The Noir thriller ----Page 2

Hard-boiled Investigators

At the end of The Maltese Falcon (1930), Brigid O’Shaughnessy asks Sam
Spade whether he would have treated her differently if he had received
his share of the money from the sale of a genuine falcon. ‘“Don’t be
too sure I’m as crooked as I’m supposed to be,”’ Spade replies. ‘“That
kind of reputation might be good business - bringing in high-priced
jobs and making it easier to deal with the enemy.”’ His answer suggests
the ambivalent position of the archetypal hard-boiled investigator. Self-
aware and self-mocking, he acknowledges that he is often seen as indis-
tinguishable from the crooks with whom he has to deal. However, while
he readily admits looking after his own financial interests, he is not ulti-
mately motivated by greed. In spite of his apparent amorality and tough
cynicism, Spade does have at least some standards - a personal code
against which unscrupulous ‘enemies’ and the disorder they create can
be judged. The label ‘hard-boiled’ is often used synonymously with
‘noir’.¹ Although this is to some extent misleading, there is substantial
overlap, and much of the best noir crime fiction is unquestionably hard-
boiled. Both labels connote the use of crime stories to provide insights
into the socio-political disorders and moral dilemmas of the time in
which  they  are  written;  they  look  critically  at  the  illusions  and
hypocrisy, the rotten power structures and the brutal injustices of a
superficially respectable society. Protagonists tend to be isolated and
estranged, existing on the margins of society and, as outsiders, capable
of seeing with a satirist’s eye. As much as anything, it is the investiga-
tor’s ability to strip away pretence and reveal the sources of corruption
that gives him his effective agency, enabling him to survive in (and
giving him a kind of freedom within) a hazardous environment.

‘Hard-boiled’ and ‘noir’ can both refer to narratives that have as their
protagonists predators or victims as well as investigators. It is the tough,

independent investigator, though, who is most strongly associated with
the hard-boiled tradition. Most accounts of this figure begin with the
Black Mask, which from 1923 on printed the kind of tough crime stories
in American settings that became one of the key points of origin for
American hard-boiled writing. The focus of these stories is on the activ-
ity of exposure, but this activity involves much more attendant danger
and moral uncertainty than there is in the orthodox detective story,
with its puzzle-solving sleuths analysing clues and providing rational
solutions. The hard-boiled investigator not only enquires into en-
trenched power structures but engages in combat against them and can
choose to inflict punishment. This enforcer element, the individualist
ethic of taking things into one’s own hands, is particularly marked in
some of the early Black Mask stories. In the retrospective investigations
of the ‘Golden Age’ of crime fiction, the detectives of Agatha Christie,
Dorothy Sayers or S. S. Van Dine are themselves insulated from the
crime that has taken place. In the characteristic Black Mask story, on the
other hand, every case becomes part of an ongoing sequence of violent
events. The time of the crime and the time of the investigation are no
longer separate. Narratives are commonly, though not invariably, in the
first person, and the narrator’s own sense of control is always open to
challenge: he is ‘caught in a narrative that writes him as much as he
writes it’,² and thus cannot have the aloofness and detachment of the
classic detective. There are, however, a variety of positions from which
such an investigation can be conducted, and narratives can be classified
in terms of the psychological and moral distance of the protagonist from
the world of crime investigated.

The archetypal hard-boiled character is, of course, the private eye. He
is the figure most often analysed in comparisons between hard-boiled
crime fiction and classic detective fiction, to the extent that compari-
sons with the white male hard-boiled tradition (for example, in analyses
of female-authored or black crime fiction) are generally constructed
solely with reference to Hammett’s Sam Spade or Chandler’s ‘cru-
sader/knight’ of the mean streets. The private eye, in a way no less than
the traditional detective, can function as a very positive figure. Many
private eyes, adhering to an individualistic core of values, are distanced
from the world investigated by qualities that ultimately distinguish
them from those ‘on the wrong side of the fence’.³ Their characterisa-
tion can be seen as based in ‘romantic images of the lone male - strong,
brave, independent - a compendium of the macho values apparently so
popular in American society’.⁴  This summing up of the nature of the
private eye is a fair enough description of the kind of protagonist

popularised by Chandler and his heirs (for example, Howard Browne,
Richard S. Prather and Robert B. Parker) and by such contemporaries as
Frederick Nebel, Carroll John Daly and George Harmon Coxe. These are
writers who created a gallery of breezily macho action heroes whose
hard-boiled manner gives a tough veneer either to fairly traditional
detection or to high-spirited adventure tales, rather than compelling us
to enter the despondent, morally insecure world of noir.

The romantic crusader image does not, however, apply nearly so well
to other investigative figures of the thirties. Hammett, for example, can
be credited with the inauguration of an altogether less comfortable kind
of crime fiction. He introduced characters who much more nearly
conform to the description of the private eye as ‘half gangster’ - a man
whose innocence has become so tarnished as to be no longer visible,
and who is a close relation of the crook-as-investigator protagonists who
emerge in other thrillers of the early thirties. The range of investigators,
then, is considerable. At one end of the scale, often presented in a lightly
comic manner, is the Marlowe-like private eye of unshakeable integrity,
together with such honourable private eye substitutes as tenacious
reporters and newspaper photographers, and the triumphantly pugna-
cious action hero. At the other end are Hammett’s decidedly unknightly
Continental Op on his more turbulent days and other protagonists who
lack even the legitimate credentials of private eyes and news hounds -
the ex-cons or the hard-bitten strong-arm men to be found in the work
of Raoul Whitfield and Paul Cain. As is evident even from the cover art
of the period (see Figure 2), criminals and investigators can often appear
to be indistinguishable.

From pulp heroics to Poisonville

The divergent possibilities within hard-boiled fiction - in terms of tone,
narrative resolution, characterisation and moral vision - are apparent
from the outset in the work of ‘the Black Mask boys’, sometimes within
the work of a single writer. So, for example, Frederick Nebel, a good
friend of Hammett’s and one of the most popular of the early Black Mask
contributors,⁵  uses grim urban settings and writes in a tough style
(‘“Now pipe this, you eggs . . .”’⁶). His stories and novels often darkly
delineate a Depression America that is greedy, politically corrupt and
morally chaotic, in which only the tough can survive. In his first novel,
Sleepers East (1933), a journey brings together people involved in con-
cealing a murder that has serious political ramifications, leaving char-
acters caught up in ‘a vast contraption whose existence depended on

the co-ordination of all the other cogs’ (113). One of his stories was
adapted as a film, The Bribe (Robert Z. Leonard, 1949), which contains
enough noir elements (pervasive corruption, a sense of defeat and
betrayal) to bring it within canonical film noir.⁷ His ‘Tough Dick’

Donohue can be counted as one of the main successors to Hammett’s
Op: a man who ‘had seen crime in its many strata’,⁸  Donohue is the
protagonist in a series of violent and cynical stories published in Black
Mask in the early thirties. In many of Nebel’s stories, however, especially
those using the series characters of MacBride and Kennedy, his light-
hearted prose carries him towards a more thoroughly comic world of
knockabout antics and whimsical humour. Humour (the wisecrack in
particular) is a basic ingredient of much hard-boiled writing, but when
the dominant tone becomes genially comic the effect tends to be pro-
tective and reassuring. Kennedy, ace reporter and falling-down drunk,
reels through more than 30 droll Black Mask tales in which he alter-
nately aids, annoys and is propped up by Captain John MacBride
and his fellow policemen: ‘The reason I’m holding him up, Cap, is
that the souse can’t stand. He fell out of a taxi, fell over the curb and
started crawling up the path . . .’.⁹ The same combination of pulp

heroics and a jaunty, humorous tone is to be found in Nebel’s later
Cardigan stories, published in Dime Detective, one of Black Mask’s most
important rival magazines, which first appeared in November 1931.
‘Kick Back’ (April 1934), for example, begins with a grey-coated gunman
disarmed after he slips on a banana peel and ends in an exchange of
light comic banter, with the good guys ‘bickering all the time, like a
couple of kids’.¹⁰

Another of the early Black Mask writers whose work shifts between
different hard-boiled tones is Carroll John Daly, Hammett’s most impor-
tant co-contributor and at first the more popular of the two.¹¹ His stories
are crudely written and, for the most part, are not notably akin to noir.
They do, however, break sharply from traditional detective fiction in
being more violent and urban and in establishing a partial prototype of
the hard-boiled investigator.¹²  Daly’s December 1922 story, ‘The False
Burton Combs’, is often taken to be the first of Black Mask’s hard-boiled
stories. It contains, like most Daly stories, little by way of serious social
criticism, partly because what is represented is the intrusion of a gang
into an orderly community, rather than (as, say, in Hammett) a whole
community that is corrupt. But ‘The False Burton Combs’ does offer its
share of cynical one-liners - as when the narrator observes that ‘There
ain’t nothing in government unless you’re a politician. And as I said
before, I ain’t no crook.’¹³ Also, though he is an ‘adventurer’ rather than

a detective, the narrator uncovers wrongdoing from a position that he
locates between the crook and the policeman. It is this ‘middleman’
position that is most obviously related to the development of hard-
boiled detection. Daly’s investigative figure, the nameless first-person
narrator, is both morally ambivalent and dangerously implicated. Guilty
and vulnerable, he occupies, at different stages of the story, the three
roles kept carefully separate in most classic detective fiction, that is,
victim, murderer and detective. He is paid to impersonate a potential
victim (the ‘false’ Burton Combs). Although he is wrongly accused
of being a professional killer, he believes that it is ‘good ethics’ to shoot
a man down after he has been duly warned (if ‘you happen to have
my code of morals’¹⁴). By the end of the story, however, his public
image has been transformed from that of ‘desperate criminal’ to heroic
detective,  credited  with  the  confident  agency  of  the  traditional
heroic protagonist. When the narrator tells the reader, ‘“I guess I’ll
take that job - if it pays enough to get married on,”’¹⁵  it is clear
that the story has been resolved by an optimistic and romantic con-
clusion which henceforth disqualifies the hero from the role of the lone
investigator.

In Daly’s writing, rather than the light-hearted, resilient humour that
characterises Nebel’s stories, it is all-conquering, two-fisted action that
distances his protagonist from the corrupt world he enters. His first
series character and his most famous creation, Race Williams, can be
regarded as ‘the true progenitor of the American private eye’.¹⁶  Well
armed and well paid for fearlessly tackling brutal gangsters and master
criminals, Race dispenses rough justice when the situation seems to call
for it: ‘“Call it murder if you like - a disregard for human life. I don’t
care. I’ll run my business - you run yours.”’¹⁷ The Race Williams stories
(over 30, published in Black Mask between 1923 and 1934) occasionally
probe sources of socio-political corruption, but the boastful exploits and
rugged individualism of the hero closely connect him to such tradi-
tional action heroes as the frontiersmen and gunfighters of the Ameri-
can West.¹⁸ For Race Williams, being situated between cops and crooks
mainly implies a willingness to resort to violent means and to proceed
without formal legal sanction. His violence of response in part func-
tions as a critique of violence in society, and as means of bringing to
light hidden corruptions (in such a society, the implication is, only
violent means are effective). But, like the earlier American dime novel
heroes, Race acts out fantasies of revenge against popular scapegoats,
like foreign master criminals. Excessive evil is routinely vanquished, as
in the Race Williams novel The Snarl of the Beast (1928),¹⁹ which ends

with the dispatching of ‘the Beast’, a ‘notorious English criminal’ with ‘flaming eyes’ and ‘great hairy hands’ (49 and 280).

From the point of view of literary noir, the more interesting Daly
series character, appearing in Detective Fiction Weekly from the early
1930s,²⁰ is Satan Hall, a policeman, but one whose methods isolate him
within the force in much the same way that the private eye is isolated.
Published at the height of the public obsession with gang warfare and
city corruption, the Satan Hall series aims for a degree of verisimilitude
in its social and political references. At the same time, though, the
stories contain strong elements of ironic inversion and satiric fantasy.
In contrast to the Race Williams stories, the nature of the crimes por-
trayed has shifted towards contemporary relevance and the investiga-
tive figure is pushed much further towards moral ambivalence. Instead
of concentrating on devious criminal masterminds and foreign villains,
Daly focuses on the corruption of local politics. Society is shown to be
at war because the forces of destabilisation and threat are within. In
Satan Sees Red (1932), for example, ‘the system’ and ‘the racket’ are
treated as synonymous, and the cause of both is said by the world-weary
captain to lie in ‘crooked politics, stupid laws and human nature’ (40).
Bowers, a big racketeer closely involved in the political life of the city,
is in origin just a local ‘gangster and gunman’ hunting his enemies in
the ‘dark alleys’. The description of the grotesquely caricatured Daggett,
in Satan Laughed (1934), epitomises the way in which Daly represents
the relationship between city political power and organised crime: the
ironised ‘great man’ has ‘worked his way into control. Gangster, racke-
teer, politician. Now a power behind the throne; the throne of evil that
dominates all too often in many large cities’ (220-1).

Satan Hall, as his name suggests, is also a larger-than-life figure. All
of the details of his appearance and manner associate him with his evil
namesake, from the sinister curves of his thin lips to his hot breath and
a ‘steady tread’ - the ‘Footsteps of Doom’ - associated with the inex-
orable fate that awaits malefactors (Adventures of Satan Hall, 16, 31). His
character, in contrast to that of more ordinary detectives, is defined in
terms not of duty but of passion and obsession, the embodiment of a
barely contained ‘pent-up force’ capable of sweeping away the corrupt

(52). Daly plays sardonically with the metaphoric possibilities of ‘Satan’
Hall, the fallen angel who is without the blessing of those who sit in
judgement, as the only effective opponent of ‘the infernal system’ (14),
the ‘lower city’ controlled by Bowers and his kind. The predecessor of
later avengers like Mike Hammer and Dirty Harry, Satan has to go into
the dark doorways and dismal streets, keeping ‘close to the gutter’ and

dispensing his own form of justice: it might be murder in the eyes of
the state law but not in the light of ‘The criminal’s law. Satan’s law’
(92-3).

In spite of Daly’s greater renown at the time, it is, of course, Dashiell
Hammett  whose  reputation  has  survived  and  who  has  much  the
stronger claim to be seen as the progenitor of literary noir. In 1923, eight
years before Daly’s creation of Satan Hall, Hammett introduced in Black
Mask a protagonist, the Continental Op, who was a much more plausi-
ble inhabitant of the territory ‘close to the gutter’. The Op was followed
in 1929 by Sam Spade and in the next year by Ned Beaumont, an inves-
tigative figure who is himself the associate of racketeers and corrupt
politicians. Hammett’s immense influence is due in part to his superior
ability in creating a distinctive voice, a true ‘hard-boiled’ style that is in
itself an implicit rejection of bourgeois hypocrisy and conventional
values. His spare, unembellished prose is appropriate to his no-nonsense
protagonists. Hammett is often praised as a realist, and unquestionably
part of his superiority to a writer like Daly lies in his greater verisimili-
tude. His flawed, vulnerable narrators and his hard, direct representa-
tion of contemporary material give him an ability to lay bare the ‘heart,
soul, skin and guts’ of a corrupt town (Red Harvest, 12). As a phrase like
this suggests, Hammett does share something of Daly’s fondness for
mythologising,²¹  though not for the kind of insistent patterning that
characterises the Satan Hall stories. What really distinguishes Hammett
from Daly, however, are the qualities which have led critics to label him
a modernist and which also identify him as a more obviously noir
writer: his development of more sophisticated ironies, his ambiguity
and complexity, his disruption of reliable narrative and of binary oppo-
sitions between good and evil, order and disorder. The ambivalence of
Hammett’s stories is not produced (as it is in Daly’s Satan Hall stories)
just by playing with moral inversions but by injecting into his writing
a thoroughgoing scepticism that affects themes, structure and narrative
techniques.

In creating his most famous protagonist, Sam Spade, Hammett uses
the image of a ‘blond satan’ (Maltese Falcon, 375) which may well, of
course, have influenced Daly’s creation of Satan Hall. Spade (like Satan)
is the ‘good guy’ who is also capable of killing without much com-
punction, and the emphasis on his satanic appearance leads us to reflect
from the outset on his ‘wicked’ side. In contrast to Daly, however,
Hammett uses the image in passing, rather than as a means of shaping
and colouring the whole story. The comparative subtlety of Hammett’s
narrative methods is evident in the fact that it is only in the final pages

of The Maltese Falcon that we discover the full deviousness of Spade’s
character. It is only at this juncture that the reader realises not just that
he was hired by the woman who murdered his partner but that he has
been aware of her guilt from the beginning and has nevertheless made
love to her and played along with her until the end. It is typical of
Hammett  that  this  crucial  piece  of  information  emerges  without
comment or explanation, so that it is readers themselves who must work
out what has been revealed (that is, if Spade knows now he must have
known all the time) and who must think through the implications for
their assessment of Spade’s character. Repeatedly in Hammett novels the
protagonist’s closest alliances turn out to be with those who are most
guilty and who have most to conceal. In Red Harvest, the Op is working
for the Willsson family, hired by the son of the man who is at the centre
of the town’s corruption and who himself hires the Op only when he
is persuaded that his gangster associates mean to murder him as well.
In The Dain Curse (1929), it turns out that the Op has been collaborat-
ing with the murderer, Fitzstephan, and it emerges that Ned Beaumont,
in The Glass Key (1931), is working for Madvig, who in turn works for
the murderer. Nick Charles, in The Thin Man (1934), is relying on the
information of another friend and killer, Macaulay. All of these are con-
nections that are hidden from the reader until the end.

What the reader is certain of from the first in Hammett’s novels are
his  protagonists’  imperfections,  their  human  weaknesses  and  self-
distrust. Fat and middle-aged, the Op often has to cope with things that
undermine his strength and competence. In ‘The Gutting of Couffignal’
(Black Mask, 1924), for example, his loss of masculine effectiveness is
imaged in his lameness - a defect for which he compensates by steal-
ing a crutch from a cripple. More like Conrad’s Marlow than Chandler’s
Marlowe, the Op has no higher motivation than dedication to his job.
His work ethic makes him painstaking, patient and dogged. Tough when
necessary, the Op never glorifies toughness: he admits that there is a
certain attraction in brutality, but is self-doubting enough to be worried
by this. There are arguably some ‘knightly’ qualities in the Op, particu-
larly in The Dain Curse, in which his compassion for and rehabilitation
of the mistreated damsel in distress (Gabrielle) is much more to the fore.
But on the whole he is deliberately created as the antithesis of a knightly
hero. In the 1927 Black Mask stories later published as Blood Money,²²
for example, he is situated between characters who represent opposing
types of ally, the romantic boy, Jack Counihan, and the hardened crim-
inal, Tom-Tom Carey, a contrast used to define the choices the Op
himself has to make. The young operative Counihan, at first teased by

the Op for his self-image of ‘youthful gallantry’ (382), must ultimately
be condemned for the romantic vanity that leads him to think he can
play the part of ‘a desperate suave villain’ (411), so betraying the Op,
who goads him into a response that ensures his death. Carey, on the
other hand, traffics in guns, booze, dope and illegal immigrants, and is
capable of torturing information out of a man in a most grisly fashion
(‘ribbons of flesh had been cut loose’ [387]). He is, however, a much less
treacherous ally because honest about his greed and villainy. In Red
Harvest, where the Op’s own character is ‘infected’ with the poison of
violence, he plays all factions against one another and abandons himself
to the violent atmosphere in full awareness of the corruption of his own
character and motives: ‘It makes you sick, or you get to like it’ (139).
Ned Beaumont, in The Glass Key, lacks even the partial legitimation of
the private eye, since he is merely the henchman of a prominent rack-
eteer and politician. Beaumont is a gambler who is capable of being
thoroughly unscrupulous, for example, of planting evidence; he is a
man of dubious values and cloudy motives, telling harsh truths about
some things and lying about others.

One of the essential characteristics of noir is a preoccupation with the
problems of seeing and speaking the truth, evident in its exploration of
new narrative forms and its tendency towards narrative fragmentation,
subjectivity  and  unreliability.  This  tendency  is  fundamental  to
Hammett’s novels. Instead of simply (as Daly and Nebel do) aiming to
expose the falsity of public discourse and to bring out the hidden con-
nections between the criminal and the official, Hammett creates narra-
tives in which lying and deceit undermine and erode all human
relations and all of the fictions sustained by respectable society. Like
Conrad, Hammett depicts society as a network of secret agents, men
and women concealing their true identities and past crimes, telling false
stories that leave them entangled in a web of lies. Macaulay, one of the
more accomplished deceivers in The Thin Man, only succeeds as well
as he does because so many others are also dishonest, so acting as
his unwitting accomplices. False narratives are not just the means by
which the powerful establish their ascendancy, but are often the only
way for victims to try to protect themselves and for the investigator-
protagonists to gather information and survive. The duplicity is so
pervasive that it appears to typify the whole nature of discourse in
the modern world.

Hammett’s involvement in leftist politics in the mid-thirties, a few
years after he published his last novel, has led some critics to read back
into his novels (particularly Red Harvest) a Marxist political agenda.²³

The critique he develops is in many respects left-wing, for example in
its hostility to the greed and exploitation he associates with unre-
strained  capitalism.  The  economic  structure  of  capitalism  appears,
however, to be more an effect than a cause. Hammett expresses a pes-
simistic vision that is essentially political without being programmatic.
In this he again resembles Conrad, conveying a sense of irremediable
human flaws, abuses of power, inescapable violence and death, rather
than a hope that changing the structure of society will bring a utopian
transformation. The atmosphere of ubiquitous deceitfulness is such that
moral chaos and betrayal seem the norm rather than the exception.
Anarchic human appetites - sometimes sexual, but more often the lust
for wealth or power - disorder all relationships from the most personal
to the political and economic. In Blood Money, the title itself underlines
the symbolic coupling of money and violence. Surreal confusion follows
the gathering of 150 gangsters in San Francisco for an assault on The
Seaman’s National and The Golden Gate Trust, after which (with trust
shattered) murderous greed seems to infect the houses of the city, filling
them with death and betrayal: ‘All the house held was fourteen dead
men’ (340); ‘Larrouy’s home was pregnant with weapons’ (354). In
Maltese Falcon, the initial pretence of a quest for the restoration of family
harmony - ‘Miss Wonderly’s’ search for a sister whose loss would kill
‘Mama and Papa’ (376-7) - is rapidly replaced by the real names and
actual motivation, the quest for fabulous wealth. The all-devouring
Gutman, whose history of the Falcon is a tale of the universal pursuit
of riches, is the father-figure of a grotesque family group constituted by
its lust for the Falcon. In seeking its possession Gutman will do any-
thing, whether it is killing others or quite readily agreeing to the sacri-
fice of his surrogate son Wilmer.

In other novels, instead of creating treacherous criminal confedera-
cies as analogues for the unchecked materialism of the larger society,
Hammett devises narratives in which those who are most apparently
respectable maintain their position in conventional society. They do so
by creating intricate lies to conceal their exploitation of everyone asso-
ciated with them, so revealing their readiness, like Gutman, to betray
those closest to them. All bonds of trust disintegrate, making orderly,
sustaining social relationships impossible. Whether it is in the tortured
relationships of The Dain Curse or the broken families of The Thin Man,
family members in Hammett novels routinely damage one another.
Men of power safeguard their careers by sacrificing their children:
Senator Henry, in The Glass Key, betrays his daughter by using her attrac-
tions to secure the support of Paul Madvig, and, having killed his own

son, shows himself willing to kill Madvig so that he would carry the
blame for the earlier crime. Children cannot conceive of the perfidy of
their fathers. In Red Harvest an idealistic son begins a newspaper cam-
paign against the corruption of Personville, unaware of how deeply
involved his own father is in these crimes. None of these are problems
that seem susceptible of a solution. The powers of destruction are too
entrenched. If the end of the novel appears to bring resolution, it is a
brief point of equilibrium after which things will return to the same sort
of conflicts which set the plot in motion. At the end of Red Harvest,
when the Op leaves Personville after a frenzy of cleansing and retri-
bution, he has merely given the town back into the same hands as
before. Personville is ‘all nice and clean and ready to go to the dogs
again’ (181), and the Op is under no illusion that he has achieved some-
thing of lasting value. Similarly, at the end of The Glass Key, as Ned
Beaumont prepares to depart, he stares ‘fixedly’ through an open door,
and we are left pondering the open question of whether Madvig stands
any chance of ‘cleaning house’ and ultimately managing to ‘get the city
back’ (783).

Instead of remediable political-economic ills, there is a sense of deep-
seated moral disorder in the patterning of Hammett’s novels, reinforced
by symbolic suggestions of randomness, disorder and loss of control.
So, for example, the town of Personville has an element of historical
specificity. A mining town of about 40000 people, it had a strike in 1921
that led to the influence of criminal elements. The resident criminals
have helped to put down the strike but cannot be kept in check by Elihu
Willsson, himself implicated in their corrupt methods. Hammett also,
however, makes extensive use of the naming of the town, which is
known by two names, both metaphoric. As ‘Personville’ it suggests a
representative population and, in terms of the power structure, one
man’s presumption in taking over the whole town, making it in every
respect his personal property (‘Elihu Willsson was Personville’). The
insidious nature of the corruption he presides over gives rise to the
town’s other name, ‘Poisonville’, with its suggestions of crookedness
and violence spreading like a toxin through the body politic, not just
in one small town but (given the representative nature of the name)
through the whole of American society. Hammett’s titles very often
point towards a symbolic reading: the horrific violence of a ‘red harvest’;
the ‘glass key’²⁴  that suggests a liminal passage into darker experience
through a door which, once opened, cannot be locked again; the
fetishised falcon which, valueless in itself, is invested with meaning by
those who seek to possess it; the ‘thin man’ who symbolises man

reduced to a financial resource, ‘as thin as the paper in that cheque’,
alive only ‘on paper’, as an asset to those whose greed leads them to
feed off him. Meanings are amplified by inset dreams and parables,
hinting in one way or another at the dark truths that cannot be con-
tained: the falling beam in the Flitcraft parable, which makes it seem as
though someone has ‘taken the lid off life’; the snakes that cannot be
locked up again in the dream Janet Henry tells Ned Beaumont; the story
of cannibalism in The Thin Man, which supports the wider theme of
insatiable greed by describing in gruesome detail an isolated man’s
reversion to primitive impulses, to a savagery that cannot ultimately be
concealed by his ‘conflicting stories’.

Beautiful manners and flawless English

Hammett’s most famous successor, Raymond Chandler, started writing
for Black Mask in December 1933, shortly after Hammett published The
Thin Man, his final novel. Aside from the tale of cannibalism, The Thin
Man has a lightness of tone that has led critics to dissociate it from the
body of his earlier work. This dissociation was strengthened by the series
of ‘Thin Man’ films originating with the novel, in which the ‘thin man’
came to be identified as Nick Charles, so that the darker implications
of Hammett’s imagery of rapacity were forgotten. The work of Chandler
is characterised by a much more consistent lightness of tone. Chandler
combines witty detachment with an underlying sentimentality that is
also there in some film adaptations, heightened, for example, in a
romanticised adaptation like The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946).

Hawks’ film foregrounds the relationship between Marlowe and Vivian
Sternwood which, like that between Nick and Nora Charles, seems
capable of withstanding the threatening and corrupting forces of the
noir underworld.²⁵

Of  other  Hollywood  adaptations  of  Chandler  novels,  the  most
‘canonically noir’ is Murder, My Sweet (Edward Dmytryk, 1944), adapt-
ing Farewell, My Lovely (1940), and it is in a way this film that best sug-
gests why Chandler is usually regarded as Hammett’s heir.²⁶ The place
of Hammett and Chandler within the film noir canon has led many
critics to overemphasise the relationship between the two, and their
names, of course, are routinely linked as creators of the private eye, with
the image of Bogart playing both Spade and Marlowe acting as iconic
confirmation of their union. The novels themselves, however, are very
different in style, themes, narrative patterns and attitudes to action.
There are unquestionably noir elements in Chandler’s work, and these

are accentuated in Dmytryk’s film adaptation. Dmytryk underscores the
‘quintessentially noir’ role of the femme fatale and the immersion of a
vulnerable protagonist in a world gone wrong, peopled by grotesque
characters. He creates an atmosphere of paranoia, heavy with threat and
violence. An ‘uncompromising vision of corruption and decay’ is in-
tensified by surreal, expressionistic distortions.²⁷  Murder, My Sweet is,
however, a film that destabilises Chandler’s world, undercutting the
comparative detachment and superiority that Marlowe preserves in the
text through verbal wit. Limits to his masculine competence and insight
are suggested, for example, by expressionist shooting, with its attendant
sense of disorientation and vulnerability, as well as by Marlowe’s sym-
bolically bandaged eyes in the framing interrogation.

Wider social and political concerns of the sort voiced in Hammett’s
novels are sometimes more evident in the stories Chandler published
between 1933 and 1939 than in his novels. ‘Finger Man’ (Black Mask,
1934), for example, an early story which Marlowe narrates, does little
to develop the character of the private eye, focusing instead on the
machinations of ‘a big politico’ who is willing to go to great lengths to
‘fix’ things in his territory.²⁸  Another short story, ‘Guns at Cyrano’s’
(Black Mask, 1936), ultimately reveals the consequences of the un-
scrupulous behaviour of ‘that thin cold guy’, a corrupt state Senator.²⁹
And in ‘Trouble is My Business’ (Dime Detective, 1939) the real villain of
the piece is old man Jeeter, who ruined people during the Depression
‘all proper and legitimate, the way that kind of heel ruins people’,
driving them to suicide while never having ‘lost a nickel himself’.³⁰ The
crimes  of  power-hungry  politicians,  the  clandestine  alliances  of
government officials with gangsters and the criminality of ‘legitimate
business’, often supported by brutally corrupt policemen, are preoccu-
pations to be found in Chandler’s novels as well, where such themes
provide a public dimension to the narrative. Chandler has not, however,
always convinced his readers of his serious commitment to exposing
corruption in high places. Docherty, for example, argues that the ‘big
bosses’ - the corrupt businessmen and political manipulators - are often
perceived by Marlowe as ‘presentable and decent’, Chandler perhaps
being more inclined to exculpate gangsters than to imply that all busi-
nessmen are really gangsters. It is certainly true that, in comparison to
Hammett, the reader is not immersed in a sense of nightmarish urban
corruption, and figures like Eddie Mars and Laird Brunette do remain
‘civil’ and ‘presentable’. It might be said that the keyword here, though,
is ‘presentable’. A characteristic Chandler trope is the picture of a beguil-
ing surface, of a scene that can remain ‘presentable’ even after we have

returned from the subterranean horrors of finding the body in the lake.
Part of the point about his smooth businessmen-gangsters is that they
retain their façade of gentlemanly respectability, and having succeeded
in this they do, in fact, go unpunished, because that is the nature of
the society portrayed. Chandler depicts a world of ‘respectability’, but
one should not underrate the disturbing elements lurking just out of
sight. The suburban Dad that Marlowe conjures up in The Little Sister
(1949) is sitting ‘in front of a picture window’, but it gives him no view
of ‘the big money, the sharp shooters, the percentage workers, the fast
dollar boys . . .’ (202-3). Even those who play down the socio-political
dimension in Chandler’s novels see in them a modernist sense of urban
anomie and moral disintegration.

There are, however, several aspects of Chandler’s work which muffle
his critique of American society. Most important is his use of the same
first-person narrator, which, combined with some recurrent features of
style, means that his novels are considerably more homogeneous than
those of Hammett. When Marlowe develops beyond the sketchily
realised narrator of ‘Finger Man’, the fictional world created is always
reliably  mediated  by  the  voice  of  a  protagonist  who  unfailingly
combines honourable conduct with penetrating judgement and self-
mocking humour. Though Marlowe is caught up in plots of notorious
complexity (and is significantly less in control than, say, the figure of
the classic detective) he continues to provide the reassurance of a stable
and trustworthy perspective. His detachment places him much closer
to the masculine competence and ‘rightness’ of traditional detective
fiction, and so moves him away from a noir sense of uncertainty.

The protective presence that Marlowe establishes is above all stylistic.
The witty, ironic aloofness of his narrative acts to evaluate and to
contain  the  moral  disorder  of  the  society  he  investigates.  When
Hammett’s Op is shot in Red Harvest, he issues a declaration of war on
Poisonville and on ‘fat Noonan’, the chief of police: ‘“Now it’s my turn
to run him ragged, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Poisonville
is ripe for harvest. It’s a job I like, and I’m going to do it . . . I’ve got a
mean disposition. Attempted assassinations make me mad”’ (64). This
mood of aggression, leading the Op to fight the corruption in Poi-
sonville by means of violence and brutality, provides Red Harvest with
the distinctively noir element of immersion in a world gone wrong.
It is very unlike Marlowe’s response to extreme provocation. Both
Marlowe  and  the  Op  speak  with  a  satirist’s  mocking  insight,  but
Marlowe’s insights are not the savage ironies of the Op. Instead, his
habitual form of self-defence is teasing, elegantly phrased and ironically

guarded. In Farewell, My Lovely, for example, when Marlowe tries to
make Anne Riordan see the rottenness of Bay City, he says, ‘“Sure, it’s
a nice town. It’s probably no crookeder than Los Angeles. But you can
only buy a piece of a big city. You can buy a town this size all complete,
with the original box and tissue paper. That’s the difference. And that
makes me want out”’ (295). The effects of this quip are characteristi-
cally double. Marlowe is urging Anne (and the reader) to see the reali-
ties of local corruption, and his irony underscores his fastidious taste
and the weary cynicism of his disillusioned gaze. The sarcastic use of
‘nice’ (a recurrent feature of Marlowe’s style) and the reductive image
of the whole town gift-wrapped combine to satirise the deceptiveness
of decent appearances and the ease with which powerful coalitions can
buy and sell influence. The satirical diminishment and the arch manner
also, however, provide a distancing humour, removing both Marlowe
and his audience from the brutal scene just experienced and making it
clear why he ‘wants out’. Indeed, even when he is being physically
coerced, Marlowe’s self-ironising manner simultaneously acknowledges
his limitations and draws attention to his separateness: ‘“Don’t make
me get tough,” I whined. “Don’t make me lose my beautiful manners
and my flawless English”’ (Farewell, My Lovely, 289). Marlowe’s superi-
ority to his environment is not, though he is resilient, a matter of physi-
cal prowess but of a subtle intellect that can manage a self-deprecating
joke even when he has been sapped and imprisoned and ‘shot full of
dope and locked in a barred room’ (288). Unlike the Op, Marlowe would
never ‘go blood-simple’. What we most remember in Chandler’s novels
is not the narrator losing himself in a violent, crowded scene but the
wry voice of the satirist, scathing, defensive or appalled, but ultimately
disengaged.

The high degree of stylistic control, it has been argued, goes with an
‘authoritarian romantic core’.³¹ It can be seen as reflecting the bourgeois
individualist’s distaste for and essential separation from the sordid world
he investigates. As critics have often observed, when Marlowe does enter
into conflict with the depraved society around him, his preferred role
is that of the questing knight. This sentimentalised figure engages in
encounters that simultaneously propel him on and test his skill in arms,
challenging his fearlessness and integrity and leading him to a more
sophisticated understanding of his moral make-up. Marlowe’s knightly
qualities are everywhere apparent, from the history of his naming
(‘Mallory’ in the early Black Mask story, ‘Blackmailers Don’t Shoot’, with
‘Marlowe’ as its ‘coded version’) to Chandler’s own description of the
man of honour, ‘good enough for any world’, who must go down ‘these

mean streets’.³² When Marlowe contemplates the stained-glass window
in the Sternwood house, he reflects that the knight rescuing the lady
looks so ineffectual ‘that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later
have to climb up there and help him’ (3). Chandler is seen as promot-
ing the positive side of the ‘Great Wrong Place’ myth, the American
dream of the ‘last just man’ whose alienation is the guarantee of his
integrity. In addition, however, his idealised representation of the
private eye has led many to psychoanalyse the ‘real’ nature of both
Marlowe and his creator and to search for unintentional revelations of
Marlowe/Chandler’s own obsessions and neuroses. One might in fact
argue that it is this inadvertent revelation of inner weaknesses that has
been most responsible for making adaptations of Chandler’s work of
such interest to critics of the classic film noir cycle. Marlowe’s isolated
knightly superiority can be interpreted as a hedge against his own neu-
rotic unease. His inner-directed, intellectualising defensiveness in such
a reading acts as a compensation for paranoid fear and inadequacy.³³
Murder, My Sweet, in particular, with Dmytryk’s expressionistic sugges-
tions of paranoia, its strongly subjective flashback structure and its
shadowed, dreamlike distortions of perception, can be taken to reveal
personal aversion and crisis - noir sexual anxiety, the destabilising of
masculine authority and the placing of the protagonist in a situation of
impairment and powerlessness. The romantically admirable knight,
then, can be read as an ideal of mastery generated by a tortured self
whose fears of losing control are projected, for example, in the fasci-
nated disgust he expresses for effeminate men like Marriott, Lavery and
Geiger.³⁴

Marlowe’s neurotic alienation, his fears about loss of agency, about
violations of self and fragmenting identity are expressions of charac-
teristically modernist anxieties. In comparison to Hammett’s moder-
nism, however, Chandler’s involves shifting the focus of his thrillers
away from wider socio-political disorder and corruption, and towards
terrors that are more inward. His novels bring together the public and
the personal: the crimes of crooked policemen, businessmen and politi-
cians provide an outer structure within which more private crimes are
enacted. Part of Chandler’s point is that these personal wrongs are inex-
tricably related to the larger controlling forces at work in early twenti-
eth-century society: as Marlowe says in The Big Sleep, ‘it all ties together’
(158-9). But it is equally evident that the intrusive forces of urban crimi-
nality function more as background than as foreground. The kinds of
intrusion Marlowe himself seems to find most disturbing and repellent
are those that surface in personal relationships, particularly those which

threaten  bodily  violation,  as  encounters  with  sexually  attractive,
dynamic women do. Chandler is one of the few writers of this period
to make substantial use of the figure of the femme fatale - in fact, to
habitually place the femme fatale at the centre of his plots. Critics often
take this to be an individual neurotic response to the sexy manipula-
tive woman. Women are always associated with ‘the nastiness’ of which
Marlowe fears he has become part, and against which he protects
himself both with humour (‘“I’m the guy that keeps finding you
without any clothes on”’; ‘It wasn’t a game for knights’) and, at times,
with astonishing ferocity: ‘I put my empty glass down and tore the bed
to pieces savagely’ (Big Sleep, 163-4 and 111-13).

‘The hardest of the hard-boilers’³⁵

Chandler often refers to Marlowe’s marginality. It is part of his claim to
integrity that, for no more than ‘twenty-five dollars a day and expenses’,
he is willing to risk getting himself ‘in Dutch with half the law enforce-
ment of this country’ (Big Sleep, 81). But however at odds he is with
‘law-abiding society’, Marlowe does not occupy any position outside the
law other than that of lowly independence. Unlike many another
‘loogan’ (‘a guy with a gun’), though he may sit on the fence, he never
falls on to the wrong side of it (Big Sleep, 105). Chandler did allow one
or two protagonists who were more tarnished than Marlowe,³⁶ but on
the whole his chosen perspective is poor but ostentatiously honest.
Amongst Chandler’s fellow Black Mask writers, on the other hand, there
were some who gave much more scope to morally ambiguous protago-
nists, to men whose position ‘outside the law’ gave them an angle of
vision very different from that of the essentially pure Marlowe. Like
Daly’s Satan Hall and Hammett’s Ned Beaumont, such figures are char-
acteristic of the early thirties - of a time, that is, when the gangster (both
real and imagined) had become one of the most easily recognisable
emblems of the changes afflicting urban America. One of the significant
developments in the Black Mask writing of this period is the creation of
investigative figures who are more clearly tainted by the corrupt milieux
they are investigating. In terms of respectable society, they are margin-
alised  by  their  criminal  connections  rather  than  by  their  shabby
integrity. Corruption is judged, but there is no secure position within
the text constituting a moral high ground.

Two of the most notable Black Mask contemporaries of Chandler,
Paul Cain and Raoul Whitfield,³⁷ both moved their investigative figures
nearer to criminality, emulating the ‘tougher’ strains in Hammett’s

writing, particularly in Red Harvest and The Glass Key. Their protagonists
fulfil the functions of the private eye and are not altogether without
scruple. But they are exposing the underside of a society from which
they cannot themselves be dissociated. Whitfield, who wrote nearly a
hundred stories (of varying quality) for Black Mask between 1926 and
1930, published (starting in December 1929) ‘The Crime Breeders’, a
story sequence reissued in 1930 as a novel called Green Ice. The narra-
tor, Mal Ourney, is an ex-con. As in Hammett’s Woman in the Dark
(1933), in which the protagonist, Brazil, has just been released from
prison, the status of the ex-con creates a dubious kind of freedom. He
is a character technically free but unable to dissociate himself from the
way in which society has defined him. Unlike the private eye, who is
often said to be a man without a past, the ex-con has a past that is of
determining importance. Ourney, like Brazil, is not a true criminal,
having gone to jail because he has taken the blame for a death caused
by the driving of his drunken girlfriend, but neither is he blameless
(‘She’d been drinking my liquor’). He is, in relation to real killers, an
outsider, that is, ‘not a crook’ in comparison to those ‘inside’ the crimi-
nal fraternity. On the other hand, much more like the Op or Ned Beau-
mont than Marlowe, he has criminal connections and risks becoming
a crook by using unscrupulous methods. For example, he taunts and
psychologically torments a hospitalised criminal in order to get a name
out of him: ‘It wasn’t easy to do - not with the woman-faced fence dying
on the bed’ (142-3).

Mal Ourney sees himself as a crusader, but of rather a rough and prag-
matic kind. Crimes are interpreted and judged from the perspective of
the aggrieved underdog rather than from the moral vantage point of
the knight errant. Whitfield shared what was, in the Depression years,
a common conviction that the source of many social ills lay in the
exploitation of the small and weak by the large and greedy. The object
of Ourney’s crusade is to bring down some of the big crooks who are
‘the breeders - the few who rope in the dumb ones, the weak ones’
(Green Ice, 31). He generalises his objectives to include exposure of all
those who use others, making explicit the ‘greed and exploitation’
theme that lies behind much of the writing of this period: ‘I got the
idea that just a few humans were using a lot of other humans as they
wanted, then framing them, smashing them . . . I’d like to smash some
of the ones who use the others up’ (65). A cynical and not overly
optimistic friend of the underdog, Whitfield’s protagonist identifies
with the small crooks, the human debris that is presented as the cost
of profit-making on the part of the criminally rich and unscrupulous:

‘It’s a dirty street all the way, but some of the debris is important - to
me’ (29).

What Green Ice shares with Hammett’s fiction is a narrative movement
that draws the protagonist ever deeper into a densely crowded scene of
corruption. As the earlier title, ‘Crime Breeders’, implies, there is a pro-
liferation of the forces of corruption. In contrast to Chandler, who con-
fessed that a ‘crowded canvas’ bewildered him,³⁸  Whitfield used the
frenetic, apparently disconnected movements of his large cast of char-
acters to express the nature of a society in which deceit and betrayal,
framing and double-crossing, are the norm. The intricacy of the con-
nections  in  itself  suggests  the  web  of  urban  corruption  and  the
intractable difficulty of knowing the truth: ‘I spent most of the time
trying to separate lies from truths. After a while I gave it up’ (159). The
movement associated with Ourney is ‘blundering’ (133), and the con-
fusion of his quest is underscored by the image of ‘green ice’, the emer-
alds that everyone is after. Fetishised by those who greedily compete for
them, they are in reality cold and deadly. The pursuit is ultimately of
death itself, of stones that are ‘perfectly cut. Something like a coffin’
(179). The trope of the emeralds as coffin/death is an irony compounded
by the fact that the ‘five big ones’ are, like the falcon in Hammett’s
novel, fake - intrinsically worthless symbols of the fabulous wealth that
motivates treachery in remote places and an endless chain of betrayals.
This ‘unending’ quality is one of the most noir aspects of the novel. The
climax of the plot is a shoot-out at a funeral, which is again heavy with
the sort of irony that attaches to the theme of wealth and death.
Gunmen rise out of the flowers and kill for emeralds that are ‘fused glass.
...Cold as - death’ (191). In the end, Ourney thinks back over the list
of the dead and acknowledges that he has only stopped two of the
‘crime breeders’. As the ‘New York dick’ says, ‘“You didn’t do so damned
much reforming, Ourney”’ (191).

The stories of Paul Cain are similarly grim and downbeat, centring on
morally dubious protagonists who are closely involved with the cor-
ruption they investigate. Cain, whose real name was George Sims,
started writing for Black Mask a year before Chandler’s first story
appeared. William F. Nolan dubbed him ‘the hardest of the hard-boilers’.
The effectiveness of his stories, however, is due to more than just their
sheer toughness. What is most unsettling is the use Cain makes of
morally equivocal perspectives to disorient the reader. This is reinforced
by his use of delayed recognition. Cain often suppresses, for example,
the identity of the narrator and his relationship to the violent scene he
is investigating, which, when ultimately revealed, is invariably com-

promised. The protagonist is never just a detached investigator. Through
first- or close third-person narration, Cain provides fragmented descrip-
tions of violent scenes, encounters with both criminals and corpses that
are made strange by a focus on what at first seem to be disconnected
details or disconnected body parts. In ‘Black’, for example, we first
witness three apparently unrelated people: a dying man, the narrator
and a cabby. These men seem to have been thrown together by chance
but are, we eventually learn, all players in the same violent and com-
plicated set of rivalries. The way that the reader and the protagonist find
out information is fragmentary and apparently haphazard: the narrator
looks through a small window, with the rain drumming, hearing the
conversation inside as a buzz that does not mean anything. As in
Hammett, the corrupt interests controlling a small town are a micro-
cosmic version of big city corruption, and, like the Op, the narrator
controls the unravelling of guilt and stage-manages punishment. In
contrast to the Op, however, this narrator is not employed as an inves-
tigator but as a hired gun, sent by his boss to seek revenge. His func-
tion, as he moves silently through the small town, is to bring together
those who are corruptly and secretly connected. Having offered to work
for each of the rival factions, the narrator forcibly brings the parties in
the dispute together and then ironically proposes that he accept money
from both and kill them both: ‘“I’m auctioning off the best little town
in the state . . .” . . . I was having a swell time’ (11-12). As elsewhere, the
hallmarks of Cain’s writing are black humour and a laconic manner, the
stylistic equivalent of the narrator’s blunt vision and methods.

Images of showmanship and game-playing dominate Cain’s stories,
with the implication that success and indeed survival in such a world
are entirely dependent on luck, cunning and an ability to manipulate
appearances, though Cain avoids suggesting that a tough masculinity
and aggressive individualism will invariably prevail. In ‘Murder in Blue’,
for example, the protagonist, Doolin, is a young man retained as a
bizarre kind of showman to organise a violent entertainment for a dying
villain. He orchestrates assorted killers to perform in his show with the
same element of playing both ends against the middle as in ‘Black’. His
plans as a showman, however, are made in ignorance of secret connec-
tions, and he finds himself an unwilling actor in a grotesque, dehu-
manised final scene of violence. This denouement is presented to us as
Doolin sees it, like strips of motion picture film, with surreal laughter
and automaton-like characters killing and dying. Doolin himself only
fortuitously survives to tell the tale. Cain develops in an extreme form
the undermining of trust that is a recurrent feature of the thrillers of

this period. The ironies of his stories spring from a widespread tendency
to trust the wrong people, or to distrust ‘everybody except the guy who
was holding the knife’ (181). Characters often make errors of this sort,
and there is always someone with a knife. Paranoia is on the whole struc-
tural rather than clinical: if someone has come to the view that every-
one was trying to double-cross them, then ‘Everybody probably was’
(184-5). As readers, we cannot even feel sure that the narrator is trust-
worthy, since he is as likely as any other character to be guilty. In ‘Parlor
Trick’, for example, we appear at first to be reading another narrative
describing the entry of the narrator-protagonist into what we suppose
is an alien and threatening environment. We share what we think is his
shock at seeing Frank with ‘a thin knife-handle sticking out of one side
of his throat’ (52). The first twist in the story comes with the revelation
that the narrator himself has put the thin knife in Frank’s throat; the
second reversal occurs when he has resigned himself to being taken
away for execution by ‘the boys’ but finds that the gun is turned instead
on one of his supposed executioners: ‘Frank’s number has been up for
a long time’ and McNulty was ‘in it with him’ (61). Cain thus turns
what at first looks like an investigative structure into the narrative of a
criminal.

This transformation of the protagonist into the criminal is much more
than an isolated narrative trick for creating suspense and surprise. In
September 1930, Black Mask’s editor, Joseph T. Shaw, argued, in defence
of his magazine, that Black Mask had published only one story, the seri-
alised parts of Hammett’s The Glass Key, in which ‘the gangster was in
any sense “the hero”’ and this, he said, was justified as a representation
of the alliance between corrupt politicians, public officials and organ-
ised crime. It was a demonstration of ‘one of the most serious illnesses,
to put it mildly, that our body politic has ever suffered from’.³⁹ During
the course of the thirties, however, in Black Mask and elsewhere, the use
of criminal protagonists and very often the abandonment of an inves-
tigative structure became increasingly common in narratives of both
private and public crimes. The next chapter looks at the stories of the
very public careers of gangsters. In these narratives, the tensions appar-
ent in Paul Cain’s ‘Parlor Trick’ are often central, with the business rival-
ries of powerful gang bosses and the powerlessness of the small-time
crook epitomising the imbalance and ‘illness’ of Depression America.