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The piedmont areas of North and South Carolina provided much of the music that Earl Scruggs heard in his youth. After hearing the music of banjoists such as Charlie Poole, Snuffy Jenkins, Fisher Hendley, Smith Hammett and Mack Woolbright, Scruggs created his own three-finger style. Poole was a successful recording artist and model performer whose banjo playing resembled the classic style. Snuffy Jenkins is most often cited as Scruggs’s predecessor in three-finger banjo. Fisher Hendley was a businessman and civic figure as well as a musician. Woolbright was a blind musician who made a deep impression on Scruggs. Smith Hammett played a three-finger style perhaps inspired by a traveling African American musician. Hammett experienced a violent death. Scruggs came up with his own style when 10 or 11 years old while playing in the parlor of his family home in Flint Hill. Jim Mills explains Scruggs’s unique step forward.

This chapter on Dashiell Hammett’s The Dain Curse takes a narratively unmotivated car accident as the starting point for a discussion of genre negation as a force of innovation in Hammett’s writing. As a violent interruption of preestablished modes of operation, the accident embodies the way in which the novel relates to the conventions of popular fiction only to wreck and overturn them. Thus, the linearity of the investigative process is replaced with a circular structure; the purity of genre is replaced with references to a catalogue of popular fiction templates, none of which are fully executed; narrative closure is replaced with ambiguity and contingency; and the classic figure of the ‘sidekick’ is literarily blown to pieces in what Gulddal reads as another emblematic representation of the principle of genre mobility.

This chapter examines the character of the wartime home-front detective in Hollywood films during the 1940s and discusses the similarity of this detective to his counterpart in the assembly line. It analyzes the film adaptations of several crime novels including Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, Raymond Chandler's Murder My Sweet, and Cornell Woolrich's Black Angel.

Mamoulian's second film, the gangster picture City Streets (1932), was based on a screenplay by Dashiell Hammett with Gary Cooper co-starring with Sylvia Sidney. From there, Mamoulian moved on to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), in which leading man Frederic March was transformed by groundbreaking special effects from the respectable Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde, a monstrous sexual predator. Restlessly exploring genres, he next made Love Me Tonight (1932), an innovative musical pairing the songs of Richard Rodgers with stars Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette McDonald, and a sophisticated tragic-comedy with Marlene Dietrich, The Song of Songs (1933).

Hard-boiled detective fiction and film noir are almost exclusively aligned with the desires for money and sex, two mirrored conditions of a fragile human economy. The Maltese Falcon (1941), Double Indemnity (1944), and Murder, My Sweet (1944) certainly rely upon economic issues in their adaptations from the Hammett, Cain, and Chandler novels. All three novels and their film adaptations deal with sexual exchanges for material possessions: Brigid's erotic enticements to Spade for the mysterious falcon; Phyllis's promise of amorous reward for the monetary compensation from the indemnity policy; and Mrs. Grayle's lubricious invitations to Spade in order to guard her jaded secret and thereby her social position. Of course, this concupiscence as capital outlay is hardly limited to feminine desires in film noir, since Spade, Neff, and Marlowe engage in this kind of self-interested manipulation for profit. Emerging during the era of the international Great Depression and the rise of global fascism, film noir often addresses the complex, paradoxical interrelationship of economics and passion. Excess—financial, sexual, material—serves as a central motif in all of these films as it had in the development of the hard-boiled detective genre. While Hammett, Cain, and Chandler established a new style and aesthetic for hard-boiled detective fiction and for film noir, their art also reflected the pervasive economic troubles that plagued Depression-era and early post-war American culture.

This chapter focuses on American crime and detective fiction published after World War I. It first discusses pulp publishing and its role in the transformation of American crime writing, with particular reference to the Black Mask magazine and its early years. It then cites the works of writers such as Carroll John Daly as well as Dashiell Hammett's contribution to the creation of a distinctively American form of crime fiction. It also examines the protagonists featured in crime and detective fiction during the Depression era, along with the novels of Horace McCoy and James M. Cain. Finally, it analyzes Raymond Chandler's notion of “quality of redemption”.

In any reversible reaction such as . . . vA A + vB B ↔ vR R + vS S [2.1] . . . the system inevitably moves toward a state of equilibrium, or maximum probability. This equilibrium state is very important in analyzing chemical reactions because it defines the limit to which any reaction can proceed. Organic reactions, particularly those constituting a synthetic scheme for a fine chemical, usually involve molecules reacting in the liquid phase. The effects of reactant structure and of the solvent (medium) in which the reaction occurs (the solvation effects) are not included in the conventional macroscopic approach to thermodynamics. Therefore, the treatment of liquid-phase reactions tends to be less exact than that of gas-phase reactions involving simpler molecules without these influences. A convenient way of approaching this problem is to start with the conventional macroscopic or thermodynamic approach and add enough microscopic detail to allow for the effects of solute (reactant) structure and the medium. This approach is called the extrathermodynamic approach and may be regarded as bridging the gap between the two rather disparate fields of rates and equilibria represented by kinetics and thermodynamics, respectively. Such an approach is particularly useful in organic synthesis and forms the subject matter of this chapter. An important consideration in process calculations is the change that results in the basic thermodynamic properties, internal energy (U), enthalpy (H), Helmholtz work function (A), and Gibbs free energy (G) when a closed system of constant mass moves from one macroscopic state to another. For a homogeneous fluid, these change equations can be expressed in terms of four differential equations, which then can be written in difference form by employing the operator Δ to represent the change from state 1 to state 2: Of these, the enthalpy and free energy change equations are the most frequently used in the analysis of reactions.

The kinetics of chemical reactions were first studied in liquid solutions. These experiments involved mixing two liquids and following the change in the concentration of a reactant or product with time. The concentration was monitored by removing a small sample of the solution and stopping the reaction, for example, by rapidly lowering the temperature, or by following a physical property of the system in situ, for example, its color. Although the experiments were initially limited to slow reactions, they established the basic laws governing the rate at which chemical changes occur. The variables considered included the concentrations of the reactants and of the products, the temperature, and the pressure. Thus, the reacting system was examined using the variables normally considered for a system at equilibrium. Most reactions were found to be complex, that is, to be made up of several elementary steps which involved one or two reactants. As the fundamental concepts of chemical kinetics developed, there was a strong interest in studying chemical reactions in the gas phase. At low pressures the reacting molecules in a gaseous solution are far from one another, and the theoretical description of equilibrium thermodynamic properties was well developed. Thus, the kinetic theory of gases and collision processes was applied first to construct a model for chemical reaction kinetics. This was followed by transition state theory and a more detailed understanding of elementary reactions on the basis of quantum mechanics. Eventually, these concepts were applied to reactions in liquid solutions with consideration of the role of the non-reacting medium, that is, the solvent. An important turning point in reaction kinetics was the development of experimental techniques for studying fast reactions in solution. The first of these was based on flow techniques and extended the time range over which chemical changes could be observed from a few seconds down to a few milliseconds. This was followed by the development of a variety of relaxation techniques, including the temperature jump, pressure jump, and electrical field jump methods. In this way, the time for experimental observation was extended below the nanosecond range.

The opening chapter explains the sudden advent of hard-boiled writing in the 1920s, to clarify why this curious genre emerged when it did, and what continues to beguile readers as much formally as narratively. If that hardly frames a new critical perspective, the questions are still worth reviewing to show why sociological, historical, even formalist interpretations so often misunderstand the appeal. A more productive approach that focuses on strategies of early hard-boiled writing discloses how it anticipated later, genuinely accomplished detective fiction, which diverts readers’ eyes seductively away from plot and psychology. The most celebrated of early writers—Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James Cain—indelibly stamped the genre by deflecting attention from plot to the interest objects hold in themselves. As well, they created fictional heroes notable for garish self-expression rather than credible character, and who thus finally (if paradoxically) remain winningly two-dimensional.

This chapter seizes on Hammett’s intriguing early insight that detection requires description more than violence—indeed that, at the genre’s best, description trumps narrative. Chandler and Ross Macdonald extended that premise in elaborate renderings of furniture and wardrobes, of authentic locales and even facial features as a means of inventively diverting attention in order to sustain it. In the process, objects become all but haunted, returning us to plot in a heightened state of awareness, tightening the hold of the past on the present. Admittedly, that descriptive impulse in its frequency and obtrusiveness can come to verge on parody. But as the interruptions of misdirection and diversion occur ever more self-consciously, they also increasingly draw our gaze to the configuration of the whole.

While this third chapter begins by focusing on the same early pioneers, it veers from inanimate descriptions to constructions of character. That is, Hammett conceived his private investigator as fundamentally figurative, the culmination of a flamboyant style expressed more or less entirely through dialogue, with the flaunting of a cool, flip, smart-assed affect. Subsequent fictional detectives likewise gain our attention by being reduced to stick-figure sketches, little more than quirky gestures and colorful banter. In contrast to other genres, where language tends to realistic transparency while character proves more substantial, detective fiction banks on the impeccable thinness of words deftly turned. Chandler grasped the implications of such seemingly superfluous configurations, with arch similes built on Hammett’s tersely sober expressions. Ever since, genre authors have embellished an ideal of self-conscious “attitude,” celebrating in the process a wry immunity to conventional civic and moral discriminations.

This chapter explores the complex affiliations between crime stories by Dashiell Hammett, Georges Simenon, and Bertolt Brecht and their not necessarily synonymous responses to state repression in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and the growing interpenetration of crime, business, and the law. Paying particular attention to the comparative and transnational context, and the philosophical and political underpinnings of the stories, the chapter offers close readings of Hammett’s Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon, Simenon’s early Maigret novels and a selection of his roman durs, and Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera. A series of illustrative tensions, whereby the state’s ethical and coercive tendencies are equally evident, are carefully teased out via interlinked and comparative readings of Simenon and Hammett, and Hammett and Brecht. Ultimately the inability of the crime story to effect meaningful social change is taken as a harbinger for the future direction of the genre.