Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
132
result(s) for
"American hard-boiled detective fiction"
Sort by:
Los Angeles stories
\"Los Angeles Stories is a collection of loosely linked, noir-ish tales that evoke a bygone era in one of America's most iconic cities. In post-World War II Los Angeles, as power was concentrating and fortunes were being made, a do-it-yourself culture of cool cats, outsiders, and oddballs populated the old downtown neighborhoods of Bunker Hill and Chavez Ravine. Ordinary working folks rubbed elbows with petty criminals, grifters, and all sorts of women at foggy end-of-the-line outposts in Venice Beach and Santa Monica.Rich with the essence and character of the times, suffused with the patois of the city's underclass, these are stories about the common people of Los Angeles, \"a sunny place for shady people,\" and the strange things that happen to them. Musicians, gun shop owners, streetwalkers, tailors, door-to-door salesmen, drifters, housewives, dentists, pornographers, new arrivals, and hard-bitten denizens all intersect in cleverly plotted stories that center around some kind of shadowy activity. This quirky love letter to a lost way of life will appeal to fans of hard-boiled fiction and anyone interested in the city itself. Ry Cooder is a world-famous guitarist, singer, and composer known for his slide guitar work, interest in roots music, and more recently for his collaborations with traditional musicians from many countries, including The Buena Vista Social Club. He has composed soundtracks for more than twenty films, including Paris, Texas. Two recent albums were accompanied by stories Cooder wrote to accompany the music. This is his first published collection of stories\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Die problematisering van die etiese: Deon Meyer se Infanta as hardboiled misdaadroman
Deon Meyer’s fifth crime novel, Infanta (2004), appears inherently South African, both as regards a clearly recognisable physical environment and as social, political and moral landscape. However, it also stands in a long international literary tradition of crime and detective fiction. Unlike the majority of earlier Afrikaans crime novels, Meyer’s work relates to the American hard-boiled tradition rather than the British tradition of genteel detective fiction. It is when Meyer’s novel is read in the context of the traditional characteristics of the genre that it emerges in a surprising way how the novel not only attempts an objective description of the South African social and moral condition, but also serves as an implicit judgment of the situation, a judgment from which the reader is not excluded.
Journal Article
Hard-Boiled Reinvestigations of African American History in Barbara Neely’s Blanche on the Lam (1992) and Blanche Among the Talented Tenth (1994)
Barbara Neely’s first two hard-boiled novels manifest features of contemporary narratives of slavery. The paper investigates the hybrid and seemingly ambiguous co-presence of two generic traditions in Neely: the hard-boiled crime novel’s lonely detective hero and scepticism are contrasted to the neo-slave narrative’s trickster protagonist and hopeful stance. The paper demonstrates that the hybrid presence of the two generic traditions withstands a binary logic of social scepticism versus hope. Neely’s novels trace a personal strategy of social resistance performed by Blanche White, Neely’s black female detective, who fights institutional racism via individual acts of speaking out and producing alternative knowledge.
Journal Article
“Mean and Shabby and Wrinkled”: The Experience of Middle Age in American Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction
This article examines the nuance of aging masculinity presented in hard-boiled detective fiction, something that is frequently lost amid sleek Hollywood portrayals of these characters. The detectives of this genre are inevitably middle-aged men and aging—along with vulnerability—is thus a fundamental, if often disavowed, element of the form. Among the early authors of this school, Raymond Chandler proves to be the most reflective on the topic of mortality. This article examines The Long Goodbye (1953) as a guiding illustration of hard-boiled insights into aging, along with supporting examples from the genre’s history, particularly the works of Dashiell Hammett. The question of hard-boiled realism is of special note to this discussion, as these works ostensibly offer a platform for more “true” representations of male bodies as they age. However, Chandler’s hard-boiled realism, typified in the 1944 essay “The Simple Art of Murder”, bases authenticity on style and language rather than on verisimilitude. This conflicting realism undoubtedly explains the halting representations of aging in hard-boiled fiction. The detective’s experience of age can be disavowed with a well-chosen quip or a well-placed right hook. This essay will read this inherent tension—that is, between articulation and renunciation— with respect to male aging within the hard-boiled ethos.
Journal Article
Death at Gills Rock
After tracking a clever killer in
Death Stalks Door County , park ranger and former Chicago homicide detective Dave Cubiak is elected Door County sheriff. His newest challenge arrives as spring brings not new life but tragic death to the isolated fishing village of Gills Rock. Three prominent World War II veterans who are about to be honored for their military heroics die from carbon monoxide poisoning during a weekly card game. Blame falls to a faulty heater but Cubiak puzzles over details. When one of the widows receives a message claiming the men “got what they deserved,” he realizes that there may be more to the deaths than a simple accident. Investigating, Cubiak discovers that the men’s veneer of success and respectability hides a trail of lies and betrayal that stems from a single, desperate act of treachery and eventually spreads a web of deceit across the peninsula. In a dark, moody tale that spans more than half a century, Cubiak encounters a host of suspects with motives for murder. Amid broken dreams, corruption, and loss, he sorts out the truth.
Death at Gills Rock is the second book in Patricia Skalka’s Dave Cubiak Door County Mystery series.
eBook
Traducir el policial: Aproximaciones al género en La traducción (1998), de Pablo De Santis
Los dispersos y acotados estudios sobre la obra de Pablo De Santis tienden a considerar que sus textos están atravesados por el género policial, pero al mismo tiempo no hay producciones que justifiquen de manera sistemática dicha afirmación. Así, en este trabajo nos centramos en La traducción (publicada originalmente en 1998 y fi nalista del Premio Planeta en 1997), con la intención de analizar las modalidades en que esta novela se acerca y trabaja con distintos aspectos del amplio género policial. En primer lugar, analizamos la doble delimitación espacial y la presencia de una lengua extranjera como elementos que nos permiten asociar la novela con la vertiente clásica del policial. Luego nos centramos en el problema de la nacionalización de género y la figura del comisario, factores que permiten asociar la ficción con la tradición local del género. También nos abocamos a la historia de los lobos marinos, paralela a la trama principal, y en ella encontramos aspectos que traen a cuenta la novela negra. Por último, en base a las distintas cuestiones señaladas, indicamos los usos posibles del concepto de género. Con la sumatoria de estos elementos, veremos que La traducción manifiesta un conocimiento y un trabajo con el género policial muy precisos por parte de De Santis, aun en el caso de esta novela de cuyo carácter policial el propio autor reniega.
Journal Article
Postmodernism and Genre Fiction as Deferred Action: Haruki Murakami and the Noir Tradition
Conspicuous in the work of author Haruki Murakami are his use of the hard-boiled detective, in whom Murakami recognizes himself as a professional writer, and the problematizing of the boundaries that separate one genre from another and circumscribe genre discourse in general. By means of noir pastiche, Murakami carries these tropes into A Wild Sheep's Chase and Dance Dance Dance where they function within a larger critique of the postmodern. Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World takes this deployment of noir even further. In a skillful montage of alternating discursive modes, Murakami deconstructs noir itself, divesting it of its power to define a postmodern Japan that only exists in a politically conservative Japanese imagination, or in a peculiarly postmodern type of Orientalism within the Western imagination.
Journal Article
Hard‐Boiled/Noir Fiction
This chapter contains sections titled:
Black Mask and Early Hard‐Boiled Crime Fiction
Postwar America and the Paperback Revolution
Some Contemporary Transformations
References and Further Reading
Book Chapter
The American Novel of Mystery, Crime, and Detection
This chapter contains sections titled:
References and Further Reading
Book Chapter
