. Penniless and desperate, the woman became the mistress of the
very man who now wants to marry Sheila. And just two weeks ago the woman,
now pregnant, was refused aid from the Women’s Charity overseen by Birling’s
wife. Who was the father? None other than Birling’s thieving, alcoholic son Eric.
After pointing out that the Birlings are to blame for this tragedy, Goole leaves.
There are coincidences and then there are outrageous coincidences. An
Inspector Calls dares to make a single wealthy family apparently responsible for
a young woman’s death through a string of casual cruelties. At first glance, the
pattern can be justified as sheer symbolism, Priestley’s implausible but compact
cross-section of social exploitation. Then comes the first twist. After the detec-
tive leaves, the Birlings face the prospect of scandal and disgrace. But a phone
call to the police establishes there is no inspector named Goole. Have they
been hoaxed? They recall that Goole showed the woman’s picture to only one
 250 PA RT I I

family member at a time. Perhaps the pictures were of different women? And
the Birlings have only Goole’s word that there was a suicide at all. Perhaps all
the girls they harmed are still alive? A call to the infirmary reveals that there has
been no suicide for months.
While the others relax into complacency, Sheila and her brother Eric are
shamed by the stranger’s visit. She points out that a tragedy was averted by
sheer chance. And the story isn’t over. In the play’s final moments, there’s a
phone call from the police. A young woman has just died on her way to the
infirmary. It is suicide. An inspector is on his way to question the Birlings.
Slow curtain.
In its old-fashioned setup—six characters in a dining room, constant dia-
logue, no flashy effects—Priestley’s play seems a staid piece. All the better to
jostle us when the ground shifts under the characters’ feet. He admits: “I have
spent a good many of my writing hours devising means to conjure audiences
away from the prevailing tradition, after persuading them, perhaps for the first
half-hour of a play, that they were safely within its bounds.”47 Is Goole a trav-
eler from the future, visiting the family of miscreants before the woman’s sui-
cide? Or did Goole’s visit occur in a parallel universe, a virtual rehearsal for the
investigation to come? Either way, instead of splitting time into two paths, as
do Dangerous Corner and Time and the Conways, An Inspector Calls folds one
time frame over another. Priestley injected his mildly experimental interest in
“four-dimensional drama” into a standard mystery situation.
An Inspector Calls has enjoyed a long career in repertory and in other media,
whereas Eberhart’s Eight O’Clock Tuesday is forgotten. However, both indicate
that by the 1940s authors and audiences were getting accustomed to broken
time lines. Nonlinear ordering had to be carefully domesticated and varied
within prudent limits, but it still led to fruitful, accessible experimentation.

Multiplying Visions and Voices

From the 1910s onward, mystery storytellers became as aware as their coun-
terparts in mainstream fiction of the power of manipulating viewpoint. That
recognition was displayed in the Golden Age whodunits, the psychological
thrillers, and in the varying approach to hard-boiled narration pursued by
Hammett, Chandler, and Macdonald. By the 1940s, with the expansion of these
genres and increasing competition for new options, novelists, playwrights, and
filmmakers became hypersensitive to Percy Lubbock’s precept: “The whole
intricate question of method, in the craft of fiction, I take to be governed by the
question of the point of view.”48
Sometimes the innovations were modest. In radio, for instance, the singular
viewpoint became common in detective tales narrated by Joe Friday (Dragnet),
 The 1940s 251

Philip Marlowe, and others. More rarely, we find radio plays recounted by the
culprit, as in Norman Corwin’s “The Moat Farm Murder” (1944), treated as a
series of diary entries. Although Cain felt obliged to supply a narrating situ-
ation for his protagonist’s first-person account, by the 1940s most storytellers
simply let the writing or speaking point-of-view character address us straight-
forwardly, without any explanation for why he or she is talking. The Great
Gatsby, The Sound and the Fury, and As I Lay Dying had avoided framing
devices and simply let characters narrate freely. Likewise, radio drama popular-
ized “choral” narration.
By the 1940s, readers of popular fiction could understand that a collection of
first-person accounts no longer needed to be framed as documents or testimo-
nies. An ambitious example is Kenneth Fearing’s The Big Clock (1946). Fearing’s
The Hospital (1939) had experimented with fragmented viewpoints, but here
he applies the technique to a mainstream mystery. The Big Clock plays out the
man-on-the-run premise as a battle of wits between a philandering magazine
editor and his publisher, who is determined to frame him for a murder. Echoing
the Golden Age dossier format, major and minor characters supply first-person
narration. The 1948 film version simplifies things by means of a crisis structure
and an extended moving-spotlight flashback.
Fearing’s cynical take on Manhattan intellectuals in The Big Clock was antic-
ipated in his satire Dagger of the Mind (1941). A man is murdered in an artists’
colony filled with backbiting writers, painters, sculptors, and musicians. Several
guests, along with a police captain, take turns narrating the investigation. Their
accounts are clouded by envy and drunken hallucinations. In addition, three
of the narrators are killed in the course of the book, with two describing the
moment of death. Although 1940s film, fiction, radio, and comics include dead
narrators surprisingly often, including three in one story seemed to mock the
conventions of first-person recounting. This tactic fits the book’s parodies of
highfaluting prose and gushing reviews in avant-garde magazines.
Splitting the story action among two or more first-person narrators became a
significant storytelling option in the 1940s and beyond. Jim Thompson’s The Crim-
inal (1953) and The Kill-Off (1957) switches among many accounts, as does Fredric
Brown’s The Lenient Beast (1956). In Len Deighton’s Only When I Larf (1968),
three con artists provide alternating, comically incompatible accounts of their
exploits. Variants of the As I Lay Dying technique would become a staple of mys-
tery fiction, particularly domestic thrillers, well into the 2010s.
More subtly Agatha Christie continued her campaign of misdirection
through style and character perspective. Building on her viewpoint stratagems
in Death in the Clouds (1935), she explored intricate patterning of viewpoints in
a psychological thriller, a whodunit recruiting three detectives, and a novel cen-
tered on Poirot. In And Then There Were None (1939), an unseen host assembles
ten people, all guilty of homicide, on an island. Each one is mysteriously killed,
 252 PA RT I I

in accordance with the nursery rhyme. They try to unite against the threat but
fail to find the killer, and all perish. A confession turns up by accident that
reveals how the series of murders was pulled off.
Christie’s premise goes back at least to the novel The Invisible Host (1930) by
Gwen Bristow and Bruce Manning, and the play based on it, The Ninth Guest
(1930). (The ninth guest, as you might expect, is Death.) Variants include the
plays Halfway to Hell (1934) and Angel Island (1939). Whether or not Christie
knew of these earlier works, it was her version—thanks in part to superior craft
and to her brand name—that became a perennially popular novel, a hugely
successful 1943 play, and several film and radio versions.49 Its influence lingered
for decades and can be seen in Quentin Tarantino’s shooting-gallery plot for
The Hateful Eight (2015).50
And Then There Were None, said to be the best-selling mystery of all time,
relies on an ingenious revision of the schema through a fractured point-of-view
technique. Ninety-one chapters shuttle us among the thoughts of eight major
characters. (The two servants don’t rate.) In violation of the Detection Club
creed, we are allowed to enter the murderer’s mind; however, as in Death in the
Clouds, those chapters don’t reveal the plotter’s identity. As an extra fillip, at the
end we learn that the killer is the guest who has played the detective role, taking
charge of the investigation and announcing, correctly, that the murderer must
be one of their own.
With her typical resourcefulness, Christie prepared a stage version that
allowed the romantic couple to escape. After all, one variant of the nursery
rhyme mentioned survivors. The play became the source of René Clair’s 1945
film. That version didn’t respect the moving-spotlight precision of the novel
(except in some abrupt to-camera addresses), but it did execute its own bit of
sleight of hand, a sneaky ellipsis.
In Remembered Death (aka Sparkling Cyanide, 1945), Christie distributes
third-person viewpoints in a more geometrical way. A year ago, Rosalind Bar-
ton died during a restaurant dinner. Now her husband George has received
anonymous letters suggesting poisoning. In an initial chapter, Rosalind’s sis-
ter Iris recalls this threat, as well as incidents in the weeks leading up to the
death. Others’ memories of Rosalind are activated in five more chapters, each
restricted to one member of the dinner party. These chapters also expose secret
affiliations among the dinner guests and interested outsiders. In an effort to
find the killer, George invites the guests to the same restaurant to reenact the
fateful evening. Another set of six chapters traces the effects of the invitation,
with the difference that Colonel Race, a detective, is included. During the meal,
George is killed.
Rex Stout once asked if one could undercut the conclusions of the primary
detective by letting a subsidiary character come up with the correct solution.
The climax would involve “exposing not only the real villain but the real hero.”51
 The 1940s 253

This stratagem governs the last section of Remembered Death. Brief, cross-
cut chapters trace the inquiries of Colonel Race, another official, and a man
romantically involved with a suspect. We’re likely to expect that Colonel Race,
Christie’s series detective, will break the case, but the solution is found by the
amateur (who had initially seemed to be a sinister force).
In Remembered Death Christie tidies up the splintered-viewpoint structure
of And Then There Were None and applies it to a classic puzzle situation. Once
more, she admits the reader into the minds of the suspects in a way that the
Golden Age rules would discourage. That obliges her to find tricky ways of
obscuring what the culprit is up to. She achieves this result by multiplying the
sort of ellipses she exercised at one point in Roger Ackroyd and throughout
Death in the Clouds.
And Then There Were None and Remembered Death use third-person narra-
tion throughout, but Five Little Pigs (aka Murder in Retrospect, 1942) incorpo-
rates a casebook block. It’s also something of a grid book with a strict geometry,
which is yet again built on a nursery rhyme. Many connoisseurs consider it
Christie’s supreme achievement.
Sixteen years ago Caroline Crale was found guilty of poisoning her hus-
band. She offered no effective defense. Now her daughter asks Hercule Poirot
to determine if Caroline was innocent. Poirot’s investigation hinges wholly on
testimony and recollection. After questioning five lawyers and police officials in
five chapters, he then visits the five witnesses who were in the household on the
fatal day. But Poirot needs more, so he induces the witnesses to write out their
memories of the central couple and the day of the murder.
The five first-person memoirs do several things. They function as flashbacks,
often replaying the same events from different points of view. (The gaps and
disparities will provide Poirot with clues about what really happened.) In good
Wilkie Collins fashion, the memoirs reveal more about the writers than they
realize. A final five-chapter section reattaches us to Poirot as he asks his last
questions (five, of course) and then assembles the suspects for the ultimate
revelation.
Apart from its quintuple structures, Five Little Pigs offers Christie’s version
of the old novelistic dream, the prismatic narrative. The witnesses differ sharply
in their appraisals of Caroline Crale. She is “a rotter,” “a gentle creature,” “very
dangerous,” and a victim, depending on who’s talking and writing about her.
The same multifaceted treatment is accorded the young woman Crale has taken
as a mistress. The need to resolve the plot eventually forces Christie to establish
who each woman truly is. Still, as Robert Barnard points out, the conflicting
views that the witnesses express provide different parts of the solution.52 As in
Berkeley’s grid geometry in The Poisoned Chocolates Case, the clues jostle and
reconfigure themselves: there, depending on each detective’s pet solution; here,
based on each observer’s incomplete knowledge of the central women.
 254 PA RT I I

A Frenzy of Recapitulation

All these devices—flashbacks, restricted knowledge, multiple viewpoints,

first-person recounting—were often deployed in plots built out of large-scale
sections. Several books and films, particularly those hinging on flashbacks such
as The Locket, display block organization. The most thoroughgoing 1940s use of
block construction proved to be a breakthrough novel by Vera Caspary.
Caspary was a Greenwich Village free-love practitioner, Communist Party
fellow traveler, occasional screenwriter, boundlessly energetic purveyor of sus-
pense fiction, passionate paramour of a married man, and advocate for women
in prison. She became the queen of block construction in film and fiction. As
a screenwriter, she turned the splintered viewpoints of A Letter to Five Wives
into the neat episodes of Letter to Three Wives, and her screenplay for Les Girls
(1957) resorted to the same pattern. Several of her novels (Stranger Than Truth,
1946; Final Portrait, 1971; Elizabeth X, 1978) were constructed in blocks present-
ing different first-person viewpoints.
In 1942 Collier’s offered Caspary $10,000 for the serial rights to Ring Twice
for Laura. The price tag indicates the health of the slick-magazine market,
which could set an ambitious beginner on a path toward fame. Published as
Laura in 1943, the book found acclaim, and the success of the 1944 film version
was credited with confirming that a psychological thriller could be the basis of
an A-level picture.53
The novel pivots on both a mystery story and a romance. A woman is found
murdered in her apartment. Although a shotgun blast has disfigured her face,
she’s initially identified as advertising executive Laura Hunt. After the funeral,
detective Lieutenant Mark McPherson is lingering in her apartment when Laura
returns from a trip. The victim was actually Diane Redfern, a model. The misiden-
tified-victim convention triggers an investigation into the usual sort of suppressed
backstory: How did Diane wind up in Laura’s place? Was she alone? Was she the
target all along, or did the killer mistake her for Laura? Along the way, the cop—
already half in love with Laura dead—begins to both woo and browbeat her.
At the same time, a cluster of suspects needs questioning: Laura’s flighty
Aunt Sue, her fiancé Shelby Carpenter, and her lordly patron, the columnist
Waldo Lydecker. Laura isn’t exonerated either because she has reason to hate
Diane. The usual scatter of clues—the murder weapon, a bottle of cheap bour-
bon, and a cigarette case—tugs McPherson this way and that, although his
final discovery of the killer depends as much on intuition about personality as
it does on physical traces. The plot hole in the film (Why isn’t the artist Jacoby,
who painted Laura’s haunting portrait, an obvious suspect?) is in the original
novel as well, but few readers or viewers seem to notice it.
What is striking about the book is its point-of-view structure. Following
Golden Age precedent, Caspary revives the casebook method of composition.54
To take us through the nine days of the investigation, Caspary creates four
 The 1940s 255

first-person narrators, each assigned one or two blocks. There’s a metafictional,

anthological impulse too: each narrator’s style has its own tenor, representing a
particular subgenre of mystery fiction.
If you didn’t know the Laura mystique already, you might suspect that the
opening section, told from Waldo’s perspective, would announce him as the
brilliant amateur detective who will solve the case and surpass the plodding
McPherson. Waldo is a celebrity columnist, a connoisseur of murder and lethal
banter. Like 1920s detective Philo Vance, he collects art and lords it over others
through intolerable erudition. Waldo writes in periodic sentences of eloquent
self-congratulation: “My grief in her sudden and violent death found consola-
tion in the thought that my friend, had she lived to a ripe old age, would have
passed into oblivion, whereas the violence of her passing and the genius of her
admirer gave her a fair chance at immortality.”55 There are even fake footnotes
like those in S. S. Van Dine and Ellery Queen, attesting to the scholarly bona
fides of this dandy.
Waldo’s power over Laura, as her patron and guru, is expanded to a remark-
able authority over the narrative in this first part. He recounts things he didn’t
witness, chiefly the early offstage phases of McPherson’s investigation, and his
explanation is that of the artist as god.

That is my omniscient role. As narrator and interpreter, I shall describe scenes

which I never saw and record dialogues which I did not hear. For this impu-
dence I offer no excuse. I am an artist, and it is my business to re-create move-
ment precisely as I create mood. I know these people, their voices ring in my
ears, and I need only close my eyes and see characteristic gestures. My written
dialogue will have more clarity, compactness, and essence of character than
their spoken lines, for I am able to edit while I write, whereas they carried on
their conversation in a loose and pointless fashion with no sense of form or
crisis in the building of their scenes.56

This is an extraordinary passage. At one level it evokes the tradition from

Dupin to Nero Wolfe of the detective as Romantic artist, a demiurge who uses
sympathetic imagination to solve the crime. At the same time, the reconstruc-
tions of scenes Waldo didn’t witness opens the very 1940s possibility that what
follows may be his fantasy. Only near the end of his text does Waldo assert that
his knowledge of McPherson’s investigation is derived from what Mark later
told him one night at dinner. This all-seeing narrator actually doesn’t know one
incriminating fact. His omniscience is an illusion.
McPherson takes up the tale in the second segment. He has read Waldo’s
account and treats it as a piece of evidence. As McPherson swerves the action
into the realm of professional detection, the verbal register shifts. If Waldo’s
style is showoffish, McPherson’s is laconic. Waldo celebrates how his prose will
immortalize Laura, but McPherson admits that his own version of things “won’t
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have the smooth professional touch.” Actually, though, it does. It reads hard-
boiled. “As we stepped out of the restaurant, the heat hit us like a blast from a
furnace. The air was dead. Not a shirt-tail moved on the washlines of McDou-
gal Street. The town smelled like rotten eggs. A thunderstorm was rolling in.”
McPherson, channeling Chandler, gives us the voice of the tough but sensitive
dick. There’s an echo of James M. Cain when he signals that in retrospect he was
wrong to trust this femme fatale: he sourly describes himself in the third person.

She offered her hand.

The sucker took it and believed her.

McPherson’s eventual victory over Waldo is prefigured in the cop’s reflections

on writing up crime. When Waldo learned Laura was still alive, McPherson
says, “The prose style was knocked right out of him.” So much for a Wimseyish
fop set down in a Manhattan murder.57
The hanger-on Shelby gets his voice in as well. A brief third section consists
of a police transcript of McPherson’s questioning. Aided by his attorney, Shelby
withdraws some lies, dodges uncomfortable questions, and generally remains
the most obvious suspect, as well as Mark’s rival for Laura. At this point in the
book, Caspary begins to play an intricate game of knowledge, in which we get
bits of information that test the string of deceptions and evasions the suspects
offer McPherson.
In the fourth block, Laura writes her testimony. Once more the circum-
stance of composition is explained to us. Laura confesses that she can’t under-
stand what she thinks and feels unless she sets it down. She has burned her
old diaries, but now she has to start over. “It’s always when I start on a long
journey or meet an exciting man or take a new job that I must sit for hours in
a frenzy of recapitulation.”58 Now the action is that of the inquiring woman in
peril, the figure familiar from Eberhart and Rinehart. As a result, the stylistic
register is “feminine,” noting costume details and shades of color while tracking
fluctuations of feeling. Laura’s narration is also suspenseful and contemplative,
dwelling on moments that seem to radiate danger: McPherson’s trick questions,
Waldo’s sinister manipulations, and Shelby’s pretense that he’s protecting her
rather than himself.
Laura carries the action to a pitch of emotion because she starts to realize
that she has clung to two failed men. She will gradually accept that McPherson,
despite his coldness, is the best match for her. Waldo is “an old lady” and Shelby
is an overgrown baby. Caspary, the left-winger, gives these portraits the taint of
class corruption. Waldo and Shelby are ghoulish creatures of the high life, and
Aunt Susie is the faded, self-indulgent socialite Laura might become.
Laura’s recognition of her unhappiness is rendered in a choppy, spas-
modic fashion. Waldo’s, McPherson’s, and Shelby’s accounts have all been
 The 1940s 257

chronological. Laura’s is not. It skips around in time, replays scenes we’ve seen
from other viewpoints, and incorporates dreams that, as in The Sin of Nora
Moran, seem as well to be flashbacks. “This is no way to write the story. I should
be simple and coherent, fact after fact, giving order to the chaos of my mind. . . .
But tonight writing thickens the dust. Now that Shelby has turned against me
and Mark has shown the nature of his trickery, I am afraid of facts in orderly
sequence.”59 It’s a story arc we find throughout 1940s in fiction and film: the
strong career woman is thrown off balance and succumbs to confusion. The
most notorious example is Lady in the Dark, the 1941 play that appeared on film
in 1944, the same year as the film version of Laura.
The lady returned from the dead will need a real man to rescue her. That
rescue is enacted, again, in prose texture when McPherson reassumes control
of the narrative in a fifth block. In the first stretch of it, he provides a classic
summing up of the case. It’s rendered with a wide-ranging explanation that
deflates Waldo’s early, preening claim to artistic omniscience. There follows
McPherson’s account of rescuing Laura from Waldo’s second attempt to kill her.
McPherson’s hard-boiled diction has won out. As Waldo is taken away in
the ambulance, however, he earns a degree of oratorical revenge. McPherson’s
narration quotes Waldo’s mumbled phrases as, dying, he fills in plot points. In
the process, Waldo’s style is inserted, like an alien bacterium, into McPherson’s
curt passages.
McPherson, who can afford to be gallant, gives Waldo the last convoluted
word. It comes in a quotation from a second manuscript found by McPher-
son at the climax, a passage that confirms Waldo’s guilt. In Waldo’s unfinished
confession, Laura is the essence of womanhood, a modern Eve, but one who
continually reminded him that he could never be Adam.
Laura anthologizes three traditions: whodunit, thriller, and hard-boiled
investigation. Their stylistic registers would have been difficult to capture on
film, but during production the filmmakers considered mimicking the novel’s
block construction. Citizen Kane had made multiple-viewpoint narration more
thinkable in 1940s movies. Eventually, however, only Waldo’s voice-over was
retained, but at the cost of coherence. His voice initially frames the film, drops
out as our attachment shifts to McPherson, and then mysteriously returns at
the very end—suggesting that his declaration of love for Laura is uttered, some-
how, after his death.60

Plotting the Twist

Caspary went on to other successes, but Laura remains her most memora-
ble novel. It became a landmark romantic mystery and a prototype for the
modern domestic thriller, which weaves together first-person accounts by
 258 PA RT I I

many characters. It’s also an enduring example of how a popular genre’s inno-
vations in viewpoint, time shifting, and block construction could engage a
broad audience.
Still other crime stories yielded the same dynamic by pushing toward greater
experimentation, applying mainstreamed modernist and Golden Age tech-
niques to whodunits, thrillers, and hard-boiled tales. Josephine Tey’s novel,
The Franchise Affair (1948), filters the action through a secondary character
while severely marginalizing Tey’s series detective Alan Grant. (She makes
him mistaken as well.) Tey’s Daughter of Time (1951) is a Jamesian tour de force
that turns the armchair detective into a bedridden one. Inspector Grant is
confined to his hospital bed. Supported by helpers who bring him books and
dig up documents, he discovers who really killed Richard III’s cousins in 1483.
Another novelist would have built the plot around the archival research, but
confining us wholly to Grant’s perspective enables Tey to track his thinking.
She also dramatizes the play of hypotheses in conversations with his bedside
visitors. The Daughter of Time, lauded upon publication, has long been consid-
ered one of the finest of all mystery novels.
Ingenuity flourished. There were stunts such as It’s My Own Funeral (1944),
narrated by a detective in a coffin, and Dead to the World (1947) in which the
investigator’s spirit travels back to the land of the living to find his murderer.
Only a little more serious was Pat McGerr’s Pick Your Victim (1946), which
replaced the question Whodunit? with To whom was it done? Jamesian prin-
ciples of limited viewpoint are playfully put into action when Marines in an
Aleutian Islands outpost find a torn news story. They know who the murderer
is but must figure out who was killed. A time jumping strategy dominates Rich-
ard Hull’s Last First (1947), a mystery “dedicated,” the book flap tells us, “to
those who habitually read the last chapter first.” But this is persiflage because
the initial chapter is written so obliquely that it really doesn’t give away the
ending of the main action.
One celebrated debut novel encapsulates many of the prime formal options
of the period. Ira Levin’s A Kiss Before Dying (1953) shows how a book could
gain a clockwork intricacy by exploiting a host of emergent storytelling strate-
gies. It also looks forward to the “twist” aesthetic that would become important
in later decades.
Classic puzzle stories create surprises through quietly deceptive narration,
but in the 1940s more storytellers started creating surprise through flamboy-
antly unreliable narration. Agatha Christie could mislead us, but she would not
indulge in demented narrators. Later, Psycho and Fight Club, both in novel and
film form, would exploit the duplicitous narration that became a major option
in mysteries in the 1940s and early 1950s.
The situation in A Kiss Before Dying has a folktale simplicity. Bud Corl-
iss wants to marry money, and he targets Leo Kingship’s three daughters. He
 The 1940s 259

seduces Dorothy, but when she gets pregnant, Bud realizes her father will dis-
own her, so he fakes her suicide. His next plan, to marry Ellen, is spoiled when
she discovers Dorothy’s murder, so he kills Ellen as well. Now Bud targets Mar-
ion. “Third time lucky . . . all the childhood fairy tales with the third try and
the third wish and the third suitor.”61 But with the help of George Gant, a young
man who knew Dorothy, Marion survives and Bud is killed.
Onto a three-block exoskeleton, labeled with the three daughters’ names,
Levin maps familiar plot schemas. The first part, “Dorothy,” is largely restricted
to Bud’s viewpoint, as he tries to make her abort their child. His efforts are ren-
dered in the manner of the stalking-killer plot. The second part shifts to Ellen’s
perspective as she investigates her sister’s death. Through clever detective work
she establishes that Dorothy was planning a wedding, and she tracks down
two young men who took classes with her. Ellen’s uneasy encounters with both
suspects seem to make her a woman in peril. Part three puts Marion at risk of
being killed by Bud. Now the moving-spotlight narration shifts from her to Bud
to George in a classic passage of climactic crosscutting.
The firm tripartite geometry attests to the heritage of Golden Age mystery.
In the same vein, Levin has resorted to letters and newspaper coverage of the
murders. Ellen’s letter laying out her suspicions is a swift exercise in classic
detective clue-reading. There is also the genre’s typical self-consciousness, with
references to both Holmes and thrillers (notably Rebecca). Recycling a 1940s
motif, Levin traces Bud’s psychosis to the traumatic killing of a Japanese soldier.
But what sets the book apart, and provides a model for the twists that would
drive later thrillers, is a simple weaponizing of a narrative option that usually
passes unnoticed when we read. After the 1920s, perhaps picking up on Hem-
ingway’s cryptic pronouns in In Our Time (1925), crime novelists began teasing
the reader by withholding a major character’s name during a story’s opening
pages. The character is merely “he” or “she.” It takes three pages for Howard
Van Horn to be identified in Ellery Queen’s Ten Days’ Wonder and five pages for
Dorothy B. Hughes to name Dix Steele in the first chapter of In a Lonely Place
(1947). When the character’s name is never given, as in Helen Eustis’s Horizontal
Man (1946), we get the book’s first mystery: Who is the character doing all this?
More experimentally, Hughes’s Dread Journey (1946) switches viewpoints within
scenes and often doesn’t specify who’s thinking what; a simple “he” or “she”
leaves us to guess. At the limit, Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust doesn’t divulge
its protagonist’s name for thirty pages, and almost never mentions it afterward.
Levin saw another possibility in the cryptic personal pronoun. He could
use it as a structuring device across the novel’s three blocks. Part one of
A Kiss Before Dying presents Dorothy’s murder from a third-person viewpoint
restricted to the killer, but it never names the man, simply calling him “he”
for more than sixty pages. At the beginning of part two, when Ellen explains
her suspicions in a letter to Bud (who’s purportedly back home), his being
 260 PA RT I I

named discourages us from assuming that Bud could be the mysterious he

of part one. We might expect Bud to eventually become the helper male of
classic endangered-women thrillers.
To steer us away from Bud, Levin quickly provides two suspects on the cam-
pus, hinting that one or the other could be Dorothy’s killer, the he of the open-
ing block. The twist comes near the end of part two when Levin reveals that
Bud is on the scene and he’s the man whose thoughts we followed in the first
part. Only then do we realize what my précis divulged: the two sisters were
killed by Marion’s fiancé Bud.
By the third part, we’re fully informed and can participate in woman-in-
peril suspense, as Bud cozies up to Marion and tries to get a job in her father’s
company. It’s another local, George Gant, who becomes the helper male by
discovering proof that Bud transferred from Dorothy’s college to Ellen’s. As
often happens, George has to overcome the doubts of everyone in time to res-
cue Marion. In a sly echo of part one, George pretends to be a man named
Dettweiler when he confronts Bud, and Levin’s narration switches between his
two names.
A Kiss Before Dying displays the sleek engineering that would make Ira Levin
(only twenty-three when the novel was published) famous for Rosemary’s Baby,
The Stepford Wives, and The Boys from Brazil, along with the play Deathtrap.
His tour de force demonstrates how traditional detective story strategies of
misdirection and obfuscation could be applied to narration in the thriller as
well. That sort of synthesis would continue for decades, up to Gillian Flynn’s
Gone Girl and beyond.

✳✳✳

Across all media, storytellers reworked the strategies of mystery and suspense
that came forward in glorious variety during the 1940s. The new hybrids of
Golden Age whodunits, suspense thrillers, and hard-boiled detection became
classics, many of them identified with film noir. The decade was an era of con-
solidation for Anglo-American popular narrative generally, and it laid the
foundations for future developments of form and style in mysteries. That con-
solidation encompassed emerging genres such as the police procedural and the
heist plot. Over the same years, in other wings of the variorum, we find some
efforts that pushed subjective viewpoint to odd extremes, providing models
that endure today.
 CHAPTER 8

THE 1940s
The Problem of Other Minds, or Just One

A
n eloping couple picks up a hitchhiking tramp, and later the
bridegroom is found murdered. Other murders follow, making
the tramp the likeliest suspect. While the police comb the Con-
necticut hills, a neurosurgeon from New York is held as a witness. He begins
to write about his experience as the chase unfolds. The problem is that his
account—mixing his recollections, commentary, and imaginings—seems
flagrantly unreliable. His free-associative meanderings and incantatory recita-
tions of incidents suggest an obsessive fantasist, and perhaps a killer.
He tells us his name is Henry Riddle. Dr. Riddle’s car broke down in the
ideal spot for witnessing the tramp’s carjacking, but he claims he did not see it.
More curious, the tramp is seen wearing a hat that used to belong to Riddle,
and the good doctor discovers in his pocket $2,500, the same sum that the
dead bridegroom was carrying. In addition, for an eyewitness who seemed to
have witnessed nothing, Dr. Riddle supplies descriptions of other murders—
purportedly as he imagines them but displaying a disturbing degree of detail.
One body is horribly mauled by what seem to be surgical instruments.
Denying us chapter breaks, presenting flashbacks out of chronological order,
constantly replaying certain scenes, Joel Townsley Rogers’s The Red Right Hand
(1945) shows how pseudo-modernist literary techniques can becloud a mys-
tery plot.1 Episodes blur together, one crime interrupts another, and the whole
thing becomes a phantasmagoria. We’re teased by the remarkable similarities
between Dr. Riddle and the killer: “I know the look of him as well as I know my
own. Perhaps better.” Does the tramp even exist? Is everything about the doctor
 262 PA RT I I

a maniac’s fantasy? The deep plunge into subjectivity and the refusal of external
validation (the police seem politely skeptical of Riddle’s account) yield a hazy
collage of detective fiction motifs.
A contemporary reviewer found that The Red Right Hand provided “a per-
fectly logical” solution to its puzzles.2 But the wrap-up, with its intricate coin-
cidences and multiplied false identities (four characters turn out to be all one
person), is outrageously forced. Calling it all “a bad dream without reality,”
our narrator seems to treat the solution as no more than a perfunctory end to
a gory fantasia on 1940s mystery conventions.
One reason to consider the 1940s as a crucial phase in popular mystery
storytelling is that both the hard-boiled novel and the psychological thriller
enjoyed a new prominence in many media. The result was a burst of non-
linear time schemes, strategic viewpoint shifts, block construction, and a
general “cinematization” of literature and theater. These changes depend
on a freewheeling crossover culture borrowing from 1910s experiments,
modernism, modified modernism, and the flagrant artifice of Golden Age
whodunits.
Experimenting with viewpoint, storytellers explored the powers of restricted
narration to a new degree. Plunges into subjectivity became de rigueur in ordi-
nary fiction and film, and representations of extreme mental states became
pervasive, even hyperbolic. The Red Right Hand is only one of several works
that pushed those techniques to delirious limits. Other novels made subjec-
tivity unreliable, often under the aegis of psychoanalysis. In those, the tour de
force impulse of the Golden Age remained in power. At least one novelist, who
became emblematic of the edgy 1940s thriller, exploited these possibilities in
unique, sometimes wacky directions.

Mind Games

Mainstream fiction and genre exercises had familiarized audiences with

basic options for handling the Lubbock problems of narration: Who sees?
Who knows? Who tells? Mystery writers and readers had learned that the
restriction to a single viewpoint didn’t require first-person prose. Literary
narration can attach us to a character and still report action in objective
third person, as Dashiell Hammett does in The Glass Key. A filmic parallel
would be The Big Sleep (1946), which ties us firmly to Marlowe without any
voice-over.
Third-person attachment more commonly yields some interiority, and
1940s writers were ready to explore it. Dorothy B. Hughes’s In a Lonely Place
(1947) closely follows serial killer Dix Steele, exposing his mind through inner
monologues. Mystery writers occasionally employed stream-of-consciousness
 The 1940s 263

techniques as well. At the climax of To Love and Be Wise (1950), Superintendant

Bryce asks Inspector Grant if the solution isn’t simply death by drowning.

As Grant did not answer immediately, he looked up and said sharply: “Isn’t it?”
Now you see it, now you don’t.
Something wrong in the set-up.
Don’t let your flair ride you, Grant.
Something phoney somewhere.
Now you see it, now you don’t.
Conjurer’s patter.
The trick of distracted attention.
You could get away with anything if you distracted the attention.
Something phoney somewhere. . . .
“Grant!”
He came back to the realization of his chief ’s surprise. What was he to
say? . . . . With a detached regret he heard his own voice saying: “Have you ever
seen a lady sawn in half, sir?”3

As if to underscore the eureka moment, this stretch of inner speech omits a

front frame that would signal that Grant is lost in thought. Only his chief ’s
words bracket the subjective passage.
Internal narration in mystery novels may feel a bit like a montage of cinematic
voice-overs, a technique that rose to prominence in the 1940s. References to
motion pictures pervade popular media of the period, and some novels and plays
aimed for the cinematic fluidity Rodgers and Hammerstein sought in Allegro
(1947). Sometimes the prose could be more “cinematic” than its film adaptation.
The Hollywood version of David Goodis’s 1946 novel Dark Passage starts solidly
objective, showing us a metal drum in the bed of a truck leaving a prison. We
see the drum tumble off and roll down a hill, and suddenly we’re inside it (figs.
8.1–8.2). For a long stretch of what follows, we see most of the action through the
eyes of the protagonist. But compare the opening transition in Goodis’s original.
The protagonist is standing before his cell bars when he decides to escape.

Sleep was a blackboard and on the blackboard was a chalked plan of the yard.
He kept tracing it over and over and when he got it straight he imagined a white
X where he was going to be when the truck unloaded the barrels. The X moved
when the empty barrels were place back on the truck. The X moved slowly and
then disappeared into one of the barrels that was already in the truck.
The blackboard was all black. It stayed black until a whistle blew. The motor
started. The sound of it pierced the side of the barrel and pierced Parry’s brain.
There wasn’t much air but there was enough to keep him alive for a while. A little
while. The sound of the motor was louder now. Then the truck was moving.4
 264 PA RT I I

8.1 Dark Passage (1947): The escape in the oil drum. 8.2 Dark Passage: Parry’s perceptual viewpoint. After
this, we see the first part of the film through his eyes.

Now we are firmly in the scene, and Parry is actually escaping from prison.
It’s a hallucinatory, quasi-filmic rendering, a pictorial transition from men-
tal imagery (the planned escape) to a tangible sensory impression of Parry’s
successful escape. Through a kind of superimposition, Parry himself replaces
the white X. The imagined blackboard becomes, perhaps through a fade-out,
the darkness inside the barrel. A passage like this seems unlikely to appear in a
novel written before 1940s motion pictures.
Cinematic techniques had shaped comic strips and comic books, but a peak
was reached in Will Eisner’s The Spirit (1940–1952). This series about a hard-
boiled private eye presumed dead who returns to solve crimes became an exer-
cise in flamboyant pictorial display. The imagery carried film noir angles and
chiaroscuro onto the page. Eisner freely employed flashbacks and fantasies,
directly addressed the reader, and used “voice-over” texts and both optical and
mental subjectivity.
Film references abound in that tour de force of mental collapse, Patrick
Hamilton’s novel Hangover Square (1941). The sad, aimless George Bone is a
movie fan, and he eagerly attends Tarzan Finds a Son, Goodbye Mr. Chips, and
other recent London releases. But the book goes further than mere citations. It
begins with the schizophrenic Bone snapping into his alternative identity with
a click he hears in his head. The change creates a “film” over his brain, and the
word reminds him that “It was like the other sort of film, too—a ‘talkie.’ It was
as though he had been watching a talking film, and all at once the sound-track
had failed. The figures on the screen continue to move, to behave more or less
logically, but they were figures in a new, silent, indescribably eerie world. Life,
in fact, which had been for him a moment ago a ‘talkie,’ had all at once become
a silent film. And there was no music.”5 Hamilton’s book appeared just as the
intelligentsia was becoming more sensitive to silent film as an art form.6
 The 1940s 265

Throughout Hangover Square, the comparison of Bone’s “dead mood” to

movies reappears. When Bone leaves his silent cinema perception behind, the
narration provides a rich sound array in a noisy pub or a crowded train. As
Bone’s condition deteriorates, the click and snap of his early disturbances turn
into a violent crack inside his head. These devices become auditory enactments
of the book’s subtitle: “The Man with Two Minds.”
Bone’s fugue states provide an occasion for a pseudo-Joycean stream of con-
sciousness. Planning to kill Netta, the woman who exploits him, Bone sees a
woman with a hair-net.

Netta. The tangled net of her hair—the dark net—brunette. The net in which
he was caught—netted. Nettles. The wicked poison-nettles from which had
been brewed the potion which was in his blood. Stinging nettles. She stung and
wounded him with words from her red mouth. Nets. Fishing-nets. Mermaid’s
nets. Bewitchment. Syrens—the unearthly beauty of the sea. Nets. Nest. To
nestle. To nestle against her. Rest. Breast. In her net. Netta. You could go on like
that forever.”7

Three hundred pages later, this punning reverie comes to maturity. After Bone
has killed the woman, he carefully ties threads across her parlor furniture,
securing her in his own net.
The subjectivity on flamboyant display in Hangover Square has a counterpart
in a curious B-film, Stranger on the Third Floor (1940). Reporter Michael Ward
gets his big break when he serves as the star witness in a murder trial and writes
up the case. His fiancée Jane is happy that now they can afford to get married,
but she harbors doubt about the young man who is convicted and sentenced to
the electric chair. Michael recalls his own threats directed at the fussy old man
in the apartment next to his. Eventually he’s arrested on suspicion of murdering
his neighbor. It falls to Jane to try to track down the real killer, a mysterious
little man who prowls the neighborhood.
Over about sixty minutes, Stranger on the Third Floor anthologizes the
subjective options that filmmakers would deepen in the years to come. As
Michael passes the empty courtroom, an optical point-of-view shot puts us in
his shoes. Quick flashbacks reveal incidents when Michael remembers threat-
ening to kill his neighbor. When Michael falls asleep, a daringly stylized dream
presents him standing trial for murder—anticipating his presumptive fate later
in the film (figs. 8.3–8.4). His worries about his testimony are presented in
several minutes of voice-over, along with auditory flashbacks to bits of dia-
logue earlier in the film.
None of these devices was new with this film, but Stranger on the Third
Floor previews how filmmakers would weave them together in a thrust toward
a “novelistic” interiority in mystery plots. Optical and auditory subjectivity, for
 266 PA RT I I

8.3 Stranger on the Third Floor (1940): The reporter 8.4 A similar stylization represents the reporter fac-
whose testimony brought a death sentence on a young ing the death penalty.
man dreams of standing trial himself. It plays out in
looming Expressionistic imagery.

example, would become common in 1940s films and later ones. Alfred Hitch-
cock had relied on these devices in his British work of the 1930s, and he prob-
ably influenced other filmmakers to take up the techniques. They were carried
to extremes in The Lady in the Lake (1947), which like Dark Passage devoted
long sequences limited to the protagonist’s visual viewpoint. By 1952, a film
could frankly launch a pure point-of-view sequence to begin the story action
(fig. 8.5).
Deeper plunges into characters’ minds were routine in mainstream fiction,
and they were picked up in mysteries as well. Although dreams have been used
as narrative devices for centuries, in the 1940s they became especially salient for

8.5 Mr. Denning Drives North (1940): In a condensa-

tion of familiar 1940s techniques, the opening scene
provides both an optical viewpoint and a dream image.
 The 1940s 267

novelists—a practice that continues to this day. Dreams can enhance character-
ization and build on motifs. In mysteries, they can also trick us, as in the films
The Woman in the Window (1944) and Uncle Harry (1945).
Indeed, deep subjectivity could structure an entire book. Chris Massie’s
novel The Green Circle (1943) brings together a man and a woman who offer
competing accounts of a murder. At the climax, however, we learn that the
stories are built out of fragments of the man’s life, woven together in his fantasy.
Margaret Millar’s Beast in View (1955) looks forward to Psycho, both novel and
film, in creating unreliable narration that suppresses crucial information about
the protagonist’s mental condition.
By the time filmmakers adapted Hangover Square for 1945 release, there
was an expanded menu of subjective options available. In the screen version,
George Bone is a gifted composer and not the drifter of the novel. The screen-
play follows Hollywood tradition in creating a double plot: George has musical
ambition, and he’s also yearning for love. Barbara, daughter of an impresario,
urges him to complete his flamboyant, slightly tortured piano concerto. The
film’s Netta figure is a music-hall singer who induces George to write songs for
her. As in the book, she scorns him once she’s gotten what she wants.
Unlike Hamilton’s protagonist, the film’s George is led to hair-trigger violence
during his fugue states. He kills an old antiques dealer, then attacks Barbara,
and finally strangles Netta and burns her body on a Guy Fawkes bonfire. Once
he’s dissociated from reality, the action he takes is usually to seek out a woman
he thinks has wronged him. (We are never told why his first murder target is
the shopkeeper.)
As we’d expect in a film, George’s descents into madness are presented
through distorted optical viewpoints and a stiffer performance style. More
unusual is the use of music. As a composer, George undergoes bouts of amnesia
triggered by discordant sounds. In Bernard Herrmann’s experimental score, the
noises that assail him (clanging metal pipes, tumbling violins) are followed by
eerie chromatic passages for flute.
At the end, George performs his concerto while the police are closing in.
The jagged, percussive keyboard work synchronizes uncannily with the swirl-
ing tension of odd angles, rapid cutting, and sweeping camera movements.
Playing his music provides George with a catharsis: abrupt flashbacks to his
crimes reveal to him what he has done during his blackouts. As the salon burns,
George dies playing the final passages of his composition. But it is the film’s
orchestral score that brings the piece to a resolution as the end credits appear.
George’s auditory imagination seeps into the very texture of the soundtrack—
one evidence of how thoroughly 1940s cinema sought, sometimes in terms akin
to that of prose, to make manifest the workings of characters’ minds.
More generally, storytellers made subjectivity a major source of innovation
in all media. A plunge into a character’s dreams or memories could fruitfully
 268 PA RT I I

complicate the unfolding of the plot and motivate formal experiment. For
decades, novels, plays, films, and radio dramas and films would cross the
border between objective action and subjective distortion.

All in the Mind

“Psychopaths sell like hotcakes,” says the ambitious screenwriter Joe Gillis in
Sunset Boulevard, and in the mid-to-late 1940s he was right. As an American
version of Freudianism worked its way into popular narrative, it proved espe-
cially valuable in tales of crime and mystery. After all, deviant psychology is
more interesting than plain old greed or jealousy. Psychoanalysis gave murder
plots more gravitas. It also motivated the use of many pet 1940s techniques.
One of the first plays to treat psychopathology as a cause of crime was
Smoke Screen (1935). A thug and his gang invade the home of a psychother-
apist, who proceeds to analyze the crook’s dreams. The doctor exposes the
source of the thug’s sociopathy as fear of his father, who died in a hail of
police bullets. The play became a 1939 film as Blind Alley, which was remade
as The Dark Past in 1949.
Storytellers realized that the talking cure could be treated as a detective
story.8 In what Variety called the “psycho film cycle,” the therapist becomes an
interrogator, the patient a witness or culprit. Flashbacks could dramatize the
traumatic incident, and past events could be shot through with subjectivity.
As in any mystery, the climax could tell us what really happened. These conven-
tions appear in the grim schizophrenic drama Bewitched (1945), the paranoid
thriller Possessed (1947), and The Locket (1946). In Christmas Holiday (1944),
the ingratiating sociopath is diagnosed: “A psychoanalyst said Robert’s relation
with his mother was pathological.”
More affirmative variants of the premise steer the subject toward mental
health and a happy ending, as in Spellbound (1945) and The High Wall (1947).
These add a romance to spice up the tension between analyst and patient. In The
Locket, a lovely neurotic is responsible for two men’s deaths. She manages to fool
her lovers, one of whom is a psychiatrist, before she’s overcome with a break-
down at her wedding. Even then, she is given a fair chance at recovery.
Psychiatric probing of crime appeared on stage during this period, including
The Walking Gentleman (1942), in which a professor analyzes a serial killer.
Lawrence Treat’s novel O As in Omen (1943) makes its protagonist a psychiatrist
who uses hypnosis and dream interpretation to solve the mystery. Robert M.
Coates’s Wisteria Cottage (1948) attaches us to a schizophrenic killer, with three
psychiatry reports inserted to explain the action.
The domestic thriller was particularly prone to plots featuring women going
mad. Patricia Highsmith’s breakthrough short story, “The Heroine” (1945),
 The 1940s 269

suggests that its protagonist’s pyromania is derived from her mother’s neuroses.
Patrick Hamilton’s Gas Light (1938), a stage play that had two film adaptations,
centered on a woman whose husband plots to make her think she’s insane.
Far more eccentric is Guy Endore’s Methinks the Lady . . . (1945), which uses
block construction and shifting viewpoints to explore, or rather exploit, Freud-
ian theory.
Mrs. Spencer Gillian (her first name is never revealed) shoplifts a cheap pin
from a department store. As the wife of a distinguished psychoanalyst, she is let
off, but she is dogged by the store detective. When a woman is found murdered,
stabbed with the mermaid pin that the heroine stole, she stands trial for murder
and is found guilty. The next verdict to come will decide: Can she be considered
insane?
All of this has happened before the novel opens. The first and longest block
consists of Mrs. Gillian’s memoir, composed in prison just before the second
verdict. Through scrambled flashbacks, we learn of her childhood, her meet-
ing her husband Spence, her bout of encephalitis, and above all her psychic
turmoil. Her account is of a mind plagued by schizophrenia. She dreams that
her sister Maggie, now a prostitute, visits her. Even after Maggie dies, the visits
come to seem real. Mrs. Gillian splits into Maggie and imagines killing Mrs.
Gillian (herself). The murder of the other woman convinces Mrs. Gillian and
the police that her hallucinations had a real-life consequence.
The motif of the split psyche runs throughout her account. The heroine
suffers from double vision, she asks Spence to explain doppelgängers, and she
sees the store detective as the opposite of her husband. As if to confirm her
schizophrenia, her memoir is constantly interrupted by passages of Q&A, with
her assuming a second voice challenging her account or demanding that she
stop digressing. Her long monologue, as is common in the “diary of a madman”
genre, traces the dissolution of a personality.
Throughout the first part, Mrs. Gillian has reported her husband’s technical
disquisitions on neuroses and dreams. This married couple spends a remark-
able amount of time reflecting on masturbation, infantile sexuality, and bodily
functions. When the heroine grapples with her sister/herself, the fight turns
into body horror. The heroine strips Maggie naked and scissors her legs around
Maggie’s shoulders. “I had her practically around the neck, her head was almost
in my crotch. . . . Perhaps because of the wetness, perhaps because my mind had
wandered, suddenly she had twisted in my grasp and brought her mouth over
my pubis and she was biting down hard.”9
During the struggle, the heroine senses Maggie as a dog, a cat, a horse,
an elephant, a jellyfish, and a goat. Here and elsewhere we’re reminded that
the author was chiefly famous for the novel The Werewolf of Paris (1933). The
shape-shifting creates a crucial ambiguity. Did the heroine really fantasize
wrestling with an imaginary double? The title, Methinks the Lady . . . , hints that
 270 PA RT I I

Mrs. Gillian protests her madness too much. Could her entire confession be an
effort to fake insanity? This possibility is broached in the book’s second block,
which shifts the viewpoint and the mode of writing.
Now three psychoanalysts discuss the text we’ve just read. Two are Freud-
ians, one is anti-Freudian. Presented in playscript format, their conversations
pick apart Mrs. Gillian’s account. The analysts offer further interpretations of
symbolism and analyze her husband. They also reflect on the judge in the case,
who has mysteriously committed suicide before presiding over the insanity
verdict. The skeptic argues that Dr. Gillian has coached his wife to fake her
madness. Taking on the role of the detective, one analyst claims that the crucial
question is “whodunit?”
But the real detective emerges in the next block, a return to Mrs. Gillian’s
account. She now submits a more objective document, the transcript of the
hearing to determine her sanity. In Spence’s testimony, he convinces judge and
jury that his wife, although mentally disturbed (in part by her pregnancy),
didn’t commit the crime. When he names the real culprit, the classic conven-
tions lock in. Physical clues (the mermaid pin again) and bits of behavior are
reinterpreted to create a case against the least likely person. The book concludes
with a card announcing the birth of a child to the Gillians and an epilogue in
the name of the actual author, Guy Endore, writing to thank a certain Dr. B—
McC—“for sharing details of his cases,” while coyly apologizing for a title that
mangles Shakespeare.
As in The Red Right Hand, the solution seems rushed and plagued by
unanswered questions. But the crosstalk between the wife’s digressive,
free-associative confession and the clinicians’ meanderings yields a playful
dossier reminiscent of Philip MacDonald. Greeting the book as a “light-
hearted” introduction to “Freudian or near-Freudian mysteries,” “a danse
macabre in boogie rhythm” that lets “the phallic symbols fall where they
may,” reviewers rightly sensed a game played not entirely in earnest.10
Perhaps the decade’s extreme example of how psychoanalytic doctrines
can motivate schizophrenic narration is John Franklin Bardin’s Devil Take the
Blue-Tail Fly (1948). It begins with harpsichord virtuoso Ellen Purcel leaving a
mental hospital in the company of her husband Basil, a distinguished conduc-
tor. Around her departure hover disturbing dreams and flashbacks hinting at
her guilt about her mother’s death. Her journey back to their home is intercut
with her first day there as she searches for a missing key—which turns out
to be in plain sight. Her response: “She hated Basil, and she slapped his face
hard.” Are we in a Gas Light situation? Is he manipulating her environment,
trapping her in madness?
Evidently not. Ellen is genuinely disturbed, and as she struggles toward nor-
mality the plot swirls together memories, hallucinations, and teasing glimpses
of repressed items from the heroine’s past. At the center of Ellen’s adult problems
 The 1940s 271

is her college affair with a philandering folk singer, Jimmy Shad, who captivates
her with the blue-tail fly song. Even this fairly definite episode is rendered in
incantatory prose. Her memory of driving off with Shad is that of a swooping,
dissociated aerial view:

She opened her eyes and saw that she floated high in the air, that the moon was
her neighbor and that small clouds raced playfully by her side. . . . So it was,
by looking a little longer at this reckless car, by following it with her eyes and
mind, by haunting it with her melody, that she discovered its occupants, the
two of them: the lean, saddle-faced man who drove like a demon, eyes hard
upon the black streak of road, arm thrown about the small form of the girl,
the dreamy-eyed child nestled against his shoulder, the conservatory student
who had fallen in love with a cabaret performer. . . . She realized that this was
another of her selves that she was watching, another, more tangible Ellen.11

This image gives way to a more sordid one, another view from her floating van-
tage point, watching the couple sprawled on a bed. The evocation of man/child
intimacy points back to the primal source of Ellen’s troubles.
As with Woolf and Faulkner, the original experience is reshaped by the act
of remembering, and the optics of Ellen watching herself points toward her
growing schizophrenia. After leaving the hospital, her imaginary childhood
friend Nelle (“Ellen” spelled backward) returns to trouble her. Eventually Ellen
absorbs the now-grown, hard-bitten Nelle as an alternate personality. When
Shad returns to New York, he seduces Ellen, but it’s Nelle who kills him. By the
end, with Basil perhaps also killed, Ellen retreats to her bed, haunted by memo-
ries of her father and mother struggling like two fairies over her crib. “Don’t you
do it! I tell you, she is too young to touch that!” “If you touch a hair of her head,
I’ll murder you!”12
The Red Right Hand warps and blurs the conventions of the detective story,
and Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly does much the same with the psychological
thriller. The woman in peril suffers not from a creepy husband but from infantile
abuse, and the murder she commits in a fugue state may never be discovered.
There are no “objective” scenes assigned to official investigators, clinical observ-
ers, or family friends. The book locks us into Ellen’s mental world, where the
music that accompanies her both in life and in mind is torn by piercing screams.

Woolrich: The Overstrained Imagination

Cornell Woolrich is usually treated as an author with a uniquely haunting voice.

Alcoholic and homosexual, he lived for decades in a hotel with his mother.
After she died, he lost a leg to untreated gangrene. He pounded out pulp stories
 272 PA RT I I

and thriller novels, the most famous of them published in the years 1940 to
1948. He dedicated one book to his typewriter.
His tales of suspense cultivated a hothouse morbidity. At his limit,
Woolrich projects a paranoid vision of life without hope and death without
dignity. But like all popular storytellers, he inherited situations, techniques,
and themes. To present a bleak, aching world of precarious love and doomed
lives, he carried detective and thriller conventions to a paroxysmic pitch.
His faults and his virtues epitomize a great many of the distinctive narrative
strategies of his time.
For him, one bout of amnesia isn’t enough, so The Black Curtain (1941)
doubles it: the hero, already having forgotten his previous identity, is clobbered
by some falling bricks and now can’t remember who he just was. The prototyp-
ical serial killer of the period is a man, but The Bride Wore Black (1940) lets a
woman stalk her victims. Most thriller novelists are content to put one woman
in jeopardy per book, but Black Alibi (1942) lines up six. Alternatively, when
a woman tries to free her imprisoned husband by investigating four suspects,
she’s plunged into danger every time she meets one (The Black Angel, 1943).
Woolrich’s plots bungle police procedure (his cops are exceptionally willing
to help suspects), and the authorities often flounder. Suspense thrillers usually
invoke the supernatural only to dispel it, but in Night Has a Thousand Eyes
(1945), the authorities fail to save a life because one old man really can predict
the future. Amateur sleuths do not fare much better. The unheroic hero of The
Black Path of Fear (1945) could hardly be less effective; he has to be rescued by
the Havana police.
Sometimes the straining for originality snaps. Critics have long pointed out
improbabilities and contradictions in the plots. Woolrich’s most devoted chron-
icler, Francis M. Nevins, warns of “chaotic ambiguities.”13 The chronology of
Rendezvous in Black (1948) is impossible, and the climactic revelation of I Married
a Dead Man (1948) is arguably incoherent. Characters are whisked from place to
place without explanation, and convenient coincidences abound.
Add to all this a hypertrophied style that in every book slips into unabashed
weirdness. “His face was an unbaked cruller of rage.” “She sliced off a layer of air
with her hand in my direction.” “Her silhouette was that of a biped.”14 Woolrich
probably offers more howlers than any other major thriller writer of his era.15
The plot problems and the vagaries of language can be attributed in part to
the rush of Woolrich’s production, his transport while hammering at his Rem-
ington portable. Pulp author Steve Fisher recalled, “Sitting in that hotel room
he wrote at night—continuing through until morning, or whenever the story
was finally completed. He did not revise, polish, and I suspect did not even read
the story over once it was committed to paper.”16 Although Woolrich was grate-
ful to editors who corrected his hundreds of errors in spelling and punctuation,
he apparently resisted efforts to touch up his prose.17 When an editor suggested
 The 1940s 273

a change to a single paragraph, he replied, “I knew you wouldn’t like it,” and
broke with the publisher forever.18
Admiring readers excuse the faults by claiming that Woolrich’s powers of
evocation and the propulsion of suspense keep the pages turning. “Headlong
suspense created by total, unrelieved anxiety,” noted Jacques Barzun. “Breath-
less reading is the sole pleasure.”19 Raymond Chandler called him the “best idea
man” among his peers, but admitted, “You have to read him fast and not ana-
lyze too much; he’s too feverish.”20
What keeps us reading? For one thing, the outré thriller situations. A couple
hurrying to leave New York must clear the man of murder before the bus leaves
(Deadline at Dawn, 1945). A killer stalks a city, but it’s not a human: it’s (appar-
ently) a jaguar escaped from a sideshow (Black Alibi). A mail-order bride seems
unacquainted with things she wrote in her letters (Waltz Into Darkness, 1947).
And most famous, a man laid up in his apartment thinks he sees traces of a
killing through a window across the courtyard (“Rear Window,” 1942).
Outrages to plausibility carry their own allure. What, we ask, might come
of these wild mishaps? A train crash kills a husband and his pregnant wife. In
the melee an abandoned woman, also pregnant, is mistaken for the wife and
welcomed by the husband’s family (I Married a Dead Man). A man accused of
murder has an alibi, to be provided by a woman he met in a bar. The trouble
is, she’s vanished, and all the witnesses deny she existed (Phantom Lady, 1942).
The development of the action also presents intriguing reversals. The lonely
man gulled by the fake mail-order bride falls in love with her. People who claim
not to have seen the phantom lady wind up dead. The woman trying to exon-
erate her husband falls in love with the guilty man and dreams about him even
after he has killed himself.
There’s another attraction, as Geoffrey O’Brien has pointed out. Woolrich’s
urban thrillers retain an air of brimstone and supernatural calamity. In his pulp
days, he wrote horror stories, and his crime fiction was published in magazines
offering “weird menace” tales. His overwrought style sometimes recalls fanta-
sists such as Poe and Lovecraft.
With such strong hooks, it’s no surprise that Woolrich has attracted filmmak-
ers. Nearly all the novels were brought to the screen soon after publication, and
by the 2010s his work had inspired more than a hundred movies and television
shows. However faithful or unfaithful to the unfolding of the plot in the origi-
nals, the adaptations typically respected the intriguing premises and twists.21
Woolrich’s novels tend to rely on two basic plot patterns, both derived from
the hunt. Either amateurs try to solve a crime and move from suspect to sus-
pect, or a serial killer stalks a string of victims. In the first option, our viewpoint
is typically tied to the investigators, but in the second pattern, Woolrich is more
innovative. Normally, the serial-killer plot either concentrates on the killer’s
viewpoint, as in the novels Hangover Square (1941) and In a Lonely Place (1947),
 274 PA RT I I

or concentrates on the investigators, as in Ellery Queen’s Cat of Many Tails

(1949). A few bounce the spotlight among all the parties—killer, victims, and
detectives—as in Fritz Lang’s film M (1931) and Philip MacDonald’s novel X v.
Rex (1933).
In contrast, Woolrich emphasizes the viewpoints of the victims. The killer
might appear only at the beginning and the end (Rendezvous in Black) or be
introduced at intervals in brief, objective scenes (The Bride Wore Black). Less
space is devoted to the investigators, although they may gain prominence as
the crimes pile up. Woolrich puts his primary energies into building waves of
suspense as one target after another confronts death.
The shooting-gallery structure enables Woolrich to copiously fulfill
Mitchell Wilson’s demand that the thriller show us what fear feels like.22 The
1940s interest in intensely subjective narration helps out here, and Woolrich
sustains it in detailed descriptions of victims’ growing fright. In Black Alibi,
Teresa is being stalked by an unseen figure:

Something else now assailed her, again from without herself, but of a different
sensory plane than hearing this time. A prickly sensation of being watched
steadily from behind, of something coming stealthily but continuously after
her, spread slowly like a contraction of the pores, first over the back of her neck,
then up and down the entire length of her spine. She couldn’t shake it off, quell
it. She knew eyes were upon her, something was treading with measured intent
in her wake.23

This passage comes as part of a ten-page account of the woman’s wary progress
through a night street, rendered wholly from her viewpoint.
Woolrich’s other basic plot, the investigation of a murder, plays up the role
of fear as well. His amateur detectives, lacking official firepower, are constantly
facing danger from the suspects they track. “Fright was like an icy gush of water
flooding over them, as from burst pipe or water-main; like a numbing tide rapidly
welling up over them from below.”24
In both of his favored plot schemes, these plunges into characters’ minds and
bodies help fill out a full-length novel. As we’ve seen, in popular narrative the
scale of the format presents the storyteller with forced choices. Once Woolrich
abbreviates some lines of action (professional police investigation, the killer’s
mental life), he needs to expand on the reactions of the victims or amateur
detectives. But this very emphasis is one source of Woolrich’s stylistic howlers.
In stretching out his suspense scenes, he’s tempted to pileups like this: “And the
path that had led me to it through the night had been so black and so full of fear,
and downgrade all the way, lower and lower, until at last it had arrived at this
bottomless abyss, than which there was nothing lower.”25 Such rodomontade
inflates the 1940s emphasis on subjectivity to staggering proportions.
 The 1940s 275

He also recruits other techniques we’ve considered. They keep his action
moving forward through time and hurtling into the unfolding scenes. And
some tactics can help mask story problems. For example, by hinging his story
around a search for a killer or a victim, Woolrich’s plots tend to create a string
of one-on-one encounters. Rather than disguising the episodic quality of these,
he sharpens them by breaking the action into distinct blocks. Those blocks are
presented as a checklist agenda, Woolrich’s equivalent to the closed circle of
suspects we find in the whodunit’s weekend house party.
The Black Angel is a simple instance. After an initial cluster of five chapters
presenting Kirk Murray sentenced to death, we follow Kirk’s wife Alberta as
she seeks the true killer among four suspects. Her efforts are given in four
parallel chapters, each tagged with a telephone number. One that Alberta finds
scratched out in an address book is presented just that way in the chapter title:
“Crescent 6–4824.” In a climactic fifth chapter, when she returns to one of
the suspects, another title is recycled: “Butterfield 9–8019 Again (And Hurry,
Operator, Hurry!).”
A more complicated example of modularity is The Bride Wore Black. It’s
broken into five parts, each titled with the name of a victim. Each part con-
tains three sections. An initial one, “The Woman,” shows the vengeful bride
slipping into a new false identity. The part’s second section, titled with the vic-
tim’s name, shows how the murder is accomplished. A third section offering
“Post-Mortem” on the victim consists of documents and conversations among
police. Viewpoints are rigidly channeled as well. Each “Woman” section is
handled in objective description, and each victim section presents the targeted
man as the center of consciousness. As with other 1940s novels, the book
seems to have been mapped out on a spreadsheet.
The modular layout and rigorous moving-spotlight narration risk choppi-
ness, yielding something like a set of short stories. But the tidy exoskeleton
helps mask problems of time and causality by making the plot seem rigorously
organized. And the very arbitrariness of the pattern creates a sort of metacuri-
osity. Like the teasing tables of contents in 1920s and 1930s Golden Age fiction,
a Wooolrich checklist of suspects or victims makes us aware of a larger rhythm.
How will this pattern be filled out?
An overarching unity is provided as well by the demands of a deadline
(another Hollywood-friendly feature). Thanks to this classic device, Woolrich
can use time tags to trigger anticipation and yield a sense of shape. Long before
the husband in Phantom Lady is accused of the crime, the first chapter bears
the title, “The Hundred and Fiftieth Day Before the Execution,” apparently
dooming him from the start. Deadline at Dawn imposes a strict structure with
illustrated clock faces.
Facing a ticking clock wedded to a clear-cut pattern, we become sensitive to
variations among the modules. The victim-centered chapters of The Bride Wore
 276 PA RT I I

Black contrast the personalities and private lives of Julie’s prey, along with her
ever-more elaborate methods of murder, and the last chapter breaks the three-
part format by inserted a flashback dramatizing the fatal wedding. Rendezvous
in Black revives the shooting-gallery structure of Black Angel and The Bride,
adding a schedule that sets each murder on May 31 of different years. Within
this regularity (“The First Rendezvous,” etc.), viewpoints multiply gradually,
and the interplay of characters’ range of knowledge becomes richer.
The modular structure shows up in milder ways. Black Alibi tags its chapters
with victims’ names and concentrates on one woman’s terror at a time, with
each chapter concluding with an exchange among investigators. Deadline at
Dawn and Phantom Lady alternate scenes between two characters embarked
on parallel investigations. Night Has a Thousand Eyes, in some ways the most
ambitious of the books, embeds the checklist within the police investigation. As
teams of cops trace parallel leads, their efforts are crosscut with the target under
threat, waiting with his daughter and another cop.
A simpler, more poignant, rhyme-and-variations effect is supplied by a pro-
logue and epilogue in I Married a Dead Man. The prologue’s first-person narra-
tion, set off from the central chapters’ third-person narration, finishes: “We’ve
lost. That’s all I know. We’ve lost, we’ve lost.” An epilogue rewrites the prologue
and yields closure: “We’ve lost. That’s all I know. And now the game is through.”
In his uncompleted autobiography, Woolrich reflected on his early efforts
to compose scenes. A character takes a hotel elevator, and instead of writing,
“He got in, the car started; the car stopped at the third and he got out again,”
the young Woolrich would pad the trip out to a page or more. This was ama-
teurish, he thought at the end of his life.26 This sort of expansion of minute
activities is a hallmark of his 1940s novels. Episodes of terror and suspense are
rendered in detail, as are the necessary touches of atmosphere. In The Black
Path of Fear, the man on the run has told his story to Midnight.

When I’d finished telling it to her the candle flame had wormed its way down
inside the neck of the beer bottle, was feeding cannibalistically on its own drip-
pings that had clogged the bottle neck. The bottle glass, rimming it now, gave
a funny blue-green light, made the whole room seem like an undersea grotto.
We’d hardly changed position. I was still on the edge of her dead love’s cot,
inertly clasped hands down low between my legs. She was sitting on the edge of
the wooden chest now, legs dangling free.27

The behavior of light, the insistence on color, the items of setting, the descrip-
tion of the characters’ postures and gestures—these are typical of Woolrich’s
scenes.
Much popular fiction peppers its dialogue exchanges with a few details
of locale and demeanor, but in rendering even the most mundane action,
 The 1940s 277

Woolrich employs Lubbock’s “scenic method” to a disconcerting degree. To

quote adequately would take pages, but some samples can suggest just how
distended even perfunctory moments can be.

I reached out for a little lamp he had there close beside the bed and clicked it
on. Twin halos of light sprang out, one at each end of the shade, and showed up
our faces and a little of the margin around them. The shade itself was opaque,
to rest the eyes.
Then I just sat back and waited for the shine to percolate through to him,
sitting on the bias to him. It took some time. He was sleeping like a log.28

Any other writer would have retained just the first sentence and the last (but
maybe not with the clichéd log simile). Who cares about the design of a light
fixture, or whether the shade rests the eyes? Woolrich feels the need to show
and tell as much as he has room for. Conrad’s urge to “make you see . . .
to hold up unquestioningly, without choice and fear, the rescued fragment”
finds anxious expression in Woolrich’s overripe descriptions.

Sights for Sore Eyes

Woolrich has Roderick Usher’s “morbid acuteness of the senses.” Scenes are
thick with smells and sounds. One virtuoso section of Rendezvous in Black is all
noises and speech because our center of consciousness is a blind woman.
Above all, Woolrich scenes revel in optical point of view. Sometimes the
observer is imaginary, looking at things alongside the character. For example,
Detective Wanger enters a murder scene:

They seemed to be playing craps there in the room, the way they were all
down on their haunches hovering over something in the middle of the floor.
You couldn’t see what it was, their broad backs blotted it out completely.
It was awfully small, whatever it was. Occasionally one of their hands went
up and scratched the back of its owner’s rubber-tired neck in perplexity.
The illusion was perfect. All that was missing was the click of bone, the lingo
of the dicegame.29

Actually, the policemen are interrogating a boy whose father has been mur-
dered. Surely Wanger, a hard-nosed cop, doesn’t take the huddle for a craps
game. We’re given the mistaken impression of an innocent-eyed observer who’s
watching from a particular angle.
More often, it’s the character who occupies a definite station point, deter-
mined by foreshortening and perspectival distortion. The supreme example
 278 PA RT I I

is “Rear Window,” whose original title was “Murder from a Fixed Viewpoint.”
Another tale tries, clumsily, for the same kind of positioning: “He turned and
looked up, startled, ready to jump until he’d located the segment of her face far
up the canal of opening between them.”
Woolrich’s interest in the geometry of looking, what can and can’t be seen,
finds a natural home in eyewitness plots, of which there were several in 1940s
film and fiction (and even radio).30 In “Rear Window,” the protagonist Jeff
tracks his neighbor’s progress from window to window as if studying an
Advent calendar. Woolrich strives to capture the exact angle of Jeff ’s field
of view: “There was some sort of a widespread black V railing him off from
the window. Whatever it was, there was just a sliver of it showing above the
upward inclination to which the window sill deflected my line of vision. All
it did was strike off the bottom of his undershirt, to the extent of a sixteenth
of an inch maybe. But I hadn’t seen it there at other times, and I couldn’t tell
what it was.”31
Jeff ’s tightly focused attention contrasts with his neighbor Thorwald’s casual
surveys of the courtyard. The climax will come when Thorwald realizes he’s
been Jeff ’s target, and Jeff sees in the murderer’s look “a bright spark of fixity”
that “hit dead-center at my bay window.”32
A similar effect occurs at the climax of “The Boy Cried Murder” (aka “Fire
Escape”) of 1947, the source of the film The Window (1949).33 Buddy has been
sleeping on a fire escape and is awakened by a murder. He watches through a
slit in the window shade as the woman comes toward him. “She started to come
over to where Buddy’s eyes were staring in, and she got bigger and bigger every
minute, the closer she got. Her head went way up high out of sight, and her
waist blotted out the whole room. He couldn’t move, he was like paralyzed. The
little gap under the shade must have been awfully skinny for her not to see it,
but he knew in another minute she was going to look right out on top of him,
from higher up.”34 Again, there’s a stylistic slip (of course she’ll be higher up if
she looks out on top of him), but it’s a by-product of a struggle to vividly cap-
ture an optical viewpoint.
Sometimes Woolrich relies on typography.

I hurried down the street, and the intermittent sign back there behind me kept
getting smaller each time it flashed on. Like this:
MIMI CLUB
Mimi Club
mimi club
I could tell because I kept looking back repeatedly, almost in synchroniza-
tion with it each time it flashed on.35

The result points toward a peculiar kind of vividness—that of a film. The pas-
sage imitates alternating shots of the woman looking and the withdrawing club
 The 1940s 279

sign. If Woolrich’s modular structure is indebted to strains in crossover fiction,

the dense, overvisualized scenes inevitably suggest cinema.
Woolrich worked as a Hollywood screenwriter for a few years and had a
lifelong affinity for movies. The books often use cinematic analogies and
metaphors, and the characters are frequent moviegoers. (In a 1936 story, “Dou-
ble Feature,” a gangster takes a woman hostage in a projection booth.) Woolrich
spent his last years holed up drinking and watching old films on TV. It is no
surprise, then, that some passages echo the look and feel of Hollywood scenes.
Many writers, highbrow and lowbrow, were imitating cinema in Woolrich’s
day.36 Some incorporated filmlike montage sequences to suggest dreams and
stream of consciousness. In Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly, the high-angle “crane
shot” of Ellen’s return to the past isn’t a one-off visual effect. Earlier in the
same passage we can easily imagine the filmic dissolve: “The closer she came
to the quickly blackening glass, the fainter and more indistinct her own image
became. Then, while she watched, the mirror seemed to dissolve, to lap away as
tide recedes from a moonlit beach, revealing a depth, an emptiness, a greatly
enlarged interior. . . . She found herself seated at a table in the midst of a dark-
ened ballroom, her eyes fixed on a point in space not far from her where a spot-
light stroked a silver circle on the floor.”37 In Methinks the Lady . . . , there is a
sustained passage that “intercuts” Mrs. Gillian’s vision of Maggie in her bedroom
with her memory of a fairy tale told in her childhood, all the while (off-screen,
so to speak) we hear her husband Spence counting off his morning exercises.38
But Woolrich goes further than nearly everyone. In the late novel Fright
(1950), two paragraphs headed “Still Life” survey an empty room that shows signs
of interrupted activity—a crumpled newspaper, a note, a burning cigarette, a
swaying lamp chain. It mimics the sort of tracking shot over details we find in
1940s cinema, culminating a page later in a pan across a corpse jammed against
the door.39
When a man realizes his beloved woman lies dead on the bed, a dash can
imitate the abrupt effect of a cut:

But her eyes were still blurry with slee—

His hand stabbed suddenly downward toward the hairbrush, there before
her.40

In Night Has a Thousand Eyes, a woman waits in her car while her father visits
the fortuneteller over a period of weeks. Each brief scene starts with the same
imagery and phrasing, creating a string of rhyming “shots” across three pages.

I sat there waiting for him, cigarette in my hand, light-blue swagger coat loose
over my shoulders. . . .
I sat there waiting for him, rust-colored swagger coat loose over my
shoulders. . . .
 280 PA RT I I

I sat there waiting for him, plum swagger coat over my shoulders. . . .
I sat there waiting for him, fawn swagger coat over my shoulders. . . .
I sat there waiting for him, green swagger coat over my shoulders. . . .
I sat there waiting for him, black swagger coat over my shoulders, as I’d
already sat waiting so many times before.41

The modular approach ruling the book’s overall architecture is carried down
into the texture of scenes, here creating parallel miniblocks that convey the
daughter’s anxious acquiescence to her father’s obsession.
Woolrich’s literary optics aspire to the condition of movies. We get an effort
to mimic a subjective tracking shot as a heroine circles a garden. “The little
rock-pool in the center was polka-dotted with silver disks, and the wafers
coalesced and separated again as if in motion, though they weren’t, as her point
of perspective continually shifted with her rotary stroll.”42 Likewise, a woman
approaching a man slowly tapers into focus.

She was up to him eye to eye before he could even take her in in any kind of
decent perspective. His visualization of her had to spread outward in concen-
tric, radiating circles for those eyes, staring into his at such close-range.
Brown eyes.
Bright brown eyes.
Tearfully bright brown eyes.
Overflowingly tearful bright brown eyes.
Suddenly a handkerchief had come up to shut them off from his for a
moment, and he was able to steal a full-length snapshot of her. Not much
more.43

This is just showboating, but it’s uniquely Woolrich showboating.

The same goes for a passage struggling to describe people at a bar as if they
were framed in the flattening view of a telephoto shot.

There were eight people paid out along it. They broke into about three
groups, each self-contained, oblivious of the others, but he had to look
close to tell where the divisions came in. Physical distance had nothing to
do with it; they all stretched away from him in an unbroken line. It was the
turn of the shoulders that told him. The limits of each group were marked
by a shoulder turned obliquely to those next in line beyond. They were like
enclosing parentheses, those shoulders. In other words, the end men in each
group were not postured straight forward, they turned inward toward their
own clique. The groupings broke thus: first three, then a turned shoulder,
then three again, then another turned shoulder, then finally two, standing
vis-à-vis.44
 The 1940s 281

Few writers would strive so hard to capture the positions of figures in space. It
will take another page for the viewpoint character to realize that a left-handed
drinker has stepped out: one beer mug isn’t empty, and the handle is pointing in
a different direction than the others.
It’s not hard to imagine such scenes as Hitchcockian point-of-view shots. In
Waltz Into Darkness, Durand notices a colonel and his lady in the reflection of the
“thick, soapy greenish” window of a cafe. At first the view yields a blob sporting
“three detached excrescences”: a feather in a hat, a bustle, and “a small triangu-
lar wedge of skirt.” Eventually this Kirchner-like monstrosity draws away “into
perspective sufficient to separate into two persons.”45 Conrad’s “impressionism,”
aiming to capture the limits of physical point of view, reaches a new height with
Woolrich’s account of straining, imperfect vision.
Many of Woolrich’s verbal howlers result from the keyed-up emotion he tries
to squeeze out of every scene. There’s also sheer overwriting and padding, as well
as his unwillingness to revise. But many errors stem from his urge to put every
bit of action starkly before us. Straining for sensory vividness lures him into
eccentricity and clumsiness (“triangular wedge,” as if all wedges weren’t triangu-
lar). When his narration falters, it’s often the result of his dogged obedience to
the narrative traditions he inherited. Henry James asserted that “a psychological
reason is, to my imagination, an object adorably pictorial.”46 A Woolrich char-
acter puts it in a typically convoluted way: “Every time you think of anything,
there’s a picture comes before you of what you’re thinking about.”47 Woolrich’s
excesses no less than his achievements stem from a period in which powerful
conventions were crystallized and circulated in a dizzying host of variants.

✳✳✳

In the 1950s mysteries continued to proliferate on radio and film, moving into
television and attracting stage audiences with Dial M for Murder (1952) and Wit-
ness for the Prosecution (1955). Although hardcover publishing contracted, the
genre was sustained in magazines, book club editions, and paperbacks. Fairly
soon, other genres gained wider fan followings. As horror titles, westerns, and
erotic romances crowded best-seller lists, new subgenres of mystery—legal thrill-
ers, techno-thrillers, and serial-killer investigations—joined them. Over the
decades, James Patterson, Patricia Cornwell, Dan Brown, Janet Evanovich, Stieg
Larsson, and Gillian Flynn dominated the charts and were translated around the
world. One reviewer, exposed to a daily flood of such material, called mystery
and suspense stories “the new mainstream of American popular fiction.”48
By the beginning of the new century, mysteries shared the film and TV
market with superhero sagas, fantasy franchises, and animated musicals, but
they were much cheaper to produce and had an immense fan base. Print ver-
sions provided reliable midlist titles and an endless number of series detectives
 282 PA RT I I

or miscreants (Hannibal Lecter, Dexter). Films, television shows, and other

spinoff media assured crime stories a central place in mass culture, reinforced
by true crime cable documentaries and podcasts.
In plot structure and narration, these proved the vitality of the variorum, con-
firming Jean-Claude Carrière’s suggestion that in popular storytelling, as in cin-
ema, “It was through the repetition of forms, through daily contact with all kinds
of audiences, that the language took shape and branched out.”49 Ruth Rendell’s
manipulations of viewpoint in her stand-alone novels owe a great deal to thriller
conventions consolidated in the 1940s. The modular plotting of Fredric Brown’s
novels, with blocks defined by character voice or time period, is in the Woolrich
vein. An extreme instance is Here Comes a Candle (1950), with the ongoing action
interrupted by renditions of scenes as if played out on stage, on radio, or in a
film—an extension of the casebook format to adjacent media. Novelistic experi-
ments with narration include The Anderson Tapes (1970), which renders a crime
and investigation through wiretaps and official recordings, and Stanley Ellin’s
Mirror, Mirror on the Wall (1972) and Desmond Cory’s Bennett (1977), both hallu-
cinatory tales with echoes of Woolrich and The Red Right Hand. Throughout the
years, the dossier format recurred as well, perhaps most flamboyantly in Barbara
Vine’s The Child’s Child (2012) and Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders (2017),
each embedding an entire novel within the one we’re reading.
As the range of possibilities proliferated, the self-consciousness always pres-
ent in the whodunit allowed for an updating of the comedy of murders that
had emerged in the 1940s with Arsenic and Old Lace (1941) and the film Mur-
der, He Says (1945). In an echo of Seven Keys to Baldpate and Shadows on the
Stairs (1941), the comic play could take the writing of a mystery as its premise.
Anthony Shaffer’s Sleuth (1970), centering on a mystery novelist who aims to
kill his wife’s lover, gave its second act over to a baggy-pants pastiche of Priest-
ley’s An Inspector Calls. Ira Levin’s Deathtrap (1978) went further, positing the
play we’re watching as an alternative version of the play being written. Like the
1920s productions that brought the audience in as jury, these had to spread
their clues across the footlights. To conceal the fact that one character was
another in disguise, Sleuth’s playbill listed a nonexistent actor in the second
part. In Deathtrap, a scene description read out onstage corresponded exactly
to the scene-setting boilerplate in the audience’s program.50 Such playfulness,
wholly in the spirit of Golden Age artifice and the light modernism of Piran-
dello, confirmed the high degree of connoisseurship among mystery fans.
Among all these variants, authors continued to explore the ways verbal tex-
ture, the sheer laying of words on the page, could generate powerful effects of
viewpoint and plot structure. At the same time, writers developed and refined
genres minted in the 1940s—the police procedural, the heist plot—and these
too trained generations of audiences in manipulations of time, viewpoint, and
structure. The case studies in the following chapters sample some of the ripe
formal and stylistic variety provided by this mode of storytelling.
PART III
 CHAPTER 9

THE GREAT DETECTIVE REWRITTEN

Erle Stanley Gardner and Rex Stout

T
he early hard-boiled tradition had shown how much could be
achieved without the shuffled time schemes and booby-trapped
viewpoints and baroque chapter divisions cultivated by the
Golden Age experimenters. Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler were
committed to linear plotting and restricted point of view. But they too displayed
the power of high artifice, showing how tightly confined viewpoint could yield
Hammett’s disquieting “detached attachment” or Chandler’s fine-grained trac-
ing of the detective’s response to everything he encounters—qualities largely
missing from the classic whodunit.
Two other writers provide some alternative options. Close contemporar-
ies and veterans of pulp publishing, they found success when Hammett was
abandoning novels and Chandler was serving his apprenticeship. Erle Stanley
Gardner’s first Perry Mason novel was published in 1933, and Rex Stout’s first
Nero Wolfe book appeared the following year. Hammett had been lucky to enter
the pulps when they were booming; but the Depression devastated that market,
and writers struggled.1 Gardner and Stout realized that the future of detective
stories lay in book-length fiction, ideally of a sort that could be serialized in
slick-paper magazines aimed at the family or women’s market. This decision
gave the two men careers of great longevity, and both were still turning out
novels in the 1970s.
Chandler scoffed at his rivals. He called Gardner “only by courtesy a writer
at all” and declared Stout “one of the smooth and shallow operators” whose
“words don’t get up and walk. Mine do.”2 I’m inclined to put Chandler’s rancor
 286 PA RT I I I

down to envy because Gardner and Stout were more prolific and more skilled at
crafting work for the household magazines. Nevertheless, Chandler’s disdain is
shared by general opinion. Few historians have acknowledged the significance
of Gardner and Stout in the tradition of perplexing plots. Because both men
welcomed the Great Detective tradition more warmly than the hard-boiled
writers did, they have been written off as formulaic, with Gardner marked a
plodder and Stout dismissed as a charming lightweight.
These judgments aren’t valid. Gardner was a thoughtful artisan, always
on the lookout for fresh technical devices. He shows the extent to which a
disciplined literary worker can create originality in a mass-market medium.
More surprising, his work reveals how popular narrative can appeal to folktale
archetypes and principles of oral storytelling.
Stout, a child of literary culture to an extent Hammett and Chandler never
were, brought a refined aesthetic perspective to the detective story. He took
some Great Detective conventions to new levels of intricacy, and his playful
demotic draws unexpectedly on several traditions, not least that of “light
modernism.” Contrary to Chandler, Stout’s words do get up and walk. Hell,
they can dance.

Medium-Boiled

“Perry Mason, Criminal Lawyer” reads the scrawl on the jacket of The Case of
the Velvet Claws (1933). “Remember that name. You’ll meet him again. He is
going to be famous.” Thayer Hobson, president of the William Morrow publish-
ing house, added that blurb because he had already purchased a sequel. In the
wake of Christie, Van Dine, and Queen, Hobson expected that another series
detective would enjoy a robust life.
He could hardly have known just how robust. Mysteries seldom achieved
best-seller status in hardcover format, but once paperback publishing took
off in the 1940s, the Mason titles became evergreens. In one month of 1946,
Gardner novels sold more than thirteen million paperback copies.3 By 1965,
twenty-one of them had sold more than two million copies each.4 The relent-
less, quick-witted criminal lawyer was featured in films, radio shows, and
eventually in a top-rated television series.
Erle Stanley Gardner first published in Black Mask in 1923, only a year after
Hammett’s debut there. Calling himself the Fiction Factory, Gardner committed
to pounding out a million words per year.5 After mastering the electric type-
writer, he quickly adopted dictation, passing Dictaphone recordings to several
secretaries for transcription. Velvet Claws was his debut as a novelist and the
first of eighty-two books centered on Mason. By 1979 he had written more than
a hundred novels, and they had sold more than 310 million copies worldwide.6
 The Great Detective Rewritten 287

Both fans and peers agreed that Gardner’s readers were held by cunning
plot construction. For him story stood above all. Gardner was a self-conscious
literary craftsman, as obsessive as any follower of Flaubert or James in probing
the principles underlying his narrative technique.
He was a creature of the 1910s and 1920s craze for manuals. Even while selling
to the pulps, he scoured how-to books for tips. He toyed with Plot Genie and
Plotto, and finding the plot wheels uninspiring, he devised his own discs that
could randomly combine situations and settings to inspire a story. He absorbed
the go-getting dynamics promoted in William Wallace Cook’s The Fiction Factory
(1912) and H. Bedford-Jones’s This Fiction Business (1921). He became such a
model pupil that Bedford-Jones invited him to write the preface to The Graduate
Fictioneer (1932), a manual for early career authors.
Like Hammett and Chandler, Gardner wanted to preserve the investiga-
tion plot, with all its machinery of clues, misdirection, and surprises, as a
mainspring for an urban adventure. But unlike Chandler, Gardner was con-
vinced that a mystery pulled the reader along not by style but by the pattern
and pacing of incidents. That led him to formulate guidelines for working out
his plots.
The writer should plot the story, Gardner believed, from the murderer’s
viewpoint. He devised the Murderer’s Ladder, a series of stages that begin with
motivation and pass through temptation, planning, and first steps until culmi-
nating in the cover-up, the falsely accused suspect, and above all the need to
manage “the little overlooked clues and loose threads.”7 Inevitably, the imper-
fections in the plan spur the killer to improvise, and the efforts to cover up
errors yield “false alibis, false clues, misdirected suspicions.”8 By exposing these,
the detective will solve the case.
Thinking structurally, Gardner sees those flaws in the execution of the crime
as yielding incidental mysteries, and these can launch the plot proper. Instead
of starting with the discovery of a dead body, let the novel unfold through an
intriguing situation. A sleepless man calls on Mason to silence a howling dog.
Or a client wants Mason to find the con man who’s running a swindle as a
beauty contest. Like the blackmail and missing-person pretexts in hard-boiled
plotting, these legal contretemps delay the big crime—the murder—and ask
the reader to imagine how they’re related to it. They form part of what Gardner
called a “clue sequence” that led to a continuous flow of unresolved situations
that must eventually make sense.
Gardner was especially sensitive to the problem of maintaining reader
interest during the detective’s investigation. Questioning suspects one after
another invites tedium, and there’ll be plenty of grilling when the case gets to
court. Golden Age authors had to pad out the investigation with detectives’
eccentricities, colorful walk-ons, and more murders. Gardner solved the prob-
lem of the sagging middle by hurling his detective against adversaries whom
 288 PA RT I I I

he must bluff, bully, trick, or trap. Philo Vance and Hercule Poirot have the
law on their side as they tag along with the authorities; the Continental Op
and Philip Marlowe pursue private inquiries. Perry Mason is on a collision
course with the police, the district attorney, and hostile attorneys with their
own agendas.
As early as 1926, Gardner was imagining “a lawyer whose sense of justice is
a lot stronger than his sense of legal ethics who habitually outsmarts the dis-
trict attorney, with the action taken from court before a reader’s eyes.”9 Mason
would be no dilettante bantering with suspects and thick-headed police, but a
hard-charging champion of the prime suspect. Mason strides into every scene
with one purpose: outwitting the forces arrayed against his client. In the usual
hard-boiled tale, conflict is surprisingly understated; stretches of quiet menace
are broken by sudden violence. Gardner believed that blunt confrontations
could sound a new note. “There hasn’t been any real Jack London style of con-
flict developed by detective writers.”10
The Continental Op and Sam Spade doggedly do their job without fanfare,
and they sometimes reveal doubt about their dirty business. They’re largely
reactive. But Mason takes the initiative and radiates tireless, unquestioning
strength.

He was a fighter; a fighter who could, perhaps patiently, bide his time for deliv-
ering a knock-out blow, but who would, when the time came, remorselessly
deliver that blow with the force of a mental battering ram.11
“I’m representing my client, and when I represent a client, I fight for him—to
the last ditch if necessary.”12

In his struggle to protect his client, the hero will bend or break the law. He will
hide his client from the cops and remove or destroy evidence. He will forge a
document, send anonymous letters, bribe a witness, burglarize a crime scene,
hire impersonators, or fabricate a confession.
The client is in jeopardy by mishap, but Mason embraces danger deliberately:

“I’m gambling with everything I’ve got that he isn’t guilty.”

“That’s just the point, Chief,” Della Street protested in hot indignation.
“You’re staking your professional reputation backing the play of an emotional
kid about whom you know nothing.”
Perry Mason grinned at her, a grin which held no amusement, but was the
savage grin of a fighter coming back into the ring to face a formidable adver-
sary who has already inflicted terrific punishment. “Sure I am,” he agreed. “I’m
a gambler. . . . I play a no-limit game. When I back my judgment, I back it with
everything I have.”13
 The Great Detective Rewritten 289

By casting the detective as an aggressor who takes big risks, the writer adds a layer
of suspense that can carry the reader through the middle stretches of the book. To
save his client and keep himself out of jail, Mason must unmask the killer.
Fortunately, his chance of winning is boosted by his gifts. Gardner believed
that popular fiction had three essential archetypes: Cinderella, Robin Hood,
and Sherlock Holmes.14 In Mason he combined Holmes with Robin Hood. He’s
a smart detective, and his adroitness in squeezing out of tight spots makes
him akin to suave rogues such as Raffles and the Saint. “I’m not a lawyer,” he
admits in one book, “except as a sideline. I’m an adventurer.”15
Mason joins the hard-boiled tradition of making the mystery an urban
adventure. The bait-and-switch premise that brings the detective into the case
leads to something more perilous. Perry seldom faces immediate death, as
the Op and Marlowe do, but the threat to the social order that Hammett and
Chandler envision are class-based: the corruption of Poisonville, or the depen-
dence of the rich upon the underworld. In Gardner, the danger is that of legal
machinery that may crush an individual.
In classic hard-boiled tales, few people can be considered spotless, but
Mason can take his client’s innocence for granted. Typically, that client is a
woman. She isn’t above reproach; Mason’s clients often lie, blunder, or hide evi-
dence. But Gardner purifies the Maltese Falcon situation by making the woman
in distress guiltless and not sexually alluring to Mason. His sympathy for her is
unadulterated by suspicion or desire. She is in effect the Cinderella who must
be rescued by magic. Gardner’s recourse to courtroom showdowns shrewdly
extends the 1920s and 1930s vogue for trial novels and plays, but these climaxes
also display the knight in virtuous combat, defending his lady and shaming his
opponents in a public tournament.
The Case of the Caretaker’s Cat (1935) is an early example of Gardner’s
method. The plot is initiated through pretext mysteries: a questionable will,
some missing diamonds, the hiding of a million dollars in cash, and a dispute
over whether a family retainer can keep his cat after the master has died. In a
whimsical moment, Mason takes the cat as his client, but he soon decides to
represent a hard-working young woman cut out of the dead millionaire’s will.
Her purity is guaranteed by the fact that although she deserves a legacy she
won’t pursue it and prefers to run a waffle cafe. Soon the young man she loves is
accused of murder, and Mason comes to his defense. At the same time, a shady
attorney is bent on denying the woman any claim on the will, and Mason aims
to bring down this predator.
For most cases, Mason hires detective Paul Drake to investigate witnesses
and tap sources in the police force for inside information. Drake’s role is to
provide lumps of exposition about crime scenes and witness testimony, leav-
ing Mason free to pursue his elaborate schemes. In Caretaker’s Cat Mason rigs
 290 PA RT I I I

up a car-exchange trick that reveals the first murder victim is actually alive
under a false identity. In court Mason clears the young man of the second mur-
der, thanks to a slipup in one phase of the Murderer’s Ladder: the culprit got
scratches on his hands when trying to substitute a different cat for the caretak-
er’s pet. All of the initial mysteries now fall into a coherent clue sequence.
As one of the Black Mask boys, Gardner saw Perry Mason as a two-fisted
hero. But the initial drafts of the first two Mason novels worried Gardner’s
agent: the characters were “rather viciously hard-boiled.”16 Gardner’s editor
urged him to soften Mason, particularly with regard to his “hard-boiled pater-
nalism” in the treatment of Della.17 Gardner toned down Mason’s aggressive-
ness by presenting him as being calmly confident about his powers.
Gardner further softened Mason’s character in hopes of breaking into the
slick-magazine market. One option was to give him a romantic side. Gardner’s
agent reminded him that both moviegoers and readers “like tenderness, heart
interest.”18 Hopes for high-end serialization of the books pushed Gardner to toy
with a Mason-Della liaison. In Caretaker’s Cat, Mason recruits her for an elabo-
rate charade in which they pretend to be honeymooners. One moment suggests
that Della takes the ploy more seriously than he does.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “to wish this on you, Della, but you’re the only one I know
whom I can trust.”
“On a honeymoon?” she asked dryly.
“On a honeymoon,” he answered tonelessly.
She snapped the wheel savagely, making the tires scream as the car slid
around to the left and headed toward the Union Depot.
“You don’t necessarily need to collect any traffic tickets en route,” he observed.
“Shut up,” she told him. “I want to collect my thoughts. To hell with the
traffic tickets.”19

Soon Della will halt the car to stare at Perry, ignoring the horns honking
behind her. It’s a scene easy to visualize on the movie screen, and it tantalizes
the reader with the possibility that Della is frustrated with Mason’s inability
to grasp how his ploy might hurt her feelings. The book’s last line has Perry
remarking that they should keep the car they’ve bought “in case I should want
to go on a honeymoon.”
The tease continues in later books, for example, in The Case of the Lame
Canary (1937), when Della and Perry plan a cruise to Asia together without
Gardner ever specifying the sleeping arrangements. That book won serializa-
tion in the Saturday Evening Post, but Gardner wound up hating the compro-
mise. He complained that he resorted to gimmicks (“silenced rifles and trick
garages and substituted amnesia victims and what the hell have we”), but it’s
likely that he resented the infusion of love interest too.20 His plots preferred to
 The Great Detective Rewritten 291

admit romance through the conventional secondary couple, as in Caretaker’s

Cat. For Gardner, Mason’s softer side emerged not in passion for women but in
his compassion for people threatened by the machinations of the law.
The demands of the magazine market recast Mason’s professional ethics
as well. Francis M. Nevins points out that the early Mason is willing to rig
evidence to free a client he knows is guilty because Mason believes that the
murder was justified. After signing up with the Post, Gardner straitlaced his
hero more. “I never take a case unless I’m convinced my client was incapable
of committing the crime charged.”21 The smoothing of Mason’s edges con-
tinued in the last books and the popular television series. Gardner insisted
that the program’s writers rely on Mason’s “sense of justice, his basic faith in
human nature.”22
Still, in the 1930s and 1940s books, Mason’s pugilistic personal style marks
him as a tough hombre. In one book he quotes Sam Spade:

Driscoll said with quivering lips, “I don’t have to take this from you, you know.”
“The hell you don’t,” Mason said easily. “You just think you don’t. You’ll take
it and like it. Sit down!”23

Outselling the other Black Mask boys by orders of magnitude, Gardner main-
streamed the hard-boiled aesthetic while offering a more consoling vision of
the urban adventurer. He saw Mason’s strengths as “his mastery of dramatic
courtroom technique, plus his fighting ability, his ingenuity, and his general
hardboiled loyalty to his clients.”24
As a man, Gardner lived his beliefs. While cranking out prose, he found
time to defend penniless clients and form a Court of Last Resort to investigate
wrongly convicted prisoners.25 As an author, he gave readers not a lonely ide-
alist walking mean streets but a ruthless white-collar professional who could
skirt the law in the name of genuine justice. Perry Mason’s flawed but idealistic
successors fill the pages of our legal thrillers.

Writing Degree Zero

Gardner proves that a successful writer need not write well. His language is at
best functional, at worst barbarous. In an early pulp story, within two pages we
encounter:

And now the Lady of Death was smiling her incarnadined lips at me.
I confronted her with a questioning gaze which I did my best to maintain
as a blank of unrecognition, yet filled with just that receptive leer which the
character I impersonated would have used under such circumstances. . . .
 292 PA RT I I I

And then her crimsoned lips sought my face, kissed me with sticky caresses,
just as they had kissed the dying features of Al Kelaney and left telltale imprints
on the clammy skin.
I saw a look of puzzled bewilderment.26

Gardner probably realized that a style like this wouldn’t succeed in the book
market, so the Mason novels retreat to a conservative strategy: cut the frills
and pack the pages with plot complications and dialogue. Throughout, Gard-
ner deploys a style so withdrawn and neutral, so dependent on speech, that he
makes Hammett look florid. To lay a page of The Maltese Falcon alongside a
Gardner page is to see the difference between musculature and skeleton.
Long before Elmore Leonard advised writers to “leave out the parts that
readers tend to skip,” Gardner was engineering his books for speed reading.27
He avoids fine-grained description of settings or behavior. Those he does sup-
ply are sketchy or clumsy.

The car purred smoothly up the Conejo Grade, ran past a rolling plateau coun-
try that was studded with huge live oaks. The wind had gone down now and
the stars of early evening were resplendent in a sky that was clear as crystal.
Mason took the small tin box, replaced the gum and studied it, tilting the
box backwards and forwards so as to get a good view of both the top and
bottom sides of the chewing gum.

The famous Gardner pace demands treating these descriptive bits as mere tran-
sitions. The scene-setting can be done in a phrase. In Caretaker’s Cat, Mason
gets a call from Paul Drake.

“Okay,” he said, “I’ll come down.”

He switched out the lights, took a cab to the place Drake had indicated, and
stared into the detective’s pop-eyes. “You look as though you had something up
your sleeve.”28

Once on the scene, conversations start. Leonard again: “I bet you don’t skip
dialogue.”29
The interchanges center on Perry confronting people or spitting out orders
to Della and Drake.30 “Make it snappy!” The conversations are sometimes mad-
deningly repetitive, with longer speeches broken up with filler such as “And
then?” and “All right” and “Go on.” (Pulp editors grudgingly admired Gardner’s
ability to pad out scenes to maximize wordage.) Some pages of Caretaker’s Cat
consist wholly of quoted dialogue, with no tags identifying speakers. The effect
is like reading a screenplay or the script of a radio drama. There is little of Joseph
Conrad’s effort to “make you see”: the Gardner pace makes you overhear.
 The Great Detective Rewritten 293

This strategy is well suited to plots that culminate in courtroom testimony. By

convention, these scenes consist of dozens of quick probes and clipped answers.

“Just one moment,” Mason said. “Just one more question. You can recall
other events which happened on that night with startling clarity, can you not,
Mr. Archer?”
“I can recall them.”
“You can recall having had Chilean wine for dinner?”
“Yes.”
“You know that it was Chilean wine?
“Yes, sir.”
“A red wine?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You recall that perfectly?”
“Yes.”
“You recall asking for Chilean wine?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You recall that you had a steak?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You recall how it was cooked?”
“Yes, sir. Medium rare.”
“You recall that is the way you ordered it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“But you cannot recall whether or not immediately after the hold-up and
before you telephoned the police you telephoned Villa Lavina?
“No, sir?”
“Thank you,” Mason said, “that’s all.”
“That’s all,” Fritch said wearily.31

Fritch isn’t the only weary one. This passage concludes a stretch of back-and-
forth that runs sixty pages.
Smothering scenes in dialogue helps Gardner suppress Mason’s thinking.
Sometimes we’re told that Della Street is trying to figure out his plans, but the
third-person narration is largely neutral and objective in the Maltese Falcon
and Glass Key manner. (Gardner even adopts the Ned Beaumont tactic of giv-
ing us characters’ full names again and again.) This is the Sayers principle of
hiding the detective’s reasoning: the narration trails Mason from situation to
situation as he issues orders, but it seldom accesses his mind directly. In all, his
opaque schemes add another layer of mystery to the plot.
The metronomic dialogue and narration bear the traces of oral compo-
sition. Years as a courtroom attorney turned Gardner into a talker. A 1946
profile noted that “the oratorical muscles of Erle’s cheeks and neck have a
 294 PA RT I I I

herculean development from scores of millions of words barked in court and

rattled off into a recording machine.”32 He had begun dictating his stories
shortly before he launched the Mason franchise. Once he had outlined his
plot on paper, he often took to the road in his motor home. Camping in wil-
derness solitude with his Dictaphone, he let his voice take over. No wonder
the scenes read like plays; Gardner’s desert recitations brought the rapid dia-
logue exchanges to life. His secretaries typed up the results and sent them to
publishers with minimal revision.
For stage directions framing all the talk, he could tap into a store of fixed
phrases that had served him well. Mason unlocks his office door, settles down
with a pencil to scan a document, looks up when Della strides in. Gardner
carries perfunctory scene-setting to almost parodic extremes. Consider these
chapter openings from four 1930s books.

Morning sun, streaming in through the windows of Perry Mason’s private office,
struck the calf-skin bindings on the shelved law books and made them seem
less grimly foreboding.
Late morning sun, streaming through the windows of Perry Mason’s private
office, fell across the big desk in splotches of golden light.
Afternoon sun was slanting in through the windows of Perry Mason’s office
and casting reflections on the glass doors of the sectional bookcases
as Perry Mason pushed through the office door and tossed a briefcase on
the table.
Morning sun streamed through the windows of Perry Mason’s office. He sat at
his desk, his eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep, looking across at Paul Drake.33

Later books open chapters in a no less ritualized way.

It was Della Street, Perry Mason’s confidential secretary, who first called the
lawyer’s attention to the glamorous ghost.
Della Street, Perry Mason’s confidential secretary, picked up the telephone and
said, “Hello.”
Della Street, Perry Mason’s confidential secretary, entered Mason’s private office.
Della Street, Perry Mason’s confidential secretary, stood in the doorway between
the lawyer’s private office and the passage leading to the reception room.34

All of this has an archaic ring. Milman Parry and Albert Lord showed that
Homer and other bards used epithets to fill out the metrical scheme of the tales
they sang.35 Their performances could plug in fixed phrases with astonishing
fluency. In a perverse echo of antiquity, Gardner did the same for mass-media
narrative. Performing his text out loud while “writing” it, he deployed his
 The Great Detective Rewritten 295

own stock of formulas. The phrase “Della Street, Perry Mason’s confidential
secretary” becomes a modern equivalent of a Homeric noun epithet such as
“fleet-footed Achilles.” Likewise, Gardner the fluent lawyer could draw on legal
commonplaces to build interrogations and courtroom exchanges: “Court will
recess until two o’clock.” “I object on the grounds that it’s incompetent, irrele-
vant, and immaterial.” All of these set phrases facilitate rapid storytelling and
speed reading.
It’s sometimes said that in teaming up Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, Rex
Stout found a way to combine the brilliant-sleuth premise with hard-boiled
dynamism. Stout’s achievement is actually more complicated, but the judgment
fits the Perry Mason stories fairly well. Insisting on a rigorous solution to a
puzzle (“No thimblerigging!” he wrote to himself), Gardner shows that Mason
is shrewd at spotting clues and drawing inferences. Although respecting the
puzzle conventions, Gardner provides an alternative hard-boiled vision, one
showing how a heroic protagonist spoiling for a fight and ready to protect an
unfairly accused person will not succumb to Chandler’s romantic melancholy.
Gardner shows how the hard-boiled aesthetic could be adapted to classic mys-
tery plotting and, undistracted by literary graces, give readers the satisfaction of
watching a fighter win.
Gardner wouldn’t have been as prodigal as he was without trying other
styles. In 1939, the same year as The Big Sleep, Gardner launched another
series under the pseudonym A. A. Fair. The Bigger They Come is told in first
person by the short, clever lawyer turned private eye Donald Lam. Lam’s nar-
ration displays Gardner’s usual reliance on long dialogues, but it also shows
that he had an urge to innovate. Rejecting the prototypical private dick, he
made Lam incapable of defending himself against the bruisers who work
him over. In the process, Gardner harks back to the old Black Mask days. He
gives Lam’s humiliation some of the bemused stoicism found in Hammett’s
Continental Op.

His fingers hooked around the knot in my necktie, twisted it until it started
choking me. He pulled on the necktie, and I came up out of the chair as though
I hadn’t weighed fifty pounds. His right hand swung up from his hips so that
the heel of his palm pushed the tip of my nose back into my face and sent tears
squirting out of my eyes. “Sit down,” he said.
Under the impact of that hand, I went down like a sack of meal. “Stand up,”
he said, and his hand on my necktie brought me up.
I tried to get my hands up to block the heel of his hand as it came for my
sore nose. He speeded up the punch just a little, and beat me to it. “Sit down,”
he said.
I felt that the whole front of my face was coming off.36
 296 PA RT I I I

Lam ultimately outwits the bullies he encounters, but his resignation to the
inevitable beatdowns gives the series a comic flair. Just as important, Lam’s
boss is the tough, greedy, overweight Bertha Cool. In the prickly exchanges
between them, Gardner taps into the vein that Rex Stout had opened up with
the immortal pairing of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin.

Holmes and Watson in Manhattan

Rex Stout began writing before Hammett, Chandler, and Gardner did.
Between 1912 and 1917, he published more than thirty stories and four novels,
most in pulp magazines. At age twenty-seven, Stout gave up writing to run
a company that arranged for schoolchildren to set up savings accounts.
The earnings from this business enabled him to move to Europe and launch a
second writing career.37
The first fruits of that effort put him among authors who were adapting
modernist techniques for a wider readership. How Like a God (1929) was called
“an extraordinarily brilliant and fascinating piece of work,” and Seed on the
Wind (1930) made “the Lawrence excursion into sexual psychology seem pale
and artificial.”38 Stout was compared favorably with Dostoevsky and Aldous
Huxley.39 In a contemporary survey of the novel, a distinguished academic
had no hesitation including Stout in the company of Woolf, Dos Passos, and
Faulkner.40
Stout mingled with the literati. He met G. K. Chesterton, Bernard Shaw, H.
G. Wells, Ford Madox Ford, and Joseph Conrad. He got fan letters from Have-
lock Ellis and Mrs. Bertrand Russell. Manhattan tastemakers Mark Van Doren,
Christopher Morley, and Alexander Woollcott became close friends.41
Yet soon Stout turned his back on experimentation. After the 1929 stock
market crash, he needed to make money. How Like a God and Seed on the
Wind, published by a firm he helped found, sold poorly. His next efforts were
less formally adventurous but continued in a vein of erotic provocation. Golden
Remedy (1931) traces the sexual frustrations of a philandering concert impre-
sario. In Forest Fire (1933), a park ranger confronts his homosexual impulses.
Both books garnered mixed reviews and few sales.
Stout took to heart the Collins test, the distinction between art and enter-
tainment. Realizing that he was “a good storyteller but not a great novelist,”
he vowed, “To hell with sweating our another twenty novels when I’d have a
lot of fun telling stories which I could do well and make some money on it.” 42
His confession echoes a comment of several reviewers who had found that
his first two novels, although technically a bit gimmicky, still managed to tell
gripping stories.43 More than one compared their effect to the suspense gen-
erated by detective fiction.44
 The Great Detective Rewritten 297

In quick succession, Stout tried his hand at a political thriller (The President
Vanishes, 1934), two comic romances, and detective novels. “There was no
thought of ‘compromise.’ I was satisfied that I was a good storyteller; I enjoyed
the special plotting problems of detective stories; and I felt that whatever com-
ments I might want to make about people and their handling of life could be
made in detective stories as well as in any other kind.”45 Fer-de-Lance (1934)
launched a series centered on Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, and after
1940, Stout would concentrate wholly on them. Their cases, chronicled more
or less sequentially in thirty-three novels and forty short stories and novellas,
ended in A Family Affair (1975), published shortly before Stout’s death.46
When the author of How Like a God turned to mysteries, we might have
expected him to produce a geometrically intricate block construction similar
to The Poisoned Chocolates Case. After the reverse time scheme of Seed on the
Wind, Stout might have launched something like Obelists Fly High, which begins
with an epilogue and concludes with a prologue. Instead, Stout did something
else. He carried a central convention of the detective story to a new, almost
obsessive limit; he made that convention newly ingratiating; and in the process
he revealed unexpected ways to experiment with style in a mass-market genre.
Nero Wolfe, weighing in at one-seventh of a ton, lives in a well-appointed
brownstone on Thirty-Fifth Street. Here he breeds orchids, reads, drinks vast
quantities of beer, and dines on meals of rare delicacy. To support his lifestyle,
he works as a private investigator. But he is the ultimate armchair detective. His
central rule of behavior, and the formal premise that founds the series, is that
he leaves his home only under extreme necessity.
Wolfe’s self-imposed isolation obliges him to employ an assistant, Archie
Goodwin, who works as his secretary—typing correspondence, keeping plant
records, dusting the office—and as an investigator. Archie fetches clients, wit-
nesses, and suspects to meetings. Slender and strong, reasonably handsome,
Archie is attractive to and attracted by women of many ages.47
Above all, Wolfe is committed to rationality—or at least as much as a detec-
tive in the intuitionist tradition can be. As a boy, Stout steeped himself in Doyle,
Freeman, Collins, and other classics, and he admired Christie, Sayers, even Van
Dine. He defended the orthodox detective story as a fairy tale “about man’s
best loved fairy”: the belief in the power of reason to serve justice.48 Wolfe, who
grunts and purses his lips and closes his eyes, avoids displays of emotion, espe-
cially from women. He is the detached, arrogant, grumpy genius.
Archie Goodwin, as Wolfe describes him in an appreciative mood, is
“inquisitive, impetuous, alert, skeptical, pertinacious, and resourceful.”49 He is
good with weapons and his fists. He can bluff as well as Wolfe, but in an ingra-
tiating, rapid-fire style. Although no less sensitive to money than Wolfe—he
often has to goad his boss into taking a lucrative case—he has a streak of
idealism and fair play, perhaps because he hasn’t withdrawn from the world.
 298 PA RT I I I

He has pals, including the heiress Lily Rowan and other lady friends, and he
enjoys parties.
The contrast between Wolfe and Archie has inclined some commentators to
see Stout’s accomplishment as a teaming of two prototypical protagonists: the
puzzle-solving genius and the hard-boiled man of action. It’s true in part, but in
the blend both components are changed.
Traditionally the armchair detective commands center stage. The proto-
type, Baron Orczy’s Old Man in the Corner, is both protagonist and narrator.
Prompted by a young woman, he recounts his cases in embedded flashbacks.
Stout took the armchair detective premise as a formal problem. “Like the
restrictions a sonnet writer is held to, Wolfe’s chosen way of life offers a chal-
lenge that is fun to meet.”50 Stout’s solution is to make the assistant participate
fully in the action. Archie tells the story, and he is given plenty to do. In some
books, Wolfe is offstage for many chapters.
Stout defended the use of a Watson as the best solution to the “purely tech-
nical problem” of fair play.51 The writer must present all the information needed
to solve the mystery, but the significance of crucial clues must be played down.
A narrating sidekick not only justifies suppressing the detective’s thinking, but
it provides creative options. “A Watson keeps the reader at the viewpoint where
he belongs—close to the hero—supplies a foil for the hero’s transcendence and
infallibility, and makes the postponement of the revelation vastly less difficult.
Also, if your imagination is up to the task of making the stooge a man instead of
a dummy, he will be handy to have around in many other ways.”52 Stout seized
on the opportunities afforded by a restless, outgoing Watson who could con-
trast sharply with the great detective while complicating the plot and throwing
his own mystifications into the mix. In effect, he turned the Poe-Doyle helper
into a coequal protagonist.
Stout believed that what made Holmes attractive was not his reasoning
power but his idiosyncrasies. He admired “the thousand shrewd touches in the
portrait of the great detective. . . . It is stroked in quite casually, without effort
or emphasis.”53 Archie is by turns frustrated and amused by Wolfe, and his
reactions go beyond John Watson’s gentlemanly tolerance. Recorded in Archie’s
respectful mockery, Wolfe’s eccentricities and tantrums become diverting.
“What makes Wolfe palatable,” Donald Westlake notes, “is that Archie finds
him palatable.”54
Stout’s major formal innovation is to make his Watson at least as interesting
as his Holmes. The hard-boiled detective tends to be wary, weary, and with-
drawn, but Archie the extravert is socially adroit. He’s closer to the fast-talking
newshound or salesman of 1930s movie comedies. And he has a conception of
masculinity far more flexible than that of most hard-boiled heroes. He doesn’t
insult women or bully weak men. He can punch, but he also loves to dance in
nightclubs and usually prefers milk to whisky. He almost never gets whacked
 The Great Detective Rewritten 299

unconscious. On the one occasion he is given knockout drugs, he wakes up

weeping and takes a plausible stretch of time to recover.55 Then there’s his name:
Who calls a tough guy Archie?
Stout admired Hammett enormously, ranking him above Hemingway, and
it seems likely that Archie’s patter owes something to the Continental Op’s
ironizing vernacular. But Stout detached himself from the “sex-and-gin mar-
athon” on display in most hard-boiled novels.56 In 1950, Stout parodies the
Spillane style by having Archie impersonate a tough dick. He squeezes a tar-
get with phrases like “first-hand dope,” “a nice juicy price,” and references to
“bitching up” a plan before he declares, in the noble Marlowe manner: “I have
my weak spots, and one of them is my professional pride. . . . That’s a fine god-
damn mess for a good detective, and I was thinking I was one.” Archie never
normally talks this way. He walks away from the encounter grinning. “The
game was on.”57
Because Archie sees Wolfe through grudgingly admiring eyes, Stout can
make their ongoing relations part of the plot. Stout turns the Watson/Holmes
interplay into a battle of wits—not just a race to the crime’s solution but a
daily game of two men pushing against each other. Archie prods the lazy
Wolfe to take cases, quarrels with him about tactics, teases him about his
habits, and threatens to quit. (Archie claims to have resigned or been fired
dozens of times.)
The petty friction of different temperaments working and living together
makes every moment fraught with comedy. Both men bicker ingeniously.
“You know me, I’m a man of action.” “And I, of course, am super-sedentary.”
When Archie pushes too far, Wolfe will interrupt: “Shut up.” They go through
periods of sullen silence, usually broken by the need to cooperate on a case.
Yet the interpersonal stratagems allow for a fundamental respect and affec-
tion. After Archie’s boast about being a man of action, Wolfe reveals that he
fetched the unconscious Archie home in a cab, with Wolfe cradling Archie’s
head in his lap.58
A stream of contrasts fills out the books. We have Archie’s impudence versus
Wolfe’s stolidity, Archie’s flood of words versus Wolfe’s grunts and lapidary pro-
nouncements, Archie crossing his legs and lifting his eyebrow and Wolfe clos-
ing his eyes and wiggling a finger. Literary analogies spring to mind: Quixote
and Sancho Panza, the phlegmatic and sanguine characters of the Comedy of
Humours. Whatever we settle on, it seems evident we are on archetypal terrain.
“It is impossible,” wrote cultural historian Jacques Barzun, “to say which is the
more interesting and admirable of the two.”59
Stout strengthens Wolfe and Archie’s tie to the Great Detective tradition
through Doyle’s strategy of world building. Within an atmospheric London,
the cozy bachelor redoubt at 221 B Baker Street was rendered with loving exac-
titude, from the V.R. bullet-holes on the wall to the shag tobacco kept in the
 300 PA RT I I I

Persian slipper. Mrs. Hudson, Mycroft, Lestrade, and the Irregulars formed a
repertory cast. Since Doyle almost no major writer of detective fiction had won
readers through the sheer charm of the heroes’ milieu.
Stout launched his series as critics were celebrating the richness of Holmes’s
world. By Doyle’s death in 1930, an ardent fandom had sprung up among the
Manhattan literary elite.60 Entire books treated Holmes and Watson as actual
figures, culminating in Vincent Starrett’s Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1933).
In his influential introduction to the first collection of all the stories in 1930,
Christopher Morley waxed eloquent about the “minor details of Holmesiana”
and the “endless delicious minutiae to consider!”61 There’s the sitting room
where clients call; Holmes stretched languidly on the sofa while he scrapes
the violin; breakfasts on winter mornings; “The game is afoot!”—each scrap
of information asks to be caressed and cherished. Morley founded the Baker
Street Irregulars as an informal dining group. In 1934, the year Fer-de-Lance was
published, Morley invited Stout to join the now habitually meeting Irregulars.
Stout’s sardonic streak made him resist the cult’s ponderous coyness. “The
pretense that Holmes and Watson existed and Doyle was merely a literary agent
can be fun and often is, but it is often abused and becomes silly.”62 He shocked
an Irregulars dinner in 1941 with a remorseless paper asserting that Watson was
a woman, probably the wife of Holmes and the mother of Lord Peter.63 He was
bemused by the efforts of the Wolfe Pack, a coterie of admirers who wanted to
immortalize his creation through similar pseudoscholarship.
Who can blame them? All the trappings were there. This cantankerous genius
had a Watson. Said Watson eventually confessed that the cases (“reports”) were
being published thanks to the ministrations of a literary agent named Rex Stout.
Some characters had read the Wolfe books. As the series went on, sporadic
revelations of Archie’s Ohio childhood and Wolfe’s youthful espionage work
coaxed the faithful to ever-more patient rereading and ever wilder speculation.
What fans today call head-canon proliferated. Is Wolfe Mycroft Holmes’s son? Or
even Sherlock’s, with Irene Adler? Is Archie Wolfe’s son? Or just his cousin? It was
perhaps inevitable that the foremost Holmesian expert, W. S. Baring-Gould,
would write a treatise on the Wolfe ménage.64
More than any other writer of the time, Stout gave detectival eccentricity an
obsessive-compulsive granularity. The brownstone on West 35th Street, how-
ever recognizably part of Manhattan, became an alternative world, ruled by
routines capable of endless fine-tuning. Fritz Brenner cooks; Theodore Horst-
mann tends to the orchids. Wolfe’s schedule is strict, from breakfast in his bed-
room to the evening, when, if there are no meetings with clients, Wolfe reads
and Archie is likely to go out on a date or to a poker game.
The geography of the brownstone is as sharply etched as its routines, and
as the years go by, we learn more and more. Seven front steps lead to the door,
which has a one-way glass and a chain bolt. Pressing the button activates a
 The Great Detective Rewritten 301

doorbell, which replaced the buzzer of the first book. The best chair in the office
is red, with a small table positioned at a client’s elbow for easy check-signing.
At one end of the office is a big globe (first two feet, then three feet in diameter)
that Wolfe likes to gently spin. On his desk is a thin gold strip that he uses as
a bookmark. One drawer is reserved for the beer-bottle caps Wolfe occasion-
ally counts. There’s a safe, a cabinet for files, and built-in bookshelves holding
hundreds of volumes. A painting conceals a peephole.65
In the last book of the series, after his most traumatic case, Wolfe contem-
plates ten days of peace. What will he do? “Loaf, drift. . . . Read books, drink
beer, discuss food with Fritz, logomachize with Archie.”66 This is a world that
tries to keep anything new from happening.67
Stout’s casually stroked-in details pay homage to the master. Morley called
the Holmes stories “this great encyclopedia of romance,” but another detec-
tive novelist, Edmund Crispin, pointed out that the account of Wolfe’s lair
are “so encyclopedic and thoroughgoing that the Holmes-Watson ménage on
Baker Street, in comparison, is reduced to the sketchiest of shadow-shows.”68

Revising the Conventions

Apart from characterizing his Holmes and Watson in full array, Stout uses
world making to fill out the novel’s length. In the process, he enlivened central
conventions of the classic puzzle mystery.
For instance, the armchair premise motivates not only Archie’s excursions
but the need to hire other investigators who become fixtures of Wolfe’s world.
These operatives become helpers, occasional obstacles, and Archie’s comrades
in arms. They also push offstage all the cycles of tailing and questioning that
can make the action flag. Similarly, Wolfe’s willful immobility recasts the con-
vention of the bumbling police. Archie can be summoned to headquarters and
even jailed as a material witness, but Wolfe can usually avoid that fate. The cops
must come calling. Wolfe can subject Inspector Cramer and Sergeant Purley
Stebbins to his schedule, and when he finally grants them an audience, he can
intimidate, bargain, and dodge accusations in comfort.
The personal proclivities of the Great Detective have always helped flesh out
the standard plot and build fan loyalty. Food is central to Stout’s strategy. He
delineates every exotic dish served in the household, every sandwich Archie
gobbles in custody, even Cramer’s stomach-turning snack of salami and butter-
milk. Groceries, brought home by Fritz or picked up in flight from the police,
are lovingly itemized. The Continental Op briefly notes his abalone soup and
minute steak, and Marlowe typically just eats an unspecified lunch or dinner.
Archie dwells on his dining options. “I had had it in mind to drop in at Rus-
terman’s Restaurant for dinner and say hello to Marko that evening, but now
 302 PA RT I I I

I didn’t feel like sitting through all the motions, so I kept going to Eleventh
Avenue, to Mart’s Diner, and perched on a stool while I cleaned up a plate of
beef strew, three ripe tomatoes sliced by me, and two pieces of blueberry pie.”69
Archie invokes another Wolfe domain, Rusterman’s, only to head to the diner
counter and indulge the Ohio boy’s fondness for comfort food. The “sliced by
me” defines Archie’s insistence on taking charge, along with his appreciation of
freshness. It’s a touch nobody but Stout would include.
Building this unique world obliges Stout to alter the role of detecting as a
profession. Philip Marlowe accepts what business he can scrape up, and Perry
Mason can afford to take indigent clients, even a caretaker’s cat. Wolfe and
Archie rely on high-end customers. The clientele comes mostly from the plu-
tocracy and the professions: lawyers, professors, media producers, company
executives, and a surprising number of writers and publishers. Typically a
financial or personal problem leads to a murder, and Wolfe and Archie are
obliged to solve the crime in order to collect payment for the original assign-
ment. In one book, Wolfe calls this “effecting a merger.”70
More than most detectives, Wolfe takes on some clients in teams. He may be
retained by a committee delegated to manage a crisis or representatives of a firm
or professional association or a family of heirs or a band of old college classmates.
The question-and-answer scenes of the classic mystery get recast as business
meetings, or what Archie sometimes calls conferences. Wolfe summons a group
of people with stakes in the matter. Refreshments are served—more detailing of
beverages and preferences—and participants are free to examine Wolfe’s library
and furnishings. When Wolfe gets to work, the quizzing that is the mainstay of
the classic puzzle is turned into an open-ended discussion. Jacques Barzun calls
it Wolfe’s seminar method.71 “I doubt I’ll have a single question to put to any of
you, though of course an occasion for one may rise. I merely want to describe
the situation as it now stands and invite your comment. You may have none.”72
Chandler, who had been an oil company executive, confessed he had trouble
writing scenes with more than two people, but Stout, who founded a successful
company, excelled in roundtable discussions.73
The mercantile tenor of the books reshapes the conventional denouement,
the gathering of all the suspects. Archie, reflecting as usual on the artifice of
detective conventions, calls these Wolfe’s parties or charades. Theatrical they
often are, but they don’t have the inexorability of Ellery Queen’s “exercises in
deduction” or Perry Mason’s annihilation of testimony. Wolfe’s evidence is often
flimsy, and he must provoke the guilty party to self-betrayal. Assembled in
Wolfe’s office, usually under the eyes of Cramer and Stebbins, the principals are
lectured, hectored, bluffed, and misled. After the book’s procession of meet-
ings presided over by Wolfe, the climax seems less a blinding revelation than a
boardroom power play.
 The Great Detective Rewritten 303

Wolfe’s conclusions are often risky intuitions, light on evidence that would
convince a jury. Hence the frequent recourse to extralegal pressures that
would give even Perry Mason pause. Wolfe will coolly order burglary, send
out anonymous messages, and press the guilty party to commit suicide. Worse,
later phases of the plot are likely to hide crucial information from Archie, and
us. Stout may have taken comfort in the fact the best mystery mongers vio-
lated fair-play rules.74 He claimed that Doyle ended his career by concocting
“preposterous” mysteries, but that didn’t lessen the magnetism of the Holmes/
Watson relationship.75 Stout never wanted to sacrifice character byplay to the
Detection Club rulebook.
Wolfe’s dodgy shortcuts, implausible as they sometimes are, create fine
scenes. They generate suspense, offer Archie new challenges, allow Wolfe to
earn his fee, prove his cunning, and provoke Cramer’s wrath. Likewise, keeping
Archie in the dark at the climax adds value, tightening household friction and
giving him occasion for eloquent complaint.
Nearly all of the typical Stout dynamics are already on display in the
first book, Fer-de-Lance (1934). The esoteric title distinguishes it from the
run-of-the-mill detective novel of the moment.76 Stout’s trust in the reader’s
patience is apparent in the fact that the viper isn’t mentioned for more than
two hundred pages.

I tried it again. “Fair-du-lahnss?”

Wolfe nodded. “Somewhat better. Still too much n and not enough nose.”77

Stout takes the opportunity to contrast heartland Archie and cosmopolitan

Wolfe while letting smart readers enjoy linguistic play and instructing the rest
of us in pronunciation. Of his next book, a reviewer would write: “Mr. Stout
adorns his tale with lots of good writing adapted to highbrow and lowbrow
alike.”78
Fer-de-Lance, rather long for a mystery of its day, presents a cascade of coin-
cidences and delays. The murder isn’t revealed as such until the fourth chapter.
Not until a hundred and fifty pages in do we learn that the victim was not the
intended target. These plot zigzags are buried in the minutiae of Wolfe’s world.
The opening plunges us right in.

There was no reason why I shouldn’t have been sent for the beer that day, for
the last ends of the Fairmont National Bank case had been gathered in the
week before and there was nothing for me to do but errands, and Wolfe never
hesitated about running me down to Murray Street for a can of shoe-polish if
he happened to need one. But it was Fritz who was sent for the beer. Right after
lunch the bell called him up from the kitchen.
 304 PA RT I I I

Beer, Wolfe, Fritz, a successful case, an order issued by the employer, and house-
hold customs are all breezily taken for granted from the start. In an ordinary
book, this would be a more typical middle chapter. The mystery isn’t Whodunit?
but What’s the big deal about the beer? The scene centers on Wolfe (the “Nero”
isn’t supplied for three chapters). Archie hints at his bulk but concentrates on
chronicling his eccentric thoroughness in sampling the entire array of legal 3.2
beer. “None shall lack opportunity.”79 He could have waited; prohibition is only
a few months from ending.
We approach the main action at several removes. The operative Fred Durkin
brings in Maria Maffei, whose brother Carlo is missing. Maria leads Archie
to the key witness Anna Fiore, whom he brings back to the office. As Wolfe’s
involvement deepens, the first chapters provide demonstrations of personal
styles. Archie’s dogged but fruitless questioning of Anna in the boarding house
is contrasted with Wolfe’s patient conversations with her in the office. Archie
takes two hours, a period Stout renders in a paragraph of summary, but Wolfe
pursues her for five, with the crucial exchanges dramatized across several pages.
“It was beautiful,” Archie reports.80 The questioning reveals that the missing
brother is indirectly involved in the golfing death.
Next Stout gives Archie his own big scene. He delivers to the White Plains
investigators Wolfe’s $10,000 bet that the death was a murder and that poison
will be found if the body is exhumed. This is the first display of Archie’s gifts for
politely annoying the hell out of authorities with a string of arguments, threats,
and forced choices. Wolfe’s confidence that he can turn the case to profit is
amplified by Archie’s grinning effrontery. Later we’ll discover that they’re also
settling an old score with this district attorney, who among other transgressions
has married money.
The first six chapters are occupied with these business maneuvers. A hard-
boiled novel would begin with the victim’s daughter visiting the office, but here
that comes eighty pages in. She’s been lured by Wolfe’s newspaper advertise-
ment, itself the result of his accidental discovery of the murder. Once Wolfe is
hired, Archie can rush toward the action he enjoys, and we get the character-
istic cycle of his excursions, his reports to the boss, his tapping his newspaper
sources, and the conferences with police and suspects. The hero-worshipping
tone in the early chapters gives way to exasperation, as we’re introduced to the
rhythm of Wolfe’s stubbornness and Archie’s badgering that will pervade the
series to come.
The opening stretches also display how Wolfe uses his supersedentary role
to play puppeteer. He bends everyone to his agenda, with Archie summoning
people to meals and interrogations while horning in on their private lives. The
armchair premise, driven by Wolfe’s self-centeredness, ultimately determines
how he’ll settle the case. By triggering the killer’s murder/suicide, he will never
have to bestir himself to testify in court.
 The Great Detective Rewritten 305

Besides familiarizing us with the routines and introducing us to the protag-

onists’ personal styles, this first book’s opening portions set in place distinctive
features of Stout’s prose. Of course Archie’s vulgar zest and Wolfe’s pompous
pronouncements dominate these sections, but Fer-de-Lance establishes a fin-
er-grained pattern of echoes and refrains that show something just as distinc-
tive in Stout’s achievement. No less than Chandler, Stout brought novelistic
finish to the detective story. He bent Archie’s vernacular to verbal patterning
that had become part of mainstream literary technique.
Early in Fer-de-Lance Wolfe says that Archie collects facts but has no “feeling
for phenomena.”81 Wolfe tells Maria that Carlo’s disappearance is only a fact.
Apparently it doesn’t become a bona fide phenomenon until physical clues let
him grasp Carlo’s role in the murder.
The phrase sounds good, but Archie, having looked up “phenomenon,”
suspects Wolfe is just parading. But Archie won’t let it go. He will defend his
hunches about one suspect as proving he too can pick up on “phenomena.”
When no suspect seems a prime candidate, Archie reflects that Wolfe may need
to “develop a feeling for a new kind of phenomenon: murder by eeny-meany-
miney-mo.” Later, Archie confronts Wolfe and starts talking “just for practice”:
“The problem is to discover what the devil good it does you to use up a million
dollars’ worth of genius feeling the phenomenon of a poison needle in a man’s
belly if it turns out that nobody put it there?” In the closing lines, Wolfe says
he’s willing to take responsibility for the two deaths that conclude the action
and keep him out of court. Archie replies:

“Now, natural processes being what they are, and you having such a good feel-
ing for phenomena, you can just sit and hold your responsibilities on your lap.”
“Indeed,” Wolfe murmured.82

More than Hammett and Chandler, Stout creates refrains that crisscross
dialogue and the protagonist’s commentary. He has precedents. Jane Austen,
whom Stout considered “probably, technically,” the greatest novelist, sends the
word “likeness” chiming significantly through Emma.83 After Wagner, artists in
many media made more self-conscious use of motivic play, and it was a promi-
nent strategy of modern literature and drama, as in Conrad and Bernard Shaw.84
The most proximate source for Stout was perhaps Ulysses, with its refrains of
“Met-em-pike-hoses,” “agenbite of inwit,” “Your head it simply swirls,” and
many more. Stout’s first “art novel,” How Like a God, introduces the rare word
“vengeless” early and brings it back twice across the book to emphasize the
protagonist’s passivity.85
Too Many Cooks (1938) is a rich tissue of refrains, most set out in the first
chapter and revived as needed. They’re often traces of Archie’s sarcasm, as when
he always refers to the district attorney as his friend. After Wolfe declares that
 306 PA RT I I I

a guest is “a jewel on the cushion of hospitality,” Archie fobs the phrase off on
a dinner guest, who doesn’t get it, and later, after seeing a Wolfe scheme foiled,
grins and reflects on “how it probably felt at that moment to be a jewel on the
cushion of hospitality.”86
Stout relies on refrains across books as well as within them. For example,
“satisfactory” is Wolfe’s highest term of praise (and, interestingly, the framing
motif of The Thin Man). In one book, Archie applies it to their guest: “That girl
would have been a very satisfactory traveling companion.” The word recurs
at intervals and returns on the last page, where Archie works off his anger by
punching an obstreperous guest whose “hundred and ninety pounds . . . made
it really satisfactory.”87 Erle Stanley Gardner’s repetitions from book to book
are bland filler, whereas Stout’s serve more literary ends of characterization and
patterning, while quietly assisting world building.
Fer-de-Lance doesn’t yet deploy “satisfactory” in the Wolfean sense, but it
sprinkles in refrains such as “lethal toy,” “genius,” “artist,” and “lovin’ babe!” and
pauses for a debate about the slang use of “ad” for “advertisement.” Sometimes
the iterations are closely packed, knitting together dialogue exchanges, but they
can also recur at a distance. Archie reflects that somehow Wolfe could be called
elegant, and when the obstinate witness Anna behaves with poise four pages
later, he grants: “She was being elegant. She had caught it from Wolfe.” Two
hundred pages later, when Archie induces Anna to sign the decisive statement,
he notices that their first client Maria has changed dramatically. “She looked
elegant.” Evidently she has caught it from Anna.88 Compared with the “Good-
byes” that Chandler scatters through the last chapters of The Long Goodbye
(1953), Stout’s refrain is subtle and piquant.
Or take foreshadowing. The classic whodunit scatters clues deceptively,
creating a sort of disguised foreshadowing. The gun hanging on the wall
in act one might not be the murder weapon; something else is, but it will
be barely mentioned or obliquely described. A more self-consciously lit-
erary novel can foreshadow action through imagery rather than clues and
hints. For instance, the beer bottles brought in to Wolfe on the first page of
Fer-de-Lance remain as props in later office scenes, as does the desk drawer
in which Wolfe stores his opener and bottle caps. At the climax, that drawer
is opened.

“Look out!”
Wolfe had a beer bottle in each hand, by the neck, and he brought one of
them crashing on to the desk but missed the thing that had come out of the
drawer. . . . I was ready to jump back and was grabbing Wolfe to pull him back
with me when he came down with the second bottle right square on the ugly
head and smashed it flat as a piece of tripe.
 The Great Detective Rewritten 307

The beer and the drawer have been carefully planted, but most novelists,
mystery mongers or not, wouldn’t plant Archie’s remark, two hundred
pages earlier, long before we have heard anything about vipers and have met
any suspects.

I looked at Wolfe and back again at the pile on the floor. It was nothing but
golf clubs. There must have been a hundred of them, enough I thought to kill
a million snakes. For it had never seemed to me that they were much good for
anything else.
I said to Wolfe, “The exercise will do you good.”89

Knowing that a snake will indeed pop up in the office and that Wolfe will dis-
patch it furiously, we can see Archie’s imaginary serpent massacre and his teas-
ing comment as classic instances of through-composed novelistic texture.

The Fortunes of Pfui

If you resent the vulgarity of Mr. Goodwin’s jargon I don’t blame you, but
nothing can be done about it.

—Nero Wolfe90

A vein of comedy runs through mysteries of the 1920s. Lord Peter warbling
about a body in the bath is only the most obvious instance of the silly-ass char-
acterization that crept into the puzzle form. London’s Bright Young Things took
up sleuthing in A. A. Milne’s Red House Mystery (1922); and Margery Alling-
ham’s Albert Campion, with his sidekick former burglar Magersfontein Lugg,
began as a parody of Wimsey. At a loftier level, Sayers, Anthony Berkeley, and
others had thought that the detective story could legitimize itself by becoming
a “novel of manners,” with the mild comedy that the genre could sustain. A
rougher, more sarcastic humor could be found in Hammett and other hard-
boiled authors, at about the same time slick magazines were running folksy
tales of comic detection.91
Film had offered some comic crime efforts as well. Howard Hawks turned
Trent’s Last Case (1929) into a Charley Chase farce, and Seven Keys to Baldpate
(1930) revived that perennially popular stage mystery. But screwball comedy
had the strongest influence. The film of The Thin Man (1934) showed the lively
possibilities of socialites solving murders in the midst of high-end shopping,
fine dining, and tipsy chatter. Even the hard-bitten Perry Mason of the novels
became the louche drunk of The Case of the Lucky Legs (1935).
 308 PA RT I I I

Stout had a funny side. He wrote humorous short stories in his pulp days,
and after the second Wolfe novel he published some light romances. Occasion-
ally the Wolfe books meld the conventions of the post-Doyle detective story
with the prose equivalent of a screwball comedy. Some Buried Caesar (1939)
begins with Archie crashing the sedan, as Wolfe jounces in the back seat. As
they walk to a nearby farm, Wolfe notes that they’re crossing a cow pasture.
“Being a good detective, he produced his evidence by pointing to a brown
circular heap near our feet.” Soon, though, a bull charges them. (“He started
the way an avalanche ends.”) Archie runs to the fence and vaults clumsily
over, to the amusement of two young women watching. Meanwhile Wolfe has
somehow found a perch on a boulder in the field and is now standing as still as
a statue, awaiting rescue.92
This slapstick episode launching Some Buried Caesar is, however, atypi-
cal. Stout’s comedy is largely verbal, a torrent of wisecracks, teasing, mimicry,
malapropisms, and barefaced silliness. Later in the book, a twenty-five-page
interlude finds Archie jailed with a despondent con man named Basil and
planning to organize the prisoners into a union. When Wolfe visits, it’s not just
to console Archie but to get ready cash. As Wolfe starts to recall his experience
in a Bulgarian prison, Archie shuts him up by shouting through the bars, “Oh,
Warden! I’m escaping!”93 Lily Rowan, whom we first meet in the book, calls on
Archie as well, using the nickname Escamillo, which will in later books recall
the bull episode.
Doyle recalled, somewhat unfairly, that Watson never showed a gleam of
humor, but Archie personifies fun. In nearly every story somebody accuses him
of clowning, with good reason.

To Lily Rowan: “You’re always right sometimes.”

To Wolfe, after a stretch of inactivity: “I’m just breaking under the strain of
trying to figure out a third way of crossing my legs.”
To O’Hara, bearing a message from Wolfe: “He said to tell you you’re a nin-
compoop, but I think it would be more tactful not to mention it, so I won’t.”
To a visitor who wants to see Wolfe: “You C A N apostrophe T, can’t. Don’t be
childish.”
To a suspect: “You’re too careless with pronouns. Your hims. Your first him’s
opinion of your second him is about the same as yours.”

A thug decides to lecture Archie about showing too much humor. “Someday
something you think is funny will blow your goddamn head right off your
shoulders.” Esprit de l’escalier makes Archie ponder. “Only after he had gone did
it occur to me that that wouldn’t prove it wasn’t funny.”94
Archie’s comment tops the topper, indicating that the smartass dialogue is
set inside an even richer verbal texture. The Wolfe books are the only novels
 The Great Detective Rewritten 309

in which Stout employed first-person narration. “It’s Archie who really carries
the stories, as narrator,” Stout noted. “Whether the readers know it or not, it’s
Archie they really enjoy.”95
His performance calls on many tricks of yarn-spinning in the American
grain. There’s exaggeration, as when Archie declares of Wolfe’s gift of a card
case: “I might have traded it for New York City if you had thrown in a couple of
good suburbs.” There’s Gracie Allen backchat: “I wanted to ask her what the dif-
ference was between asking her advice and wanting to see what she would say,
just to see what she would say.” Wolfe says he’s glad Archie has come. Archie
replies: “I was glad he was glad I had come, but I wasn’t glad, if I make myself
clear.”96 That Archie calls his books “reports” merely adds to the joke; nothing
could be further from neutral description.
Above all, there’s the mixture of spoken language and literary calculation.
Chandler could tell us that a man has a face like a collapsed lung, but Stout gives
us something more conversational. “He didn’t look tough, he looked flabby,
but of course that’s no sign. The toughest guy I ever ran into had cheeks that
needed a brassiere.” As in this example, Archie’s demotic can slam the gearwork
between high and low, lofty and ingenuous. In one of the most brilliant pas-
sages Stout ever wrote, Archie is sharing a dinner with Wolfe and Cramer. “If
you like Anglo-Saxon, I belched. If you fancy Latin, I eructed. No matter which,
I had known that Wolfe and Inspector Cramer would have to put up with it that
evening, because that is always part of my reaction to sauerkraut. I don’t glory
in it or go for a record, but neither do I fight it back. I want to be liked just for
myself.”97 How to define the tone of this passage of mock defense—cast, inev-
itably, in terms of food and word choice? That last sentence is at once proud,
self-deprecating, sincere, and a jab at the American conviction that one’s indi-
viduality is precious, even during a burp.
This is the relaxed performance of a tall tale. Archie’s vernacular makes him
kin to Huck Finn, but there’s as well the shuttling among registers we find
in Twain’s platform speeches and literary critiques. Instead of declaring the
detective’s noble creed (avenging a partner, fighting for a questionable client),
Archie demonstrates he’s a “trained investigator” by focusing on essential clues,
like a woman’s attractive mouth. “A habit of observation of minor details is an
absolute must for a detective.”98 Philip Marlowe’s ironic narration emphasizes
his reluctant acceptance of the hard-boiled role, but Archie exploits the cliché
for self-deprecating humor.
Throughout, the echoes that crisscross Archie’s wordage enhance the comic
texture. “Satisfactory” can work this way, but the most pervasive refrain is
Wolfe’s favorite exclamation.

“Pfui.”
“Yes, sir. I agree.”
 310 PA RT I I I

Clearly, “pfui” is pronounced differently from Archie’s equivalent.

“What do you think of her?”

“Pfui.”
“Go on and phooey.”

As with everything he hears, Archie recycles it: “As Wolfe would say, pfui.”99
Sometimes a refrain shows up as it would in a 1930s movie. In Too Many
Cooks, a glass of spilled ginger ale in an early train scene is invoked in later dia-
logue and Goodwinian commentary. The gag pays off in the last chapter when
back on the train Archie teaches his new “friend” the district attorney how to
get a young woman’s attention. The book ends with Archie quoting the DA’s
botched apology for spilled ginger ale from the first chapter: “It’s rite all kite, it
doodn’t stain.”100
More commonly, Wolfe enunciates a word or phrase, preferably something
pedantic, and it returns to mocking effect in Archie’s conversation and com-
mentary. The title of The Final Deduction strikes the main chord, with “deduc-
tion” (as in an inference) chiming throughout the text. It will take on a new
significance when we learn the tax-related motive for the murder scheme, but
before that Archie rings a variant that once more punctures Wolfe’s intellectual
pretensions.

At the dinner table, in between bites of deviled grilled lamb kidneys with
a sauce he and Fritz had invented, he explained why it was that all you
needed to know about any human society was what they ate. If you knew
what they ate you could deduce everything else—culture, philosophy, mor-
als, politics, everything. I enjoyed it because the kidneys were tender and
tasty and that sauce of one of Fritz’s best, but I wondered how you would
make out if you tried to deduce everything about Wolfe by knowing what
he had eaten in the past ten years. I decided you would deduce that he
was dead.101

Even here, the “deduce” refrain is not a proper clue to solving the mystery. It’s
rather an invitation to enjoy your memory of early scenes, and of the whole
Wolfe saga.
Stout’s comic refrains are in the vein of P. G. Wodehouse. Like Archie,
Bertie Wooster is fascinated by language. He’s constantly picking up phrases
from his butler Jeeves and then trying them out, usually in ill-fitting con-
texts.102 Bertie’s fumbling vocabulary lessons begin in earnest in Right Ho,
Jeeves, which was published in 1934, the year of Fer-de-Lance. It seems
likely that Stout borrowed the tactic and applied it to Archie’s keener, more
 The Great Detective Rewritten 311

flippant intellect. In exchange, Wodehouse praised Stout’s books for bring-

ing “excellent comedy into the type of narrative where comedy seldom bats
better than .100.”103
The emergence of grimmer tints in Chandler and other hard-boiled novel-
ists in the 1940s seems to have affected Stout’s work. The Silent Speaker (1946),
the first postwar Wolfe novel, finds Archie much taken with Phoebe Gunther,
a plucky government assistant protecting her boss. She is murdered at Wolfe’s
door. Archie is more distraught than we’ve ever seen him, telling Fritz to go to
hell and pressing Wolfe to investigate.
Deepening Archie’s emotional investment in the case poses Stout with a
formal problem. How to absorb grim moments into the basically comedic reg-
ister of these tales? The writer must steer a course between sentimentality and
coldness. In these cases, Archie’s insouciant conceit is shaken by anger and a
sense of righteousness that goes beyond the cash matrix that both he and Wolfe
prize. Archie becomes something close to the one good man of the hard-boiled
tradition. The trick is how to tell it.
Stout solves the problem by regulating narrational depth. Normally
Archie shares with us his immediate perceptions. When he sees a person or
place, he files his report immediately. But in confronting Phoebe’s violent
death, his narration shifts to externalities. Here what’s neutrally described is
not Sayers’s account of Trent finding a clue but a man responding naturally
to murder.
The technique is introduced brutally. Archie keeps from us the fact that
Phoebe is the crumpled shape he finds under the stoop. Instead we get pure
behavior. “Fritz had pulled the front door shut, and when I found myself
fumbling to get the key in the hole, I stood erect to take a deep breath and
that stopped the fumbling.”104 This behaviorist handling seems indebted to
Hemingway and Hammett. At the end of A Farewell to Arms, Frederic Henry’s
stoic grief is given in single lines of dialogue (“You get out” to the nurse) and
a final line: “After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to
the hotel in the rain.”105 Leaving the reader to imagine Henry’s devastation
adheres to Hemingway’s “iceberg” principle, in which most of the meaning is
submerged.106 Similarly, Hammett’s detached narration in The Glass Key and
The Thin Man forces us to judge the protagonist’s responses by the way he
acts. Borrowing this hard-boiled objectivity, Stout has dosed Archie’s insouci-
ant monologue with moments that evoke his emotions through flat accounts
of action.
Stout doesn’t stay in the impersonal register. Once we’ve imagined the depth
of Archie’s sense of guilt about Phoebe’s death, he can open up a little. Sitting
with his milk in his bedroom, he briefly probes his reactions. “This seemed to
hit me in a new spot or something, and anyhow there I was, trying to arrange
 312 PA RT I I I

my mind. Or maybe my feelings. All I knew was that something inside me

needed a little arranging.”107
Archie’s emotional arranging condenses into a resolve to act. He is shaken
but not shaking. “I had been sitting in my room twenty minutes when I noticed
that I hadn’t drunk any milk, but I hadn’t spilled any from the glass.”108 Shock
and recrimination turn Archie into the hard-boiled hero, but one bereft of self-
pity. By this stoic standard, a Chandler ending such as “I felt tired and old and
not much use to anybody” looks crybaby.”109
The Silent Speaker supplies a template for three more cases that introduce
Archie to emotional pain: Murder by the Book (1952), Prisoner’s Base (1952), and
The Golden Spiders (1953). Throughout these righteous-Archie books, Stout will
suggest deep feeling through neutrally described behavior. The most laconic
variant comes when Sergeant Stebbins visits with bad news about a boy killed
in a hit-and-run.

“His name was Drossos. Peter Drossos.”

I swallowed. “That’s just fine. The sonofabitch.”110

“That’s just fine” is bitter sarcasm. “The sonofabitch” is pure rage. But Archie’s
swallow has already shown him recoiling from the blow.
The Silent Speaker has the most nuanced emotional arc of the righteous-
Archie books. Here the recovery of the affirmative tone is more gradual.
After Archie’s recriminations (“the dirty deadly bastard . . . she had been
utterly all right”) and another display of callousness on Wolfe’s part, the two
men cooperate when they realize that Phoebe has hidden the telltale record-
ing cylinder.
In the final pages, they reconcile. Archie realizes that Wolfe has avenged
Phoebe’s death by punishing the professional association that attacked her
government agency. But was it ethical for Wolfe to collect a reward from
the same association? Wolfe explains that in his own way he was moved by
Phoebe’s death.

“She had displayed remarkable tenacity, audacity, and even imagination. . . .

Surely she deserved not to have her murder wasted.”
I stared at him, “Then I’ve got a hypothesis too. If that was it, either primary
or secondary, to hell with ethics.”111

By now, we don’t need access to Archie’s thinking to appreciate his reac-

tion. The partnership endures by asserting the worth of Phoebe’s sacrifice in
the light of each man’s ethos. By injecting dashes of hard-boiled impassivity,
Stout can mingle stoic resolve with a recognition of the good that Archie and
Wolfe can do.
 The Great Detective Rewritten 313

Logomachizing

Stout’s effort to treat investigation plots with character-driven humor, carried

by dialogue and narration, gives language a central role. As Wolfe puts it, “The
success of any investigation depends mainly on talk, as of course you know.”112
Gardner embraced a nakedly functional style, propelled by a rapid plot. We read
on to find out Mason’s next move. Archie and Wolfe’s verbal sallies are more
dawdling, putting action on hold. We turn the pages to see what people will say
next and how Archie will spin it. Gardner wants us to read past his stock epithets
in order to follow his story, but Stout invites us to enjoy single words or phrases.
Gambit (1962) famously opens with Wolfe burning, page by page, the con-
troversial third edition of Webster’s International Dictionary. Its editors’ crimes
include finding “ain’t” acceptable and permitting “infer” as a synonym for
“imply.” The client who comes calling wins Wolfe over, Archie reports, by “call-
ing him a wizard and implying (not inferring) that he was the one and only.”
Naturally, the imply/infer couplet will become a refrain.
Language makes world building possible; it gives sap and savor to character-
ization; it creates sidelong humor. Not least, it permits a literary gamesmanship
that makes the Wolfe tales deeply bookish. They’re about the people who write
and publish them, the people who read them, and the seductive power of prose.
More than any of their mass-market counterparts, these detective stories preserve
in their verbal maneuvers a fascination with the constitutive power of words.
Again and again Archie steers our attention to the sounds and sights of lan-
guage. One book’s central clue is a diphthong that links four names. Punctua-
tion plays a big role too. Wolfe’s long-standing contempt for “unquote” in lieu of
“end of quote” becomes a refrain. As Wolfe dictates a letter, he stipulates punc-
tuation marks, and when Archie reads it back, he signals every one. A cowhand
writing to Archie asks about colons (“them two dots”). Archie’s own discourse
is perfectly punctuated, which warrants his criticism of Wolfe’s typing: “I don’t
care for the semicolon after ‘appointment.’ ”113
For Wolfe, words become weapons. He springs verbal traps and uses school-
marm pugilism to browbeat the spoiled rich who treat him as a hireling. Asked
if he plays Scrabble, Wolfe replies, “I like using words, not playing with them.”114
Archie likes both. In both dialogue and his reports to us, Archie is ready to
mobilize words for the attack. Challenged on a point, he waves a hand. “Persi-
flage. Chaff.” In The Red Box, Archie tosses around yclept and mise en scène. He
will accuse Wolfe of just spouting adjectives and rhetorical questions. He can
seize the initiative when Wolfe lapses:

“Do you realize that that fool is going to let that fool make a fool of him again?”
I yawned. “Listen to you. If I did a sentence like that you’d send me from
the room.”115
 314 PA RT I I I

But Archie also likes to hang around words and watch them fraternize.
Listening to Wolfe and conning the lexicon have exposed Archie to some
fancy footwork. The belched/eructed cadenza shows how good a pupil he has
been. Archie is as skilled at persiflage and chaff as Wolfe is, but in a scatty,
honky-tonk register. The next critic who suggests that he’s a hard-boiled
hero should consult this passage, his response to an invitation downtown
from Lieutenant Rowcliff.

I said, “Poop and poo. Both for you. You sound like a flatfoot catching kids
playing wall ball. Maybe I wanted the glory of taking him to headquarters
myself. Or maybe I wanted to help him escape from the country by putting
him on a subway for Brooklyn, where I believe you live. You’ve got him, haven’t
you, with a handle I gave you to hold him by? Poops and poos for all of youse.
It’s past my bedtime.”116

It’s a domesticated Joycean farrago, a burlesque-house burst of 1930s double-

talk, with phrases (“Poops and poos for all of youse”) that might have been
pulled from Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts (“With wed led said with led dead
said”). No surprise that the Wolfe books were incessantly reread and quoted
by critic William Empson, connoisseur of wayward verbal associations.117 “A
word in a speech which falls outside the expected vocabulary,” he points out,
“will cause an uneasy stir in all but the soundest sleepers.”118 By this standard,
Edmund Wilson’s dismissal of Stout showed him snoozing.
The speaking voice that pervades these books is altogether aware of
being read. The Counterfeiters flaunted the conceit of a book about its own
self-generation, but Twain had gotten there before, letting Huck Finn con-
fess that making a book was “a trouble.”119 Stout, having reinvented himself
in Bohemian Paris, came more and more to endow Archie’s reports with a
reader-friendly intimacy alien to Hammett’s and James M. Cain’s first-person
fiction. The writer who in How Like a God identifies its protagonist as “you” is
likely to be sensitive to address.
So Archie frets that his account of a case will be read by Wolfe or Cramer
or the Internal Revenue Service. He wonders whether to include this or that
detail, and he can acknowledge when he’s hit a wall. “If you are inclined to quit
because I seem to be getting nowhere, no wonder.”120 He may ask us to vote on
whether he should proceed. Readers write to him, and some become clients.
In the Sherlockian tradition, these maneuvers reinforce the amiable pre-
tense that Archie, Wolfe, and the whole ménage exist. But given the playful
style, the outing of Archie as a literary creator comes off as one more effort—
in a comic register, again—to create surprise at the level of the sentence.
Stout’s bookishness enables him to carry the reflexivity paraded in popular
narrative and in detective exercises such as The Poisoned Chocolates Case
 The Great Detective Rewritten 315

and The Three Coffins down to the fine grain of the narration, with nods to
literary modernism.
Consider the second Wolfe novel, The League of Frightened Men. Paul
Chapin is lame because of a hazing prank at Harvard, and the men responsible
have tried to atone by financing his literary career. When members of the group
start to die mysteriously, the survivors receive mocking poems with the refrain,
“Ye should have killed me.”121
Wolfe investigates Chapin by reading his novels, tales of erotic obsession
that echo Stout’s early books. Wolfe concludes that Chapin took his revenge in
his writing, not in the world. But Wolfe exposes Chapin’s fixation on another
man’s wife, expressed through his fetishistic treasuring of her gloves and under-
wear. Chapin vows to avenge himself by murdering a Wolfe surrogate in his
next novel “in the most abhorrent manner conceivable.”122
The League of Frightened Men is laced with conversations about fiction,
poetry, plays, magazine articles, and literary devices. Archie and Wolfe argue
about analogies and metaphors, and a client’s visit is presented as a playlike
dialogue transcript. There’s an oblique reference to Ulysses’s current best-seller
status in Wolfe’s remark: “What good is an obscenity trial except to popularize
literature?”123 The refrains are notably arch: alongside Wolfe’s “feeling for phe-
nomena” we get references to Spenser, romanticism, the soul, and stigmata.
One self-conscious motif gets punned via Archie’s vernacular. In the open-
ing pages, alongside a news story covering Chapin’s audacious obscenity case,
there’s a report Archie asks about. “Did you see the piece in the paper about a
woman who has a pet monkey which sleeps at the head of her bed and wraps its
tail around her wrist? And keeps it there all night?”124 Since we’ll later learn that
Chapin forces his wife to steal the garments of the woman he worships, we’re
invited to wonder if the monkey story isn’t a subterranean parallel.
The wondering ends when the woman whom Chapin desires asks Archie
not to pity the betrayed wife: “A monkey might as well pity me because I haven’t
got a tail.” She has no claim on Chapin, while his wife does. The motif gets its
twist on the last page, when Archie reflects that he and Chapin have something
in common, because both men were misled by Wolfe and Fritz. “They had
made a monkey of me all right.”125 Stout’s symbolic imagery is transmuted into
slang by Archie’s comic commentary.
Later books lure Wolfe into commercial publishing, a field ripe for Archie’s
satire. In Murder by the Book (1951), an investigation carries Archie through the
process of moving a manuscript from author to professional typist to publisher.
The usual play with language ensues, with refrains about virginity, powers of
observation, ears, contrivances, and even a palm tree. There is a tour de force of
Archie entertaining the secretarial staff of the law firm at Wolfe’s dinner table,
with each guest characterized by voice, as well as a visit to Chandler’s California,
where it is always raining.
 316 PA RT I I I

In Plot It Yourself (1959), Wolfe must undertake what he calls “textual study”
of five unpublished manuscripts. Unknown authors are accusing famous ones
of plagiarism. Wolfe determines that all the manuscripts were written by the
same hand, but not by any of the writers claiming damages. Throughout, char-
acters quote each other, and Archie absorbs their idiolects into his narration.
Special barbs are reserved for literary pretension, as when Archie recycles a
vapid author’s catchphrase “more felt than perceived” and reflects on a chil-
dren’s book: “She had written a book entitled The Moth That Ate Peanuts, which
showed that she would stop at nothing.”126 That book becomes a running gag,
which doesn’t prevent its supplying Wolfe with a major clue.
Who but Stout the word lover would turn his detective to scrutinizing dic-
tion, syntax, and punctuation? Wolfe holds forth on tics of wording (“better
than fingerprints”), but Archie’s own style, in conversation and in narration,
parodies his boss’s inferences. Wolfe points out that weak writers substitute
uncommon verbs for “said”: “They have him declare, state, blurt, spout, cry,
pronounce, avow, murmur, mutter, snap.” A writer he suspects of plagiarism
relies on “aver.” A page later, Archie agrees: “ ‘I’m sold,’ I averred.”127
The metafictional machinery switches into high gear when Wolfe argues that
habits of paragraphing are the most personal features of a writer’s presentation.
Wolfe goes to bed, leaving Archie to puzzle over the manuscripts. But that action
is swallowed up in the longest paragraph in the book, launched by two sentences
that cry out to be severed. “I put the stories in the safe and then considered the
problem of the table-load of paper. The statuses and functions of the inhabi-
tants of that old brownstone on West 35th Street are clearly understood.” Archie
tacks on 156 words of exposition about household routines, duties, and eating
arrangements utterly irrelevant to the paperwork problem that headed the para-
graph. He ends his inventory of “the castle” with this: “The next sentence is to be,
‘but the table-load of paper, being in the office, was clearly up to me,’—and I have
to decide whether to put it here or start a new paragraph with it. You see how
subtle it is. Paragraph it yourself.”128 The command echoes the book’s title, which
is derived from a review Archie claims to have read in the Times.
These interactive high jinks appear early on, making us vigilant for all the
wordplay and fussy distinctions to come. The climax of Plot It Yourself arrives
when Wolfe discovers unexpected correspondences among the manuscripts
and the published books. In the office showdown, the guilty party reveals the
error. “I realized how stupid I had been not to write them in a different style,
but you see I didn’t really know I had a style. I thought only good writers had
a style.” Archie adds that hearing that reply “you might have thought Wolfe
was conducting a class in the technique of writing.”129 A story that begins with
Archie grading Wolfe’s reading on a scale from A to D ends in patient close
reading and a discussion of style. Pace Professor Barzun, the business confer-
ence has become a seminar.
 The Great Detective Rewritten 317

✳✳✳

It would be too glib to say that while Gardner softened Hammett’s impersonal
objectivity Stout put a comic spin on Chandler’s presentation of the detective as
filtering intelligence. The 1930s Wolfe novels were independent achievements,
published while Chandler was learning his craft in the pulps. Archie Goodwin’s
voice seems to have been not a recasting of Chandler but a mixture of the Great
Detective tradition with vernacular fiction—not just Hammett but breezy 1920s
novelistic practice and Broadway patter.
Moreover, Stout’s sensibility moved in a cosmopolitan direction. He echoed
the “light modernism” of Cocteau and Pirandello, a playful fusion of old
and new. Perhaps his stay in Paris acquainted him with that rappel à l’ordre
sometimes called “neoclassicism” but better thought of as a romping willing-
ness to bring suavity and faux naïveté to formal experiment. As Parade was
openly eclectic, so are Stout’s novels: Archie blends current slang with Twain,
Hammett, Hemingway, Wodehouse, and even Gertrude Stein. Style in the
Wolfe novels becomes like one of Fritz’s sauces: the flavors of many literary
traditions soak in and sharpen our appetites.
Accepting the framework of whodunit conventions, Stout delivered literary
pleasure through old-fashioned appeals: agreeably eccentric characters, scenes
of bluff and nerve, and a fully furnished world. He rendered it all in the brisk
flow of American yarn-spinning, mixed with self-conscious motivic play and
a willingness to let common words mingle with rare ones, belch cozying up to
eructed. Of all detective writers of his day, he most fully realized the polyphonic
possibilities—lexical montage, parody, ventriloquism—that Mikhail Bakhtin
saw as the promise of the novel.130 The intensity of verbal organization that
Edmund Wilson praised in Woolf and Joyce but failed to find in mysteries is
here, but in an unpretentious vein.
Stout abandoned the structural experiments of his “literary” novels, but
his crossover achievement asked a question very much in keeping with the
modernist sensibility. If detective fiction is a game of wits, why can’t it also be
a game of language?
 CHAPTER 10

VIEWPOINTS, NARROW AND EXPANSIVE

Patricia Highsmith and Ed McBain

S
ome of the narrative strategies I’ve surveyed might be dismissed as
desperate efforts at novelty. But two major writers who began in the
1950s remind us that the more traditional formal options mapped
out in the 1910s retained real power. Patricia Highsmith’s reliance on classic
novelistic techniques of restricted viewpoint created subtle effects denied to
the hyperbolic subjectivity at large during the 1940s. At the other extreme,
Ed McBain showed how old-fashioned omniscient, chatty narration could
revise the multiple-protagonist plot. And both authors deployed their strategies
within genre frameworks. Highsmith’s studies in morbid psychology relied on
thriller conventions, and McBain’s revision of the cross-sectional “city novel”
found an ideal vehicle in a new genre, the police procedural.

Terror, Suspense, Justice, or Whatever

Should we even consider Patricia Highsmith in the tradition of popular

narrative? She seemed to be something more than a purveyor of thrills. The
books invoke myth (a labyrinth in The Two Faces of January, 1964) and flirt
with role playing and symbolic substitutions. Her games of male doubling
conjure up homoerotic associations, and a recurring emphasis on the obliter-
ation of identity—her characters often dream of being no one, free of any
marks of personhood—fits the ethos of many “serious” novels.
 Viewpoints, Narrow and Expansive 319

At the beginning of her career, Highsmith declared herself interested in

aesthetic values. “The full force of a writer’s energy and intellect must all his
life be directed toward increasing his awareness of his art as an art.” Feeling
satisfaction in reading a story, she noted, “is to feel form.”1 Highsmith rec-
ognized that recurring themes added richness to a novelist’s work, and she
admitted her fondness for “the relationship between two men, usually quite
different in make-up, sometimes an obvious contrast in good and evil, some-
times merely ill-matched friends.”2 She was, like the modernists, writing out of
high ambition.3
Highsmith was committed to engaging readers. On the threshold of her first
novel, she claimed to see no incompatibility between “professional” writing
and “arty” writing.4 She considered Daisy Miller “riveting entertainment.”5 Her
mentors were Poe, with whom she shared a birthday, and Dostoevsky, whom
she defended as a crime novelist. She leaned toward the extreme emotions of
pulp. “The best writers’ work has this indescribable, generally unisolable quality
of satisfying one’s sense of terror, suspense, justice or whatever.”6
Highsmith declared, “I consider myself an entertainer. I like to tell a fas-
cinating story.”7 In her youth, she worked along with Mickey Spillane writ-
ing scenarios for the comic book company that would become Marvel. She
studied crime novels of the 1940s in preparation for “The Heroine” (1945), her
breakthrough story of a quietly confident fantasist. Her first novel provided
Hitchcock with his comeback film, Strangers on a Train (1951), and seemed to
announce a splendid career in mass-market suspense fiction.
Nearly all of her twenty-one novels published between 1950 and 1991
embrace the conventions of the thriller. Like Hangover Square and In a Lonely
Place, Highsmith’s books tend to concentrate on mentally disturbed men on
the run. The men have deliberately, or more often accidentally, killed some-
one; or they’re the target of someone who wants to kill them. They’re pursued
by police or by someone who knows or suspects their secrets. To cover their
tracks, the men may lie, forge documents, create fake identities, and assume
disguises. Everything depends on suspense, which Highsmith defined as “a
threat of impending violent action.”8
Surely this ought to have been a winning formula. But the result didn’t sus-
tain a career on the level enjoyed by less gifted novelists. Most of her books
sold fewer than 8,000 hardcover copies, about half what the top crime writ-
ers achieved. Her editors often demanded rewrites, and sometimes they sim-
ply turned down her manuscripts. Her only paperback original, and her most
immediately lucrative book, was The Price of Salt (1952), a lesbian novel pub-
lished under a pseudonym. Short stories aimed for The New Yorker wound up
in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. During some stretches she had no Ameri-
can publisher. Lionized in Europe, she was mostly ignored in the United States.
 320 PA RT I I I

Unlike most women crime writers, Highsmith kept away from domestic
suspense and the woman-in-peril plot, but she didn’t accept the conventions
of hard-boiled storytelling either. As if in defiance of Chandler, she took crime
out of the shabby streets and away from the professional crooks. She thrust it
back into the drawing room—or the American equivalent, the postwar split-
level. Her men are engineers, architects, publishers, art dealers, and the idle
rich. Others are painters, novelists, musicians, and all-purpose intellectuals.
Tom Ripley, Highsmith’s continuing series character, studies languages, savors
wines and cigars, dabbles in drawing, and like Lord Peter Wimsey plays the
harpsichord.
The action is likely to unfold in a big American city or in Rome, Paris, and
other exotic locales. We’re constantly told of business plans, dinner parties
and country weekends, fine clothes and cars, where to shop and how much
to tip. The people are cultivated. They know Bach and Vivaldi, Cocteau and
Kafka, Malraux and Proust. In these books, murder invades the dream world
of slick-paper fiction and Holiday photo spreads. The crime novel becomes the
“novel of manners,” but in a very different vein from that imagined by Dorothy
Sayers and Anthony Berkeley.
Traditional whodunits had set crimes in the upper reaches of society, but
Highsmith focuses her plots around the perpetrator, not a bringer of order such
as Hercule Poirot or Philo Vance. Into bourgeois and bohemian life, her men
inject radical disorder. They are outrageously reckless.
Vic, the cuckolded husband in Deep Water (1957), playfully encourages
people to speculate that he killed his wife’s old lover. When she takes up with
a new man, Vic drowns him and savors the suspicions she can’t confirm. In
A Suspension of Mercy (1965), a writer wonders how to depict the disposal
of a corpse. He experimentally buries a rolled-up carpet while his wife is on
a trip. Of course he is seen burying it; and by the time the police investigate
him, the wife has vanished, and he can’t recall where he buried the carpet. No
self-respecting hunted man in fiction would behave as suicidally as Highsmith’s
protagonists do.
The protagonist’s recklessness shows up in capricious moments of weakness.
Stricken by shame, Highsmith’s characters are forever destroying evidence
that would spare them future trouble. A novel may begin with a ridiculously
unforced error. The Cry of the Owl (1962) is built around an aeronautical engi-
neer, to all appearances normal, who has fallen into the habit of spying on a
woman as she prepares her nighttime meals. The drama begins when she sees
him and, contrary to common sense, doesn’t call the police. Highsmith’s admira-
tion for Camus’s The Stranger and the acte gratuite is revealed in protagonists
who make fatal choices from obscure or arbitrary motives.9
The famous premise of Strangers on a Train—the exchange of murders—
indicates the sheer contingency that rules these plots. In The Blunderer (1954),
 Viewpoints, Narrow and Expansive 321

a man murders his wife; another man learns of the crime and imagines dispos-
ing of his own partner. Then she is found dead. In Ripley’s Game (1974), after
Jonathan Trevanny slights Tom Ripley, Tom spreads the rumor that Jonathan’s
blood disease has worsened. As if to make amends, Tom sets up Jonathan as a
contract killer; after all, his family will need money. Out of fear and weariness,
Jonathan agrees.
Through careful modulation, Highsmith glides from a far-fetched premise
into an outrageous result. “You cannot always create a good book by sheer
logic. . . . Stretch the reader’s credulity, his sense of logic, to the utmost—it’s
quite elastic.”10 We can understand why Ray Garrett, in Those Who Walk Away
(1967), wants to explain his wife’s suicide to her enraged father Coleman. But
after Coleman tries to kill Ray (twice), anybody else would flee Venice or go
to the police. Instead Ray skulks around the city hoping to calm down his
stalker. Somewhere around the third chapter of every Highsmith book, Gra-
ham Greene reckoned, the reader must simply accept the illogic of the hero’s
rash choices.11
From crime fiction of the 1930s and 1940s, Highsmith drew standard nar-
rative techniques—hallucinations, inner monologues, dreams, even amnesia.
We get newspaper bulletins and physical clues, such as rings and signatures.
There’s a lot of drinking, which often motivates characters’ bursts of unreason.
But she treats these devices without hyperbole, in unfussy prose.
In The Glass Cell (1983), an ex-convict’s lawyer has been murdered. In a
packed paragraph, banal routine sits calmly alongside ominous reflection.

There was the usual Saturday shopping to do. Carter volunteered to do it,
because Hazel obviously wanted to be near the telephone. She wouldn’t rest,
Carter thought, until she had found out who killed Sullivan, and until the
murderer was properly punished—put behind bars or executed. What had
he possibly thought he could achieve by killing Sullivan? He simply hadn’t
thought, of course. Carter started making up the shopping list on his own.
No use asking Hazel what she wanted for the weekend. Hazel went into the
living room to call the Laffertys. She had their number in her address book.
While she was talking to them, Carter did the dishes. She talked a long
while, and only finished as Carter was going out of the door with the wire
shopping wagon.12

Today’s author would split this into several short paragraphs, separating Carter’s
thoughts from his and Hazel’s actions. By running them together, Highsmith
flattens his memories of murder to the same level as household chores. The
only concrete detail, the wire shopping wagon, gives the homey touch, and the
superfluous “She had their number in her address book” seems to signal that
Carter abruptly recalls his wife’s habits from before he went to prison.
 322 PA RT I I I

Violence that Woolrich or Jim Thompson would pump up is given in simple,

brisk description in Ripley Under Ground (1970).

Then Tom was aware of being flung over by the shoulders, and of hands
around his throat. Tom threshed his legs free of the covers. He was pulling
ineffectually at Bernard’s arms to get his hands from his throat, and at last
Tom got his foot against Bernard’s body and pushed. The hands left his throat.
Bernard dropped with a thud to the floor, gasping. Tom turned on the lamp,
nearly knocked it over, and did knock over a glass of water which spilt on the
blue oriental rug.13

Highsmith deploys a Hammett-like minimalism, but it isn’t quite the same

thing as objectivity. Instead, a transparent use of language transmits a charac-
ter’s consciousness of his immediate surroundings. Again, the passage’s only
concrete detail comes at the end, when the house-proud Tom Ripley registers
the water dripped on his precious rug. Soon enough we are seeing the damaged
Bernard as Tom does, “on the floor, propped on one arm, in the position of The
Dying Gaul.”
As in Simenon, the flatness of the style helps create a neutral reportage
that makes very unlikely events seem plausible. As Highsmith notes, “I am
very fond of coincidences in plots and situations that are almost but not quite
incredible.”14 In these books, people searching a city often just bump into their
quarry. Throughout his adventures, Ripley miraculously avoids capture, largely
because most people are trusting, docile, and afraid of making a gaffe.
Highsmith’s cops are often as easily deceived as children. David Kelsey,
in This Sweet Sickness (1960), can lead a double life, in a boarding house and
in his upscale model home, and the police simply assume that there are two
men. Working-class suspects would probably be more carefully scrutinized,
but Highsmith’s high achievers, however much they sweat under pressure, are
usually handled lightly by the authorities. These professionals are surprised to
learn that they can just brazen things through. Tell a lie, feign forgetfulness,
be courteous, offer to cooperate, and you can usually get away with anything.
The ease with which Tom Ripley can impersonate Dickie Greenleaf, the man
he killed, elates him and the reader. Through misleading phone messages,
forged letters, quick timing, and a touch of hair dye, Tom can fool, or at least
puzzle, any cop he meets.
All of these deceptions exact a price, however. There is, for one thing, a
fatal hesitation or blurriness of perception. The protagonists slip into a radi-
cal uncertainty about what they’re doing and how they’re judged. Highsmith
mimics this in her style, yielding extraordinarily wavering accounts of action.
“He put his hands over his eyes and yielded to the queasiness in his stomach, or
his mind. He wanted to throw up and couldn’t, or didn’t.” Even Tom Ripley,
 Viewpoints, Narrow and Expansive 323

master of sangfroid, can lose his footing. “When they hung up, Tom felt
stunned, and also angry, or irritated.”15
During these intervals of unfocused response, the protagonists are at risk
of dissolving their identity. Highsmith’s men swing between fear of losing
themselves and a bliss that comes from that freedom. They yearn to be
corpses or ghosts or strangers wandering the landscape. Many are forced to
admit that they have split themselves up. They may end up crushed—“Take
me,” says Guy in the last line of Strangers on a Train—or just possibly rescued
by miraculous chance.16 In The Two Faces of January, Rydal is saved by the
deathbed confession of the man bent on killing him.

Men Alone, or in Pairs

Cornell Woolrich wraps his scenes in thick padding, but as early as 1947
Highsmith recorded in her notebook a commitment to short, swift presentation.
“The point to be made in any given scene is the sole raison d’être of the
scene, and must pull it through quickly.” This vividness could be achieved
through a rigorous control of viewpoint. “Give only the sensations of the
main character. Or his sensations when upon mental speculation or observa-
tion two characters have acted upon him, or reacted.”17 The second sentence
is a bit obscure, but it seems to open the possibility of a split perspective,
involving a pair of characters. As it turns out, Highsmith’s crime variorum
exploits these two main formal options.
Some books are heavily restricted to one man’s viewpoint. Deep Water, This
Sweet Sickness, The Glass Cell, and nearly all of the Ripley books lock us to
what the protagonist knows and thinks. If restriction magnifies mystery in
the first-person tales of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, Highsmith’s
restrictive technique creates the standard thriller effects of suspense and
surprise. We share the character’s uncertainty about what others know about
his transgressions.
The Tremor of Forgery (1969) illustrates the intensity Highsmith gains by
riveting us to a single consciousness. Howard Ingham is staying in a cottage
in Tunisia writing a novel. One night he senses a figure hovering at the door,
and he hurls his typewriter into the darkness. He hears a body being dragged
away. The entire scene is clouded in uncertainty. Was the man a burglar? Was
he killed? Ingham learns little in the chapters that follow, which fill up with
the familiar mix of self-recrimination, lies, and worries about how others will
judge him. We never leave Ingham’s mind. Everything is sifted through the
hero’s typical blurriness and hesitations.
The book’s title, which Ingham intends to use for his novel, refers to the
telltale trembling of the forger’s hand. The story Ingham is creating seems pure
 324 PA RT I I I

Tom Ripley: “a man with a double life, a man unaware of the amorality of
the way he lived, and therefore he was mentally unbalanced.” Soon Ingham
realizes that the title won’t work; his protagonist is an altruist, and he has no
anxieties that would betray him. (“Dennison never trembled to any extent
worth mentioning.”) Instead, it’s Ingham who is shaken, striving to bluff his
way through the hazy morality of his crisis. In the last pages, saved by a wild
Highsmithian coincidence, Ingham can with relief leave Tunisia to return to
the woman he thought had abandoned him. “Even the typewriter in his hand
weighed nothing at all now.”18
Just as often, Highsmith relies on shifting viewpoint between the two
principal characters. This pattern is established in Strangers on a Train’s
oscillation between Bruno, who kills Guy’s wife, and Guy, whom Bruno goads
into killing his father. The Blunderer and Those Who Walk Away similarly
switch our attention between protagonist and antagonist. Highsmith may add
a third or fourth viewpoint occasionally, but the two-man seesawing remains
central. “I prefer two points of view in a novel. . . . [They can] bring a very
entertaining change of pace and mood.”19
Highsmith’s preternatural interest in alternating viewpoints led her to
experiment with the very texture of scenes. By the time she began her career,
writers of popular fiction were urged not to change viewpoint too often lest the
bad habits of the omniscient author creep in. The James-Lubbock legacy pro-
moted the idea that, as Edith Wharton put it, “sudden changes from one mind
to another are fatiguing and disillusioning.”20 An entire novel could shift the
spotlight among characters, chapter by chapter, but each scene ought to have
no more than one center of consciousness.
Highsmith, instead, carefully plans moments that jump from mind to
mind. Early scenes in A Suspension of Mercy and A Dog’s Ransom (1972) oscil-
late viewpoints when characters encounter one another. In both books, the
characters picked out will later have entire chapters devoted to them. They are
the ones to watch.
More striking, in climactic passages, Highsmith mingles viewpoints that
were earlier set apart. In Strangers on a Train, after Guy has killed Bruno’s
father, Bruno invades Guy’s life more aggressively, as if the two murders have
made them kin. The men meet for a restaurant lunch, and for the first time
Highsmith’s curt paragraphs rapidly switch between them.

Bruno wanted very much to put his hand over Guy’s fist, that rested lightly on
the edge of the table, just for a moment as a brother might, but he restrained
himself. “Did she like you right away or did you have to know her a long time?
Guy?”
Guy heard him repeat the question. It seemed ages old. “How can you ask
me about time? It’s a fact.” He glanced at Bruno’s narrow, plumpening face,
 Viewpoints, Narrow and Expansive 325

at the cowlick that still gave his forehead a tentative expression, but Bruno’s
eyes were vastly more confident than when he had seen them first, and less
sensitive. Because he had his money now, Guy thought.
“Yeah, I know what you mean.” But Bruno didn’t quite. Guy was happy with
Anne even though the murder still haunted him. Guy would be happy with her
even if he were broke. Bruno winced now for even having thought once that he
might offer Guy money.21

And so on to the end of the scene. Each man reads the other’s mind as tit-for-tat
inner monologues stage the dance of dependency that occupied earlier, parallel
chapters.
At the limit, Highsmith can let the minds merge. Many chapters of Ripley’s
Game feature quick shifts between Tom and Jonathan Trevanny in the Bruno/
Guy manner. Now they have killed two Mafiosi in Tom’s home. The narration
initially attaches us to Tom, who’s planning to dump the corpses.

The Renault, he knew, had only slightly more than half a tankful, and the bodies
were going to be in there. He and Jonathan hadn’t had any dinner. That wasn’t
wise. Tom went back into the house and said:
“We ought to eat something before this trip.”
Jonathan followed Tom into the kitchen, glad to escape for a few moments
from the corpses in the living-room. He washed his hands and face in the
kitchen sink. Tom smiled at him. Food, that was the answer—for the moment.
He got the steak from the fridge and stuck it under the glowing bars. Then he
found a plate, a couple of steak knives and two forks. They sat down finally,
eating from the same plate, dipping morsels of steak into a saucer of salt and
another of HP. It was excellent steak.22

We switch from Tom’s thoughts (they need to eat something) to Jonathan’s

reaction (respite from the corpses). The report of Tom’s smile is ambivalent: it’s
either Jonathan’s observation or Tom’s reclaiming control of the action. “Food,
that was the answer—for the moment” dangles between the two men’s minds.
Although it echoes Tom’s plan to calm the situation, it suggests that Jonathan
welcomes a meal as well.
The men’s shared awareness of their need emerges as concrete behavior when
they split the steak and eat from the same plate. After this moment of ambivalent
communion, the chapter alternates the two perspectives again as they go on to
consummate their crime. Their complicity is given in the very flow of Highsmith’s
prose. And the judgment (“It was excellent steak”), like the wire shopping basket
and the blue carpet, ends the murderers’ meal with a domestic banality.
At first glance, Highsmith’s narrative technique seems smoothly tradi-
tional. She avoids warping time, breaking the plot into blocks, misdirecting
 326 PA RT I I I

attention, and hiding crucial information. “I am not an inventor of puzzles,

nor do I like secrets.”23 By concentrating on a few characters in a morally
fraught situation, Highsmith exploits the classic resources of the post-James
psychological novel.
In Highsmith’s hands, linearity becomes a succession of fatal coincidences.
Subjectivity becomes a swirl of passivity, hesitation, confusion, bursts of
aggression, and resignation to doom. Alternating two viewpoints goes beyond
differentiating characters and instead points to disturbing convergences and
complicities. The conventions of modern crime fiction are rewritten by someone
who, to use Sartre’s phrase about Camus’s achievement in The Stranger, is
“very much at peace within disorder.”24

Policeman’s Lot

During the 1940s paperback boom, the most successful books were reprints of
hardbound titles, but paperback originals became important as well. They ran
between 55,000 and 80,000 words.25 With books this brief, authors could churn
out several a year and earn advances up to $2,000 per manuscript.26 Paperback
originals were the postwar equivalent of the pulp magazines, and their tawdry
covers and suggestive taglines made them nearly as disreputable. But a great
many of today’s crime canon first saw publication in this format.27
Highsmith didn’t benefit much from the rise of paperback originals, but
others did. Even authors who had achieved hardcover publication, as Elmore
Leonard had with his early westerns, shifted to the new market. One of
these writers was Evan Hunter (né Salvatore Lombino). In the process, he
redefined an emerging genre more extroverted than the severe intrigues of
Highsmith. That genre would show that modern crime fiction had room for
multiple protagonists, omniscient narration, and a swaggering mix of realism
and artifice.
Hunter had found mainstream success with The Blackboard Jungle (1954),
which portrayed high schools as nests of juvenile delinquency and, not least,
included the word “fuck.” Hunter recalled that in 1955 Pocket Books recruited
him to start a paperback series of crime stories.28 Writing as Ed McBain, he
settled on the police procedural.29
The genre has roots in the nineteenth century “casebooks” purporting to
be memoirs of police detectives, and some Golden Age books point forward
to later developments.30 A modern version crystallized in the late 1940s.
There might be a mystery, with suspects and clues, but the brilliant intuitions
and inferences of the master detective were largely replaced by a dogged pur-
suit of evidence. A mild example is The Woman in Question (1950), which
 Viewpoints, Narrow and Expansive 327

lacks a Great Detective and is propelled by a dogged, quizzical Chief Inspec-

tor. His interrogations remain chiefly a justification for an experiment in
prismatic narrative, not a demonstration of the rigors and boredom of the
policeman’s lot.
The procedural was celebrated as a turn toward realism. After all, in the
modern world the gifted amateur didn’t exist, and the private eye was someone
you hired to track an errant spouse or a suspicious employee. Only the police
could plausibly engage with major felonies.
The claims for realism were strengthened by the emphasis on mundane rou-
tine and scientific criminology. Lawrence Treat’s novel V as in Victim (1945) is
usually credited with providing a template for future writers. It’s centered on two
policemen, a detective and a lab technician, who collaborate to solve a murder.
Another duo, a seasoned officer and a novice, crack the case in the film Naked
City (1948). Even more than in V as in Victim, the plot stresses the tedium of the
job and the overwhelming odds against finding a suspect or a piece of missing
jewelry. As a result, chance takes on an important role in cracking a case—
another appeal to a realism that would be out of place in the classic detective
formula, which tried to conceal its lucky coincidences.
Naked City made use of a streetwise voice-over narrator identifying himself
as producer and former newsman Mark Hellinger. Hellinger’s Runyonesque
wisecracks comment on the action, sometimes even providing dialogue for
scenes we see. Voice-over narration, a technique borrowed from radio, returned
to its home medium in the program Dragnet (1949–1955). Again, the protago-
nists are a pair of cops, one of whom, Joe Friday, crisply announces the time
and place and purpose of each scene. Transferred to a feature film (Dragnet,
1954) and television (1951–1959, 1967–1970) and endlessly parodied and quoted
(“Just the facts, ma’am”), Jack Webb’s creation was the most widely known of all
police procedurals.31
Friday is bereft of a personal history or a private life, becoming a relentless
interrogator rapping out one-line questions and quips. At the opposite pole of
Webb’s spare objectivity was Mackinlay Kantor’s novel Signal Thirty-Two (1950),
an ambitious effort to probe the impact the job has on a pair of patrolmen.
Through flashbacks, dreams, inner monologues, and the absence of a mystery
through line, Kantor uses crossover techniques to portray crime fighters.
Like Signal Thirty-Two, Sidney Kingsley’s play Detective Story (1949) is res-
olutely psychological. Why is McLeod, a good investigator, also self-righteous,
merciless, and violent? When he learns that his wife once used the services of
the abortionist whom he has sworn to imprison, his rigid morality collapses.
He realizes that in reacting against his father’s abusive ways he has become
a brute himself. This really is a “detective story,” the story of how a detective
becomes morally unbalanced.
 328 PA RT I I I

McLeod’s line of action is at the center of the plot, but Detective Story
showcased the convention of marginal cases that swarm into a copper’s day.
Over a few hours, the squad room fills up with petty criminals, victims,
lawyers, and eccentrics. Each one has a story to tell. The minor cases may
connect to the central story through sudden convergences (a burglar grabs
a patrolman’s pistol to threaten McLeod) or through parallels, as when
a young couple embodies the possibility of a more solid marriage than
McLeod has.32
Given the formal possibilities explored in all of these media products,
the case for realism becomes harder to make. Granted, the procedural rests
on research into how cops do their job, and the dialogue is full of police
slang. The pressures of physical danger and stultifying routine are drama-
tized. The latest scientific techniques and gadgets are put on display. There
will be descriptions of wounds, autopsies, and the effects of leaving a
corpse in the water for weeks—gory naturalistic details not common even
in hard-boiled fiction, let alone cozy Agatha Christie stories. The Scotland
Yard novels of J. J. Marric and the Los Angeles series by Dell Shannon mul-
tiply the crimes we’re tracking, skipping quickly from one to another, and
they dare to leave some cases unsolved and some miscreants uncaptured—
just as in life.
Yet Friday’s rat-a-tat commentary is as stylized as Naked City’s jaunty
soliloquies. The character arcs in Signal Thirty-Two and Detective Story are
as traditionally tidy as anything in straight fiction and theater. The two detec-
tives in V as in Victim are carefully counterpointed, and the Marric books
stress parallels between cops’ off-duty lives and the crimes they investigate, all
the while keeping CID Commander George Gideon central as a canny crime
solver. And as often as not, the slice-of-life premise is undercut by the revelation
that two or more cases are subtly connected.
Historically, the procedural owes something to the 1920s and 1930s puzzle
stories, particularly in its reliance on interrogation and physical clues. But one
advantage of the procedural format is its ability to absorb plot premises and
dramatic situations from other crime genres. To build suspense, procedurals
routinely shift the spotlight among the lives of cops, crooks, and civilians.
While the detective is sweating over a report on the typewriter, the narration is
likely to show witnesses being stalked and criminals pulling their jobs. These
wide-ranging episodes put us in familiar thriller territory: the man on the
run, the woman in jeopardy. One particular variant makes the policeman go
undercover, so suspense is added when he becomes unaware that the gang
members realize his identity.
The genre’s use of moving-spotlight narration opens rich possibilities for
experimentation. For example, Hillary Waugh’s Last Seen Wearing (1952),
another early milestone in the genre, offsets its documentary trappings (day
 Viewpoints, Narrow and Expansive 329

and date tagging each chapter) with a wide-ranging narration moving between
witnesses and cops. The investigation depends on a patient and lucky search
for a missing purse. But the case ends with the protagonist, a small-town chief
of police, ordering his men to arrest a perpetrator whom he and we have never
seen. It’s a flashy turn, flaunting a “limited omniscience” that keeps the killer
permanently offstage.

He Do the Police in Different Voices

Once Ed McBain took up the genre, he pushed to extremes the poles of hard-
edged realism and self-conscious artifice. No writer has insisted more on
by-the-book accuracy. “The police routine,” announces the opening page of
every 87th Precinct novel, “is based on established investigatory technique.”
Yet no mystery writer was bolder in flaunting narrative form. Across fifty-two
novels, McBain set out to find just how playfully artificial the police procedural
could be. “I still try different tricks all the time.”33
At the realism pole, McBain’s novels go beyond their counterparts by
including facsimiles of official reports, fingerprint cards, identification
sketches, and other documents. It’s as if the books are trying to replicate the
close-ups supplied in cop films of the period. In addition, these items usually
don’t contain clues the way Golden Age floor plans and other visual material do.
They’re presented simply as guarantees of fidelity to (fictional) fact.
These drab bureaucratic records issue from a wholly imaginary space and
time. McBain has affectionately furnished his city of Isola with named streets
and distinct neighborhoods. Its detailed topography both is and is not a virtual
New York. Similarly, despite scrupulous indication of season, days, and hours,
the novels’ calendars are warped. Across the series, some characters age a little,
some quite a bit, and one, the long-suffering Meyer Meyer, remains perpetually
thirty-seven—one of the many inside jokes aimed at devoted readers.34
By the time McBain began writing, the procedural was incorporating cops’
personal lives in the drama. This enhanced the purported realism of the new
subgenre; instead of hard-drinking solitary private eyes, we got family men,
widowers, and policemen falling for suspects. Again, McBain pushes this con-
vention to a limit. Detective Steve Carella and his colleagues are given fully
rendered private lives, and in the late books their romantic and erotic impulses
count for as much as the cases they crack. The wedding of Carella’s sister is
central to ‘Til Death (1959), and the awkward ups and downs of Bert Kling’s love
life dominate later books. By now we’re used to police stories dramatizing how
work puts strains on a marriage, but McBain pushed cop soap opera to a high
pitch. McBain freely takes us into the minds and hearts of all his characters, and
he doesn’t hesitate to exploit sheer schmaltz.
 330 PA RT I I I

From Naked City and Dragnet onward, the building block of procedurals was
the interrogation scene. Dragnet made stichomythia—the rapid-fire exchange
of single lines—a trademark. McBain adopts it freely but again carries it to an
extreme. As with Erle Stanley Gardner, we get pages and pages of such dialogue,
with the rhythm of Q&A letting us keep track of the speakers.
Lieutenant Byrnes turns a father/son confrontation into “a cop questioning
a suspect.” After two pages of clipped exchanges, Byrnes realizes that Larry has
become a junkie.

“How bad is it?”

“Not too bad.”
“Heroin?”
“Yes.”
“How long?”
“I’ve been on for about four months now.”
“Snorting?”
“No. No.”
“Skin pops?”
“Dad, I . . .”
“Larry, Larry, are you mainlining?”
“Yes.”
“How’d you start?”

And so on for another five pages full of white space.35

In these passages McBain takes Lubbock’s “dramatic” method to a per-
cussive limit. But these and the dry document facsimiles stand out against
a jazzy commentary. McBain provides a modern version of the narrational
judgments that Lubbock deplored. He translates the nineteenth-century
novel’s garrulous authorial voice, at once lyrical and philosophical, into a
raffish demotic.
Warmer than Webb and zanier than Hellinger, this narration natters on
about the weather, the city, the peculiar ways of men and women, and the iro-
nies of fate. One book begins:

She came in like a lady, that April.

The poet may have been right, but there really wasn’t a trace of cruelty
about her this year. She was a delicate thing who walked into the city with
the wide-eyed innocence of a maiden, and you wanted to hold her in your
arms because she seemed alone and frightened in this geometric maze of
strangers, intimidated by the streets and the buildings, shyly touching you
with the pale-gray eyes of a lady who’s materialized somehow from the cold
marrow of March.
 Viewpoints, Narrow and Expansive 331

This murmured personification, with surprising citation of Eliot’s Waste Land,

rolls on for another three paragraphs before switching to something down
market:

For Detective Meyer Meyer, April was a Gentile.

Sue him; she was a Gentile. Perhaps for Detective Steve Carella April was a
Jewess.
Which is to say that, for both of them, April was a strange and exotic
creature.36

“Sue him,” recalling Guys and Dolls, channels Meyer’s argot. The omniscient
voice shifts to Carella’s consciousness and confidently presents his entrance-
ment by April. The scene continues with the narration switching freely between
the two men’s minds as they work at their desks.
The reservation about Carella’s fantasy woman (“Perhaps . . .”) is unchar-
acteristic. By and large, the narration of these books knows everything—the
characters’ pasts, their inner longings and childhood frustrations, even how the
action will turn out.

But Hawes was already moving into the building, his gun drawn. He did
not know that his conversation with the landlady had been viewed from
a second-floor window. He did not know that his red hair had instantly
identified him to his observer. He did not know until he was almost on the
second-floor landing, and then he knew instantly.
The explosion thundered in the small, narrow corridor.37

Sometimes the narration interrupts itself and loses patience.

They had planned to spend that Wednesday night in Sharyn’s apartment,

but because a cop had got shot downtown, and Sharyn was here in the city,
anyway—
No matter where you lived in this city, Isola was still called The City. If you
lived in Riverhead or Majesta or Calm’s Point or even Bethtown, and you were
taking the subway or a bus downtown, you were going into The City. That was
it. Sharyn lived in Calm’s Point, but Kling lived in The City, and since she was in
the city anyways that day, they decided to sleep at his place, talk about lengthy
exposition.38

Hunter, a college English major, was well aware that his debt to tradition vio-
lated post-Jamesian norms. “I know that in these books I frequently commit
the unpardonable sin of author intrusion. Somebody will suddenly start talking
or thinking or commenting and it won’t be any of the cops or crooks, it’ll just
 332 PA RT I I I

be this faceless, anonymous ‘someone’ sticking his nose into the proceedings.
Sorry. That’s me. Or rather, it’s Ed McBain.”39
So the clipped dialogue is counterweighted by a narration that won’t shut
up until the very end of the book, when it might discover tact, or a gag, or
both. In a final exchange, Carella remarks of one culprit:

“Maybe he’s the rotten bastard in this kettle of fish.”

“You mixed a metaphor,” Hawes said.
The car went silent.
The men breathed the hot summer air. Slowly, the car threaded its way
uptown to the precinct and the squad room.40

The self-conscious narration plays reflexive games. It makes mocking ref-

erence to Dragnet, Detective Story, and police procedurals in general. Such
sideswipes are a convention of mystery fiction, as a way of claiming that this
book isn’t hokey like those commonplace ones. But with McBain, the constant
refrain is part of his comic awareness of form. With Romance (1995), he offers
a mise-en-abyme. The plot is built around a play called Romance, which itself
includes another play of the same title (“where nobody gets to kiss the girl”).
Fat Ollie’s Book (2002) incorporates a short, inept novel that falls into the hands
of a transvestite junkie. In treating the book as nonfiction, the crook follows
preposterous clues but accidentally intervenes in a real case.
In another book, McBain’s narration combines omniscience with omnipo-
tence, pondering the possibility of replotting the characters’ destinies. Then he
shrugs off the idea.

You are God and you can do it any way you want to. You can even get them
married the next day before his ship sails. Anything you want to do. All the
possibilities are there. And you’re God, and there isn’t anyone who’s going to
slap your wrist, no matter how you do it.
But God, man, that is the way it happened.41

All mass-market authors, and especially ones writing paperback originals,

faced the problem of filling up a fixed format, the short novel. Writers of who-
dunits were able to build elaborate plots à la Agatha Christie or John Dickson
Carr. But the procedural writers typically treated simpler crimes. That genre
needed other ways to pad things out: dead-end clues, a long chain of evidence,
a bevy of suspects, and questioning irrelevant but colorful witnesses.
Likewise, the bare bones of a typical McBain case could not sustain a
classic puzzle intrigue, even to the 60,000-word minimum of a paperback
original. He fattens his page count by incorporating, in the usual procedural
manner, situations derived from suspense genres (killer’s viewpoint, man
 Viewpoints, Narrow and Expansive 333

on the run, woman in danger) alongside the extensive, often fruitless, police
investigations.42 But those choices wouldn’t distinguish him from Marric and
other writers. He also develops the unusual strategies I’ve mentioned: the
richly furnished fake city, the cop soap opera, the pages stretched out with
dialogue, the oversharing narration, and the reflexive asides. These forged a
brand designed to work within the limits of a strict publishing format.
McBain’s most famous formal gesture became an integral part of that brand.
In planning the 87th Precinct series, McBain wanted to counter the heroic
detective of the classic and hard-boiled traditions and also avoid the cop
partners who were becoming standard in the procedural. His idea was the
“conglomerate hero” that was formed by an entire squad. There would be “one
cop stepping forward in one novel, another in the next novel, cops quitting,
getting killed, and disappearing from the series, other cops coming up, all of
them visible to varying extents in each of the books.”43
The conglomerate plan didn’t work out at first. McBain killed Carella’s
partner in the first book and planned to kill off Carella in the second, but the
editor refused, believing that the series needed a strong single figure. McBain
responded by creating an ensemble that emphasized Carella but still gave due
attention to his colleagues. In one early book, Carella doesn’t enter until the
last chapter; in later books, other characters fill the role of protagonist. Many
police procedurals try for this detectival democracy, but McBain succeeded
more fully than most.
Once he had settled on multiple protagonists, McBain could pack his ram-
ifying plotlines with incidents, pointed characterization, authorial commen-
tary, and metaphorical values. He uses crosscutting, between chapters and
within them, not only to juxtapose the progress of different investigations but
also to attach us to victims, criminals, and bystanders. “Invention and imagi-
nation enter the books in the guise of the various people the cops meet along
the way. I always give them center stage when they appear, relegating the cops
to supporting roles at that time.”44
The initial entry in the series sets the pattern. Cop Hater (1956) presents a
serial killer preying on police detectives. In the course of the action, three cop
marriages are compared, and scenes of domestic life are interspersed with the
murders. The parallels serve to heighten the relative purity of Carella’s love for
his deaf-mute fiancée Teddy, and they provide important clues to the motive
behind the killings. The husband/wife motif is given extra valence by a joking
clue about a household misunderstanding that one victim-to-be doesn’t get.
Alternating with these ingredients are the routines of the squad, the descrip-
tions of the city in a summer heat wave, and a host of vivid minor figures, from
the snitch Danny Gimp to the blowsy madam Mama Luz. In only 150 pages, we
meet twenty-two interconnected characters, several of whom will reappear in
later novels. Cop Hater also hints at the importance of thematic motifs in tying
 334 PA RT I I I

the action up; the cop hater doesn’t hate all cops, just one. Thereafter, McBain
will use titles as metaphors to link lines of action (Killer’s Wedge, 1959; Doll,
1965; Bread, 1974; Ice, 1983; Tricks, 1987, and so on).
Most often, several squad members tackle one case from different angles,
with personal plots running in tandem. Sometimes two cases converge, as they
had in Kingsley’s Detective Story. But McBain tried other variants. Chance may
link the story lines. Cop Hater’s subsidiary plot turns on a pure coincidence, an
accidental barroom assault from a suspect who proves to be innocent of the
major crimes.
Story lines proliferate. Nocturne (1997) has two fleshed-out plots running
across two days, and Tricks presents three plots in an even shorter time span.
Widows (1991) runs four plotlines in parallel. The limit is reached in Hail, Hail,
the Gang’s All Here! (1971). Here, across two shifts, fourteen cases—some major,
some trivial—mobilize the entire squad. As usual, McBain parades his ingenuity.
“This modest volume is dedicated to the Mystery Writers of America, who,
if they do not award it the Edgar for the best ten mystery novels of the year,
should have their collective mysterious heads examined.”45 Actual cops do work
several cases at once, but again McBain subjects a realistic premise to an ambi-
tious, flagrantly formal design.
Expanding the roster of cases responded as well to new publishing condi-
tions. Successful authors of paperback originals made the move to hardcover
just when editors began demanding longer books in most genres. From the
1970s onward, mystery novels of consequence were expected to run at least
80,000 words, and some could go to 100,000.46 McBain accordingly filled out
his books even more, adding cases and giving his cops more tangled romantic
relationships.
McBain’s invention didn’t flag. On the surreal first page of The Big Bad City
(1999), nine handcuffed basketball players are led into the squad room just as
a perp in custody whips a knife out of his anus. By the end, two incompatible
flashbacks will leave some doubt about a Florida murder. In Candyland: A
Novel in Two Parts (2001), a descent into sordid sex in the first half, signed
by Evan Hunter, is followed by a police investigation signed by Ed McBain.47
It’s another echo of Golden Age ingenuity, playing on the disparate styles of
Hunter’s erotic thrillers and McBain’s procedurals.48
The posthumously published Fiddlers (2005) is a Balzacian tour de force
incorporating more than ninety characters spread among all the classes and
ethnic groups of Isola. Six murders lead the entire 87th team to a ramifying
network of suspects, witnesses, friends, family, romantic partners, and casual
hookups. Alongside the investigation are developments both happy and mel-
ancholy in the cops’ personal lives. Meanwhile, Fiddlers trots out narrative
tricks from earlier books, including a motivic title and neatly converging lines
of inquiry. The narrating voice expounds on the fraught definition of a serial
 Viewpoints, Narrow and Expansive 335

killer, and the regulars mull over the plot device governing Cop Hater. At the
close of his career, McBain was still expanding his own variorum, a vast catalog
of off-kilter riffs in a genre supposedly committed to solemn realism.

✳✳✳

Highsmith’s legacy is vast and deep. Apart from the many films based on her
novels, she made the psychological thriller respectable for a literary audi-
ence. And Tom Ripley provided a prototype for the sympathetic sociopath so
common now, from Hannibal Lecter to Lawrence Block’s philatelist hitman
Keller. McBain’s impact is no less consequential. Hill Street Blues (1981–1987)
made the squad room ensemble drama a television perennial.49 With typical
pugnacity, McBain wanted to sue. “If it hadn’t been stolen from me I would
have admired it greatly.”50
 CHAPTER 11

DONALD WESTLAKE AND THE

RICHARD STARK MACHINE

D
onald E. Westlake began publishing novels in 1959, a bit later
than Evan Hunter. Both benefited from the postwar boom in
mass-market fiction. Both writers started by working at a lit-
erary agency while sending out short stories. Both published first novels in
hardcover before switching to paperback originals. Both worked in many
genres, including science fiction. Hunter scotched rumors that he’d written
erotic pulp at the beginning of his career, but Westlake cheerfully confessed
he had, getting out of the business only because it didn’t pay well.1 Both writers
produced dozens of books under plenty of pseudonyms, and both wrote
notable screenplays.
And both writers used the series format to launch experiments in story-
telling. Ed McBain’s centrifugal energies multiplied plotlines and characters,
whereas Westlake was a minimalist. He was celebrated as a master of clean
prose, but he also had a unique formal project. He treated one crime genre with
a Zen-like discipline. In the process, he unpretentiously engineered one of the
great accomplishments in American popular fiction.

One Last Big Job

The police procedural is a streamlined revision of schemas familiar from

literary anatomies of the city. In this genre, the random encounters and
wayward fates of characters in Dickens’s London, Sue’s Paris, Bely’s Petersburg,
 Donald Westlake and the Richard Stark Machine 337

Joyce’s Dublin, Döblin’s Berlin, and Dos Passos’s Manhattan are given a more
linear trajectory when a crime must be solved. The investigation provides a
goal-directed plot, creating an ensemble of protagonists and ancillary figures.
At the same time, a teeming city can enable chance events to derail or fulfill
the investigation.
Much the same can be said of another genre of crime fiction that developed
alongside the procedural: the heist or caper story. Here, too, the modern city is
a landscape to be charted and mastered in pursuit of a goal, and a team of spe-
cialists assembles to do a job—but these working stiffs are crooks rather than
cops. Here is the same patient attention to drudgery, the effort it takes to plan
and execute a precise operation. There’s a similar democratization of roles, so
that the ensemble, rather than a single protagonist, may dominate the action. In
some respects, both the procedural and the heist story can be considered ver-
sions of the military novel and film, which concentrates on teamwork focused
around a well-defined mission.2
Stories of Robin Hood and gentlemen thieves such as Raffles aren’t exactly
heist tales, just as not all stories about police are procedurals. Donald Westlake
defined the heist plot with his typical conciseness: “We follow the crooks
before, during, and after a crime, usually a robbery.”3 This formulation points
up two features. First, the viewpoint is typically organized around the crim-
inals, not the detectives who might pursue them, as in a police procedural.
Second, the plot is structured around the big caper, although lesser crimes
might enable it, such as stealing weapons. The organizers recruit crooks with
specific skills (safecracking, demolition, driving, and so on). Because the
process matters so much, heist plots focus on details of time and physical
circumstance, and they draw attention to impediments such as locks, alarms,
and patrolling watchmen.
In this incarnation, the clear-cut heist plot is of relatively recent vintage. An
early, rough example is Don Tracy’s novel Criss Cross (1934). An armored-car
driver is seduced by a thief ’s girlfriend and becomes the inside man in a rob-
bery. In the aftermath, the hero is betrayed by the woman and nearly loses his
life. In a more comic register, a 1941 play became the film Larceny, Inc. (1941),
showing how a gang sets up a luggage shop in order to burrow into the bank
vault next door. The twist is that their business starts booming and the crooks
are distracted from their crime.
Two films helped crystallize the genre. The 1948 screen version of Criss
Cross, in keeping with fashions of the time, begins at a point of crisis on the day
of the robbery, with flashbacks that then lead up to the heist. The Killers (1946)
applied the lesson of Citizen Kane (1941) by having an insurance investigator
question witnesses, whose recollections are dramatized in out-of-order flash-
backs. Both films looked forward to a key feature of heist books and films: a
complex play with chronology.
 338 PA RT I I I

Then came a novel that neatly laid out the heist plot. W. R. Burnett’s The
Asphalt Jungle (1949) provides the canonical sequence of actions that would
govern the genre:4

Circumstances lead one or more characters to decide to execute a heist (robbery,

hijacking, kidnapping).
The initiators recruit participants.
As a group, they are briefed and prepare their plan. They study their target,
rehearse their scheme, and take steps to make it easier.
The heist begins and concludes.
The aftermath of the heist, failed or successful, shows the fates of the participants.

Burnett’s novel expands its cast to include the financier of the heist (and his
cohorts), the specialists’ families, the cops, and the press. As with the proce-
dural, we enter a network of ancillary characters. Any of these could botch the
job or betray the team.
The 1950 film version of The Asphalt Jungle somewhat simplified the novel’s
plot but gave the genre to the world. In good variorum fashion, moviemakers
rang ingenious changes on the canon. Rififi (1954) sustains a thirty-minute
robbery sequence without one line of dialogue, maximizing suspense and call-
ing attention to minute noises. Violent Saturday (1955) intercuts the robbers’
planning phase with townsfolk whose fates will eventually converge with the
crime. The combat story overtones of the genre come to the fore in The League
of Gentlemen (1960), which runs its heist, in the words of the leader, as “a full-
scale military operation.” The same analogy is treated more lightheartedly in
Ocean’s 11 (1960).
Given the likelihood that slipups will spoil the heist, it’s not surprising that
comic caper films appeared too. The miscreants in The Lady Killers (1955)
are undone by the kindly old lady who rents them their hideout. Big Deal on
Madonna Street (1958) uses chapter titles to mock the canonical phases of the
action. The blundering thieves of Wrong Arm of the Law (1963) scrutinize Rififi
and other heist films for “education and training.” The Italian Job (1964) became
a cult favorite by recruiting zippy Mini Coopers as getaway cars.
The film version of The Asphalt Jungle offers a fairly pure instance of the
basic structure. Events leading up to the heist—the circumstances, recruitment,
and planning phases—consume the first forty-five minutes. The heist, lasting
about eleven minutes, ends just before the film’s midpoint. After that comes a
gunfight initiated by a double-cross attempted by the financier and his hench-
man. That confrontation takes another seven minutes. The rest of the film runs
another forty minutes or so. Although the balanced geometry puts the heist
snugly at the center of the plot, the film devotes most of its time to showing
many lives leading up to and away from the crime, and this enables more exten-
sive characterizations of all involved.
 Donald Westlake and the Richard Stark Machine 339

This neat symmetry isn’t the only possibility. Any phase of the action can be
given great weight. The first half hour of Bob le flambeur (1956) is an episodic
introduction to Bob’s routines and associates. It’s the circumstantial phase pre-
sented at low pressure, emphasizing the fascinating milieu Bob drifts through.
Only when Roger points out a croupier at the Nantes casino does Bob formu-
late “the job of a lifetime.” Then crew assembly and planning can begin. As the
plot develops, characters and relationships presented casually in the exposition
become crucial to the heist and its unraveling.
Other phases can also be stretched out. Ocean’s 11 (1960) dwells on the phase
of gathering the talent. Before the start, Danny Ocean has already conceived
the heist, but we aren’t told the plan. Instead we watch his team members con-
verge on Las Vegas. Not until the film’s midpoint (at 53:00) is the plan revealed
in a briefing. The dawdling exposition suits a film about cool ex-military guys
hanging out.
The formation of the crew is exceptionally protracted in Odds Against
Tomorrow (1959) because two members hesitate about participating. The
racist Earl Slater, wracked by the shame of not providing for his wife, finally
gets her to agree to let him join. Not until twenty-three minutes from the end
does the African American musician Johnny Ingram finally accept a role in
the heist, which immediately becomes the film’s climax. The source novel for
Odds Against Tomorrow handles the basic pattern very differently, putting the
heist just before the midpoint and devoting the second half of the book to
the increasingly hopeless getaway in which the interracial tensions play out
at length.
The planning phase sometimes includes a rehearsal for the heist, and that
may require a subsidiary crime, such as stealing keys or a vehicle. The film ver-
sion of The League of Gentlemen (1960) has an unusually long planning phase,
in which the gang masquerades as soldiers in order to seize weapons from a
military post. This robbery, running nearly twenty minutes, takes longer than
the central heist but serves to demonstrate the team’s esprit de corps. The men’s
precision and resourcefulness, based on their wartime experience, lead us to
expect a successful main event.
The heist can be the climax, as in The Big Caper, or it can be virtually the
film’s entire second half, as in The Italian Job (which arguably doesn’t complete
the heist and so never provides a proper aftermath). The flamboyant robbery
in Topkapi (1964), involving elaborate subterfuges, dominates the film’s later
stretches, leading to a quick reversal in its epilogue. The heist is finished early
on in The Lady Killers; the crucial action is the long aftermath in which, contra-
dicting the title, the crooks dispose of one another. In contrast, the heist domi-
nates nearly all of Larceny, Inc. Most of the film is devoted to the crooks’ slowly
deepening tunnel: the process is interrupted by breaks in the water main, a
geyser of furnace oil, and their decision to abandon their plan in favor of going
straight—before another crook comes along to continue the caper.
 340 PA RT I I I

Given the pressure to fill out the variorum, it was probably inevitable that
somebody would make a heist movie that keeps the heist off-screen and makes
the action one long aftermath. In Plunder Road (1957), after the initial train
robbery is completed, the rest of the film consists of chases and suspense
sequences. The circumstances, recruitment, and planning phases are alluded
to in dialogue, as suits a low-budget production. Touchez pas au grisbi (1954)
starts the morning after the caper and shows thieves trying to protect their loot
from a treacherous drug dealer.
The fact that Topkapi allowed Jules Dassin to parody his own Rififi was
only one indication of the high artifice at work in the genre. As with the police
procedural, a surface realism—serious crime, details of tradecraft, location
shooting—is overbalanced by a frank acknowledgment of formal play. So
clear-cut were the conventions that filmmakers could indulge in hypothetical
sequences. Bob le flambeur includes a voice-over narrator who two-thirds of
the way through announces, “Here’s how Bob pictured the heist,” and provides
a scene of a successful robbery. Needless to say, that scenario isn’t fulfilled.
Similarly, a hypothetical sequence early in Gambit (1966) is countermanded by
the actual progress of the heist.
Because the phases of a heist plot are so familiar, storytellers have felt free
to rearrange them. Simon Kent’s novel The Lions at the Kill (1959) begins long
after the heist, when virtually all of the robbers are killed; we then flash back
to the heist itself, which forms the bulk of the book, before returning to the
present. The film Seven Thieves (1960) irons Kent’s novel into a linear story,
but a similar flashback structure is used in The Lavender Hill Mob (1951). More
in the spirit of The Killers is The Good Die Young (1954). As four men drive to
the target, each is given a flashback explaining what brought him into the gang
(always a woman). When the backstories are complete, the robbery becomes
the film’s climax.
Just as some authors specialized in procedurals, others specialized in the
heist plot. One was Lionel White. Most of his plots are straightforward linear
accounts of recruitment, planning, execution, and aftermath. Because they
shuttle viewpoints among characters, they often overlap time frames slightly.
For example, by intercutting many characters carrying out a bank job, Steal Big
(1960) jumps back in small bursts to replay events. Coffin for a Hood (1958) is
more ambitious, involving a lengthy flashback from killers at a cafe to a survey
of people whom they’ll meet later.
White’s most audacious and influential manipulation of time comes in
Clean Break (1955).5 A crook, his pal, a cashier, a bartender, and a crooked cop
conspire to rob a racetrack. They will employ helpers to start a fistfight and
shoot a racehorse. The early chapters devote short stretches to following each
one, already recruited, through the circumstances phase of the heist template.
The men assemble at their planning meeting, which is invaded by the snoopy
 Donald Westlake and the Richard Stark Machine 341

wife of the weak cashier. She then tells her boyfriend about the heist, so
another strand involving other characters is introduced.
On the day of the robbery, White’s narration attaches itself sequentially
to each man as he executes his role in the scheme. The early part of the book
has a few mild jumps back in time to follow each heister, but on the day of
the job extreme back-and-forth shifts occur. We follow the bartender going
to the track on the fateful day, and the next subchapter skips back to the
cashier waking up and then catching the same train. In a later section, we skip
back to the previous day and attach ourselves to the sniper who will shoot
the racehorse. Because of the overlapping lines of action, the shooting of the
horse and the starting of the sham bar fight are presented twice. Everything
eventually converges on Johnny Clay, the mastermind, who breaks into the
money room and steals the day’s revenue. These temporal overlaps emerge
partly from the description of the action, but they’re also marked either by
characters looking at clocks or watches or by explicit mention, such as “It was
exactly six forty-five when . . .”
In the film version, Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956), the staggered,
overlapping time scheme is laid out by an impersonal voice-over narrator
that could have come from a police procedural. Apart from lending an aura of
authenticity, the voice-over exaggerates the time markers of the novel. The first
five scenes are introduced with these tags:

“At exactly 3:45 . . .”

“About an hour earlier . . .”
“At seven PM that same day . . .”
“A half an hour earlier . . .”
“At 7:15 that same night . . .”

These lead-ins remind us of the ticking clock, set up parallels among the char-
acters, and get us acclimated to the film’s method of tracking one character,
then jumping back in time to track another. This is moving-spotlight narration
on markedly parallel tracks. The same method is applied during the heist, when
ten consecutive scenes and several others are tagged in the same way.
It’s not just the repetitions that play up White’s jagged time scheme. When
the sniper Nikki is shot after plugging the racehorse, the narrator reports drily:
“Nikki was dead at 4:24.” Cut to Johnny leaving a luggage store, and the voice-
over announces: “At 2:15 that afternoon Johnny Clay was still in the city.” In
all, the time jumps more or less buried in White’s prose are made dissonant in
the film. Here the juxtaposition heightens the likelihood that Johnny’s robbery
won’t go according to plan.
The replayed bits are also sharply profiled. As the blocks move from charac-
ter to character and skip back in time, they include actions we’ve already seen.
 342 PA RT I I I

The most persistent is the repetition of the track announcer calling the start of
the crucial seventh race (which helps orient us), but we also see replays of the
wrestler Maurice starting a fight, the downing of the horse, and glimpses of
Johnny waiting to slip into the cash room.
Instead of lining up flashback blocks in the manner of The Killers, Kubrick’s
film offers brief parallel chunks of time stacked in a slightly overlapping array
until they all square up in a single moment, the consummation of the robbery.
This structure allows for the sort of character delineation we find in The Asphalt
Jungle while also establishing early on that the robbery is doomed. In addi-
tion, there’s a formal game for the viewer to enjoy. The Killing points in two
directions—revising the flashback schema of many 1940s films but becoming
a model for future filmmakers like Tarantino who want to make more unusual
plays with time and viewpoint comprehensible.
Clean Break became a reference point in the genre. The robbers in the novel
The League of Gentlemen (1958) take White’s book as a vade mecum for their
scheme. Perhaps in homage, the author presents their robbery with a staggered
time scheme like White’s. More generally, The Killing gave White’s reputation a
boost. Perhaps in a grateful spirit, his novel Steal Big included this scene.

Donovan didn’t look at the half-dozen worn, barely legible signs in the
dingy lobby of the building. He went at once to the elevator and asked for
the fifth floor. Getting out of the elevator, he turned left, took a dozen steps
and knocked on a pebbled-glass door. The door bore the legend, KUBRIC
NOVELTY COMPANY.6

Mr. Kubric, it turns out, supplies illegal guns and explosives.

Reverse-Engineering the Stark Machine

Why read Donald Westlake? His fans would say, for sheer fun. His motto was
“I believe my subject is bewilderment. But I could be wrong.” He made his
name, or rather one of them, with comic intrigues such as The Fugitive Pigeon
(1965) and The Busy Body (1966). Although Dancing Aztecs (1976) is probably
his most virtuoso turn in this vein, Help, I Am Being Held Prisoner (1974) gets
my vote as the funniest.

Soon our food came, and so did the wine, but Eddie kept on telling me his
reminiscences. Friends of his had fallen under tanks, walked into airplane
propellers, inadvertently bumped their elbows against the firing mechanism
of thousand-pound bombs, and walked backwards off the flight deck of an
aircraft carrier while backing up to take a group photograph. Other friends had
 Donald Westlake and the Richard Stark Machine 343

misread the control directions on a robot tank and driven it through a Pennsyl-
vania town’s two hundredth anniversary celebration square dance, had fired a
bazooka while it was facing the wrong way, had massacred a USO Gilbert and
Sullivan troupe rehearsing The Mikado under the mistaken impression they
were peaceful Vietnamese villagers, and had ordered a nearby enlisted man to
look in that mortar and see why the shell hadn’t come out.
It began after a while to seem as though Eddie’s military career had been
an endless red-black vista of explosions, fires, and crumpling destruction, all
intermixed with hoarse cries, anonymous thuds, and terminal screams. Eddie
recounted these disasters in his normal bloodless style, with touches of that dry
avuncular humor he’d displayed during our hour at the bar. I managed to eat
very little of my veal parmigiana—it kept looking like a body fragment—but
became increasingly sober nonetheless.7

Few contemporary novelists could produce sentences as perfect, and hilarious,

as these.
We also go to Westlake for his unique handling of crime fiction, a genre that
was highly sensitive to tradition. He paid homage to McBain, Rex Stout, Lionel
White, and many others in essays that show a keen critical mind. He also had an
amused awareness of the broader conventions of popular narrative. Who else
would take the trouble to puncture Arthur Hailey’s oversized “institutional”
novels Hotel and Airport with Comfort Station (1970), a parody set in a men’s
public toilet? He didn’t spare his peers. Let Ross MacDonald write, “He had a
long nose, slightly curved, which appeared both self-assertive and inquisitive,”
and Westlake will add, “I hope my nose is looking disbelieving.”8
Possibly the strangest book Westlake wrote, Adios, Scheherazade (1970),
offers a comic metafictional account of storytelling. Drawing on his experience
writing sex novels to order, he gives us a first-person account by Ed Topliss.
Ed has written twenty-eight dirty books on a monthly basis but just can’t
squeeze out another. Instead every day he types up his memories, fantasies,
and free associations. Things get complicated when his wife discovers his
manuscript and leaves him. Realizing that his fake confessions will lead him
to jail, he goes on the run, compulsively batting out a new chapter on whatever
typewriter he can find.
Into this farrago Ed tosses citations, in-jokes, and some of the precepts of
mass-market writing I’ve considered in previous chapters. He explains how
to pad a book to fit a format (for porn: fifty thousand words, ten chapters, a
big sex scene in each). He mentions, and demonstrates, how to mount repeti-
tious scenes and pile up short paragraphs. He outlines the four basic pornog-
raphy plots: male protagonist, female protagonist, alternation between the two,
and what he calls La Ronde, a daisy-chain of couplings. Stout’s and McBain’s
novels were reflexive in bursts, and Westlake’s could be as well, but here we
 344 PA RT I I I

have modernism fully burlesqued. In Adios, Scheherazade, Ed points out that it

would be an avant-garde breakthrough to write a novel about writing a novel—
or in this case, about failing to write one. As ever, comedy sells reflexivity, and
André Gide’s Counterfeiters is not far away.9
Adios, Scheherazade showed that Westlake not only played with structure
but also enjoyed thinking about it. The book was written while Westlake was
developing two self-consciously formal franchises of his own, both using the
heist premise. In the comic one, John Dortmunder is a working-class thief
whose ill-assorted gang typically fumbles every job they pull. From The Hot Rock
(1970) to Get Real (2009), the Dortmunder series became a genial landmark in
the genre.10
That series was born as an alternative to one Westlake had launched under
the ominous signature of Richard Stark.11 The Hunter (1963) introduced Parker,
a hard-bitten professional thief whose look Westlake modeled on the young
Jack Palance. Westlake later regretted not giving Parker a first name, and even
the surname caused problems. “For 27 books I’ve had to find some other way to
say, ‘Parker parked the car.’ ”12
Between 1962 and 1969, Westlake pounded out twelve paperback Parkers.
Under the Stark name he also signed a brief spinoff series featuring Alan
Grofield, an extroverted actor who sometimes joins Parker’s crew to finance a
summer theater. The next four Parkers (1971–1974) shifted to hardcover publi-
cation. After pausing the series for more than two decades, Westlake composed
eight new Parker adventures between 1997 and 2008, the year of his death.
Novelist John Banville judged the series to be “among the most poised and
polished fictions of their time and, in fact, of any time.”13
The fourth book in the series sums up the protagonist’s lifestyle. “Parker had
lived the way he wanted, to a pattern he liked. He was a heavy gun, in on one or
two institutional robberies a year—a bank, or a payroll, or an armored car—just
often enough to keep the finances fat, and the rest of the time he lived in resort
hotels on either coast, with a cover that would satisfy even the income-tax
beagles.”14 The strict pattern of Parker’s routine is paralleled by the rigorous way
the novels recount his career.
Parker is not a romantic. Westlake decided that Parker has the values of a
conscientious workman: precision, efficiency, tenacity. He prepares his heists
meticulously and coldly calculates the odds. He never has sex when planning a
job because that would distract him from his craft. He has no lust for violence,
but he will kill if necessary. He will rabbit-punch a passerby to grab a car and
will threaten the family of a policeman to get access to evidence. He will impla-
cably pursue someone who has double-crossed him, which his associates do
with foolish frequency.
Under normal circumstances Parker moves through the world without
friction, stealing vehicles and picking locks with aplomb. But the genre
 Donald Westlake and the Richard Stark Machine 345

demands that a heist be imperfect, so his abilities emerge most clearly when
he has to think his way out of tight spots. To survive, he must often leave the
loot behind.
Continuing characters are featured in any popular series, but Westlake
restricted their number because his hero is a loner. Parker has no everyday
friendships, only professional associates he calls on for a job. The sixteenth
Parker novel, Butcher’s Moon (1974), reunites several of them to carry out a
spectacular raid to settle a matter that was left dangling two books earlier.15
As the series goes on, Parker gets a little less flinty. At one point he decides
not to kill a drugged man because it would be like killing a child. (So he
“broke three bones, all fairly important.”16) His time with Grofield creates a
bit of bonding. In the finale of The Handle (1966), instead of leaving Grofield
for dead, he takes risks to rescue him. When Grofield thanks him, Parker is
puzzled: “We were working together.” In later books he leaves off vagabond-
age to join Claire (no last name) in a lakeside home that is both bolt-hole and
bourgeois household.
Reflecting on the history of crime fiction, Westlake maintained that every
genre springs from a source somewhat close to real life. It then becomes rou-
tinized into ritual. Dashiell Hammett knew the grimy world of crime, and
Raymond Chandler, the cashiered executive, turned that realistic work into
“a kind of narrative poetry.” That ritual became “roughed up” after World
War II, as writers were now more strongly emotional. The extreme instance
is Mickey Spillane, but Westlake also mocks Chandler and Ross Macdonald
for overwrought prose and sensational situations (homosexuality in Chan-
dler, family secrets in Macdonald).17 Westlake might well have included Jim
Thompson’s febrile plots and style as further evidence of the new excesses of
crime fiction.
In contrast, Westlake made the Stark novels exercises in minimalist, objec-
tive narration. Chandler and other hard-boiled writers had let their protag-
onists tell the story, but Westlake wrote in the third person, and he strove to
make it dry and detached. He tried “giving the character’s emotion without
stating what that emotion was. Not saying ‘He was feeling tense,’ instead saying,
‘His hand squeezed harder on the chair arm,’ as if staying outside the guy.”18
Westlake isn’t completely outside; his novels follow the protagonist’s train of
thought to a degree that The Glass Key never does. But very seldom does Parker
show or voice his emotions. He never rants as Spillane’s characters do, nor bab-
ble like Thompson’s traumatized losers.
Parker speaks as little as possible. When asked if his plane flight was good,
he says yes. “Parker meant nothing by the word; it was simply a sound that
ended that topic.”19 His reticence is contagious. Stark renders Parker’s adven-
tures in a far more laconic style than we find in Westlake’s comic novels. In The
Mourner, Parker and his sideman Handy have questioned a syndicate thug.
 346 PA RT I I I

His fate ends a chapter: “They had him write the address down, and then they
tied him and left him in a closet. They never did remember to go back.”20 Scenes
of violence are presented in a clipped, almost offhand manner. Here Parker is
moving quietly toward a man who’s stalking him:

There was a sudden scattering of leaves, and Negli was standing up in full sight,
staring and staring the wrong way, his natty back to Parker and only five feet
away.
“Why don’t you fight like a man!”
Parker shot him in the back of the head.21

Compared to McBain’s rodomontade, this prose is radically stripped down.

Even “staring and staring” doesn’t look wasteful because it emphasizes how
stubbornly oblivious Negli is. The addition of “natty” to “back” heightens the
contrast between Negli the showboater and the ruthlessly efficient Parker.
Another chapter done.
More elegantly than Lionel White, Westlake rings variations on heist
conventions. For one thing, Parker’s targets are astonishingly varied. Parker
knocks over the usual armored cars, but his field of action widens to a football
game, a casino, a convention of coin collectors, an Air Force base, an African
embassy, a rock concert, a revival meeting, a jewelry auction, and a rural race-
track. In one book, Parker and his team pillage an entire town.
Stark went on to twist the canonical plot structure in distinctive ways. In
the first book, The Hunter, the heist has already taken place, and everything
is aftermath. Following books treat smaller robberies rather than the One
Big Caper. Not until the fifth book, aptly titled The Score (1964), do we get
the full arc of action, from circumstances and planning to heist and after-
math. In other books, there might be aborted or abandoned heists (Plunder
Squad, 1972) or miniheists carried out by lesser entrepreneurs (The Outfit,
1963).
For Westlake, building a whole book around a heist posed problems.
Robberies, he said, “aren’t serial. They happen and they’re over with.”22 Burnett
had overcome the problem by tracing out a network of characters affected by
the crime, both before and after. White stretched out the heist with shifting
viewpoints and time jumps. Westlake borrows from both writers, but he tries
other solutions too.
One is to pack the setup and the aftermath with premises from other
genres, as McBain had. Westlake provides confrontations out of hard-boiled
detective novels, and one book, The Jugger (1965), has the contours of a
traditional private-eye story.23 Some books put Claire in a woman-in-peril
situation. Most often, though, Stark novels fill themselves out with extended
passages of pursuit.
 Donald Westlake and the Richard Stark Machine 347

When Parker isn’t planning or executing a job, he’s usually chasing someone
or being chased. Again, The Hunter provides a template. Parker has been left for
dead. He formulates two goals: to kill the man who double-crossed him, and
to retrieve the money he’s owed, even if that means challenging a crime syndi-
cate. Later examples include Slayground (1971), in which the heist collapses at
the beginning and the entire book consists of Parker’s effort to survive a night
trapped in a shuttered amusement park.
In expanding the heist plot through what Westlake called “the schnook on
the run” premise, he updated an adventure prototype.24 Leslie Charteris’s urban
bandit Simon Templar (aka the Saint) is suave and chatty, whereas Parker is
blunt and hard-boiled. But both characters often go up against both cops and
crooks, and their thefts can become secondary action to extended fight-or-
flight maneuvers.
All of the Parker books take delight in describing the physical details of
committing larceny. They fill out the genre template with loving descriptions
of planning, raising funds, buying and disguising vehicles, assembling tools
and weapons, and executing the job. When Westlake moved Parker from
paperback originals to hardcover publication, the demand for a longer book
pushed him toward more intricate descriptions. The first forty pages of Deadly
Edge form a meticulous account of chopping a hole in an auditorium roof,
slipping through it, subduing guards, and stealing the ticket money at a rock
concert. (This is a print equivalent of Rififi’s virtuoso central sequence.) At the
other end of the same book, Parker’s stalking of the men who have invaded his
home lasts nearly as long.
This painstaking specificity supplies a certain realism, but it’s eventually
in service to larger patterns. The title of The Seventh (1966) refers both to the
division of spoils and to the book’s position in the series. When Parker got a
second wind in the 1990s, the first five titles created chain-link continuity:
Comeback, Backflash, Flashfire, Firebreak, and Breakout. Branded titles are
common enough in popular fiction (A as in Alibi, The Cat Who . . .), but
Westlake’s love of structure goes beyond whimsy. In the Stark books, he
switches on a remorseless, almost frightening narrative machine.

Four-Way Split

With one exception, all the Parker novels display the same exoskeleton. A book
is divided into four numbered parts, roughly equal. Within each part, the chap-
ters tend to be rather short and modular. Each one presents a slice of the action
as a single character experiences it in third-person narration.
All the chapters in the book’s first part present the story action from Parker’s
viewpoint. The fourth part usually does the same. But at least one part in the
 348 PA RT I I I

middle will not adhere to him. Part two or part three may present another char-
acter’s viewpoint across all its chapters, or more likely will shift viewpoints from
chapter to chapter. As in much popular fiction, Westlake moves from mind to
mind, but like Klempner in Letter to Five Wives he doesn’t use tags. None of the
chapters is labeled with time, place, or the viewpoint character’s name.
Consider The Score (1964). In part one, Parker and the team assemble and
plan to ransack Copper Canyon, North Dakota. In part two, we’re still attached
to Parker when he arranges for financing, gets guns, tests the road and hideout,
and assembles the team for the heist. Part three traces the heist itself through
ten chapters. Most are attached to a different thief or citizen as the pillage pro-
ceeds; two objective chapters provide more synoptic coverage.
Treating the heist from a series of perspectives builds suspense and explains
details of execution not already previewed. It permits shrewd suppression of
incidents because a lot can happen between viewpoint shifts. We also get some
surprises about character motivation, as when the gutting of Copper Canyon
is revealed as an act of revenge that Parker discovers too late. The part four
chapters return our viewpoint to Parker as he deals with the new problems of
the heist’s aftermath.
In contrast, The Green Eagle Score (1967) makes the mobile-viewpoint
block of chapters its second part. Again part one is attached to Parker, who
sizes up the targeted Air Force base and starts making plans. Part two shifts
among the other major characters: Parker’s team members, the financier
backing them, a woman who divulges their plans to her psychoanalyst, and
the psychoanalyst himself who recruits two of his more unstable patients to
help him rip off the gang’s booty. In part three, the heist is rendered through
Parker’s perspective. As usual, part four sticks with Parker as he and the team
pursue the stolen money.
Lawrence Block has compared the quadruple format to a symphonic struc-
ture, with each movement given a different tone and texture.25 In modern
terms, it’s a spreadsheet layout. Of course heist novels often vary viewpoints
on the action. The Asphalt Jungle and White’s books freely mix perspectives
within chapters and even single scenes. Westlake subjects this tendency to
a principled rigor. His rules are odd, even obsessional: always start and end
with Parker, shift viewpoints within only one middle part, typically restrict
each chapter to only one character, even a minor walk-on. The books are a
pop-culture cousin of Oulipo, the French literary school that required its
members to embrace arbitrary constraints. Write a novel without using the
letter “e,” for instance, or describe the same action in sixty-six different ways.
Through pattern plotting, Stark plays a suite of variations not only on types of
heists but on possible ways of arranging viewpoint modules.
Stark’s multipart, theme-and-variations format was recast for the first Dort-
munder novel. It began as a Parker project. Suppose that Parker kept failing to
 Donald Westlake and the Richard Stark Machine 349

steal a rare gem? The result veered into comedy, and Westlake put the manu-
script aside for years before deciding to finish it. The Hot Rock varies the Stark
geometry by dividing the action into six labeled phases, each recounting a heist
attempt aiming at a different target. (The emerald migrates from a museum to a
prison, to a police station, to an asylum, etc.) Each phase breaks the action into
brief parallel modules: one chapter is devoted to casing the joint, another to
gathering the gang, another to meeting at the O. J. Bar & Grill, and so on before
culminating in another failed heist.26 As with the Parker books, you can lay out
the plot on a grid.
Westlake always claimed that he didn’t outline his novels in advance. “I don’t
know what’s going to happen next. The fun part is telling myself the story.”27
Perhaps this rigid, arbitrary template provided a framework that would regu-
larize whatever he came up with, like pouring cement into molds. But it also
constrained him in fruitful ways.
Westlake’s task was to fill out 60,000 words or so. By always including one
stretch that expands beyond Parker’s perspective, he obliged himself to flesh out
his story by probing the motives and goals of several characters. By packing in
several characters and inventing business and backstory, he could make some
figures central to the main action, some mere bystanders, and some who could
create unhappy accidents to spoil the heist. Given slots, he had to fill them.
Form follows (self-imposed) format.
Once he was committed to diverging systematically from Parker’s range of
knowledge, Westlake could try alternatives. The most common tactic is to let
the off-Parker block sample several characters’ viewpoints. The Handle (1966),
in contrast, toggles between the viewpoints of just two, Grofield and the target
of the heist, Baron. In The Green Eagle Score, the betraying woman’s visits to
her doctor alternate with scenes surveying other characters drawn into the
scheme.
Given Westlake’s skill in shifting stylistic registers—florid comedy for the
Dortmunder novels, severity for the Parkers, something in between for the
Grofields—we shouldn’t be surprised that the chapters devoted to several
characters are written to match their temperaments. In Plunder Squad (1972),
Devers, the ladies’ man, is given swaggering inner monologues, and the fussy
Lou Sternberg resents lodging in a chain motel. “Ghastly. Drinking glasses in
the bathroom were encased in little white paper bags imprinted with a mes-
sage including the word ‘sanitized.’ ”28 Parker’s mind is fastidious, but not along
these lines.
A sly conversation in The Mourner lays bare Stark’s signature four-block grid.
Parker is explaining how a particular double-cross worked. Kapoor replies:

“It sounds so complex. I have the feeling I’ve heard barely a quarter of the story.”
Parker shrugged. “You heard all of your parts.”29
 350 PA RT I I I

The four-part structure yields a trim economy, but it presents problems

too. The block construction takes away one advantage of multiple viewpoints:
rapid crosscutting among characters’ perspectives. In a more normal novel,
like one in McBain’s 87th Precinct series, Parker’s piecemeal activities would
alternate with scenes featuring other characters acting at the same time. This
moving-spotlight approach would build suspense as we learn more than Parker
does. But the first part of a Stark book always ties us to him, as does the last and
usually one in between. To cover what other characters are up to, within and
between blocks, Westlake creates elaborate time jumps and realignments.
The simplest are flashbacks within a part. The novel usually opens with
Parker in action—going to a meeting, fleeing a robbery gone wrong, dodging an
ambush. Then the narration supplies the backstory we need. Then the action of
the second or third part is likely to shift back to dramatize incidents mentioned
in the Parker-centered chapters. Flashbacks across parts fill in gaps and replay
events we understand better on the new pass. These time jumps are motivated by
a character who provides a new perspective. As one critic puts it: “Stark loves to
shift character points of view, not only to advance the story but to go back inside
the action and examine it for further angles and riches. The result is noir that
drives forward relentlessly while feeling kaleidoscopic and reflective.”30
This ambitious strategy is on display in the first book, The Hunter. Here the
alternative viewpoint is singular, that of the treacherous Mal.

Part one, Parker POV: Parker is on the lam after a heist. His wife Lynn, who
betrayed him, has killed herself. He goes on to seek Mal, who double-crossed
him.
In the part’s final chapter, a flashback traces the heist, Lynn’s attempt to kill
Parker, and his escape.
Part two, Mal POV: Mal is fleeing Parker. He tries to gain status in the Outfit.
Hiding out in a mob hotel, he sees Parker entering his bedroom window.
In the part’s final chapter, a flashback takes us back to before the heist, when Mal
set up Lynn to kill Parker. There is a replay of a scene in part one’s flashback,
when Mal and Lynn leave Parker for dead, this time rendered from Mal’s
perspective.
Part three, Parker POV: The first five chapters jump back in time. They return
to Parker’s search, which took place during part two, when we were restricted
to Mal. The part culminates in a replay of Parker coming through the window
(start of part two) and consummates it by dramatizing Parker’s murder of Mal.
Part four, Parker POV: In straight chronology, Parker confronts the Outfit
demanding the loot that Mal gave them.

The effect of this time shuffling is a constant pulse of curiosity (what’s Parker
doing when we’re with Mal?), surprise (Parker’s entry through the window),
 Donald Westlake and the Richard Stark Machine 351

and suspense (Parker’s window entry is cut off by a string of flashbacks trac-
ing how he got there). By embracing block construction and grid patterning,
Westlake guarantees himself the possibility of rearranging the time frame
within parallel parts. In a sense, he carried to a new, stricter level the overlapping
blocks that White had pioneered in Clean Break.
Stark novels happily explored a range of variations. Flashbacks can appear in
any part, even the last, as a way of plugging gaps in earlier stretches. The Mourner
has eight segments (flashbacks, replays) shifted across the parts. The simultane-
ity of parts laid out in The Hunter is treated for more intense suspense in Deadly
Edge. During part two Parker is pursuing the man who double-crossed him; in
part three, over the same days two thugs hunting Parker discover the home he
shares with Claire. He calls her twice in part two, and the same calls are replayed
from her viewpoint in the next part. These sync points encourage us to dread the
outcome because the second call proves to Parker that she’s under attack, and
he’s far enough away to make rescue unlikely.
Hand Westlake the most linear story imaginable and he will snap it into
quarters, chop up the scenes, and shuffle them into back-and-fill patterns. The
Sour Lemon Score (1969) is a basic chase plot. After the heist, which consumes
the whole of part one, Parker must track down the treacherous Uhl. He will
visit five possible contacts seriatim before finally confronting his quarry.
This simple string is knotted up in part three. Some of Parker’s visits are
presented out of order, and the contact characters’ viewpoints replay and fill in
stretches of parts one, two, and three. Part four, reattaching us to Parker, has
the nerve to plug gaps in part two by adding more flashbacks, even a flashback
within a flashback. Again, Stark bares a pet device:

Parker grimaced. He and Uhl had been doing a long-distance dance up and
down the eastern seaboard for three days. He’d gotten to Pearson before Uhl,
but Uhl had caught up. And then Uhl had gotten to Barri Dane before Parker,
but Parker didn’t catch up. But that was all right, because Parker had gotten to
Joyce Langer before Uhl, and that meant everything was caught up.
But if only the timing had been a little different somewhere along the line.31

Surprisingly, Westlake’s shameless formalism doesn’t throw you out of the story
world. Varied within strict lines from book to book, Westlake’s design creates
an almost hypnotic flow of engagement. The pages fly by. “The books,” notes
Luc Sante, “are machines that all but read themselves.”32
The four-part structure is easy to follow, but what enables readers to grasp
and enjoy the shuffled time schemes? The third-person narration is mobile
but reliable, and flashbacks are clearly signaled. Westlake doesn’t rely on the
twists that arise from the concealment strategies of the thrillers I consider
in chapter 13. We aren’t misled through subjectively distorted flashbacks or
 352 PA RT I I I

unclaimed viewpoints. When we’re surprised, it’s usually because the four-
part structure and the succession of scenes have skipped over a crucial inci-
dent that needs explaining in retrospect.
Moreover, the conventions of the heist genre help us break the action into
phases (assembly, planning, execution, aftermath) and assign character roles
(driver, gunman, explosives expert) on minimal cues. Characters adhere to a
behavioral realism. The unity of mind, word, and deed is usually solid.
The modularity of chapters helps too. Each chapter is a discrete chunk of
plot, so Westlake can set one scene into a block and then replay it in another
block. We recognize a unit that we’ve already encountered, if only in part. And,
of course, regular readers of the Stark saga come to the books expecting a
fragmentary layout of events, so we’re experts in sorting such things out.
There’s evidence that readers of earlier eras could have handled Westlake’s
formal games. In 1922, the legendary pulp master H. Bedford-Jones revealed a
new template for “the book-length,” a novella to be run complete in a magazine
issue. He suggested breaking the action into four distinct parts, with tempo-
ral displacements and viewpoint shifts. Part two should skip back to a period
before part one but conclude later than that had ended. Part three should flash
back to another stretch of part one, but now showing events from the villain’s
perspective. The final block could then return to the hero’s viewpoint for an
exciting climax.33 It’s possible that Westlake knew of Bedford-Smith’s article or
the novellas built along these lines, but it’s just as likely that he came up with his
more rigorous, time-looping modularity on his own, not least because of the
tendency of heist plots to fall into sharply defined phases.
The last Stark novel of the first period is a sweeping anthology of earlier
strategies. Butcher’s Moon (1974) is twice the length of the paperback originals.
Aiming to retrieve the loot that was lost in Slayground, Parker takes on the
local mob, the political elite, and a police force. For help, he recruits eleven
associates who have survived earlier jobs. Instead of a single heist, there are
eleven, eight in a single night. The climax is an all-out assault on a gangster’s
mansion to rescue the wounded Grofield—another gesture showing that Parker
isn’t utterly amoral.
There are the usual grace notes, including bodyguards who while away
their downtime playing Monopoly. At one point a go-between protests, “I’m
only the messenger.” Parker shoots him: “Now you’re the message.” The book’s
final lines expose Westlake’s procedure. Grofield, unconscious for most of the
action, whispers, “What the hell happened?” One of his team replies, “Well,
that’s a long story.”34
In organizing this long story Westlake for once abandons the four-part
structure. He builds the novel out of fifty-five chapters that switch viewpoints
among two dozen characters, taken singly or in groups. The scenes are cross-
cut, using the alternation technique that his parallel-block construction had
 Donald Westlake and the Richard Stark Machine 353

avoided. Some bits of action, such as the shooting of Grofield, are rendered from
three overlapping viewpoints. If you haven’t read the earlier books, Butcher’s
Moon looks fairly conventional, but seen against the background of the previ-
ous novels, it’s a departure.
Had Butcher’s Moon exhausted his formal options? Westlake said that Stark’s
voice was suddenly “gone, erased clear out of my head.”35 He wrote no Parker
novels for twenty-three years.
In the interim he agreed to adapt Jim Thompson’s The Grifters for a 1990
film. The novel ties the action to Roy Dillon’s viewpoint, but director Stephen
Frears asked for more emphasis on Roy’s mother. Westlake’s screenplay creates
an ensemble film by introducing the three main characters in a sequence that
intercuts them executing their signature scams (fig. 11.1).36 The balance may
have reminded Westlake of his fondness for columnar patterns in the heist
novels. In any event, after adapting The Grifters, he tells us that Stark’s voice
came back.37
The final eight Parker novels expand the template in ingenious ways.
Westlake sets up more obstacles for Parker to overcome, both on the job and
in his flights and pursuits. A plan for stealing paintings in Firebreak (2001) is
put on hold when Parker has to find out who’s stalking him. Eventually the two
lines of action are connected. True to its title, Breakout (2002) sees Parker, con-
summate break-in artist, forced to escape from prison, find a way out of a sealed
armory, and free his sideman’s woman from jail. Westlake bares the book’s
device by having a crew member declare, “All we do is break outta things.”38

11.1 The Grifters (1990): The plot’s “level playing field” is solidified in a triptych split screen. This ges-
ture toward abstraction reaffirms Westlake’s inclination toward neat parallel structures.
 354 PA RT I I I

Chapters multiply and scenes are stretched. The climax of Comeback

(1997), a suspenseful confrontation among three men in a darkened house,
takes sixty-nine pages. Minor characters are promoted. In Flashfire (2000),
a realtor starts out as a neutral source of information, but she intervenes in
Parker’s pursuit several times, both as help and hindrance. The same book is
filled out by a subplot when Parker becomes a witness to murder, and so a
target himself.
In this second cycle, the chapters devoted to non-Parker characters become
breezier, which allows for semicomic squabbles and in-jokes. In one book, a
heister gets messages left for him in a library’s copy of S. S. Van Dine’s Gra-
cie Allen Murder Case, a book so awful that it’s never checked out. At times,
Westlake goes full-bore Dortmunder. No first-period Stark book would have
indulged in a passage in which Parker and a disgruntled employee move
through an office at night.

He had bumped into the wrong desk, causing the breakfast to flip over and
hit the floor facedown. Lindahl stooped to pick up the plate, but the omelet
stuck to the black linoleum, which was now a black ocean, and that omelet
the sandy desert island, with the solitary strip of bacon sticking up from
it, slightly slumped but brave, the perfect representation of the stranded
sailor, alone and waiting for his cartoon caption. On the floor, it looked
like what the Greeks call acheiropoeietoi, a pictorial image not made by a
human hand.

When Lindahl suggests cleaning up the mess, Stark resets the style with a string
of monosyllables. “ ‘A mouse did it,’ Parker told him. ‘Drop the plate on it and
let’s go.’ ”39
In this period, the expanded story lines are still mapped out in four parts,
but Westlake makes them very linear. The first five novels in the new cycle, from
Comeback to Breakout, avoid elaborate time shifts. The same thing happens in
the last three, which try something else: a single story line links them.
Butcher’s Moon had picked up a situation left dangling in Slayground, and
that book itself had been an experiment in oddly bifurcated narrative. In the
opening scene of The Blackbird (1967), Grofield and Parker split up after a
failed heist. The rest of the book follows Grofield into a government intrigue.
What happened to Parker? The later Slayground begins with the same heist
scene, slightly rewritten, and tracks Parker’s escape into the Fun Island amuse-
ment park.
Elsewhere, story lines from earlier books are relaunched, usually when a
character comes back from the past. The treacherous Uhl, for instance, wreaks
his damage in The Sour Lemon Score and reappears three books later in Plunder
Squad. Events that Uhl has set in motion pay off much later in Firebreak. Not
 Donald Westlake and the Richard Stark Machine 355

until the final trilogy, though, does Stark bind successive novels together in a
single tight sequence.
Nobody Runs Forever (2004) ends in suspension, with Parker fleeing into
a forest. This was a jolt for the fans who read the book upon publication. Did
the title suggest that Parker would be captured? Ask the Parrot (2006) picks up
the story immediately and shows Parker rescued but forced to launch another
caper. In Dirty Money (2008), Parker comes home to Claire but soon returns to
the scene of Nobody Runs Forever to retrieve the spoils he left behind.
The three books add many new characters and bring back ones from ear-
lier Parker adventures. There are nearly forty robbers, cops, bounty hunters,
bystanders, and thugs wanting in on the action. There’s also a parrot, with one
chapter rendered from his point of view. To the very end, mishaps, lies, and
double-crosses proliferate. In Dirty Money—in effect, our farewell to Parker—
the fourth part is crammed with enough action and subterfuge to occupy an
entire paperback original. Death prevented Westlake from writing another
Stark novel, but this last entry fully rounds off the trilogy.
A man who writes Adios, Scheherazade is well aware of the refined pleasures
of mass-market storytelling. For all their grimness, the Stark stories commit to
a vision of form as play. McBain balances procedural accuracy with wild styl-
ization, whereas Westlake seems to treat everything, including his hard-bitten
hero, as part of a grand, rigorous artifice.
Here’s a last piece of evidence. Jimmy the Kid (1974) shows one of Dort-
munder’s gang trying to pull off a kidnapping by following the scheme he finds
in Child Heist, a nonexistent Parker novel. (Westlake was inspired by an actual
case in which kidnappers mimicked a Lionel White novel.) Westlake ends the
book with correspondence between Stark and his lawyer. They are contemplat-
ing legal action against a film based on the botched Dortmunder snatch. The
paperback edition of Jimmy the Kid, presumably at Westlake’s demand, bears a
flyleaf headed, “STARK REALISM.”40 In other words, pop formalism.

✳✳✳

The heist genre encourages narrative complexity more than the western or
musical does. It is not surprising that the tradition was revived in the 1990s
and later, when caper plots attracted filmmakers who were keen to tell stories
in fresh ways.
Among Americans it was Steven Soderbergh who returned to the caper
film most devotedly. The Underneath (1995) is a remake of Criss Cross, with an
extra layer of flashbacks. Logan Lucky (2017), with its lovable hillbilly despera-
dos, joins the tradition of comic heist movies. No False Move (2021), exploring
industrial espionage among automobile companies, starts with a failed robbery.
The plot avoids flashbacks and reveals the crime’s causes and consequences
 356 PA RT I I I

solely through dialogue and shifting viewpoints. In a genre disposed to time

shifting, sticking to straight linearity creates novelty: the viewer must focus on
characters’ reactions to a gradually evolving situation.
More typical, and extreme, is the Ocean’s series (2001–2018), which makes
a fetish of the male camaraderie and playful plot tricks typical of the genre.
The films pepper the action with voice-overs, cunning ellipses, and flashbacks
within flashbacks. The plots hide key information about the plan. They fill
the action with in-jokes, such as a star cameo by Bruce Willis commenting
on box-office grosses. Piling up obstacles, reversals, bluffs, and double-bluffs,
Soderbergh’s franchise forms an anthology of the genre’s tricks.
The most overstuffed entry is Ocean’s Thirteen (2007), which gives short
shrift to the early phases of the standard plot schema. The bulk of the film
consists of a mind-bogglingly intricate heist, including planting bedbugs in a
hotel room and manufacturing loaded dice in a Mexican factory under threat
of strike. The network of rules and roles laid out in the 1950s—master mind,
aged expert, financier, crooked helpers, allies and rivals and go-betweens and
stooges—is given baroque elaboration and treated with a self-congratulatory
panache.
If Soderbergh had adapted a Stark novel, we might have had something
ambitiously nonlinear, along the lines of his Elmore Leonard adaptation
Out of Sight (1998). Here events set in the past are distributed, in blocks and
smaller chunks, within present-day scenes. By then, however, Westlake-style
maneuvers had become common storytelling strategies in Hollywood. A new
variorum emerged, with one filmmaker crystallizing its ambitions.
 CHAPTER 12

TARANTINO, TWISTS, AND

THE PERSISTENCE OF PUZZLES

I guess what I’m always trying to do is use the structures that I see in novels
and apply them to cinema.

—Quentin Tarantino

A
udiences found a lot to like in Pulp Fiction (1994): the casually
cool hitmen Jules and Vincent; the scandalous sight of sado-
masochistic sex paraphernalia; and the shock of a hypodermic
punched into a woman’s heart. The looping, digressive dialogues about fast food
(“Royale with cheese”) and popular culture (the Kung Fu TV show) revealed a
filmmaker willing to indulge his characters’ obsessions and their narcissistic
self-presentation.
Most startling of all was the unexpected play with time and viewpoint that
released that Ahhh response I noted in the introduction. Reservoir Dogs had
already made plain Quentin Tarantino’s willingness to break up chronology,
but we could expect that in a heist movie. The flashbacks to the planning of
the holdup are carefully framed by the present-tense scenes in the warehouse.
The structure isn’t quite as simple as this, but Pulp Fiction did feel more dis-
orienting than its predecessor, and perhaps for first-time viewers it still feels
that way.
 358 PA RT I I I

Tarantino emerged at a period when ambitious filmmakers were rediscov-

ering the power of nonlinear techniques. Never shy about claiming cinema
influences, Tarantino emphasized popular fiction as an important inspiration.
“When you’re reading a book, you’re reading about Moe, Larry, and Curly
doing something in chapters one, two, and three, and then chapter four is
about Moe five years before. Then, when that chapter is over, you’re back in the
main thrust of the action again, but now you know a little bit more about this
guy than you did before.”1 Along these lines, the section of Pulp Fiction called
“The Gold Watch” flashes back to Butch’s childhood, when he receives his
father’s wristwatch. This motivates his risky effort to retrieve it by returning to
his apartment.
Tarantino’s films imaginatively revise schemas circulating in popular cinema
and crime fiction. His revisions would become influential over the next twenty
years and beyond. With the expansion of narrative options from the 1990s
to today—the varieties charted in screenplay manuals and film criticism—
Tarantino’s work offers a handy prototype of how popular narrative can inno-
vate in ways that are at once challenging and manageable. The skills that viewers
bring to bear on contemporary cinema are versions of the skills that made the
works of Ed McBain and Donald Westlake and hundreds of other storytellers
powerfully and pleasurably accessible.

Playing with Blocks

Tarantino began his film career in collaboration with Roger Avary, a coworker
at a video store. Avary had written a screenplay called The Open Road, which
Tarantino revised and expanded.2 The result was a very long draft consisting of
a story within a story. An outlaw couple is on the run, and during their flight
the young man writes a screenplay about a couple on a cross-country murder
spree. Eventually The Open Road was split into two screenplays: True Romance
(which Tarantino finished writing in 1987) and Natural Born Killers (finished
in 1990). After the success of Tarantino’s directorial debut in Reservoir Dogs
(1992), both scripts were made into features by other directors.3 The screenplays
show that Tarantino experimented with block construction and nonlinear time
schemes from the start of his career.
The present-time action of the screenplay for Natural Born Killers is simple
and straightforward. Police officer Jack Scagnetti is charged with transferring
serial killers Mickey and Mallory Knox from prison to a mental facility. At the
same time Wayne Gayle, a “commando journalist,” approaches the couple for an
interview to be broadcast on his series American Maniacs. Mickey agrees. But in
the course of the interview a riot breaks out, and Mickey seizes the opportunity
to kill his guards and take Gayle and others as hostages. He induces the officials
 Tarantino, Twists, and the Persistence of Puzzles 359

to free Mallory, who kills Scagnetti. Using Gayle and his cameraman as human
shields, the couple shoot their way out, take refuge in the forest, and murder
Gayle before driving off.
Tarantino breaks his time line by opening with Mickey and Mallory shoot-
ing up a coffee shop. This prologue introduces us to their outrageous homicidal
impulses and their mad love for each other. Early scenes with Scagnetti are
interrupted by quick flashbacks illustrating their crimes, such as the killing of
Mallory’s parents. But the main time shift comes with a long block inserted
after Gayle has gotten Mickey’s permission for the interview.
“Mickey and Mallory’s Reign of Terror” is an assemblage of Gayle’s new
American Maniacs episode, waiting only for the interview to be added. Like the
“News on the March” segment of Citizen Kane, exposition is part of its purpose.
But the details of the crime spree don’t preview actions that will be filled out in
the film to come, as in Kane. The main purpose of the “Reign of Terror” episode
is to show how the couple’s rampage intoxicated millions of fans.
Most outlaw couple films, from They Live by Night (1948) to Bonnie and Clyde
(1967), strive to build some sympathy for their protagonists. Tarantino, steeped
in VHS classics, probably also tapped Gun Crazy (1950), Boxcar Bertha (1972),
and Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry (1974) to give his couple a more lunatic edge.
Earlier films had considered the possibility of killers having a fan following;
in Bonnie and Clyde, the couple are mailed an admiring poem. The idea is
amplified in Tarantino’s screenplay, which mocks the media’s cult of celebrity.
Gayle is presented as a smarmy hypocrite, tsk-tsking about bloodshed but eager
to turn Mickey and Mallory into pop-culture heroes. Tarantino’s rather heavy
satire reveals them as admired for their rebellion and devotion to one another,
but still monstrous.
The “Reign of Terror” episode begins with harsh juxtapositions. The couple’s
normal married life is captured in home-movie footage followed by photos of
bloodied victims. Quick shots of Mallory as a little girl yield to rough TV
footage of the couple’s capture. Then, as in “News on the March,” the presen-
tation becomes chronological. After providing shocking accounts of several
murders, the episode moves to cover the couple’s trial and their growing fan
following. Their popularity is confirmed by the insertion of another block:
footage from Thrill Killers, an exploitation feature fictionalizing their story.
The film’s heroic death scene is fleshed out by a trailer and interviews with the
stars and the director.
“Reign of Terror” reaches a climax in its coverage of the trial, at which
Mickey acts as his own attorney and manages to stab a woman giving testimony
on the witness stand. This atrocity obliges the judge to pass a sentence declar-
ing that once imprisoned Mickey and Mallory can never meet again. The film’s
framing story presents their first reunion in many years—as they join forces to
blast their way out of prison.
 360 PA RT I I I

The Natural Born Killers script insists that the film is to be in 35mm color,
but the American Maniacs episode has a different look and feel. Gayle’s purring
commentary scenes, shot on location and addressed to the camera, frame a
polymorphous montage. We get 8mm and 16mm footage, still photos, post-
cards, and video material, both from surveillance cameras and, in the court-
room, from official recording devices. The result is both a parody of cable TV
murder shows and a film geek’s reveling in various capture devices. Yet there
can be no doubt about what’s at the top of the hierarchy. Gayle demands that
the interview with Mickey be shot on black-and-white, high-contrast 16mm
film. “Fuck video. This is just too damned important. This is for posterity. . . .
Film . . . film . . . film!”4
Gayle’s words eventually become ironic. At the climax, during the prison
scenes, the narration cuts between orthodox 35mm color and the camera
recording Mickey in black-and-white. Once he takes the cameraman hostage,
the riot is captured in both formats.5 After their escape, Mickey and Mallory
have Gayle at their mercy. He reminds them that at every crime scene they have
left one witness alive to tell of their exploits. They agree and kill Gayle while his
16mm camera watches.
The “Reign of Terror” block looks ahead to the movie-within-a-movie
structure of Grindhouse, which also includes trailer footage. But in a sense, the
entirety of Natural Born Killers is a block quarried out of the Open Road project.
Another big chunk followed another outlaw couple. In making this his next proj-
ect, Tarantino’s place in the hard-boiled crime tradition became more evident.
In interviews Tarantino acknowledged debts to Jim Thompson, Cornell
Woolrich, Fredric Brown, Charles Willeford, and other maestros of noir novels.6
Pulp Fiction’s title would pay homage to mass-market crime writing. (The film
was originally to be called The Black Mask.7) Tarantino’s favorite author was
Elmore Leonard, whose crime stories had by then attracted attention among the
literati.8 With True Romance “I was trying to write an Elmore Leonard novel as
a movie.”9 Tarantino long imagined making a film from Leonard’s The Switch
(1978), and he would later adapt Rum Punch (1992) as Jackie Brown (1997).10
Leonard’s plots throw together laconic peace officers, laid-back ex-military,
third-rate con artists, frustrated wives, amiable psychopaths, reefer-buzzed
bandits, and fumbling but still dangerous mob wannabes, all to lethal effect.
This cast forms a fairly complex network, including a hierarchy of villains,
some dangerous and others who only think they are.
Although praised for their easy momentum, Leonard’s novels make some
unusual choices about viewpoint. In Killshot (1989), a parking lot fight between
an ironworker, a paid killer, and a hopped-up thief is presented in four ways.
We’re initially sharing the ironworker’s viewpoint. Then, as he goes to work
on his assailants with an iron bar, the perspective switches to that of his wife,
watching from a window. That passage is followed by her later testimony to
 Tarantino, Twists, and the Persistence of Puzzles 361

the police, which is rendered first as indirect summary and finally as extended
quoted monologue.
Tarantino’s love of protracted dialogue exchanges echoes another of Leon-
ard’s strategies. Leonard credits the conversation-heavy novels of George V.
Higgins for confirming his own tendency “to move my plots with dialogue
while keeping the voices relatively flat, understated.”11 In Get Shorty (1990), fifty
pages are devoted to three characters talking around a kitchen table, with fluid
shifts of viewpoint.12
Famed for a clipped style, Leonard also skillfully deploys the conventional
novelistic technique of interrupting ongoing action with a chunk or chapter
of backstory. The original script for True Romance experiments with a one-off
expository block in the Leonard manner. Tarantino pulls a long early stretch
of action—the couple meeting and sharing a night before Clarence kills Drexl
and grabs the suitcase—out of chronological sequence. It’s then inserted into a
later phase of the action, triggered by Clarence telling Dick why they came to
Los Angeles. The straightforward transposition of that block of action is typical
of Leonard’s back-and-fill inclinations, although he usually doesn’t postpone
expository material as long as Tarantino’s screenplay does.
The True Romance screenplay displays explicit chaptering, another con-
structional feature that would become habitual with Tarantino. After a pro-
logue showing Clarence meeting a woman in a bar, tags introduce “Motor
City,” “Hollywood,” “Clarence and Alabama Hit LA,” “Cass Quarter, Heart of
Detroit,” and “The Big Day.” The chapters are minimally informative. They
don’t segregate characters by viewpoint, and they don’t neatly demarcate time
schemes. For example, the Cass Quarter section breaks up the block that
shows Clarence killing Drexl. Chaptering became more strict in Pulp Fiction
and the films that followed.
Although Tarantino’s script structure wasn’t retained in True Romance as
produced, it shows how he applied a more novelistic model of block construc-
tion and time shifting than we find in the media collage of Natural Born Killers.
His first directorial project would be further steeped in the crime tradition and
abstract plot patterning.

Dogs in a Warehouse

Several aspects of Reservoir Dogs are indebted to Ringo Lam’s Hong Kong
gangland film City on Fire, as many have noted and Tarantino more or less
acknowledged.13 (When I asked Lam if he was offended, he smiled and said
that Hong Kong films had been ripping off Hollywood for years.) But at the
level of structure, there are other inspirations. One is Lionel White’s novel
Clean Break (1955) and Kubrick’s adaptation of it, The Killing (1956). Both book
 362 PA RT I I I

and film present a racetrack heist in a staggered time scheme, following one
character into the robbery before skipping back earlier to trace another.
A more pertinent pulp-literary inspiration is The Hunter (1963). This and
other Richard Stark novels, Tarantino claimed, “were very influential to this
film.”14 Point Blank, John Boorman’s 1967 film adaptation of The Hunter, relied
on fragmentary, often enigmatic flashbacks in the vein of other 1960s films
(The Pawnbroker, 1964; Petulia, 1968). In contrast, Tarantino’s heist story uses
lengthy blocks to manipulate time in a way different from Leonard’s work and
more reminiscent of the Stark novels.
Reservoir Dogs treats a jewel store robbery through an alternation of past
and present. Apart from a prologue showing the gang sharing a diner meal,
the present-time scenes take place after the failed holdup. (The action of The
Hunter likewise takes place in the robbery’s aftermath.) One by one the sur-
viving gang members gather in a warehouse and try to figure out how the
cops knew about the heist. The past sequences trace the gathering of the team,
culminating in the revelation of the mole among them and the robbery itself.
The film’s structure is more complicated than I’ve suggested. There isn’t an
exoskeleton like the chaptering of True Romance’s screenplay; the inserted
titles are localized and serve to introduce characters. But the film does have an
underlying geometry that, as in the Parker novels, falls neatly into four parts.
The first part, coinciding with the classic act one of Hollywood construction,
sets up the situation. After the diner session and the opening credits, the rob-
bery is skipped over. Its aftermath begins with a shot of one robber, Mr. Orange,
bloodied and shrieking in a car’s back seat. When the team starts to gather after
the holdup, Mr. White and Mr. Pink discuss the robbery, and a flashback shows
Mr. Pink pursued by cops already near the scene. Mr. White concludes that
there must have been an informer among the team. The question “Who’s the
mole?” drives the next part of the film.
In this second section, coinciding with what Kristin Thompson calls
the “complicating action” of a classical Hollywood plot scheme, the mole is
revealed.15 That process begins with a flashback introducing Mr. White as Joe
recruits him for the heist. Is he the mole? The narration returns to the ware-
house in the present. Enter Mr. Blonde, with the policeman he has captured.
A flashback shows Mr. Blonde being recruited to the team. Back in the present,
after Mr. Blonde slices off the policeman’s ear and prepares to burn him alive,
the wounded Mr. Orange reveals that “I’m a cop” and shoots Mr. Blonde.
There follows a third stretch consisting wholly of flashbacks. Tagged “Mr.
Orange,” it explains how he slipped into the gang. Among scenes showing
Mr. Orange meeting his plainclothes partner, there are embedded flashbacks
to him rehearsing a fake story about a confrontation with cops in a men’s
room, which is eventually dramatized (figs. 12.1–12.2). Still more flashbacks
trace stages of the heist: Mr. Orange and others driving to a meeting, Joe
 Tarantino, Twists, and the Persistence of Puzzles 363

12.1 Reservoir Dogs (1992): When Mr. Orange tells his fake story to Joe and others in a bar . . .

12.2 . . . the narration provides a lying flashback.

briefing the team, and Mr. Orange and Mr. White casing the jewelry store.
This third section culminates in the failed robbery, shown briefly. Fleeing
with Mr. White, Mr. Orange is shot by the driver of the car he tries to com-
mandeer. He in turn shoots the driver.
As a distinct block, with flashbacks curled inside other flashbacks, this
section resembles the “Reign of Terror” TV show of Natural Born Killers, and
like that block, this makes points that go beyond sheer exposition. Thomp-
son notes that the third part of a classical plot, which she calls the “develop-
ment,” often fills in prior events and character background. Here the backstory
supplies a character arc. The “Mr. Orange” chapter, Tarantino has remarked, “is
almost like another movie.”16
Mr. Orange enters the undercover job confident, even cocky; he assures
his plainclothes mentor that he’s in solid with the gang. His main task is to
project cool—a word that the gang members bandy back and forth. To a point
 364 PA RT I I I

Mr. Orange succeeds; after hearing his commode story, Joe laughs approval.
“You knew how to handle that situation. You shit your pants, and then you dive
in and swim.” But after Mr. Orange has killed an innocent woman and been seri-
ously shot himself, he loses his cool, shrieking out on the car seat that he’s dying.
Like the repetition of Jules’s biblical monologue in Pulp Fiction, this replay serves
to remind us where the scene fits into the film’s story action. But the replay also
emphasizes the collapse of Mr. Orange’s cockiness (figs. 12.3–12.4).
This comedown reminds us that Tarantino’s films sometimes deflate the
panache associated with cool. After Alabama sneaks Clarence an admiring
note, “You’re so cool,” he’s shot in the face. As for Mickey and Mallory, Taran-
tino notes: “You see them posturing and being cool and surly, and they’re
romantic and they’re exciting. Then you see them killing people that don’t

12.3 After an opening scene that buries Mr. Orange among several, more sharply delineated men
at the diner table, this coda to the robbery picks him out as an important character. His “I’m sorry!”
seems to be a self-recrimination for botching the job.

12.4 The replay of Mr. Orange’s suffering. Because this is “his” chapter, the framing is closer. Now that
we know he’s the mole, “I’m sorry!” seems to beg his forgiveness for his betrayal—and his shooting of
an innocent woman.
 Tarantino, Twists, and the Persistence of Puzzles 365

deserve to die. Hopefully, the audience will say, ‘Wait a minute this isn’t
fun any more. Why aren’t I having fun? And why was I having fun at the
beginning?’ ”17 The almost sentimental tenderness that Mr. White provides the
dying Mr. Orange suggests that the bravado of cool masks a more fragile bond
of feeling between men in action.
The male melodrama is rendered all the more painful in the finale. Joe and
Eddie arrive at the warehouse and accuse Mr. Orange of being the informer.
Mr. White defends him, and in a three-way standoff, all are shot. But then,
cradled in Mr. White’s arms, Mr. Orange confesses that he has betrayed their
friendship. After the sorrowful Mr. White shoots him, the off-screen police
finish off Mr. White. Mr. Pink has already run out with the loot.
The True Romance screenplay, with its five chapter titles, invites us to
imagine a tabular structure in the Stark spirit. The four sections I’ve assigned
to Reservoir Dogs lack tags, but given Tarantino’s acknowledgment of The
Hunter as inspiration, we can risk a chart. First, I offer a layout of the Stark
novel (table 12.1; summarized in chapter 11). Comparing it with what we find
in the film (table 12.2) shows some striking affinities.

Table 12.1 Richard Stark, The Hunter (1962)

Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four

POV attached to Parker POV attached to Mal POV attached to POV attached to
Parker Parker
Parker on the lam Mal learns Parker is FB chaps. 1–5 Parker settles scores,
after heist. He kills after him. He hides simultaneous with with mixed success.
Lynn and seeks Mal. out, but Parker enters Part Two: Parker’s
through hotel window. pursuit of Mal.
FB to heist and FB to before Part Chap. 6: Replay
Lynn’s attempt to kill One, when Mal sets Parker’s entry
Parker. up double-cross. through window at
start of Part Two.
Surviving the hit, he FB to within FB in Parker gets
goes on the lam and Part One: Mal sets up information about his
pursues Lynn and Lynn to kill Parker. money and kills Mal.
Mal.
Replay of her attempt
to kill Parker.
Mal gets job with the
Outfit.
Note: Chronological sequences are shown in roman type; flashbacks (FB) are shown in bold type.
Table 12.2 Quentin Tarantino, Reservoir Dogs (1992)

Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four

Heist team meets in diner Mr. White. FB: Joe Mr. Orange. Framing FB: Warehouse:
and strolls out. proposes heist to Mr. Mr. Orange meets cop
White. contact.
[Credits] Warehouse: Mr. Blonde Embedded FB: Cop Confrontation of
brings in cop he has contact tells Mr. Orange survivors: Death of Joe,
captured. the commode anecdote. Eddie, Mr. White, and
Mr. Orange. Mr. Pink
escapes with loot.
[Ellipsis: Failed jewel Mr. Blonde. FB: Joe Embedded FBs: Mr.
robbery] proposes heist to Mr. Orange rehearses at
Blonde, with Nice Guy home; with partner.
Eddie.
Mr. Orange wounded, Warehouse: The men Embedded FB: Bar: Mr.
crying out in back seat as rough up the cop. Mr. Orange tells commode
Mr. White drives. Blonde cuts his ear. anecdote.
Mr. Orange shoots Mr.
Blonde. “I’m a cop.”
Warehouse: Mr. White Embedded Lying FB:
brings Mr. Orange in, Commode story.
joined by Mr. Pink. They
dispute whether there was
a mole.
FB: Mr. Pink flees robbery Embedded FB: Bar: Joe
scene. approves of Mr. Orange.
Warehouse: Mr. White and Framing FB: Mr. Orange
Mr. Pink quarrel: “Who’s and fellow cop conclude
the mole?” plan.
FB: Mr. Orange prepares
for heist.
FB: Heist team drives to
meeting.
FB: Meeting: Joe briefs
the team.
FB: Mr. Orange and Mr.
White case the shop.
FB: The failed robbery.
FB: Replay of Mr.
Orange crying out in
back seat.

Note: Chronological sequences are shown in roman type; flashbacks (FB) are shown in bold type.
 Tarantino, Twists, and the Persistence of Puzzles 367

In all, Reservoir Dogs is more structurally complex than the True Romance
and Natural Born Killers screenplays. Tarantino thought its organization was
a selling point for producers. Jane Hamsher mimicked his pitch: “He’d written
this movie, see, about these guys and this heist gone bad, and it was told novel-
istically, you know, with time folding back on itself, not linearly like most mov-
ies, which he was really fascinated with.”18 The time scrambling in this movie
is mild when compared with the fragments and whorls Point Blank created
out of The Hunter. In his film’s first half, Tarantino presents a traditional arc of
mystery, with the question (whodunit?) answered at the end of the second part
(whodunit), and more elaborately explained in the third (howdunit). Suspense
then kicks in for the climax. A closer approximation to the Stark machine,
eliminating the whodunit element, comes with Pulp Fiction.

Pulp Fiction as Pulp Fiction

True Romance, Natural Born Killers, and Reservoir Dogs display strategies
Tarantino uses for mounting almost any plot he concocts. He usually relies on
block construction, following Stark in attaching the block to a single character
or group. Then the plot shifts to another block, another character, and a differ-
ent, perhaps overlapping time sequence.
The simplest example is Death Proof (2007). The first half of the original the-
atrical release presents four young women who are targeted by Stuntman Mike,
a free-range master of vehicular homicide. All the women are killed, but in the
second half Mike meets his match in a quartet of car-crazy film staffers, one
of whom is a stuntwoman and another an expert driver. Mike is the only link
between the film’s episodes. More broadly, Death Proof constitutes one segment
in a larger ensemble of blocks, the double-feature Grindhouse. That presents
Planet Terror as another free-standing feature, the whole contraption padded
out with fake trailers.
A more old-fashioned use of block construction appears in the Taranti-
no-conceived Four Rooms (1995). He and three other American indie directors
created four short films, which are strung together through the misadventures
of a new bellboy at a classic hotel. The result revived the portmanteau film for-
mat seen long before in If I Had a Million (1932) and Flesh and Fantasy (1943).
The blocks in Four Rooms are labeled with intertitles, a procedure Tarantino
often relied on. Modeling his films on novels, he has often called his blocks
“chapters,” but they’re so long that they approximate the parts that we find in
the Stark books, not the more compact chapters of Elmore Leonard and other
crime novelists.
A good example is the extended chronological blocks of Inglourious Basterds
(2009). Here five tagged chapters show anti-Nazi forces at work in occupied
 368 PA RT I I I

France. The first block shows Shosanna Dreyfus, harbored by a farm family,
fleeing from Colonel Landa. The second chapter introduces us to the Basterds,
the “Apache” force staffed by Jewish soldiers and Nazi turncoats. Brief flash-
backs fill out the Basterds’ history. Chapter 3 picks up Shosanna in 1944, now
running a Parisian movie house under a false identity. Landa reappears when
her theater is commandeered for the screening of Goebbels’s latest propaganda
effort. Shosanna decides to use the occasion to exact revenge.
Landa appears as well in the fourth chapter, which introduces a British espi-
onage effort aided by a German actress. “Operation Kino” is to work with the
Basterds in attacking the audience at the film premiere. Ironically, the Basterds
and Shosanna are unaware of each other’s mission. Chapter 5 shows the two
forces converging at Shosanna’s theater. The alternation between chapters
before the climax is picked up within the final block, as crosscutting gives us a
suspenseful, moving-spotlight view of the entire operation. An epilogue shows
the Basterds’ vengeance on Landa.
A simpler confluence of story lines occurs in Once Upon a Time . . . in Hol-
lywood (2019). Three principal characters—fading cowboy star Rick Dalton, his
loyal stunt double and amanuensis Cliff Booth, and rising star Sharon Tate—
are followed across three days in 1969. These days constitute the film’s chap-
ters. The narration crosscuts among the trio until a climax brings members of
Charles Manson’s gang to Rick’s driveway for a home invasion.19 Like Inglouri-
ous Basterds and Django Unchained (2012), the film posits an alternative his-
tory, a strategy that leads Tarantino to more conventional time schemes than
we find in the other films.
The Hateful 8 (2015) invokes the folk motif of converging fates, the inter-
section of disparate lives at a crossroads, on a vehicle, or in an inn. As in Seven
Keys to Baldpate, hidden affinities come to light. The plot begins with two
labeled chapters taking stagecoach passengers to Minnie’s Haberdashery, a gen-
eral store. Two longer chapters show their arrival and confrontation with sev-
eral suspicious men already there. These chapters are chronological, except for
some brief flashbacks in the third and a replay of a key moment, the poisoning
of a coffee pot, in the fourth.
The fifth chapter is a block like those we find in the Stark novels. It skips
back to show action simultaneous with the events of the first two chapters.
While the travelers are on the road, the gang aiming to free Daisy Domergue
takes over Minnie’s place and kills the inhabitants. This block ends by replaying
the visitors’ arrival from the gang’s point of view. The last block, “Final Chap-
ter,” runs chronologically, as in a Parker novel. Again, the structure is that of a
mystery. Like the Mr. Orange section of Reservoir Dogs, chapter 5 of The Hate-
ful 8 functions as a climactic revelation of what really happened.
In Jackie Brown (1997) Tarantino mimics Clean Break and The Killing, but
in miniature. He presents the shopping-mall money exchange three times,
 Tarantino, Twists, and the Persistence of Puzzles 369

from different characters’ attached viewpoints. The side-by-side replays make

the whole money drop stand out as a block, as does the chapter title (“Money
Exchange: For Real This Time”) and the length (more than twenty minutes). A
practice session for the exchange has already been presented as a parallel block,
with its own introductory title (“Money Exchange: Trial Run”). As in a classic
heist film, the multiple-viewpoint coverage keeps us aware of what each player
contributes to the scam, and how he or she reacts to the others. During the
replays, we watch for a glitch that will cause ruin down the line.
Kill Bill Volume 1 (2003) and Kill Bill Volume 2 (2004) splinter time more
extensively than other Tarantino films. The core story is quite linear. A young
woman, known throughout as the Bride, is trained to join a team of elite killers.
Sent to murder a rival, the Bride discovers she’s pregnant and decides to quit
the game. Her boss, Bill, learns she’s getting married and sends a hit squad to
the wedding rehearsal. But the Bride survives. Escaping from the hospital, she
sets out to eliminate the hit team one by one and finally Bill himself, who has
seized and raised her child.
Despite a shooting-gallery premise reminiscent of Woolrich’s novels, Kill
Bill’s plot skips around freely in time. The film begins by showing us the Bride’s
checklist of targets. The two films’ ten chapters are arranged out of order and
broken up by flashbacks—most notably, an animated chapter-within-a-chap-
ter recounting the past of the Japanese assassin O-ren. In their use of parallel
chaptering and shifting viewpoints, the films again recall the Parker template.
But unlike Westlake, Tarantino inserts a tell-all flashback at the climax. Under
the sway of truth serum, the Bride explains to Bill and to us that she defected
because she was pregnant. Again, the denouement depends on solving a
mystery.
In sum, the blocks in most Tarantino films achieve traditional effects. When
they rearrange chronology, that tactic promotes suspense, compares characters
and situations, and holds back a secret until the climax. These maneuvers don’t
inspire the intense response I encountered among others watching Pulp Fiction.
Confronted with the revelations of The Hateful 8 or Kill Bill, we might say “aha”
but not ahhh. Pulp Fiction uses block construction not to create suspense but to
create a surprise—a surprise not about the story world but about the manner
of narration itself.20
Like a Stark novel, Pulp Fiction consists of four blocks, with three of them
bearing chapter titles. The second block gathers all the characters who will
dominate the film’s plot: Vincent, Jules, Butch, Marcellus, and Mia. Along with
secondary characters Fabienne, Zed, Maynard, Jimmy, and Mr. Wolf, this group
constitutes the film’s network. And somewhat as the novel Laura is a block-
based anthology of mystery genres (effete sleuth, hard-boiled cop, woman in
peril), Pulp Fiction juxtaposes plot schemas centering on contract killing, prize-
fight corruption, and a clumsy heist.
 370 PA RT I I I

As in the True Romance screenplay, one long block has been shifted out of
order. That screenplay had skipped over the lovers’ meet-cute and Clarence’s
killing of Drexl, reinserting those incidents when the couple explain past events
to their LA friend. Similarly, the first section of Reservoir Dogs skips over the
robbery that we will see more of in the third part. But in those cases the gaps
are signaled more or less explicitly. Pulp Fiction instead plays down its ellipsis.
The first, untagged chapter ends with a fade-out as Jules and Vincent empty
their pistols into the preppy. We might not sense that anything important that
follows has been omitted, especially because we soon see the pair bring Marcel-
lus the briefcase. At this point, some viewers might notice that the hitmen are
now dressed like dorks. The same viewers might note that when the bartender
mentions their clothes and asks how things are going they brush off the ques-
tions. For these viewers, there has been a minor but noteworthy gap that they
could look forward to filling.
Other viewers probably don’t dwell on these anomalies. The entry of
Vincent and Jules is handled obliquely: they walk away from us, mutter their
replies to the bartender, and become subsidiary elements in the scene. We’ve
already been tasked with following the much more interesting monologue of
a silky baritone threatening Butch from off-screen. Soon there’s a new atten-
tion-grabbing moment at the bar, when Vincent calls Butch “Punchy” and
foreshadows their clash in the third chapter.
Whether we notice the anomalies or not, the film’s fourth chapter, “The
Bonnie Situation,” eventually fills the gap between the preppy slaughter and
the hitmen’s arrival in the bar. This chapter shows Vincent and Jules finishing
off the preppies, grabbing the briefcase, accidentally killing Marvin, and clean-
ing the car with the help of Winston Wolf. (That’s how the pair wound up
wearing shorts and T-shirts when they reported to Marcellus.) Then they retire
to the coffee shop, where they halt the robbery launched by Honey Bunny and
Pumpkin. From there they set out to Marcellus’s bar. Essentially one long block
has been snipped out of the first chapter and pasted into the last. Table 12.3
illustrates the geometrical structure.
This is a pretty radical shift. In the third chapter, we’ve seen Butch win the
fight, return to Fabienne, retrieve his father’s watch, and kill Vincent. Then
Butch and Marcellus are captured. Butch escapes, rescues Marcellus, and flees
town with Fabienne. In the chronology of the story world, the last event to take
place is the couple’s departure.
Reservoir Dogs devotes its third section to a string of Mr. Orange flash-
backs before returning to the warehouse confrontation, but Pulp Fiction dares
something more unusual. It puts its flashbacks in the final chapter and never
returns to the present-tense frame of the action.21 If we think back while
watching Vincent clean the car and defend the virtues of pork products, we
would realize that he will be killed by Butch. Postponing the diner scene puts
 Tarantino, Twists, and the Persistence of Puzzles 371

Table 12.3 Quentin Tarantino, Pulp Fiction (1994)

Prologue: Honey Bunny and Pumpkin plan and launch robbery.

Credits.
Part One “Vincent Vega and “The Gold Watch” “The Bonnie Situation”:
Marcellus Wallace’s Wife”
Flashbacks fill ellipsis at
end of Part One.
POV attached to Jules POV split between Butch POV attached to Butch POV attached to Jules
and Vincent and Vincent and Vincent
Jules and Vincent Bar: Marcellus orders FB: Butch as child FB: Jules and Vincent
kill double-crossing Butch to throw fight. receives father’s watch. kill fourth preppy and
preppies. Marvin.
[Ellipsis suppressing Jules and Vincent bring Night: Butch wins FB: Mr. Wolf helps them
“The Bonnie Situation” Marcellus the briefcase. prizefight and returns clean up.
and the Prologue.] to Fabienne.
Next day: Vincent visits Morning: Butch FB: Diner: Jules declares
Lance to get heroin. retrieves watch from he will leave criminal
his apartment and kills life. After off-screen
Vincent. Leaving, he replay of Prologue, Jules
runs down Marcellus and Vincent confront
and crashes his car. Pumpkin and Honey
Bunny. They swagger
out of diner.
Night: Vincent takes Mia Street: Butch and
Wallace out for dinner. Marcellus are captured
by Zed and Maynard.
Butch rescues Marcellus,
who forgives him.
Mia overdoses and Vincent Butch flees town with
saves her. Fabienne.

Note: Story events are chronological within and between parts unless otherwise noted. Chronological sequences within chapters
are shown in roman type; flashbacks (FB) are shown in boldface type.

climactic weight on Jules’s decision to leave his life of crime—a decision that
Vincent won’t make, with fatal results. Once more, the self-assurance of cool is
somewhat chastened.
But there’s more to Jules’s decision, and that involves his refusal to turn
over the briefcase to the diner robbers. This gesture leads us to the film’s other
time shifting maneuver, placement of the Pumpkin-Honey Bunny dialogue
 372 PA RT I I I

at the beginning. Another variant of the miscreant couples in Reservoir Dogs

and Natural Born Killers, this pair is quietly quarreling over the best target of
armed robbery: liquor stores, banks, or maybe a coffee shop? We’re initiated
into the film by watching them spring to their feet to announce their heist
(see fig. 0.3).
This prologue is replayed, partially off-screen, in the final chapter when
Jules is eating breakfast and Vincent is in the toilet. Just as one long block
of action from the beginning has been pushed to the end, now a triggering
incident from that block has been previewed at the outset of the movie. In
this respect, it’s a more flamboyant equivalent of Mr. Pink’s flashback to the
robbery in the first portion of Reservoir Dogs, which also serves as a preview,
pointing toward the heist glimpsed later. But the replay of Honey Bunny and
Pumpkin calling the diner patrons to attention also helps us sort out story
order, like the off-screen repetition of Jules’s self-righteous scripture-quoting
before the lurking preppy’s assault.
The sudden return of this casually larcenous couple provokes the ahhh
response because we’ve probably forgotten about the opening. After all, the
scene ended more than two hours earlier. It was cut off by rousing credits
and engaging action, and it was never referred to again. Reading is forgetting,
Roland Barthes remarks in S/Z, but in many cases we might say that reading
is forgetting until we’re reminded.22 As a bonus, the return of the first scene
we encountered creates a satisfying rounding-off; the robbery launched at the
beginning finds a conclusion in the film’s last moments, which keeps the brief-
case ready to be delivered to Marcellus.
The replayed prologue in Pulp Fiction is a step beyond Stark; the Parker
books never yank a scene out of order and make it a forgettable prologue.
The closest analogue I know is what Fredric Brown, one of the more eccentric
crime novelists, offers in The Far Cry (1951). The book begins with a woman
fleeing a knife-wielding attacker. Apparently unrelated scenes follow. Is this
prologue a flashback to be explained as such, or is it a flash forward to an
upcoming piece of action? Eventually, the plot leads to a final replay of this
initial action, with the book closing itself in a circle as it exposes the identity
of the attacker. But A Far Cry flaunts this device more vividly than does
Tarantino’s film. The prologue is given saliency by being printed in italics,
and the whole scene is repeated about eighty pages in (as the narration asks:
“Could he start the story there?”). The reader is teased to anticipate that the
enigmatic opening will be explained.
By encouraging viewers to forget its first scene, Pulp Fiction gives us some-
thing rare and powerful. Simply pulling one scene from its normal sequence
and putting it at the beginning, without fanfare, produces unexpectedly
strong results. Here Tarantino uses block construction not to fill in a gap in
the action but to nudge us to recognize how the story has been presented
 Tarantino, Twists, and the Persistence of Puzzles 373

to us. After seeing the whole film, we might need some time to reconstruct
the chronology, but in the moment the click effect of the coffee shop replay
makes us aware of how we have been engaged, mostly unawares, by structure
and narration. In this respect, Tarantino creates a prototype of what later
will be celebrated as the “twist.”

Tarantino and the Twist

Westlake’s Parker novels pushed beyond 1940s plot schemas, and Tarantino
pushed beyond Westlake. The worldwide success of Pulp Fiction shows that,
once time shifting becomes familiar to audiences, storytellers in the popular
tradition can continually extend the schemas in circulation.
A media archaeologist could find traces of many other films, plays, comic
books, TV shows, and items of prose fiction in Tarantino’s work. Merely hunt-
ing down Tarantino’s specific citations has kept fans and scholars busy for years.
More broadly, the violence unleashed within his story worlds builds on the
escalation of cinematic gore that was especially pronounced from the 1960s
onward. The characterization of his petty crooks and con artists relies on the
hard-boiled tradition from Hammett to Leonard and beyond. Chaptered films
have a long history, most notably in another object of Tarantino adoration,
Jean-Luc Godard. But broad audiences were able to take Pulp Fiction’s tagged
segments in stride because they had encountered the technique in resolutely
mainstream films such as The Sting (1973) and the viewer-friendly Hannah and
Her Sisters (1985).
As usual, familiarity balances innovation. The conventions of a crime-
centered plot help the viewer understand Pulp Fiction’s narrative strategies (just
as awareness of the undercover-cop and heist schemas anchor the time shuf-
fling of Reservoir Dogs). We can grasp the emerging situations quickly because
we recognize the daring daylight robbery, the stolen briefcase containing some-
thing precious, the hitmen on a mission, the thrown prizefight, and the figure
of the all-powerful crime boss. The crime film has been a mainstay of American
and British cinema at all budget levels, and before Tarantino’s debut a host of
detective and gangster films reiterated conventions that ambitious filmmakers
could exploit: Francis Ford Coppola with The Conversation (1974), Brian De
Palma with Scarface (1983), Abel Ferrara with King of New York (1990), and
many others. In 1994, the year of Pulp Fiction, suspense thrillers Disclosure and
Speed and the hired-killer movie Leon the Professional were released, along with
Oliver Stone’s version of Natural Born Killers.
Although Tarantino denied that he was indebted to the neo-noir trend of
the 1970s and 1980s, there seems no doubt that viewers could see affinities
with Pulp Fiction. From flat remakes such as The Big Sleep (1978) and earnest
 374 PA RT I I I

pastiches such as Body Heat (1981) to eccentric mockery (The Long Goodbye,
1973), American cinema had revised the hard-boiled tradition. The self-con-
sciousness of this trend was epitomized in Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982), a
satiric collage of classic scenes linked by original scenes designed in 1940s style.
The retro sensibility was given its strongest insider cachet by a filmmaking
duo widely seen as Tarantino’s predecessors. Joel and Ethan Coen built their
careers on grotesquely comic takes on familiar mystery genres. Well before
Pulp Fiction they offered Blood Simple (1985), a suspense thriller reminiscent
of Double Indemnity, and Miller’s Crossing (1990), a blend of Red Harvest and
The Glass Key (figs. 12.5–12.6). Bungled kidnap plots afforded the Coens oppor-
tunity to parody family comedies (Raising Arizona, 1987), mock police proce-
dure in the hinterlands (Fargo, 1996), and satirize studio era Hollywood (Hail,
Caesar!, 2016). They also filmed a doom-thriller in the James M. Cain mode
(The Man Who Wasn’t There, 2001), a comic heist film (The Ladykillers, 2004),
a bloody police chase (No Country for Old Men, 2007), and a spy caper (Burn
After Reading, 2008).
A good example of the Coens’ absurdist revisionism is The Big Lebowski
(1998), which brings a plot of Chandlerian intricacy into the Gulf War era.
The detective is the hapless Dude, a stoned idler lured into a ransom scheme
by a ferocious millionaire. Marlowe-fashion, he is repeatedly confronted by
men coming in with guns. He is beaten senseless and plunged into surrealistic
dreams. When the Dude meets a real private eye, a shabby shamus tailing him,
he’s told, “It’s a wandering daughter job,” a quotation from a Continental Op
short story. These citations are exaggerated by the sheer grotesquerie on dis-
play: a nymphomaniac wife, a Katharine-Hepburnesque experimental artist, a
raging philosemitic Vietnam vet, a gang of German nihilists, and a pedophile
bowler named Jesus. The hard-boiled voice-over narration is supplied, bizarrely,
by a drawling cowboy drinking at the bowling alley the Dude frequents.
The Coens’ success indicates how firmly the crime film had settled into inde-
pendent American cinema. After Pulp Fiction the impulse would attract many
directors, most notably Bryan Singer with The Usual Suspects (1995) and Chris-
topher Nolan with Following (1998) and Memento (2000).
Throughout all these films, the familiarity of mystery conventions throws
new storytelling strategies into relief. For instance, the investigation plots of
Following and Memento enable us to grasp their complicated flashback pattern-
ing. Nonlinear time schemes had long been made easy to grasp in courtroom
dramas, police interrogations, and man-on-the-run memories. By the time
Pulp Fiction arrived, The Fugitive (1993) had shown that audiences could han-
dle a barrage of flashbacks that constantly interrupt present-day events with
ever-changing glimpses of a murder in the past. Tarantino’s films played out
before audiences who were fairly well-versed in time shifting tactics and pre-
pared to register fresh options.
 Tarantino, Twists, and the Persistence of Puzzles 375

12.5 Miller’s Crossing (1990): Hammett’s clue of Taylor Henry’s lost hat in The Glass Key becomes
a motif drifting through the protagonist’s dream . . .

12.6 . . . and prefiguring a gesture in the final shot.

Likewise, the persistence of the anthology film in the off-Hollywood sphere

invited filmmakers to find ingenious ways to link discrete story lines. Richard
Linklater’s Slacker (1991) offered a simple propinquity structure, with one story
halting near a character who would launch the next one. Jim Jarmusch’s Night
on Earth (1991) consisted of three episodes taking place in the same evening in
different countries. In Mystery Train (1989), Jarmusch bound the segments in
a more laminated fashion: three blocks share the moment when a gun is fired.
 376 PA RT I I I

Although Pulp Fiction was first planned as a portmanteau film, it became, as the
screenplay calls it, “Three Stories . . . About One Story.”23
Tarantino gave as much as he took. Pulp Fiction helped nonlinear pat-
terning and block construction capture filmmakers’ imaginations around the
world. Whatever the degree of direct influence, the film became emblematic
of a new narrative flexibility in Anglophone cinema, typified by The Usual
Suspects, Flirt (1995), Trainspotting (1995), Hard Eight (1996), L. A. Confi-
dential (1997), Boogie Nights (1997), Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels
(1998), Out of Sight (1998), Magnolia (1999), and Go (1999). Many films both
inside and outside the mystery genre would continue to juggle time, to shift
viewpoints unpredictably, to present multiple drafts of certain incidents, to
organize plots in solid blocks, and to expose connections among disparate
story lines. Examples are Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), The
Prestige (2006), A Perfect Getaway (2009), The Social Network (2010), Source
Code (2011), and Moonrise Kingdom (2012). More recently La La Land (2016),
Arrival (2016), Dunkirk (2017), Molly’s Game (2017), Atomic Blonde (2017),
Bad Times at the El Royale (2018), Rocketman (2019), and Wrath of Man (2021)
remind us that this dynamic of schema and revision is far from finished. It
is this expanding variorum that manuals like Linda Aronson’s Twenty-First
Century Screenplay try to map.
“Pulp Fiction stuns with the glib twists of its plot,” wrote a reviewer.24 In
the 1990s, with the rise of narrative self-consciousness and with “form as the
new content,” critics and viewers came to assign a new importance to sudden
reveals, jarring reversals, and other forms of surprise. The term “plot twist,”
apparently seldom used before the 1960s, jumped in frequency during the
1990s and soared in the new century.25 But what do we mean when we say that
a narrative has a twist?
To some extent, current tastes have rehabilitated the role of narrative sur-
prise. As we’ve seen, drama theorists after Lessing saw more artistic skill and
deeper audience engagement in an intensifying suspense (“enduring disqui-
etude”) than in a sudden shock that soon wore off. Of course, surprise must
play some role, especially in raising the stakes of suspense, as in Hugo’s play
Cromwell, which alternates between the two states, or as we saw in The Lady
Vanishes (see chapter 5). Today, however, it seems that in place of what Lessing
called “short surprises” audiences prefer big ones, major turns of action: twists.
As used by critics and audiences, the concept is broad enough to include
almost anything that is surprising in a story. To capture one intuitive difference,
we might distinguish between story world twists and narrational ones. A twist
in the story world would consist of a discrete incident that violates our expec-
tations. A pure case would be that of a sudden natural event, such as a tornado
or an illness besetting a character. Many twists are one-off incidents occurring
accidentally or having causes too remote or minor to be relevant, as when a
 Tarantino, Twists, and the Persistence of Puzzles 377

coincidence reveals new information to a character. (Think of all the conve-

nient moments when a character overhears a crucial plot point.)
A more drastic twist occurs when the narration violates an informational
norm and suppresses basic premises about the story world. A tornado or ill-
ness or an overheard conversation wouldn’t violate any fundamental premises
of the story world; such things just happen, especially in stories. In contrast, a
narrational twist tends to make us reappraise the status of what we’ve been told
earlier. The story world twist tends to be one-off, the narrational twist reveals a
hidden pattern.
The clichéd example of the narrational twist is the story that ends, “And then
I woke up.” This “ontological” twist recasts our understanding of the status of
the whole fiction, admittedly in a throwaway manner. A comic example is the
metafictional reframing of Seven Keys to Baldpate (1913), which overturns our
assumptions about the existence of the action we’ve seen. More grimly, the film
The Sixth Sense (1999) reveals that the protagonist, a pediatric psychologist
studying a troubled boy who “sees dead people,” is himself a ghost. In both
cases, we have taken for granted premises that aren’t operative, and the plot
takes a very different shape. We’re back to Christie’s reminder: It’s not unfair to
leave things out.
In literary history, the narrational twist is often identified with the commer-
cial development of the American short story, particularly in the hands of O.
Henry.26 The “sting in the tail” form can be traced back to Poe’s edict that the
short story, aiming at a single vivid impression, ought to build to it in its final
pages. But in novels and films, twists can come rather early in the plot, or in the
middle, as well as at the end. You can argue that the film Psycho (1960) has two
narrational twists. One, arriving fairly early, kills off the protagonist. Posed at
first as a mystery, it’s later revealed as part of a pattern of narrational suppres-
sion. That hidden pattern comes to light in the second twist, when the finale
reveals the true identity of Norman Bates’s mother.27
All genres have exploited twists, but mystery plots and thrillers of the post-
war era have been especially drawn toward them. As viewers became more
familiar with the conventions, storytellers sought new ways to create surprise.
Psycho as both book and film is a central example, but so is Ira Levin’s novel A
Kiss Before Dying (1953). Its narration incorporates a drastic twist at the end
of the second part, when the identity of the “he” of the first two parts reveals
a wholly different pattern of motive and identity than the earlier portions
had suggested. The investigation plot of The Conversation (1974) coaxes us to
assume that, although we’re attached to surveillance expert Harry Caul, we are
not registering his thoughts (except during his dream). We think we hear what
his microphone picks up, but it’s actually his interpretation of the fatal line of
dialogue. The twist reveals that the narration has been subjective to an unex-
pected degree.28
 378 PA RT I I I

As in the whodunit, the narration-driven twist depends on the viewer get-

ting insufficient information, taking too much for granted, or failing to realize
that certain incidents can be construed in nonobvious ways. With Christie’s
Murder of Roger Ackroyd, we’re inclined to assume that the Watsonian narrator
is trustworthy and that he isn’t skipping over or misdescribing certain events.
But once we know he’s the killer, we can check back and discover that certain
passages prepared for it but were designed to misdirect us.
Similarly, in The Sixth Sense, we take for granted that all the characters are
on the same ontological plane. In most supernatural stories, if a ghost might
be abroad, we are told. Having suppressed this information, the scenes of Dr.
Crowe with other characters must allow for the possibility that the protagonist
isn’t apparent to them. Through stylistic choices about staging and shooting,
the narration finds clever ways to justify the characters’ failures to address him
(figs. 12.7–12.8).
Such films show that for craft-conscious storytellers the twist aesthetic
appeals to the fair-play tenet of the Golden Age mystery. Just as we ought to
be able to page back and spot how a certain clue or description led us astray,
so we should be able to notice hints and suggestions that, read properly, antic-
ipated the twist. In The Sting we’re informed of the plan to gull gambler Doyle
Lonnegan, but we’re not told of the backup system that sends fake FBI agents
raiding the betting parlor. We take them as actual agents, so we’re momentar-
ily misled into thinking that the con has failed. But if we care to revisit earlier
scenes, we can find a hint about the FBI sting to be pulled on Lonnegan, and us

12.7 The Sixth Sense (1999): A scene begins with Cole’s mother and Dr. Crowe sitting in silence, as if
there has been a pause in their conversation. The symmetrical framing also suggests that Crowe is as
“present” as the mother.
 Tarantino, Twists, and the Persistence of Puzzles 379

12.8 In a restaurant, Crowe’s wife is eating alone, but her apparent indifference to him is most easily
construed as a sign of their troubled marriage.

(figs. 12.9–12.10). Determined viewers of The Conversation and Psycho should

be able to go back to spots where they were misled.
The Sixth Sense offers a glaring hint that is striking only in retrospect. The
boy Cole criticizes the efforts of Dr. Crowe to tell a bedtime story. “You have
to add some twists and stuff.” In classic whodunits, the detective would review
the clues we misinterpreted. In this film, as in other twist movies, the narration

12.9 The Sting (1973): As part of the “big con,” Johnny Hooker is apparently shot during the FBI raid,
and a trickle of blood from his mouth seems to confirm his death.
 380 PA RT I I I

12.10 When Hooker spruces up for the big con, we see him bite on something small and then slip it
into his pocket. Later we’ll realize it must have been a blood capsule to be released during the gunplay.

provides quick flashbacks reviewing the hints we missed. Our storytellers still
adhere to Golden Age strictures about “fair play.”
As we’d expect, storytellers compete to find surprising schema revisions.
We are back to the process outlined by Jean-Claude Carrière whereby film-
makers and viewers adapt “to forms of expression which briefly seem daring
but quickly become commonplace.”29 The churn, as we now call it, demands
ever-bolder twists. In Obsession (1976), Vertigo turns incestuous; the revelation
in Dressed to Kill (1980) goes Psycho one better. After the investigating photog-
rapher in Blowup (1966) arranged and enlarged still pictures, the audio engi-
neer in The Conversation cleaned up his “nice fat tape.” In Blow-Out (1966),
the sound recordist added still photographs to create his own stop-motion
movie reconstruction. The variorum grows, switcheroos pile up, and fan con-
noisseurship follows.
What, then, about Pulp Fiction? The “glib twists” heralded by the reviewer
include many surprises. Mia overdoses, Butch kills Vincent, Butch runs
down Marcellus, the two men are captured by two predatory hillbillies, and
Vincent accidentally shoots Marvin. But two twists bear less on the unex-
pected. Tarantino’s big twists do something rare: they resettle the overall
architecture of the film.
First, after Vincent is shot down and Butch has returned to Fabienne, we
get a fourth block, “The Bonnie Situation,” in which Vincent is alive again. The
replay of the preppy massacre helps prepare us for the time shift, but it seems
likely that for many viewers this flashback counts as a jolt. (A friend tells me
 Tarantino, Twists, and the Persistence of Puzzles 381

that the packed theater he was in reacted with murmurs.) We took for granted
that nothing important was skipped over at the end of the first shootout. Yet
one can, as we’ve seen, scrub back through the film and find the giveaways
during Vincent and Jules’s visit to the bar in the first part.
Pulp Fiction’s second twist comes with the ahhh reaction I signaled earlier:
the realization that the prologue with Pumpkin and Honey Bunny is now being
replayed. This doesn’t require any elaborate checking back. We now more or
less remember the scene, and we simply realize that it was a preview of action
we’ll see later.

✳✳✳

Both of these twists tease us, during viewing or afterward, to assemble the
film’s chronology and thus appreciate the cleverness of the whole construction.
We’re pushed to ask: Why end the film with Jules’s redemption and Vincent’s
moment of comradely triumph? Perhaps it’s another puncturing of coolness.
No longer snappy dressers, the hitmen now strut toward a parting of the ways,
one toward death and the other, perhaps, to “wandering the Earth” like Caine
in Kung Fu. Yet there’s a residual coolness in the texture and form of the film
itself, something that lets audiences congratulate themselves on understand-
ing a puzzle of narrative structure that others won’t get.
Media historian Jeff Sconce considers Pulp Fiction an example of “smart cin-
ema,” a group of 1990s films that celebrate “an aura of ‘intelligence’ that distin-
guishes them (and their audiences) from the perceived ‘dross’ (and ‘rabble’) of
the mainstream multiplex.”30 Central to this smartness, Jason Mittell suggests,
is the “operational aesthetic,” in which admiring audiences “watch the gears at
work marveling at the craft required to pull off such narrative pyrotechnics.”31
I’d add that the formal cleverness that the hip viewers savor is first cousin to
the ingenuity that John Dickson Carr and Ben Hecht praised in Golden Age
whodunits. We get the same “hoodwinking contest”—a display of virtuosity, a
challenge to the reader (viewer), a conspiratorial invitation to share the logic of
creative choices, and above all a spur to solve a mystery not of crime and pun-
ishment but of artistic form.
The domestic psychological thriller of recent years might not seem to
have the same aura of cleverness, but it too invites the audience to join a
self-conscious game of form. These connoisseurs, as demanding as fans of
gunplay and neo-noir, want fresh twists.
 CHAPTER 13

GONE GIRLS
The New Domestic Thriller

T
hriller novels of all sorts were common before World War II, but
they moved onto U.S. best-seller lists very gradually. Ian Fleming
and John le Carré spy stories gained a wide audience in the 1960s
and remained perennial. In the 1970s, horror exercises such as The Exorcist and
Jaws set the keynote for comparable works by Stephen King, Anne Rice, and
others. The 1990s saw legal thrillers by Scott Turow and John Grisham gain
prominence, along with military thrillers by Tom Clancy, scientific thrillers
by Michael Crichton, and forensic thrillers by Patricia Cornwell and Richard
Patterson. Many were hybrids that mixed detection-driven investigation plots
with parallel action attached to killers or targets.
Psychological thrillers by Mary Higgins Clark had been New York Times
best-sellers, but Gone Girl was the first “domestic suspense” novel since the
1940s to crack the Publisher’s Weekly top ten in annual sales. Published in June
2012, it sold nearly two million copies that year, and the 2014 film jolted the U.S.
box office to life. Two years later the novel had accumulated sales of more than
nine million copies in forty-one languages. And unlike most best-sellers, it was
praised for making some serious social points.
Gillian Flynn had found middling success with two previous thrillers that
showed a mind immersed in popular culture. As a shy child, she had been a
keen reader and movie fan; her father, a film professor, shared Jaws, Psycho,
Alien, and other modern classics with her. Flynn claims she was reading screen-
plays at age twelve. After trying straight journalism, she spent ten years review-
ing movies and television for Entertainment Weekly. David Fincher, director of
 Gone Girls 383

Gone Girl, called Flynn “that popcorn-munching girl in the second row craning
her neck to see the whole screen at Cinerama Dome.”1
Many crime writers build their plots from actual cases, but Flynn tracks the
conventions of fiction, movies, and TV. Inspired by Hitchcock’s Psycho and
Dennis Lehane’s novel Mystic River, Flynn based Gone Girl on a primal genre
situation: a man is suspected of killing his wife. Amy Elliott and Nick Dunne
are hip writers hoping to rise in the Manhattan slick-magazine world. But both
lose their jobs in the 2008 recession, and Nick’s mother’s cancer forces them to
relocate to his Missouri home town. Their marriage frays. One day Amy disap-
pears, leaving behind traces of a bloody struggle.
So far, so conventional. The controversy arose because Flynn turns the cen-
tral situation into a grim diagnosis of the failures of love. Amy and Nick are
striving urban sophisticates—smart, eloquent, sexy, and ironically self-aware.
But their intelligence and social adroitness simply give them more weapons to
use against each other.
One theme becomes the ultimate unknowability of one’s partner. With so
many images out there, we fashion identities that may not correspond with our
uncertain, defensive selves. Flynn noted: “They each have a certain persona
that they may have created and as that gets dismantled, what does that reveal?”2
Suave Nick ultimately lacks ambition and a sense of responsibility, and witty
Amy reveals herself as manipulative and deceptive on a colossal scale.
As Amy and Nick fight through their relationship, the very nature of mar-
riage is put into question too. Amy starts with a trust fund established by her
parents and based on their children’s books starring a disgustingly perfect
prodigy called Amazing Amy. Nick feels that Amy uses her money as a cudgel,
but he forces her to move away from New York, plunging her into heartland
purgatory. They argue about income, jobs, and having children. Worse than
being unhappy, it seems, is being conventionally unhappy, becoming the stan-
dard issue surly husband and nagging wife. Because of their hyperintelligence,
their marriage becomes a string of needling insinuations and sulking truces.
Flynn’s other main inspiration, she says, was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Commenters eagerly took up the theme of unhappy overachievers. “Gone
Girl’s Biggest Villain Is Marriage Itself,” ran a typical headline, and one reviewer
followed up Flynn’s warning about the danger of “confusing persona with per-
sonality.”3 As a journalist who had interviewed filmmakers promoting new
releases, Flynn knew the advantages of alerting the press to issues that could
trigger think pieces. Quentin Tarantino and other directors had proven adept at
angling press coverage. As director Claude Chabrol once explained, “You have
to help the critics over their notices, right?”4
But catchy themes weren’t enough to yield a massive best-seller. The book’s
force also depended on its form. Gone Girl is woven out of two voices. Nick’s
first-person account begins when Amy disappears. His daily updates initially
 384 PA RT I I I

alternate between excerpts from her diary stretching back to their courtship
and Amy’s first-person accounts after she’s gone. The he said/she said architec-
ture stretches back at least to Dinah Craik’s A Life for a Life (1859). This device
can lay bare characters’ plans, reactions, and self-scrutiny, while prodding us to
reflect on their faults and virtues. Our sense of the quiet fury of the Dunne mar-
riage comes largely from these first-person ruminations. Amy’s diary excerpts
also recall the document-dossier format exploited by Wilkie Collins and other
nineteenth-century writers and revamped in the alternating blocks of character
viewpoint in the 1930s and 1940s.
But Flynn reworked these strategies in startling ways. One editor com-
plained of other books’ “tremendously soggy middles. This book’s middle was
an incredible, extraordinary hammer blow.” Another editor gave Gone Girl to
an author as “homework—to learn about plot structure.”5 Flynn’s manner of
telling yielded not only empathy and suspense but a shocking surprise. There
was, in the jargon of the trade, a twist.
The twist was not merely a reversal of fortune or a surprise revelation of a
past misdeed. It cast the Dunne marriage in a new and even more damaging
light. To dissect a duplicitous couple, Flynn constructed a duplicitous narra-
tion. To present characters who deceive each other, she created narrators who
mislead the reader. Tracing the fate of Nick and Amy became a game of wits
between author and audience, just as in Golden Age mysteries. In the end, the
cunning of Gone Girl’s storytelling would help ignite a cycle of popular fiction
that shows little sign of flagging.

Deadlier Than the Male (Novelist)

The huge success of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) and Patrick Hamilton’s
play Gas Light (1938) made the gynocentric thriller respectable. At a time when
the “masculine” forms of police procedural and heist story were only beginning
to emerge, publishers in England and the United States eagerly supported what
was coming to be called “domestic suspense.”
This development encouraged female authors. Some, most notably Patricia
Highsmith, moved freely into the minds of male killers. But Margaret Millar,
Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, Charlotte Armstrong, Dorothy Salisbury Davis, and
many other women novelists gave the vulnerable-heroine premise new life. It
slipped quickly into other media, as in the 1943 radio play Sorry, Wrong Number
by Lucille Fletcher, and Suspicion (1941), Hitchcock’s film version of Before the
Fact. The premise flourished in Hollywood films of the 1940s and would prove
to be a robust option for decades, notably in Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965), Wait
Until Dark (1967), Double Jeopardy (1999), What Lies Beneath (2000), and Safe
Haven (2013).
 Gone Girls 385

The central motif of the woman in peril was open to many variations. Before
the Fact, Rebecca, and Gas Light restrict us to the wife’s range of knowledge, but
Sanxay Holding’s Lady Killer (1945) presents the situation from a bystander’s
viewpoint. A woman caught in an unhappy marriage feels endangered on a
Caribbean cruise, but she learns that she’s not a target. Instead, a bigamous fel-
low passenger is attempting to kill his second wife, who responds by murdering
the man’s first wife, who’s been posing as an innocent traveler. The homicidal
couple leaves the ship, with each one likely to eliminate the other. The uncertain
ending reminds us that the title cuts both ways: a man may be a lady-killer, but
the lady can be a killer too.
The Gothic tradition often featured an innocent woman lured into a mansion
teeming with dangers and overseen by a mysterious, often attractive master.
This setting reappears in the somber Manderley of Rebecca and the overbearing
household of Gas Light. But the modern thriller usually centers on suburbia
and the city. The dashing husband or lover is now an apparently caring, sensi-
tive executive or professor or artist. Yet in this genre of “domestic suspense,” the
cozy household turns threatening. The emotions of fear, dread, and uncertainty
characteristic of the woman-in-peril genre are channeled into a recognition of
the limited social options available to wives and daughters.
Just as the classic Gothic relied on dramatizing a forbidding house, for
the modern Gothics, details of bed and board matter. The protagonist of
Nedra Tyre’s The Death of an Intruder (1953) is a meek woman who inherits
a cottage. She comes to new life by furnishing and decorating it. But when
her home is invaded by a guest who won’t leave, she’s forced to watch her
beloved figurines and Matisse reproductions coldly taken away. The runaway
wife of Nancy Price’s Sleeping with the Enemy (1987) is characterized in part
through food. While hiding in a small town, she’s at first forced to live on
oatmeal and catsup. Once she gets a job, she can return to cooking her favorite
dishes. In the 1991 film version, groceries become a warning. Laura learns that
her obsessive-compulsive husband has found her when she discovers that her
canned goods have been neatly stacked in the way that he likes them. A woman’s
life can be menaced by a rearranged cupboard.
Within the routines of housekeeping, meeting friends, holding neighbor-
hood parties, and ferrying the children to school and play dates, the wife finds
herself facing peril. After an expectant mother exposes an abusive gynecolo-
gist in the film The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992), she becomes the target
of his vengeful widow. Posing as a nanny, the widow tries to take over the
family by planting suspicions of infidelity and mobilizing a battery of everyday
items—baby monitor, breast pump, asthma inhalers—as weapons against the
trusting wife.6
When the protagonist is more aware of her danger, the veneer cracks. She
learns that the family around which she has built her life is threatened by an
 386 PA RT I I I

unfaithful husband, a blackmailer, or another woman. She’s tempted to take the

blame. Is she too cold or too warm? Is she spoiling her children or neglecting
them? Should she accept her partner’s bouts of drinking or try to make him
shape up?
Celia Fremlin’s The Hours Before Dawn (1958) exploits domestic guilt and
inadequacy to the fullest. Louise is a lower-middle-class woman suffocating under
the routines of raising obstreperous toddlers, pleasing an oblivious husband,
quieting a baby who screams through the night, and fending off chattering
neighbors. Everything from the jam stain on the carpet to Louise’s drab coveralls
accuses her of being a poor wife and mother. Half asleep every day, she can hardly
meet the challenge of the poised, coldly pleasant roomer Miss Brandon, who
seems to be seducing her husband. When Louise’s baby goes missing, the waking
dreams that haunt her are realized.
In The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and The Hours Before Dawn, the rival’s
hidden motives drive the plot. But the wife may have her own secrets. Consider
Mary Higgins Clark’s Where Are the Children? (1975). Nancy Eldridge is living
in Provincetown with her husband Ray and her children Mike and Missy.
Seven years earlier, during her first marriage, her children were murdered and
she was convicted by circumstantial evidence and her own numb reluctance
to fight. Only the disappearance of a key witness allowed her conviction to be
overturned. Her husband Carl committed suicide. Nancy started over under a
false identity and found happiness in her second marriage. But then her children
Mike and Missy disappear on the same day that the local newspaper runs a
story revealing her past.
Nancy retreats into shock and despair, and the local police are all too ready
to charge her with the new abductions. Not until a local doctor administers
sodium amytal does Nancy recall more of the old crime and the new one. In the
meantime, Rob Legler, the missing witness from years ago, is roaming the town
and becomes an alternative suspect.
The action unfolds in fewer than twenty-four hours, and the book’s narration
shifts rapidly among many characters in third-person mode. We get access
to the thoughts of Nancy, husband Ray, Ray’s assistant Dorothy, the good
Dr. Miles, retired lawyer Knowles, police chief Coffin, and townspeople who
notice incidents that bear on the kids’ disappearance. Most teasingly, we’re
presented with the actions and thoughts of the mysterious man renting a vast
house across the Bay and spying on Nancy’s family with a telescope. Early on
we learn that this giggling pedophile is the one who has kidnapped Mike and
Missy. The suspense derives from the question of how he can be caught before
he harms, and eventually kills, them. And by the way: Who is he?
Where Are the Children? interrupts the kidnap crisis with brief flashbacks
to fill us in on the first crime. Bits of backstory reveal the tightly knit com-
munity of Provincetown. For the most part, the men are the active players,
 Gone Girls 387

with Dr. Miles and the lawyer Knowles teaming with Ray to defend Nancy.
The other women, Dorothy and assorted housewives, pick up on clues to the
disappearance but are cowed by their husbands into dismissing their con-
cerns. At the climax, the women come forward to report to the police, and
Nancy realizes the importance of a dropped mitten and breaks away from
male supervision. She rushes to the house to save Mike and Missy. There she
learns that the kidnapper is her first husband, Carl. Seven years ago he killed
their children, pinned the blame on her, and faked his suicide.
The faked death, a constant in crime fiction and especially common in the
domestic thriller, is concealed from the reader by a narrational ploy. In the
early chapters, as we follow the action and thoughts of the kidnapper, he’s
referred to only as “he.” Halfway through, he gets a phone call from Dorothy,
who addresses him as Mr. Parrish, the name he used to rent his hideout.
When she brings a potential buyer to tour the house, she encounters him:
“She looked up and gasped and stared into the searching eyes and perspiring
face of the fourth-floor tenant, Courtney Parrish.”7 Because these chapters
attach us to Dorothy’s consciousness, the narration isn’t lying. To her, he is
Parrish. But thereafter, the novel’s narration calls him Courtney or Parrish,
even when we’re sharing his thoughts. This simple slippage misleads us and
creates the climactic twist.
Just as in the classic fair-play detective story, we should be able to turn
back and find the hints we missed. For example, the “he” of the early chapters
is well-acquainted with Nancy’s past, and he recalls that he first saw her on
campus. (Carl, we’ll learn later, was a professor.) In our first pass through the
book, we’ll probably skim over such nudges, but the fan/connoisseur will keep
an eye out for them, if only to be able to feel the pleasure of a game of wits like
that promoted by Golden Age whodunits. Books such as Eustis’s Horizontal
Man and Levin’s A Kiss Before Dying used the texture of prose to mislead us
in ways akin to the maneuvers of Christie and Carr. Hitchcock, Tarantino,
Shyamalan, and other filmmakers sought cinematic methods to suppress infor-
mation for the sake of twists. It is no surprise, then, that Mary Higgins Clark
and other writers applied the whodunits’ formal and stylistic maneuvers to
domestic thrillers as well.

Hopscotching Through the Past

Where Are the Children? is characteristic of the postwar domestic thriller in

another way. It’s fairly short; the thirty-one brief chapters, plus a prologue, add
up to about 65,000 words. Today publishers and literary agents expect most
popular novels to run 90,000 to 100,000 words or more. For this reason, as well
as others, the domestic thriller became more complex. Its basic conventions,
 388 PA RT I I I

particularly those bearing on exhuming the past, were given expanded, intri-
cate treatment.
A key figure in this change is Laura Lippman, a Baltimore-based novelist
who began with a series centered on private detective Tess Monaghan. She
edged into the suspense genre with Every Secret Thing (2003). Like a hybrid
1930s whodunit, it counterpoints an investigation plot with blocks devoted to
the lead-up to the crime. Two young women recently out of prison for murder-
ing a baby are accused in the death of another child. Across a number of months
and several viewpoint characters, the original circumstances are revealed.
With To the Power of Three (2005), Lippman expanded on the double-entry
plot structure, which would become her signature technique and a staple of the
genre. Again, police take a significant role, but the emphasis falls on three girls
involved in a shooting in a high school bathroom. The investigation is crosscut
with chapters that trace the girls’ friendship from third grade to their senior
year. In the process, the girls’ role in a student’s death is exposed as the source
of their violent confrontation.
The alternation of viewpoint from chapter to chapter, a schema we’ve
encountered throughout popular narrative, is a shaping force in Lippman’s
plots. What the Dead Know (2007) alternates another police inquiry with
clusters of chapters stretching back to 1975—again, showing how adolescent
behavior shapes what people become. Another convention of the thriller, the
enigmatic figure claiming to be a missing person, is put to good use.
From the angle of construction, Lippman can be seen as reviving R. Austin
Freeman’s “inverted tale.” But Freeman starts with a block showing the crime
planned and consummated, then follows that with another block tracing the
investigation and solution. Lippman breaks the lead-up to the crime into short
chapters, sometimes years apart, and intercuts those with the present-day
investigation. The result is a two-column grid structure.
One police team recurs in these three books, although they are assigned
increasingly minor roles. Lippman’s later books abandon the procedural
thread but retain an investigative premise. In Life Sentences (2009), the
detective is a writer with personal stakes in the quest. Cassandra Fallows has
written two tell-all memoirs, the first about her father and the second about
her husbands. When her third book, a novel, fails, she decides to try to report
on a crime committed by a schoolmate. Laying bare Lippman’s zigzag forms,
Cassandra explains her plan: “I’d weave the story of what happened to Callie
as an adult with our lives as children together.” She calls it “hopscotching
through the past.”8
Life Sentences uses Lippman’s double-entry format to track present-day
events in parallel with first-person passages from Cassandra’s early memoir,
My Father’s Daughter. Both time lines are chronological, but the viewpoints
fluctuate. The present-time chapters, rendered in the third person, are attached
 Gone Girls 389

in turn to Cassandra, the African American murder suspect Callie, Teena the
cop turned saleswoman, the flamboyant attorney Gloria, and a trio of grade
school girls with a hold over Callie. All of these characters are given specific
social circumstances, detailed routines, and pasts conjured up through flash-
backs. The result is a book running to forty-six chapters and nearly 350 pages.
In each of these novels, Lippman keeps the reader oriented through an
exoskeleton marked by segment tags. Life Sentences gathers its present-day
chapters under dates and increasingly metaphorical titles, from “Banrock
Station: February 20–23” to “Happy Wanderers: September 5–6.” The portions
from My Father’s Daughter are set off by poetic titles and the absence of
chapter numbers.
The double-entry structure has its precedents, such as in Bleak House
and Bill S. Ballinger’s postwar novels. But Lippman’s later work rings more
ingenious changes on the parallel-chronology layout. The first part of I’d Know
You Anywhere (2010) intercuts the 1980s rampage of a rapist and murderer
with the later life of the victim he spared; now a wife and mother, she learns of
his possible release from prison. The remaining sections of the book intercut
her reactions with that of other women connected to the case. And When She
Was Good (2012) is simpler, alternating today’s Heloise, who runs a high-end
escort service (chronicled in the present tense), with her earlier life as Helen,
a teenager fleeing into the arms of a drug dealer (past tense). The two time lines
intersect when Helen decides to leave her lover, and the tense shifts wholly to
the present.
The Most Dangerous Thing (2011) is a tour de force of pattern plotting,
tracing the lives of several young grownups haunted by severe teenage mistakes.
Strikingly, the sections (“Us,” “Them,” “Pity Them,” “Pity Us All”) are set off by
different narrational marks. We get italics versus roman type; present tense for
some sections, past for others; and stretches in which the actions of the friends
are described by a collective narrator (“we”).
With these books Lippman came to be considered a serious novelist, reviewed
as such in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. She shows
a surgically precise sensitivity to adolescent girls’ friendships and betrayals, and
her women are more ready to exercise agency than many heroines of earlier
decades. Lippman would continue to create elaborate, absorbing variants on
the dual time line exhumation of a past crime.
At the same time, the books are ingenious revisions of schemas already at
work in the genre. It wouldn’t be a stretch to rewrite Clark’s Where Are the
Children? along Lippman lines. We’d pull out the brief flashbacks dotting the
present-time chapters and expand them into a parallel chronology. That would
trace Nancy’s student years and her too-early marriage to her professor Carl
Harmon, who treats her as a pampered daughter. Later, through viewpoint
shifts, we’d watch Carl plot and carry out the murder of their children. Perhaps
 390 PA RT I I I

all of this could be synchronized—“hopscotched”—with the abduction of Mike

and Missy.
As for the present-time scenes, the mobile viewpoints could be expanded
to supply more ample backstory on the secondary Provincetown characters.
To mark the two time lines, we could put current action in the present tense
and use dates and years to tag Nancy’s early life with Carl. In a pinch, the
major twist could be preserved by presenting Carl’s infanticides in the “he”
style, distinct from the characterization of him as Nancy’s professor and
husband—creating in the very style the split personality that inhabits him.
This wouldn’t be just a matter of padding the book to 100,000 words or so.
In our Lippman rewrite, a parallel time line could produce more fleshed-out
characterizations, a contrasting ambience (California campus versus New
England seaside), and a greater immersion in Nancy’s first breakdown, which
Clark’s book is forced to render telegraphically through her drug-induced
interrogation. The younger Nancy could be given friends who play a role in
defending or condemning her. In addition, an extra layer of suspense could
be mounted for everything that occurs in the past. (Will Nancy discover that
her husband has framed her?)
I’m not suggesting that this reverse engineering would improve Clark’s
compact tale, only that the conventions she relies on could be expanded and
thickened in the Lippman manner. As Rebecca gained cultural distinction
by its length and psychological depth, I suspect that density of presentation
played a part in many publishers avoiding labeling the modern thriller as
“a novel of suspense” and simply calling it a novel. These books proudly sig-
nal the artistic prestige associated with a longer format, complex time lines,
contrasting viewpoints, socially marked lifestyle details, and fuller charac-
terization. Not as forbidding as “modernism” but not as bare bones as earlier
thrillers, these works aim in their own way to cross over from genre fiction to
literary fiction, aiming for the praise that crime novels have occasionally won
across the decades—“as good as real literature.” A Washington Post critic calls
Lippman “one of the best novelists around, period.”9

Amy, Amazing

Gillian Flynn was well aware of Lippman’s work. “Every time Laura Lippman
comes out with a new book, I get chills because I know I am back in the hands
of the master. She is simply a brilliant novelist, an unflinching chronicler of life
in America right now.”10
For the most part, Lippman remained loyal to the detective-novel premise
of solving a crime; her formal ingenuity lay in aligning the investigation with
richly realized scenes from the past. Flynn followed a comparable model in her
 Gone Girls 391

first two books. Sharp Objects (2006) centers on Camile Preaker, a reporter
who returns to her small town to cover the murder of two girls. Through flash-
backs she relives her own troubled past while she probes the crime.
Dark Places (2009) adopts a multiple-entry structure reminiscent of Lippman’s
early books. Libby Day has survived the massacre of her mother and two sisters.
Her brother Ben has been sent to prison for the killings, and she has grown up
living off her notoriety. Now, running out of money, she agrees to confirm Ben’s
guilt for a morbid true-crime club. The plot is split between Libby’s investigation
today (first person, past tense) and the eighteen hours leading up to the attack
on Libby’s family in 1985 (third person, past tense). That time line is further
split between the viewpoints of Ben and Patty, their mother. At the climax,
a third character’s viewpoint is summoned to settle what really happened that
night, and Ben’s narrative line is brought into Libby’s present.
Gone Girl (2012) constitutes Flynn’s departure from the investigation plot
and a shift into the pure domestic thriller. She outsources the detecting to the
police, who are largely kept offstage. Her focus is the Dunne household and
the disintegrating marriage, which is examined through the techniques of
split viewpoint and parallel chronology developed in Lippman’s work. During
the book’s first half, events after Amy’s disappearance are confined to Nick’s
first-person account. Portions of that are intercut with entries from Amy’s diary
recounting incidents from the past.
The exoskeleton of the plot is exposed not only through the rocking-horse
exchange of viewpoints but through tags. Nick’s sections (always “Nick Dunne”)
are called “The Day of,” “The Night of,” “One Day Gone,” and so on. The parallel
sections are tagged “Amy Elliott Dunne, Diary Entry” and dated from January 8,
2005, to June 26, 2012. Nick gets the past tense, and Amy’s diary, unexpectedly,
is dominated by the present.
The novel’s first half aims to throw suspicion on Nick. He has reason to
resent Amy; he’s failed at everything he’s tried. Her diary excerpts trace the
evolution of a selfish, abusive husband. His account—he seems to know
we’re reading this—contains evasions and lies. He conceals what he does for
a couple of hours on the day of Amy’s disappearance, and he admits:

I have a mistress. Now is the part where I have to tell you I have a mistress
and you stop liking me. If you liked me to begin with. I have a pretty, young,
very young mistress, and her name is Andie.
I know, it’s bad.11

If your plot centers on a murderous husband, you have a choice. You can let
us in on his plans, as in Iles’s Malice Aforethought and films such as Dial M for
Murder (1954). But Gone Girl doesn’t unequivocally show that Nick has killed
Amy or even plotted to kill her.
 392 PA RT I I I

The second alternative for handling a murderous-husband situation is to

keep it uncertain, chiefly by confining us to the wife’s range of knowledge.
The premise is, “I think my husband is trying to kill me.” This ploy was made
famous in Before the Fact and in 1940s films such as Secret Beyond the Door
(1948) and Sleep, My Love (1948).
The first half of Gone Girl uses Amy’s diary entries, in alternation with
Nick’s account, to present the familiar arc of suspicion. The Dunnes’ marriage
weakens, and she becomes increasingly frightened. Just before their fifth
anniversary she buys a gun for self-defense. In her last entry, she records her
fear that he will kill her.
Nick looks guilty at first, but with the whiff of doubt, another convention
kicks in: that of the “helper male.”12 If there’s another man nearby able to res-
cue the wife and play the role of a future romantic partner, then the husband
is likely to be exposed as villainous. Examples are the Hollywood version of
Gaslight (1944) and Sleep, My Love. If no helper is visible, then we’re likely to
have a plot based on the wife’s misjudgment of the husband, as in Suspicion and
Secret Beyond the Door. In Gone Girl’s first half, Amy seems to have no recourse
to a helper male. This fact might dissolve some suspicion attached to Nick.
Maybe, some readers might ask, Amy was indeed abducted by a third party?
So much for the convention of the killer husband. A second type of domestic
thriller, rarer than the first, centers on a homicidal woman. She shows up in
Vera Caspary’s novel Bedelia (1945) and in films such as Ivy (1947), A Woman’s
Vengeance (1948), and Too Late for Tears (1949).
An especially shocking 1940s specimen of the killer wife is the poised, irre-
sistible Ellen Berent in Leave Her to Heaven (novel 1944, film 1945). At first,
Ellen wishes no harm to her husband Dick; she just wants to eliminate anybody
with whom she’d have to share him. She lets his little brother drown, and fearing
that her unborn child will come between them, she flings herself downstairs
and induces a miscarriage. Eventually, though, she turns her wrath on Dick.
As we’ll see, Ellen’s most extreme tactic looks forward to Gone Girl.
What is exceptionally clever about Gone Girl is that its central twist replaces
the murderous-husband schema with a revelation of Amy as a spider woman.
Nick discovers that his sister Go’s shed is bursting with fancy consumer goods
he never bought. He realizes he’s been framed.
The diary extracts stop and Amy’s voice reenters, in the present. “I’m so
much happier now that I’m dead.” An inner monologue begins, and she explains
that she has faked her disappearance to get Nick convicted. This is the midway
hammer blow that the editor found so compelling. Like other twists, it depends
on suppressive narration, which in turn arises from a central convention of the
new domestic suspense cycle: the unreliable narrator. True, the narration of
Where Are the Children? is devious, but quietly so. In contrast, Amy’s diary, filled
with lies about Nick’s misbehavior, is exposed as flagrantly untrustworthy.
 Gone Girls 393

The diary also lets Flynn shift the ground of the domestic thriller. The cheating
husband, a classic threat to the wife, turns out to be a helpless victim. The wronged
wife becomes an avenging fury. With icy calm, Amy explains her frustration
with Nick’s failure to be the man she tried to make him. She has tolerated playing
Cool Girl to his masculine self-absorption, but now that he’s taken a mistress
she’s decided he’s not worth it. Her eloquent rant against the bad faith of modern
courtship should stir discussion in book clubs around the world. Is she the new
century’s liberated woman, keen to send her husband to Death Row because he’s
become a bourgeois-bohemian cliché?
Amy’s pride in her genius stems from not one but three trails she’s laid
for the police to follow. She leaves clues in the treasure hunt, a hyperclever
game she obliges Nick to play every anniversary. This time, though, the hints
point to Nick’s infidelity and penchant for violence. A second array of clues—
imperfectly cleaned bloodstains, obviously faked signs of abduction, big credit
card purchases in his name—make Nick seem like a lying killer. Then there’s
Amy’s diary, full of made-up abuses. She arranges for the diary to be discovered
at just the moment that will harm Nick most. The diary entries initially coax
us toward the before-the-fact situation, seeming to provide a record of a wife’s
growing apprehension of danger.
At first Amy intends to drown herself, so that when her body is discovered
Nick will be executed. This vindictive-suicide motif is the extreme tactic Ellen
Berent pursues in Leave Her to Heaven. Ellen poisons herself and sets up her
sister Ruth, who’s in love with Dick, as her murderer. Like Amy, she has left
behind a damning testament, a letter that will lead the police to arrest Ruth.
The unreliability of Amy’s diary shows how much Flynn owes to tradition.
Since the 1930s, mystery fiction has long surprised us by questioning documents
we’d initially trusted. Murder Isn’t Easy sets up a string of more or less untrust-
worthy accounts of murders in an advertising agency. Likewise, Death Has a Past
puts a confession’s provenance and trustworthiness into question. Later authors
in the woman-in-peril tradition would mostly avoid the misleading memoir in
favor of a more prosaic realism. In one of her rare ventures into gynocentric
suspense, Edith’s Diary (1977), Patricia Highsmith presents a protagonist whose
journal represents fantasies that compensate for her melancholy marriage and
stifling household routine. Her husband leaves her and her son grows up a lout,
but in her diary she has a happy, thriving family and becomes a grandmother.
We’re aware of her fantasies from the outset. Edith is an unreliable narrator, but
Highsmith isn’t. As ever, she’s interested in tracing, in unshockable prose, the
disintegration of a personality. There is no big twist, only Edith’s reckless choices
and clumsy efforts to hide her growing delusion.
Mary Higgins Clark saves the revelation of her killer’s identity for the cli-
max, but Flynn resists the temptation to make the diary revelation Gone Girl’s
final twist. Apart from being a shock, the diary device works to reveal character.
 394 PA RT I I I

Amy is even more Machiavellian than Nick suspects. Moreover, now that we
know Amy’s true nature, the novel can launch an ingenious new spiral of action.
Having coupled two plot schemes across the first half of the book, the killer
husband and the homicidal femme fatale, Flynn replays them in miniature.
On the run, Amy is robbed by the drifters Jeff and Greta. She calls her old
lover, the rich Desi Collings, and convinces him that Nick represents a threat.
In effect, Amy relaunches the lethal-husband scenario and recruits Desi as her
helper male. Of course, in most such plots, the helper male rescues the woman
from peril. Here she is the peril. Once Desi has given Amy luxurious refuge,
she relaunches the lethal-woman schema. She scatters clues casting him as her
abusive captor, framing him as she framed Nick, and then kills him.
No wonder Gone Girl is vastly longer than its counterparts, coming in at
more than 145,000 words. It’s plumped up not just by the ruminations on the
lacerations of marriage but also by a section that enables Amy to abandon her
suicide plan, recover her losses, and plot her return home, all the while reen-
acting the scenario of the first part. As a piece of pattern plotting, it’s extraor-
dinarily balanced, with alternating blocks lined up in parallel. It’s a triumph
of tagging as well; imagine a reader trying to assemble the plot without each
chapter’s labeling the time of the action (table 13.1).
Part One, “Boy Loses Girl,” ends with Nick’s discovery of the shed full of man-
toys. Part Two, “Boy Meets Girl,” signals Desi’s being gulled by Amy. Here Flynn
daringly throws her time schemes out of alignment. As Nick’s proceeds day by
day (“Seven Days Gone” and onward), the revived Amy’s time line jumps back to
“The Day of ” and runs a bit out of sync with Nick’s. Explicit tagging helps read-
ers grasp the disjunction in time lines and look forward to their realignment.
The convergence takes place when Amy sees Nick’s contrition on a TV talk
show, which spurs her to find a way to return home and regain control of him.
In Part Three, “Boy Gets Girl Back (or Vice Versa),” the alternating voices
continue. What should have been a brief epilogue returns to marriage as
combat. Amy comes home spattered in blood and bearing lies about Desi
holding her prisoner. Nick tries to prove her perfidy, but she reveals herself
to be a superior strategist. She becomes a heroic survivor, her parents’ book
series is relaunched, and she’s writing a memoir herself (not, of course, from
her texts we’ve been reading). For his part, Nick tries to write his own version
(perhaps his texts we’ve been reading).
In the end, Amy blocks him again. She’s pregnant by sperm she carefully
preserved, and he can’t bear leaving a child in her care. She vows to con-
tinue her program of shaping him up. “I don’t have anything else to add. I just
wanted to make sure I had the last word. I think I’ve earned that.”13 Whom is
she addressing? Perhaps, like everything else she’s done and said, it’s a way of
proving to herself that she’s amazing.
 Gone Girls 395

Table 13.1 Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl (2012)

Part Three:
Part One: Part Two: Boy Gets Girl Back
Boy Loses Girl Boy Meets Girl (or Vice Versa)

Nick Dunne: Amy Elliott Nick: Amy: Nick: Amy:

15 chapters Dunne: 11 chapters 12 chapters 6 chapters as 6 chapters as
of recounting 14 diary entries of recounting of recounting in Part Two in Part Two
(first person, past (first person, (first person, (first person, alternate
tense) alternate present tense) past tense) present tense) with . . .
with . . . alternate
with . . .

The Day of. . . . January 8, Seven The Day of . . . Forty Days The Night of
2005 Days Gone (flashbacks to Gone: Amy the Return
(continued) scheme) returns

through through through: The Day of . . . through: through:

Six Days Gone June 26, 2012 Thirty-Three through: Twenty Ten Months,
Days Gone Weeks After Two Weeks,
the Return Six Days After
the Return

Seven Days Gone: Forty Days

Amy’s frame-up Gone: Amy’s
exposed. second scheme
achieved.

A Blooming Ecosystem

Around the time of Gone Girl’s 2012 publication, other gynocentric thrillers
offered shifting viewpoints and broken time lines: Lippman’s work, S. J. Wat-
son’s Before I Go to Sleep (2008), and Alex Marwood’s The Wicked Girls (2012).
But like Citizen Kane and Pulp Fiction, Flynn’s novel became a totemic work
for a trend, a vivid prototype that could encourage a cycle of experimentation.
After its success, publishers began to seek out the next Gone Girl.
The rising prestige of domestic thrillers was probably helped by the research
of Sarah Weinman. She produced several essays celebrating the genre, edited
a collection of classic short stories, and assembled a 2015 Library of America
 396 PA RT I I I

edition of eight domestic suspense novels from the 1940s and 1950s. Weinman
played an important role in giving the new cycle a worthy past.14
Writers announced their allegiance to the emerging norms. Today’s suspense
novel, claims a manual for aspiring writers, favors nonchronological ordering,
multiple points of view, parallel motifs, and flashbacks.15 J. P. Delaney confessed
a preference for “cutting between different narrators, jumping between time
frames, creating contrasting viewpoints.”16 Delaney proves his point in Believe
Me (2018), a bald-faced rewrite of his 2001 The Decoy (signed by Tony Strong).
The books share the same plot premise and the same twists, but the new version
employs shifting tenses, a clear exoskeleton, and the fancy device of occasion-
ally describing scenes as if they were in a screenplay. (One chapter is called
“Rewrites and Flashbacks.”) The second book shows how much the genre had
changed in just a few years.
Heidi Pitlor was equally explicit. For The Daylight Marriage (2015), “I wanted
there to be two different storylines told at two different paces. One would cover
a day, and one would cover months to a year.”17 The premises—when a wife
goes missing, her husband tells of the investigation while she recounts what
happened beforehand—led to the inevitable comparison. “Despite the acrid
marriage, the his-and-hers narration, and the fact that Lovell quickly emerges
as the primary suspect, this isn’t really another Gone Girl.”18
That reassurance reminds us that the market in popular narrative is driven
by the search for novelty, even within narrow bounds. The search often proceeds
according to the variorum principle, the pressure to saturate the ecological
niche with fine differences that are recognized by fans. All genres court slight
variation. What differentiates this cycle of domestic thrillers is the authors’ and
readers’ awareness of nuances not just in setting and character but also in struc-
ture and narration.
Certainly the writer needs to create vivid characters. A tangible milieu of
women’s culture helps too, built out of granite countertops, running shoes,
brand name cars and utensils, decorated baby rooms, iPads and iPhones, and
Netflix subscriptions. But within this world are embedded traditional ingredi-
ents of mystery-based action. Again and again we encounter amnesia, mistaken
or hidden identity, traffic accidents, tailing and stalking, fake deaths, imper-
sonation, spying, children in danger, incriminating admissions. Often, then, a
book’s freshness depends on how the story is told.
At a basic level, mystery and suspense can be generated by multiple time
lines, shifting viewpoints, unreliable narration, and the twists that emerge from
suppressed information. For fans and connoisseurs working at another level,
new wrinkles in any of these strategies will be a source of extra enjoyment. A
2017 review spells it out: “The use of a multi-viewpoint, chronologically com-
plex narrative to create suspense by purposely misleading the reader is a really,
really popular device. Two words: Gone Girl. While we are not the fools we once
 Gone Girls 397

were and now assume immediately that we are being played, the question is
whether we still take pleasure in the twists and revelations that follow.”19
As in the classic detective story, the informed reader is invited to guess
how the author will tweak storytelling norms. Fans of domestic suspense have
acquired what Trollope deplored in Collins—the “taste of the construction.”
Start with the most striking of the new norms: alternating parallel time
lines. The simplest structure is on display in Mary Kubicka’s Every Last Lie
(2017). When a husband has a fatal car accident, the wife’s search for the
cause is interrupted by chapters tracing incidents leading up to the crash.
Megan Goldin’s Escape Room (2019) juxtaposes four executives trapped in an
elevator with flashbacks from the viewpoint of a woman taking revenge on
the team. A similar toggling between Now and Then shapes Peter Swanson’s
All the Beautiful Lies (2018). The murder of Harry Ackerson’s father brings
him back to his hometown, and alternating chapters survey the childhood
and girlhood of Harry’s stepmother, who may have arranged for the crime.
In a second part, the alternation picks up other characters, one of whom is
revealed as the killer. The structure allows Swanson to build suspense—how
will the time lines converge?—while presenting rhyming situations of adults
taking sexual advantage of the young people in their care.
The parallels of present and past become nakedly threatening in J. P. Del-
aney’s The Girl Before (2017). Here the sinister Gothic mansion becomes a
forbidding postmodern panopticon overseen by a suave, obsessive architect.
Eighty-two chapters alternate to show startlingly similar events befalling Emma
(who once lived in the house) and Jane (who’s living there now). The parallel
chapters suggest that the obsessive landlord has murdered Emma, and this
heightens our concern for Jane’s fate. Something similar happens in Amy Gen-
try’s Bad Habits (2021), when the heroine, a hard-edged professor, encounters
her college rival at a conference. Her steps toward murder alternate with chap-
ters explaining the origins of her hatred.
The thriller’s two time lines are usually chronological. This is an enormous
aid to readers who must keep track of pretty complicated strings of events. But
once that’s established as an intrinsic norm, we can handle a dose of nonlin-
earity. Each parallel time line, for instance, will often include brief flashbacks
and bits of backstory. And occasionally a writer will shift past-time scenes
around. Marwood’s The Wicked Girls shuffles crucial scenes out of order to
delay key revelations. In one section of All the Missing Girls (2016), Megan
Miranda puts chapters in reverse chronology to expose the pressures building
toward a child’s abduction.
Tagging, redundancy, and other design features enable the author to braid
time lines in fairly complex ways. Heidi Pitlor’s Daylight Marriage begins at
night during a quarrel and then skips ahead by more than a day, when the
wife goes missing. The aftermath of her disappearance unfolds in alternation
 398 PA RT I I I

with chronological flashbacks to events plucked from the thirty-hour gap. In

Rebecca Fleet’s The House Swap (2018), a 2012–13 chronology is intercut with
two simultaneous lines of action from 2015. The simultaneity of the 2015 strands
is only gradually revealed because one of them is untagged and attributed to an
unknown narrator.
More elaborate is Lisa Scottoline’s After Anna (2018). The bulk of the plot
crosscuts the murder trial of Dr. Noah Alderman with the period when his
wife Maggie brought home her daughter by her first husband. The days of
Noah’s trial are presented in reverse order, beginning with the moment the
jury delivers its verdict. Scottoline works some past events into the trial phase
through testimony and Noah’s flashbacks. These often mesh with the adjacent
episodes of Maggie’s forward-moving chronology—less hopscotching than
straddling. The tight cross-stitching of past and present exposes, virtually side
by side, two characters’ attitudes toward a single incident.
Another ambitious effort in pattern plotting is Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on
the Train (2015). It breaks an eighteen-month period into three strands attached
to different women. The calendar governing the eyewitness Rachel and the
anxious wife Anna keeps them in sync, but Megan’s time line starts further
in the past and never catches up with theirs. Needless to say, the fragments of
time revealed in Megan’s story furnish key revelations at the climax. As in After
Anna, some events are replayed from different viewpoints, which help sharpen
characterization and anchor chronology.

Multiplying Perspectives and Tagging Blocks

Whereas the domestic suspense stories of Mignon Eberhart and her rivals
tended to limit us to what an endangered heroine or bystander knows, books
such as After Anna and The Girl on the Train illustrate the extent to which
the contemporary domestic thriller has made multiple perspectives a central
convention. One way to avoid bogging down your plot, says Pitlor, “is to have
alternating viewpoints. When you hit a wall with one, you switch to another. . . .
There is energy just in the movement between characters.”20
Multiple viewpoints were a staple of classic fiction and became a vehicle of
experimentation early in the twentieth century. Nowadays any novel is likely to
shift our attachment from character to character.21 Ed McBain, Richard Stark,
Elmore Leonard, and many other authors proved this to be a rewarding option
for the hard-boiled urban adventure. When mystery novels use multiple view-
points, the usual benefits include giving us access to a range of sympathetic
or unsympathetic characters. This device also permits the author to omit key
events, conceal motives, and deflect our attention, all of which can prepare the
way for twists.22
 Gone Girls 399

A virtuoso example in the domestic thriller vein is Margaret Millar’s 1957

novel An Air That Kills. A banal premise—a man is murdered by his wife and
her lover—is treated in round-robin fashion, with the viewpoint shifting among
friends, relations, bystanders, and (without acknowledgment) the guilty par-
ties. Chapter by chapter, Millar charts a social network, with most of the major
events occurring offstage, presented to us as people learn of them. Although
she relies on third-person narration, she treats the central mystery with the sort
of obliqueness we associate with Conrad’s multiplying narrators.
Most of our recent domestic thrillers limit their viewpoints more severely.
The titles I’ve already mentioned typically tie us to few characters per time
line. The first part of Peter Swanson’s The Kind Worth Killing (2015) alternates
between Ted (present) and Lily (mostly past). After a major twist, all the action
unfolds in the present, but a new dual viewpoint is established. Similarly, Mick
Herron’s This Is What Happened (2018) attaches us to only three characters, in
blocks, before crosscutting all three at the climax.
More ambitious authors try shuttling among many viewpoints. Big Little
Lies (2014) by Liane Moriarty reduces present-time episodes to fragments of
gossipy dialogue, but its parallel story line roams among many characters’
minds. Perhaps a limit is hit in Paula Hawkins’s Into the Water (2017). The
book has ten point-of-view characters, along with portions of a discovered
manuscript, all deployed in a double-entry structure switching between 2015
and 1993. Readers registered their disappointment on the Amazon sales site.
“The story is told through the visions of so many people that you lose what it
is all about.” “Quit halfway due to too many characters, no guide to who they
are or who they’re talking about. . . . It’s a struggle to follow which timeframe
each chapter is in.”23
Those readers should have been grateful that Hawkins resisted the temp-
tation to present the point-of-view characters as first-person narrators, as she
had done with the central trio of The Girl on the Train. After all, I-centered
storytelling is very much on the agenda for domestic thrillers. In the earliest
European novels, it was motivated as a letter or journal or testimony, and
that’s still not out of bounds for today’s writers, as the embedded journal in
S. J. Watson’s Before I Go to Sleep (2011) shows. But by the twentieth century,
writers could simply present first-person narration as a monologue, with no
listener or reader presumed.
First-person narrators hold a lot of advantages for domestic suspense. They
can produce pointed characterizations; they can realistically justify limits on
what we learn; and not least, they can help us keep time lines straight. In
Everything You Want Me to Be (2017), three first-person accounts alternate
within three overlapping periods. The varying voices distinguish the slightly
out-of-sync chains of events. He Said/She Said (2017), a title inevitable in this
genre, consists of two time lines. Within the 2015 one, the viewpoint bounces
 400 PA RT I I I

between Laura and Kit, both speaking in the first person and the present tense.
For the period 2000 to 2005, however, the voice is mostly Laura’s and in the
past tense. And in each time line there’s a crucial flashback at the end, narrated
by one of the two centers of consciousness. The reliably recurring narrators
underscore the larger rhythm of time shifts.
A domestic thriller can update the conventions of the document dossier by
filtering a narrator’s voice through contemporary media. Emails and text mes-
sages replace letters and telegrams, and websites do duty for library sources. A
Simple Favor (2017) incorporates a character’s blog into the alternating rhythm
of first-person accounts. A podcast serves much the same function in Gilly
Macmillan’s I Know You Know (2018), and Snoop, a music-sharing app, lets us
know that others are spying on characters in Ruth Ware’s One by One (2020).
In Macmillan’s The Perfect Girl (2016), a Sunday night concert and its aftermath
are intercut with Monday morning reactions, each time line anchored by a
first-person narrator. Interspersed with these dueling voices are bits of a screen-
play by another character, and eventually the aspiring filmmaker becomes a
third narrator himself. In all, the polyphony that Mikhail Bakhtin found char-
acteristic of the novel form is sustained in today’s domestic thrillers (although
the voices are more smoothly harmonized than he might prefer).
To succeed with a mass audience, the genre’s play with these narrative strat-
egies needs to present a clear-cut exoskeleton that relies on tagging. The barest
segmentation (Chapter One, Chapter Two) couldn’t easily alert us to parallel
construction or point-of-view shifts. Instead, authors tend to split the novel
into parts, titled or not, and then lay out the parallel time lines, often tagged
as Now/Then or Before/After. Within the parts, the segments are likely to be
labeled further with dates, locations, or character names. The character name
is virtually demanded if the segment is narrated in the first person; if the nar-
rator’s identity isn’t given, the wily reader will suspect something important is
being suppressed. While helping us sort the story out, labels can perform the
traditional function of teasing us. In retrospect, Gone Girl’s section title “Boy
Gets Girl Back (or Vice Versa)” hints that both Desi and Nick will recover Amy,
and she will “get back” both of them in different ways.
Despite their reliance on structural symmetries and labels, the books in
this genre don’t include tables of contents. Exposing the overall design so early
might undercut some later surprises. In After Anna, where sections alternate
“Noah, After” and “Maggie, Before,” a table of contents would give away the epi-
logue, which is tagged “Maggie and Noah, After.” The exoskeleton and tagging
guide moment-by-moment uptake; the overall symmetry is felt, not paraded as
in the tables of contents we find in 1930s mysteries or crossover novels such as
March Cost’s Dark Glass (1935).
As we’ve seen throughout, the very texture of the writing can help sharpen
the differences between time frames and viewpoints. The contrast of past tense
 Gone Girls 401

and present tense, or differences in typography (roman/italics, one typeface/

another), can help keep us oriented. Here again we see the diffused heritage of
Woolf ’s and Faulkner’s italics and Dos Passos’s changing fonts, as well as cross-
over books setting up these cues as reliable orienting devices.
All of these strategies—the parallel time structures, the play of viewpoints,
the use of the exoskeleton, and tagging both to stabilize the design and mislead
the reader—are at the service of a convention celebrated by thriller writers and
readers: the unreliable narrator. Across the twentieth century, it has become a
convention of both esoteric and exoteric narrative.
“There are only so many ways a person can be unreliable,” remarks an editor.
“Either they’re directly lying to you, or they have a problem.”24 Both options are
common enough in domestic suspense. A first-person narrator may mislead us
overtly with the sort of lies Amy plants in her diary in Gone Girl, or through
omission as Nick does in his account of his actions on the fateful day. Or the
narrator may hallucinate, sincerely reporting what isn’t the case, as in A. J.
Finn’s The Woman in the Window (2018).
Unreliability can also arise from the overall structure of the book. In Some-
times I Lie (2017), Alice Feeney presents what appears at first to be a single
first-person narrator acting in two time frames (“Now” and “Then”) and
declaring her thoughts in a diary (tagged “Before”). The “I” is deceptive, how-
ever, because it actually belongs to two different characters. Here each narra-
tor is fairly reliable; it’s the juxtaposition of voices that’s misleading (as is the
refusal to tag the speakers). The ensuing twist reshapes our understanding of
the author of the diary.
To prepare for a twist, suppressive narration often extends the stratagems of
duplicitous characters. For example, thriller characters commonly assume false
identities, and the narration can conspire straight-facedly with the scheme.
A single character in two time lines might have different names, as in The
Wife Between Us (2017) and Anatomy of a Scandal (2017). The narration doesn’t
reveal the masquerade until it’s ready. In many of the books I’ve already men-
tioned, there’s a comparable shell game with the pronouns I and he and she—
something we’ve already seen in Levin’s A Kiss Before Dying.
Authors can exploit the reader’s confidence that she has mastered the genre’s
conventions. The twist in Sometimes I Lie relies on the assumption that untagged
“I” passages in parallel before-and-after segments are likely to belong to a single
character. More drastically, The Silent Patient (2019) by Alex Michaelides plays
on our assumption that the events in one time line are (again in the absence
of tags) running chronologically. The twist comes when it’s revealed that some
of the “present,” apparently chronological chapters are actually flashbacks to
events in the second time line, albeit from a different character’s viewpoint.
Readers of domestic thrillers embrace the gamelike nature of the plotting. They
cultivate a high degree of connoisseurship, savoring not only new situations but
 402 PA RT I I I

also innovations in structure and narration. The back cover of one paperback
edition slips easily between a “you” that indicates the protagonist to a “you”
that refers to a knowing reader:

When you think you’re safe, YOU’RE NOT.

When you think the past is over, IT ISN’T.
When you think you know someone, YOU DON’T.
When you think you’ve guessed this twist, YOU HAVEN’T.25

This marketing tactic might serve as a slogan for the entire genre.
As you’d expect, film adaptations of these novels largely respect their nar-
rative strategies. The Girl on the Train (2016) uses parallel editing, a flurry of
flashbacks, and some tagging to trace the three women’s story lines. A Simple
Favor (2018) turns one character’s blog into a vlog and presents the time shifts
through flashbacks. Setting the pace was the film version of Gone Girl (2014),
which adheres to the main armature of the book and even retains the out-of-
sync time lines after the midpoint revelation of Amy’s fake diary.
Surely fans want some of the complexity and surprises of the books to be
retained on the screen. But, again, novelty is needed. So for the movie, The
Girl on the Train was given a bleak, deglamorized treatment suitable for a sor-
did story of alcoholism, anxiety, and female rivalry. In the hands of director
Paul Feig, A Simple Favor, a straight novel of suspense, became an exercise
in absurdity, with over-the-top costumes, sour humor, and preposterous but
funny violence.
The film version of Gone Girl added another layer to the implications of the
novel. Gillian Flynn’s screenplay made a crucial alteration by starting with a
close-up of Amy’s alert face lying alongside the camera, accompanied by Nick’s
voice-over imagining opening up that skull to see what’s inside. This prologue
primes us to take Nick as a potential abuser, an impression reinforced in the
plot’s first half. At the end, however, Amy has been revealed as a monster and
Nick is pinned down as her victim. In an epilogue repeating the first image of
Amy staring dolefully out, we get Nick’s voice-over again. “What have we done to
each other? What will we do?” Perhaps more mayhem lies in the future? In any
case, by providing this monologue, the film literally steals Amy’s voice, deleting
the novel’s final line in which she claims the last word. Flynn has shrewdly given
her fans another point of debate about gender power dynamics.

✳✳✳

In the years after Gone Girl, the domestic suspense ecosystem teemed with off-
shoots and hybrids. There were some sports, nearly desperate pursuits of nov-
elty. (One author showed false identities achieved through astral projection.)
 Gone Girls 403

Agents and editors were puzzled that the cycle was still in force.26 With the
explosive success of Finn’s The Woman in the Window, it seemed clear that the
market was not drying up. Said one editor, “This is women’s fiction right now.”27
In any variorum situation, competition grows keen. When Hitchcock came
to Hollywood in the early 1940s, he made a string of successful thrillers. But
soon he was being imitated left and right, so he had to surpass his imita-
tors with something more offbeat. The results were the films Lifeboat (1944),
Spellbound (1945), Notorious (1946), and Rope (1948). A comparable challenge
faced Laura Lippman, who had done so much to establish the conventions of
the new domestic thriller.
With After I’m Gone (2014), Lippman took on a family saga. This time the
parallel story in the past isn’t completely chronological. Three chapters are
shifted out of order, the first as a tantalizing flash forward, and two others
saved to fill a crucial gap. Accidents of teenage violence, always a lure for
Lippman, recur in Wilde Lake (2016). Again, the chronology is slightly juggled
before the past time line starts (and the heroine narrates in utero). With Sunburn
(2018), Lippman moved away from domestic suspense and her double-entry
time scheme, using a shifting viewpoint within a linear layout. This riff on a
noir situation recasts the lethal femme fatale as a tough survivor of domestic
violence and a mother plotting to protect her daughters. She followed with
another effort at “repurposing the books that are beloved to me, trying to
figure out how to further the conversations they began in my head.”28 Lady
in the Lake (2019) paid homage to the hard-boiled tradition in its title but
reverted to a multiple-viewpoint mystery structure and the possibility of a
dead narrator—both tactics firmly in the 1940s tradition. Dream Girl (2021),
a satiric tale of a bed-bound novelist, recast the situation of Stephen King’s
Misery (1987) but splintered it through scrambled flashbacks that yielded a
satiric portrait of literary careerism.
Gillian Flynn pursued more diverse genre paths. She supplied a comic book
script to Dave Gibbons, adapted a screenplay for a women’s heist film (Widows,
2018), and prepared an American version of the British science-fiction tele-
vision series Utopia. Always an aficionado of many media, and determined
to create energetic female protagonists, she could afford to venture beyond a
flourishing cycle she had helped create.
In that cycle, techniques I’ve tracked throughout this book are flagrantly on
display. The dizzying matrix of formats shows how quickly one area of popular
narrative can happily create its own variorum.
But those who decry popular culture, if there’s anybody like that left,
will argue that we see only formulaic recycling here. Like the crime novel-
ists I examined in earlier chapters, writers of domestic suspense revise classic
storytelling strategies. True, the skeptic might grant, there are some add-ons
from literary modernism, such as unclaimed voices (eventually to be claimed)
 404 PA RT I I I

and stream of consciousness (but never disruptive to a Woolfian or Faulkner-

ian degree). Still, the main lines—multiple narrators, time shifts, tagging and
chaptering, twists, unreliable narration—can all be found in fiction a hundred
years ago.
But this is in part my point. The history of popular narrative in the
English-speaking world, and probably elsewhere, displays continuity and
change, schema and revision. Difficulties must be balanced by clarity and
redundancy. Teasing obscurities are usually illuminated. There is, however,
room for refinement: new methods of clueing and misdirection, formal
subterfuges playing on our presuppositions, stylistic innovations that turn
common language multivalent. The case studies I’ve surveyed show that
mass-culture storytellers have kept discovering fine-grained tactics that give
us unfamiliar pleasures within a comfortably familiar frame. And those tactics
aren’t merely cosmetic; they fundamentally shape the experience we have of
the story being told.
Another conclusion bears on the resourcefulness of audiences. They swiftly
learn the rules of the game even while those rules are pushing into fresh
territory. To understand the innovations, we need familiar landmarks. Just as
important, many readers and viewers go beyond the minimal skills needed
to keep up. They become connoisseurs sensitive to subtle alterations of well-
worn forms. Once more, the “taste of the construction” that Trollope deplored
in Collins’s plots became a taste for construction, the trickier the better. Like
audiences of earlier eras, who also encountered stories that posed pleasurably
difficult challenges, fans have developed skills suited to the relentless, exhilarat-
ing churn of popular storytelling.
 CONCLUSION
The Power of Limits

I had Following. I had this movie that also had structural complexity that
they could understand.

—Christopher Nolan

W
hen you have two or more stories to tell, Intolerance (1916)
reminds us that you can arrange them in large blocks or
alternate them. In this book, I took the block option, so it
might be helpful to show how my two story lines could be crosscut.
In the early decades of the twentieth century, Anglo-American storytellers
conducted experiments on both esoteric and exoteric platforms. Novelists,
playwrights, and filmmakers became sensitive to techniques of plot patterning
and narration. Nonlinear time schemes, variables of viewpoint, and strategic
segmentation had all been utilized by earlier storytellers, but now there
was a new self-consciousness and an urge to explore the capacity of these
techniques. That awareness was spelled out in a poetics of fiction, articulated
by critics and authors of manuals. Often the innovations were conducted
under the aegis of comedy, as in Seven Keys to Baldpate, but not necessarily,
as Intolerance shows.
At the same time, authors of mystery stories and plays became more
self-conscious as well, conducting their own experiments and codifying best
 406 Conclusion

practices in their own guidebooks. How to perplex the reader while exposing
the “hidden story”? How to assure both novelty and adherence to the rules that
make the novelty stand out?
A sharper split between exoteric and esoteric storytelling appeared in the
1920s and 1930s. It was epitomized in High Modernism, which embraced
the Ultraist idea of ceaseless revolution, maximal difficulty. These plots were
perplexing at a different level than even Henry James and Joseph Conrad had
dared. Now the perplexity lay as much in the how as in the what, the authorial
“method” governing the very texture of the tale. What story is being told, and
why is it told this way?
Meanwhile—to some extent under the influence of modernism but also
relying on their genre tradition—authors of detective stories became a popular
version of a modern literary movement. They raised their degree of artifice. The
whodunit, always relying on a puzzle, ransacked the resources of viewpoint,
linearity, and segmentation. Footnotes, diagrams, and tables of contents could
be clues. Readers were invited to play behind the backs of the characters. What
John Dickson Carr called the Greatest Game emphasized the “literariness” of
mystery fiction. It was a new form of the reflexivity that had always been a tool
of popular storytelling, but now it provided a mass-market parallel to the work
of the avant-garde.
As Ultraism declined in the 1930s, “serious” writers and playwrights warmed
to the idea of accessibility. There had long been crossover works—esoteric
authors revising schemas from earlier literary traditions, popular storytellers
revising and smoothing the difficult techniques on display in “high” literature.
But with no modernist masterpieces emerging, the field was now clear for an
explosion in popular storytelling fueled by wartime demands for entertainment
and the rise of paperback publishing. During the 1940s, “prestige” fiction and
drama developed models of crossover appeal comparable to ones already dom-
inating cinema and radio. These efforts consolidated a vast variorum of strate-
gies that future generations would revisit, revise, and refine.
In its own vein, mystery fiction did much the same. With principal subgenres
well established, authors were able to update the menu of creative choices. There
were blends (Laura’s anthologizing of whodunit, hard-boiled, and thriller),
new stylistic refinements (Stout, Highsmith), and new plot options (the police
procedural, the caper). Some authors pushed to delirious extremes, as in the
examples of Cornell Woolrich and The Red Right Hand.
Perhaps most surprising, the classic whodunit also continued to provide
creative options, and not just in the cozies that kept the English tradition alive.
The whodunit’s insistence on “the taste of the construction” could be imposed on
private-eye adventures and woman-in-peril plots. Hard-boiled tales exploited
time shuffling, viewpoint switches, and block construction. These strategies
were especially evident in film noir, but they also appeared in novels, as in
Richard Stark’s Parker series. Domestic thrillers could recruit nonlinear story
 Conclusion 407

lines and multiple narrators (all potentially unreliable). The formal adroitness
prized by the Golden Age authors became a hallmark of ambitious mysteries
in adjacent genres for decades afterward. Christopher Nolan, who named the
private yacht in Dunkirk after The Moonstone, remarks of his neo-noir: “I wrote
Memento very much as a puzzle box. I was fascinated by the idea of structure.”1
Narrational duplicity and misdirection—all the ellipses and grid layouts and
unwarranted inferences—continue in the domestic thrillers and “puzzle films”
of our day. Here the mystery may involve a crime, but it will also conjure up
a metamystery about the way the story is told. The knowing reader or viewer
should expect that the characters, the narrators, and the storyteller—that is, the
plot structure and the filmic narration—may be willfully, playfully, misleading.
In my emphasis on recurring schemas, I don’t mean to suggest an eternal
return or simple recycling. We don’t have to assume that 1940s viewers could
fully understand Inception (2010). But, to recall Steven Johnson’s point of depar-
ture, that doesn’t make them dumb either. Today’s viewers are heirs to a process
of schema and revision through which Anglo-American popular storytellers
constantly reinvigorated devices of viewpoint, time schemes, and segmentation.
It would be possible to trace some larger tendencies—say, a tendency toward
greater ellipsis, faster pace, more oblique presentation—that have governed
the process. My point is that some principles have yielded arresting originality
throughout the decades, and that testifies to the inexhaustible potential of basic
choices of form and format.
None of us encountered all of these stories, but we each met enough of them
to train us in their techniques. We tapped into the variorum at different points,
but we all learned to cope with novelty in the hundreds of films and plays and
novels on offer. Hence we could follow (to different degrees) films such as
Pulp Fiction and appreciate how Tarantino’s chaptering, viewpoint shifts, and
looped time scheme created a fresh version of a tale of petty gangsters.
The glowing briefcase is the only mystery in Pulp Fiction, but through nar-
rative artifice Tarantino creates a bigger one. The perplexity comes from asking
how these stories connect, and the answer is very much in the spirit of ingenu-
ity of Golden Age tales such as And Then There Were None. True, we have to
do a bit more work than in Christie’s case, but thanks to the variorum, we can
manage. And the novices among us can learn. A generation of cinephiles and
fanboys discovered complex storytelling by grappling with Pulp Fiction, possibly
the coolest thing they’d ever seen.

Crossover Culture

When talking with friends about this book, I was often asked, “Where does
postmodernism fit in?” The label has a specific meaning in certain arts, such
as architecture, and for some purposes it’s useful.2 I’m less convinced by those
 408 Conclusion

macro-level accounts of the postmodern age as an era of late capitalism or as

skepticism about grand narratives (while all too often presenting a grand narra-
tive about . . . the emergence of postmodernism).
To answer my questions about narrative strategy and audience uptake,
I think it’s more fruitful to consider that works tagged as postmodernist offer
idiosyncratic varieties of those amalgamations of classic, proto-modern,
modern, and popular principles I’ve been trying to trace. Raymond Carver’s
minimalism builds on Stein, Hemingway, e. e. cummings, and others, while also
providing cues to allow us to adjust to the story’s idiosyncrasies. A PoMo narra-
tive may have more recondite references than those provided as fan service by
a superhero film, but it seems to me that the mixing and revising of inherited
schemas remain. The postmodernist label may be useful in picking out condi-
tions of production or reception, but in terms of form and style, we are usually
best served by looking closely at the dynamic of perpetual, pluralistic recycling
throughout the history of narrative. A great many works—A Voice in the Dark,
How Like a God, and The Woman in Question—are quirky, offbeat, and largely
forgotten. I think a more open, wide-ranging analytical approach does better
justice to the churn of mass art.
That churn continues. No one needs convincing that popular storytelling
pervades today’s media landscape. Beyond plays, books, and films, thousands
of stories are accessed through television, the internet, and streaming platforms.
Radio dramas have been replaced by audiobooks and podcasts. Self-published
novels, in print or digital forms, proliferate. So do fan fiction and websites such
as Wattpad, which claims to have ninety million writers and readers. Beyond
fiction, documentary books, films, and videos have been framed in narrative
form. If “media literacy” means anything, it must include the deep grooves that
repeated exposure to the variorum has carved into our minds.
The variorum of stories is now accompanied by a variorum offering craft
advice and trade secrets. The self-consciousness about technique that emerged
in writing manuals of the 1910s has persisted for a century and exploded with
online writing and self-publishing. Amazon.com offers How to Write a Novel
That Will Sell Well and Satisfy Your Inner Artist, How to Write a Damn Good
Novel, Write a Novel in a Year, The 24 Laws of Storytelling, Writing the Cozy
Mystery, The 10-Day Screenplay, How to Write a Screenplay in 10 Weeks, How to
Write a Screenplay That Doesn’t Suck (and Will Actually Sell), How Not to Write
a Novel, and dozens more guides. The propulsion behind William Cook’s Plotto
and the Fiction Factory has not faded.
I’ve concentrated on Anglo-American traditions of mass storytelling
because they’re the ones I know best. I’m sure that a plunge into other national
and cultural traditions would yield many differences. But from my exposure
to Japanese, Chinese, and European popular culture, I’d expect that some
principles would persist. We would find distinct versions of the variorum,
 Conclusion 409

of competition and churn, of scaling form to format, of ingenuity within lim-

its, and of the basic techniques of segmentation, viewpoint, and chronology.3
Narrative audacity and finesse have no boundaries.
Needless to say, this geyser of narrative has largely consisted of ordinary
work. Raymond Chandler complained that the “average” detective story finds
readers, whereas “you never see the average novel. It doesn’t get published.”4 He
was utterly wrong, as he could have discovered by scanning the paperbacks at
the La Jolla bus terminal. Today any report of new publishing deals confirms
the reassuring ordinariness of popular narrative. Here is one from May 2021:
“A loosely autobiographical work of fiction about an American 20-something
expat in London in a rollercoaster relationship with a charming, emotionally
unavailable British man who cannot, will not love her back, and the dramatic
repercussions on her mental health.”5
Beyond the ordinary works are “literary fiction,” prestige crossover items
that draw on several of the traditions I’ve tried to illuminate. The he said/she
said pattern of Dinah Craik’s dossier novel A Life for a Life is transposed into
two blocks in Carol Shield’s Happenstance: Two Novels in One About a Mar-
riage in Transition (1980). Like Intolerance, Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered
(2018) alternates distinct historical epochs (but only two) in tracing lives lived
in the same house. George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) splinters the
cemetery-chorus schema of Spoon River Anthology and Our Town into scores
of voices mourning the death of the president’s son, the snippets quickened by
horror and action-movie rescue attempts. Now that reverse chronology has
become a minor option in the variorum, we can appreciate the different han-
dling it receives in Pinter’s Betrayal (1980), Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along
(1981), Memento (2000), and the film Shimmer Lake (2017). Given a network
narrative, how can you stitch your characters together beyond the usual ties of
friendship, kinship, crime, and convenient traffic accidents? How about bind-
ing their stories through their association with trees? You might even assign
some narrative authority to trees and develop the whole through omniscient
viewpoint, fragmentary segmentation, chapters tagged with character names,
and (yes) judicious switches to italics. That is, Richard Powers’s prizewinning
novel The Overstory (2018).
The lure of mystery continues to shape popular storytelling, and most inno-
vative creative choices induct us into fresh story worlds. The process is evi-
dent in the rise of regional mysteries; every town in the United States and
in the United Kingdom seems to have its own local sleuth. Police procedure
dominates the endless British television serials devoted to this or that remote
village. Offbeat graphic novels have often relied on investigation plots, as in the
work of Charles Burns and Daniel Clowes. Hard-boiled fiction, traditionally
dominated by white male heroes, has proved amenable to other protagonists,
such as women (Kinsey Millhone, V. I. Warshawski, and Tess Monaghan) and
 410 Conclusion

members of minorities (Easy Rawlins, Joe Leaphorn, Dave Brandstetter, and

Lauren Lourano). Innovations in structure and style continue as revisions of
long-standing schemas, which I’ve indicated in the tailpieces to some chapters.
Schemas of hard-boiled fiction are recast in the episodic, telegraphic style
of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels and in the bebop narration and multiple
story lines of James Ellroy. When a domestic thriller can be titled It’s Always
the Husband and one of the best crime writers can include, in a scene of high
tension, the sentence “Let’s take the back door, he suggested, in such a smooth
undertone it barely required speech marks,” the tradition of surprising ingenuity
is in good shape.6
And mystery still provides a powerful menu of options for storytell-
ers who want to make a more unusual work accessible. Colson Whitehead’s
social-network novel Harlem Shuffle (2021) unfolds as a heist, then an under-
world revenge scheme, and finally a man-on-the-run situation. Each block
corresponds to one influence that Whitehead acknowledged: Richard Stark,
Elmore Leonard, and Patricia Highsmith.7 The legacy of Golden Age artifice can
be found in those current novels and plays that seek to turn any narrative into
a game and a puzzle, as Citizen Kane and Letter to Five Wives did in the 1940s.
Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi (2020), for example, uses an investigation plot to
move through parallel worlds, leading to the revelation of a crime. A Broadway
producer mounting “avant-garde plays” is attracted to thrillers as experiments
in narrative, dramas that “jump around in chronology or mess with point of
view.” The formal strategies fulfill, he says, “an appetite that has long existed” in
independent film and Peak TV.8 That appetite, as A Voice in the Dark reminds
us, has been around longer than that.
Today we’re unlikely to run into a pure instance of the easiest narrative:
that linear, single-viewpoint, reliably recounted, neatly segmented story that
I set up as a default in the introduction. Granted, extremely popular fiction
sagas such as The Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter series largely adhere
to the norms of the nineteenth-century novel. Philip Pullman, author of the
His Dark Materials trilogy (1995–2000), urges writers not to complicate their
stories “by using a first-person stream of consciousness, or a number of differ-
ently situated narrators, . . . [or] . . . by making those narrators unreliable, their
knowledge partial, their different agendas out there conflicting in the text. . . .
So tempting. But resist it.”9
Pullman’s effort to defend classic technique suggests that what he’s arguing
against is all too common. The most banal paperback best-seller is likely to
exhibit at least some of the roundabout strategies running through modern sto-
rytelling. If mystery stories were early adopters of unusual storytelling devices,
now all genres use them. Stephen King’s excursions into horror and fantasy are
an anthology of experimental possibilities, not least the parallel-worlds novels
Desperation (1996) and The Regulators (1996). Science fiction, rising to greater
 Conclusion 411

respectability after World War II, freely explored manipulations of viewpoint,

linearity, and segmentation. The results can be pretty strange. The film Source
Code (2011) posits technology that sends thoughts from one man to another,
but it makes both characters identical on-screen, as if the sender has taken over
the recipient’s body as well as his mind. And both comedy and psychological
subjectivity in any genre justify narrative innovations, as in Groundhog Day
(1993) and The Father (2020).
Once these strategies saturate popular storytelling, our prior experience,
aided by each work’s design features, helps us grasp new stories we encounter.
Our versatility with the variorum enables us to pick the right expectations
to apply, while also appreciating what is fresh in this experience. Once we’ve
adjusted to an intrinsic norm, the story’s form and style can efface themselves
and make “content” stand out. But if we’re interested in the fine grain of craft,
the “spectacle of skill,” it’s often worth pausing over technical choices and the
adroitness with which they’re managed.
It may be, in fact, that popular storytelling, taken in bulk, has left its most
lasting legacy in training us in skills of comprehension. An astonishing number
of the exoteric stories we encounter are easily forgotten, even those we quite
enjoyed in the moment. I may not be the only fan who pauses before the paper-
back rack and wonders, “Have I read this one?” It’s not just advancing age that
makes me ask if I’ve seen that movie before. My ability to mistrust a narrator,
note disparities of dates, pick up on cues of behavior, rush breathlessly through
crosscut lines of action, and try to guess the twist is more enduring than the
memory of this or that character or line of dialogue. The storytellers I’ve sur-
veyed in part 3 are, for me, exceptions; they did more than sharpen my skills of
pickup. I hope my little-known examples have shown that even mediocre work
can give our story sense a decent workout, and that’s no small thing. Once we’ve
acquired the taste of the construction, a delight in language, stagecraft, or cine-
matic technique comes along as a bonus.

✳✳✳

Critics have long spoken of “experimental” writing, usually as a way of sig-

naling that an avant-gardist has boldly pushed into unknown regions.10 But
throughout my argument I’ve followed more recent precedent in assuming that
popular narrative can sponsor its own research projects. After all, a scientific
experiment is an attempt to test specific hypotheses under constrained condi-
tions. If you vary certain parameters, you can watch what happens. The results
can suggest further adjustments in the constants and the variables, and perhaps
a revision of the hypotheses.
Something like this seems to happen in innovative exoteric art. Genres,
conditions of production and reception, and other traditions provide the
 412 Conclusion

constraints. Techniques of the sort I’ve considered can be held constant or

varied, pressured by competition and the demand for novelty or virtuosity.
Start with a standard whodunit but make the Watson figure the culprit. Start
with a missing statuette and decline to describe any character’s inner states.
Start with a wife targeted for murder and follow her viewpoint as she comes to
realize her peril. Start with casual encounters among petty criminals—hitmen,
a prizefighter, a gang boss—and see what happens to the viewer’s experience if
you simply pull bits of action out of order. Start with a missing-person inves-
tigation plot and present it wholly through text messages, Google searches,
news clips, and FaceTime sessions, as the film Searching (2018) does. Every
decision triggers a cascade of problems of clarity and impact and implication,
each demanding further adjustment.
As consumers of narrative, we ought to appreciate what these experiments
reveal. Constraints can foster originality. Basic storytelling techniques seem at
once recognizable and inexhaustible. Over more than a hundred years, fresh
uses of familiar strategies can still captivate and move us. Not all stories are
experiments, and not all satisfy us; but enough are and do to keep us marveling
at how resourceful humans are in devising narrative experiences that we can’t
wholly predict.
When Sondheim described Oscar Hammerstein II as an experimenter, he
wasn’t exaggerating. Popular storytelling is, within self-imposed limits, an
adventure in testing how artistic form and style can expand an art form and
affect an audience. We often find that those limits are not so limiting.
 NOTES

Introduction: Mass Art as Experimental Storytelling

1. On the “new complexity” in film narrative, see Allan Cameron, Modular Narratives
in Contemporary Cinema (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Warren Buckland, ed.,
Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema (London: Wiley-Blackwell,
2009); Warren Buckland, ed., Hollywood Puzzle Films (New York: Routledge, 2014);
Miklós Kiss and Steven Willemsen, Impossible Puzzle Films: A Cognitive Approach to
Contemporary Complex Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018). See
also Jason Mittell, Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling
(New York: New York University Press, 2015).
2. Linda Aronson, The 21st Century Screenplay: A Comprehensive Guide to Writing Tomor-
row’s Films (Los Angeles: Silman-James, 2010).
3. David Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), chaps. 2 and 3.
4. David Bordwell, Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Story-
telling (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
5. Noël Carroll, A Philosophy of Mass Art (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), chap. 3.
6. J. B. Priestley as quoted in John Baxendale, “Priestley and the Highbrows,” in Middle-
brow Literary Culture: The Battle of the Brows, 1920–1960, ed. Erica Brown and Mary
Grover (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 77.
7. Unsigned review, Saturday Review (August 25, 1860) in Wilkie Collins: The Critical
Heritage, ed. Norman Page (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), 83.
8. Naomi Royde Smith, All Star Cast (New York: Macmillan, 1936), book jacket.
9. Lisa Jaillant notes: “The term middlebrow referred perhaps more clearly to mass-market
venues and middle-class audiences than to formal characteristics of literary style.” Lisa
Jaillant, Modernism, Middlebrow, and the Literary Canon: The Modern Library Series,
1917–1955 (Milton Park, UK: Routledge, 2016), 5.
 414 Introduction

10. Nicola Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2004), 13–15.
11. See Jaillant, Modernism, Middlebrow, and the Literary Canon; Joan Shelley Rubin, The
Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992);
Janice Radaway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and
Middle-Class Desire, rev. ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999);
and essays gathered in Erica Brown and Mary Grover, eds., Middlebrow Literary Culture:
The Battle of the Brows, 1920–1960 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
12. Carroll, Philosophy of Mass Art, 47.
13. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 4th ed., ed. Joachim Schulte and P.
M. S. Hacker (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), section 66, 36e.
14. Meir Sternberg, Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction (Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), especially chaps. 4 and 5.
15. The history of popular narrative includes many forms that will seem ungainly to us
alongside those recognizable as prototypes of our most common schemas. The literature
on these is vast, so I will simply signal a few instances concerned just with the Western
tradition: N. J. Lowe, The Classical Plot and the Invention of Western Narrative (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of
the Novel (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 1996); William W. Ryding, Structure in Medi-
eval Narrative (The Hague: Mouton De Gruyter, 1971); Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel:
Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2001). A broad global survey is Franco Moretti’s two-volume compendium, Franco
Moretti, The Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). Many of these
studies indicate that choices about parameters of linearity, viewpoint, and segmentation
remain pertinent to story-making across periods and cultures.
More specifically, my ideal type is a good background norm for the period and
the public I’m interested in here. See Jean Matter Mandler, Stories, Scripts, and Scenes:
Aspects of Schema Theory (Hilldale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1984); and Alyssa McCabe and Carole
Peterson, eds., Developing Narrative Structure (Hilldale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1991). See also
Patrick Hogan, The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotions
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and the Literary Universals website,
https://literary-universals.uconn.edu.
16. Todd Berliner has suggested that most mainstream films pose at least mild cognitive
challenges, ones that viewers enjoy overcoming. Todd Berliner, Hollywood Aesthetic:
Pleasure in American Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), chap. 1.
17. In what follows, I treat narration broadly as the patterned presentation of story infor-
mation, concentrating on viewpoint techniques. For many theorists of narrative, narra-
tion also entails the voice of a narrator, a more or less personified agency recounting the
tale. My own view is that novels, films, and other media do employ character narrators,
such as Huckleberry Finn, as well as clearly delineated noncharacter narrators, such
as the voice-over commentary in a documentary film. Otherwise, I treat narration as
a general process in both verbal and nonverbal media, without assigning this or that
passage to a distinct agent. I make a case for this position in David Bordwell, “Three
Dimensions of Film Narrative,” chap. 3 in Poetics of Cinema (New York: Routledge,
2008), 121–33.
18. Theorists of narrative have written extensively on manipulations of chronology and
viewpoint, but matters of segmentation are often taken for granted. An exception is
Sternberg, Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering, 172–76. We notice how much we
rely on paragraphing and other gaps on the page only when we encounter the unbroken
 Introduction 415

stretches in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936) or the limit case of László Kraszna-
horkai’s Satantango (1985), in which an entire chapter may consist of a single long sen-
tence. Similarly, a film’s division into scenes and sequences, like a play’s division into
scenes and acts, is crucial to our story comprehension.
19. See Robert Hughes, Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1993), 110. A thorough account of the history of Pound’s formulation
is found in Michael North, “The Making of ‘Make It New,’ ” Guernica August 15, 2013,
https://www.guernicamag.com/the-making-of-making-it-new/. North proposes that
Pound’s conception of artistic innovation acknowledges “its debt, even as revolution, to
the past, and the way in which new works are often just recombinations of traditional
elements.”
20. “An Exclusive Interview with Mary Higgins Clark: The ‘Queen of Suspense’ Talks About
Her Life and Work,” in Loves Music, Loves to Dance, by Mary Higgins Clark (New York:
Pocket, 1991), n.p.
21. Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actu-
ally Making Us Smarter (New York: Riverhead, 2005).
22. Clayton Hamilton, “Building a Play Backward,” The Bookman 38 (February 1914):
605–14.
23. See Carol Clover, The Medieval Saga (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982). Cf.
Johnson, Everything Bad, 125–28. See also Richard C. West, “The Interlace Structure
of The Lord of the Rings,” in A Tolkien Compass, ed. Jared Lobdell, (LaSalle, IL: Open
Court, 1975), 77–94.
24. Christopher Nolan as quoted in Tom Shone, The Nolan Variations: The Movies, Myster-
ies, and Marvels of Christopher Nolan (New York: Knopf, 2020), 76.
25. Charles Rosen, The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (New York: Norton,
1972), 71.
26. Ernst H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 168–74, 183–91.
27. On story schemas in scripture, see Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New
York: Basic Books), 96–98. On folktale structures, see Axel Olrik, “Epic Laws of Folk
Narrative,” in International Folkloristics: Classic Contributions by the Founders of
Folklore, ed. Alan Dundes (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 83–97.
28. For a more extensive discussion of schemas in the study of film history, see David
Bordwell, On the History of Film Style, 2nd ed. (Madison, WI: Irvington Way, 2018),
151–54.
29. For a thorough consideration of basic story types, see Hogan, The Mind and Its
Stories.
30. I consider the screenwriting vogue for Joseph Campbell’s myth-oriented Hero’s Journey
in Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It, 33–34.
31. For further discussion, see David Bordwell, “Pulverizing Plots: Into the Woods with
Sondheim, Shklovsky, and David O. Russell,” David Bordwell’s Website on Cinema (blog),
http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2014/03/03/pulverizing-plots-into-the-woods
-with-sondheim-shklovsky-and-david-o-russell/.
32. Christopher Nolan as quoted in Shone, Nolan Variations, 120.
33. Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner, Dictionary of American Slang, 2nd suppl.
ed. (New York: Crowell, 1975), s.v. “switch,” 534. See also H. T. Webster, “They Don’t
Speak Our Language,” Forum and Century 90, no. 6 (December 1933): 372.
34. Stanley Cortez as quoted in Doug McClelland, Forties Film Talk: Oral Histories of
Hollywood (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1992), 254.
 416 Introduction

35. Discussions of the first and last of these films can be found in David Bordwell,
“Grandmaster Flashback,” David Bordwell’s Website on Cinema (blog), http://www
.davidbordwell.net/blog/2009/01/27/grandmaster-flashback/; and David Bordwell,
“What-If Movies: Forking Paths in the Drawing Room,” David Bordwell’s Website on
Cinema (blog), http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2014/11/23/what-if-movies-forking
-paths-in-the-drawing-room/.
36. Jean-Claude Carrière, The Secret Language of Film, trans. Jeremy Leggatt (New York:
Pantheon, 1994), 15.
37. I develop the concept of intrinsic stylistic norms at greater length in David Bordwell,
Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), chap. 4
and thereafter.
38. James Joyce letter of June 24, 1921, as quoted in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, rev. ed.
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 512.
39. See Robert J. Ray, The Weekend Novelist (New York: Dell, 1994), 140–46; James Scott
Dell, Plot and Structure (Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest, 2004), 23–34. I discuss this
template in Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It, 27–33.
40. Nöel Carroll suggests that many mainstream films aim to dramatize homilies, a pro-
cess that becomes a significant way social and political ideologies are reinforced. Nöel
Carroll, “Film, Rhetoric, and Ideology,” chap. 18 in Theorizing the Moving Image (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 275–89.
41. Ben Hecht as quoted in Philip K. Scheuer, “A Town Called Hollywood,” Los Angeles
Times, June 30, 1940.
42. John Dickson Carr, “The Grandest Game in the World,” in The Door to Doom and
Other Detections, 2nd ed., ed. Douglas G. Greene (New York: International Polygonics,
1991), 310.
43. Dana Polan notes the opening’s T-shirt hint in Dana Polan, Pulp Fiction (London:
British Film Institute, 2000), 33.
44. Ted Elliott as quoted in Jeff Goldsmith, “The Craft of Writing the Tentpole Movie,”
Creative Screenwriting 11, no. 3 (May/June 2004): 53.
45. The original novel, minus two wives, became the 1948 film Letter to Three Wives, based
on the same mystery premise.
46. Further explanation of my angle of approach is available in David Bordwell, Poet-
ics of Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2008), chap. 1; and more informally in David
Bordwell, “Zip, Zero, Zeitgeist,” David Bordwell’s Website on Cinema (blog), http://www
.davidbordwell.net/blog/2014/08/24/zip-zero-zeitgeist/; and David Bordwell, “Hunting
Deplorables, Gathering Themes,” David Bordwell’s Website on Cinema (blog), http://
www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2020/04/09/hunting-deplorables-gathering-themes/.
47. Howard Haycraft, Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story (New
York: Appleton-Century, 1941); Julian Symons, Mortal Consequences: A History from the
Detective Story to the Crime Novel (New York: Harper and Row, 1972); Martin Edwards,
The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books (London: British Library, 2017); and Martin
Edwards, The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and Their Creators (New
York: HarperCollins, 2022). The many specialized monographs by LeRoy Lad Panek are
also informative and original; a useful summary of his ideas can be found in LeRoy Lad
Panek, An Introduction to the Detective Story (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State
University Popular Press, 1987).
48. Three useful critical surveys are Martin Priestman, ed., The Cambridge Companion
to Crime Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Catherine Ross
Nickerson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction (Cambridge:
 1. The Art Novel Meets 1910s Formalism 417

Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Alfred Bendixon and Olivia Carr Edenfield,
eds., The Centrality of Crime Fiction in American Literary Culture (New York: Rout-
ledge, 2017). The Palgrave Macmillan’s series Crime Files offers in-depth monographs
on many specific topics.
49. Mystery writers have not been shy about sharing their “practical poetics.” The chapters
that follow owe a good deal to Marie F. Rodell, Mystery Fiction: Theory and Technique
(New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1943); A. S. Burack, ed., Writing Detective and
Mystery Fiction (Boston: The Writer, 1945); Howard Haycraft, ed., The Art of the Mystery
Story (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1946); Lawrence Treat, ed., The Mystery Writer’s
Handbook (New York: Harper, 1956); Herbert Brean, ed., The Mystery Writer’s Hand-
book, rev. ed. (Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest, 1976); Martin Edwards, ed., Howdunit:
A Masterclass in Crime Writing by Members of the Detection Club (London: Collins,
2020); and Lee Child (with Laurie R. King), ed., How to Write a Mystery: A Handbook
from Mystery Writers of America (New York: Scribners, 2021). There are too many infor-
mative anthologies of critical writing on the genre to list here, but I should single out
Francis M. Nevins, ed., The Mystery Writer’s Art (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green
State University Popular Press, 1970); and Bernard Benstock, ed., Art in Crime Writing:
Essays on Detective Fiction (New York: St. Martin’s, 1983). Works bearing on particular
points are cited in later chapters.

1. The Art Novel Meets 1910s Formalism

1. For a review of the Goldwyn film, see “Stage Play Given Interesting Screen Presenta-
tion,” Wid’s Daily, June 12, 1921.
2. Ralph E. Dyar, “The Novelty in This Play,” A Voice in the Dark: A Play in Prologue
and Three Acts, Acting Version, unpublished manuscript, University of Oregon Special
Collections, Collection no. Ax 255, n.p.
3. Ralph E. Dyar, A Voice in the Dark: A Play in Prologue and Three Acts, Acting Version,
unpublished manuscript, University of Oregon Special Collections, Collection no. Ax
255, 3–22.
4. E. Clark, “ ‘Coat-Tales’ Opens the New Season,” New York Times, August 7, 1916.
5. “Novelty in Drama, ‘Voice in the Dark,’ ” New York Times, July 29, 1919.
6. On American magazine serialization at this period, see Richard Ohmann, “Diverging
Paths: Books and Magazines in the Transition to Corporate Capitalism,” in A History of
the Book in America, vol. 4, Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing in the United
States, 1880–1940, ed. Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2009), 102–15.
7. John Tebbel, Between Covers: The Rise and Transformation of American Publishing
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 179.
8. Henry James, “The Future of the Novel,” in Literary Criticism, vol. 1, Essays on Litera-
ture, American Writers, English Writers (New York: Library of America, 1984), 100–101.
9. Henry James, Selected Letters, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1987), 385.
10. Henry James, “Far from the Madding Crowd,” in Literary Criticism, vol. 1, Essays on Lit-
erature, American Writers, English Writers (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1045.
Hardy’s book was originally published in two, not three volumes, but did run to some
900 pages, a common triple-decker length. See Guinevere L. Griest, Mudie’s Circulating
Library and the Victorian Novel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), 118.
 418 1. The Art Novel Meets 1910s Formalism

11. Henry James, “Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life,” in Literary Criticism, vol. 1,
Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers (New York: Library of America,
1984), 958; Henry James, “The New Novel,” in Literary Criticism, vol. 1, Essays on Liter-
ature, American Writers, English Writers (New York: Library of America, 1984), 136.
12. Henry James, “The Tragic Muse,” in Literary Criticism, vol. 2, French Writers, Other
European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition (New York: Library of America,
1984), 1107.
13. Greist, Mudie’s Circulating Library, 108.
14. See Elizabeth MacAndrew, The Gothic Tradition in Fiction (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1979).
15. For a wide-ranging survey, see Andrew Maugham, ed., The Cambridge Companion to
Sensation Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
16. Collins revised schemas from many sources, including Wuthering Heights (1847) and
a novella he wrote with Dickens and others, The Wreck of the Golden Mary (1856). See
John Sutherland, introduction to The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins (New York:
Oxford, 2008), xv–xvi.
17. Anonymous review of “The Woman in White,” Saturday Review, August 25, 1860, in
Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage, ed. Norman Page (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1974), 249–50.
18. Anthony Trollope, “The Unpalatable Taste of the Construction,” (1883), in Wilkie
Collins: The Critical Heritage, ed. Norman Page (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1974), 223.
19. Henry James, “Mary Elizabeth Braddon,” in Literary Criticism, vol. 1, Essays on Lit-
erature, American Writers, English Writers (New York: Library of America, 1984),
742, 743.
20. Henry James, “The Novels of George Eliot,” in Literary Criticism, vol. 2, French Writers,
Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition (New York: Library of
America, 1984), 912.
21. Henry James, “Daisy Miller” et al., in Literary Criticism, vol. 2, French Writers, Other
European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition (New York: Library of America,
1984), 1269.
22. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. John Paul Riqueline (New York:
Norton, 2007), 189.
23. Henry James, “In the Cage,” The Complete Tales of Henry James. Vol. 10, From 1898
to1899, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Lippincott, 1964), 198.
24. Jacques Barzun, “Henry James the Melodramatist,” in The Energies of Art: Studies of
Authors Classic and Modern (New York: Harper, 1956), 233.
25. Joseph Warren Beach, The Method of Henry James (1918), rev. ed. (Philadelphia: Saifer,
1954), 33–34; Henry James, “The Wings of the Dove,” in Literary Criticism, Vol. 2, French
Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition (New York:
Library of America, 1984), 1299.
26. Henry James, “The Awkward Age,” in Literary Criticism, Vol. 2, French Writers, Other
European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition (New York: Library of America,
1984), 1131.
27. James, “Wings of the Dove,” 1294.
28. Joseph Warren Beach, The Twentieth Century Novel (New York: Appleton Century
Crofts, 1932), 8.
29. Henry James, The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H.
Powers (New York: Oxford University Press 1987), 11.
 1. The Art Novel Meets 1910s Formalism 419

30. T. S. Eliot suggested that Collins was the principal influence on the “dramatic method”
Dickens employed in his later novels. See Wilkie Collins, “Introduction to The Moon-
stone,” in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition: Literature, Politics, Belief,
1927–1929, ed. Frances Dickey, Jennifer Formicelli, and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 357–60.
31. Joseph Conrad, “The Nigger of the Narcissus,” preface to Great Short Works of Joseph
Conrad (New York: Harper 1966), 23.
32. Joseph Conrad, Victory (New York: Doubleday, 1915), 204.
33. The passage is analyzed in Beach, Twentieth-Century Novel, 346–47.
34. Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, ed. Thomas C. Moser (New York: Norton, 1968), 49.
35. A helpful summary of the temporal manipulations is offered in Robert N. Hudspeth,
“Conrad’s Use of Time in Chance,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 21, no. 3 (December
1966): 283–89.
36. C. E. Montagu, Manchester Guardian (review), January 11, 1914, in Joseph Conrad: The
Critical Heritage, ed. Norman Sherry (London: Routledge, 1973), 274.
37. Arthur T. Quiller-Couch, “Four Tales by Mr. Conrad,” The Bookman (June 1903), in
Joseph Conrad: The Critical Heritage, ed. Norman Sherry (London: Routledge, 1973),
156.
38. George P. Lathrop, “Growth of the Novel,” Atlantic Monthly 33 (June 1874): 684–97.
39. See Brander Matthews, Aspects of Fiction and Other Ventures in Criticism (New York:
Harper, 1896). Beach’s The Method of Henry James and Richard Curle’s Joseph Conrad:
A Study (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Page, 1914) are examples of emerging analysis of
the novelists’ characteristic technical choices.
40. George P. Lathrop, “The Novel and Its Future,” Atlantic Monthly 34 (September 1874):
314.
41. See, for example, Clayton Hamilton, Materials and Methods of Fiction (New York:
Doubleday Doran, 1908), 118–30.
42. Walter B. Pitkin, The Art and Business of Story Writing (New York: Macmillan, 1913),
176.
43. See Mary Eleanor Roberts, “The Single View-Point,” The Photoplay Author and Writer’s
Monthly 5, no. 5 (May 1915): 140–41.
44. See Hamilton, Materials and Methods, 134–38; J. Berg Esenwein, Writing the Short-
Story: A Practical Handbook on the Rise, Structure, Writing, and Sale of the Modern
Short Story (New York: Hinds, Noble and Eldridge, 1909), 121–22.
45. Blanche Colton Williams, A Handbook of Story Writing (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1917),
98.
46. Polti provides continuous inspiration for filmmakers, as indicated by Mike Figgis,
The Thirty-Six Situations (London: Faber, 2017).
47. An overview of Clayton Hamilton’s career is provided in Frederick J. Hunter, “The
Technical Criticism of Clayton Hamilton,” Educational Theatre Journal 7, no. 4
(December 1955): 285–93.
48. Clayton Hamilton, A Manual on the Art of Fiction, Prepared for the Use of Schools and
Colleges (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1918), 120.
49. Hamilton, Materials and Methods, 127–29.
50. Clayton Hamilton, “Building a Play Backward,” The Bookman (February 1914): 605–14.
51. This development in England is surveyed in John Russell Taylor, The Rise and Fall of the
Well-Made Play (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967).
52. Jack Poggi, Theater in America: The Impact of Economic Forces 1870–1967 (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1968), 47–48.
 420 1. The Art Novel Meets 1910s Formalism

53. Gustav Freytag, Technique of the Drama: An Exposition of Dramatic Composition and
Art, 2nd ed., trans. Elias J. MacEwan (Chicago: Griggs, 1896), 114–40.
54. Elisabeth Woodbridge, The Drama: Its Law and Its Technique (Boston: Allyn and Bacon,
1898), v–x; Clayton Hamilton, Studies in Stagecraft (New York: Holt, 1914), 94–95.
55. Charlton Andrews, The Technique of Play Writing (Springfield, MA: Home Correspon-
dence School, 1915), 106–9.
56. Hamilton, Materials and Methods, 66.
57. See George Pierce Baker, Dramatic Technique (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1919), 194,
211, 215; and Andrews, The Technique of Play Writing, 108.
58. “Collaborating on a Play Is a Ticklish Business,” New York Times, November 22, 1914.
59. Poggi, Theatre in America, 30–31. For a compact overview of the American film indus-
try’s cultural role during the period, see Charlie Keil, “The Movies: The Transitional
Era,” in American Literature in Transition 1910–1920, ed. Mark W. Van Wienen (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 312–27.
60. Terry Bailey, “Normatizing the Silent Drama: Photoplay Manuals of the 1910s and Early
1920s,” Journal of Screenwriting 5, no. 2 (June 2014): 209–24; Steven Maras, Screenwriting:
History, Theory, and Practice (London: Wallflower, 2009); Stephen Curran, Early Screen-
writing Teachers 1910–1922: Origins, Contribution and Legacy (London: AEC, 2019).
61. I review these developments in the online lecture, David Bordwell, “How Motion Pic-
tures Became the Movies,” David Bordwell’s Website on Cinema (blog), http://www
.davidbordwell.net/blog/2013/01/12/what-next-a-video-lecture-i-suppose-well-actually
-yeah/. See also Charlie Keil, Early American Cinema in Transition: Story, Style, and
Filmmaking, 1907–1913 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001); David Bord-
well, On the History of Film Style, 2nd ed. (Madison, WI: Irvington Way Institute, 2018),
chap. 6; and David Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2005), chap. 2.
62. Crosscutting was also sometimes called “the switch-back” or, more confusingly, the
“cut-back.” Both could refer to a shift in either space or temporal order. See Edward
Mott Woolley, “The Story of D. W. Griffith, the $100,000 Salary Man of the Movies,”
McClure’s, September 1914, 116.
Alternation of story lines was well-established in literature, from The Odyssey to the
triple-decker, and historians of theater have disclosed “parallel editing” techniques
in late nineteenth-century stage spectacles. See A. Nicolas Vardac, Stage to Screen: The-
atrical Method from Garrick to Griffith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1949); and John L. Fell, Film and the Narrative Tradition (Norman: University of Okla-
homa Press, 1974). For a broader analysis, see Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs, Theatre
to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1997).
63. See Kristin Thompson “From Primitive to Classical,” in The Classical Hollywood Cin-
ema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, by David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and
Kristin Thompson (London: Routledge, 1985), 160, 217.
64. See Kristin Thompson, “The International Exploration of Cinematic Expressivity,” in
Film and the First World War, ed. Karel Dibbets and Bert Hogenkamp (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 1995), 65–85.
65. Julian Johnson, “The Shadow Stage,” Photoplay Magazine 2, no. 1 (December 1916): 77.
66. There are some variations among surviving copies of the film, and no one version con-
tains all the footage found in others. I base my analysis on the circulating Museum of
Modern Art 16mm print and video versions distributed on disc by Image, Kino Video,
and Cohen Film Collection. I have focused on items common to these editions.
 1. The Art Novel Meets 1910s Formalism 421

The intricate history of the film’s versions is traced in Russell Merritt, “D. W. Grif-
fith’s Intolerance: Reconstructing an Unattainable Text,” Film History 4, no. 4 (1990):
337–75. Good overviews are available in William C. Drew, D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance: Its
Genesis and Its Vision (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1986), 81–90; and in essays under the
rubric “Intolerance” in Paolo Cherchi Usai, ed., The Griffith Project, vol. 9, Films Produced
in 1916–18 (London: British Film Institute, 2005), 31–99.
67. ‘Twas Ever Thus has apparently not survived. Its release while Griffith was adding new
epochs to The Mother and the Law, the germ of the modern story, may have spurred him
to include four stories rather than three and to intercut them rather than set them side by
side. See “Bosworth, Inc., Releases Fourth Elsie Janis Subject,” The Moving Picture World,
October 2, 1915, 97; and Lynde Denig, “ ‘Twas Ever Thus,” The Moving Picture World,
October 9, 1915, 283. Thanks to Megan Boyd for telling me of ‘Twas Ever Thus.
68. A program quoted in “ ‘Intolerance’ Impressive,” New York Times, September 6, 1916.
69. Intolerance program, Chestnut Street Opera House, Philadelphia, December 22, 1916.
70. Claire Dupré la Tour surveys the film’s deployment of written language in Claire Dupré
la Tour, “Intolerance: Intertitles,” in The Griffith Project, vol. 9, Films Produced in 1916–
18, ed. Paolo Cherchi Usai (London: British Film Institute, 2005), 81–88. See also Tony
Liepa, “Figures of Silent Speech: Silent Film Dialogue and the American Vernacular,
1909–1916” (PhD diss., New York University, 2005), 418–33. I’m grateful to Charlie Keil
for this last reference.
71. D. W. Griffith, “What I Demand of Movie Stars,” Motion Picture Classic 3 (February
1917): 40.
72. Griffith, “What I Demand,” 41.
73. Robert E. Welsh, “David W. Griffith Speaks” (1914), in D. W. Griffith Interviews, ed.
Anthony Slide (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 9; Drew, Griffith’s Intol-
erance, 81–90.
74. Johnson, “Shadow Stage,” 81.
75. See David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Christopher Nolan: A Labyrinth of Linkages,
2nd ed. (Madison. WI: Irvington Way Institute, 2019), 19–24.
76. See Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); and Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Produc-
tion of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity
6, no. 2 (April 1999): 59–77. See also Tom Gunning, “The Whole Town’s Gawking: Early
Cinema and the Visual Experience of Modernity,” Yale Journal of Criticism 7, no. 2
(1994): 197–99; Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)
Credulous Spectator,” in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers , 1995), 128.
77. David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style, 2nd ed. (Madison, WI: Irvington Way
Institute, 018), 129–39, 278–81. Other objections can be found in Malcolm Turvey, The
Filming of Modern Life: European Avant-Garde Film of the 1920s (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2011), chap. 6; Charlie Keil,“ ‘To Here from Modernity’: Style, Historiography,
and Transitional Cinema,” in American Cinema’s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institu-
tions, Practices, ed. Charlie Keil and Shelly Stamp (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2004), 51–65; and Charlie Keil, “Integrated Attractions: Style and Spectatorship
in Transitional Cinema,” in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Strauven
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 193–203.
78. See, for instance, Tom Gunning, “Intolerance: Narrative Structure,” in The Griffith Proj-
ect, vol. 9, Films Produced in 1916–18, ed. Paolo Cherchi Usai (London: British Film
Institute, 2005), 47, 49.
 422 2. Making Confusion Satisfactory

2. Making Confusion Satisfactory: Modernism and Other Mysteries

The chapter epigraph is from Anthony Burgess, “Joyce as Centenarian,” Homage to

Qwert Yuiop: Selected Journalism 1978–1985 (London; Abacus, 1986), 533.
1. Rex Stout, How Like a God (New York: Vanguard, 1929), 3.
2. David C. Tilden, “Exploring the Dark,” New York Herald Tribune, September 8, 1929.
3. F. H., “Novel on the Stairs,” New Republic, November 13, 1929, 357. The Sanctuary
comparison was made by Peter Quennell, as quoted in John McAleer, Rex Stout: A
Biography (New York: Little, Brown, 1977), 213.
4. Joseph Warren Beach, “The Novel from James to Joyce,” The Nation 132 (June 10, 1931):
635.
5. Joseph Warren Beach, The Twentieth Century Novel: Studies in Technique (New York:
Appleton Century Crofts, 1932), 274–75.
6. Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (1921; repr. New York: Viking, 1957), 274.
7. Lubbock, Craft of Fiction, 173.
8. Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1923), Collected Essays, Vol. 1 (London:
Hogarth Press, 1966), 319.
9. Peter de Voogd, “Joycean Typeface,” in Aspects of Modernism: Studies in Honour of Max
Nänny (Tübingen: Narr, 1997), 204–5; Bruce Arnold, The Scandal of Ulysses: The Sen-
sational Life of a Twentieth-Century Masterpiece (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), 99, 159,
233.
10. Anthony Burgess, Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce (London:
Deutch, 1973), 58–61.
11. Objective descriptions of behavior typically head the paragraph before we get the
“stream of consciousness” passages, which tend to be sentence fragments. In addition,
as Dorrit Cohn points out, Joyce uses the traditional distinction between tenses to keep
us oriented. See Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Con-
sciousness in Fiction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 62–63.
12. Charles Rosen, Sonata Forms, rev. ed. (New York: Norton, 1986), 45.
13. Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music. Vol. 4, The Early Twentieth
Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 5–29.
14. Ernst H. Gombrich, The Story of Art (New York: Phaidon, 1950), 432–33.
15. Kirk Varnedoe, A Fine Disregard: What Makes Modern Art Modern (New York: Abrams,
1990), 22. For an in-depth account of how a modernist filmmaker can reactivate tradi-
tional schemas, see Malcolm Turvey, Play Time: Jacques Tati and Comedic Modernism
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2019).
16. I’ve argued that a great deal of innovation in popular storytelling comes from applying
received conventions to new subjects, themes, and story worlds. See Christopher Nolan,
A Labyrinth of Linkages (Madison, WI: Irvington Way Institute, 2019), 5–6; and David
Bordwell, “Reinventing Hollywood in Paperback: Welcome to the Variorum,” David
Bordwell’s Website on Cinema (blog), http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2019/03/02
/reinventing-hollywood-in-paperback-welcome-to-the-variorum/.
17. Beach, “The Novel from James to Joyce,” 636.
18. See Leon Edel, The Psychological Novel 1900–1950 (New York: Lippincott, 1955), 26–30.
Apparently May Sinclair was the first to apply the term to literature in her essay.
See May Sinclair, “The Novels of Dorothy Richardson,” The Little Review 5, no. 12 (April
1918): 6.
19. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927), “Time Passes,” part II, section 3.
20. Cohn, Transparent Minds, 247–49.
 2. Making Confusion Satisfactory 423

21. William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury: The Corrected Text (New York: Vintage,
1990), 3.
22. I argue that a similar process of revising an intrinsic narration norm is at work in cer-
tain films as well. See David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: Univer-
sity of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 213–28.
23. See William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury: With Glossary and Commentary
(London: The Folio Society, 2016), vii.
24. Gertrude Stein, “How Writing Is Written,” in How Writing Is Written, ed. Robert Bartlett
Haas (Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow, 1974), 153.
25. Faulkner, Sound and the Fury: Corrected Text, 148.
26. An example is “Appendix,” The Sound and the Fury, in The Sound and the Fury and As
I Lay Dying (New York: Modern Library, 1946), 3–22.
27. Reviews guiding prospective readers are summarized in Carl Rollyson, The Life of
William Faulkner, vol. 1, The Past Is Never Dead: 1897–1934 (Charlottesville: University
of Virginia Press, 2021), 236–38.
28. Lyle Saxon, “A Family Breaks Up,” New York Herald Tribune, October 13, 1929.
29. Basil Davenport, “Tragic Frustration,” Saturday Review of Literature, December 28,
1929, 602.
30. Clifton Fadiman, “Hardly Worth While,” The Nation 130 (January 15, 1930): 77.
31. See, for example, Todd McCarthy, “Pulp Fiction,” Variety, May 23, 1994, https://variety
.com/1994/film/reviews/pulp-fiction-1200437049/. In Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan “puts
his stamp on the heroic rescue operation, offering a bravura virtual-eyewitness account
from multiple perspectives—one that fragments and then craftily interweaves events as
seen from land, sea and air.” See Peter DeBruge, “Dunkirk,” Variety, July 17, 2027, https://
variety.com/2017/film/reviews/dunkirk-review-christopher-nolan-1202495701/.
32. James Joyce as quoted in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1982), 521.
33. Among the many discussions of narrative technique, a very useful overview is Stephen
Kern, The Modernist Novel: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2011). An older but still informative collection is Malcolm Bradbury and James
McFarlane, eds., Modernism (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1976). Accounts of theo-
retical debates about modernism may be found in Jean-Michel Rabaté, ed., A Handbook
of Modernist Studies (Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2013).
34. William Faulkner, as quoted in Joseph Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography (Oxford: Univer-
sity Press of Mississippi, 2005), 248.
35. One version of Joyce’s plan was published in Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce’s Ulysses: A
Study (1930; repr. New York: Vintage, 1961), 30. The schema is available online at https://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_schema_for_Ulysses.
36. Letter of June 24, 1921, quoted in Ellmann, James Joyce, 512.
37. Harry Levin, “What Was Modernism?,” Massachusetts Review 1, no. 4 (Summer 1960):
610.
38. Booth Tarkington as quoted in Kenneth Roberts, I Wanted to Write (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1949), 237.
39. Jurij Tynjanov as quoted in Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard/Belknap, 1984), 192.
40. Jean Cocteau, Le Coq et l’arlequin (Paris: Sirène, 1918), 11.
41. Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” in The Common Reader (New York: Harcourt, 1925), 150.
42. Gore Vidal, “Maugham’s Half and Half,” in United States: Essays 1952–1992 (New York:
Random House, 1993), 244.
 424 2. Making Confusion Satisfactory

43. John McAleer, Rex Stout: A Biography (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977), 208–9.
44. Dorothy Richardson, Pointed Roofs (1915), chap. 1, section 3.
45. George Meredith’s Rhoda Fleming (1865) puts thoughts in parentheses following lines
of dialogue. Jean-Richard Bloch’s Nuit kurde (1925) assigns a page to each character
and runs three unbroken columns (“Dream,” “Thought,” and “Speech”) as simultaneous
discourse. Like Morley, Bloch is at pains to explain the technique. See A Night in Kurd-
istand, trans. Jean-Richard Bloch (London: Gollancz, 1930), 187–97.
46. John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer (1925), chap. 1, section 3.
47. C. Kay Scott, Siren (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1925), 9.
48. Christopher Morley, Thunder on the Left (New York: Penguin, 1946), 86–87.
49. Vladimir Nabokov, “Letter to Edmund Wilson,” in The Dixie Limited: Writers on
William Faulkner and His Influence, ed. M. Thomas Inge (Jackson: University Press
of Mississippi, 2016), 95. Nabokov ascribed contemporary writers’ “typographic broth”
to the influence of Ulysses. See Fredson Bowers, ed., Lectures on Literature (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 190), 363.
50. Joseph Harrington, “Subway Fire,” Saturday Evening Post, January 21, 1939.
51. John Klempner, Letter to Five Wives (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1946), 53.
52. See Tom W. Blackburn, “Take with Soda” (1944), in Pulpwood Days, vol. 2, Lives of the
Pulp Writers (Elkhorn, CA: Off-Trail, 2013), 139.
53. For example, compare the 1931 Cosmopolitan edition of Faith Baldwin’s Skyscraper to
the 1948 Dell reprint.
54. I consider this technique in David Bordwell, Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Film-
makers Changed Movie Storytelling (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), chap. 6.
55. Thomas H. Uzzell and Camelia Waite Uzzell, Narrative Technique: A Practical Course
in Literary Psychology, 3rd ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934), 462. On varieties of
viewpoint manipulation, see Arthur Sullivant Hoffman, Fundamentals of Fiction Writ-
ing (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1922), 317–47; Carl H. Grabo, The Technique of the
Novel (New York: Gordian, 1928), 33–66; and Van Meter Ames, Aesthetics of the Novel
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928), 171–92. All betray the influence of James
and Lubbock.
56. Robert Morss Lovett and Helen Sard Hughes, History of the Novel in England (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1932), 450.
57. This doesn’t mean that more traditional techniques such as “He thought, ‘I love her,’ ”
went away. The new options coexisted with the older ones, sometimes within the same
texts. See Melanie Conroy, “Before the ‘Inward Turn’: Tracing Represented Thought in
the French Novel (1800–1929),” Poetics Today 35, no. 1-2 (Spring-Summer 2014): 166.
58. Neil Verma, Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics, and American Radio Drama
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 61–62.
59. See, for example, Mabel Constandoros and Howard Agg, “The Tunnel,” in Radio The-
atre: Plays Specially Written for Broadcasting, ed, Val Gielgud (London: Macdonald,
1946), 175–99; and Louis MacNiece, “The Dark Tower,” in The Dark Tower and Other
Radio Plays (London: Faber and Faber, 1947), 9–66.
60. Variety’s reviewer called it “appalling, horrible, heart-breaking, stomach-upsetting.”
Quoted in “80 percent Agreement,” Variety, May 8, 1940.
61. John P. Marquand, The Late George Apley (New York: Little, Brown, 1937). For the
reviewer’s comment, see Percy Hutchison, “Mr. Marquand’s Novel of the Boston Brah-
min Tradition,” New York Times, January 3, 1937.
62. These concepts are developed in the essays in Rabaté, A Handbook of Modernism
Studies.
 2. Making Confusion Satisfactory 425

63. For detailed accounts of Parade, see Alan M. Gillmor, Erik Satie (Boston: Twayne,
1988), chap. 7; and Nancy Perloff, Art and the Everyday: Popular Entertainment and the
Circle of Erik Satie (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1991), chaps. 3–5.
64. Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York: Picador,
2008), 99.
65. It seems akin to what Robert Scholes, also resisting the duality of modernism/middle-
brow, calls “durable fluff.” See Robert Scholes, Paradoxy of Modernism (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2006), chap. 5. A comparable account is in Turvey, Play Time.
66. Quoted in James Harding, The Ox on the Roof: Scenes from Musical Life in Paris in the
Twenties (New York: St. Martin’s, 1972), 38.
67. See the essays in Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik, eds., Modern Art and Popular
Culture: Readings in High and Low (New York: Abrams, 1990).
68. Philip Furia, The Poets of Tin Pan Alley: A History of America’s Great Lyricists (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 102–5.
69. Quoted in Walter Starkie, Luigi Pirandello, 1867–1936 (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 1965), 207.
70. Luigi Pirandello, “Premise: Six Characters in Search of an Author” (1933), in Naked
Masks: Five Plays by Luigi Pirandello, ed. Eric Bentley (New York: Dutton, 1952), 209–10.
71. Luigi Pirandello, “On Humor,” Tulane Drama Review 10, no. 3 (Spring 1966): 54; origi-
nally published in 1920.
72. Pirandello, preface to Six Characters in Search of an Author (1929),” in Naked Masks, 363.
73. On Theatricalism as a movement, see Mordecai Gorelik, New Theatres for Old (New
York: Samuel French, 1940), chap. 7.
74. Brooks Atkinson, “On Light Fantastic Toes,” New York Times, October 2, 1938.
75. In the absence of a published script, infeasible for obvious reasons, the press reports and
the film are the best record we have of this farrago.
76. Robert Lynd, “Chance,” Daily News (January 15, 1914), in Norman Sherry, Conrad: The
Critical Heritage (Oxfordshire, UK: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 271.
77. An overwhelmingly wide-ranging account of popular culture’s relation to modernist
graphic art is Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik, High and Low: Modern Art and Popu-
lar Culture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1990).
78. T. S. Eliot, “Wilkie Collins and Dickens” (1927), in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot:
The Critical Edition: Literature, Politics, Belief, 1927–1929, ed. Frances Dickey, Jennifer
Formicelli, and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore, MD: Johnsons Hopkins University
Press, 2015), 171.
79. Gertrude Stein as quoted in Lawrence D. Stewart, “Gertrude Stein and the Vital Dead,”
in The Mystery and Detection Annual, ed. Donald K. Adams (Beverly Hills, CA: Donald
Adams, 1970), 105. See also Stein, “Why I Like Detective Stories,” 146–50.
80. Gertrud Stein, Lectures in America (Boston: Beacon, 1935), 167.
81. Gertrude Stein, Blood on the Dining-Room Floor: A Murder Mystery (New York: Dover,
1982), 71. I’m grateful to Tom Gunning for calling my attention to Stein’s book.
82. Cora Jarrett as quoted in Will Cuppy, “Mystery and Adventure,” New York Herald Tri-
bune, September 16, 1934.
83. Cora Jarrett as quoted in “Book Notes,” New York Times, October 27, 1933.
84. Cora Jarrett, Night Over Fitch’s Pond (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1933), chap. 16.
85. Jarrett, Night Over Fitch’s Pond, chap. 18.
86. See Alvah C. Bessie, “Death Watch,” Saturday Review of Literature, September 9, 1933,
93; “A Tragic Mystery,” New York Times Book Review, September 10, 1933, 16.
87. Advertisement for Night Over Fitch’s Pond, New York Herald Tribune, February 4, 1934.
 426 2. Making Confusion Satisfactory

88. C. H. B. Kitchin, Birthday Party (Richmond, VA: Valancourt, 1938), chap. 1.

89. “An Epilogue by A. B. C. Müller as Epitaph for Cameron McCabe,” in The Face on the
Cutting-Room Floor, by Cameron McCabe (New York: Penguin, 1982), 204.
90. “A Dossier on a Vanished Author and a Vanished Book by the Editors,” in The Face on
the Cutting-Room Floor, by Cameron McCabe (New York: Penguin, 1982), 270.
91. Clifton Fadiman, “Realism and Mannerism,” The Nation, September 25, 1929, 329.
Another reviewer praised the book’s suspense; see Lewis Gannett, “A Man Talks to
Himself,” New York Herald Tribune, August 30, 1929.

3. Churn and Consolidation: The 1940s and After

1. The star image of Hermione Baddeley, who plays Mrs. Finch, may also make her
account doubtful; she was known for brash, not overly bright characters.
2. Two of them are young women who together offer the same testimony, and they are
minor characters. Hence the film’s American title, “Five Angles on Murder.”
3. “ ‘The Woman in Question’ with Jean Kent,” Harrison’s Reports, February 22, 1952;
Bosley Crowther, “The Screen in Review,” New York Times, February 19, 1952.
4. “ ‘Woman in Question’ Slow-Paced Drama,” Hollywood Reporter, February 19, 1952;
“New Films in London,” Times, October 9, 1950; Otis L. Guernsey Jr., “On the Screen,”
New York Herald Tribune, February 19, 1952.
5. See Amy Flanders, “ ‘Our Ambassadors’: British Books, American Competition and the
Great Book Export Drive, 1940–1960,” English Historical Review 125, no. 515 (August
2020): 879; and James L. W. West III, “The Divergent Paths of British and American
Publishing,” Sewanee Review 120, no. 4 (Fall 2012): 508.
6. John Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States, vol. 3, The Golden Age
Between Two Wars (New York: Bowker, 1978), 660, 680–81.
7. A detailed, wide-ranging survey of U.S. publishing after 1940 is provided in Beth Luey,
“The Organization of the Book Publishing Industry,” in A History of the Book in Amer-
ica, vol. 5, The Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, ed. David Paul Nord,
Joan Shelley Rubin, and Michael Schudson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2009), 29–54.
8. John Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States, vol. 4, The Great Change
1940–1980 (New York: Bowker, 1981), 371; Kenneth C. Davis, Two-Bit Culture: The
Paperbacking of America (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1984), 125.
9. Ron Goulart, Over 50 Years of American Comic Books (Lincolnwood, IL: Mallard, 1991),
99.
10. On Hollywood films of the 1940s, see Thomas Schatz, Boom and Bust: American Cinema
in the 1940s (New York: Scribners, 1997); and David Bordwell, Reinventing Hollywood:
How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2019).
11. Douglas Gomery, A History of Broadcasting in America (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008),
77–78, 86–90. See also Michele Hilmes, Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcast-
ing in the United States (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2002).
12. Neil Verma, Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics, and American Radio Drama
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 20–22.
13. For a compact overview of the emergence of “experimental” broadcast programs, see
Neil Verma, “Radio Drama,” in American Literature in Transition 1930–1940, ed. Ichiro
Takayoshi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 267–84.
 3. Churn and Consolidation 427

14. Eugene Vale, The Technique of Screenplay Writing (New York: Crown, 1944); Lewis
Herman, A Practical Manual of Screen Playwriting for Theater and Motion Pictures
(Cleveland, IL: World, 1952); John Howard Lawson, Theory and Technique of Playwrit-
ing and Screenwriting (New York: Putnam’s, 1949).
15. Manuel Komroff, How to Write a Novel (Boston: The Writer, 1950), 62–95. Another
nuanced and impressive overview is Thomas H. Uzzell, The Technique of the Novel: A
Handbook on the Craft of the Long Narrative (New York: Lippincott, 1950). In revising
his earlier manuals, Uzzell incorporates analyses of Ulysses, Manhattan Transfer, Point
Counter Point, and Sanctuary.
16. Komroff, How to Write a Novel, 122–34.
17. George Orwell, “Inside the Whale,” in A Collection of Essays (Garden City, NY: Double-
day Anchor, 1954), 231–37.
18. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twenti-
eth Century (London: Verso, 1998).
19. Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction and the Arts Between the World Wars
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 8–12; Robert Genter, Late Modernism:
Art, Culture and Politics in Cold War America (Pittsburgh: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2010), 4–11. For an overview of these inquiries, see Douglas Mao and Rebecca L.
Walkowitz, “The New Modernist Studies,” PMLA 123, no. 3 (May 2008): 737–48.
20. Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (1939; repr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2008), 71.
21. Examples are Wallace Stegner, “Is the Novel Done For?,” Harper’s Magazine, December
1942, 76; Allen Tate, “The State of Letters,” Sewanee Review 52 (Autumn 1944): 612–13;
Diana Trilling, “What Has Happened to Our Novels?,” Harper’s Magazine, May 1944,
535; and Robert Coates, “The State of the Novel,” Yale Review, 36 (Summer 1947): 610.
See also the symposium, “The State of American Writing, 1948: Seven Questions,” Par-
tisan Review 15, no. 7 (July 1948): 855–94, which included this as the premise for one
question: “It is the general opinion that, unlike the twenties, this is not a period of
experiment in language and form.” For a summary of this tendency, see Chester E.
Eisinger, Fiction of the Forties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 13–20.
22. Eric Bentley, “The Drama at Ebb,” Kenyon Review 7, no. 2 (Spring 1945): 174.
23. Josephina Niggli, Pointers on Radio Writing (Boston: The Writer, 1946), 76–79.
24. The way the film transforms the source novel is discussed in Bordwell, Reinventing
Hollywood, 103–6.
25. See Niggli, Pointers on Radio Writing, 63–64; Luther Weaver, The Technique of Radio
Writing (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1948), 118–19.
26. Flashback strategies of American studio films of the 1940s are analyzed in chapter 2
of Bordwell, Reinventing Hollywood.
27. Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (New York: Rinehart, 1948), 152.
28. James Naremore analyzes the Heart of Darkness script in detail in James Naremore,
“Hearts of Darkness: Joseph Conrad and Orson Welles,” in True to the Spirit: Film
Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity, ed. Colin MacCabe, Kathleen Murray, and Rich
Warner (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 59–73.
29. For a detailed comparison of the newsreel and the film’s overall structure, see David
Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction (New York: McGraw-Hill,
2019), 105–6.
30. Charles Poore, “Books of the Times,” New York Times, August 7, 1947.
31. Philip Toynbee, “Notation of the Book,” Prothalamium: A Cycle of the Holy Graal (New
York: Doubleday, 1947), n.p.
 428 3. Churn and Consolidation

32. John Klempner, Letter to Five Wives (New York: Dell, 1946), 27.
33. Klempner, Letter to Five Wives, 132, 135.
34. Klempner, Letter to Five Wives, 160.
35. Letter to Three Wives (1948), the excellent film adapted from Klempner’s novel, shows
another common alternative. Instead of the widely scattered flashbacks of the novel,
Vera Caspary’s screenplay offers something easier to assimilate on film. After the fram-
ing opening, each wife’s story is treated as a block, and each is given a distinctive time
frame: Deborah’s first night in town after marrying Brad, the night of Rita and her
husband’s big quarrel, and Porter’s long-running pursuit of Lora Mae. For a discussion
of the film, see Bordwell, Reinventing Hollywood, 183–90.
36. Komroff, How to Write a Novel, 144–52.
37. See Joseph Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature: An Essay in Two Parts,”
Sewanee Review 53, no. 2 (Spring 1945): 221–40; Joseph Frank, “Spatial Form in Mod-
ern Literature: An Essay in Two Parts,” Sewanee Review, 53, no. 3 (Summer 1945):
433–56; and Joseph Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature: An Essay in Three
Parts,” Sewanee Review 53, no. 4 (Autumn 1945): 643–63. Frank developed this idea in
many directions, not all of them convincing to me, but it lingered in the critical liter-
ature. See also Joseph Frank, The Idea of Spatial Form (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 1991).
38. This program is laid out in René Wellek and Austin Warren, “The Study of Literature in
the Graduate School,” in Theory of Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949), chap.
20. Overall, the book is a judicious defense of the logical and methodological priority
of the “intrinsic” approach.
39. Mark Schorer, “Technique as Discovery,” Hudson Review 1, no. 1 (Spring 1948): 67.
40. The most polemical case for adding “extrinsic” approaches to the critic’s toolkit can be
found in this survey by Stanley Edgar Hyman, The Armed Vision: A Study in the Methods
of Modern Literary Criticism (New York: Knopf, 1948).
41. Saul Rosenzweig, “The Ghost of Henry James,” Partisan Review 11, no. 4 (1944): 436–55;
William Troy, “Thomas Mann: Myth and Reason” (1938), in Selected Essays, ed. Stanley
Edgar Hyman (New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1967), 241.
42. T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order and Myth” (1923), in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The
Critical Edition: The Perfect Critic, 1919–1926 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity Press, 2014), 476–81.
43. For an influential argument for modernism’s development out of symbolism, see
Edmund Wilson, “Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930”
(1933), in Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s and 1930s (New York: Library of
America, 2007), 641–854.
44. Irving Howe, “The Culture of Modernism,” in Decline of the New (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, and World, 1978), 3–33.
45. For an overview, see Erica Brown and Mary Grover, “Introduction: Middlebrow
Matters,” in Middlebrow Literary Culture: The Battle of the Brows, 1920–1960 (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 1–21.
46. Virginia Woolf, “Middlebrow,” The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (New York:
Harcourt, Brace, 1974), 176–86.
47. Gilbert Seldes, The Seven Lively Arts (New York: Harper, 1924). See also Michael Kam-
men, The Lively Arts: Gilbert Seldes and the Transformation of Cultural Criticism in the
United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
48. See Dwight Macdonald, “Soviet Cinema, 1930–1940, a History” (1939–40), in Dwight
Macdonald on Movies (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 218–44; Clement Greenberg,
 3. Churn and Consolidation 429

“Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939), in Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 1, Perceptions
and Judgments, 1939–1944, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1986), 14–17.
49. For a careful discussion of these and related categories, see James Naremore and Pat-
rick Brantlinger, “Introduction: Six Artistic Cultures,” in Modernity and Mass Culture
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 1–23.
50. Woolf, “Middlebrow,” Death of the Moth, 180.
51. Robert Warshow, “American Popular Culture,” The Immediate Experience: Movies,
Comics, Theatre, and Other Aspects of Popular Culture (New York: Atheneum, 1971), 7.
52. “State of American Writing,” 855.
53. I discuss this trend in David Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the
Interpretation of Cinema (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 73–78; and
in David Bordwell, The Rhapsodes: How 1940s Critics Changed American Film Culture
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 20–31.
54. Martha Wolfenstein and Nathan Leites, Movies: A Psychological Study (1950; repr. New
York: Atheneum, 1970), 25–41.
55. Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film
(1947; repr. New York: Noonday, 1959), 272.
56. James Sandoe, “Dagger of the Mind,” in The Art of the Mystery Story, ed. Howard
Haycraft (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1946), 254; Neil Verma, Theater of the Mind:
Imagination, Aesthetics, and American, Radio Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2012), 171.
57. Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Woman, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 30–31.
58. Janet Morgan, Agatha Christie: A Biography (London: Collins, 1984), 260.
59. Lawrence G. Blochman, “Plot and Background,” in The Mystery Writer’s Handbook, ed.
Herbert Brean (New York: Harper, 1956), 95.
60. Radway, Reading the Romance, 245n28.
61. Graham Greene, Brighton Rock (London: William Heinemann, 1938), part 2, chap. 2.
The skewed citation is to Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immorality from Recollec-
tions of Early Childhood,” lines 65–67.
62. See Warren French, “William Faulkner and the Art of the Detective Story,” in The
Thirties: Fiction: Poetry, Drama (Deland, FL: Everett/Edwards, 1975), 55–62; and
Annette Trefszer and Ann J. Abadie, eds., Faulkner and Mystery (Jackson: University of
Mississippi Press, 2014).
63. William Faulkner as quoted in “Editors’ Notes,” Intruder in the Dust (New York: Vin-
tage, 1994), 243.
64. Lawrence H. Schwartz, Creating Faulkner’s Reputation: The Politics of Modern Literary
Criticism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988), 70–71.
65. The following references to the debate draw on Louise Bogan, “The Time of the Assas-
sins,” The Nation, April 22, 1944, 475–78; Edmund Wilson, “Why Do People Read
Detective Stories?,” in Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s and 1940s (New York:
Library of America, 2007), 657–61; Jacques Barzun: “Not ‘Whodunit?’ But ‘How?’:
First Aid for Critics of the Detective Story,” Saturday Review of Literature, November
4, 1944, 9–11; Joseph Wood Krutch, “ ‘Only a Detective Story,’ ” The Nation, November
25, 1944, 647–52; Bernard DeVoto, “The Easy Chair,” Harper’s, November 20, 1944,
34–37; Edmund Wilson, “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?,” Literary Essays
and Reviews of the 1930s and 1940s (New York: Library of America, 2007), 677–83.
66. Wilson, “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?,” 672, 679.
 430 3. Churn and Consolidation

67. Barzun develops this idea in detail in Jacques Barzun, “Detection and the Literary
Art,” in The Delights of Detection, ed. Jacques Barzun (New York: Criterion, 1961), 9–21;
Jacques Barzun, “A Tale Is Not a Novel,” A Catalogue of Crime, ed. Jacques Barzun and
Wendell Taylor (New York: Harper, 1971), 7–9; and Jacques Barzun, “The Novel Turns
Tale,” in New Views of the English and American Novel, ed. R. G. Collins and Kenneth
McRobbie (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1971), 33–40.
68. Wilson, “Why Do People Read Detective Stories?,” 657; Wilson, “Who Cares Who
Killed Roger Ackroyd?,” 679.
69. DeVoto, “Easy Chair,” 36.
70. Krutch, “ ‘Only a Detective Story,’ ” 647.
71. Barzun, “Not ‘Whodunit’?,” 10.
72. Wilson, “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?,” 682.
73. Wilson, “Why Do People Read Detective Stories?,” 661.
74. Bogan, “Time of the Assassins,” 476.
75. E. M. Wrong, “Crime and Detection,” in The Art of the Mystery Story, ed. Howard Hay-
craft (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1946), 24; and Marjorie Nicolson, “The Professor
and the Detective,’ in Art of the Mystery Story, ed. Howard Haycraft (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1946), 113.
76. DeVoto, “Easy Chair,”37.
77. Wilson’s point in effect grants the DeVoto/Krutch argument that not all components of
a literary work are of equal weight. DeVoto and Krutch could reply that the detective
story executes its own balancing act by downplaying verbal texture to the benefit of
plotting.
78. W. H. Auden, “The Guilty Vicarage,” in The Complete Words of W. H. Auden, Prose vol.
2, 1939–1948, ed. Edward Mendelson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002),
261–70.
79. John Dickson Carr, “The Grandest Game in the World,” in The Door to Doom and
Other Detections, ed. Douglas G. Greene (New York: Harper, 1980), 308–25. This essay,
originally published in 1963, was written in 1946.
80. Herbert Marshall McLuhan, “Footprints in the Sands of Crime,” Sewanee Review 54,
no. 4 (October-December 1946): 620.
81. Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder,” Atlantic Monthly, December 1944,
53–59.
82. Miranda B. Hickman, “The Complex History of a ‘Simple Art,’ ” Studies in the Novel 35,
no. 3 (Fall 2003): 294.
83. Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder,” Atlantic Monthly, December 1944, 56,
57.
84. Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder,” Later Novels and Other Writings (New
York: Library of America, 1995), 977.
85. Chandler charged that the daintiness of the English mystery revealed writers unac-
quainted with the harsh side of life. This stirred John Dickson Carr to fury. When he
reviewed a Chandler collection of stories, he noted with heavy sarcasm: “Of course
these people know nothing of violence, especially those who lived in London and were
on duty from 1940 to 1945.” See John Dickson Carr, “With Colt and Luger,” New York
Times Book Review, September 24, 1950. Carr, an Anglophile American who lived
through the German blitzkrieg, may have been casting shade on Chandler, an English
expatriate who had a “good war” in California.
86. Chandler, “Simple Art of Murder,” 991.
87. Chandler, “Simple Art of Murder,” 991–92.
 3. Churn and Consolidation 431

88. Letter to Howard Haycraft, December 9, 1946, in Raymond Chandler Speaking, ed. Dor-
othy Gardner and Kathrine Sorley Walker (Plainview, NY: Books for Libraries, 1962),
52.
89. “Once in a Blue Moon” (advertisement), New York Times, April 8, 1945.
90. D. C. Russell, “The Chandler Books,” Atlantic Monthly 175, no. 3 (March 1945): 123.
91. D. C. Russell, “Raymond Chandler, and the Future of Whodunits,” New York Times
Book Review, June 17, 1945.
92. Particularly vehement were the remarks of the two cousins who wrote under the pseud-
onym Ellery Queen. See Joseph Goodrich, ed., Blood Relations: The Selected Letters of
Ellery Queen 1947–1950 (Lexington, KY: Perfect Crime, 2012), 81–84.
93. Jacques Barzun, “From ‘Phèdre’ to Sherlock Holmes,” in The Energies of Art: Studies of
Authors Classic and Modern (New York: Harper, 1956), 320–23; Jacques Barzun, “Detec-
tion in Extremis,” in Crime in Good Company, ed. Michael Gilbert (London: Constable,
1959), 144; Robert Barnard, A Talent to Deceive, rev. ed. (New York: Mysterious Press,
1987), 110–13.
94. See Philip Weinstein, “Innovators II: Prose,” in American Literature in Transition 1920–
1930, ed. Ichiro Takayoshi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 84–91.
95. Josiah Strong as quoted in Malcolm Bradbury, “The Cities of Modernism,” in Mod-
ernism, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin,
1976), 98.
96. James Naremore, More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts, Updated and Expanded
Edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 48, 220.
97. See Paul R. Gorman, Left Intellectuals and Popular Culture in Twentieth-Century Amer-
ica (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 186–92.
98. See David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950), 311–67; and David Riesman, “Our Country
and Our Culture,” Partisan Review 19, no. 3 (May-June 1952), 310–11.
99. Bordwell, The Rhapsodes, chap. 2.
100. “Unidentified Interview” (1962), in Vladimir Nabokov, Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected
Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor, ed. Brian Boyd and Anastasia
Tolstoy (New York: Vintage International, 2019), 313.
101. Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp’,” Partisan Review 31, no. 4 (Fall 1964): 515–30; Richard
Poirier, “Learning from the Beatles,” Partisan Review 34, no. 4 (Fall 1967): 528, 529.
102. Stephen Sondheim, Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954–1981) with Attendant Com-
ments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes (New York: Knopf, 2010),
332.
103. Steve Swayne provides a thorough analysis of the role of cinema in his career; see Steve
Swayne, How Sondheim Found His Sound (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2005), 159–213.
104. Craig Zadan, Sondheim & Co., 2nd ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), 135.
105. Meryl Secrest, Stephen Sondheim (New York: Knopf, 1998), 185.
106. Secrest, Stephen Sondheim, 236.
107. Sondheim, Finishing the Hat, 303.
108. Stephen Sondheim, Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981—2011) with Attendant
Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions, Anecdotes and Miscellany
(New York: Knopf, 2011), 363.
109. Sondheim, Finishing the Hat, 168.
110. Sondheim, Finishing the Hat, 379, 232.
111. Sondheim, Finishing the Hat, 166.
 432 3. Churn and Consolidation

112. Sondheim, Look, I Made a Hat, 147, 177.

113. Sondheim, Finishing the Hat, 301.
114. Dwight Macdonald, “Masscult and Midcult,” in Against the American Grain: Essays on
the Effects of Mass Culture (New York: Random House, 1962), 56, 74. Cf. Dwight Mac-
donald, “A Theory of Popular Culture,” Politics 1, no. 1 (February 1944): 20–33.
115. Sondheim, Finishing the Hat, xviii.
116. You can argue that the Ultraist impulse returned in music and the visual arts, but these
largely nonnarrative modes aren’t my concern here. The operas of Philip Glass, John
Adams, and other “minimalists” are of course narrative, but musically they are cross-
over works in the sense I’m claiming.
117. Dwight Macdonald, “8 ½: Fellini’s Obvious Masterpiece,” in Dwight Macdonald on
Movies (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 15–31.
118. See, for example, Earl Miner, An Introduction to Japanese Court Poetry (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1968), 31–33; Makoto Ueda, Literary and Art Theories in
Japan (Cleveland, OH: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1967), 37–54; T. C. Lai,
Chinese Painting (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 3–17.
119. I discuss Ozu’s reliance on popular genres in David Bordwell, Ozu and the Poetics of
Cinema (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).
120. Robert Hughes, The Spectacle of Skill: Selected Writings (New York: Vintage, 2016).

4. The Golden Age Puzzle Plot: The Taste of the Construction

1. Viktor Shklovsky, “Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery Story,” in Theory of Prose, trans.
Benjamin Sher (Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1990), 101.
2. Anthony Trollope, “The Unpalatable Taste of the Construction” (1883), in Wilkie Col-
lins: The Critical Heritage, ed. Norman Page (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1997),
223.
3. Joseph Warren Beach, The Twentieth Century Novel (New York: Appleton-Century-
Crofts, 1932), 210; Robert Lynd, “Review of Chance” (January 15, 1914), in Joseph Conrad:
The Critical Heritage, ed. Norman Sherry (New York: Routledge, 2013), 271.
4. Conrad Aiken, “William Faulkner: The Novel as Form,” in The Dixie Limited: Writers
on William Faulkner and His Influence, ed. M. Thomas Inge (Oxford: University Press
of Mississippi, 2016), 102.
5. See Meir Sternberg, Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction (Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 1978), 64–66, which treats these as basic appeals invoked
by all narratives to one degree or another.
6. LeRoy Lad Panek, An Introduction to the Detective Story (Bowling Green, OH: Popular,
1987), 122–31.
7. A thorough history of the Detection Club is provided in Martin Edwards, The Golden
Age of Murder: The Mystery of the Writers Who Invented the Modern Detective Story
(London: Harper Collins, 2015).
8. For an excellent, wide-ranging survey, see Martin Edwards, The Life of Crime: Detecting
the History of Mysteries and Their Creators (New York: HarperCollins, 2022), chaps. 1–5.
Leroy Lad Panek has documented the early years of detective fiction in his admirable
monographs: Leroy Lad Panek, The Origins of the American Detective Story (Jefferson,
NC: McFarland, 2006); Leroy Lad Panek, Before Sherlock Holmes: How Magazines and
Newspapers Invented the Detective Story (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011); and Leroy
Lad Panek (with Mary M. Bendel-Simso), The Essential Elements of the Detective Story,
 4. The Golden Age Puzzle Plot 433

1820–1891 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017). See also Nathaniel Williams, “Dreiser, Dey,
and Dime Novel Crime: The Case of Nick Carter,” in The Centrality of Crime Fiction in
American Literary Culture, ed. Alfred Bendixen and Olivia Carr Edenfield (New York:
Routledge, 2017), 53–73.
9. Henry James, “Mary Elizabeth Braddon” (1865), in Henry James, Literary Criticism, vol. 1,
Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers (New York: Library of America,
1984), 743.
10. Van Wyck Mason, “Suggestions for the Character-Detective Story,” The Writer 46, no. 6
(June 1934): 241.
11. Howard Haycraft calls her “one of the great story-tellers of the age” but also deplores the
role of “happenstance” in her plotting and her reliance on romantic liaisons to forward
the action. He considers her on the borderline between “mystery” and proper detec-
tive fiction, with her protagonist serving as both “participating (usually interfering!)
Watson and detective-by-accident.” Howard Haycraft, Murder for Pleasure: The Life and
Times of the Detective Story (New York: Appleton-Century, 1941), 89.
12. For a subtle analysis of Rinehart’s novels, see Jan Cohn, “Mary Roberts Rinehart,” in
Ten Women of Mystery, ed. Earl F. Bargainnier (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green
State University Popular Press, 1981), 183–220.
13. Mary Roberts Rinehart, The Circular Staircase (New York: Pocket Books, 1943), 1.
14. For examples, see Arthur Bartlett Maurice, “The Detective in Fiction,” The Bookman
15, no. 3 (May 1902): 231–34; Cecil Chesterton, “Art and the Detective,” The Living Age,
no. 251 (November 24, 1906): 505–15; Brander Matthews, “Poe and the Detective Story,”
Scribner’s Magazine 42, no. 3 (September 1907): 287–93; Julian Hawthorne, “Riddle
Stories,” in The Lock and Key Library: Classic Mystery and Detective Stories, ed. Julian
Hawthorne (New York: Review of Reviews, 1909), 9–19.
15. Carolyn Wells, The Technique of the Mystery Story (Springfield, MA: Home Correspon-
dence School, 1913), 61.
16. Wells, Technique of the Mystery Story, 62.
17. Wells, Technique of the Mystery Story, 12.
18. E. C. Bentley, Those Days (London: Constable, 1940), 254.
19. The novel of manners, in which the individual achieves self-definition in relation to
social structures, composes what many consider the “great tradition” of the British
novel, from Pride and Prejudice to Barchester Towers. Joseph Wiesenfarth argues that
it owes more to the Gothic novel than many suppose. See Joseph Wiesenfarth, Gothic
Manners and the Classic English Novel (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988).
This prospect makes Dorothy Sayers’s dream of a merger with the detective tale some-
what plausible.
20. LeRoy Lad Panek, Watteau’s Shepherds: the Detective Novel in Britain, 1914–1940 (Bowl-
ing Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1979), 22–28.
21. Panek deftly analyzes the role of adventure in Golden Age mysteries in Panek, Watteau’s
Shepherds, 9–16. See also John Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula
Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), chaps.1
and 2.
22. Dorothy L. Sayers, introduction to Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror,
Second Series, ed. Dorothy L. Sayers (London: Gollancz, 1931), 16.
23. Raymond Chandler, “Twelve Notes on the Mystery Story” (1946), in Later Novels and
Other Writings (New York: Library of America, 1995), 1007.
24. Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, The Long Week-End: A Social History of Great Britain
1918–1939 (New York: Norton, 1931), 289.
 434 4. The Golden Age Puzzle Plot

25. David Welky, Everything Was Better: Print Culture in the Great Depression (Cham-
paign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 178.
26. For a history, see Carol Billman, The Secret of the Stratemeyer Syndicate: Nancy Drew,
the Hardy Boys, and the Million Dollar Fiction Factory (New York: Ungar, 1986).
27. Willard Huntington Wright, The Great Detective Stories (New York: Scribner’s, 1928),
36–37.
28. Ellery Queen, How to Read the Queen Stories: A Personal Message from Ellery Queen
(pamphlet) (New York: Stokes, 1933), 1–2.
29. S. S. Van Dine, The Bishop Murder Case (New York: Scribner’s, 1929), 269.
30. G. K. Chesteron, “The Sins of Prince Saradine,” in The Annotated Innocence of Father
Brown, ed. Martin Gardner (New York: Oxford University Press), 167.
31. John Dickson Carr, “The Grandest Game in the World,” in The Door to Doom and Other
Detections, 2nd ed., ed. Douglas G. Greene (New York: International Polygonics, 1991),
310.
32. These precepts can be found in E. M. Wrong, “Crime and Detection” (1926), in The Art
of the Mystery Story, ed. Howard Haycraft (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1946), 18–32;
Willard Huntington Wright, “The Great Detective Stories” (1927), in The Art of the Mys-
tery Story, ed. Howard Haycraft (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1946), 37–42; S. S. Van
Dine, “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories,” in The Art of the Mystery Story, ed.
Howard Haycraft (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1946), 101–89; Ronald Knox, “A Detec-
tive Story Decalogue,” in The Art of the Mystery Story, ed. Howard Haycraft (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1946), 194–96.
33. “The Detection Club Oath,” in The Art of the Mystery Story, ed. Howard Haycraft (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1946), 198.
34. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “A Gaudy Death,” Tit-Bits, December 15, 1900, www.arthur
-conan-doyle.com/index.php/A_Gaudy_Death:_Conan_Doyle_tells_the_True_Story
_of_Sherlock_Holmes%27s_End.
35. Carr, “The Grandest Game in the World,” 323.
36. Sayers was quite proud of “this little stunt” and floated the possibility of printing the
missing passage in a sealed page at the end of the book. See Janet Hitchman, Such a
Strange Lady: A Biography of Dorothy L. Sayers (New York: Avon, 1976), 88–89.
37. Carr, “The Grandest Game in the World,” 310.
38. Van Wyck Mason, The Castle Island Case (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1937).
Mason, a widely read mystery-adventure novelist, explains his project in Van Wyck
Mason, “The Camera as a Literary Element,” The Writer 51, no. 11 (November 1938):
325–26. I discuss the book and its counterparts in more detail on David Bordwell’s
Website on Cinema (blog), http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2021/06/20/what-you
-see-is-what-you-guess/.
39. C. Daly King, Obelists Fly High (New York: Dover, 1986), 277.
40. Philip MacDonald, R.I.P. (London: Collins, 1937). This novel, whose action runs in a
single house from 6:00 p.m. on one day to 4:15 a.m. on the next, appears to be an exper-
iment in rendering filmic continuity of action on the page.
41. Chapters of Wilkie Collins’s Hide and Seek (1854) are grouped into “The Hiding” and
“The Seeking,” with these parts enclosed within a curtain-raiser and a tailpiece.
42. Carter Dickson, The Judas Window (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951), 3.
43. John Dickson Carr, The Crooked Hinge (New York: Collier, 1978), 235.
44. Joseph Shaw as quoted in Eugene Cunningham, “The Art and Success of Dashiell Ham-
mett,” El Paso Times, March 9, 1930.
 4. The Golden Age Puzzle Plot 435

45. Quoted in Francis M. Nevins, Ellery Queen: The Art of Detection (Perfect Crime Books,
2013), 15, Kindle.
46. John Dickson Carr, “The House in Goblin Wood,” in The Third Bullet and Other Stories
(Roslyn, NY: Black, 1954), 112.
47. Carr, “House in Goblin Wood,” 112.
48. John Dickson Carr as quoted in Douglas G. Greene, John Dickson Carr: The Man Who
Explained Miracles (New York: Otto Penzler, 1995), 304.
49. We’re kept from dwelling on the conspirators by H.M.’s arrival on the scene, majestically
slipping on a banana peel. “In placing a cryptic clue,” Carr advised, “be sure that your
reader never sees it at eye level. This can be done by using love scenes or comic scenes”
(as quoted in Greene, John Dickson Carr, 106n). In an appendix to the first publication
of the story, Ellery Queen discusses how the slapstick incident also foreshadows key
elements in the plot. See “About the Story,” Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine 10, no. 48
(November 1947): 20–22. It is interesting that this analysis focuses on the clues in the
story, not the hints in the enveloping narration.
50. Robert Barnard suggests that the prevalence of Christie novels in cheap paperbacks
might nudge readers to see the Letty/Lotty stratagem as a typographical error, all the
better to mystify the reader. See Robert Barnard, A Talent to Deceive: An Appreciation of
Agatha Christie, 2nd ed. (New York: Mysterious, 1987), 94.
51. Agatha Christie, A Murder Is Announced in Murder Preferred (New York: Dodd, Mead,
1960), 196.
52. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier,” in The Complete
Sherlock Holmes (New York: Garden City, 1960), 1188.
53. Doyle, “Adventure of the Blanched Soldier,” 1192.
54. Dorothy L. Sayers, “The Omnibus of Crime” (1928–29), in The Art of the Mystery Story,
ed. Howard Haycraft (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1946), 98–100.
55. Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (New York: Viking, 1957), 163. Daniel R. Barnes
suggests that Lubbock’s mention may have influenced Christie’s book. See Daniel R.
Barnes, “A Note on The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,” in Mystery and Detection Annual
1972, ed. Donald Adams (Beverly Hills CA: Donald Adams, 1972), 254–55.
56. Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (New York: Pocket, 1975), 11.
57. Agatha Christie as quoted in Charles Osborne, The Life and Crimes of Agatha Chris-
tie: A Biographical Companion to the Works of Agatha Christie (New York: St. Martin’s,
1982), 45.
58. Christie, Murder of Roger Ackroyd, 48.
59. Christie, Murder of Roger Ackroyd, 122. More felicities of Christie’s stratagems in this
and other novels are carefully charted in John Goddard, Agatha Christie’s Golden Age:
An Analysis of Poirot’s Golden Age Puzzles (London: Stylish Eye, 2018), 89–110.
60. Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder,” in Later Novels and Other Writings
(New York: Library of America, 1995), 985.
61. William Gillette’s play Sherlock Holmes (1899) and the 1916 film adapted from it begin
by revealing the villains’ scheme, and Watson enters relatively late in the first act. Two
German films of The Hound of the Baskervilles (1914 and 1929) move freely among the
characters, while still keeping back essential information.
62. Knox, “A Detective Story Decalogue,” 194.
63. Dorothy Sayers, “Gaudy Night,” in The Art of the Mystery Story, ed. Howard Haycraft
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1946), 209. For a stimulating analysis of the book, see
Dawson Gailard, Dorothy L. Sayers (New York: Ungar, 1981), 55.
 436 4. The Golden Age Puzzle Plot

64. The relevant novels are The Roman Hat Mystery (1929), The French Powder Mystery
(1930), and The Dutch Shoe Mystery (1931).
65. Dorothy L. Sayers, Murder Must Advertise (New York: Avon, 1967), 274.
66. Sayers, Murder Must Advertise, 203.
67. Sayers, Murder Must Advertise, 228.
68. Sayers, Murder Must Advertise, 100.
69. Sayers, Murder Must Advertise, 12–13.
70. Sayers, “Omnibus of Crime,” 101n. In introducing her play Busman’s Honeymoon, she
offered even more strict guidelines, claiming that fair play means “every clue must
be shown at the same time to the public and the detective.” “Author’s Note,” Dorothy
L. Sayers and M. St. Clare Byrne, Busman’s Honeymoon (New York: Samuel French,
1939), 5.
71. Dorothy Sayers, “Grand Manner in Crime Stories” (1933), in Taking Detective Stories
Seriously: The Collected Crime Reviews of Dorothy Sayers, ed. Martin Edwards (Perth,
Scotland: Tippermuir, 2017), 80.
72. Sayers, Murder Must Advertise, 153.
73. Sayers, Murder Must Advertise, 79, 288.
74. Knox, “A Detective Story Decalogue,” 194.
75. Agatha Christie, Death in the Air (New York: Berkeley, 1984), 3.
76. Christie, Death in the Air, 49, 130–31.
77. Anthony Berkeley, “To A. D. Peters,” The Second Shot (London: Langtail, 2010), n.p.
78. Elmer Rice, Minority Report: An Autobiography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964),
103.
79. Clayton Hamilton, “Building a Play Backward,” in Problems of the Playwright (New
York: Holt, 1917), 23–24.
80. Rice, Minority Report, 104.
81. Early on G. K. Chesterton considered The Ring and the Book a detective story. See G. K.
Chesterton, Robert Browning (New York: Macmillan, 1904), 160–76.
82. When The Ring and the Book was adapted for the stage as Caponsacchi (1926), the play
radically condensed the original by focusing on one major character.
83. As Clayton Hamilton’s speculations about time shifting had inspired On Trial’s flash-
backs, Dyar claimed that Hamilton’s writing on point of view led him to a dramaturgy
emphasizing sensory differences among witnesses’ accounts. See Rebecca Drucker,
“A New Playwright Comes Out of the West,” New York Herald Tribune, September 21,
1919.
84. Torquemada [Edward Powys Mathers], “Can You Solve Torquemada’s Murder
Mystery?” Cain’s Jawbone: A Novel Problem (London: Unbound, 2020), n.p.
85. Henry James, “The Wings of the Dove,” in Literary Criticism, vol. 2, French Writers,
Other European Writers, and Prefaces to the New York Edition (New York: Library of
America, 1984), 1294.
86. Anna Katherine Green anticipates this tagging strategy in The Leavenworth Case (1878),
which bookends its chapters under the rubrics of “The Problem,” “Henry Clavering,”
“Hannah,” and “The Problem Solved.” She appears not to have used this device in other
books.
87. Philip MacDonald, introduction to The Maze (London: Collins, 1980), 2.
88. For some years Sayers worked on a book on Collins. For background on this project
and Collins’s influence on her novels, see E. R. Gregory, introduction to Wilkie Collins:
A Critical and Biographical Study by Dorothy L. Sayers (Toledo, OH: Friends of the
University of Toledo Libraries, 1977), 7–15.
 5. Before the Fact 437

89. On Sayers’s fondness for the howdunit, see Hitchman, Such a Strange Lady, 94.
90. On the round-robin novel as support for the club, see Edwards, Golden Age of Murder,
246–55.
91. Jon L. Breen offers a comprehensive view of trial fiction; see Jon L. Breen, Novel Ver-
dicts: A Guide to Courtroom Fiction, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 1999).
92. Brog, “The Paradine Case,” Variety, December 31, 1947. A discussion of flashbacks in
trial films of the 1940s can be found in David Bordwell, Reinventing Hollywood: How
1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2017), 79–82.
93. Anthony Berkeley, The Poisoned Chocolates Case (London: British Library 2016), 226.
94. See A. B. Cox, “The Detective Story” and “The Mystery Story,” in Jugged Journalism
(London: Jenkins, 1925), 33–57.
95. Ellery Queen, The Egyptian Cross Mystery, in The Ellery Queen Omnibus (New York:
Grosset and Dunlap, 1932), 334.
96. Berkeley, Poisoned Chocolates Case, 173–74.
97. John Dickson Carr, The Hollow Man (New York: Orion, 2013), 152.
98. Berkeley, Poisoned Chocolates Case, 227–28.
99. See Christianna Brand, “A New Denouement” and Martin Edwards, “Epilogue (Second
Part),” in Berkeley, Poisoned Chocolates Case, 249–67. Edwards’s contribution is a bril-
liant fantasia on Golden Age motifs, wholly in the spirit of the novel’s gesture toward
endlessly proliferating solutions.
100. Berkeley, Poisoned Chocolates Case, 247.
101. Linda Schlossberg suggests that the several false solutions in Trent’s Last Case, along
with Trent’s eventual repudiation of pure logic as a means of understanding human
affairs, puts the book closer to the modernist novels that depict an ambiguous and unre-
liable reality. See Linda Schlossberg, “Trent’s Last Case: Murder, Modernism, Meaning,”
in Formal Investigations: Aesthetic Style in Late Victorian and Edwardian Detective Fic-
tion, rev. ed., Studies in English Literatures, Vol. 4, ed. Paul Fox and Koray Melikoglu
(Stuttgart: Ibidem, 2014), 247–65.
102. Rob Spillman, “On William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying,” Pen America, October 15, 2012,
https://pen.org/on-william-faulkners-as-i-lay-dying/.
103. Dorothy Sayers, “The Present Status of the Mystery Story,” London Mercury 23
(November 1930): 52.

5. Before the Fact: The Psychological Thriller

The chapter epigraph is from Agatha Christie’s Towards Zero (New York: Harper,
2011), 4.
1. Marie Belloc Lowndes, The Lodger (New York: Dell, 1964), 193.
2. Lowndes, Lodger, 102.
3. Lowndes, Lodger, 58.
4. Lowndes, Lodger, 209.
5. Lowndes, Lodger, 224.
6. Useful accounts of the thriller can be found in Ralph Harper, The World of the Thriller
(1969; repr. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974); Charles Derry, The
Suspense Thriller: Films in the Shadow of Alfred Hitchcock (Jefferson, NC: McFarland,
1988); Martin Rubin, Thrillers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and
Patrick Anderson, The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals
 438 5. Before the Fact

Captured Popular Fiction (New York: Random House, 2007). Most of these authors
include detective stories in the category of the thriller, but they also provide analyses
of the narrower genre I’m considering here. I examine emerging ideas of the thriller
during the 1930s and 1940s in chapter 10 of David Bordwell, Reinventing Hollywood:
How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2017).
7. Examples are W. W. Wister, “Why Photoplays Have Killed Melodramas,” Nickelodeon,
March 18, 1911, 299–300; Franklin K. Mathiews, “Books as Merchandise and Something
More,” Publishers’ Weekly, May 11, 1915, 1487–91; and Henry Alton, “Some Dangerous
New Grafts on the Old Tree of Nickel Thrillers,” McBride’s Magazine Advertiser, Decem-
ber 1915, 17.
8. R. Austin Freeman, “The Art of the Detective Story” (1924), in The Art of the Mystery
Story, ed. Howard Haycraft (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1941), 10.
9. Basil Hogarth argues for a broader conception of the genre and treats detective stories
as one type of thriller. See Basil Hogarth, Writing Thrillers for Profit: A Practical Guide
(London: Black’s Writers and Artists Library, 1936). Hogarth devotes the bulk of his
book to detective stories, which need smooth carpentry, but the chapter on “the thriller
of sensation” advises the novice to pile up action-driven episodes in which “intrigue
and coincidence can be stretched as far as you please” (138). Hogarth doesn’t acknowl-
edge the psychological thriller as a creative option.
10. Detection Club constitution as quoted in Martin Edwards, The Golden Age of Murder
(London: Collins, 2017), 92.
11. Patrick Hamilton as quoted in Sean French, Patrick Hamilton: A Life (London: Faber
and Faber, 1993), 139.
12. Milward Kennedy, Death to the Rescue: A Detective Story (London: Gollancz, 1931), 6.
13. “Chaplin in ‘Circus’ a London Sensation,” New York Times, March 16, 1928.
14. Beatrix Hesse has estimated that two-thirds of all crime plays written before 1930 were
staged between 1926 and 1929. See Beatrix Hesse, The English Crime Play in the Twenti-
eth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 1.
15. Many writers believed that a pure whodunit plot was ineffective in a play. Collins gave
away the mystery in his stage version of The Moonstone, as did A. E. W. Mason when
adapting At the Villa Rose. See Hesse, English Crime Play, 23–24.
16. Charles Morgan, “Mr. Milne Tries a New Trick with a Mystery Play,” New York Times,
March 25, 1928.
17. Dorothy L. Sayers, “The Omnibus of Crime” (1928–29), in The Art of the Mystery Story,
ed. Howard Haycraft (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1941), 102.
18. Anthony Berkeley, dedication to A. D. Peters, in The Second Shot (Garden City, NY:
Crime Club, 1931).
19. Dorothy L. Sayers, introduction to Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror,
Second Series (London: Gollancz, 1931), 17.
20. Berkeley, Second Shot.
21. Sayers, Great Short Stories, 17.
22. Freeman, “Art of the Detective Story,” 13.
23. Quoted in Edwards, Golden Age of Murder, 184.
24. Freeman Wills Crofts, The 12.30 from Croydon (London: Poison Pen, 2016), chap. 18,
e-book.
25. Richard Hull, Murder Isn’t Easy (New York: Putnam, 1936), 248.
26. Nicholas Blake, The Beast Must Die (New York: Dell, 1958), 7.
27. Blake, Beast Must Die, 98.
 5. Before the Fact 439

28. As in the second part, Blake “bares the device” of the moving-spotlight narration in a
string of three sentences that juxtapose the thinking of Nigel, Georgia, and Felix. Blake,
Beast Must Die, 180.
29. Blake, Beast Must Die, 156.
30. In the same spirit, Raymond Chandler objected that the intrusion of “the amateur gen-
tleman” Nigel had “a devastating effect” on a “damn good and extremely well written
story.” See Raymond Chandler, Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler, ed. Frank MacShane
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 246. As indicated, I think Blake designed
the clash between the narrative modes as a way to criticize the limits of Golden Age
detection.
31. Blake, Beast Must Die, 222.
32. Francis Iles, Malice Aforethought: The Story of a Commonplace Crime (New York: Dover,
2018), 14, 111, 108.
33. Francis Iles, Before the Fact (New York: Pocket, 197), 1.
34. Iles, Before the Fact, 259.
35. “From Dostoevsky’s Notebooks,” “Backgrounds and Sources,” in Crime and Punish-
ment, trans. Jessie Coulson, ed. George Gibian (New York: Norton, 1964), 534.
36. Elizabeth Sanxay Holding, The Unfinished Crime and the Girl Who Had to Die (New
York: Stark House, 2020), 105, 107.
37. Patrick Hamilton, Rope (New York: Samuel French, n.d.), 4.
38. Holding, Unfinished Crime, 65.
39. Until Highsmith’s Tom Ripley, that is.
40. Cain was delighted with the use of the tape recorder to chronicle Walter Neff ’s voice-
over account in the film version of Double Indemnity (1944). See Peter Brunette and
Gerald Peary, “James M. Cain: Tough Guy,” in Backstory: Interviews with Screenwriters
of Holly wood’s Golden Age (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), 115, 127.
41. James M. Cain, “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” in The Postman Always Rings Twice,
Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce and Selected Stories (London: Everyman’s Library,
2003), 121.
42. Quoted in Howard Haycraft, Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective
Story (New York: Appleton-Century, 1941), 90.
43. Mary Roberts Rinehart, The Circular Staircase (New York: Pocket, 1943), 1.
44. Julian Symons, Mortal Consequences: A History—From the Detective Story to the Crime
Novel (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 97.
45. Mignon G. Eberhart, The House on the Roof (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1996), 246.
46. Carl D. Brandt, introduction to Eberhart, House on the Roof (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1996), vi.
47. Diane Waldman, “Horror and Domesticity: The Modern Gothic Romance Film of the
1940s” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1981), 5–56.
48. Patrick Hamilton, Angel Street (New York: Samuel French, n.d.), 107.
49. Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1962), 264.
50. Donald Westlake as quoted in Bill Pronzini, Gun in Cheek: A Study of “Alternative”
Crime Fiction (New York: Coward, McCann, and Geoghegan, 1982), 199.
51. du Maurier, Rebecca, 100.
52. du Maurier, Rebecca, 308.
53. Alfred Hitchcock, “Why ‘Thrillers’ Thrive” (1936), in Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected
Writings and Interviews, ed. Sidney Gottlieb (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1995), 110.
 440 5. Before the Fact

54. Dorothy L. Sayers, “Detective Stories and a Thriller” (1934), in Taking Detective Stories
Seriously: The Collected Crime Reviews of Dorothy L. Sayers (Perth, Scotland: Tipper-
muir, 2017), 116.
55. Alfred Hitchcock, “Hitchcock on Stories” (1937), in Hitchcock on Hitchcock 2: Selected
Writings and Interviews, ed. Sidney Gottlieb (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2015), 29. Sayers’s 1937 play Busman’s Honeymoon tried to adapt the puzzle plot for the
stage by presenting some visual clues that are available to the audience but ignored by
the characters. The result, she claimed, was “a perfect dramatic formula” for a detec-
tive play. Few other authors seem to have pursued this “contrapuntal” technique. See
“Authors’ Note,” in Busman’s Honeymoon, by Dorothy Sayers and M. St. Clare Byrne
(New York: Samuel French, 1939), 6.
56. Val Gielgud, foreword to Money with Menaces and To the Public Danger: Two Radio
Plays, by Patrick Hamilton (London: Constable, 1939), v–vi.
57. “Dramatic Notes,” in Selected Prose Works of G. E. Lessing, ed. Edward Bell (London:
George Bell, 1889), 377–78.
58. J. Brander Matthews, “Victor Hugo,” in French Dramatists of the Nineteenth Century
(New York: Scribners, 1881), 20–21.
59. Henry Edwards, “The Language of Action,” The Bioscope, suppl., (July 1, 1920): iv. I’m
grateful to Charles Barr and Michaela Mikalauski for calling this piece to my attention.
60. Alfred Hitchcock, “Lecture at Columbia University” (1939), in Hitchcock on Hitchcock:
Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. Sidney Gottlieb (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1995), 273–74.
61. François Truffaut, Hitchcock, rev. ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), 73.
62. Maria Belodubrovskaya thoroughly explores the role of surprise in Hitchcock’s work
in “The Master of Surprise: Alfred Hitchcock, the Surprise Plot, and Cataphoric Plea-
sures,” forthcoming.
63. William Archer, Play-Making: A Manual of Craftsmanship (Boston: Small, Maynard,
1912), 172.
64. Edward Chodorov, Kind Lady (New York: Samuel French, 1936), 71–74.
65. Charles Barr offers a revealing discussion of Jamaica Inn’s mixed handling of narration.
See Charles Barr, Jamaica Inn in English Hitchcock (Moffat, Scotland: Cameron & Hollis,
1999), 202–6.
66. “New Films in London: ‘Blackmail’,” Times (London), May 25, 1936; “Films of 1938,”
Times (London), January 2, 1939; “Gaumont Cinema: ‘Rebecca,” Times (London), June
27, 1940. Hitchcock’s early strategies for maintaining his distinctive profile are detailed
in Janet Staiger, “Creating the Brand: The Hitchcock Touch,” in The Cambridge Com-
panion to Alfred Hitchcock, ed. Jonathan Freedman (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2015), 40–50. See also Robert E. Kapsis, Hitchcock: The Making of a Reputation
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), chap. 2.
67. Lupton A. Wilkinson, “He Makes the Movies Move,” Los Angeles Times, January 5, 1941.
68. Illuminating discussions of Hitchcock’s debts to literary and theatrical traditions can be
found in R. Barton Palmer and David Boyd, eds., Hitchcock at the Source: The Auteur as
Adapter (Albany: SUNY Press, 2011), especially Thomas Leitch, “Hitchcock from Stage
to Page,” 11–32; and Mark Glancy, “The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934): Alfred Hitch-
cock, John Buchan, and the Thrill of the Chase,” 77–88.
69. Tom Ryall, Alfred Hitchcock and British Cinema (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 75–76.
70. Raymond Chandler, “Letter to Hamish Hamilton” (September 4, 1950), in Raymond
Chandler Speaking, ed. Dorothy Gardiner and Kathrine Sorley Walker (New York:
Houghton Mifflin, 1962), 132.
 6. Dark and Full of Blood 441

71. Charles Bennett, Hitchcock’s Partner in Suspense: The Life of Screenwriter Charles Ben-
nett (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2014), 67.
72. See Pat Hitchcock O’Connell and Laurent Bouzereau, Alma Hitchcock: The Woman
Behind the Man (New York: Berkley, 2003), 31–91; and Christina Lane, Phantom Lady:
Hollywood Producer Joan Harrison, The Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock (Chicago:
Chicago Review, 2020), 35–125.
73. I offer more detailed analyses of the film in David Bordwell, “The Man Who Knew Too
Much,” http://www.davidbordwell.net/filmart/ManWhoKnewTooMuch_FilmArt_2nd
_1988_292.pdf; and David Bordwell, “Sir Alfred Simply Must Have His Set Pieces:
The Man Who Knew Too Much,” David Bordwell’s Website on Cinema (blog), http://www
.davidbordwell.net/blog/2013/02/14/sir-alfred-simply-must-have-his-set-pieces-the
-man-who-knew-too-much-1934/.

6. Dark and Full of Blood: Hard-Boiled Detection

1. This chapter is especially indebted to the suggestive account of “popular modernism”

in James Naremore, More Than Night: Film Noir and Its Contexts, 2nd ed. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2008); and his wide-ranging essay, James Naremore,
“Dashiell Hammett and the Poetics of Hard-Boiled Detection,” in Art in Crime Writing:
Essays on Detective Fiction, ed. Bernard Benstock (New York: St. Martin’s, 1983), 49–72;
as well as to Geoffrey O’Brien’s nuanced discussion of hard-boiled style in Geoffrey
O’Brien, Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks and the Masters of Noir, expanded ed.
(New York: Da Capo, 1997). Chapter 6 of John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery and
Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1976), is also incisive and informative.
2. For a compact history, see Brooks E. Hefner, “Pulp Magazines,” in American Literature
in Transition 1920–1930, ed. Ichiro Takayoshi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2018), 434–48. On Black Mask, see William F. Nolan, The Black Mask Boys: Masters in
the Hard-Boiled School of Detective Fiction (New York: Morrow, 1985). David M. Earle
links the pulps to quasi-modernist magazines and to the paperback revolution in David
M. Earle, Re-Covering Modernism: Pulps, Paperbacks, and the Prejudice of Form (Burl-
ington VT: Ashgate, 2009).
John Locke has edited two invaluable collections on publishing practices: John
Locke, Pulpwood Days. Vol. 1, Editors You Want to Know (Castroville, CA: Off-Trail,
2007); and John Locke, Pulpwood Days. Vol. 2, Lives of the Pulp Writers (Castroville,
CA: Off-Trail, 2013). The autobiographical accounts in the latter are matched by the
vivid memoir by Frank Gruber, The Pulp Jungle (Los Angeles: Sherbourne, 1967).
Another good collection of original articles on pulp practices is Ed Hulse, ed., The Pen-
ny-a-Word Brigade: Pulp Fictioneers Discuss Their Craft (Dover, NJ: Murania, 2017).
3. Joseph T. Shaw, “The Aim of Black Mask,” Black Mask, June 1927, iii.
4. Carroll John Daly, “The Snarl of the Beast” (1927), in The Snarl of the Beast: The Col-
lected Hard-Boiled Stories of Race Williams, vol. 2 (Boston: Altus, 2016), 79.
5. Carroll John Daly, “The Hidden Hand” (1928), in The Snarl of the Beast: The Collected
Hard-Boiled Stories of Race Williams, vol. 2 (Boston: Altus, 2016), 301.
6. Dashiell Hammett, “Another Perfect Crime” (1925), in Hardboiled Mystery Writers:
Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald: A Literary Reference, ed.
Matthew J. Bruccoli and Richard Layman (New York: Carroll and Graff, 2002),
207–10.
 442 6. Dark and Full of Blood

7. Joseph T. Shaw, ed., introduction to The Hard-Boiled Omnibus: Early Stories from Black
Mask (New York: Simon &Schuster, 1946), vi–vii.
8. Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder,” Later Novels and Other Writings (New
York: Library of America, 1995), 991.
9. Daly, “Snarl of the Beast,” 129.
10. Joseph T. Shaw, “We’re On Our Way!!” Black Mask, May 1927, vi.
11. Brooks E. Hefner surveys Daly’s career in Brooks E. Hefner, introduction to Them That
Lives by Their Guns: The Collected Hard-Boiled Stories of Race Williams, vol. 1, by Carroll
John Daly (Boston: Altus, 2015), xi–xviii. See also G. A. Finch, “A Fatal Attraction,” The
Armchair Detective 13, no. 2 (Spring 1980): 112–24; and Michael S. Barson, “ ‘There’s No
Sex in Crime’: The Two-Fisted Homilies of Race Williams,” Clues 2, no. 2 (Fall/Winter
1981): 103–12.
12. Cleanth Brooks Jr. and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Fiction (New York: Apple-
ton-Century-Crofts, 1943), viii. This textbook, which exemplifies the extent to which
New Criticism was being integrated into college curricula, warns instructors that their
students are likely to prefer “the crudest story of violent action.” (viii). Brooks and Warren
may have had pulp fiction in mind.
13. Dashiell Hammett, Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett 1921–1960, ed. Richard Layman
and Julie M. Rivett (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2001), 46.
14. Raymond Chandler, “Trouble Is My Business,” in Collected Stories (New York: Knopf,
2002), 989.
15. Advertisement for Red Harvest, New York Times Book Review, February 17, 1929, as
quoted in Lisa Jaillant, “New Publishers,” in American Literature in Transition: 1920–
1930, ed. Ichiro Takayoshi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 404.
16. Paul Cain, “Gundown” (1933), in William F. Nolan, The Black Mask Boys: Masters in the
Hard-Boiled School of Detective Fiction (New York: Morrow, 1985), 220.
17. Dashiell Hammett, “Poor Scotland Yard!,” in Matthew Bruccoli and Richard Layman,
eds., Hardboiled Mystery Writers: Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdon-
ald: A Literary Reference (New York: Carroll and Graff, 2002), 105.
18. Dashiell Hammett, “Introduction to The Maltese Falcon,” in Hardboiled Mystery Writers:
Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald: A Literary Reference, ed.
Matthew Bruccoli and Richard Layman (New York: Carroll and Graff, 2002), 117;
Raymond Chandler, introduction to “The Simple Art of Murder,” in Later Novels and
Other Writings (New York: Library of America, 1995), 1017.
19. For more on crime films of the 1910s, see David Bordwell, “Film Noir a Hundred Years
Ago,” David Bordwell’s Website on Cinema (blog), http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog
/2017/04/18/film-noir-a-hundred-years-ago/.
20. Dashiell Hammett, “The Creeping Siamese,” in The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps, ed.
Otto Penzler (New York, Vintage, 2007), 15–24; Carroll John Daly, Snarl of the Beast:
The Collected Hard-Boiled Stories of Race Williams, vol. 2 (Boston: Altus, 2016), 43; Paul
Cain, Fast One (Monroe, IL: Gutter, 2013), 173, 191.
21. Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake (London: Pan, 1979), 150. Aristotle notes that
in plots “it is likely that some things should occur contrary to likelihood.” Stephen Hal-
liwell, The Poetics of Aristotle: Translation and Commentary (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1987), 63.
22. Hammett, “Introduction to The Maltese Falcon,” 117.
23. John Gallishaw, “What the Men’s ‘Pulp-Paper’ Magazines Are Buying,” The Writer 45,
no. 5 (May 1933): 133.
 6. Dark and Full of Blood 443

24. Dashiell Hammett as quoted in Ellery Queen, “The Sex Life of a Gentleman Detective,”
In the Queens’ Parlor and Other Leaves from the Editors’ Notebook (New York: Biblio and
Tannen, 1969), 47.
25. Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man (Boston: G. K. Hall, 2001), 205.
26. As quoted in Richard Layman, Shadow Man: The Life of Dashiell Hammett (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 145.
27. Robert Leslie Bellem, Blue Murder (Miami: Dennis McMillan, 1987), 10; Brett Halli-
day, Dividend on Death (New York: Mysterious, 2015), chap. 1; Steve Fisher, I Wake Up
Screaming (New York: Popular Library, 1941), 4; Jonathan Latimer, Solomon’s Vineyard
(London: Planet Monk, 2014), chap. 1.
28. H. Bedford-Jones, The Graduate Fictioneer (Denver, CO: Author and Journalist,
1932), 74.
29. Chandler, “Simple Art of Murder,” 989.
30. Daly, “Snarl of the Beast,” 104.
31. Dashiell Hammett, “The Gutting of Coffignal,” in The Big Book of the Continental Op,
ed. Richard Layman and Julie M. Rivett (New York: Vintage, 2017), 347.
32. Dashiell Hammett, “The Roman Hat Mystery,” Saturday Review of Literature, October 12,
1929, 262. Ellery Queen’s 1958 novel The Finishing Stroke, set in 1929, shows the young
Ellery chafing under this review, which calls him a “philovancish bookworm.” Ellery
Queen, The Finishing Stroke (New York: Pocket, 1963), 23.
33. Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest (New York: Vintage, 1972), 152.
34. Editor Harry Block, worried that the book “falls too definitively into three sections,”
asked for a “connecting thread.” Harry Block as quoted in Dashiell Hammett, The Big
Book of the Continental Op, ed. Richard Layman and Julie M. Rivett (New York: Vintage,
2017), 629. Fitzstephan’s role was expanded in the novel.
35. James Sandoe and Martin Edwards make this point. See Martin Edwards, The Story of
Classic Crime in 100 Books (London: British Library, 2017), 241.
36. Dashiell Hammett, The Dain Curse (New York: Vintage, 1972), 217.
37. Hammett, “Introduction to The Maltese Falcon,” 117.
38. “A Man Called Hammett,” Times Literary Supplement, November 17, 1950, in Hardboiled
Mystery Writers: Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald: A Literary
Reference, ed. Matthew Bruccoli and Richard Layman (New York: Carroll and Graff,
2002), 195.
39. Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (New York: Knopf, 1930), 53.
40. Hammett, Maltese Falcon, 122.
41. Hammett, Maltese Falcon, 274.
42. Dashiell Hammett, The Glass Key (New York: Vintage, 1972), 156.
43. Hammett, Glass Key, 177.
44. Hammett, Glass Key, 210.
45. Hammett, Selected Letters, 71.
46. Hammett, Thin Man, 217.
47. Hammett, Thin Man, 155, 173.
48. Lea Jacobs traces the emergence of the sophisticated comedy; see Lea Jacobs, The
Decline of Sentiment: American Film in the 1920s (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2008), chap. 3.
49. Richard Layman, introduction to Return of the Thin Man, by Dashiell Hammett, ed.
Richard Layman and Julie M. Rivett (New York: Mysterious, 2012), 2.
50. Hammett, Selected Letters, 47.
 444 6. Dark and Full of Blood

51. “Behind the Blurbs,” The Outlook and Independent, February 26, 1930, 350.
52. Axel Madsen, Malraux: A Biography (New York: Morrow, 1976), 114–15.
53. Hammett, Selected Letters, 47.
54. Shaw, introduction to Hard-Boiled Omnibus, viii.
55. Carroll John Daly, “The False Burton Combs” (1922), in Them That Lives by Their Guns:
The Collected Hard-Boiled Stories of Race Williams, vol. 1, by Carroll John Daly (Boston:
Altus, 2015), 635.
56. Sensitive analyses of Hammett’s 1920s writing are offered by LeRoy Lad Panek, Reading
Early Hammett: A Critical Study of the Fiction Prior to The Maltese Falcon (Jefferson,
NC: McFarland, 2004).
57. Dashiell Hammett, “The Whosis Kid,” in Big Book of the Continental Op, ed. Richard
Layman and Julie M. Rivett (New York: Vintage, 2017), 232.
58. Dashiell Hammett, “Zigzags of Treachery,” in Big Book of the Continental Op, ed. Rich-
ard Layman and Julie M. Rivett (New York: Vintage, 2017), 99; Dashiell Hammett,
“Dead Yellow Women,” in Big Book of the Continental Op, ed. Richard Layman and Julie
M. Rivett (New York: Vintage, 2017), 311, 329.
59. Dashiell Hammett, “The Golden Horseshoe,” in Big Book of the Continental Op, ed.
Richard Layman and Julie M. Rivett (New York: Vintage, 2017), 183; Hammett, “Dead
Yellow Women, 329; Dashiell Hammett, “Corkscrew” (1925), Big Book of the Continental
Op, ed. Richard Layman and Julie M. Rivett (New York: Vintage, 2017), 276; Hammett,
“Dead Yellow Women,” 311; Dashiell Hammett, “The House in Turk Street,” Big Book of
the Continental Op, ed. Richard Layman and Julie M. Rivett (New York: Vintage, 2017),
129.
60. Hammett, “The Gutting of Coffignal,” 347.
61. Hammett, Red Harvest, 171.
62. Hammett, Dain Curse, 35; Hammett, Red Harvest, 87; Hammett, Dain Curse, 203, 206.
63. Hammett, Red Harvest, 193.
64. Hammett, Red Harvest, 192.
65. Hammett, Thin Man, 154, 104.
66. Hammett, Maltese Falcon, 15, 229, 152.
67. Hammett, Maltese Falcon, 169.
68. This passage is dissected with great subtlety in Naremore, “Dashiell Hammett and the
Poetics of Hard-Boiled Detection,” 60–62.
69. Hammett, Maltese Falcon, 68.
70. Hammett, Maltese Falcon, 224.
71. Rudy Behlmer, “ ‘The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of ’: The Maltese Falcon,” in The
Maltese Falcon, ed. William Luhr (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995),
112–13; Don Hartman, “Two Heads Are Worse Than One (Especially if They’re on You),”
in Hello, Hollywood!: The Story of the Movies by the People Who Make Them, ed. Allen
Rivkin and Laura Kerr (New York: Doubleday, 1962), 155–56.
72. Hammett, Glass Key, 60, 156, 42.
73. Hammett, Glass Key, 116.
74. Hammett, Glass Key, 145.
75. Hammett, Glass Key, 40, 106.
76. The repetition is in the original Black Mask serial. Perhaps Hammett repeated the pas-
sage in the third installment to reintroduce Jack, a minor character, to readers who
had forgotten his role in the second installment. No other character is reintroduced
this way, however, and the passage would normally be modified or eliminated when an
author was recasting it for book publication. See “Dagger Point,” Black Mask 13, no. 4
 6. Dark and Full of Blood 445

(May 1933): 53. Perhaps Hammett also wanted to try a comma-filled variant on the first
Gertrude Steinian description?
77. Without referring to Hammett, Walter Nash discusses the use of full names in con-
temporary adventure novels; see Walter Nash, Language in Popular Fiction (London:
Routledge, 1990), 57–63.
78. Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (New York: Viking, 1957), 113.
79. André Gide, “Journal of The Counterfeiters,” in The Counterfeiters, trans. Dorothy Bussy
and Justin O’Brien (New York: Modern Library, 1955), 442.
80. Claude-Edmonde Magny, The Age of the American Novel: The Film Aesthetic of Fiction
Between the Two Wars, trans. Eleanor Hochman (New York: Ungar, 1972), 43.
81. Hammett, Glass Key, 214.
82. Dashiell Hammett, “Mr. Hergesheimer’s Scenario,” The Forum, November 1924, 720.
83. Hammett, “Dead Yellow Women,” 329.
84. Joseph Shaw as quoted in Francis L. Fugate and Roberta Fugate, eds., Secrets of the
World’s Best-Selling Writer: The Storytelling Techniques of Erle Stanley Gardner (New
York: Morrow, 1980), 76.
85. Hammett, Red Harvest, 134.
86. Hammett, “Mr. Hergesheimer’s Scenario,” 720.
87. Hammett, Maltese Falcon, 89, 117; Hammett, Thin Man, 11, 272.
88. Lutton Blassingame, “The Detective Fiction Market,” in Penny-a-Word Brigade: Pulp
Fictioneers Discuss Their Craft, ed. Ed Hulse (Dover, NJ: Murania, 2017), 116; originally
published in Writer’s Digest, January 1937.
89. Raymond Chandler, “Goldfish,” in Collected Stories (New York: Knopf, 2002), 515.
90. Frank MacShane, The Life of Raymond Chandler (New York: Dutton, 1976), 55.
91. Publishers’ Weekly, December 24, 1938, cover advertisement.
92. Raymond Chandler, Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler, ed. Frank MacShane (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 4.
93. Illuminating discussions of Chandler can be found in Philip Durham, Down These
Mean Streets a Man Must Go: Raymond Chandler’s Knight (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1963); MacShane, Life of Raymond Chandler; Miriam Gross, ed.,
The World of Raymond Chandler (New York: A & W, 1977); William Luhr, Raymond
Chandler and Film (New York: Ungar, 1982); and Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and
Anthony Dean Pizzuto, eds., The Annotated The Big Sleep (New York: Vintage, 2018). A
bracingly skeptical take is Julian Symons, “Raymond Chandler,” in Criminal Practices:
Symons on Crime Writing, 60s to 90s (London: Macmillan, 1994), 143–57.
94. On Chandler’s training, see Kathleen Riley, “Latin Woostered and Hard-Boiled: The
Classical Style of P. G. Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler,” Arion 26, no. 2 (Fall 2018):
17–32.
95. Donald E. Westlake, “The Hardboiled Dicks,” in The Getaway Car: A Donald Westlake
Nonfiction Miscellany, ed. Levi Stahl (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 41.
96. Chandler, Selected Letters, 115.
97. Raymond Chandler, “Casual Notes on the Mystery Novel” (1949), in Raymond Chan-
dler Speaking, ed. Dorothy Gardiner and Kathrine Sorley Walker (Plainview, NY: Books
for Libraries, 1971), 69.
98. Chandler, “Simple Art of Murder,” 987.
99. Raymond Chandler, “Twelve Notes on the Mystery Story,” in Later Novels and Other
Writings (New York: Library of America, 1995), 1010.
100. Chandler, Selected Letters, 152, 239. The fact that the suicidal writer in The Long Goodbye
(1953) signs himself “Roger (F. Scott Fitzgerald) Wade” has inclined one critic to see the
 446 6. Dark and Full of Blood

book as Chandler’s rewriting of The Great Gatsby. See Leon Howard, “Raymond Chan-
dler’s Not-So-Great Gatsby,” in The Mystery and Detection Annual, ed. Donald Adams
(Beverly Hills, CA: Mystery and Detection Annual, 1973), 1–15.
101. Chandler, “Simple Art of Murder,” 989.
102. G. K. Chesterton, “A Defence of Detective Stories,” in Howard Haycraft, ed., Art of the
Mystery Story (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1941), 4, 6.
103. Chandler, Selected Letters, 151.
104. Chandler, Selected Letters, 129–30.
105. LeRoy Lad Panek, An Introduction to the Detective Story (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling
Green University Popular Press, 1987), 153.
106. Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep (New York: Ballantine, 1972), 166.
107. Chandler, Big Sleep, 67.
108. Brett Halliday, The Private Practice of Michael Shayne (New York: Dell, 1965), 15.
109. Chandler, Big Sleep, 135.
110. Chandler, Big Sleep, 24, 45; Raymond Chandler, The High Window (New York: Vintage,
1976), 57; Chandler, Lady in the Lake, 70; Chandler, Big Sleep, 55; Chandler, Lady in the
Lake, 70; Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely (New York: Vintage, 1988), 8; Chandler, High
Window, 38.
111. Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely, 51.
112. Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely, 91, 107, 8; Chandler, High Window, 205, 34.
113. Chandler, Selected Letters, 187.
114. Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely, 264.
115. Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister (London: Hamilton, 1969), 80; Chandler, Farewell,
My Lovely, 140.
116. Chandler, High Window, 165; Chandler, Big Sleep, 90; Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely,
241.
117. Chandler, High Window, 190; Chandler, Lady in the Lake, 185.
118. Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely, 241.
119. Chandler, Lady in the Lake, 152.
120. Chandler, Big Sleep, 201.
121. Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely, 80–81.
122. Chandler, High Window, 170.
123. “I want to try adapting this stream-of-consciousness method, conveniently modified, to
a detective story, carrying the reader along with the detective, showing him everything
as it is found, giving him the detective’s conclusions as they are reached, letting the
solution break on both of them together.” Hammett, Selected Letters, 46.
124. Chandler, “Twelve Notes,” 1009.
125. For a detailed comparison of the two versions, see Miranda B. Hickman, “Introduc-
tion: The Complex History of ‘A Simple Art,’ ” Studies in the Novel 35, no. 3 (Fall 2003):
292–98.
126. Raymond Chandler as quoted in MacShane, Life of Chandler, 70.
127. Chandler, “Simple Art of Murder,” 992.
128. Chandler, Big Sleep, 154.
129. Although Chandler doesn’t mention it, Hammett was a member of the Communist
Party. “The Simple Art of Murder” tacitly encouraged later critics to find in Hammett’s
work traces of proletarian literature’s denunciation of American capitalism and inter-
national fascism. See Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American
Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1997), 255–58.
130. Chandler, Selected Letters, 448.
 7. The 1940s 447

131. Chandler, “Simple Art of Murder,” 991.

132. MacShane, Life of Chandler, 148.
133. R. W. Flint, “A Cato of the Cruelties,” Partisan Review 14, no. 3 (May-June 1947): 328; W.
H. Auden, “The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict” (1948), in
Prose. Vol. 2, 1939–1948, The Complete Works of W. H. Auden, ed. Edward Mendelson
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 265.
134. Graham McInnes, “Elementary, My Dear Watson,” University of Toronto Quarterly 16,
no. 4 (July 1947): 411–12.
135. Flint, “Cato of the Cruelties,” 328.
136. Stephen Pendo provides detailed comparisons of the films with their sources; see
Stephen Pendo, Raymond Chandler on Screen: His Novels Into Film (Metuchen, NJ:
Scarecrow, 1976).
137. Matthew J. Bruccoli, “Afterword: Chandler and Hollywood,” in The Blue Dahlia: A
Screenplay, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
1976), 131.
138. Chandler, Selected Letters, 310–11.
139. Chandler, Little Sister, 70.
140. Chandler, Little Sister, 237; Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye (New York: Vintage,
1988), 32, 210.
141. Chandler, Little Sister, 14, 188.
142. If, as some speculate, Raymond Chandler’s 1957 short story “English Summer” was an
effort to establish himself as a writer of “straight” fiction, that would suggest he was
still anchored in the 1910s. The narration suggests at once the influence of James (the
protagonist is an American abroad) and of Ford Maddox Ford.
143. I discuss the use of flashback narration in David Bordwell, Reinventing Hollywood: How
1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2017), 67–124, 237–60.
144. Chandler, Little Sister, 86, 187.
145. Luhr, Raymond Chandler and Film, 11.
146. Harry Wilson, “The Dark Mirror,” Sequence 7 (Spring 1949): 19–22.

7. The 1940s: Mysteries in Crossover Culture

1. Films in which the protagonist is a mystery writer include Footsteps in the Dark (1940),
Whistling in the Dark (1941), Dangerous Blondes (1943), The Mask of Dimitrios (1944),
Home Sweet Homicide (1946), The Unsuspected (1947), and Seven Keys to Baldpate
(1947).
2. Frederick C. Davis, “Mysteries Plus,” in Writing Detective and Mystery Fiction, ed. A.
S. Burack (Boston: The Writer, 1945), 210–12; Frederick C. Davis, “What Makes a Post
Serial?,” The Writer 60, no. 7 (July 1947): 289.
3. The publishing dynamics governing the Queen stories are explored in Matthew Levay,
“Preservation and Promotion: Ellery Queen, Magazine Publishing, and the Marketing
of Detective Fiction,” in The Centrality of Crime Fiction in American Literary Culture,
ed. Alfred Endixen and Olivia Carr Edenfield (New York: Routledge, 2017), 101–22.
4. Ellery Queen, Calamity Town, in The Wrightsville Murders (Boston: Little Brown, 1948),
197.
5. Frederic Dannay as quoted in Francis M. Nevins, Ellery Queen: The Art of Detection
(Lexington KY: Perfect Crime, 2013), 109.
 448 7. The 1940s

6. Queen, Calamity Town, 186.

7. Ten Days’ Wonder was to be, Dannay wrote in a letter to Lee, “an exposure of detective
novels and of fictional detectives.” See Frederic Dannay, “Letter of October 24, 1947,” in
Blood Relations: The Selected Letters of Ellery Queen, 1947–1950, ed. Joseph Goodrich
(Lexington, KY: Perfect Crime, 2012), 19.
8. Ellery Queen, Cat of Many Tails (Boston: Little, Brown, 1949), 241.
9. The epigraph is from “Dashiell Hammett Has Hard Words for Tough Stuff He Used to
Write,” Los Angeles Times, June 7, 1950, A3.
10. Kenneth Millar as quoted in Matthew J. Bruccoli, Ross Macdonald (New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 19.
11. Ross Macdonald, The Moving Target (Boston: Gregg, 1979), 9.
12. In a 1977 essay, Macdonald refers obliquely to Edmund Wilson’s 1941 book of biograph-
ical criticism, The Wound and the Bow. See Ross Macdonald, “Down These Streets a
Mean Man Must Go,” in Four Novels of the 1950s, ed. Tom Nolan (New York: Library of
America, 2015), 893.
13. Ross Macdonald, “Archer at Large,” in Self-Portrait: Ceaselessly Into the Past, ed. Ralph
B. Sipper (Santa Barbara, CA: Capra, 1981), 31.
14. Ross Macdonald, “The Writer as Detective Hero,” Four Novels of the 1950s, ed. Tom
Nolan (New York: Library of America, 2015), 870.
15. Ross Macdonald, “Letter to Alfred A. Knopf,” in Four Novels of the 1950s, ed. Tom Nolan
(New York: Library of America, 2015), 862.
16. Macdonald, “Writer as Detective Hero,” 873.
17. Macdonald, “Writer as Detective Hero,” 874.
18. Ross Macdonald, “Writing The Galton Case,” in Four Novels of the 1950s, ed. Tom Nolan
(New York: Library of America, 2015), 887.
19. Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case, in Four Novels of the 1950s, ed. Tom Nolan (New
York: Library of America, 2015), 653, 676.
20. Macdonald, “Writing The Galton Case,” 889.
21. Ross Macdonald, The Wycherly Woman (New York: Vintage, 1989), 175–76.
22. Raymond Chandler, “Letter to James Sandoe” (April 14,1949), in Selected Letters of
Raymond Chandler, ed. Frank MacShane (New York: Columbia University Press,
1981), 164.
23. Ross Macdonald as quoted in Ralph Burns Sipper, “An Interview with Ross Macdon-
ald,” in The Mystery and Detection Annual 1973, ed. Donald K. Adams (Beverly Hills,
CA: Donald Adams, 1975), 52–82.
24. Daniel R. Barnes, “ ʻI’m the Eye’: Archer as Narrator in the Novels of Ross Macdonald,”
in Mystery and Detection Annual 1972, ed. Donald K. Adams (Beverly Hills, CA: Donald
Adams, 1972), 181–88.
25. Macdonald, “Writer as Detective Hero,” 870.
26. Outstanding studies of Macdonald’s work include Matthew J. Bruccoli, Ross Macdonald
(San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984); Bernard A. Schopen, Ross Macdon-
ald (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990); and Tom Nolan, Ross Macdonald: A Biography (New
York: Scribner’s, 1999).
27. Will Murray, “The Executioner Phenomenon,” in Murder Off the Rack: Critical Studies
of Ten Paperback Masters, ed. Jon L. Breen and Martin Harry Greenberg (Pulp Hero
Press, 2018), 111–18.
28. An analysis is in David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1985), chap. 5.
 7. The 1940s 449

29. For a survey of narrative strategies in American films beyond the mystery genre, see
David Bordwell, Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Story-
telling (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
30. Steve Fisher, I Wake Up Screaming (New York: Popular Library, 1941), 29–30.
31. Fisher, I Wake Up, 34.
32. On Eberhart’s writing income, see Rick Cypert, America’s Agatha Christie: Mignon Good
Eberhart, Her Life and Works (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2005). In
1936 alone, she earned $50,000, the equivalent in 2017 of nearly a million dollars. As
with most successful authors, the largest revenues came from the sale of movie rights.
33. Patricia Highsmith, “Suspense in Fiction,” The Writer 67, no. 13 (December 1954): 406.
34. Mitchell Wilson, “The Suspense Story,” The Writer 60, no. 1 (January 1947): 15–16.
35. Edmund Wilson, “Why Do People Read Detective Stories?,” in Literary Essays and
Reviews of the 1930s and 1940s (New York: Library of America, 2007), 660–61.
36. Anthony Boucher, “A Matter of Crime,” New York Times, December 4, 1955.
37. Philip K. Scheuer, “Double Indemnity, Study of Murder Without Bunk,” Los Angeles
Times, August 11, 1944.
38. James M. Cain as quoted in Peter Brunette and Gerald Peary, “James M. Cain: Tough
Guy,” in Backstory: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood’s Golden Age, ed. Pat
McGilligan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 125.
39. Jim Thompson, Nothing More Than Murder (New York: Vintage, 1990), 147.
40. George Cukor wanted the trial testimony in A Woman’s Face to include witnesses’
contrasting versions of scenes, and Joseph Mankiewicz wanted the recollections of
two characters in All About Eve (1950) to involve a replay, but neither aspiration made
it into the final film. Cukor judged that a replay would have been “too complicated
for audiences.” See Philip K. Scheuer, “A Town Called Hollywood,” Los Angeles Times,
May 11, 1941.
41. For a discussion see David Bordwell, “Twice-Told Tales: Mildred Pierce,” David Bord-
well’s Website on Cinema (blog), http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2013/06/26/twice
-told-tales-mildred-pierce/.
42. See Kristin Thompson, “Duplicitous Narration and Stage Fright,” in Breaking the Glass
Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988),
135–61.
43. I discuss The Locket in more detail in Bordwell, Reinventing Hollywood, 117–23.
44. Robert Wallsten as quoted in Cypert, America’s Agatha Christie, 97.
45. Wolcott Gibbs, “Flatbush Idyll,” The New Yorker, January 18, 1941, 36.
46. Eberhart as quoted in Cypert, America’s Agatha Christie, 98.
47. John B. Priestley, introduction to The Plays of J. B. Priestley, vol. I (London: Heinemann,
1948), vii–viii.
48. Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (New York: Viking, 1957), 251.
49. Apparently without being aware of the earlier versions, Ellery Queen was planning a
similar plot but abandoned it when the authors saw Christie’s novel serialized in the
Saturday Evening Post; see Nevins, Ellery Queen, 58–59.
50. Justin Chang offers a detailed analysis of Tarantino’s debt; see Justin Chang, “The
Hateful Eight: How Agatha Christie Is It? (An Investigation),” Variety, December 28,
2015, https://variety.com/2015/film/columns/the-hateful-eight-agatha-christie-quentin
-tarantino-1201667948/.
51. Rex Stout, “The Mystery Story,” in The Writer’s Book, ed. Helen Hull (1950; repr. New
York: Barnes & Noble, 1956), 64.
 450 7. The 1940s

52. Robert Barnard, A Talent to Deceive: An Appreciation of Agatha Christie (New York:
Mysterious, 1979), 83–85. Barnard, himself a distinguished crime novelist, has created in
this book a superb study in the craft of mystery fiction. For a detailed consideration of
plotting and clueing in Five Little Pigs, see John Goddard, Agatha Christie’s Golden Age:
An Analysis of Poirot’s Golden Age Puzzles (London: Stylish Eye, 2018), 461–83.
53. Henry Klinger, “The Story That Sells to the Movies,” in The Mystery Writer’s Handbook,
ed. Herbert Brean (New York: Harper, 1956), 187.
54. See A. B. Emrys, Wilkie Collins, Vera Caspary, and the Evolution of the Casebook Novel
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 111–39.
55. Vera Caspary, Laura (New York: Vintage, 2012), 7.
56. Caspary, Laura, 20.
57. Caspary, Laura, 65, 66, 75, 65.
58. Caspary, Laura, 123.
59. Caspary, Laura, 145.
60. For a discussion of the film’s play with narration see Bordwell, Reinventing Hollywood,
256–58.
61. Ira Levin, A Kiss Before Dying (New York: New American Library, 1954), 128.

8. The 1940s: The Problem of Other Minds, or Just One

1. Joel Townsley Rogers, The Red Right Hand (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1997).
2. Isaac Anderson, “Among the New Mystery Novels,” New York Times, May 13, 1945.
3. Josephine Tey, To Love and Be Wise (New York: Dell, 1950), 188.
4. David Goodis, Dark Passage in Four Novels (London: Zomba, 1983), 252.
5. Patrick Hamilton, Hangover Square: A Story of Darkest Earl’s Court (London: Penguin,
1974), 11.
6. See David Bordwell, Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie
Storytelling (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), chap. 11.
7. Hamilton, Hangover Square, 23.
8. Freud noted that the hidden information in the patient’s case inevitably reappears: “It
cannot rest until the mystery has been solved.” See Sigmund Freud, “Analysis of a Pho-
bia in a Five-Year-Old Boy” (1909), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psycholog-
ical Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 10, (1909): Two Case Histories, trans. James Strachey
et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), 122.
9. Guy Endore, Methinks the Lady . . . (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1945), 176.
10. Iris Barry, “New Fiction: Methinks the Lady . . . ,” New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book
Review, November 4, 1945, 11; James MacBride, “Schizoid,” New York Times, November
4, 1945.
11. John Franklin Bardin, Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly (London: Victor Gollancz, 1948), 111.
12. Bardin, Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly, 179.
13. Francis M. Nevins Jr. Cornell Woolrich: First You Dream, Then You Die (New York:
Mysterious, 1988), 336.
14. Cornell Woolrich, The Black Curtain (New York: Ballantine, 1982), 35; Cornell Wool-
rich, The Black Path of Fear (New York: Ace, n.d.), 50; William Irish [Cornell Woolrich,
pseud.], Waltz Into Darkness (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1947), 158.
15. For astute comments on Woolrichian prose, see Geoffrey O’Brien, Hardboiled America:
Lurid Paperbacks and the Masters of Noir, 2nd ed. (New York: Da Capo, 1997), 97–100;
and Thomas C. Renzi, Cornell Woolrich from Pulp Noir to Film Noir (Jefferson, NC:
 8. The 1940s 451

McFarland, 2006), 17–18. Surprisingly, Woolrich isn’t represented in Bill Pronzini’s

compilations of bad crime writing; see Bill Pronzini, Gun in Cheek: A Study of “Alterna-
tive” Crime Fiction (New York: Coward, McCann, 1982); and Bill Pronzini, Son of Gun
in Cheek (New York: Mysterious, 1987).
16. Steve Fisher, “I Had Nobody,” The Armchair Detective 3, no. 3 (1970): 164.
17. Mark T. Bassett, introduction to Blues of a Lifetime: The Autobiography of Cornell Wool-
rich (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1991), xii.
18. Lee Wright as quoted in Nevins, Cornell Woolrich, 257.
19. Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor, A Catalogue of Crime, rev. ed. (New York:
Harper & Row, 1989), 561.
20. Raymond Chandler, “Letter to Alex Barris” (1949), in Raymond Chandler Speaking,
ed. Dorothy Gardner and Kathrine Sorley Walker (Plainview, NY: Books for Libraries,
1971), 55.
21. For comparison of the works with the media adaptations, see Nevins, Cornell Woolrich,
453–524; and the book-length study by Renzi, Cornell Woolrich from Pulp Noir to Film
Noir. On the film adaptation of The Black Path of Fear, see Bordwell, Reinventing Hol-
lywood, 331–35; and David Bordwell, “Back on the Trail of The Chase,” David Bordwell’s
Website on Cinema (blog), http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2016/11/01/back-on-the
-trail-of-the-chase/. For a comprehensive introduction to the Woolrich oeuvre, both in
print and on the screen, see James Naremore, “An Aftertaste of Dread: Cornell Wool-
rich in Noir Fiction and Film,” http://jamesnaremore.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/04
/Woolrich-and-Dread.pdf.
22. Mitchell Wilson, “The Suspense Story,” The Writer 60, no. 1 (January 1947): 15–16.
23. Cornell Woolrich, Black Alibi (New York; Ballantine, 1982), 33.
24. William Irish [Cornell Wooolrich. pseud.], “Deadline at Dawn,” in The Best of William
Irish (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1944), 419.
25. Woolrich, Black Path of Fear, 136.
26. Bassett, introduction to Blues of a Lifetime, 11.
27. Woolrich, Black Path of Fear, 85.
28. Woolrich, Black Path of Fear, 175.
29. Cornell Woolrich, The Bride Wore Black (New York: Ace, n.d.), 88.
30. Eyewitness plots are discussed in David Bordwell, “The Eyewitness Plot and the Drama
of Doubt,” David Bordwell’s Website on Cinema (blog), http://www.davidbordwell.net
/blog/2018/07/23/the-eyewitness-plot-and-the-drama-of-doubt/.
31. William Irish [Cornell Wooolrich, pseud.], “Rear Window,” in The Best of William Irish
(Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1944), 273.
32. Irish, “Rear Window,” 288.
33. For a discussion of the film, see Bordwell, “The Eyewitness Plot and the Drama of
Doubt.”
34. William Irish [ Cornell Wooolrich, pseud.], “Fire Escape ,” in Dead Man Blues (Phila-
delphia: Lippincott, 1948), 112–13.
35. Cornell Woolrich, The Black Angel (New York: Avon, 1946), 147.
36. I point out some examples in Bordwell, Reinventing Hollywood, 52–54, 276–85.
37. Bardin, Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly, 105.
38. Endore, Methinks the Lady . . . , 102–3.
39. Cornell Woolrich, Fright (New York: Hard Case, 2007), 80–82.
40. Cornell Woolrich, Rendezvous in Black (New York: Modern Library, 2004), 94.
41. George Hopley [Cornell Woolrich, pseud.], Night Has a Thousand Eyes (New York:
Farrar and Rinehart, 1945), 112–14.
 452 8. The 1940s

42. Cornell Woolrich, I Married a Dead Man (New York: Ballantine, 1983), 94.
43. Woolrich, Black Curtain, 62.
44. Irish, Deadline at Dawn, 408.
45. Irish, Waltz Into Darkness, 119.
46. Henry James, “The Art of Fiction,” in Literary Criticism, vol. 1, Essays on Literature,
American Writers, English Writers, by Henry James, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Library
of America, 1984), 61.
47. Hopley, Night Has a Thousand Eyes, 89.
48. Patrick Anderson, The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Cap-
tured Popular Culture (New York: Random House, 2007), 6.
49. Jean-Claude Carrière, The Secret Language of Film, trans. Jeremy Leggatt (New York:
Pantheon, 1994), 15.
50. Rupert Holmes’s campy Accomplice (1990) builds on schemas exploited in Sleuth,
Deathtrap, and other murder plays, not least the duplicitous cast list and an announce-
ment before the performance that a new player has been substituted for one that is
indisposed.

9. The Great Detective Rewritten: Erle Stanley Gardner and Rex Stout

1. Several accounts of the decline of the pulp market in the 1930s can be found in John
Locke, ed., Pulp Fictioneers: Adventures in the Storytelling Business (Silver Spring, MD:
Adventure House, 2004).
2. Frank MacShane, ed., Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1981), 152, 174.
3. Alva Johnston, The Case of Erle Stanley Gardner (New York: Morrow, 1947). 9.
4. J. Kenneth Van Dover, Murder in the Millions: Erle Stanley Gardner, Mickey Spillane, Ian
Fleming (New York: Ungar, 1984), 15.
5. A penetrating analysis of Gardner’s career, including appreciations of his non-Mason
stories, is Francis M. Nevins, “Erle Stanley Gardner,” in Cornucopia of Crime: Memories
and Summations (Lexington, KY: Ramble House, 2010), 23–52.
6. Van Dover, Murder in the Millions, 15–19; Francis L. Fugate and Roberta B. Fugate,
Secrets of the World’s Best-Selling Writer: The Storytelling Techniques of Erle Stanley
Gardner (New York: Morrow, 1980), 193n.
7. Erle Stanley Gardner as quoted in Fugate and Fugate, Secrets of the World’s Best-Selling
Writer, 214.
8. Gardner as quoted in Fugate and Fugate, Secrets of the World’s Best-Selling Writer, 215.
9. Gardner as quoted in Fugate and Fugate, Secrets of the World’s Best-Selling Writer, 65.
10. Gardner as quoted in Dorothy B. Hughes, Erle Stanley Gardner: The Case of the Real
Perry Mason (New York: Morrow, 1978), 102.
11. Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Sulky Girl (New York: Ballantine, 1961), 2.
12. Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Howling Dog (Della Street Press, 2012), chap. 3,
Kindle.
13. Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Caretaker’s Cat (New York: Garden City, 1963),
1022.
14. Fugate and Fugate, Secrets of the World’s Best-Selling Writer, 89–99.
15. Gardner, Case of the Caretaker’s Cat, 88.
16. Fugate and Fugate, Secrets of the World’s Best-Selling Writer, 96.
17. Fugate and Fugate, Secrets of the World’s Best-Selling Writer, 101.
 9. The Great Detective Rewritten 453

18. Fugate and Fugate, Secrets of the World’s Best-Selling Writer, 174.
19. Gardner, Case of the Caretaker’s Cat, 126.
20. Gardner as quoted in Hughes, Erle Stanley Gardner, 131.
21. Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Perjured Parrot (Mattituck, NY: Aeonian, 1976), 17.
22. Erle Stanley Gardner as quoted in Nevins, “Erle Stanley Gardner,” 49. A thorough con-
sideration of the television series can be found in Thomas Leitch, Perry Mason (Detroit,
MI: Wayne State University Press, 2005).
23. Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Lame Canary (Della Street Press, 2013), chap. 7,
Kindle.
24. Gardner as quoted in Hughes, Erle Stanley Gardner, 25.
25. See Erle Stanley Gardner, The Court of Last Resort, rev. ed. (New York: Pocket, 1954);
and Hughes, Erle Stanley Gardner, 255–69.
26. Erle Stanley Gardner, “Hell’s Kettle” (1930), in The Black Mask Boys: Masters in the
Hard-Boiled School of Detective Fiction, by William F. Nolan (New York: Morrow, 1985),
114–15.
27. Elmore Leonard, “Writers on Writing: Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and
Especially Hooptedoodle,” New York Times, July 16, 2001.
28. Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Crooked Candle (London: Arcturus, 2012), 56;
Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Terrified Typist (London: Heinemann, 1955), 41;
Gardner, Case of the Caretaker’s Cat, 24.
29. Leonard, “Writers on Writing.”
30. See Van Dover, Murder in the Millions, 39–45, for a good analysis of the repetitions and
interjections in these conversations.
31. Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Hesitant Hostess (New York: Pocket, 1959), 204–5.
32. Johnston, The Case of Erle Stanley Gardner, 12.
33. Gardner, Case of the Caretaker’s Cat, 14; Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Curious
Bride (New York: Pocket, 1953), 205; Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Lucky Legs
(Thorndike, ME: Hall, 1999), 39; Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Velvet Claws
(New York: Pocket, 1970), 219.
34. Quotations come from the first chapters of The Case of the Glamorous Ghost (1955), The
Case of the Lucky Loser (1957), and The Case of the Screaming Woman (1957), in Seven
Complete Novels, by Erle Stanley Gardner (New York: Avenel, 1979), 1, 261, 367; and Erle
Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Singing Skirt (New York: Pocket, 1961), 5.
35. See Milman Parry, “Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making: 1. Homer and
Homeric Style,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 41 (1930): 73–146; Milman Parry,
“Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making: 2. The Homeric Language as
the Language of an Oral Poetry,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 43 (1932): 1–50;
Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2000), 30–67. Thanks to John Belton for his advice on the poetics of oral narrative.
36. A. A. Fair [Erle Stanley Gardner, pseud.], The Bigger They Come (New York: Pocket,
1943), 92–93.
37. For a longer version of what follows, with more gags, see David Bordwell, “Rex Stout:
Logomachizing,” David Bordwell’s Website on Cinema (blog), http://www.davidbordwell
.net/essays/stout.php.
38. David C. Tilden, “Exploring the Dark,” New York Herald Tribune, September 8, 1929;
William Soskin, New York Evening Post, quoted in advertisement for Seed on the Wind,
New York Times Book Review, September 28, 1930, 16.
39. Clifton Fadiman, “Realism and Mannerism,” The Nation, September 25,1929, 329; Francis
Hackett, “Novel on the Stairs,” New Republic, November 13, 1929, 357.
 454 9. The Great Detective Rewritten

40. Joseph Warren Beach, “The Novel from James to Joyce,” The Nation, June 10, 1931, 35.
41. John McAleer, Rex Stout: A Biography (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977), 223–28.
42. Rex Stout as quoted in John McAleer, Royal Decree: Conversations with Rex Stout
(Ashton, MD: Pontes, 1983), 3.
43. See, for example, Fred T. Marsh, “Seed on the Wind,” The Bookman, November 1930,
305.
44. Fadiman, “Realism and Mannerism”; Hackett, “Novel on the Stairs”; Ernest Sutherland
Hayes, “A Modern Hamlet,” Saturday Review of Literature, October 26, 1929, 312.
45. Rex Stout as quoted in McAleer, Rex Stout, 243.
46. For a comprehensive list of Stout’s publications, see Guy M. Townsend, Rex Stout: An
Annotated Primary and Secondary Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1980). For a solid
critical study of themes of politics and family in the Wolfe books, see David R. Ander-
son, Rex Stout (New York: Ungar, 1984). An early, still useful study is Mia I. Gerhardt,
“Homicide West; Some Observations on the Nero Wolfe Stories of Rex Stout,” English
Studies 49, no. 2 (Summer 1968): 107–27.
47. The fullest published description of the protagonists is given in Rex Stout, “Fourth of
July Picnic,” in And Four to Go (New York: Viking, 1958), 130–31. In a 1948 memo sent
to a radio producer, Stout prepared physical descriptions of Wolfe and Archie; these are
reproduced in McAleer, Rex Stout, 383.
48. Rex Stout, “Grim Fairy Tales,” Saturday Review of Literature, April 2, 1949, 34.
49. Rex Stout, “Blood Will Tell,” in Trio for Blunt Instruments (New York: Crimeline, 1997),
197.
50. Rex Stout as quoted in McAleer, Royal Decree, 43.
51. Rex Stout, “What to Do About a Watson,” in The Mystery Writer’s Handbook, ed. Herbert
Brean (New York: Harper’s, 1956), 162.
52. Stout, “Grim Fairy Tales,” 34.
53. Rex Stout, introduction to Introducing Mr. Sherlock Holmes, ed. Edgar W. Smith (Mor-
ristown, NJ: The Baker Street Irregulars, 1959).
54. Donald E. Westlake, introduction to The Father Hunt (New York: Bantam, 1993), vii.
55. See the extraordinary in-depth handling of Archie’s poisoning in Rex Stout, The League
of Frightened Men (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1935), chaps. 18–19.
56. Stout, “What to Do About a Watson,” 162.
57. Rex Stout, In the Best Families (New York: Bantam, 1995), 192–93.
58. Rex Stout, The League of Frightened Men (1935; repr. New York: Pyramid, 1974), 185.
59. Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor, “Rex Stout: Too Many Cooks,” in A Book of
Prefaces to Fifty Classics of Crime Fiction 1900–1950 (New York: Garland, 1976), 101.
60. The process is traced in Mattias Boström, From Holmes to Sherlock: The Story of the Men
and Women Who Created an Icon (New York: Mysterious, 2017), 201–2.
61. Christopher Morley, “In Memoriam Sherlock Holmes,” in The Complete Sherlock
Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (New York: Garden City, 1960), ix.
62. Rex Stout as quoted in McAleer, Royal Decree, 43.
63. Rex Stout, “Watson Was a Woman,” in The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of
Critical Essays, ed. Howarad Haycraft (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1946), 311–18.
64. W. S. Baring-Gould, Nero Wolfe of West Thirty-Fifth Street: The Life and Times of Amer-
ica’s Largest Detective (New York: Viking, 1969).
65. The fullest inventory, chronology, and cast list I know is to be found in O. E. McBride,
Stout Fellow: A Guide Through Nero Wolfe’s World (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2003).
66. Rex Stout, A Family Affair (New York: Bantam, 1976), 169.
 9. The Great Detective Rewritten 455

67. Stout himself was a creature of routines, at least in his later decades: to bed at eleven,
up at eight, breakfast followed by gardening, an afternoon snack, dinner at 6:30. See
McAleer, Rex Stout, 349.
68. Morley, “In Memoriam,” viii; Edmund Crispin, “Archie, Your Notebook,” Sunday Times,
June 4, 1967.
69. Stout, In the Best Families, 193.
70. Rex Stout, The Rubber Band (New York: Jove, 1979), 65.
71. Jacques Barzun, “About Rex Stout,” in A Birthday Tribute to Rex Stout (New York:
Viking, 1965), 7. He adds that Wolfe’s “are the only seminars in which truth of any kind
has been found.” Elsewhere Barzun describes Stout as having “acclimatised the Business
Conference to the uses of detection.” See also Jacques Barzun, “Detection in Extremis,”
in Crime in Good Company: Essays on Criminals and Crime Writing, ed. Michael Gilbert
(London: Constable, 1959), 144–45.
72. Rex Stout, “When a Man Murders . . . ,” in Three Witnesses (New York: Viking, 1956), 117.
73. Raymond Chandler, Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler, ed. Frank MacShane (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 187.
74. Rex Stout, “The Mystery Novel,” in The Writer’s Book, ed. Helen Hull (New York:
Harper, 1950), 64.
75. Stout, introduction to Introducing Mr. Sherlock Holmes.
76. A search on Google N-gram yields no mention of the fer-de-lance in any books pub-
lished between 1922 and 1934, the year Stout’s novel appeared.
77. Rex Stout, Fer-de-Lance (New York: Bantam, 1992), 238.
78. Will Cuppy, “Mystery and Adventure: The League of Frightened Men,” New York Herald
Tribune, August 8, 1935.
79. Stout, Fer-de-Lance, 1–2.
80. Stout, Fer-de-Lance, 17.
81. Stout, Fer-de-Lance, 58.
82. Stout, Fer-de-Lance, 134, 163, 164, 285.
83. Rex Stout as quoted in McAleer, Royal Decree, 22. I’m grateful to Joseph Wiesenfarth for
alerting me to the “likeness” refrain in Emma, a book that Stout was rereading shortly
before his death.
84. Shaw discusses leitmotifs in Bernard Shaw, The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on
the Niblung’s Ring (New York: Brentano’s, 1916), 119–28. An example in Shaw’s own work
is the boa constrictor slithering through Man and Superman.
85. Rex Stout, How Like a God (New York: Vanguard, 1929), 4, 41, 237.
86. Rex Stout, Too Many Cooks (New York: Pyramid, 1963), 88, 104, 163.
87. Rex Stout, Prisoner’s Base (New York: Bantam, 1979), 44, 221.
88. Stout, Fer-de-Lance, 69, 74, 268.
89. Stout, Fer-de-Lance, 236, 37.
90. The epigraph comes from Stout, Some Buried Caesar, chap 9.
91. The most famous example would be Octavius Roy Cohen’s caricatured portrayal of
Black detective Florian Slappey in Saturday Evening Post stories.
92. Rex Stout, Some Buried Caesar (New York: Bantam, 2008), 7.
93. Stout, Some Buried Caesar, 223.
94. Rex Stout, Death of a Dude (New York: Bantam, 1994), 7; Stout, League of Frightened
Men, 9; Rex Stout, And Be a Villain (New York: Bantam, 1961), 148; Rex Stout, The Red
Box (New York: Bantam, 1982), 73; Stout, A Family Affair, 67; Stout, In the Best Families,
195.
 456 9. The Great Detective Rewritten

95. Rex Stout as quoted in McAleer, Rex Stout, 282.

96. Stout, League of Frightened Men, 97; Stout, A Family Affair, 46; Rex Stout, If Death Ever
Slept, in Seven Complete Nero Wolfe Novels (New York: Avenel, 1983), 318.
97. Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye (New York: Vintage, 1988), 186; Stout, If Death
Ever Slept, 252; Rex Stout, Murder by the Book (New York: Bantam, 1992), 15.
98. Rex Stout, Might As Well Be Dead, in Seven Complete Nero Wolfe Novels (New York:
Avenel Books, 1983), 234.
99. Rex Stout, Too Many Clients (New York: Viking, 1960), 88; Stout, Some Buried Caesar,
154; Stout, If Death Ever Slept, 352.
100. The packed first chapter of Too Many Cooks is a scale model of Archie’s literary method,
from refrains and ventriloquizing to literary parody; the latter consists of puzzling how
to describe helping Wolfe undress in the confines of a Pullman car: “Dear Reader. . . .”
101. Rex Stout, The Final Deduction (Thorndike, ME: Thorndike, 1999), 96.
102. On the linguistic playfulness of the Jeeves novels, see Kristin Thompson, Wooster Pro-
poses, Jeeves Disposes; or, Le Mot Juste (London: Heineman, 1992), 282–90. She also
discusses the parallels between the Jeeves/Wooster stories and the Holmes/Watson
partnership (105–9).
103. P. G. Wodehouse, foreword to Rex Stout: A Biography, by John McAleer (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1977), xv–xvi. Not incidentally, Wodehouse had already written a book called
The Indiscretions of Archie (1928).
104. Rex Stout, The Silent Speaker (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1977), 96.
105. Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929; repr. New York: Scribners, 2014), 284. The
several alternate endings Hemingway considered are appended (303–22).
106. Ernest Hemingway as quoted in George Plimpton, “An Interview with Ernest Heming-
way,” in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises: A Casebook, ed. Linda Wagner-Martin
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 29.
107. Stout, Silent Speaker, 98. Exceptional in the novels, this is a two-page chapter devoted
wholly to Archie’s reaction to death.
108. Stout, Silent Speaker, 99.
109. Raymond Chandler, “Killer in the Rain” (1935), in Collected Stories (New York: Knopf,
2002), 215.
110. Rex Stout, The Golden Spiders (New York: Bantam, 1979), 13.
111. Stout, Silent Speaker, 207.
112. Rex Stout, Gambit (New York: Chivers, 1996), 134.
113. Rex Stout, A Right to Die (New York: Bantam, 1965), 60; Rex Stout, “The Rodeo Murder,”
in Three at Wolfe’s Door (New York: Bantam, 1974), 186; Rex Stout, “Disguise for
Murder,” in Full House: A Nero Wolfe Omnibus (New York: Viking, 1955), 516.
114. Stout, Death of a Dude, 72.
115. Stout, Too Many Cooks, 140.
116. Stout, Red Box, 143.
117. “His main joy was Rex Stout, whose books he would read again and again, until Nero
Wolfe assumed near-reality and figured as a quotable authority in his conversation.”
See John Henry Jones, “The Empsons,” London Review of Books, August 12, 1989.
118. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity: A Study of Its Effects in English Verse
(New York: Meridian, 1955), 7.
119. Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (New York: Airmont, 1962), 318.
120. Rex Stout, Please Pass the Guilt, in Seven Complete Nero Wolfe Novels (New York:
Avenel, 1983), 169.
121. Stout, League of Frightened Men, 24.
 10. Viewpoints, Narrow and Expansive 457

122. Stout, League of Frightened Men, 210.

123. Stout, League of Frightened Men, 10.
124. Stout, League of Frightened Men, 8.
125. Stout, League of Frightened Men, 159, 210.
126. Rex Stout, Plot It Yourself (New York: Bantam, 1986), 34.
127. Stout, Plot It Yourself, 39–40.
128. Stout, Plot It Yourself, 32.
129. Stout, Plot It Yourself, 177.
130. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 5–46.

10. Viewpoints, Narrow and Expansive: Patricia Highsmith

and Ed McBain

1. Patricia Highsmith, “The Sense of Form,” The Writer 61, no. 1 (January 1948): 12–13.
2. Patricia Highsmith, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, 2nd ed. (Boston: The Writer,
1981), 138.
3. Several essays in an anthology by Wieland Schwanebeck and Douglas McFarland, Patri-
cia Highsmith on Screen (London: Palgrave, 2018), explore thematic affinities between
Highsmith and modernist literature. See also Tom Perrin, “On Patricia Highsmith”
http://post45.research.yale.edu/2012/12/cluster-introduction-patricia-highsmith/.
4. Highsmith, “Sense of Form,” 11.
5. Highsmith, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, 140.
6. Highsmith, “Sense of Form,” 14.
7. Patricia Highsmith as quoted in Andrew Wilson, Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia
Highsmith (London: Bloomsbury, 2003), 2.
8. Patricia Highsmith, “Suspense in Fiction,” The Writer 67, no. 12 (December 1954): 403.
9. Highsmith’s admiration for The Stranger is examined in Wilson, Beautiful Shadow,
121–22.
10. Highsmith, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, 38, 60.
11. Graham Greene, foreword to Eleven, by Patricia Highsmith (Harmondsworth: Pen-
guin, 1989), ix.
12. Patricia Highsmith, The Glass Cell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 165.
13. Patricia Highsmith, Ripley Under Ground (New York: Penguin, 1970), 164.
14. Highsmith, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, 56.
15. Patricia Highsmith, The Two Faces of January (London: Sphere, 2014), 172; Highsmith,
Ripley Under Ground, 219.
16. Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train (London: Vintage, 1999), 268.
17. Patricia Highsmith, entry in Cahier 16 (dated 11/22/47), A-05/16, Archives littéraires
Suisse. Thanks to Stéphanie Cudré-Mauroux for helping me gain access to this text. It
is not reprinted in Anna von Planta, ed., Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks
(New York: Liveright, 2021).
18. Patricia Highsmith, The Tremor of Forgery (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 18, 154,
256.
19. Highsmith, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, 90.
20. Edith Wharton, The Writing of Fiction (1925; repr. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 69.
21. Highsmith, Strangers on a Train, 195.
 458 10. Viewpoints, Narrow and Expansive

22. Patricia Highsmith, Ripley’s Game (New York: Vintage, 1993), 232.
23. Highsmith, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, 140.
24. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Camus’ ‘The Outsider,’ ” in Literary Essays, trans. Annette Michelson
(New York: Philosophical Library, 1957), 35.
25. “The Pocket Book Market,” in The Writer’s Market, ed. Ruth A. Jones and Aron M.
Mathieu, 14th ed. (Cincinnati, OH: The Writer’s Digest, 1956), 125, 221–22. See also
Thomas L. Bonn, “Elements of Success,” Paperback Quarterly 4, no. 4 (Winter 1981):
35–47.
26. See “The Book Market: Paper-Bound Editions,” The Writer 66, no. 7 (July 1953): 2245–46.
27. See Geoffrey O’Brien, Hard-Boiled America: Lurid Years of Paperbacks (New York: Van
Nostrand Reinhold, 1983); Jon L. Breen and Martin Harry Greenberg, Murder Off the
Rack: Critical Studies of Ten Paperback Masters (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1989); and
Brian Ritt, Paperback Confidential: Crime Writers of the Paperback Era (Eureka, CA:
Stark House, 2013).
28. Ed McBain, introduction to Cop Hater (New York: Signet, 1973), vi.
29. My discussion of McBain’s work has benefited from the very thorough survey provided
by Erin E. MacDonald, Ed McBain/Evan Hunter: A Literary Companion (Jefferson, NC:
McFarland, 2012).
30. For an overview, see Mike Grost, “Casebook Fiction,” A Guide to Classic Mystery and
Detection, http://mikegrost.com/casebook.htm. Philip Macdonald’s serial-killer novel
Murder Gone Mad (1931) can be considered a forerunner of this genre as well.
31. Webb’s contribution to the genre is discussed in detail in Jason Mittell, Genre and Tele-
vision: From Cop Show to Cartoons in American Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004),
chap. 5.
32. Bartlett Cormack’s 1927 play, The Racket, anticipates Detective Story in setting its action
wholly in a police station, but nearly all the crimes passing through are connected to the
central situation of the struggle between police captain McQuigg and mob boss Nick
Scarsi.
33. Ed McBain as quoted in Tom Callahan, “In the Shadow of Ed McBain,” Writer’s Digest
76, no. 9 (September 1996): 29.
34. George N. Dove furnishes a visitor’s guide to Isola and a careful reconstruction of the
books’ antichronology in his fine study. See George N. Dove, The Boys from Grover
Avenue: Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct Novels (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green Popular
Press, 1985), chap. 2 and 3.
35. Ed McBain, The Pusher (New York: New American Library, 1987), 61.
36. Ed McBain, The Heckler (New York: Pocket, 2003), 13.
37. Ed McBain, Lady Killer (New York: Otto Penzler, 1994), 110.
38. Ed McBain, Fat Ollie’s Book (New York: Simon & Schuster 2002), 108.
39. McBain, introduction to Cop Hater, viii.
40. Ed McBain, Killer’s Choice (New York: Ballantine, 1975), 158.
41. Ed McBain, See Them Die (New York: Signet, 1976), 146.
42. McBain had written many short stories exploiting these conventional premises. “By
the time I wrote the first of the 87th Precinct novels, all of the elements were already in
place. Here were the kids in trouble and the women in jeopardy, here were the private
eyes and the gangs. Here were the loose cannons and the innocent bystanders. And here
too were the cops and robbers.” Ed McBain, introduction to Learning to Kill: Stories
(Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2006), xv.
43. McBain, introduction to Learning to Kill, vii.
44. Evan Hunter, “An Interview with Ed McBain,” The Writer 82, no. 4 (April 1969): 11.
 11. Donald Westlake and the Richard Stark Machine 459

45. Ed McBain, “Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here!,” in Three from the 87th (New York: Dou-
bleday, 1971), 3.
46. See “Book Publishing,” in Writer’s Market ʼ74, ed. Jane Koester and Rose Adkins
(Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest, 1974), 585–667.
47. A sensitive discussion of Candyland, along with a tribute to McBain’s work as a whole, is
offered in Thomas Leitch, “The Importance of Ed McBain,” Mystery Scene no. 70 (2001):
30–33.
48. John Dickson Carr considered “collaborating” with his pseudonym Carter Dickson:
“There is a fourth dimensional quality about it that I like.” See Douglas J. Greene, John
Dickson Carr: The Man Who Explained Miracles (New York: Otto Penzler, 1995), 212.
49. On Hill Street Blues, the standard source is Todd Gitlin, Inside Prime Time (New York:
Pantheon, 1983), 264–324. A more updated survey of later programming is provided
in Jonathan Nichols-Pethick, TV Cops: The Contemporary American Television Police
Drama (New York: Routledge, 2012). Erin MacDonald traces McBain’s overall influence
on the genre; see MacDonald, Ed McBain/Evan Hunter, 283–87.
50. Ed McBain as quoted in Bill Slocum, “If It’s Murder, It’s McBain,” New York Times,
April 30, 1995.

11. Donald Westlake and the Richard Stark Machine

1. Samples of Westlake’s tongue-in-cheek erotic writing can be found in Lawrence Block

and Donald E. Westlake, Hellcats and Honeygirls (Burton MI: Subterranean, 2010).
2. In contrast, John G. Cawelti sees the caper film as an offshoot of the “new mythology of
crime” that develops out of the gangster genre. See John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery,
and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1976), 68–76. Cawelti discusses Westlake’s work on pages 68–69.
3. Donald E. Westlake, “Introduction to Murderous Schemes,” in The Getaway Car: A
Donald Westlake Nonfiction Miscellany, ed. Levi Stahl (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2014), 53.
4. For a fuller discussion of the genre, see Stuart Kaminsky, “The Big Caper Film,” in Amer-
ican Film Genres: Approaches to a Critical Theory of Popular Film (New York: Pflaum,
1974), 79–99; and Daryl Lee, The Heist Film: Stealing with Style (London: Wallflower,
2014).
5. Lionel White, Clean Break (New York: Dutton, 1955).
6. Lionel White, Steal Big (New York: Fawcett, 1960), 47.
7. Donald E. Westlake, Help, I Am Being Held Prisoner (New York: Mysterious, 1974),
94–95.
8. Donald E. Westlake, “The Hardboiled Dicks,” in The Getaway Car: A Donald Westlake
Nonfiction Miscellany, ed. Levi Stahl (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 50.
9. For a detailed discussion of the reflexive strategies of Adios, Scheherazade, see Fred Fitch,
“Review: Adios Scheherazade,” Westlake Review, https://thewestlakereview.wordpress
.com/2015/04/01/review-adios-scheherazade-chapter-2/.
10. Largely on the strength of these novels, conservative pundit William Kristol claimed
that he nominated Westlake for the Nobel Prize in Literature. See William Kristol,
“Donald E. Westlake, 1933–2008,” Weekly Standard, January 19, 2009, https://www
.weeklystandard.com/william-kristol/donald-e-westlake-1933-2008.
11. Westlake claimed he took the “Richard” from Richard Widmark’s characterization in
Kiss of Death (1947) and the last name from the style he aimed at: “crisp and lean, no fat,
 460 11. Donald Westlake and the Richard Stark Machine

trimmed down . . . stark.” Richard Stark [Donald Westlake pseud.], “Richard Stark
introduced by Donald E. Westlake,” in Payback (New York: Warner, 1999), viii.
12. Donald Westlake as quoted in Christopher Bahn, “Interview: Donald Westlake,” AV Club,
November 16, 2006, https://www.avclub.com/donald-westlake-1798210202.
13. John Banville, “Criminal Odes,” Bookforum 14, no. 4 (December 2007/January 2008),
https://www.bookforum.com/print/1404/the-tumultuous-decades-between-the-wars
-saw-the-birth-and-development-of-a-new-genre-pulp-fiction-that-sought-in-the
-gritty-seams-of-american-life-a-fresh-moral-code-one-that-made-sense-for-hard
-times-and-harder-people-1376.
14. Richard Stark, The Mourner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 34.
15. There are, however, a great many recurring partners in crime, along with numerous
walk-ons. A list is at https://parkerseries.uchicago.edu/character_guide/.
16. Richard Stark, The Sour Lemon Score (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010),
147.
17. Westlake, “Hardboiled Dicks,” 33–52.
18. Bahn, “Interview: Donald Westlake.”
19. Richard Stark, Plunder Squad (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 167.
20. Stark, The Mourner, 64.
21. Richard Stark, The Seventh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 144.
22. Donald E. Westlake, “Tangled Webs for Sale: Best Offers,” in The Getaway Car: A Don-
ald Westlake Nonfiction Miscellany, ed. Levi Stahl (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2014), 92.
23. Jean-Luc Godard freely adapted the investigation plot for his Made in USA (1967), a film
that Westlake managed to keep out of distribution for years. See Albert Nussbaun,
“An Inside Look at Donald E. Westlake,” in The Getaway Car: A Donald Westlake
Nonfiction Miscellany, ed. Levi Stahl (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014),
157–58.
24. Donald Westlake, “Introduction to Levine,” The Getaway Car: A Donald Westlake
Nonfiction Miscellany, ed. Levi Stahl (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 83.
25. Lawrence Block, “Trust Me on This: Stealing Time with Richard Stark,” Los Angeles
Times, December 23, 1990. The pattern may also owe something to Lester Dent’s advice
in Lester Dent, “The Pulp Master Fiction Plot” (1936), in The Mystery Writer’s Hand-
book, ed. Herbert Brean (New York: Harper, 1956), 45–56.
26. For the sake of variety, not every stage in every heist is shown, but most are; and some
are presented out of chronological order, a strategy that Westlake had begun in the
Parker series.
27. Donald Westlake, as quoted in Stuart Kaminsky, Behind the Mystery: Top Mystery
Writers Interviewed (Cohasset, MA: Hot House, 2005), 41.
28. Stark, Plunder Squad, 102.
29. Stark, The Mourner, 190.
30. Richard Rayner, “At the Speed of Pulp,” Los Angeles Times, September 14, 2008,
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-caw-paperback-writers14-2008sep14
-story.html.
31. Stark, Sour Lemon Score, 144.
32. Luc Sante, foreword to The Handle, by Richard Stark (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2009), ix.
33. H. Bedford-Jones, “Something New About the Book-Length,” Writer’s Monthly 19, no. 6
(June 1922): 483–86.
34. Richard Stark, Butcher’s Moon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 169, 306.
 12. Tarantino, Twists, and the Persistence of Puzzles 461

35. Donald E. Westlake, “Writers on Writing: A Pseudonym Returns from an Alter-Ego

Trip, with New Tales to Tell,” in The Getaway Car: A Donald Westlake Nonfiction
Miscellany, ed. Levi Stahl (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 28.
36. In the DVD commentary for the film, Westlake explains how he came up with the
opening, and Frears expresses his satisfaction with the solution (The Grifters, Miramax
DVD ed. no. 27184, 3:06–5:08).
37. Westlake, “Writers on Writing,” 28–29.
38. Richard Stark, Breakout (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 231.
39. Richard Stark, Ask the Parrot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 99.
40. Donald E. Westlake, Jimmy the Kid (New York: Mysterious, 1974), inside flyleaf.

12. Tarantino, Twists, and the Persistence of Puzzles

The epigraph is from Graham Fuller, “Answers First, Questions Later,” in Quentin
Tarantino: Interviews, rev. ed., ed. Gerald Peary (Jackson: University of Mississippi
Press, 2013), 37.
1. Quentin Tarantino as quoted in Graham Fuller, “Answers First, Questions Later,” in
Quentin Tarantino: Interviews, rev. ed., ed. Gerald Peary (Jackson: University of Missis-
sippi Press, 2013), 38.
2. Tarantino discusses the Open Road screenplay in Erik Bauer, “Method Writing: An
Interview with Quentin Tarantino,” Creative Screenwriting 5, no. 1 (1998): 39.
3. Tom Shone, Tarantino: A Retrospective (San Rafael, CA: Insight, 2017), 42–53. For a
detailed comparison of the two versions of True Romance, see Robert Arnett, “True
Romance: Quentin Tarantino as Screenwriting Auteur,” Creative Screenwriting 5, no. 1
(1998): 50–55.
4. Quentin Tarantino, Natural Born Killers: The Original Screenplay (New York: Grove,
1995), 27.
5. Tarantino’s script confines the mixed-media technique to the “Reign of Terror”
episode and the footage from Gayle’s camera, but Oliver Stone’s adaptation of Natural
Born Killlers (1994) combines formats from the beginning. Stone constantly cuts
between color and black-and-white shots of the same scene, and he inserts footage
shot in different media—usually without any realistic justification. He had already
experimented with mixing formats in JFK (1991), which might have influenced Taran-
tino’s treatment of Gayle’s project. Stone continued his hybrid technique in U-Turn
(1997) and later films.
6. Paul A. Woods, King Pulp: The Wild World of Quentin Tarantino (New York: Thunder’s
Mouth, 1996), 102–4. See also Geoffrey O’Brien, “Pulp Fantastic,” in Filmmaker, June 8,
2019, https://filmmakermagazine.com/107629-pulp-fantastic-geoffrey-obrien-on-quentin
-tarantinos-pulp-fiction/#.X-Ov2C2ZOys.
7. Jason Bailey, Pulp Fiction: The Complete Story of Quentin Tarantino’s Masterpiece
(Minneapolis, MN: Voyageur, 2013), 33.
8. In 1985, Leonard’s Glitz landed on the New York Times best-seller list, and he appeared
on the cover of Newsweek. The same year saw appreciative comments by George F. Will,
introduction to Dutch Treat: Three Novels (New York: Arbor House, 1985), ix–xiv. Later
appreciations include Martin Amis, “Maintaining on Elmore Leonard” (1999), in The
War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971–2000 (New York: Vintage, 2002), 225–28.
9. Tarantino as quoted in Fuller, “Answers First,” 36–37.
 462 12. Tarantino, Twists, and the Persistence of Puzzles

10. Tarantino as quoted in Erik Bauer, “The Mouth and the Method,” in Quentin Tarantino:
Interviews, rev. ed., ed. Gerald Peary (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2013),
114. Leonard later repaid the compliment by mentioning Pulp Fiction approvingly in
Out of Sight. See Elmore Leonard, Four Later Novels: Get Shorty, Rum Punch, Out of
Sight, Tishomingo Blues (New York: Library of America, 2016), 618.
11. Elmore Leonard, introduction to The Friends of Eddie Coyle, by George V. Higgins
(New York: Holt, 2000), vi.
12. When I asked Leonard about this in 1990, he said he was unaware that this was a tour de
force. “I just thought it had to be that long.” He also confirmed that in the novel Shorty
is a surrogate for Dustin Hoffman.
13. See Mike White, Who Do You Think You’re Fooling? (The Story of a Robbery) (1994),
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HgbSAL8OKY. In a 1995 interview Tarantino
noted, “It’s a really cool movie. It influenced me a lot. I got some stuff from it.” See
Stephen Hunter, “Before ‘Reservoir Dogs,’ There Was ‘City on Fire,’ ” Baltimore Sun,
April 14, 1995, https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1995-04-14-1995104053
-story.html.
14. Quentin Tarantino as quoted in Michel Ciment and Hubert Niogret, “Interview at
Cannes,” in Quentin Tarantino: Interviews, rev. ed., ed. Gerald Peary (Jackson: University
of Mississippi Press, 2013), 9.
15. Kristin Thompson, Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative
Technique (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 28–29.
16. Quentin Tarantino as quoted in Ciment and Niogret, “Interview at Cannes,” 11.
17. Quentin Tarantino as quoted in Fuller, “Answers First,” 44.
18. Jane Hamsher, Killer Instinct: How Two Young Producers Took on Hollywood and Made
the Most Controversial Film of the Decade (New York: Broadway, 1998), 5–6.
19. Jeff Smith analyzes the film as both a network narrative and a counterfactual-history
plot; see Jeff Smith, “When Worlds Collide: Mixing the Show-Biz Tale with True Crime
in Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood,” David Bordwell’s Website on Cinema (blog),
http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2019/08/09/when-worlds-collide-mixing-the
-show-biz-tale-with-true-crime-in-once-upon-a-time-in-hollywood/.
20. Something similar but milder takes place in Tarantino’s novelization Once Upon a Time
in Hollywood (2021). The climax of the original film, a bloody home invasion, is alluded
to early in the book and never dramatized or mentioned again. This invites the reader
who has seen the movie to consider the possibility that the book’s version of the story
will have a new, unpredictable ending, which it does. I discuss the effects of this dis-
placement in David Bordwell, “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Again: Tarantino
Revises His Fairy Tale,” David Bordwell’s Website on Cinema (blog), http://www.david
bordwell.net/blog/2021/07/10/once-upon-a-time-in-hollywood-again-tarantino-revises
-his-fairy-tale/.
21. An earlier example of this rather rare strategy is How Green Was My Valley
(1941), which ends with a reprise of family memories and never returns to the grim
present.
22. Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang,
1974), 10.
23. Pulp Fiction: A Quentin Tarantino Screenplay (New York: Hyperion, 1994), n.p.; see
Bailey, Pulp Fiction, 30–37.
24. Stephen Hunter, “Tarantino’s Twisted ‘Pulp Fiction,’ ” Baltimore Sun, October 14, 1994,
https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1994-10-14-1994287163-story.html.
 13. Gone Girls 463

25. See “plot twist,” Google Books Ngram Viewer, https://books.google.com/ngrams.

26. Charles E. May, “A Summary of Short Story Criticism in America,” in Short Story
Theories, ed. Charles E. May (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976), 5–9.
27. In keeping with the theory I set forward in “Three Dimensions of Film Narrative,”
story world twists should ultimately be seen as originating in narration as well because
I believe that all story world information stems from the process of narration. See
David Bordwell, “Three Dimensions of Film Narrative,” in Poetics of Cinema (New
York: Routledge, 2008), 96–100, 110. Strictly speaking, when the tornado strikes the
character’s home, the narration is likely to suppress background information about
sources of the bad weather. But that is information that wouldn’t normally be sup-
plied unless it was somehow relevant to the character’s immediate circumstances. In
a science-fiction story, it might turn out that a supervillain opposed to the character
has found a way to control the weather; in that case, the eventual revelation of the
scheme would be a narrational twist. Here the distinction between story world twists
and narrational ones is pragmatic, of use in distinguishing cases for the purpose of
critical analysis.
28. For a philosophical analysis of subjective twists, see George Wilson, “Transparency and
Twist in Narrative Fiction Film,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64, no. 1 (Winter
2006): 81–95.
29. Jean-Claude Carrière, The Secret Language of Film, trans. Jeremy Leggatt (New York:
Pantheon, 1994), 15.
30. Jeffrey Sconce, “Irony, Nihilism and the New American ‘Smart’ Film,” Screen 34 (Winter
2002): 351.
31. Jason Mittell, Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling (New
York: New York University Press, 2015), 43.

13. Gone Girls: The New Domestic Thriller

1. David Fincher as quoted in Gina McIntyre, “Thrills, Chills for Gillian Flynn in Adapting
‘Gone Girl,’” Los Angeles Times, September 5, 2014, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment
/la-et-mn-ca-sneaks-gone-girl-20140907-story.html.
2. NPR Staff, “The Marriage Is the Real Mystery in Gone Girl,” NPR Morning Edition,
June 5, 2012, https://www.npr.org/2012/06/05/154288241/the-marriage-is-the-real-mystery
-in-gone-girl.
3. Amy Gutman, “A Marriage Gone Missing,” Chicago Tribune, July 28, 2012, https://www
.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/books/ct-prj-0603-gone-girl-20120728-story
.html.
4. Claude Chabrol, “Chabrol Talks to Rui Noguera and Nicoletta Zalaffi,” Sight and Sound
40, no. 1 (Winter 1970–71): 6.
5. Juliet Annan and Maxine Hitchcock as quoted in Sarah Rainey, “Gone Girl—The
Female Noir That Puts Fifty Shades of Gray in the Shade,” Telegraph, March 27, 2013,
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/9956996/Gone-Girl-the-female-noir-that-
puts-Fifty-Shades-of-Grey-in-the-shade.html.
6. I discuss this film’s narration in David Bordwell, “Learning to Watch a Film, While
Watching a Film,” David Bordwell’s Website on Cinema (blog), http://www.davidbordwell
.net/blog/2021/07/02/learning-to-watch-a-film-while-watching-a-film/.
7. Mary Higgins Clark, Where Are the Children? (New York: Pocket, 2005), 143.
 464 13. Gone Girls

8. Laura Lippman, Life Sentences (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 29, 12.
9. Quoted in Megan Labrise, “Laura Lippman,” Kirkus Reviews, February 21, 2018, https://
www.kirkusreviews.com/features/laura-lippman/.
10. Gillian Flynn blurb for Sunburn, https://www.faber.co.uk/9780571335664-sunburn
.html.
11. Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl (New York: Broadway, 2014), 142.
12. Diane Waldman, “Horror and Domesticity: The Modern Gothic Romance Film of the
1940s” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1981), 5–56.
13. Flynn, Gone Girl, 415.
14. Sarah Weinman, ed., Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers
of Domestic Suspense (New York: Penguin, 2013); Sarah Weinman, ed., Women Crime
Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s and 50s (New York: Library of America,
2015). Several of Weinman’s essays can be found on the Women Crime Writers of the
1940s and 50s website, http://womencrime.loa.org; and on the CrimeReads website,
https://crimereads.com/author/sarahmweinman. See also Cullen Gallagher, “Women
and Crime: An Interview with Sarah Weinman,” The Paris Review (blog), October 19,
2015, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/10/19/women-in-crime-an-interview
-with-sarah-weinman/.
15. Jane K, Cleland, Mastering Suspense, Structure, and Plot: How to Write Gripping
Stories That Keep Readers on the Edge of Their Seats (New York: Writer’s Digest,
2016), 21–31.
16. J. P. Delaney, “Pacing the Thriller: Believe Me,” Writing.ie, July 30, 2018, https://www
.writing.ie/resources/pacing-the-thriller-believe-me-by-jp-delaney/.
17. Heidi Pitlor as quoted in Nicki Porter, “Page Turner,” The Writer 129, no. 8 (August
2016): 23.
18. Tina Jordan, “The Daylight Marriage by Heidi Pitlor,” Entertainment Weekly, May 11,
2015, https://ew.com/article/2015/05/11/the-daylight-marriage-heidi-pitlor-review/.
19. Anonymous, “The Wife Between Us,” Kirkus Reviews, September 28, 2017, https://www
.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/greer-hendricks/the-wife-between-us/.
20. Heidi Pitlor as quoted in Porter, “Page Turner,” 23.
21. On contemporary practitioners’ recognition of the importance of multiple viewpoints,
see Steven James, “Mapping the POV Minefield,” Writer’s Digest 96, no. 5 (July/August
2016): 44–47.
22. Len Deighton’s Only When I Larf (1968) and Charles Willeford’s The Shark-Infested
Custard (1993) each alternates three first-person narrators. Jim Thompson’s The Kill-Off
(1957) presents an astonishing twelve.
23. Comments are at https://www.amazon.com/Into-Water-Novel-Paula-Hawkins/dp
/0735211205/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=hawkins+into+the+water&qid=1554218346&s
=books&sr=1-1.
24. Carrie Feron as quoted in Rachel Deahl, “Vying to Be the Next Gone Girl,” Publishers
Weekly, October 7, 2016, https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/international
/Frankfurt-Book-Fair/article/71714-vying-to-be-the-next-gone-girl.html.
25. Sarah Pinborough, Cross Her Heart (London: HarperCollins, 2019), back cover.
26. Says editor Tess Calero: “I’ve read several articles examining the ‘woman’ and ‘girl’
trend. No matter how overdone, this seems to be working.” See Cris Freese, “Seeking
Thrills,” Writer’s Digest 98, no. 1 (October 2018): 35.
27. Allison Callahan as quoted in Deahl, “Vying to Be the Next Gone Girl.”
28. Laura Lippman, Dream Girl (New York: HarperCollins, 2021), 401–2.
 Conclusion 465

Conclusion: The Power of Limits

1. Christopher Nolan as quoted in Jeff Goldsmith, “The Architect of Dreams,” Creative

Screenwriting (July-August 2010): 21.
2. For studies of narrative, the most persuasive account I know remains Brian McHale,
Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987).
3. I discuss some of those traditions in David Bordwell, Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); and David Bordwell, Planet Hong
Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment, 2nd ed. (Madison, WI: Irvington
Way Institute, 2011).
4. Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Fiction” (1946), in Later Novels & Other
Writings (New York: Library of America, 1995), 979.
5. Announced in “Dealmaker: St. Martins,” Publishers Marketplace, https://www.publishers
marketplace.com/dealmakers/detail.cgi?id=2561.
6. Michele Campbell, It’s Always the Husband (New York: St. Martin’s, 2017); Mick Herron,
Slough House (New York: Soho, 2020), 158.
7. Alexandra Alter, “Colson Whitehead Reinvents Himself, Yet Again,” New York Times,
September 8, 2021. See also David Bordwell, “Crime in the Streets and on the Page,”
David Bordwell’s Website on Cinema (blog), http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2021
/10/10/crime-in-the-streets-and-on-the-page/.
8. Jesse Green, “How Radical! How Broadway?,” New York Times, September 8, 2021.
9. Philip Pullman, Daemon Voices: On Stories and Storytelling (New York: Vintage), 144.
10. Zola’s essay “The Experimental Novel” follows this line, although for him the avant-
garde pathway is toward Naturalism. See Emile Zola, The Experimental Novel and Other
Essays, trans. Belle M. Sherman (New York: Cassells, 1893), 43–44.
 INDEX

Page numbers in italics refer to images or captions.

And Then There Were None (1945), 112, 245, Archer, William, 42, 181, 183
251–53, 407 Archie Goodwin (character): aspects of,
À Bout de souffle, 11 295–99, 303–5, 308–11, 313–14, 317; as
Absalom, Absalom! (1936), 65–66 righteous-Archie, 311–12, 456n107
Accomplice (1990), 452n50 Aristotle, 21, 198, 442n21
Adaptation (2002), 4 Aronson, Linda, 4–5, 10, 376
Adios, Scheherazade (1970), 343–44 Arrival (2016), 23, 376
adventure: detective story and, 124, 199–200; Arsenic and Old Lace (1941), 103, 282
Golden Age detective stories on, 125 Art of the Mystery Story, The (1946), 239
Adventures of Philip Marlowe, The Ashes to Ashes (1919), 161–63, 171, 193
(1947–1951), 243 As I Lay Dying (1930), 17, 65, 99; multiple
After Anna (2018), 398, 400 narrators in, 67, 251
After I’m Gone (2014), 403 Asphalt Jungle, The (1949), 338, 342, 348
Airborne Symphony (1946), 93 Auden, W. H., 107, 230–31
Air That Kills, An (1957), 399 audience, 132; comedy for, 43–44,
Akins, Zoë, The Varying Shore by, 12, 43 73; on complex stories, 11–12, 16;
Alias Jimmy Valentine (1915), 46, 198 comprehension by, 50–51, 52–53,
Allegro (1947), 113, 263 404, 407–8, 411–12; fair play tenet
All in the Family, 11 and, 131; internet on, 12; as learning,
All Star Cast (1936), 6, 9, 18, 24, 75 16; on plotting game, 401–2; Pulp
All the Beautiful Lies (2018), 397 Fiction assembled by, 4; satisfaction
All the Missing Girls (2016), 397 for, 3; skipping by, 292; for thrillers
Ambassadors, The (1903), 58 and detective tales, 19; on twists, 376,
American Psycho (1991), 193 396–97; variorum principle and, 22; on
American Tragedy, An (1925), 103, 196 viewpoints and twists, 396–97
 468 Index

Austen, Jane, 305, 455n83 Big Sleep, The (1946), 102, 107, 235; as early
avant-garde art, 1, 3, 12; emergence of, novel, 220–21; subjectivity in, 228–31; as
88–89; investigation plots and, 155; film, 231, 242–43, 262, 373–74; law and
originality in, 17; perplexity in, 19; Three lawless in, 223; viewpoint and, 243, 295
Colors: Blue as, 6 Birthday Party (1938), 79
Avary, Roger: The Open Road by, 358, 360; Birth of a Nation, The (1915), 48, 49, 54
Pulp Fiction by, 3–4 Black Alibi (1942), 272–74, 276
Awkward Age, The (1899), 36, 38, 71 Black Angel, The (1943), 272, 275–76
Ayckbourn, Alan, 111–12 Blackboard Jungle (1954), 326
Blackmail (1929), 162, 188
Backfire (1950), 90, 248 Black Mask (magazine), 131, 227; body count
Bad Habits (2021), 397 in, 197; Chandler in, 220; on characters,
Baker, Nicholson, 57–58 195–96, 210; on films and detectives,
Baker Street Irregulars, 299–300 198, 217; Gardner in, 286, 290–91, 295;
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 317, 400 Hammett and, 194–99, 202–4, 286,
Balisand (1924), 217–18 444n76; hard-boiled detectives in,
Ballinger, Bill S., 248, 389 194–95; Op character in, 212; plot changes
Bardin, John Franklin, Devil Take the Blue- in, 245; realism in, 195; story types in, 194;
Tail Fly by, 270–71, 279 variorum principle and, 219
Barnard, Robert, 435n50, 450n52 Black Path of Fear, The (1945), 272, 276
Barnes, Djuna, Nightwood by, 7 Blake, Nicholas, The Beast Must Die by, 167–68
Barzun, Jacques, 35, 105, 116, 273; on Rex Bleak House (1852), 32, 61
Stout, 299, 302, 316, 455n71 Blitzstein, Marc, 93
BBC, 69, 87, 155, 161 Block, Lawrence, 335, 348
Beach, Joseph Warren, 61, 418n28, 419n33, block construction: Carr and, 144; Caspary
422n4, 422n5, 432n3 and, 254–58; The Dain Curse in, 194,
Beast in View, A (Millar, M.), 267 203–4, 207, 209–10, 212, 218; documents
Beast Must Die, The (1938), 167–68 and viewpoints in, 145; Doyle and
Bedford-Jones, H., 287, 352 flashback, 61; Five Little Pigs and, 253;
Before I Go to Sleep (2011), 395, 399 The Floating Admiral in, 146, 152; Golden
Before the Fact (1932), 171, 178, 193; woman- Age detective stories with, 150–52, 167,
in-peril plot in, 169–70, 175, 185, 385, 392 254–55; grid layouts and, 152, 253, 351, 388;
Believe Me (2018), 396 How Like a God with, 96; A Kiss Before
Bennett, Arnold, 39–40 Dying in, 258–60, 377, 387, 401; Lament
Bentley, E. C., Trent’s Last Case by, 77, 124, for a Maker and varying styles, 145; Letter
126, 229, 238 to Five Wives and, 428n35; mystery and
Berkeley, Anthony: on emotion and drama, suspense in, 166–67; of 1940s, 275; The
163; The Poisoned Chocolates Case and Poisoned Chocolates Case with, 150–54,
bookishness, 152–54; The Poisoned 169, 253, 297, 314–15; Pulp Fiction with,
Chocolates Case and Golden Age, 152, 369–71, 371; Reservoir Dogs with, 363;
437n99; The Poisoned Chocolates Case Second Shot with, 144; The Sound and
by, 150, 151, 169, 253, 297, 314–15; The the Fury with, 61–66, 68; Stark and,
Second Shot by, 141, 144, 153. See also 347–50; Tarantino and, 358, 361, 367–69,
Cox, Anthony Berkeley 376; thrillers in, 167; trial plots in, 147;
Big Clock, The (1948), 90, 247, 251 Woolrich using, 275–76, 279–80
Big Idea, The (1914), 44, 75 Blood on the Dining-Room Floor (Stein), 78
“Big Knock-Over, The” (1927), 197, 201 Bloom, Leopold (character), 395–98; as
Big Lebowski, The (1998), 374 distancing, 216; fictional personhood of,
Big Little Lies (2014), 399 59, 233; as loose association, 228
 Index 469

Blow-Out (1966), 380 Carroll, Noël, 5, 7, 417n40

Blow-Out (1981), 31 casebook format, 155, 282; Collins and,
Blow-Up (1966), 31 32–33, 36; Conrad and, 37, 65; Five
Blunderer, The (1954), 320–21, 324 Little Pigs in, 253; of Golden Age, 245,
Bob le flambeur (1956), 339–40 254–55, 326
Bogan, Louise, 105–7 Case of the Caretaker’s Cat, The (1935),
Bonnie and Clyde (1967), 359 289–92, 302
book publishing: 1930s book clubs and, 85; Case of the Velvet Claws, The (1933), 286
in 1940s, 85–86 Caspary, Vera: block construction and,
Boorman, John, Point Blank by, 362, 367 254–58; Laura by, 103, 235, 245, 254–58,
Borges, Juan Luis, 77 369, 385, 406
Boutell, Anita, Death Has a Past by, 176, Cast Down the Laurel (1935), 6, 9, 18
248, 393 category publishing, 103
Boyle, Kay, 7 Cat of Many Tails (1949), 238, 274
Brasher Doubloon, The (1947), 231, 243 Chabrol, Claude, 168, 383
Breakout (2002), 347, 353–54 Chance (1913), 38, 71, 77, 94
Bride Wore Black, The (1940), 272, 274–75 Chandler, Raymond, 9–10; on action,
Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), 67, 87, 89, 144 221; Black Mask with, 220; Carr on,
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 430n85; characters by, 107–8, 222–23,
69, 87, 155, 161 230, 232; on coincidences, 198, 442n21;
Brown, Fredric, The Far Cry by, 372 descriptions by, 224–26, 232; dialogue by,
Buñuel, Luis, 16 226–28; Double Indemnity film by, 109,
Burgess, Anthony, 55, 59 231–32, 235, 242, 244, 246, 374, 439n40;
Burnett, W. R.: The Asphalt Jungle by, 338, “English Summer” by, 447n142; on fair
342, 348; Goodbye to the Past by, 12; Little play, 221–22, 229; films and, 231–32; on
Caesar by, 194, 201 Gardner and Stout, 285–86; on Golden
Butcher’s Moon (1974), 209, 345, 352–54 Age detective stories, 227, 230; “Goldfish”
by, 219–20; Great Gatsby and, 445n100;
Cain, James M.: Double Indemnity novel Hammett and, 108, 220, 230–31, 240,
by, 172–73, 246, 249, 374; The Postman 446n129; hard-boiled detective stories
Always Rings Twice by, 172–74, 220, 247; and, 109, 221; inner monologues by,
scheming couples by, 244–45 232–33; Knopf and, 107–9, 220, 229; for
Cain, Paul, Fast One by, 198, 200 linear plotting, 285; literary artistry for,
Calamity Town (1942), 237–38 223, 230–31; The Little Sister by, 231–33;
Camus, Albert, The Stranger by, 213–14 The Long Goodbye by, 231–32, 306, 374,
“Canary” Murder Case, The (1927), 445n100; Ross Macdonald and, 231,
125–26, 143 240–42; “man with a gun” by, 198;
Caponsacchi (1926), 436n82 Marlowe character by, 102, 108, 199,
Carr, John Dickson: blocks and, 144; on 222, 226–32, 239; Playback by, 232–33;
Chandler, 430n85; characters by, 124, 132, on pretext crimes, 126; productivity by,
153–54, 228; on cryptic clues, 435n49; 220–21; on puzzle, plot, and worldview,
The Hollow Man by, 144, 153; “The House 107–8, 222; reflexivity and, 228; schemas
in Goblin Wood” by, 132, 136, 141; on of, 219–21; “The Simple Art of Murder”
mystery stories, 20, 107, 112, 406, 430n85; by, 107–9, 229–30, 232; stream-of-
on pseudonym, 459n48; puzzles and, 125, consciousness and, 229, 233; urban
127–31, 136, 154, 435n49; subplot and, 141 drama and, 233, 238, 240; for viewpoint
Carré, John le, 18, 382 restriction, 285; for whodunits, 221. See
Carrière, Jean-Claude, 16, 25, 66, 89, also Big Sleep, The; Farewell, My Lovely;
282, 380 The High Window; The Lady in the Lake
 470 Index

Chaplin, Charlie, 78, 110; Monsieur Verdoux detective stories, 135; hiding of, 132–33,
by, 8 164, 168, 298, 306, 406; investigative
characterization, 33–34; Black Mask plots and, 104, 106, 123–24, 151, 179, 190,
magazine on, 195–96, 210; conglomerate 287; for mystery stories, 20, 33–34, 77,
hero as, 333–34; detective story artistry 128, 329; police procedural and, 328; as
from, 196; Gardner on, 289; magazines psychological, 153–54, 206; puzzle plots
demanding, 236; of Continental Op, 199; with misleading, 407; puzzles and, 104,
plot and, 20–21; psychological thrillers 106, 127–28, 160, 180, 240, 440n55; rules
and, 120 on, 129. See also misdirection
Chesterton, G. K., 39, 77, 125, 131, 237, 296; Cocteau, Jean, 66, 73
on detective stories, 124, 222, 436n81 Coen, Ethan, 234, 374, 375. See also Memento
Child’s Child, The (2012), 282 (2000)
Christie, Agatha, 103; And Then There Were Coen, Joel, 234, 374, 375. See also Memento
None by, 112, 245, 251–53, 407; characters (2000)
by, 122, 124; critics on, 105; Death in the Cohan, George M., 43
Clouds by, 140–41, 251–53; with elaborate Cohen, Octavius Roy, 455n91
plots, 332; Five Little Pigs by, 253; Lubbock Cohn, Dorrit, 62, 422n11
and, 435n55; misdirection by, 251–53, Collins, Wilkie, 119, 397, 404; casebook
258, 377–78; A Murder Is Announced by, format and, 32–33, 36; Eliot on, 78,
133, 145; The Murder of Roger Ackroyd 419n30; schemas and, 418n16; The
by, 134–36, 140, 200, 253, 378; paperback Woman in White by, 6, 32–33
novels of, 435n50; on psychological Collins test, 6, 78, 101, 104, 296
thriller, 169; puzzles and, 133–37, 140–41; Comeback (1997), 347, 354
Queen on, 449n49; Remembered Death comedy: Arsenic and Old Lace as, 103, 282;
by, 252–53; rules and, 140, 145; as for audience adjustment, 43–44, 73; heist
serialized, 449n49; on thrillers, 157, 169; plot and, 338; Hitchcock on, 186; literary
as type, 176, 207, 237, 245, 328 artistry on, 109; Marx brothers and, 76;
Chungking Express (1994), 4 in murders, 282; in 1920s mysteries, 307;
cinema. See films Seven Keys to Baldpate and, 43, 282, 307,
Circular Staircase, The (1908), 122, 174 377, 405; Some Buried Caesar with, 308;
Circus Man, The (1914), 37 Stout and, 308–11, 317; in The Thin Man,
Citizen Kane (1941), 22, 24, 410; flashbacks 207–9, 209, 236, 307; Westlake and, 342–43
and embedded plot in, 94–95, 247; in comic books, 86; mystery stories in, 102–3;
Hellzapoppin’, 76 1940s flashbacks in, 90, 91; voice-overs
Citizens (1940), 90 in, 264
City Block (1922), 65 Company (1970), 113
Clark, Mary Higgins, 382; Loves Music, complex narratives: age of, 3–5; audiences
Loves to Dance by, 10–11; Where Are the learning, 11–12, 16; since nineteenth
Children? by, 386–89, 392 century, 12
Clarke, Susanna, Piranesi by, 410 Conan Doyle, Arthur: adventure by, 124;
Clean Break (1955), 7, 340–41, 351; as The Baker Street Irregulars on, 299–300;
Killing, 361; Reservoir Dogs on, 5; flashback blocks of, 61; Hammett and,
Tarantino on, 361–62, 368 201; helper coequal protagonist of, 298;
cleaning-up-the-town premise, 202 Holmes and character by, 77, 121, 123,
close reading, 58, 99–102, 164, 166, 316 133–34; on non-Holmes novels, 125; short
clues: Carr on cryptic, 435n49; as dead- stories by, 125; The Sign of Four by, 125, 204;
end, 332; detective plots and, 153, 202, Stout and, 105; A Study in Scarlet by, 121,
253–54, 379; in diary entries, 168, 125, 204; Watson and character by, 77, 121,
249; dossier and, 146; in Golden Age 123, 133–36; world building by, 299–300
 Index 471

Connolly, Cyril, 88 Shklovsky as, 13, 19, 119; on social sciences

Conrad, Joseph: casebook format and, 37, and fiction, 100; on The Sound and Fury,
65; Chance by, 38, 71, 77, 94; crossover 64; Tarantino on, 383; on Woolrich, 272
and, 77; embedded stories of, 248; Heart Crofts, Freeman Wills, The 12.30 from
of Darkness by, 94, 427n28; Lord Jim by, Croydon by, 165
83; and narrative conventions, 35–40; as Cromwell (Hugo), 181, 376
proto-modernist, 23–24; scenic vividness Cronyn, George, 71–72
by, 36, 37; time jumping by, 11; viewpoint crosscutting, 420n62; How Like a God with,
and, 11, 31 55–57; Intolerance and, 48–51, 52, 57, 405;
Continental Op (character): action moving-spotlight narration and, 259
descriptions by, 212–14; description of, crossovers, 155, 432n116; change and, 8, 11,
211–12, 301; dialogue and, 217–18; of 115, 156; culture of, 407–9; films and, 112,
Hammett, 201–2, 443n34; Race Williams 279; hard-boiled detective stories as, 109;
character compared with, 203, 211–12; as How Like a God as, 80, 116, 194, 296, 305;
reactive, 288; Spade or, 204; as tough but Kantor and, 327; The Late George Apley
temperate, 199 as, 70; mysteries and, 24–25, 77–79,
converging-fates network, Grand Hotel with, 7 235–36, 400; 1940s and, 25, 89, 92–93,
Conversation, The (1974), 31, 373, 377, 379–80 99, 110–11, 262, 406; Sondheim and, 111;
Cook, William Wallace, The Fiction Factory Stout and, 144, 194, 317; thrillers and,
by, 287, 408 79–80; A Voice in the Dark as, 80
Cooper, Fenimore, 120 Cukor, George, 449n40
Cop Hater (1956), 333–35 culprit-centered plot, 244–45
Coppola, Francis Ford, 31, 373, 377, 379–80 ‘cut-back’ cinema technique, 29, 420n62
Corner in Wheat, A (1909), 48
Cornwell, Patricia, 281, 382 Dagger of the Mind (1941), 251
Cortez, Stanley, 15 Dain Curse, The (1929), 194, 203–4, 207,
Corwin, Norman, 87, 251 209–10, 212, 218
Cost, March, 70–71, 400 Daly, Carroll John: death and gore by, 197;
Counterfeiters, The (1925), 6, 67, 238, 314, 344 Race Williams character by, 195–98, 201,
courtroom: block construction in, 147; with 203, 210–11, 242
embedded stories, 148; flashbacks and, Dane, Clemence, 40
147–49, 247; Gardner and, 293 Dangerous Corner (1934), 16
Cox, Anthony Berkeley, 121; on Detection Dannay, Frederic, 237–38, 448n7
Club, 169 Dark Glass, The (1935), 70–71, 400
Craft of Fiction, The (1921), 58 Dark Passage (1946), 166, 263–64, 264
Craik, Dinah Maria, 32, 384, 409 Dark Places (2009), 391
Crime and Punishment (1866), 171–72 Dassin, Jules, Rififi by, 338, 340, 347
crime stories: Bonnie and Clyde and, 359; Daughter of Time (1951), 258
conventions of, 373; of 1950s, 25 Daylight Marriage, The (2015), 396–98
Criss Cross (1948), 172, 247, 337, 355 deadline plots, 275
critics, 428n40; close reading by, 58, Deadly Edge (1971), 347, 351
99–102, 164, 166, 316; Empson as, 314; Death Has a Past (1939), 176, 248, 393
mass storytelling and, 102, 105–6; Death in the Clouds (1935), 140–41, 251–53
method for, 99–100; mystery novels Death of an Intruder, The (1953), 385
and newspaper, 126–27; Panek as, 121, Death Proof (2007), 367
125, 223, 416n47, 432n8, 433n21, 444n56; Death Rides the Air Line (1934), 143–44
Principles of Literary Criticism for, 99; Deathtrap (1978), 260, 282, 452n50
on psychological thrillers, 162; on Pulp Dedalus, Stephen, 34–35
Fiction, 376; Russian Formalists as, 66; Deep Water (1957), 320, 323
 472 Index

Delaney, J. P.: Believe Me by, 396; The Girl narrators in, 410; woman-in-peril plots
Before by, 397 and, 384–86
DeLuxe Annie (1917), 30 domestic thrillers: changes in, 25;
Detection Club: Cox founding, 169; of document dossier form and, 400;
English writers, 121; Freeman in, 164–65; Gone Girl as, 382, 391; HIBK school
round-robin novels of, 146, 152, 221, 252, in, 174–75, 179; as misleading, 407;
303; rules of, 129, 198, 303; on thrillers, 161 nonlinear story and narrators of, 406–7;
detective stories: adventure and, 124, plotting games of, 401–2; prototype of,
199–200; characterization for, 196; 169–71; Rebecca as, 244; of 2010s, 168;
Chesterton on, 124, 222, 436n81; clues Weinman on, 395–96; women going
and, 153, 202, 253–54, 379; crossover mad in, 268–71
and, 77; fair play tenet and, 139, 198; Donald Lam (character), 295–96
flashbacks in, 243; larger-than-life Don Quixote (1605, 1615), 36–37
protagonists in, 124; literary artistry Dos Passos, John, 58, 243; changing fonts
and, 107, 123–24, 146, 230, 241, 406; Ross of, 67–68, 401; city mysteries of, 65;
Macdonald and dignity for, 240; mass Manhattan Transfer by, 65, 67, 427n15;
storytelling and, 233–34; narratives and, montage principles of, 7, 140; USA
19; of 1910s, 39; in 1930s, 78–80; 1940s, trilogy of, 7, 93, 337
status of, 230; with pretext crimes, 126; dossier form, 32–34, 36–37; The Child’s Child
puzzle plots and, 240; realism and, 198; as, 282; domestic thriller and document,
Red Right Hand as, 261–62, 270–71, 400; facsimiles and murder, 129; The
282, 405; Sayers on, 155, 180; social Floating Admiral as, 146, 152; Golden
commentary in, 230; Stout on, 297; The Age detective stories and, 149, 251;
Thin Man as, 207; Edmund Wilson on, Gone Girl and, 384; grid layouts and, 95;
104–8, 116, 230 tabular structure in, 71; on viewpoint, 44
Detective Story (1949), 328–29, 334, 458n32 Dostoevksy, Fyodor, Crime and Punishment
Detour (1939), 173–74 by, 171–72
Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly (1948), Double Indemnity (1936 and 1943): 1943 film
270–71, 279 of, 109, 231–32, 235, 242, 244, 246, 374,
DeVoto, Bernard: on literary artistry, 439n40; as novel, 172–73, 246, 249, 374
430n77; on mystery stories, 107; on Doyle, Arthur Conan. See Conan Doyle,
Edmund Wilson, 105, 153 Arthur
Dial M for Murder (1952), 281, 391 Dracula (1897), 33; Welles and radio version
dialogue: by Chandler, 226–28; like films, of, 94
217–18; by Gardner, 292, 294–95, Dragnet (1949–1955), 250, 327–28, 330, 332
306; inner monologues and, 232–33; Dragon’s Teeth, The (1939), 237
Continental Op and, 217–18; by Stout, Dream Girl (2021), 403
305–7, 313; by Tarantino, 361 Dreiser, Theodore, 26, 105; An American
diary entries: clues in, 168, 249; embedding Tragedy by, 103, 196
through, 94, 147; flashbacks through, 79; Dreyer, Carl, 50
in Gone Girl, 384, 391–94, 395, 401–2; “of Duke, Winifred, Skin for Skin by, 171, 173
a madman,” 269; recounting with, 251; du Maurier, Daphne, Rebecca by, 177–78,
unnamed first-person in, 165, 167 244, 384
Dickens, Charles, 32, 61; Little Dorritt of, 59 Dunkirk (2017), 53, 376, 407
Dirty Money (2008), 355 Dyar, Ralph E., 29–31, 54, 436n83; on
Documents in the Case, The (1930), 146, 163 flashbacks and films, 45
“Documents in the Case, The” (Matthews,
B.), 40–41 Eberhart, Mignon G., 103, 122, 176, 256, 398;
domestic suspense: first-person narrators earnings of, 175, 449n32; Eight O’Clock
in, 399; after Gone Girl, 402–3; unreliable Tuesday by, 249–50
 Index 473

Edith’s Diary (1977), 393 fair play tenet: authors not following, 132–33;
Edwards, Henry, 181–83 Chandler on, 221–22, 229; detective
Egyptian Cross Mystery, The (1932), 125 stories and, 139, 198; genius readers and,
Eight O’Clock Tuesday (1941), 249–50 131; by Golden Age detective stories, 126,
Eisner, Will, The Spirit by, 264 128–29, 303, 329, 378, 380, 387; Hammett
Eliot, T. S., 101; on Collins, 78, 419n30; on, 204–5; ingenuity and, 130; Murder!
Middlemarch by, 32; for verse drama, 87; and, 186, 186; in mystery stories, 126,
The Waste Land by, 100, 331 128–30, 133, 137, 139, 146, 152, 161, 186, 205,
embedded stories, 93; Citizen Kane 221, 297, 380, 436n70; Sayers on, 436n70;
with, 94–95, 247; of Conrad, 248; Stout on, 298, 303; “things left out” and,
diary entries for, 94, 147; first-person 135–36; twists and, 378–80, 379, 380
accounts in, 168; Golden Age detective “False Burton Combs, The” (1922), 210
stories and, 149–50; How Like a God Farber, Manny, 8
and thriller as, 80; The Locket as, Far Cry, The (1951), 372
248–49, 254, 268; narration in, 150; trial Farewell, My Lovely (1940), 220–21, 246;
stories with, 148 disguised crime in, 223–24; Murder,
Empson, William, 314 My Sweet from, 143, 231–33, 243, 247;
Endore, Guy, Methinks the Lady . . . by, subjectivity in, 228
269–70, 279 Farewell to Arms, A (1929), 62
Enemies of Promise (1938), 88 Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), 32
“English Summer” (1957), 447n142 Fast One (1933), 198, 200
epistolary novel, 32, 40–41 Faulkner, William, 3; with delayed
Escape Room (2019), 397 disclosure, 119–20; virtuosity of, 77; High
esoteric works: exoteric or, 5, 8, 10, 17, 111, Modernism of, 24; As I Lay Dying by, 17,
401, 405–6; subjects, themes, and new 65, 67, 99, 251; innovation by, 61–64, 100;
story worlds by, 11; titles of, 303 on italics, 68; in 1940s, 87–88, 99; The
espionage, Edmund Wilson on Sound and the Fury by, 57, 145, 149, 194,
psychological, 107 251; stream-of-consciousness and, 65;
Eustis, Helen, The Horizontal Man by, 259, whodunits by, 103
387 Fearing, Kenneth: The Big Clock by, 90, 247,
Every Last Lie (2017), 397 251; Dagger of the Mind by, 251
Every Secret Thing (2003), 388 Feeney, Alice, Sometimes I Lie by, 401
Everything You Want Me to Be (2017), 399 Fer-de-Lance (1934), 297, 300, 303, 305–6,
Excellent Intentions (1938), 148–49, 248 311, 455n76
Executioner series (1969–2017), 242 Ferguson, Otis, 8
exoskeleton: for abstract pattern, 96; for plot Fiction Factory, The (1912), 287, 408
structure, 71 film noir: as American, 90, 109, 246, 260,
exoteric: storytelling as, 5–6, 10 264, 406; French usage, 233
exoteric works: comprehension of, 12; films, 1; artistic potential of, 110; of The Big
esoteric or, 5, 8, 10, 17, 111, 401, 405–6; Sleep, 231, 242–43, 262, 373–74; Black
with intricacy and imagination, 7; novel, Mask magazine on, 198, 217; Chandler
play, or film as, 5–6; novelty pressures and, 231–32; chapter titles in, 4; critics
on, 9–10 on, 102; crossover and, 112, 279; ‘cut-
Eye of the Beholder (1919), 43, 83 back’ technique in, 29, 420n62; deadline
Eye-Witnessed (1926), 88, 129 plots and, 275; dialogue mimicking,
eyewitness plots, 278 217–18; Dyar on flashbacks and, 45;
flashbacks and, 45, 46, 246–48; by
Face on the Cutting-Room Floor, The (1937), Germans, 110, 188, 435n61; Hammett
79–80 and, 208–9; of hard-boiled detective
Fair, A. A., 295–96 stories, 242, 246; highbrow and, 279; of
 474 Index

films, 1; (continued ) Dogs, 362, 363; trial stories with, 147–49,

The Lady in the Lake, 231, 243, 266; The 247; A Voice in the Dark with, 29–31, 33,
Little Sister on, 231–33; of The Maltese 38–39, 43, 54, 58; voice-overs and, 85, 247,
Falcon, 242–43; mass storytelling for, 265; The Woman in Question with, 81–85,
101; media traffic with, 17–18; multiple 82, 84, 90, 94, 143, 426nn1–2
viewpoints in, 92; mystery and 1940s in, Flashfire (2000), 347, 354
22, 102–3; in 1940s, 86, 90; nuances in, 8; Fleet, Rebecca, The House Swap by, 398
Out of Sight (1999) as, 376; puzzle plots Fletcher, Lucille, Sorry, Wrong Number by,
and, 179–80; restricted viewpoints in, 89, 235, 245, 384
136; segmentation in, 92–93; storytelling Floating Admiral, The (1932), 146, 152
strategies in, 5, 7; thrillers as, 180–81; title Floyd Thursby gambit, 200, 204–6
pages in, 51–52, 52–53; for unpredictable Flynn, Gillian: on characters, 383; Dark
stories, 3; viewpoint and, 45, 46–47; visual Places by, 391; Gone Girl by, 382–402; on
perspective in, 45, 45; voice-overs in, 69, investigation and past scenes, 390–91; on
147, 148, 177, 232, 262–63, 356; Woolrich Lippman, 390
and, 273, 278–80; writing manuals for, 18, Following (1998), 12, 374, 405
45, 87. See also specific films fonts: of Dos Passos, 67–68, 401; of How
Final Deduction, The (Stout), 310 Like a God, 63; italics and, 66–68,
Finn, A. J., The Woman in the Window by, 247–48, 401, 424n45, 424n57; Nabokov
267, 401, 403 on, 424n49
Finnegans Wake (1939), 66, 87 footnotes in detective fiction, 131, 255
Firebreak (2001), 347, 353–54 Footprints (1929), 145–46
first-person narration: diary entries Ford, Ford Madox, 7, 61, 119
and unnamed, 165, 167; in domestic foreshadowing, 306
suspense, 399; in embedded stories, 168; Forester, C. S.: Payment Deferred by, 162, 171,
Gardner on, 293; Hammett and, 211, 180; Plain Murder by, 162, 165–67
213–14, 233, 314; as impersonal, 210–18 Fortune and Men’s Eyes (1935), 71–72
Fisher, Steve: I Wake Up Screaming by, four-part structure, 347–54; of Reservoir
243–44, 247; on Woolrich, 272 Dogs, 362–65, 363, 364
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 7, 62, 240, 251; Chandler Four Rooms (1995), 367
and, 445n100; detective stories and, 79; Frank, Joseph, 428n37
flashbacks and, 90; place description Frank, Waldo, 65, 67
and, 224 Frankenstein (1817), 36–37
Five Little Pigs (1942), 253 Freeman, R. Austin: in Detection Club,
Five Red Herrings (1931), 129, 153 164–65; “inverted” stories of, 163–64, 169,
flashbacks: Citizen Kane with, 94–95, 247; 388; Mr. Pottermack’s Oversight by, 164;
in Company, 113; in detective stories, The Singing Bone by, 163–64
243; developments on, 41; diary entries Fremlin, Celia, The Hours Before Dawn
for, 79; Dyar on films and, 45; films and, by, 386
45, 46, 246–48; grid layouts for, 79; in Freud, Sigmund, on mysteries, 450n8
interrogation scenes, 30, 81, 142–43; Freytag, Gustav, 42
Letter to Five Wives with, 22, 97–98, Fright (1950), 279
416n45; The Lodger with, 158; moving- Front Page, The (1931), 208
spotlight narration as, 251; in mystery
stories, 143–44, 243; The Night of June 13 Galton Case, The (1959), 240–41
with, 147, 148; in 1940s, 81, 90, 91, 246; Gambit (1962), 313
plays with, 43; precedents in, 5; question Gambit (1966), 340
and answer on, 142; in Red Right Hand, game of wits, 256, 317, 384, 387
261–62, 270–71, 282, 405; in Reservoir Gance, Abel, 187–88
 Index 475

Gardner, Erle Stanley, 148, 221; in Black narration in, 149–50; fair play tenet in,
Mask magazine, 286, 290–91, 295; The 126, 128–29, 303, 329, 378, 380, 387; Great
Case of the Caretaker’s Cat by, 289–92, Detective tradition to, 121–34; hard-
302; The Case of the Velvet Claws by, boiled detective story on, 195–201, 207,
286; Chandler on, 285–86; on character 260; “inverted” stories and, 165; male
archetypes, 289; courtroom testimony competition in, 152–53; mystery stories
and, 293; dialogue by, 292, 294–95, 306; and, 246, 259, 282, 384, 407; 1920s and,
Fair and Lam of, 295–96; on first-person 210, 275; Panek on writers and, 121, 125;
thoughts, 293; for Great Detective with physical traces and alibis, 201; plot
tradition, 286; for magazines, 285–86, puzzles and, 127–31, 133, 158, 163, 188, 219,
290–91; Mason novels by, 285–86, 288; 223; The Poisoned Chocolates Case and,
Murderer’s Ladder by, 287, 290; on plot, 154, 437n99; prestige standing of, 155,
287; on puzzle plots, 295, 301; story 193, 196; psychological density in, 178;
dictation by, 293–94; story openings by, puzzles and, 144, 238, 244, 410; reader
294; Stout and, 25; on urban crime, 289, challenges by, 131–32; reflexivity of, 124,
291; on woman in distress, 289; writing 170; on Rinehart, 122; rules of, 253; size
style of, 291–92 of, 125, 287; technical devices for, 124;
Gas Light (1938), 103, 175–76, 269–70, thrillers and, 161, 168, 193; time lines
384–85 and segmentation in, 141–45; trusting
genre fiction: critique and counter in, 105–6; onlookers in, 133–34; truth convention
innovations in, 9; mystery demands in, 126; viewpoint in, 144; whodunits of,
in, 20; repetition and, 15; schema in, 13; 234, 236, 245, 248, 250, 258, 387
teaching by, 17 “Goldfish” (Chandler), 219–20
Gentry, Amy, Bad Habits by, 397 Goldin, Megan, Escape Room by, 397
German filmmakers, 110, 188, 435n61 Goldsmith, Martin: Detour by, 173–74;
Gide, André, 210, 217; Counterfeiters by, 6, Shadows at Noon by, 97
67, 238, 314, 344 “Gold Watch” episode, 12
Gillette, William, Sherlock Holmes by, Gombrich, Ernst H., 13, 60
435n61 Gone Girl (2012), 25–26, 260; diary entries
Gingrich, Arnold, Cast Down the Laurel by, in, 384, 391–94, 395, 401–2; as domestic
6, 9, 18, 67 thriller, 382, 391; helper male character
Girl Before, The (2017), 397 and, 392, 394; time tags in, 394, 395, 400
Girl on the Train, The (2015), 398–99, 402 Goodbye to the Past (1934), 12
Glass Cell, The (1983), 321, 323 Goodis, David, Dark Passage,166,
Glass Key, The (1931), 58, 345, 374–75, 375; 263–64, 264
description in, 215–18; male friendship Good Soldier, The (1915), 7, 61, 119
in, 231; names in, 216; personal and Gothic fiction: definition of, 178; of
political in, 209; plot of, 206–7; third nineteenth-century, 77, 433n19;
person in, 262, 293, 311 psychological thrillers and, 179;
Godard, Jean-Luc, 16, 460n23 variations of, 32, 124, 193; whodunit and,
Godfather, The (1969), 7 120; woman-in-peril and, 122, 170, 174,
Golden Age detective stories, 24–25; 385, 397. See also Rebecca (1938)
on adventure and action, 125; block Grand Hotel (1929), 7, 67, 70, 138, 208
construction in, 150–52, 167, 254–55; Grapes of Wrath, The (1939), 7
bookishness in, 153–54; casebook Great Detective tradition: films and, 180;
format of, 245, 254–55, 326; Chandler Gardner for, 286; to Golden Age, 121–34;
on, 227, 230; clues in, 135; courtroom Hammett on, 195; hard-boiled hero and,
drama in, 149; dossier novel in, 149, 251; 198–99, 244; logic and, 237; parodies of,
duplicitous narration in, 137; embedded 234, 234; plots in, 160; viewpoint of, 161
 476 Index

Great Gatsby (1925), 7, 62, 240, 251; Chandler 314; on hard-boiled detective stories,
and, 445n100; detective stories and, 79; 108, 239; Knopf and, 196–97, 199, 202,
flashbacks and, 90; place description 210, 220, 229; for linear plotting, 285;
and, 224 network principle and, 202–4; as
Greek Coffin Mystery (1932), 126, 130 Pinkerton detective, 195; Sam Spade
Green, Anna Katherine, Leavenworth Case character by, 199, 204, 206, 212, 214, 239;
by, 436n86 schemas by, 218; Stein and, 78; Stout
Green, Henry, Party Going by, 7 and, 299, 317; stream-of-consciousness
Greene, Graham, 107, 193, 321; The Ministry and, 196, 218, 446n123; third-person by,
of Fear by, 104, 244–45 214; on urban drama, 202; for viewpoint
Green Eagle Score, The (1967), 348–49 restriction, 285. See also Continental Op;
grid layouts: of alternatives, 95; blocks Dain Curse, The; Glass Key, The; Maltese
and, 152, 253, 351, 388; of chapters and Falcon, The; Red Harvest; Thin Man, The
couples, 97, 98; as columnar, 53, 64, 95, Hamsher, Jane, 367
353, 388, 424n45; dossier novels and, 95; Hand That Rocks the Cradle, The (1992), 385
for flashbacks, 79; for Intolerance, 95; for Hangover Square (1945), 112, 244, 264–65,
Richard Stark novels, 342–53; Letter to 267, 273, 319
Five Wives with, 97–98, 98; of narrators, hard-boiled detective stories, 22, 24–25;
64–65, 95, 407; of pattern plotting, adventure and, 124, 199–200; in Black
95–96, 111; plots and, 349; Russian Mask magazine, 194–95; “camera
Dolls and, 93, 99; as spatial, 53, 81, 152; eye” of, 35; Chandler and, 109, 221;
as trans-historical, 50; for Ulysses, 71, characters in, 196, 200; as crossovers,
95; Woolf using, 95. See also four-part 109; with danger, 180, 181; films of, 242,
structure 246; on Golden Age norms, 195–201,
Griffith, D. W., 48–53, 49, 52–53, 54; time 207, 260, 285; Hammett and, 108, 239;
frames and tints by, 51, 62; See also Hollywood and, 246; honor code of,
Intolerance 229–30; literary artistry for, 107, 196,
Grifters, The (1990), 353, 353, 461n36 210; male trust in, 203; mass culture
Grindhouse (2007), 360, 367 and, 233–34; as minorities, 409–10; with
mystery, 198; in 1920s, 210; parody of,
“Had I But Known” (HIBK) school, 234, 234; with psychological “talking
174–75, 179 cures,” 268; pulp crime and, 239;
half-memories, 128 Rinehart on thrillers and, 163; rogue
Halliday, Brett, 224–25 detectives in, 199; schemas of, 218–19;
Hamilton, Clayton: The Big Idea by, 44, 75; sex and, 199–200; with suspense, 120–
on popular storytellers, 44; on reverse 21; “taste of the construction,” 32–33,
chronology, 41–42, 142, 436n83 116, 119, 397, 404, 406, 411; toughness in,
Hamilton, Patrick: Gas Light by, 103, 175–76, 197–98; as whodunit, 120; whodunits
269–70, 384–85; Hangover Square by, on, 245; who knows what in, 202;
112, 244, 264–65, 267, 273, 319; Rope by, women as, 409
161–62, 164–65, 171, 173, 185, 194 Hard-Boiled Omnibus (Shaw, J.), 131, 194–96,
Hammerstein, Oscar, II, 113, 412 210, 217–18, 239
Hammett, Dashiell, 445n77; “The Big Hardy, Thomas, Far from the Madding
Knock-Over” by, 197, 201; Black Mask Crowd by, 32
and, 194–99, 202–4, 286, 444n76; Harlem Shuffle (2021), 410
Chandler and, 108, 220, 230–31, 240, Hart, Moss, Merrily We Roll Along by, 12
446n129; Conan Doyle and, 201; on fair Hateful Eight, The (2015), 252, 368–69
play rules, 204–5; films and, 208–9; first- Hawkins, Paula: The Girl on the Train by,
person narration and, 211, 213–14, 233, 398–99, 402; Into the Water by, 399
 Index 477

Haycraft, Howard, 433n11; The Art of the 321, 324; The Tremor of Forgery by, 323–
Mystery Story by, 239 24; The Two Faces of January by, 318, 323;
Heart of Darkness (1899), 94, 427n28 on viewpoint, 318, 323–25
Hecht, Ben, 20 High Window, The (1942), 221, 223–24, 228–
heist or caper stories, 25; action of, 339–41, 29; The Brasher Doubloon as, 231, 243
352; definition of, 337–38, 459n2; Jackie Hill, Wycliffe, 41
Brown as, 360, 368–69; for narrative Hill Street Blues (1981–1987), multiple story
complexity, 355; Pulp Fiction as, 357; lines of, 16, 335
Reservoir Dogs on, 5, 362; Westlake and, Hiroshima mon amour, 11
337, 344–47, 460n26 Hitchcock, Alfred: Blackmail by, 162, 188;
Hellinger, Mark, 327, 330 on comic interludes, 186; Before the Fact
Hellzapoppin’ (1938), 76, 425n75; Citizen film by, 384; Jamaica Inn by, 182, 185,
Kane in, 76 440n65; The Lady Vanishes by, 185, 188,
helper male character, 176, 260, 392, 394 189–92, 190, 376; The Man Who Knew
Hemingway, Ernest, 35; iceberg principle by, Too Much by, 185–86, 190, 192–93; on
311; In Our Time by, 67, 259 protagonists, 186; Psycho by, 258, 267, 377,
Herbert, A. P., The House by the River by, 379–80, 382–83; Rear Window by, 31, 193,
162, 173 273, 278; Rope by, 235, 245, 403; Sabotage
Hergesheimer, Joseph, 40; Balisand by, by, 185–88, 187; Shadow of a Doubt by,
217–18 18, 162, 193, 235; Spellbound by, 268, 403;
Herron, Mick, This Is What Happened Stage Fright by, 83, 85, 248; Strangers on
by, 399 a Train and, 319–25; The 39 Steps by, 182,
He Said/She Said (2017), 399–400 185–86, 187, 190; on thrillers, 179–80,
HIBK, 174–75, 179 185, 403; Young and Innocent by, 185–86,
hierarchy of knowledge, 180–81; Kind Lady 188, 190
and, 184 Holding, Elizabeth Sanxay, The Unfinished
highbrow/lowbrow/middlebrow, 100–101 Crime by, 172–73
highbrow works, 3, 110; embracing of, 87; Holding, Sanxay, Lady Killer by, 385
films and, 279; lowbrow and, 41, 279, 303; Hollow Man, The (1935), 144, 153
as reflexive, 41, 74 Hollywood. See films
High Modernism: on close reading, Horizontal Man, The (1946), 259, 387
100; difficulty and severity of, 3, 406; Hot Rock, The (1970), 344, 348–49
of Faulkner, Woolf, and Joyce, 24; Hours Before Dawn, The (1958), 386
in-between on, 77; of 1920s, 5; 1940s House by the River, The (1920), 162, 173
after, 100 “House in Goblin Wood, The” (1946), 132,
Highsmith, Patricia, 9–10, 457n3; The 136, 141
Blunderer by, 320–21, 324; characters House Swap, The (2018), 398
of, 320; Deep Water by, 320, 323; Edith’s howdunit: Poe on, 121, 123; by Sayers, 146
Diary by, 393; The Glass Cell by, 321, 323; How Green Was My Valley (1941), 90, 232,
illogic by, 320–22; McBain and, 25; on 462n21
narration, 321–22; psychological thrillers How Like a God (1929), 72, 81, 408; blocks
and, 325–26, 335; on recurring themes, in, 96; as crossover, 80, 116, 194, 296,
319; restricted viewpoint by, 318; Ripley 305; embedded thriller in, 80; time and,
character by, 320–25, 335; Ripley’s Game 55–58, 61, 79; type and narration in, 63,
by, 321, 325; on short, quick scenes, 69–71, 314
323; Strangers on a Train by, 319–25; How to Write a Novel (1950), 87, 99
on suspense, 244, 323; A Suspension of Hughes, Dorothy B., In a Lonely Place by,
Mercy by, 320, 324; This Sweet Sickness 259, 262, 273, 319
by, 322–23; Those Who Walk Away by, Hugo, Victor, Cromwell by, 181, 376
 478 Index

Hull, Richard: Excellent Intentions by, “inverted” stories: of Freeman, 163–64, 169,
148–49, 248; Last First by, 5, 258; Murder 388; Golden Age writers and, 165
Isn’t Easy by, 165–66, 168, 393; The investigation plots, 19; avant-garde art and,
Murder of My Aunt by, 171, 186 155; clues and, 104, 106, 123–24, 151, 179,
Hunter, Evan: Blackboard Jungle by, 326; on 190, 287; Flynn on, 390–91; impossible
narration, 331–32 crime in, 123, 130; Memento as, 374; as
Hunter, The (1963): four-part structure nonlinear, 141–42; in Woolrich, 274
in, 347–52; as heist story, 344, 346–47; Italian Job, The (1964), 338
Point Blank and, 367; Reservoir Dogs I Wake Up Screaming (1941), 243–44, 247
and, 365, 365–66, 367; Tarantino
and, 362 Jackie Brown (1997), 360, 368–69
hunt plots, Woolrich and, 273–74 Jamaica Inn (1939), 182, 185, 440n65
Huston, John, 8, 112, 215 James, Henry, 73; The Ambassadors by, 58;
Huxley, Aldous, Point Counter Point by, The Awkward Age by, 36, 38, 71; on baggy
7, 427n15 monster novels, 31–32; crossover and, 77;
Lubbock and, 58, 87, 133, 324; melodrama
I, the Jury (1947), 231, 242 and, 35; on methods and theories,
Ibsen, Henrik, 42, 122–23 33–34, 36, 61; for narrative conventions,
Icelandic sagas, 12 35–40; 1940s revival of, 99; on popular
I Know You Know (2018), 400 storytellers, 44; as proto-modernist,
Iles, Francis: Before the Fact by, 169–71, 23–24; viewpoint and, 31, 33–34; The
175, 178, 185, 193, 385, 392; Malice Wings of the Dove by, 36
Aforethought by, 169, 171, 186, 391. See Jarmusch, Jim, Mystery Train by, 75, 375
also Cox, Anthony Berkeley Jarrett, Cora, 79
I Married a Dead Man (1948), 272–73, 276 Java Head (1919), 40
In a Lonely Place (1947), 259, 262, 273, 319 Jaws (1975), 6, 382
In a Yellow Wood (1947), 96–97 Jimmy the Kid (1974), 355
Inception (2010), 53, 407 Joe Friday (character), 250, 327–28, 330, 332
Inglourious Basterds (2009), 367–68 John Dortmunder (character), 344, 348–49,
inner monologues, 232–33 354–55
Innes, Michael, Lament for a Maker by, 145 John H. Watson (character), 77, 121, 123,
Innocent (1914), 30 133–36
In Our Time (1925), 67, 259 Johnny Got His Gun (1938), 70
Inquest (1940), 147 Johnson, Steven, 11–12, 16, 56, 407
Inspector Calls, An (1947), 103, 249–50, 282 Joyce, James, 101; Bloom character by, 59,
internet, on readers and audiences, 12 216, 228, 233, 395–98; High Modernism
interrogation scenes: of audience, 129, 186; of, 24; innovation by, 61, 100; thought
Mason and, 295; past and flashbacks in, schemas and, 59; Ulysses by, 7, 17, 58,
30, 81, 142–43; of police procedurals, 328, 63–65, 71, 95, 315, 427n15; Edmund
330, 374; in Pulp Fiction, 14; by therapist, Wilson on, 107, 317
268; Wolfe and, 304 Jury, The (1935), 149
“In the Cage” (1898), viewpoint of, Jury Disagree, The (1934), 149
34–35, 38, 58
Intolerance (1916), 24, 52–53, 53, 54; Kantor, Mackinlay: crossovers and, 327;
crosscutting and, 48–51, 52, 57, 405; grid Signal Thirty-Two by, 327–28
layouts for, 95; surviving versions of, Kaufman, George S., Merrily We Roll Along
420n66; time frames in, 51, 62, 71 by, 12
Into the Water (2017), 399 Keaton, Buster, 50
intrinsic norms, 16–17 Kill Bill Volume 1 (2003), 369
 Index 479

Kill Bill Volume 2 (2004), 369 Leavenworth Case (1878), 436n86

Killing, The (1956), 341–42, 362–63; Clean Leaves from Satan’s Book (1920), 50
Break as, 361; Tarantino on, 5, 368 Lee, Manfred B., 237, 448n7
Killshot (1989), by Leonard, Elmore, 360–61 Legend (1919), 40
Kind Lady (1935), 175, 180, 183–84, 184, 188 Leonard, Elmore, 18, 196, 356; as best-seller,
Kind Worth Killing, The (2015), 399 461n8; characters and, 398; on Hoffman,
King, C. Daly, Obelists Fly High by, 130, 462n12; Killshot by, 360–61; Out of Sight
144, 297 (1998) by, 358, 462n10; paperbacks and,
King, Stephen, 66, 382; as experimental 326; on Pulp Fiction, 462n10; on readers
writer, 410; Misery by, 403 skipping, 292; Tarantino and, 360–62,
Kingsley, Sidney, Detective Story by, 328–29, 367, 373; Whitehead on, 410
334, 458n32 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 181, 376
Kiss Before Dying, A (1953), 258–60, 377, Letter to Five Wives (1948), 22, 99, 410,
387, 401 416n45; blocks and, 428n35; films and,
Kitchin, C. H. B., Birthday Party by, 79 246; with grid layouts, 97–98, 98
Klempner, John, Letter to Five Wives by, 22, Levin, Ira: Deathtrap by, 260, 282, 452n50; A
97–99, 416n45 Kiss Before Dying by, 258–60, 377, 387, 401
Knopf, Alfred: Chandler and, 107–9, 220, Levin, Meyer, 90
229; Hammett and, 196–97, 199, 202, 210, Lew Archer (character), 203, 239–42
220, 229 Life for a Life, A (1859), 32, 384, 409
Komroff, Manuel, How to Write a Novel by, Life Sentences (2009), 388–89
87, 99 Lippman, Laura, 168, 391, 395; After I’m
Kracauer, Siegfried, 102 Gone by, 403; Dream Girl (2021), 403;
Krutch, Joseph Wood, 105–6, 116; on literary Every Secret Thing by, 388; Flynn on,
artistry, 430n77 390; on investigation and past scenes,
Kubicka, Mary, Every Last Lie by, 397 390; Lady in the Lake (2019), 403; Life
Kung Fu (TV show), 257, 381 Sentences by, 388–89; To the Power of
Three by, 388; Sunburn by, 403; What the
Lady in the Lake (2019), 403 Dead Know by, 388; Wilde Lake by, 403
Lady in the Lake, The (1943), 221, 230, 257, 281, literary artistry: for Chandler, 223, 230–31;
442n21; disguised crime in, 223–24; film detective stories and, 107, 123–24, 146,
of, 231, 243, 266; viewpoints in, 222, 403 230, 241, 406; development of, 40;
Lady Killer (1945), 385 DeVoto and Krutch on, 430n77; on
Lady Killers, The (1955), 338–39 drama and comic rhythm, 109; hard-
Lady Vanishes, The (1938), 185, 188, 189–92, boiled detective stories as, 107, 196, 210;
190, 376 Joyce and Eliot on, 101; mystery stories as,
Lament for a Maker (1938), 145 103–4, 110, 127, 236; psychological thrillers
Larceny, Inc. (1941), 337, 339 with, 245; by Queen, 237; entertainment
Larsen, Nella, Passing by, 11 or, 6; whodunits and, 123–24
Last First (1947), 5, 258 literary modernism, 1, 3
Last Warning, The (1927), 75, 129 Little Caesar (Burnett), 194, 201
Late George Apley, The (1937), 70, 72 Little Dorritt (Dickens), 59
Lathrop, George, 40 Little Foxes, The (1941), 8
Laura (1944), 103, 235, 245, 369, 385, 406; Little Sister, The (1949), 231–33
viewpoints in, 254–58 Locket, The (1946), 248–49, 254, 268
L’Avventura (1960), 11 Lockridge, Frances, 236
League of Frightened Men, The (1935), 315 Lockridge, Richard, 236
League of Gentlemen, The (1960), 338–39, 342 The Lodger (1913), 157–60
Leave Her to Heaven (1945), 244, 392–93 Lolita (1955, 1958), 110, 193
 480 Index

Long Goodbye, The (1953), 231–32, 306, 374, Man Who Knew Too Much, The (1934),
445n100 185–86, 190, 192–93
Lord Jim (1900), 37–38, 83 Man Who Lived Underground, The (1941,
Lord of the Rings, The, 12 2021), 104
Love from a Stranger (1936), 175–76, 180, 183 Marric, J. J., 328, 333
Loves Music, Loves to Dance (1991), 10–11 Marwood, Alex, The Wicked Girls by, 395, 397
lowbrow works: detective novels as, 126; Marx brothers, 76
highbrow and, 41, 279, 303; highbrow/ mass storytelling, 1, 406; abrupt sensation
lowbrow/middlebrow and, 100–101; in, 18; acceptance of, 110; Carroll on,
middlebrow or, 87, 126 5; critics and, 102, 105–6; detective
Lowndes, Marie Belloc, The Lodger by, story and, 233–34; literature or, 106–7;
157–60 middlebrow works as, 104–5, 107, 112;
Lubbock, Percy: Christie and, 435n55; mystery stories in, 102–7; of 1920s
on James, 58, 87, 133, 324; on mind of forward, 8; for predictable experiences,
suspect, 136–37; on narration, 262, 330; 101; on story experience, 404
Sayers and, 134; on scenic method, 217, Masters, Edgar Lee, Spoon River Anthology
237, 276–77; on viewpoint, 136, 250 by, 75, 238, 409
Materials and Methods of Fiction (1908), 41
Macdonald, Dwight, 115 Matrix, The (1999), 4
MacDonald, Philip, 434n40, 458n30; The Matthews, Brander, 40–41, 181, 188
Maze by, 146; The Rynox Mystery by, 5, Matthews, T. S., To the Gallows I Must Go
131; X v. Rex by, 165, 274 by, 172, 185
Macdonald, Ross: Chandler and, 231, 240–42; Maugham, Somerset, 40, 66–67; on
differentiation by, 239, 242; The Galton Chandler, 230
Case by, 240–41; on Hammett, 242; Lew du Maurier, Daphne, Rebecca, 179, 185, 385;
Archer character of, 203, as domestic thriller, 244; as thriller, 259,
239–42; as long-form writer, 240; Kenneth 390; as woman-in-peril plot, 86–87, 103,
Millar as, 239–40; on Edmund Wilson, 175, 185, 193, 235, 385, 398
448n12; The Wycherly Woman by, 241 Maze, The (1932), 146
MacGuffin, 180 McBain, Ed, 458n34, 458n42; conglomerate
Macmillan, Gilly: I Know You Know by, 400; hero of, 333–35; Cop Hater by, 333–35;
The Perfect Girl by, 400 Highsmith and, 25; omniscient narration
Madame Bovary (film, 1949), 87, 90 by, 318, 331–32; police procedural
magazines, 86–87; on characterization, 236; and, 318, 355; on realism, 329. See also
Gardner writing for, 285–86, 290–91. See Hunter, Evan
also Black Mask McCabe, Cameron, 79–80
Magnificent Ambersons, The (1942), 7 McCoy, Horace, 78
Mailer, Norman, 88, 93 melodrama: James and, 35; as secrets known, 19
male trust, 203–4, 206, 233; The Glass Key Memento (2000), 4, 12–13, 407; investigation
and, 231 plot of, 374; parallel structure in, 16;
Malice Aforethought (1931), 171, 186, 391 relationship webs in, 234; retrograde
Malraux, André, 210, 320 movement of, 17–18; tags in, 16; temporal
Maltese Falcon, The (1930), 207, 235, 240, order of, 12, 17–18, 409
289, 292–93; double plots in, 204–6; mental access: death and, 92; mystery
film of, 242–43; as quest story, 204; on stories and, 132, 137, 139–40; novels and,
romance, 206; schemas in, 210; third- 34; romance and, 140–41
person in, 214–15; viewpoint in, 205 Meredith, Anne, Portrait of a Murderer by,
Manhattan Transfer (1925), 65, 67, 427n15 166, 173
man-on-the-run plot, as urban crime, 244 Merrily We Roll Along (1981), 409
Manual of the Art of Fiction, The (1918), 41 Merrily We Roll Along (1934), 12, 75, 114
 Index 481

Methinks the Lady . . . (1945), 269–70, 279 in The Jury, 149; modular layout and,
Mezzanine, The (1986), 57–58 275; police procedural and, 328, 341;
Michaelides, Alex, The Silent Patient by, 401 suspense and, 183, 185, 350, 368; as third-
middlebrow works, 9, 77; in 1940s, 7–8; as person, 34, 136, 242
between hard and easy, 6, 72, 413n9, Moving Target, The (1949), 239
425n65; highbrow/lowbrow/middlebrow Mr. Denning Drives North (1940), 266
and, 100–101; intelligentsia on, 101–2; Mr. Pottermack’s Oversight (1930), 164
lowbrow or, 87, 126; as mass entertainment, “multiple-draft” narratives, films with, 22
104–5, 107, 112; 1940s America on, 7–8; Murder! (1930), 186, 186
Priestley and Thornton Wilder as, 74; Murder, My Sweet (1944), 143, 231–33, 243, 247
Sondheim as, 115; three-bin model and, Murder by the Book (1952), 312, 315
7–8, 224, 246, 355; Woolf on, 100 Murderer’s Ladder, 287, 290
Middlemarch (1871–1872), 32 Murder Is Announced, A (1950), 133, 145
Mildred Pierce (1945), 143, 235, 246, 248 Murder Isn’t Easy (1937), 165–66, 168, 393
Millar, Kenneth, as Ross Macdonald, 239–40 Murder Must Advertise (1933), 137–40, 146,
Millar, Margaret, 384; An Air That Kills by, 166, 200
399; A Beast in View by, 267 Murder of My Aunt, The (1934), 171, 186
Miller, Arthur, 92, 101 Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The (1926),
Miller’s Crossing (1990), 234, 374, 375 134–36, 140, 200, 253, 378
Ministry of Fear, The (1943), 104, 244–45 murder stories: in formal artifice, 3; poetics
Miranda, Megan, All the Missing Girls by, 397 of, 19
misdirection: by Christie, 251–53, 258, mystery stories, 409, 417n49; in blocks,
377–78; by ingenious author, 130; A Kiss 166–67; Carr on, 20, 107, 112, 406,
Before Dying with, 258–60, 377, 387, 401 430n85; category publishing and, 103;
Misery (1987), 403 clues for, 20, 33–34, 77, 128, 329; comedy
Mittell, Jason, 12, 381 in 1920s, 307; conventions in, 22, 405–6;
Moby-Dick (1851), 32 crossovers and, 24–25, 77–79, 235–36,
modernism: confusion and satisfaction in, 400; detective story as, 198; DeVoto on,
55, 66; as holding pattern, 88; How Like 107; fair play tenet in, 126, 128–30, 133,
a God as, 55–57; on memes and cultural 137, 139, 146, 152, 161, 186, 205, 221, 297,
flotsam, 60–61; on modern world, 59; as 380, 436n70; films in, 22; flashbacks in,
quality, 99; storytelling and, 10, 24, 61, 143–44, 243; footnotes in, 131; Freud on,
65; theater for light, 73–74, 76; types of, 450n8; game of wits and, 256, 317, 384,
73; viewpoint and, 65; waning of, 87 387; Golden Age detective stories and,
modernist classic: from exoteric 246, 259, 282, 384, 407; hidden story
storytelling, 10; Nightwood as, 7; of in, 20; innovations in, 19, 22, 235–36;
1920s, 9 as literary artistry, 103–4, 110, 127, 236;
modular layout, moving-spotlight narration mental access and, 132, 137, 139–40;
and, 275 misdirection in, 130; modernism and,
Moon and Sixpence, The (1919), 40 77–78; in 1940s, 24–25, 102–7, 116,
Moonstone, The (1868), 32, 38; with crime 235, 262; in 1950s, 281; poetics of, 26;
and homes, 121 Red Right Hand as, 261–62, 270–71,
Moriarty, Liane, Big Little Lies by, 399 282, 405; shifting viewpoints for, 33;
Morley, Christopher, 296, 300–301, 424n45; Sondheim for, 112–13; Stout on, 297;
Thunder on the Left by, 68; Kitty Foyle stream-of-consciousness in, 262–63;
by, 89 theater and, 103, 281; tricky techniques
Mourner, The (1971), 345–46, 349, 351 in, 119; on viewpoint, 250; viewpoint
movies. See films in, 133–36; whodunits as, 103. See also
moving-spotlight narration, 439n28; Detection Club
crosscutting and, 259; as flashback, 251; Mystery Train (1989), 75, 375
 482 Index

Nabokov, Vladimir, 68; on fonts, 424n49; 1910s: art novel and formalism of, 29; book
Lolita by, 110, 193; Pale Fire by, 110; The publishing in, 85; innovations in, 39;
Real Life of Sebastian Knight by, 104, 193 Lubbock and poetics of, 58; mysteries
Naked and the Dead, The (1948), 88, 93 and tricky techniques in, 119; on plots,
Naked City (1948), 327–28, 330 39–40; on puzzles and curiosity, 123;
Naremore, James, 109, 427n28, 429n49, tagging in, 54; on temporal order, 39–40,
441n1, 444n68, 451n21 142; thrillers in, 160–61
narration: in embedded stories, 150; 1920s: comedy and mysteries of, 307;
Highsmith on, 321–22; Lubbock on, detective stories in, 210; esoteric or
262, 330; McBain with omniscient, 318, exoteric works in, 5, 8, 10, 17, 111, 401,
331–32; as moving-spotlight, 183; police 405–6; Golden Age whodunits in,
procedural and, 328–31; as restricted, 210, 275; 1929 watershed year in, 194;
182–83; Sondheim and, 114; stream-of- psychological thrillers in, 160–61;
consciousness and, 263; in thrillers, 173; thrillers in, 160–61; timelines and
twists from, 407, 463n27; verbal style in, perspectives in, 210; ultraism of, 89, 406
25; viewpoint and, 60 1930s: book clubs in, 85; detective stories in,
narrative conventions, 414nn17–18; as 78–80; esoteric or exoteric works in, 5, 8,
complex, 3–5, 11–12, 16; continuity and 10, 17, 111, 401, 405–6; radio drama in, 69,
change in, 404; heist or caper stories 86–87; temporal order and films of, 16;
and, 355; innovations, 3–4; of “In the Ultraism to mid-, 89, 406
Cage,” 34–35; James and Conrad for, 1940s: after High Modernism, 100; block
35–40; as multiple, 37; of mystery construction in, 275; book publishing
stories, 24; 1910s changing, 39; 1940s in, 85–86; crossover stories in, 25, 89,
and, 5, 24; of prototypical plot, 9; 92–93, 99, 110–11, 262, 406; detective
segmentation of, 10, 60; thrillers and story respect in, 230; Faulkner in, 87–88,
detective tales in, 19; A Voice in the 99; films in, 86, 90; flashbacks and, 81,
Dark and, 29–31, 33, 38–39, 43, 54, 58. 90, 91, 246; foundations from, 110; James
See also popular narrative revival in, 99; on middlebrow works,
narrators: As I Lay Dying with multiple, 67, 7–8; mystery films in, 22, 102–3; mystery
251; as first-person, 399, 464n22; grid stories in, 24–25, 102–7, 116, 235, 262;
layouts of, 64–65, 95, 407; by Stout, 134, narrative conventions in, 5, 24; paperbacks
298; voice-overs as, 263, 327, 340–41, 374, in, 326; plots of, 282; on popular narrative,
414n17. See also unreliable narrators 116; psychopaths in, 268; Queen during,
Natural Born Killers (1990), 358–61, 363, 367, 238; radio drama in, 87, 90; storytelling
372–73; mixed-media in, 461n5 in, 5; on subjectivity, 274; suspense of, 245;
Nausée, La (Sartre), 213–14 theater in, 86, 90; time lines and, 249–50;
Nero Wolfe (character): Barzun on, 299, unreliable narrators and, 258; viewpoint
302, 316, 455n71; details of, 295–98, and, 90, 250, 262
300–305, 310, 313, 456n117; Stout on, 285, 1950s: crime stories of, 25; mystery stories
295–97, 299 in, 281
network principle, 202–4 1960s, Pop Art in, 111
Nevins, Francis M., 272, 291 Nobody Runs Forever (2004), 355
Nick Charles (character), 207, 209, 214 Noises Off (1982), switcheroo and, 111–12
Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1945), 272, Nolan, Christopher: Following by, 12, 374,
276, 279 405; Inception by, 53, 407; Memento
Night Must Fall (1935), 171, 180 by, 4, 12–13, 16–18, 234, 374, 407, 409;
Night of June 13, The (1932), 147, 148 viewpoint and, 53, 423n31
Night Over Fitch’s Pond (1933), 79 nonlinear time schemes: as badge of honor,
Nightwood (1936), 7 4; domestic thrillers with, 406–7;
 Index 483

investigation plots and, 141–42; plotting pattern plotting: Ayckbourn and, 111–12;
as, 10; storytelling as, 1, 3; Tarantino and, grid layouts of, 95–96, 111; “Russian doll”
358, 376 structure in, 93–99
Nothing More Than Murder (1949), 247–48 Payment Deferred (1926, 1932), 162, 171, 180
novels: artistry of, 33, 427n21; as baggy Perfect Girl, The (2016), 400
monsters, 31–32; category publishing of, Perry Mason (character), 285–86, 288;
103; with embedding, 94; of England, interrogation scenes and, 295
171–72; exoteric storytelling and Phantom Rival, The (1915), 42
modernism in, 6–7; lengths of, 326, 334; Philip Marlowe (character), 102, 108, 199,
of manners, 433n19; mental access from, 222, 226–32, 239
34; multiple viewpoints in, 92; mystery Pirandello, Luigi, 6, 44, 74–75, 80, 94, 317
stories in, 102; plotting for serial, 32; Piranesi (2020), 410
small mystery, 125. See also specific novels Pitlor, Heidi, The Daylight Marriage by,
396–98
Obelists Fly High (1935), 130, 144, 297 Plain Murder (1930), 162, 165–67
Oboler, Arch, 69–70, 87, 89 Playback (1958), 232–33
Ocean’s 11 (1960), 338–39, 356 Plot Genie, 41, 287
Ocean’s series (2001–2018), 356 Plot It Yourself (1959), 316
Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), 339 Plunder Squad (1972), 346, 349, 354
Odyssey, 17, 65 Poe, Edgar Allan, 40; as fantasist, 273;
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), 368, helper coequal protagonist of, 298;
462n20 Highsmith and, 319; on howdunit, 121,
One by One (2020), 400 123; on psychological insights, 127; short
O’Neill, Eugene, 65 stories by, 125, 171, 377; on viewpoint,
On Trial (1914), 30, 142, 144, 147, 246–47, 133–34, 150
436n83 Point Blank (1967), 362; The Hunter and, 367
Open Road, The (Avary), 358, 360 Point Counter Point (1928), 7, 427n15
Orwell, George, 88 point of view. See viewpoint
Ostrander, Isabel, Ashes to Ashes by, 161–63, Poirier, Richard, 111
171, 193 Poisoned Chocolates Case, The (1929), 150,
Our Town (1938), 75, 110, 237, 249, 409 151, 169, 253, 297; bookishness in, 152–54;
Out of Sight (1998), 358, 376, 462n10 Golden Age motifs and, 152, 437n99;
reflexiveness of, 314–15
Pacific Overtures (1976), 114 police procedurals, 25, 409; interrogation
Pamela (1740), 32 scenes of, 328, 330, 374; McBain and, 318,
Panek, LeRoy Lad, 223, 416n47, 432n8, 326–27, 355; moving-spotlight narration
433n21, 444n56; on Golden Age mystery and, 328, 341; narration and, 328–31; for
writers, 121, 125 realism, 327–28; with suspense genres,
paperback editions, 85–86; after World War 332–33
II, 242; of Christie, 435n50; Leonard and, Polti, Georges, 41
326; in 1940s, 326; of suspense, 245 Popular Front Modernism, 88
Parade (1917), 73 Portrait of a Murderer (1934), 166, 173
parallel editing, 48 Postman Always Rings Twice, The (1934),
parallel structure, 16–17 172–74, 220, 247
Parker (character): heist stories and, 337, Pound, Ezra, 10, 59, 415n19
344–47, 460n26; structure and, 347–48 Prather, Richard S., 242
Party Going (1939), 7 Price, Nancy, Sleeping with the Enemy
Passing (1929), 11 by, 385
Passion (1994), 112, 114 Price of Salt, The (1952), 319
 484 Index

Priestley, J. B., 6, 17; on Chandler, 230; An 144, 158, 163, 188, 219, 223, 238, 244, 410;
Inspector Calls by, 103, 249–50, 282; as The Lodger and, 158; as misleading, 407;
middlebrow, 74 1910s on, 123; Queen on, 127; systematic
Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), 99 inquiry into, 120; lack of veneration for,
Prothalamium (1947), 95–96 196; Edmund Wilson on, 245
psychiatric probing: Detective Story and,
328–29, 334, 458n32; domestic thrillers Queen, Ellery, 443n32; Cat of Many
with, 268–71; Poe on, 127; Sayers on, 163 Tails by, 238, 274; on Christie story,
Psycho (1960), 258, 267, 377, 379–80, 382–83 449n49; Dannay and Lee on, 237–38,
psychological realism, 196; Golden Age 448n7; The Dragon’s Teeth by, 237; The
detective stories and, 178; Wolfe and Egyptian Cross Mystery, 125; Greek
obsessive-compulsive, 300. See also Coffin Mystery by, 126, 130; literary
realism directions by, 237; on love-interests,
psychological thrillers: blunt confession in, 236–37; of 1940s, 238; on puzzle plots,
167; Christie defining, 169; clues and, 127; Ten Days’ Wonder by, 237–38, 259,
153–54, 206; as criminal-centered, 172–74; 448n7
critics on, 162; Devil Take the Blue-Tail
Fly as, 270–71, 279; Gothic fiction and, Race Williams (character), 195–98, 201, 203,
120, 179; Highsmith and, 325–26, 335; 210–12, 242
literary cachet of, 245; The Lodger as, radio: The Adventures of Philip Marlowe
157–60; in 1920s, 160–61; 1940s and, 268; on, 243; drama on, 69, 86–87; growth
viewpoint in, 185–86; whodunits on, 245; of, 86–87; mass storytelling for, 101;
Edmund Wilson on, 107 multiple viewpoints in, 92; mystery
publishing: of books, 31, 85–86; categories stories in, 102; 1930s drama in, 69,
and, 103. See also paperback editions 86–87; 1940s and, 87, 90; Suspense as,
Pullman, Philip, 410 245; viewpoint in, 250–51; voice-overs in,
Pulp Fiction (1994): audience response, 4, 69, 243, 263; Welles and, 94
407; Avary and, 3–4; block construction Rahab (1922), 67–68
of, 369–71, 371; chapters of, 17, 369–70; readers. See audience
decentered shots of, 20, 21; as film with realism: Black Mask magazine and, 195;
memory, 1; formal ingenuity in, 3; “Gold detective stories with heightened, 198;
Watch” episode of, 12; as heist story, 357; McBain on, 329; police procedurals for,
Leonard on, 462n10; nonlinear time 327–28; psychological realism and, 196,
in, 358, 376; novel behind, 7; reformed 300; Ultraism on, 149; Van Dine and,
bad man in, 18; relationships in, 234; 131, 197
scenes from, 2, 14; surprise and, 15; time Real Life of Sebastian Knight, The (1941),
juggling in, 4, 14–15; twists in, 2, 3–5, 15, 104, 193
18, 370–72, 371, 376, 380–81 Rear Window (1954), 31, 193, 273, 278
pulp stories: Bedford-Jones and, 287, 352; Rebecca (1938), 177–79; as domestic thriller,
hard-boiled detective story and, 239; on 244; as thriller, 259, 390; as woman-in-
italics, 68–69; McCoy and, 78; by Stout, peril plot, 86–87, 103, 175, 185, 193, 235,
296; by Woolrich, 244, 271–82 384–85, 398
puzzle plots: Carr and, 125, 127–31, 136, Red Harvest (1929), 194, 203–4, 206, 374;
154, 435n49; Chandler on, 107–8, 222; city-under-siege plot in, 209; cleaning-
Christie and, 133–37, 140–41; clues and, up-the-town premise, 202; death and
104, 106, 127–28, 160, 180, 240, 440n55; gore in, 197; Knopf and, 210; Continental
detective stories and, 240; films and, Op in, 212–13
179–80; Gardner on, 295, 301; Golden Red Right Hand (1945), 261–62, 270–71,
Age detective stories and, 127–31, 133, 282, 405
 Index 485

reflexive form, 6, 75, 80, 238, 332–33; Adios, Sabotage (1936), 185–88, 187
Scheherazade and, 343–44; Chandler Sam Spade (character), 199, 204, 206, 212,
and, 228; of Golden Age detective 214, 239
stories, 124, 170; highbrow as, 3; The Sanctuary (1931), 427n15
Poisoned Chocolates Case and, 314–15; of Sartre, Jean-Paul, La Nausée by, 213–14
Stout, 314–15; updating of, 282 Sayers, Dorothy, 9–10; on detective stories,
Remembered Death (1945), 252–53 155, 180; The Documents in the Case by,
Rendell, Ruth, 282 146, 163; on fair play tenet, 436n70; Five
Rendezvous in Black (1948), 272, 274, 276–77 Red Herrings by, 129, 153; howdunit by,
repetition: genre and, 15; Nolan using, 16; in 146; on missing passage, 434n36; on
Pulp Fiction, 14–15; teaching by, 17; on murder, 193; Murder Must Advertise by,
unfamiliar aspects, 13 137–40, 146, 166, 200; on psychology,
replay, in A Voice in the Dark, 81, 142, 248 163; on romance, 236; on thrillers, 180;
Reservoir Dogs (1992), 197, 358, 361, 368, trusting onlooker alternatives by, 134
370–73; with block construction, 363; Scarab Murder Case, The (1929), 194
chronology in, 357; flashbacks in, 362, scenic method, 217, 237, 276–77
363; four-part structure of, 362–65, 363, schemas, 13, 36; of Chandler, 219–21; city-
364; as heist story, 5, 362; The Hunter under-siege plot as, 209; Collins and,
and, 365, 365–66, 367 418n16; as courtroom, 37–38, 72; by
Resnais, Alain, 16, 112 Hammett, 218; innovation and, 17;
reverse chronology, 12, 16–17, 114, 142, 397, investigation plot in, 19; Joyce and
409; C. Hamilton on, 41–42, 142 thought, 59; in music, 60; revision of, 16,
Rice, Elmer, On Trial by, 30, 142, 144, 147, 59, 61, 234, 423n22; types of, 210
246–47, 436n83 science fiction, 22–23; development of,
Richards, I. A., Principles of Literary 410–11
Criticism by, 99 Score, The (1964), 346, 348
Richardson, Samuel, 32 Scott, C. Kay, 68
Rififi (1954), 338, 340, 347 Scott, Walter, 120
Rinehart, Mary Roberts: The Circular Scottoline, Lisa, After Anna by, 398, 400
Staircase by, 122, 174; on detection and Second Shot, The (1930), 141, 144, 153
thrillers, 163; Golden Age detective Seed on the Wind (1930), 12, 24, 296–97
writers on, 122; Haycraft on, 433n11 segmentation: The Birth of a Nation on, 48, 49,
Ripley’s Game (1974), 321, 325 54; central role for, 42–43; in films, 92–93;
Rogers, Joel Townsley, Red Right Hand by, Golden Age detective stories and, 141–45;
261–62, 270–71, 282, 405 narrative and, 10, 60; tagging for, 96, 389;
romance, 206, 236–37; mental access and, for viewpoint and time shifting, 144
140–41 Seldes, Gilbert, 100–101, 111
Roman Hat Mystery, The (1929), 194, 201–2, serial publication: demands of, 35–36;
443n32 popularity of, 31–32
romantic suspense: as lucrative, 175; settings, film and alternation of, 48
Spellbound and, 268, 403 Seven Keys to Baldpate (1913), 124, 368;
Rope (1929), 161–62, 164–65, 171, 173, 185, 194 comedy and, 43, 282, 307, 377, 405; twist
Rope (film, 1948), 235, 245, 403 in, 377
Rosen, Charles, 13, 60 Seventy Times Seven (1939), 72
round-robin novels, 146, 152, 221, 252, 303 sex: detective story and, 199–200; Spillane
Run Lola Run (1998), 4, 22 and semipornographic, 199, 231, 242;
“Russian doll” structure, in pattern plotting, Stout using, 296
93–99 Shadow of a Doubt (1943), 18, 162, 193, 235
Rynox Mystery, The (1933), 5, 131 Shadows at Noon (1943), 97
 486 Index

Shaffer, Anthony, Sleuth by, 112, 282, 452n50 Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), 89, 235, 245,
Shakespeare in Love (1998), 112 384
Shaw, Bernard, 455n84 Sound and the Fury, The (1929), 57, 145, 149,
Shaw, Joseph, 131, 194–96, 210, 217–18, 239 194, 251; blocks in, 61–66, 68; characters
Sherlock Holmes (1899), 435n61 in, 216
Sherlock Holmes (character), 77, 121, 123, Source Code (2011), 22, 376, 411
133–34, 236 Sour Lemon Score, The (1969), 351, 354
Shklovsky, Victor, 13, 19, 119 Soviet filmmakers, 78, 101, 110, 187–88
shooting-gallery structure: The Black Angel Spellbound (1945), 268, 403
and, 272, 275–76; Rendezvous in Black in, Spillane, Mickey, 299, 319, 345; I, the Jury by,
272, 274, 276–77 231, 242; as semipornographic, 199, 231,
short stories, rules on, 40 242; as top seller, 103, 231
Signal Thirty-Two (1950), 327–28 Spirit, The (1940–1952), 264
Sign of Four, The (1890), 125, 204 Spoon River Anthology (1915), 75, 238, 409
Sign of the Spade, The (1916), 136–37, 137 Stage Fright (1950), 83, 85, 248
Silent Patient, The (2019), 401 Stark, Richard, 7, 25, 372, 406, 410; Breakout
Silent Speaker, The (1946), 311–12 by, 347, 353–54; Butcher’s Moon by, 209,
“Simple Art of Murder, The” (1944), 107–9, 345, 352–54; Comeback by, 347, 354;
229–30, 232 Deadly Edge by, 347, 351; Dirty Money by,
Simple Favor, A (2017), 400, 402 355; Firebreak by, 347, 353–54; Flashfire
Simpsons, The, 11 by, 347, 354; four-part structure of,
Singer, Bryan, 234, 374, 376 347–52, 368–69; The Green Eagle Score
Singing Bone, The (1912), 163–64 by, 348–49; Jimmy the Kid by, 355; The
Sin of Nora Moran, The (1933), 16, 176–77, Mourner by, 345–46, 349, 351; multiple
177, 249, 257 viewpoints by, 398; Nobody Runs Forever
Siren (1925), 68 by, 355; Parker character and, 342–56;
Six Characters in Search of an Author Plunder Squad by, 346, 349, 354; Pulp
(1921), 74 Fiction and, 5; The Score by, 346, 348;
Sixth Sense, The (1999), 377–78, 378, 379 Slayground by, 347, 352, 354; The Sour
Skin for Skin (1935), 171, 173 Lemon Score by, 351, 354. See also Hunter,
Slayground (1971), 347, 352–54 The; Westlake, Donald E.
Sleeping with the Enemy (1987), 385 Stein, Gertrude, 62–63; Blood on the Dining-
Sleuth (1970), 112, 282, 452n50 Room Floor by, 78
Smash-Up (1947), 15 Sternberg, Meir, 9
Smith, Naomi Royde, All Star Cast by, 6, 9, Sting, The (1973), 373, 378, 379, 380
18, 24, 75 Stoker, Bram, 33
social commentary, 230 Stone, Oliver, 373, 461n5
Soderbergh, Steven: Logan Lucky by, 355; Stoppard, Tom, 75, 111; Shakespeare in Love
Ocean’s series by, 356; Out of Sight by, by, 112
356, 376; Underneath, The by, 355 story arc, 18; as incident structure, 30
Some Buried Caesar (1939), 308 storytellers: artist or, 6; Collins test and, 6,
Sometimes I Lie (2017), 401 78, 101, 104, 296; James or C. Hamilton
Sondheim, Stephen: Allegro by, 113, 263; on, 44; learning by, 16; on old and new
crossovers and, 111; experimentation by, forms, 54; schema by, 13
113–15; Merrily We Roll Along (1981) by, storytelling: as exoteric, 5–6, 10; familiarity
409; as middlebrow, 115; narrators and, in, 12; in film, 5, 7; as high, low, middle,
114; Pacific Overtures by, 114; Passion by, 6–7; Highsmith on, 319; mass art as, 1,
112, 114 406; method of, 40; modernism and, 10,
Sopranos, The, multiple story lines of, 16 24, 61, 65; narrative innovations for, 3–4;
 Index 487

in 1940s, 5; as nonlinear, 1, 3; novelty on suspense: in blocks, 166–67; hard-boiled

20th century, 10; technical innovations detective story with, 120–21; Highsmith
in, 11 on, 244, 323; moving-spotlight narration
story within the story, 36–37, 44–53, 45–47, and, 183, 185, 350, 368; of 1940s, 245;
49, 52–53; embedding in, 93–94 police procedurals with, 332–33; in Pulp
Stout, Rex, 55–58, 455n67; Barzun on, Fiction, 15; risk-taking detective for, 289;
299, 302, 316, 455n71; Chandler on, sensation fiction with, 32; surprise or,
285–86; comedy and, 308–11, 317; 181–83, 193; thrillers and, 24–25, 120, 179;
crossover achievement of, 144, 194, in 2000s, 71; unreliable narrators and,
317; on detective stories, 297; dialogue 396; by Woolrich, 244, 271–82
and, 305–7, 313; Doyle and, 105; erotic Suspense (1940–1962), 245
provocation by, 296; on fair play, 298, Suspension of Mercy, A (1965), 320, 324
303; Fer-de-Lance by, 297, 300, 303, 305– Suspicion (1941), 235, 244, 384, 392
6, 311, 455n76; The Final Deduction by, Sutherland, William, Death Rides the Air
310; Gambit (1962) by, 313; Gardner and, Line by, 143–44
25; for Great Detective tradition, 286; on Swanson, Peter: All the Beautiful Lies by,
Hammett, 299, 317; on Holmes/Watson, 397; The Kind Worth Killing by, 399
236; The League of Frightened Men by, switch-back, 48, 420n62
315; Murder by the Book by, 312, 315; on switcheroo: of gag, 15; Noises Off and, 111–12
mystery stories, 297; narrator by, 134,
298; Plot It Yourself by, 316; pulp stories tags: chapter titles and, 4, 17, 369–70; for
by, 296; reflexive form of, 314–16; Seed clarity, 67–68; for connections, 390;
on the Wind by, 12, 24, 296–97; The Silent Gone Girl with, 394, 395, 400; Memento
Speaker by, 311–12; Some Buried Caesar (2000) and, 16; in 1910s, 54; for
by, 308; Too Many Cooks by, 305–6, 310, segmentation, 96, 389; of speakers, 401;
456n100; Edmund Wilson on, 314; Wolfe for understanding, 67–68, 96–97, 390
novels by, 285, 295–97, 299; Wolfe Pack Tarantino, Quentin: block construction
on, 300; world building by, 301, 313. See and, 358, 361, 367–69, 376; on
also Goodwin, Archie; Wolfe, Nero chronology, 357–58; on critics, 383;
Strahan, Kay Cleaver, Footprints by, 145–46 Death Proof by, 367; dialogue by, 361;
Strange Interlude (1928), 65 Four Rooms and, 367; The Hateful Eight
Stranger, The (1942), 213–14 by, 252, 368–69; on The Hunter, 362;
Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), 265, 266 Inglourious Basterds by, 367–68; Jackie
Strangers on a Train (1951), Highsmith and Brown by, 360, 368–69; Kill Bill films by,
Hitchcock on, 319–25 369; on The Killing, 5, 368; on Leonard,
stream-of-consciousness, 63, 65, 422n11; 360–61; Leonard and, 360–62, 367, 373;
Chandler and, 229, 233; Hammett and, Natural Born Killers by, 358–61, 363,
196, 218, 446n123; as internal narration, 367, 372–73; 1990s and, 25; nonlinear
263; Komroff on, 87; in mystery stories, techniques and, 358, 376; Once Upon
262–63; viewpoint and, 69 a Time in Hollywood by, 368, 462n20;
structure: parallels in, 16–17; playwrights pulp fiction for, 22; Reservoir Dogs by,
on, 43 5, 197, 357–58, 361, 367–68, 370–73; True
Study in Scarlet, A (1887), 121, 125, 204 Romance by, 358, 360–62, 365, 367, 370.
Study of a Novel, The (1905), 40 See also Pulp Fiction
subjectivity: Hangover Square and, 112, 244, Tarkington, Booth, 66
264–65, 267, 273, 319; innovation and, Tartt, Donna, 110, 155
267–68; 1940s on, 274 Taruskin, Richard, 60
Sunburn (2018), 403 “taste of the construction,” 116, 406, 411;
Sunset Boulevard (1950), 22, 268 Collins and, 32–33, 119, 397, 404
 488 Index

Technique of the Mystery Story (1913), 123, Thompson, Jim, 251; Nothing More Than
125, 137 Murder by, 247–48
television: All in the Family and, 11; Dragnet Those Who Walk Away (1967), 321, 324
on, 250, 327–28, 330, 332; Hill Street Blues 3-2-1 chronologies, 12, 16–17, 114, 142
on, 16, 335; mass storytelling for, 101; 39 Steps, The (1935), 182, 185–86, 187, 190
mystery stories on, 281; plotting for, 32 three-act structure, 18
temporal order: The Birth of a Nation on, Three Colors: Blue (1993), 6
48, 49, 54; as broken, 30; Conrad on, thrillers, 22; in blocks, 167; Christie on, 157,
11; Golden Age detective stories and, 169; crossovers and, 79–80; emotions
141–45; Gone Girl time tags for, 394, 395, for, 160; as films, 180–81; Golden Age
400; How Like a God and, 55–58, 61, 79; detective stories and, 161, 168, 193;
Intolerance and, 51, 62, 71; of Memento Hitchcock on, 179–80, 185, 403; as
(1999), 12, 17–18, 409; narrative and, 10, man-on-the-run plot, 244; mental lives
60; 1910s on, 39–40, 142; in 1920s, 210; for, 128; narration in, 173; in 1910s and
1930s films on, 16; 1940s and, 249–50; in 1920s, 160–61; Rebecca as, 259, 390;
nonlinear storytelling, 1, 3; playwrights Rinehart on detective stories and, 163;
on, 43; of plot, 10; precedents in, 5; in Pulp suspense and, 24–25, 120, 179; of 2010s,
Fiction, 4, 14–15; rejection of, 59; repetition 168; by Woolrich, 244, 271–82. See also
clarifying, 14–15; reverse chronology in, psychological thriller
16, 142, 397, 409; segmentation for, 144; Thunder on the Left (1925), 68
Sondheim and time shifts in, 114; switch- time. See temporal order
back and, 48, 420n62; tags and names time mysteries, 74–75
showing, 400; Tarantino on, 357–58; tints title pages, in Intolerance, 51–52, 52–53
indicating, 51, 62 To Love and Be Wise (1950), 263
Ten Days’ Wonder (1948), 237–38, 259, 448n7 Tom Ripley (character), 320–25, 335
Ten Million Photoplay Plots (1919), 41 Too Many Cooks (1938), 305–6, 310, 456n100
Tey, Josephine: Daughter of Time by, 258; To To the Gallows I Must Go (1931), 172, 185
Love and Be Wise by, 263 To the Lighthouse (1927), 61
theater: flashbacks in, 29–31, 43; for light To the Power of Three (2005), 388
modernism, 73–74; murder stories in, Toynbee, Philip, Prothalamium by, 95–96
129; mystery stories in, 103, 281; in 1940s, Tracy, Don, Criss Cross by, 172, 247, 337, 355
86, 90; puzzle plots and, 179; restricted Treadwell, Sophie, Eye of the Beholder by,
viewpoints in, 136; Thornton Wilder 43, 83
and, 74–75 Treat, Lawrence: V as in Victim by, 327
They Live by Night (1949), 244, 359 Tremor of Forgery, The (1969), 323–24
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1935), 78 Trent’s Last Case (1913), 77, 124, 126, 143, 229,
Thin Man, The (1934), 306, 311; characters 238; as comedy, 307
of, 207–8; comedy in, 207–9, 209, 236, trial plots: block construction in, 147; with
307; detachment in, 214; as detective embedded stories, 148; flashbacks and,
story, 207; Knopf on, 199, 220; sex and, 147–49, 247; Gardner and, 293
199; as stream-of-consciousness, 218 Trollope, Anthony, 32–33, 119, 153, 397, 404
third-person: The Glass Key with, 262, 293; True Romance (1987), 358, 360–62, 365,
by Hammett, 214; moving-spotlight 367, 370
narration as, 34, 136, 242 Trumbo, Dalton, 70
Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, The trusting onlooker, Sayers on, 134
(1916), 41 “Turn of the Screw, The” (1898), 37, 77
This Is What Happened (2018), 399 Twain, Mark, 105, 309, 314, 317
This Sweet Sickness (1960), 322–23 ‘Twas Ever Thus (1915), 50, 421n67
Thompson, A. E., 44 12.30 from Croydon, The (1934), 165
 Index 489

21st Century Screenplay, The (Aronson), 4–5, viewpoint: The Ambassadors and, 58;
10, 376 audience on, 396–97; The Big Sleep and,
twists: audience on, 376, 396–97; fair play 243, 295; block construction and, 145;
tenet and, 378–80, 379, 380; in Gone Girl, Conrad on, 11, 31; Death in the Clouds
384; from multiple viewpoints, 398; from and, 140–41, 251–53; dispersal of, 10;
narration, 407, 463n27; in Pulp Fiction, dossier novel on, 44; films and, 45, 46–
2, 3–5, 15, 18, 370–72, 371, 376, 380–81; 47; Great Detective tradition and, 161;
in Seven Keys to Baldpate, 377; types of, C. Hamilton on, 41–42; Hammett and
376–78; unreliable narrators and, 176, Chandler on, 285; Highsmith on, 318,
401, 404 323–25; of “In the Cage,” 34–35, 38, 58;
Two Faces of January, The (1964), 318, 323 italics and, 66–68, 247–48, 401, 424n45,
Two Mrs. Carrolls, The (1935), 175 424n57; James and, 33–34; in The Lady in
Tyre, Nedra, The Death of an Intruder by, 385 the Lake, 222, 403; The Lodger with, 158–
60; Lubbock on, 136, 250; in The Maltese
Ultraism, 58–66, 77, 87; 1920 to 1935, 89, Falcon, 205; modernism and multiplying,
406; on realism and viewpoints, 149 65; Murderer’s Ladder in, 287, 290; in
Ulysses (Joyce), 7, 17, 58, 63–65, 427n15; as Murder Must Advertise, 137–40, 146,
best-seller, 315; grid layouts for, 71, 95; 166, 200; in mysteries, 133–36; mystery
mythic foundations and, 100 from shifting, 33; narrative and, 60; 1910s
Understanding Fiction (1943), 442n12 influencing, 39–40; 1940s and multiple,
Unfinished Crime, The (1935), 172–73 90, 250, 262; Nolan and, 53, 423n31;
unreliable narrators, 137, 393, 407; in domestic as nonlinear, 1, 3; as objective third
suspense, 410; Golden Age whodunits person, 262; playwrights on, 43; Poe on,
and, 245; 1940s and, 258; suppressed 133–34, 150; precedents in shifting, 5; in
information and, 267, 392; suspense and, psychological thrillers, 185–86; in radio,
396; twists and, 176, 401, 404 250–51; radio drama on, 69; as restricted
urban milieu, 234; Chandler and, 233, 238, or omniscient, 136; segmentation for,
240; Dos Passos and, 65; Gardner and, 144; sensory differences in, 436n83;
289, 291; Hammett on, 202; man-on-the- in The Sign of the Spade, 136–37, 137;
run plot as, 244; Red Harvest and, 209; Sondheim and, 114; Stark and multiple,
Spade of, 204; Woolrich on, 273 398; stream-of-consciousness and, 69;
Usual Suspects, The (1995), 4, 234, 374, 376 as subjective, 43; Ultraism on, 149;
voice-overs as, 92, 257, 402; Watson and
Van Dine, S. S., 121, 124, 196, 286, 354; The Holmes in, 133–34; Welles manipulating,
“Canary” Murder Case by, 125–26, 143; 94; Westlake on, 347–48; The Woman in
fake footnotes by, 255; with phantom Question with, 92–93, 116, 248, 326–27;
narrator, 134; on puzzle plots, 127; by Woolrich, 274–77, 280–81
realism and, 131, 197; The Scarab Murder Vine, Barbara, The Child’s Child by, 282
Case by, 194; as Willard H. Wright, 127 visual arts: cinema and, 45, 45; familiar
variorum principle: in audience, 22; Black forms in, 60
Mask and, 219; definition of, 396; of Voice in the Dark, A (1919), 29–31, 33, 38–39,
favored and less-common options, 10; 43, 54, 58; as crossover, 80; replay in, 81,
innovation and, 39–44, 236; novelty in, 142, 248
12–13 voice-overs: in comic books, 264; in films,
Varnedoe, Kirk, 60 69, 147, 148, 177, 232, 262–63, 356;
Varying Shore, The (1921), 12, 43 flashbacks and, 85, 247, 265; as narrator,
V as in Victim (1945), 327 263, 327, 340–41, 374, 414n17; in radio,
victim plots, 174–79 69, 243, 263; as viewpoint, 92, 257, 402;
Vidal, Gore, 67; In a Yellow Wood by, 96–97 writers mimicking, 17
 490 Index

Vosper, Frank, Love from a Stranger by, 1920s and Golden Age, 210, 275; relevant
175–76, 180, 183 information in, 123, 145; “taste of the
construction” in, 32–33, 116, 119, 397, 404,
Waiting for Lefty (1935), 88 406, 411
Wallsten, Robert, Eight O’Clock Tuesday by, Wicked Girls, The (2012), 395, 397
249–50 Wilde, Percival, Inquest by, 147
Waltz Into Darkness (1947), 273, 281 Wilde Lake (2016), 403
War and Peace (1869), 32 Wilder, Thornton: Bridge of San Luis Rey by,
Ware, Ruth, One by One by, 400 67, 87, 89, 144; as middlebrow, 74; Our
“War of the Worlds,” Welles radio version Town by, 75, 110, 237, 249, 409
of, 94 William Morrow publishers, 286
Waste Land, The (1922), 100, 331 Williams, Tennessee, 92
Watson, S. J., Before I Go to Sleep by, 395, 399 Wilson, Edmund, 153, 430n77; on detective
Waugh, Evelyn, 7 stories, 104–8, 116, 230; as gatekeeper,
Waves, The (1931), 7, 65–67, 87 235; Ross Macdonald on, 448n12; on
Webb, Jack, Dragnet by, 250, 327–28, 330, 332 puzzle stories, 245; on Stout, 314; “Who
Weinman, Sarah, 395–96 Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” by,
Welles, Orson, radio shows of, 94 105; on Woolf and Joyce, 107, 317
Wells, Carolyn, 123, 125, 137 Wilson, Mitchell, 244, 274
Wells, H. G., 39 Wings of the Dove, The (1902), 36
Westlake, Donald E., 459n10; Adios, Wire, The, multiple story lines of, 16
Scheherazade by, 343–44; on Chandler, Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 8, 22
221; comedy and, 342–43; four-part Wodehouse, P. G., 26, 111, 310–11, 317,
structure by, 347–52; on gothic stories, 456nn102–3
178; The Grifters by, 353, 353, 461n36; Wolfe Pack, 300
heist stories and, 337, 344–47, 460n26; woman-in-peril plots: domestic suspense
The Hot Rock by, 344, 348–49; John and, 384–86; escape and, 175; Before
Dortmunder character by, 344, 348–49, the Fact as, 169–70, 175, 185, 385, 392;
354–55; as minimalist, 336; Parker Gardner on, 289; Gothic fiction and, 122,
character of, 344–47, 349, 460n15; on 170, 174, 385, 397; Jamaica Inn as, 182, 185,
viewpoint, 347–48; on Wolfe, 298. See 440n65; Laura as, 103, 235, 245, 254–57,
also Stark, Richard 369, 385, 406; Rebecca as, 86–87, 103,
What the Dead Know (2007), 388 175, 185, 193, 235, 385, 398; Sorry, Wrong
Where Are the Children? (1975), 386–89, 392 Number as, 89, 235, 245, 384; Suspicion
Whitcomb, Seldon, 40 as, 235, 244, 384, 392; “taste of the
White, Lionel, Clean Break by, 5, 7, 340–41, construction” in, 32–33, 116, 119, 397, 404,
361–62, 368 406, 411; woman and girl in, 464n26
Whitehead, Colson, Harlem Shuffle by, 410 Woman in Question, The (1950): flashbacks
“Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” in, 81–85, 82, 84, 90, 94, 143, 426nn1–2;
(Wilson, E.), 105 investigation plot in, 155; perspectives in,
whodunits, 24–25; with baffling crimes, 92–93, 116, 248, 326–27; as quirky, 408
123; Chandler for, 221; experiments Woman in the Window, The (1944), 267,
in, 156, 406; Faulkner writing, 103; 401, 403
formal strategies of, 245; of Golden Age Woman in White, The (1860), 6, 32–33; with
detective stories, 234, 236, 245, 248, 250, crime and homes, 121
258, 387; Gothic fiction and, 120; hard- Woman Under Oath, The (1919), 142, 143
boiled detective story as, 120; howdunit Woolf, Virginia, 3, 69; on conventions and
and, 121, 123, 146; literary artistry and, new methods, 66; grid layouts by, 95;
123–24; as mystery storytelling, 103; High Modernism of, 24; on psyche, 100;
 Index 491

on science and culture changes, 59; The Wright, Willard Huntington. See Van Dine,
Waves by, 7, 65–67, 87; Edmund Wilson S. S.
on, 107, 317 writing manuals, 239; on craft, 23, 408; The
Woolrich, Cornell, 244, 282; Black Alibi by, Craft of Fiction as, 58; craft study with,
272–74, 276; The Black Angel by, 272, 23; The Fiction Factory as, 287, 408; How
275–76; The Black Path of Fear by, 272, to Write a Novel as, 87, 99; The Manual
276; block construction by, 275–76, of the Art of Fiction as, 41; Materials and
279–80; The Bride Wore Black by, 272, Methods of Fiction as, 41; for screenplays,
274–75; descriptions by, 276–77; for films, 18, 45, 87; The Study of a Novel as, 40;
273, 278–80; Fright by, 279; I Married a Technique of the Mystery Story as, 123,
Dead Man by, 272–73, 276; murder stories 125, 137; Ten Million Photoplay Plots as,
by, 274; Night Has a Thousand Eyes by, 41; The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations
272, 276, 279; Rear Window by, 31, 273, as, 41
277–78; Rendezvous in Black by, 272, 274, Wuthering Heights (1847), 36–37, 90, 418n16
276–77; stylistic howlers by, 272, 274, 281; Wycherly Woman, The (1961), 241
uncompleted autobiography by, 276; on
viewpoint, 274–77, 280–81; Waltz Into X v. Rex (1934), 165, 274
Darkness by, 273, 281; weirdness of, 272–73
world building: by Conan Doyle, 299–300; Young and Innocent (1937), 185–86, 188, 190
by Stout, 301, 313
Wright, Richard, The Man Who Lived zeitgeist, as material for plots, 10–11
Underground by, 104 Zola, Emile, 465n10
FILM AND CULTURE
A series of Columbia University Press

Edited by John Belton

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Showstoppers: Busby Berkeley and the Tradition of Spectacle Martin Rubin
Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II Thomas Doherty
Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy William Paul
Laughing Hysterically: American Screen Comedy of the 1950s Ed Sikov
Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema
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The Cinema of Max Ophuls: Magisterial Vision and the Figure of Woman Susan M. White
Black Women as Cultural Readers Jacqueline Bobo
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Darrell William Davis
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Thomas Doherty
Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception, Representation, Modernity
James Lastra
Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts Ben Singer
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Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony Richard Allen
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Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era Edited by Noah Isenberg
African Film and Literature: Adapting Violence to the Screen Lindiwe Dovey
Film, A Sound Art Michel Chion
Film Studies: An Introduction Ed Sikov
Hollywood Lighting from the Silent Era to Film Noir Patrick Keating
Levinas and the Cinema of Redemption: Time, Ethics, and the Feminine Sam B. Girgus
Counter-Archive: Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète Paula Amad
Indie: An American Film Culture Michael Z. Newman
Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image Rosalind Galt
Film and Stereotype: A Challenge for Cinema and Theory Jörg Schweinitz
Chinese Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts Edited by Lingzhen Wang
Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Cinema Angela M. Smith
Hollywood’s Copyright Wars: From Edison to the Internet Peter Decherney
Electric Dreamland: Amusement Parks, Movies, and American Modernity Lauren Rabinovitz
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Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–1939 Thomas Doherty
Cinematic Appeals: The Experience of New Movie Technologies Ariel Rogers
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Deathwatch: American Film, Technology, and the End of Life C. Scott Combs
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Maya Deren: Incomplete Control Sarah Keller
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The End of Cinema? A Medium in Crisis in the Digital Age André Gaudreault
and Philippe Marion
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Unspeakable Histories: Film and the Experience of Catastrophe William Guynn
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After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation Erika Balsom
Words on Screen Michel Chion
Essays on the Essay Film Edited by Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan
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