American crime fiction
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The genre of crime fiction in American literature and film covers a wide variety of styles and subgenres, but certain elements can be identified as being especially identified with American crime fiction. The private detective or private eye is the character most associated with American crime fiction, and as the private detective developed, he was part of a larger form known as the hardboiled school which referred to an attitude of toughness and cynicism that might be expressed by a policeman or lawyer as well as a private detective, though the private detective is the primary embodiment of the hardboiled school. Many of these novels and films use the private detective himself as the filter through which the rest of the story is told, either because he (and they were overwhelmingly male until recently) tells the story in the first-person or as narrator or because he is the central element in every scene and the viewer or reader learns only what he does. An examination of several of these works shows how certain traits are perpetuated in different private eye characters and how that character is to be found again and again in similar situations and a similar setting. The Hollywood motion picture tends to be developed in generic categories that are easy to identify, easy to market, and repetitive in the way they are structured and in the mythos they present through their characters. The detective story is one of the staples of the Hollywood film, though in different perio
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the victim, dangerous for who she is or what she knows but not dangerous in herself, as is the case with Evelyn Mulwray in the film Chinatown (1974).
Film noir is more properly called a style rather than a genre:
Film noir was itself a system of visual and thematic conventions which were not associated with any specific genre or story formula, but rather with a distinctive cinematic style and a particular historical period (Schatz 112).
Schatz's insistence on noting the relationship to a historical period is important because it indicates that film noir was a social, psychological, and aesthetic response to a certain sense of societal angst that developed first in the uncertainties of World War II, as noted, a period of world tensions manifested in the psychological ambiguities of film noir, and then continued in the new uncertainties of the Cold War period, especially in the years immediately after World War II when American society was straining to recover from the war while also trying to adapt to the new line-up of international friends and enemies. This also explains why the style became so pervasive, since it was speaking to the national psyche that existed at the time, and that psyche did not kick in only for one genre
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Approximate Word count = 2795
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)
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