TOPIC 60.

NORTH AMERICAN CRIME NOVEL: DASHIELL HAMMETT AND

RAYMOND CHANDLER. ENGLISH DETECTIVE NOVEL: PHYLLIS DOROTHY
JAMES

1. INTRODUCTION

In the realm of education, the study of literature and history plays a crucial role
in shaping our understanding of the world. Both disciplines, while distinct, are deeply
intertwined, offering unique perspectives on human experiences and societal
development. Literature, with its rich tapestry of stories, poems, and essays, provides
a mirror to the past and present, reflecting the values, struggles, and aspirations of
different times. History, on the other hand, offers a chronological account of human
events, helping us to understand the contexts in which literary works were created.

By examining literature alongside history, students gain a comprehensive view

of how human thought and culture evolve. Literature often serves as a response to
historical events, capturing the emotional and intellectual climate of its time. It allows
readers to engage with the personal and collective narratives that history alone might
not fully convey. Through characters, plots, and settings, literature brings history to
life, offering insights into the human condition that transcend dates and facts.

2. Dashiell Hammett (1894 – 1961)

Born in 1864, Samuel Dashiell Hammett spent most of his childhood in

Baltimore. In 1915, he became an operative of the Pinkerton Agency (a famous private
detective agency). This work enabled Hammett to travel throughout the country. He
left the agency and returned to it many times in the next years. And these Pinkerton
experiences were his source for much of his future literary material. They were to him
something of what piloting was to Mark Twain or working as a seaman to Melville, or
soldering to Hemingway.

Hammett left Pinkerton to serve in WWI. As a consequence, he developed a

severe case of tuberculosis which was to plague him intermittently for the rest of his
life. In late 1921, he was forced to end his Pinkerton career. Weak, uneducated, with
a wife and child to support, Hammett enrolled in a business school, learned to type,

1
and started writing short sketches. He quickly found his subject in his earlier life as a
detective, and almost as quickly began to publish his stories in Black Mask.

Between 1923 and 1931, he wrote over sixty short stories and four of his five
novels: Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key and The
Thin Man. His stories emerge from the hypocrisies of prohibition and from the
prosperity, the urban migrations, the wayward, drifting populations, the new sexual
freedoms, the burgeoning consumerism, and the excitement of a nation on the make.
He demonstrates the disillusion, frustration, detachment, and sense of betrayal that
ring such lives and succeed such hopes, and they cynicism and hardness that become
survival tactics.

Hammett writes best and most often about the world of cops, bootleggers,
hoodlums, and small-time crime. Apartments, rented rooms, and other signs of
temporariness (provisional) and juxtaposed to the substantial and serene residences
of the wealthy. Drink and sexuality become metaphors for the separation of law and
ideals from the experiences and desires of the characters: a gap invariably bridged by
crime, and the criminal.

The detective’s job is to enter this abyss and sanitize it. his accomplishments
are often almost janitorial, removing annoying impediments to the security and
pleasure of the client. He functions by the same methods as the criminal world he
opposes. He abstains from the vices of his employers, covertly condemns their lives,
but rarely raises an overt challenge, at least in the stories.

Hammett’s works seem the product of a happy conjunction of man, mood, and
moment. There is a remarkable development in literary control and skills, but the
exterior world of the novels is of a piece. They record a particular, if peculiar, urban
environment.

3. Raymond Chandler (1888 – 1959)

Chandler’s works seem the products of a happy disjunction of person, place,

and times. He spent his childhood in Chicago and Nebraska until his parents divorced
when he was eight and he moved with his mother to England. Chandler has

2
maintained his American citizenship, however, and in 1914 he travelled to California
to escape the stifling family atmosphere and his Civil Service job. He enlisted in the
Canadian armed forces during WWI, then settled permanently in Los Angeles with his
mother and went to work as an accountant for several oil companies.

In his forties, he was a heavy drinker. His mother had died. He began to write
mystery stories, working at them systematically by rewriting the fiction he found in
magazines like Black Mask. It was only in the 1940s, with his later novels and his film
work, that he began to live comfortably on the returns from his writing.

Chandler made two major contributions to the detective form in America: the
subservience (sumisión) of realism to a romantic quest, and the development of the
scenic and verbal properties – the tone of weariness highlighted by the shocking smile
– that have become a trademark of the crime novel.

Chandler creates an alternative world in which the aging writer turns into
middle-aged detective, and the sedentary British aesthete becomes an able,
attractive, and mobile California native. He relies entirely on second-hand sources for
his knowledge of police and detective procedures. His hero, Phillip Marlowe, grows
from thirty-three to forty-five during the nineteen years of novels, while he himself
becomes a weary, occasionally suicidal, and frequently alcoholic seventy. His
detective’s attitudes often seem anachronistic, as if he speaks from and lives in two
times and two places. Chandler writers with a double vision, as an American trained
in England: viewing California, participating in its culture, and relishing the American
vernacular as an outsider. Chandler’s novels are a sustained study of Los Angeles
over the memory span of a life.

Chandler describes the cultural, economic, architectural, and geographic

peculiarities of this changing world, from the way neighbourhoods alter in their class,
ethnic, and racial balances to the styles of wealth and the fashion in clothes. His terrain
is wider than Hammett’s and the car becomes a third home for the detective, after his
apartment and office. But the main story Chandler has to tell is not about the surface
alterations of the region, but the inner family circumstances of those who live there:
how their lives intersect, and how the past re-emerges in the midst of present crises.

3
4. Phyllis Dorothy James (1920 – 2014)

P.D. James seems to combine all the traditional ingredients of the English
detective novel with a more modern reception of the universe it portrays.

One of the most striking features of the English detective novel is just how
quintessentially English it is. The bloodiest deeds are perpetrated in a countryside
renowned for its peacefulness, its unchangingness. Detective novelists have always
preferred that England of cosy villages and market towns which it is now so hard to
find except in books and on travel posters. P.D. James’s books all take place in
England and she too shows a predilection for a rural setting, usually the Fen Country
but sometimes Dorset with occasion forays into London and novel centred in
Cambridge. James devotes a considerable amount of space to setting the scene and,
more important, creating an atmosphere.

Precision in her descriptive passages is one of P.D. James’s distinguishing

features and if this is true of her natural descriptions it is even more evident when she
presents the buildings which are so important to the story. She obviously has a keen
interest in and detailed knowledge of architecture and provides the reader with a
wealth of technical details. This could be gratuitous but in fact is used to complement
other elements of the story. If we are what we eat we are also the place we live in.
One technique she uses so frequently that it is almost a trademark is to sum up the
essential traits of a character’s personality through the books on his shelves or, more
subtly, through the paintings on his walls.

Most of James’s books are centred on her policeman hero, Commander Adam
Dagliesh of the Metropolitan Police, but she differs from her predecessors and her
contemporaries in that she introduces alongside him a number of other policemen of
different ranks and different forces. Daeglish’s collaborators vary from case but are as
inseparable as their forebears Holmes and Watson. The cast of policemen that
appears in James’s novels covers a wide range and each individual is treated with an
unusual amount of depth.

P.D. James, while incorporating most of the traditional ingredients of the genre,
goes beyond these conventions, confronting us with real life and real people and

4
instead of helping the reader to escape from the problems they pose she forces the
reader into reflection. She brings a new seriousness to a frivolous form and gives it a
moral dimension.

5. CONCLUSION AND TEACHING IMPLICATIONS

It is not an easy task for teachers to include literary works like the ones
proposed in this essay in an EFL classroom, not to mention historical events that even
though can be considered of great importance due to cultural implications are hard to
introduce in a syllabus aimed at teenagers. Non-adapted literary works and historical
texts are cognitively more demanding and the students’ age, on this matter, is crucial.

The legal framework that establishes the curriculum for Secondary and Post-
Obligatory levels, namely Royal Decree 217/2022, of March 29, and Royal Decree
243/2022, of April 5, at national level and Decree 65/2022, of July 20, and Decree
64/2022, of July 20, at regional level, take into account this issue and set up specific
competences, for instance, specific competence 6, to deal with literary texts and
cultural aspects since very early stages of their secondary education.

Encouraging students to become long-life readers has always been an issue

that educational professionals and legislators have tried to solve over the years. Not
all students live in a reading-friendly environment in which they have access to other
books than the mandatory ones in the school curriculum. How to make literary texts
available for those who do not have access to mainstream literature or literature in
general can be a good reason to work with this type of texts.

6. BIBLIOGRAPHY

- Allan, Janice M., et al., eds. The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction. Abingdon:
Routledge, 2020.

- Levine, Robert S., et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of American Literature: Volume
A and B. Vol. 1. WW Norton & Company, 2016.

- Lorenzo, María Magdalena García, and Ana Isabel Zamorano Rueda. Modern and
Contemporary American Literature. Editorial UNED, 2013.

5
6