Colin,
Re your comments below:
"Isn't Hammett considered a Marxist and Red Harvest a Marxist
work?"
Hammett became a Marxist, or at least became sympathetic to
Marxism, after he met Hellman, which was, for practical
purposes, after he stopped writing
(or, more correctly, stopped being able to write), RED
HARVEST is often pointed to as a Marxist work, but it's
really quite free of any political commentary. It's no more
Marxist than Horace McCoy's short story,
"The Mopper-Up," or Daly's novel BETTER CORPSES, or Hammett's
own "Corkscrew," all of which follow similar themes.
It's possible, of course, to retroactively impose Marxist
beliefs on the book, but it's simply assuming way too much to
conclude that Hammett was including Mrxist philosophy in a
book that was written long before he ever developed Marsixt
philosphy.
This is not to say that, had Hammett continued to write once
he'd developed a more specific political viewpoint, that
those viewpoints wouldn't have found their way into his
fiction, it's just to say that those viewpoints hadn't
developed yet at the time he wrote HARVEST.
"I don't see any problem with the broad themes of Marxism in
hardboiled - in fact, I would think most Marxists would enjoy
the view of capitalist society that the genre (generally)
promulgates - corruption, crime etc. I can't really think of
a work that actually and nakedly promoted Marxism as a
political theory but materialism, a determinist view of
history and the idea of conflict in the dialectic can all sit
nicely within the genre."
Certainly many hard-boiled writers are left-of-center to
Marxist, including Dennis Lynds, Gordon deMarco, and, if you
leave the state and include procedural writers, the
Wahloos.
The thing is, there are just as many conservative to extreme
right-wing writers, Mickey Spillane, Richard S. Prather,
Warren Murphy, etc.
Hard-boiled is just a mode of story-telling, not a political
philosophy, and it's just as for a writer from either end of
the political spectrum to use it as an avenue of expression.
And, for that matter, to use it to tell a story that has no
real political ax to grind whatsoever.
JIM DOHERTY
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