Repressed Obsession

The decade from 1947-1957 is fondly remembered today as the time of "Leave It To Beaver" and "Father Knows Best", a time when wise, down-to-earth men benevolently ruled the roost, whether at home or in the White House, in the person of Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Crime readers remember it differently. From the dark alleys of gritty urban landscapes to the dusty desperate back roads of the country, crime and suspense fiction painted an America gripped by fear and suspicion. Some of the greatest writers to work in the field wrote during the fifties, including giants like Jim Thompson, David Goodis, and Chester Himes, and lesser-known writers such as Charles Willeford, Charles Williams, and Harry Whittington.

Why the outpouring of crime stories?

As Philip Kemp notes in his essay "From The Nightmare Factory" (in The Big Book of Noir), film noir, and crime fiction as well, had certain beliefs about human nature: 1) Money is the most important force in the world. People will do anything for money, mortgaging all that's important in the name of the Almighty Buck. 2) The classes clash. The upper class is suspicious of the lower classes that serve it; the lower classes seethe with resentment. 3) It's every man for himself. Neither family nor friendship call for any loyalty, nor do they receive any.

Despite the fact that these are central Marxist notions, they'd become so pervasive as to lose any political meaning. In addition, as Victor Gischler points out in an essay at Plots With Guns, the police were viewed as either incompetent or uninterested, and could not be counted on for support. It's easy to understand the disillusionment of the postwar years. We'd fought a terrible war and won, only to replace one enemy with another. In the process we'd unleashed the most powerful weapon ever created; a new war could literally mean the end of the world.

Into this environment came Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Between them, they stirred up fears of a Communist Underground plotting the overthrow of the United States. The hearings they held discredited many based on little more than hearsay. Many prominent writers, artists, and filmmakers emigrated, recalling the exodus from Nazi Germany that brought people like Fritz Lang and Robert Siodmak to the United States in the thirties.

In fact the suspicion brought on by the Red witch hunt differed only in degree from that inspired by Hitler's Gestapo or Stalin's NKVD. The HUAC was, in its way, our own American purge, in that it was baldly a power play. Evidence of crimes or conspiracy was not what these people were after. The committee was seeking those who had professed Communist beliefs. While some got off some good rejoinders (when asked if he was a Communist, Kenneth Fearing replied, "Not yet"; actor Marc Lawrence said he went to Communist meetings because he heard it was a good place to meet girls), fear and paranoia were more common responses.

The fact that our own government was acting in the most un-American way possible could not have escaped the public, at least subconsciously, as film noir reached its peak during this period, and sales of crime novels surged. Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer appeared, bringing with him a justice that the police were unable or unwilling to supply. Many others wrote from the perspective of the criminal, who may try his best to get ahead in the ruthlessly Darwinian world, but usually ended up dead or in jail at the hands of Fate or his fellow men.

Another factor in the growth of crime fiction, and a bit more prosaic one, was the growth of the paperback original (PBO). Created in the late 1930s, the production of "pocket books" surged as various publishers tried to capitalize on the runaway success of Spillane. The result was a large number of new writers entering the field, many with backgrounds in other genres such as social realism. These books were short and jam-packed with action, targeted at men, and intended to be read and tossed aside.

Later in the fifties, the atmosphere of repressive conformity began to relax, and dissent became more and more common, the rise of the Beats, for example, or the growth of rock and roll. The popularity of the paperback writers began to wane at about this time, as casual reading was gradually replaced with television. The idealism of the early sixties, along with the James Bond spy craze of the same period, sent crime fiction into a decline, although some individual writers retained or even gained popularity (Richard Stark, Ross Macdonald, and John D. MacDonald spring to mind).

As the sixties became the seventies, the country once again grew disillusioned, but the primary artistic medium for this era was film. In the intervening years the French New Wave cinema had had a chance to chew over the suspense fiction from the previous era (especially in the films of Francois Truffaut), and this influence, along with the new recognition of film noir as a distinct genre, made movies the primary vehicle for crime stories. Dirty Harry, the violent avenger of these times, was a film icon whereas Mike Hammer had achieved fame on the printed page.

Finally, writing in general and crime writing in particular became less blue-collar and more professional. Fewer writers shut themselves away in a cheap hotel and pounded out words until they sold; more people worked their day jobs and wrote what they could in their spare time. These part-time writers were teachers, or lawyers, or newspaper reporters, not bartenders or roughnecks. Crime writing had moved into the middle class, and to some degree lost touch with its roots.

Crime fiction of the fifties inspired many of today's best writers, who tend to be more polished and professional. But the influences that shaped the writers of yesterday are gone, never to be repeated. Admire those writers, for you won't see their like again.