This thesis approaches the issue of the detective in the 21st century through the parodic novella form. The main body of the work is a piece of fiction about an amateur detective trying to find a solution to an imagined crime. This comes from my study of detective fiction, starting with Oedipus and ending with twentieth and twenty-first century examples, especially in the works of Thomas Pynchon and Chester Himes, where the detective loses power. The novella follows Whitney Sloat as he acts as detective in a world that can’t let go of the hardboiled traditions. He and the people around him struggle to connect with reality, pursuing a way of life that cannot exist outside of their world.

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The hardboiled hero is recognised as a central trope in the film noir cycle, and particularly in the classical noir texts produced in Hollywood in the 1940s. Like the films themselves, this protagonist has largely been understood as an allegorical embodiment of a bleak post-World War Two mood of anxiety and disillusionment. Theorists have consistently attributed his pessimism, alienation, paranoia and fatalism to the concurrent American cultural climate. With its themes of murder, illicit desire, betrayal, obsession and moral dissolution, the noir canon also proves conducive to psychoanalytic interpretation. By oedipalising the noir hero and the cinematic text in which he is embedded, this approach at best has produced exemplary noir criticism, but at worst a tendency to universalise his trajectory. This thesis proposes a complementary and newly historicised critical paradigm with which to interpret the noir hero. Such an exegesis encompasses a number of social, aesthetic, demographic and political forces reaching back to the nineteenth century. This will reveal the centrality of modernity in shaping the noir heros ontology. The noir hero will also be connected to the flaneur, a figure who embodied the changes of modernity and who emerged in the mid-nineteenth century as both an historical entity and a critical metaphor for the new subject.

<p>In my study I analyse Reijo Mäki’s four books Pimeyden tango (1997), Pahan suudelma (1998), Keltainen leski (1999) and Black Jack (2003).  I’m interested whether Mäki as a writer belongs to traditional Finnish prose which started from Aleksis Kivi than genre of crime literature.</p><p>After Kai Laitinen humour, nature and democracy are typical to Finnish literature tradition.  Mäki’s milieu descriptions are closer to the Finnish literary tradition. Through nature the characters mirror their emotions, feelings and events. The environment is not only seen, but it is also smelled, touched and heard. Through the marks of the nature characters give right as well as misleading clues. It is particularly characteristic to the Finnish literary tradition to describe division of life, social status and the freedom and lack of it through weather, which is not typical to the crime literature.  Also Mäki’s characters are democratic and everyday and strongly individualistic and anti-social despite of person’s social standing.  Laitinen’s point of view is that in the Finnish literary tradition equality is only between men. In Mäki’s fiction women characters are narrow and they are only seen how they look.</p><p>Mäki represents the modern criminal literature in which are characteristics of puzzle, hard-boiled and police novels. Unlike hardboiled detective stories his books are full of verbal descriptions. In conclusion Mäki’s books clearly represent the Finnish literary tradition.</p>

The appearance, use, and philosophy of the disabled detective are latent even in early detective texts, such as in Arthur Conan Doyle’s canonical Sherlock Holmes series. By philosophy, I am referring to both why the detective feels compelled to detect as well as the system of detection the detective uses and on which the text relies. Because the detective feels incompatible with the world around him (all of the detectives I analyze in this dissertation are men), he is driven to either fix himself, the world, or both. His systematic approach includes diagnosing problems through symptomatology and removing the deficient aspect. While the detective narrative’s original framework assimilates bodies to medical and scientific discourses and norms in order to represent a stable social order, I argue that contemporary detective subgenres, including classical disability detective texts, hardboiled disability detective texts and postmodern disability detective texts, respond to this framework by making the portrayal of disability explicit by allocating it to the detective. The texts present disability as both a literary mechanism that uses disability to represent abstract metaphors (of hardship, of pity, of heroism) and a cultural construct in and of itself. I contend that the texts use disability to investigate what it means to be an individual and a member of society. Thus, I trace disability in detective fiction as it parallels the cultural move away from the autonomous individual and his participation in a stable social order and move towards the socially located agent and shifting situational values.

The hardboiled hero is recognised as a central trope in the film noir cycle, and particularly in the classical noir texts produced in Hollywood in the 1940s. Like the films themselves, this protagonist has largely been understood as an allegorical embodiment of a bleak post-World War Two mood of anxiety and disillusionment. Theorists have consistently attributed his pessimism, alienation, paranoia and fatalism to the concurrent American cultural climate. With its themes of murder, illicit desire, betrayal, obsession and moral dissolution, the noir canon also proves conducive to psychoanalytic interpretation. By oedipalising the noir hero and the cinematic text in which he is embedded, this approach at best has produced exemplary noir criticism, but at worst a tendency to universalise his trajectory. This thesis proposes a complementary and newly historicised critical paradigm with which to interpret the noir hero. Such an exegesis encompasses a number of social, aesthetic, demographic and political forces reaching back to the nineteenth century. This will reveal the centrality of modernity in shaping the noir heros ontology. The noir hero will also be connected to the flaneur, a figure who embodied the changes of modernity and who emerged in the mid-nineteenth century as both an historical entity and a critical metaphor for the new subject.

In my study I analyse Reijo Mäki’s four books Pimeyden tango (1997), Pahan suudelma (1998), Keltainen leski (1999) and Black Jack (2003).  I’m interested whether Mäki as a writer belongs to traditional Finnish prose which started from Aleksis Kivi than genre of crime literature. After Kai Laitinen humour, nature and democracy are typical to Finnish literature tradition.  Mäki’s milieu descriptions are closer to the Finnish literary tradition. Through nature the characters mirror their emotions, feelings and events. The environment is not only seen, but it is also smelled, touched and heard. Through the marks of the nature characters give right as well as misleading clues. It is particularly characteristic to the Finnish literary tradition to describe division of life, social status and the freedom and lack of it through weather, which is not typical to the crime literature.  Also Mäki’s characters are democratic and everyday and strongly individualistic and anti-social despite of person’s social standing.  Laitinen’s point of view is that in the Finnish literary tradition equality is only between men. In Mäki’s fiction women characters are narrow and they are only seen how they look. Mäki represents the modern criminal literature in which are characteristics of puzzle, hard-boiled and police novels. Unlike hardboiled detective stories his books are full of verbal descriptions. In conclusion Mäki’s books clearly represent the Finnish literary tradition.

The career path of African American novelist Chester Himes is often characterised as a u-turn. Himes grew to recognition in the 1940s as a writer of the Popular Front, and a pioneer of the era's black 'protest' fiction. However, after falling out of domestic favour in the early 1950s, Himes emigrated to Paris, where he would go on to publish eight Harlem-set detective novels (1957-1969) for Gallimard's La Série Noire. Himes's 'black' noir fiction brought him critical and commercial success amongst a white European readership, and would later gain a cult status amongst an African American readership in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Himes's post-'protest' career has been variously characterised as a commercialist 'selling out'; an embracing of black 'folk' populism; and an encounter with Black Atlantic modernism. This thesis analyses the Harlem Cycle novels in relation to Himes's career, and wider debates regarding postwar African American literature and race relations.Fundamentally, I argue that a move into commercial formula fiction did not curtail Himes's critical interest in issues of power, exploitation, and racial inequality. Rather, it refocused his literary 'protest' to representational politics itself, and popular culture's ability to inscribe racial identity, resistance and exploitation. On the one hand, Himes's Harlem fiction meets a formulaic and commercial demand for images of 'pathological' black urban criminality. However, Himes, operating 'behind enemy lines', uses the texts to dramatise this very dynamic. Himes's pulp novels depict a heightened Harlem that is thematically 'pulped' by a logic of capitalist exploitation, and a fetishistic dominant of racial difference. In doing so, Himes's formula fiction makes visible certain anti-progressive shifts in the analysis and representation of postwar race relations. My methodology mirrors the multiple operations of the texts, placing Himes's detective fiction in relation to a diverse and interdisciplinary range of sources: literary, historical, and theoretical. Using archival material, I look in detail at Himes's public image and contemporary reception as a Série Noire writer, his professional correspondence with French and U.S. literary agents, and his private thoughts and later reflections regarding his career. This methodology attempts to get to grips with a literary triangulation between Himes's progressive authorial intentions, the demands placed upon him as a Série Noire writer, and the wider ideological shifts of the postwar era. By exploring these different historical, geographical and literary contexts, this thesis offers a wide-reaching analysis of how cultural and racial meanings are produced and negotiated within a commodity form.

This literary study examines the relationship between the hardboiled detective and the 2003 detective novel Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane. Known for his thought provoking stories as a crime novelist, Lehane exemplifies the desire of a current literary shift from stoic patriarchal constructs of detective archetypes towards a more feminist perspective. This thesis focuses on how Shutter Island reflects on the restrictive attributes of the hardboiled detective whilst illuminating a realist depiction of male vulnerability.              The theoretical background of this research is derived from existing feminist literary theories that observe patterns of the hardboiled detective in relation to crime literature from the 20th century to the modern day. This paper applies feminist literary theory to illustrate how traditional themes within this type of literature have shifted in favor of the emerging contemporary detective depicted in feminist crime fiction.

This thesis challenges the traditional view of the 'femme fatale' as merely a dangerous and ravenous sexual predator who leads men into ruination. Critical, especially feminist, scholarship mostly regards the femme fatale as a sexist construction of a male fantasy and treats her as an expression of misogyny that ultimately serves to reaffirm male authority. But this thesis proposes alternative ways of viewing the femme fatale by showing how she can also serve as a figure for imagining female agency. As such, I focus on a particular character type that is distinct from the general archetype of the femme fatale because of the greater degree of agency she demonstrates. This 'criminal femme fatale' uses her sexual appeal and irresistible wiles both to manipulate men and to commit criminal acts, usually murder, in order to advance her goals with deliberate intent and full culpability. This thesis reveals and explains the agency of the criminal femme fatales in American Hardboiled crime fiction between the late 1920s and the end of World War II in the works of three authors: Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain. The criminal femme fatales in the narratives of these authors show a subversive power and an ability to act - even though, or perhaps only if, this action is a criminal one. I show that these criminal femme fatales exhibit agency through their efforts to challenge not only the 'masculine' genre and the criminal space that this genre represents, but also to undercut the male protagonist's role and prove his failure in asserting control and dominance. Hammett's narratives provide good examples of how the criminal femme fatales function on a par with male gangsters in an underworld of crime and corruption. Chandler's work demonstrates a different case of absent/present criminal women who are set against the detective and ultimately question his power and mastery. Cain's narratives show the agency of the criminal femme fatales in the convergence between their ambition for social mobility and their sexual power over the male characters. To explain how these female characters exhibit agency, I situate this body of literature alongside contemporaneous legal and medical discourses on female criminality. I argue that the literary female criminal is a fundamentally different portrayal because she breaks the 'mad-bad' woman dichotomy that dominates both legal and medical discourses on female criminality. I show that the criminal femme fatales' negotiations of female agency within hardboiled crime fiction fluctuate and shift between the two poles of the criminalized and the medicalized women. These criminal femme fatales exhibit culpability in their actions that bring them into an encounter with the criminal justice system and resist being pathologized as women who suffer from a psychological ailment that affect their control. The thesis concludes that the ways in which the criminal femme fatales trouble normative socio-cultural conceptions relating to docile femininity and passive sexuality, not only destabilize the totality and fixity of the stereotype of the femme fatale in hardboiled crime fiction, but also open up broader debates about the representation of women in popular culture and the intersections between genre and gender.