The street was mine

By Megan E. Abbott

Subjects: Private investigators in literature, Detective and mystery films, Race in literature, American Detective and mystery stories, Masculinity in literature, American Noir fiction, Men in motion pictures, History and criticism, Film noir, Men, White, in literature, Men in literature, City and town life in literature, City and town life in motion pictures

Description: "This book considers a recurrent figure in American literature: the solitary white man moving through urban space. The descendent of nineteenth-century frontier and western heroes, the figure reemerges in 1930s-50s America as the "tough guy." The Street Was Mine looks at the tough guy in the works of hardboiled novelists Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep) and James M. Cain (Double Indemnity) and their popular film noir adaptations. Focusing on the way the tough guy negotiates racial and gender "otherness," this study argues that he embodies the promise of an impervious white masculinity amidst the turmoil of the Depression through the beginnings of the Cold War. The book concludes with an analysis of Chester Himes, whose Harlem crime novels (For Love of Imabelle) unleash a ferocious revisionary critique of the tough guy tradition."--BOOK JACKET.