Andrew Stewart’s Reviews > Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism > Status Update
Andrew Stewart
is on page 45 of 384
“For Daly and Hammett especially, the Klan came to represent an absurd, anti-modernism and served by contrast to highlight the distinctive features of their own aesthetic. The Klansmen in their stories were fantasists, dedicated to wild racial theories and outmoded dreams of social order. They defined everything that the hard boiled protagonist would refuse to be.”
— Jul 29, 2025 05:21AM
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Andrew Stewart
is on page 95 of 384
“At the same time, he never had any patience for “the spinster environment” of academic expertise or the “serious thoughts” of cultural pretense, and he decided their high minded removal from the demands of ordinary life.”
— Jul 29, 2025 12:44PM
Andrew Stewart
is on page 95 of 384
“where a later writer like Raymond Chandler would become enamoured of ‘the American vernacular’, for the way that it presented an alternative to sterile literary sophistication, Hammett saw in slang only “meaningless distortion”.
“In short, though he later became famous—or infamous as the case may be— for his socialist politics, Hamett was also an elitist..”
— Jul 29, 2025 12:42PM
“In short, though he later became famous—or infamous as the case may be— for his socialist politics, Hamett was also an elitist..”
Andrew Stewart
is on page 94 of 384
“[Dashiell Hammett] disdained his own pulp work… and he had a little butt scorn for most examples of detective fiction, refusing to treat it as a variety of entertainment with its own critical standards.” “literature,” he claimed “is good to the extent that it is art, and bad to the extent it isn’t”.
— Jul 29, 2025 12:38PM
