Topic 60

La novela negra
introduction
 We must note, to begin with, that the Spanish
term ‘novela negra’ is not applied in English. Its
closer equivalent, ‘noir fiction’ is a subgenre of
what is commonly referred to as ‘hard-boiled
fiction’, a typically American genre that appeared
in the 30s.
 On the other hand, ‘detective novel’, ‘mystery’
and ‘thriller’, all of which are sometimes
employed interchangeably, retain some textual
differences and are considered more British-
leaning.
 ‘Detective story’ and ‘mystery’ are closer
synonyms, while ‘thriller’ includes spy stories
(e.g. the Bond series by Ian Fleming or Len
Deighton’s Harry Palmer series). In any case, the
history of these genres is closely linked together.
General traits
 In their most common plotline,
detective stories present a crime,
usually violent. The crime tends to
appear perfect and unsolvable, and
usually a suspect or a series of
suspects are wrongly accused.
 Common figures are the dim-witted
police officer or investigator, and a
detective that shows greater powers of
observation and deduction.
 The story, to be successful, must have
an unexpected denouement in which
the detective reveals the truth to the
reader and the characters in the story.
  The first detective story in the English language is ‘The Murders of the Rue
Morgue’ by E.A.Poe, in 1841.
 Poe is thought to have been influenced by Eugène Vidocq, who founded the first
detective bureau in Paris in the early 19 th century.
 Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone, published in 1868 and possibly influenced by
Emile Gaboriau’s L’Affaire Lerouge, is considered the first modern detective novel.
 Collins’ novel showed a number of striking discoveries. It is narrated by seven
different narrators, allowing for a variety of points of view and a slow completion
of facts and clues.
 It uses techniques like the follow-up of the suspect or attention to details, as well as
character archetypes that would set the standard in most of its successors.
The beginnings
  The best known 19th century detective
would be Sherlock Holmes, created by
Arthur Conan Doyle.
Sherlock Holmes
 Holmes made his debut in A Study in
Scarlett, in 1887, and appeared in three
more novels (e.g. The Hound of the
Baskervilles) and numerous short
stories.

 The inter-war years, with the coming of

The beginnings

paperback publishing, became a golden

age of the genre, both in the US and in
Britain.
Black Mask

 One of the most visible heads of this

golden age would be Dashiell Hammett,
who published the first truly ‘hard-
boiled’ story in 1929 in Black Mask
magazine.
Hard-boiled fiction
 This genre can be defined as the tough,
unsentimental style of crime writing that
appeared in the US in the 20s and 30s.
 It brought a new tone of naturalism that did
not shy away from graphic sex and
violence, and portrayed vivid but often
sordid urban backgrounds.
 The dialogues were fast paced and used
much slang. The role of the Black Mask
magazine was instrumental in the
development of the genre, to the point that
hard-boiled fiction is also referred
sometimes as ‘black mask’ fiction.
Dashiell Hammett
 DASHIELL HAMMETT, its best
known author, was influenced by
the realistic style of authors such
as Hemingway and Dos Passos.
 He separated from the classic
detective plot centered around the
country-house and the typically
British gentry and moved into
more urban, fully American
scenarios.
 Hammett influenced greatly the
noir novels of James M. Cain
(e.g. The Postman Always Rings
Twice) and a great number of
filmic versions.
Background & 1st novels
 Hammett had worked for eight years as a
detective for the Pinkerton agency, and
participated in WWI, where he contracted
tuberculosis.
 He began publishing short stories in pulp
magazines, as well as two novels, Red
Harvest and The Dain Curse (both 1929).
 His third one, The Maltese Falcon (1930),
introducing the detective Sam Spade, would
bring him great success.
 Its later adaptation to film in 1941, starring
Humphrey Bogart, would make this novel
one of the best known crime fictions of all
time.
  Later novels would be The Glass Key and The Thin Man. The
latter introduced a detective couple, Nick and Nora Charles,
who would inspire a television series and two films.
 Nora is inspired by the playwright Lillian Hellman, with whom
he had a long-lasting relationship.
 Both Hellman and Hammett were left-wing activists and
refused to collaborate with the anti-communist prosecutors
during the Red Scare after WWII, which resulted in Hellman’s
Dashiell and Lillian

being blacklisted and Hammett going to jail for a short period

Nick and Nora //

as well.
  Chandler’s fiction is propelled by a complex
morality between romanticism and a very self-
conscious cynicism.
 Born in Chicago, he moved with his mother to
England as a young man.
Raymond
Chandler

 After WWI he moved to L.A. and married an

American. The majority of his ‘urban nightmares’
would be set there and become portrayals of ‘its
paradox of beauty and tawdriness’.
 He held an executive position at an oil company,
but lost his job due to his alcoholism and decided
to publish in pulp magazines to earn a living.
  Chandler studied American masters such as Hemingway, whose prose
style he imitated; the naturalist Theodore Dreiser and the satirist Ring
Lardner.
 He was also influenced by proletarian fiction and Marxist journalism,
particularly their gritty criticism of capitalism.
 His effective ‘Blackmailers Don’t Shoot’, was the first story he
published in Black Mask, in 1933.
 It was a dark tale of extortion that contained all the genre’s conventions
Style and early works

– corrupt officials, gangsters and gun molls, and a trigger-happy

detective with an ethic code of his own.
  Chandler’s protagonists face challenges beyond mere exercises in
discovery.
 His private investigators are thrown into moral chaos, caught up in webs
of deceit, corruption and bloodshed.
 Crime is everywhere, including the law, business and even the clergy,
combining to create a society that R.W. Flint described as ‘a jungle of
predatory creatures’.
 All of Chandler’s heroes are grizzled romantics holding to an ideal of
Style

gallantry, but his approach to storytelling evolved through time. His

stories in the thirties centered on the struggle to maintain a moral
equilibrium.
 His fourth published tale, ‘Killer in
the Rain’ (1935), intensified the
hero’s alienation and ethical
dilemmas through first person
narration
 Chandler, imitating Hammett,
presented the hero-as-narrator, a
jaded storyteller whose caustic wit
illuminated the moral deviations of
the criminal world.
 More verbally adventurous than
Hammett, Chandler produced a
narrative pattern that blended
underworld vernacular and poetic
diction. This pattern relied on
pungent imagery, including startling
similes for dramatic effect.
  His first novel, The Big Sleep, published in 1939, introduced the
detective Philip Marlowe.
 It is an active attempt to move crime fiction from escapism and mere
problem solving into greater social criticism.
 In his essay ‘The Simple Art of Murder’ Chandler criticized fashionable
whodunits who presented unrealistic, mechanical fiction and advocated
crime fiction that had a further psychological and social basis.
 Consistent with his conception of America as a slew of capitalist vice,
Chandler called for a literature of unsparing realism.
Novels
More novels
 Chandler often extracted and
refashioned plot elements, characters,
scenes and memorable phrases from
previous tales, an activity he referred
to as ‘cannibalizing’
 We can find elements from previous
work in Farewell My Lovely, The
High Window, The Lady in the Lake,
The Little Sister or The Long
Goodbye .
 His last novel, Playback, was
affected by personal issues,
particularly his wife’s death. It is a
disappointing and relatively
uninspired book derived from an
unproduced film script.
British detective stories
 This genre usually focuses on the triumph of
logic to solve crimes usually of a violent
nature. The earliest examples of detective
fiction can be traced back to Wilkie Collins’
Woman in White (1860) and Moonstone
(1868), or Dickens’ unfinished Edwin Drood.
 Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes
stories, along with works from literary men
such as Chesterton, and the very well known
works from the prolific Agatha Christie
(Murder on the Orient Express, Murder in
Mesopotamia, The Labours of Hercules, The
Mousetrap, etc.) settled the conventional
structures of a genre based in suspense and
artful plotting.
P.D. James
 Born in Oxford, P.D. James attended High
School at Cambridge, although she gave up
her formal education at sixteen.
 Her husband, who participated in the SWW as
a doctor, suffered from a mental illness that
required him to spend a great deal of time in
psychiatric hospitals and would eventually
kill him.
 James would look for work with the National
Health service to support her family, and, in
1959, she would begin her first mystery,
Cover Her Face. It introduces James’ master
detective, chief inspector Adam Dalgliesh of
Scotland Yard, who in subsequent novels
would be promoted to higher ranks.
Characteristics
 Dalgliesh is a dedicated,
intelligent and sensitive man with
a penchant for poetry and a
consistent personality that
evolves realistically from novel
to novel.
 Thus, the death of his wife in
childbirth has made him
disinclined to personal
involvement, a quality that makes
him capable of cool examination
of criminal cases, even though as
time passes romantic attachments
are not left out of the question.
Novels
 Her first novel, Cover Her Face,
portrays the plight of the chronically
ill
 The suffering of prolonged dying she
had experienced with her husband
would remain a theme in her work, as
well as the medical aspects of murder.
 Her work for the National Health
Service can be seen reflected in her
second novel, A Mind to Murder
(1963). The victim, is a respected but
not beloved administrative officer of
a psychiatric clinic in London, a
fashionable institution that invites
James’ satiric wit and an exploration
of the grudges and jealousy of
confined communities.
Novels
 Unnatural Causes, about the death of
a mystery writer and one of her
weakest stories, was produced after
the death of her husband, which freed
her to prepare to advance her
government career.
 After the publication of this novel,
she entered the police department,
specializing in juvenile delinquency.
During this period she wrote Shroud
for a Nightingale, a beautifully
constructed novel about a nursing
student killed while playing patient in
a demonstration of nursing skills. The
novel balances mood, pace, and
atmosphere and is one of her best.
Cordelia Gray
 An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972)
is her first novel not featuring
Dalgliesh. The protagonist here is
Cordelia Gray, who, like Dalgliesh, has
artistic tendencies.
 She enjoys reading Thomas Hardy but
prefers Jane Austen and pays attention
to architectural features.
 The novel is about the suspicious
suicide of a handsome Cambridge
dropout. Cordelia has a secondary role
in The Black Tower, which recuperates
Dalgliesh as a protagonist, who will
investigate a number of suspicious
deaths in a home for incurable
paralytics while he himself recovers
from an illness.
 Her next novel, Death of an Expert
Witness, where an evil-tempered
forensic expert is killed, was better
received than Black Tower and
considered among her best. To ensure
authenticity, James consulted various
experts in the analysis of criminal
evidence. The novel also shows her
great powers of characterization.
 Innocent Blood involves the
process of learning to love and
forgive. Here P.D. James explores
with psychological insight the many
possibilities for fulfilment and
disappointment in human relationships
through the eyes of Philippa, an
adopted child of a well-to-do family
who discovers terrifying truths while
she searches for her origins.
 P.D. James has been hailed as the
greatest contemporary writer of
crime fiction, and has received
numerous awards, including
 British Crime Writers
Association’s ‘Silver Dagger’ (for
Shroud and The Black Tower), and
 Edgar award from the Mystery
Writers of America, also for
Shroud. An unsuitable Job for a
Woman also received a Scroll
award from the same association.