Book Review

As the titles of these two excellent books suggest, they explore the interrelationships between literary production and the political and economic revolution wrought by the New Deal. Whereas numerous studies have focused on the proletarian and radical literature or, as does Michael Denning's monumental The Cultural Front (1996), on the "laboring"of depression-era America, Sean McCann and Michael Szalay convincingly demonstrate that the various strains of New Deal reformism are inscribed on a wide range of American literary works during the period.

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McCann's Gumshoe America focuses on the "hard-boiled" crime fiction that flourished in the United States between roughly 1930 and 1960. His central thesis is that writers such as James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler re-envisioned the classic detective story (exemplified by Edgar Allan Poe's and Arthur Conan Doyle's works) according to a "logic that mirrored the [political] 'realist' critique of traditional liberal theory." That is, the classic detective story typically banished an anomalous evil and restored order to an imagined community ruled by law and rational self-interest, whereas hard-boiled crime fiction projects images of a society in which the liberal faith in individualism and representative government has disintegrated. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the framers of the New Deal believed that, given sufficient legal and regulatory power, the federal government could not only protect the public welfare but create a common culture. The detective writers upon whom McCann focuses did not take such a sanguine view. Crime writers from Cain to Chester Himes implied that the New Deal's attempt to weld a common American culture was doomed to fail. They struggled with and, McCann maintains, were eventually defeated by the same conflict that plagued the framers of the New Deal itself: how to create a genuinely democratic culture, or literature, in a society increasingly shaped by the power of the mass media and a professional elite. "A pop genre, a cultural complaint, and a political myth, hard-boiled crime fiction thus became a symbolic theater where the dilemmas of New Deal liberalism could be staged."

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