Victims of Circumstance Both the hard-boiled investigator and the career criminal have the kind of masculine competence that enables them to achieve some degree of mastery in a hostile world, however temporary and limited it might be. Even Harry Fabian, though he is in most respects a failure, can, like Rico or Scarface, be compared to counterparts in the world of business, gifted with energy, perseverance and enough nous to enable him, in his small way, to thrive: ‘He was not quite an ordinary person: he had highly developed intuitions, proceeding from long cumulative experience of the customs of the City’ (21). He knows what he is doing, and is single- minded in the pursuit of his own interests. Like most other criminal protagonists, he will end as a victim, but he will at least have put up a plausible fight before becoming a casualty in the conflict. In many noir thrillers of the period, however, the protagonist is a victim throughout, one of t...
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