Journal Article

Sof’town Sleuths: The Hard-Boiled Genre Goes to Jo’Burg

Ball, Tyler Scott

2018

Overview

In an attempt to develop new constellations of world literature, this article places the writers of South Africa’s Drum generation within the orbit of the American hard-boiled genre. For a brief period in the 1950 s, Drum was home to a team of gifted writers who cut their literary teeth in the fast-paced, hard-drinking, crime-riddled streets of Sophiatown, Johannesburg’s last remaining black township. Their unique style was a blend of quick-witted Hollywood dialogue, a private detective’s street sense, and the hard-boiled aesthetic of writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Writing in English in the era of the Bantu Education Act (1953), Drum writers challenged attempts to retribalize the African natives with the counter discourse of an educated, urbanized, modern African. This article (dis)orients conventional treatments of both Drum writers and the hard-boiled tradition by tracing alternative lines of flight between seemingly disparate fields of study.

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Subject: 20th century / 7L (George Andrinopoulos) / Aesthetics / African American literature / Ambiguity / American literature / Authorship / Chandler, Raymond / Chandler, Raymond (1888-1959) / Cosmopolitanism / Crime drama / Crime fiction / Dialogue / English language / Epic literature / Faulkner, William (1897-1962) / Genre / Gordimer, Nadine (1923-2014) / Hammett, Dashiell (1894-1961) / Heroism & heroes / Jewish literature / Literary canon / Literary characters / Literary devices / Literary influences / Literature / Misogyny / Narrative techniques / Novels / Plot (Narrative) / Private investigators / Publishing / Publishing industry / South African literature / Themba, Can (Daniel Candoise) (1924-1968) / World literature / Writers