MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Thematic comparisons between hard-boiled detective fiction and medieval romance are not necessarily a new area of study in the field of detective fiction. However, attempts to identify the hard-boiled detective as a modern-day knight are misguided, not only ignoring the idealism within the medieval romance genre, but they also discount a central literary objective of the hard-boiled subgenre: to reject the idealism of romantic nationalism and illustrate the obsoleteness of those ideals in post-war American society. I contend that early twentieth-century, American hard-boiled detective fiction inverts central medieval themes, particularly authority and identity, and writers such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Mickey Spillane reject conceptions of medieval idealism, which were championed in the nineteenth century, through this distinct and deliberate inversion.
While critical study of Hammett and Chandler often favor analysis of their novels rather than their short stories, I will use a sampling of their shorter works to demonstrate the prominence of this medieval inversion. By the time Spillane begins to write, the inversion is already a well-established and fundamental feature of hard-boiled detective fiction. His more visceral, stylistic contributions serve to highlight the “exaggerated verisimilitude” of the hard-boiled world, which emphasize opportunism and physicality at the cost of moral idealism.
This paper will serve as more than an acknowledgment of medieval themes present in hard-boiled detective fiction or a reassessment of the modern-day knight label. Its significance rests in accounting for their presence and form centuries after the introduction within the romance genre. By approaching the topic in this way, there is an opportunity to begin to close the gap between two periods of history by way of the popular forms of romance literature each produced.