Decoding Gaudiness in Early Hard-Boiled Fiction

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The term “gaudy” does not appear in Hammett’s last novel titled The Thin Man (1934).

2. “Hammet was no avant-gardist,” writes Naremore, “but the impersonal, ironic technique of his novels grows out of a deeply critical and sceptical attitude towards American society” (62).

3. “Second-generation hard-boiled writers – from the post-World War II period forward – also found inspiration,” notes Leonard Cassuto, “in the movies made from these earlier books, and the film noir that became popular in the 1940s” (5).

4. Before his death in 1959, Chandler drafted four chapters of an eighth novel in which Loring admits that the “chi-chi” furnished house she has rented for them is “a bit too gaudy” (1, 7). On the centenary of his birth, the executors of Chandler’s estate commissioned Robert B. Parker to complete the unfinished narrative, which was published as Poodle Springs (1989). The text follows the married couple’s relocation to a California resort city (Palm Springs), but disaffected from his wife’s social circle Marlowe returns alone to Los Angeles, though he and Linda Loring remain lovers. The moment when they realize their marriage is not working comes when Loring remarks that she has enough money for both of them. Marlowe’s response, as Parker crafts it, is true to his Chandlerian ethos: “Which is why, as I keep trying to explain, I can’t take it. The way I keep from being a failure is to be free. To be my absolute own man. Me. Marlowe, the Galahad of the gutter. I decide what I’ll do. I won’t be bought, or pushed, not even by love. You’re a success if you have money, but you give up too much” (208-09).

5. John G. Cawelti discusses Moose Malloy’s parallel to Jay Gatsby at more length in Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (180-81).

6. Drawing on Roland Marchand’s Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940, which discusses the importance of the “first impression” in attire as promulgated by “slick-paper” magazine advertisements, Smith argues that “Hard-boiled detectives paid close attention to the details of self-presentation – speech, dress, manners – demystifying the ways in which gender, class, and culture were embodied in consumer society. The hard-boiled hero was a nostalgic re-creation of the artisan, but he was at the same time a pragmatic manipulator of commodities, a savvy citizen of a consumer’s world” (78).