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The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir
This book considers a recurrent figure in American literature: the solitary white man moving through urban space. The descendent of 19th-century frontier and western heroes, the figure reemerges in 1930s-’50s America as the “tough guy.” The Street Was Mine looks to the tough guy in the works of hardboiled novelists Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep) and James M. Cain (Double
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Hardcover, 256 pages
Published
December 20th 2002
by Palgrave Macmillan
(first published November 15th 2002)
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Interestingly, the woman who wrote this critical work on hardboiled fiction (and film noir, as the title recounts) is also a rising star in noir-revivalism (I guess that's what I'd call it). I've not read any of those books (Die a Little, Queenpin, Song is You), but she's been highly praised by the likes of James Ellroy and has won an Edgar award for Queenpin, after a nomination for Die a Little. When I have time, I'll check her out. For now, I can recommend this work as a focused appraisal of t...more
This was a really excellent study of masculinity in noir and hard-boiled fiction. Abbott finds that the uncertainty and anxiety in this kind of detective fiction is watered down in the movie versions, but there is still a nagging doubt over the role of men in these texts and how far they conform to patrirachal norms. There is some fascinating discussion of noir heroes and femme fatales in classic noir movies, as well as some illuminating commentary on neo-noir films, especially near the end wher...more
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Megan E. Abbott is Assistant Professor of English at State University of New York-Oswego.
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