Reflections of Society and Era in Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction
The thesis focuses on popular literature, detective fiction and hard-boiled detective fiction in particular. It includes an outline of detective fiction, American hard-boiled mode and its representatives, mainly Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. The aim is to highlight modernistic literary features in their novels. The thesis also includes analysis of real cases from the 1920s and 1930s in America and their reflection in hard-boiled novels. The thesis proves that hard-boiled detective fiction reflects the twentieth-century American society and era and that it is political.
THE ADAPTATION OF A STUDY IN SCARLET AND THE FINAL PROBLEM IN BBC\'S FILM SERIES SHERLOCK AS SEEN FROM STRUCTURALISM APPROACH
THE ADAPTATION OF A STUDY IN SCARLET AND THE FINAL PROBLEM IN BBC\'S FILM SERIES SHERLOCK AS SEEN FROM STRUCTURALISM APPROACH -
Radical Anger: Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest
Dashiell Hammett’s life, in its discontinuities and contradictions, seems to embody the uneasy pluralism of American society.1 Born into a Southern Catholic family, he worked for some years as an investigator for the Pinkerton Detective Agency, which often functioned as the private police of America’s mineowners.2 Both world wars found him willing to defend America, but in the 1950s he appeared in court, and before Senator McCarthy’s Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, as a known Communist sympathiser. The fiction on which his reputation rests was written within the space of twelve years. Hammett wrote no definitive account of his political and social beliefs. The challenge to his radicalism, the need to define and to defend, came quite late in life, and after the age of thirty-nine Hammett found it difficult to write anything. The opinions of these later years survive mainly in remarks recalled by Hammett’s long-standing friend and protector, Lillian Hellman, such as his assertion the night before he went to jail for refusing to reveal the names of contributors to the bail-bond fund of the Civil Rights Congress, ‘I hate this damn kind of talk, but maybe I better tell you that if it were more than jail, if it were my life, I would give it for what I think democracy is and I don’t let cops or judges tell me what I think democracy is.’3