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LA NOVELA NEGRA NORTEAMERICANA: D. HAMMET Y R.

CHANDLER. LA NOVELA DE DETECTIVES INGLESA: P.D. JAMES.

1. INTRODUCTION
2. ORIGINS AND FEATURES
3. BLACK AMERICAN NOVEL
Samuel Dashiell Hammet
Raymond Thornton Chandler
4. ENGLISH DETECTIVE NOVEL
Phillis Dorothy James
5. THE GENRE NOWADAYS
6. CONCLUSION
7. PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS
8. BIBLIOGRAPHY.

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NORTH AMERICAN BLACK NOVEL: D. HAMMETT AND R.

CHANDLER. ENGLISH DETECTIVE NOVEL: P.D. JAMES.

What does the term ”novela negra” stand for?

1. INTRODUCTION
The Spanish term “novela negra” can stand for different genres in English:
detective novel, mystery novel, thriller. In this topic I will offer a general
overview on detective novel, in which we can distinguish two main variations:
English detective novel (whose main representative author is P.D. James) and
American hard-boiled fiction (represented by D. Hammet and R. Chandler).
Mystery or detective stories are regarded as popular literature and probably
are the most widely read stories. Authors like John Le Carré or Stephen King
have acquire fame and have obtained best sellers with spy and mystery stories.
At present these stories have a new tendency, namely the psychological thriller,
which is also very much used in movies.
In the 1920s the detective fiction lived a golden age in the USA. Among
these authors Chandler and Hammet can be stood out. In Europe the trend to
write detective stories arrived too and the genre has acquired greater value in
the last decades with figures like Mrs. James.
And what are its origins and main features?

2. ORIGINS AND FEATURES

The roots of mystery stories can be found in the folklore of many different
cultures, because emotion, fear and curiosity have always attracted people.
However it is accepted that Edgar Allan Poe was the inventor of the genre.
He has darkly metaphysical vision mixed with elements of realism, parody, and
burlesque. He refined the short story genre and invented detective fiction.
Many of his stories prefigure the genres of science fiction, horror, and fantasy so
popular today. Poe’s short and tragic life was plagued with insecurity and this
influenced his works. He believed that strangeness was an essential ingredient
of beauty, and his writing is often exotic. His stories and poems are populated
with doomed, introspective and gloomy aristocrats. The detective story as it is

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known today was firstly written by Allan Poe: The Murders of the Rue Morgue,
appeared in 1841 in the Graham’s magazine in Philadelphia. Some years later,
in 1845, he published Tales of Mystery and Imagination, where he introduced the
first detective in the history of literature, C.Auguste Dupin. Dupin was the
perfect reasoner, a man who always looked for the smallest details to develop
his final theory. This type of character was going to be found later in detectives
like Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) or Hercules Poirot (Agatha
Christie).
Let see how this type of fiction evolved, first in the USA and then in the UK.

3. AMERICAN BLACK NOVEL: HARD-BOILED FICTION

After Poe’s stories there weren’t any other important writers in USA until
the 20th century. At the beginning of this century Mary Roberts Rinehart
produced some stories with a clever lady as detective. But we have to move to
the 20s to find the golden age of detective novels. Earl Riggers created a
Chinese-American detective whose name was Charlie Chan. The lawyer Perry
Mason was a creation of Stanley Garder and has probably become the best
known lawyer of literature. But the two most important writers of the period
were Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett

Samuel Dashiell Hammett (Maryland, 1894-New York, 1961)

As a child, his family moved to Philadelphia and later Baltimore, where he
studied at Baltimore Polytechnic. He left school at fourteen to help support the
family and then, after having worked as paper boy, junior clerk in an
advertising agency, messenger, he became a detective when he was 21. He
joined the Baltimore branch of the Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency
where he was trained by James Wright, who later served as Hammett’s model
for the Continental Op. Later, he enlisted in the Army. It was during this time
he contracted influenza and later tuberculosis, from which he would suffer the
rest of his life. He signed up for journalism courses with the goal of becoming a
newspaper reporter. Actually, D. Hammett started writing detective stories in

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the 1920s, when the typical detective story was not well defined. In 1923 the
first short story by Hammett, ‘The Road Home’, appeared in Black Mask.
Regarding his style, he is considered the initiatior of the so-called hard-
boiled style. Main features are:
 Central character: strongly individual, tough, but not necessary an
achiever.
 Surrounding world: mostly hostile and aggressive.
 Location: mostly urbanized, big cities; occasionally rural or small
towns.
 Plot: mixing murders, organized crime, investigation, violence, police
action, abuse of authority by officials, corruption in any level of the
society.
 Rebuilding of social values, reconstruction of fundamental individual
rules that should lead to a fundamental justice.
 Realistic restitution of daily life scenes, social realism, human nature
in all aspects is sharply analyzed.
 Most of the time the background of the novel is basic manicheism, a
kind of quest against evil in any form.
Among his main works we can mention…
 His first book, Red Harvest (1929) was a set of four linked stories all
telling a common story of corruption and gangters in a Montana
mining town,
 which was followed shortly after by The Dain Curse (1929) both
featuring The Continental Op.
 The next year, he published The Glass Key (1931), in which the main
character, Ned Beaumont, was partly a self-portrait: a tall, thin,
tuberculosis-ridden gambler and heavy drinker;
 And The Thin Man (1934), in which he presented a detective couple,
Nick and Nora Charles, whose character was based on Lillian
Hellman (Hammett’s second wife).
 Pentimento : Hammett and Lillian Helman’s life together.

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But, undoubtly, his masterpiece is The Maltese Falcon. It is a 1930 detective

novel, originally serialized in the magazine "Black Mask". The story has been
adapted several times for the cinema. The main character, Sam Spade, appears
only in this novel and in three lesser known short stories, yet is widely cited as
the crystallizing figure in the development of the hard-boiled private detective
genre – Raymond Chandler's character Philip Marlowe, for instance, was
strongly influenced by Hammett's Spade. Spade was a departure from
Hammett's nameless and less than glamorous detective, The Continental Op.
Sam Spade combined several features of previous detectives, most notably his
cold detachment, keen eye for detail, and unflinching determination to achieve
his own justice. He is the man who has seen the wretched, the corrupt, the
tawdry side of life but still retains his "tarnished idealism".
In this novel, Hammett redefines many of the conventions of the "hard-
boiled" detective genre. Spade is a bitter, sardonic character who lets the police
and the criminals think he is in with the criminals while he works
singlemindedly to catch the crooks. Brigid O'Shaughnessy is the classic femme
fatale. The other crooks are manipulative and self-centered (or merely self-
centered) with no concern for anyone's well-being except their own.
However, unlike some other hard-boiled detectives who have a strong sense of
idealism underneath the cynical shell, Hammett never provides a clear
statement of Spade's notion of morality. Spade attempts to explain himself to
Brigid O'Shaughnessy with the Flitcraft parable, in which Hammett makes an
oblique reference to the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, but O'Shaughnessy
has no idea what he is getting at.
At the time of Miles Archer's death, Spade is having an affair with
Archer's wife, and while he does the "right thing" in the end, catching and
turning in Archer's murderer, his reasons for doing so are somewhat
ambiguous. Although he expresses a strong professional ethic ("When a man's
partner is killed he's supposed to do something about it. It doesn't make any
difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you're supposed
to do something about it") it also has an element of self-interest about it
("[W]hen one of your organization gets killed it's bad business to let the killer

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get away with it. It's bad all around - bad for that one organization, bad for
every detective everywhere"). It is left unclear whether Spade might have
chosen not to turn Brigid in if there was a bigger monetary gain for him ("...a lot
more money would have been one more item on your side"), but certain that his
emotional attachment to her (however strong that is) is not sufficient to
overcome the risks involved with letting her go. Spade's blatant calculus of risk,
reward and duty with which Hammett ends the novel contains remarkably
little trace of morality.

Raymond Thornton Chandler (Chicago 1888-1959)

Raymond Chandler was born in Chicago, but he grew up in England, after
the divorce of his parents. He also studied in France and Germany between
1905 and 1907 and then he became a naturalized British subject in 1907 in order
to be eligible for the civil service. His first position was as Assistant Store
Officer at the Admiralty. Once in the United States, he worked in a number of
different jobs, for instance, in a bank, as a bookkeeper and as an auditor in an
oil company, from where he was dismissed for his alcoholic problems. In 1924
he married divorcee Cissy Hurlburt, with whose support, he devoted himself
entirely to writing and became a successful full time writer at the age of forty-
five. His first work Blackmailers Don’t Shoot (1933) was published by Black Mask.
 Farewell, My Lovely (1940) : female duplicity and police corruption
 And The Lady in the Lake (1943): concealed identity of a woman
 The High Window: a family destroyed because of misdeeds of the past.
 The Litle Sister (1949): set in Hollywood ‘dream factory’.
 The Long Goodbye (1953): social climber woman and femme fatale.
 Playblack : inescapable past.
 Poodle Springs: he died while writing it. It was finished by Robert
Parker in 1989.
His fame remain in his first novel The Big Sleep (1939), with two film
versions, one filmed in 1945, and another filmed in 1978. It is the first novel to
feature the detective Philip Marlowe, and is considered one of Chandler's
greatest works, and one of the seminal works of hardboiled fiction. The story is

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infamously complex and hard to follow, with many characters all double-
crossing and triple-crossing each other.
The title is a euphemism for "death"; it refers to a rumination in the book
about "sleeping the big sleep", and is not descriptive of the plot.
The narrative begins as a "wandering daughter job" and ends as a
prodigal son story. Marlowe meets General Sternwood in the orchid-filled
greenhouse of his mansion and is hired to track down the gambling IOU's and
nude photos of his daughter Carmen, which blackmailers have obtained. On his
way out, Marlowe meets both Carmen, a nymphomaniac, and her older sister,
Vivian, who is married to the expatriated and now missing I.R.A. veteran Rusty
Regan. Marlowe tracks the photos through Arthur Geiger's bookstore and
breaks into his house when he hears shots. There's Carmen naked and Geiger
dead, but his body and her negatives disappear before Marlowe can get back
from returning Carmen to her father. Marlowe chases down all those who
might exploit the items, chiefly Carmen's former lovers Owen Taylor and Joe
Brody. Taylor turns up dead in his car, driven off the Lido pier. Brody admits to
the blackmail, but is killed by Geiger's boyfriend, whom Marlowe turns in. He
finally finds Geiger's body and turns the case over to his police counterpart,
Detective Ohls.
Chandler’s wise-cracking style and capacity to endure punishment from
his foes introduced a new kind of "performance" to hard-boiled fiction, in which
victory was more often verbal than physical. Chandler's ironic tone and
extraordinary metaphors focused readers on individual scenes, which he
excelled at writing. Many of these evoke Southern California in the late 1930s so
vividly that the setting seems to become part of the plot. Most critics consider
this book among the dozen greatest hard-boiled novels.
He is considered as American Literature’s finest writer of Hard-boiled fiction.
And who and how was established the genre in the UK?

4. ENGLISH DETECTIVE NOVEL

In the UK it was Wilkie Collins who began the genre with works like The
Women in White and especially The Moonstone. The detective was Sergeant Cuff,

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a man of strong character and great sensitivity who cared of his roses in his free
time. Collins’ friend Charles Dickens [47] never wrote a proper detective novel,
but he knew the police system suite well and just before his death he started
writing The Mystery of Edwin Drood. He left unfinished and the plot is so well
structured and complicated that in spite of different attempts no one has been
able to finish it. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published for the first time in 1887 a
story with Sherlock Holmes as the main character, who was to become the best
known detective in the literary history. Holmes is the perfect reasoner and has a
methodical way of work. He has an assistant, Dr. Watson, a physician who
narrates the stories and shares some similarities with Doyle himself. He was so
famous that Doyle had to re-born him after the amount of petitions of his
readers. There is also Agatha Christie, in her first story in 1920, Mysterious Affair
at Style, she introduced Hercules Poirot, a fat and little detective with a big
moustache and her knowledge of medicine (she had been a nurse), so in many
of her novels Poirot seems to be an expert on poisons. Christie also invented an
old, intelligent lady, fond of gossip called Miss Maple. The settings of Chritie’s
novels were one of the main innovations: in the quietness of the English
villages. This can be regarded as a symbol of evil behind a pretty surface, a
representation of the corrupted human beings in the quietness as well as in
urban cities. The emphasis was on the plot, on how things happened, while the
characters used to be stereotypes.
Another representative writer of the genre is…
Phyllis Dorothy James (1920-)
P.D. James is the most representative contemporary British writer of crime
fiction. When she was eleven, her family moved to Cambridge. She also worked
for the National Health Service and the Civil Service until 1979 when she began
to work as a full-time writer. It is against the backdrop of Britain’s vast
bureaucracies such as the criminal justice system and the health services where
many of P.D. James’ mystery novels take place, since these places are arenas in
which James honed her skills for decades starting in the 1940s when she went to
work in hospital administration to help support her ailing husband and two
children. In 1968 she entered the Home Office taking the open competition for

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older Civil Service candidates and served as a Principal, first in the Police
Department and then in the Criminal Law Department. It was in the former job
that she was concerned with forensic science service, so useful for her future
novels. In 1979 she decided to retire and devote herself to full time writing, but
she could not fulfill her promise since she continued on the labour scene. She
was a Governor for the BBC, she was awarded the OBE (Officer of the Order of
the British Empire), she was made an Associate Fellow of Downing College, she
ha also been President of the Society of Authors, Doctor of Letters, Doctor of
Literature, Doctor of the University, and in 1999 she received the Mystery
Writers of America Grandmaster Award for long term achievement.
James has upgraded and expanded the entire genre of mystery writing; and
that many of her books, especially the police procedurals starring Dalgliesh, the
poetry writing detective, fit the mainstream novel criteria as much as they do
the detective genre. James’ strengths are characterization and her ability to
construct atmosphere and stories rich in detail. Also, her many years of
experience within the already mentioned bureaucracies add a complex stratum
of insider’s knowledge to her writing. Although she has been compared to
A.Christie, James’ construction of novels is rather different. While Christie was
interested in how things took place, PD James put the emphasis on why things
happen. In fact, she writes psychological detective novels where she tries to
understand the mind of the criminals in a social context. Besides she creates
round characters with personal features and feelings, which clearly opposed the
flat characters of Agatha Christie’s novels.
Her style is said to be literate, her plots complicated, her clues abundant and
fair, and her solutions, a surprise. Among her most popular detective novels we
include:
 Cover Her Face (1962), which introduced her Scotland Yard detective
Adam Dalgliesh, who is described by some other characters in the
novel as tall, dark and handsome, an unsual appearance for a
detective.
 Next year she wrote A Mind to Murder (1963) with similar
characteristics;

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 Then An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972), which introduced her

female character called Cordelia Gray, a self-independent 22-year-old
detective who owns a detective agency in the Soho and goes through
melodramatic moments.
 In The Black Tower (1975), she introduces classical detective story
considerations and insights on the subject of death, though she
always tried to avoid it; investigation in a home for incurable
paralytics.
 Death of an Expert Witness (1977)
 Shroud for a Nightingale: new method of killing with poisons and the
discovery clue by clue. It won the Silver Dagger Award.
 Unnatural Causes and The Maul and the Pear Tree: least successful
novels.
 These works were followed by The Children of Men (1992) and Death
in Holy Orders (2001), which displays an insightful grasp of the inner
workings of church hierarchy and concerns murder at an Anglican
theological college on the East Anglican coast.
 Her lastest Commander Dalgliesh mystery is The Murder Room (2003).
Innocent Blood (1980), is her masterpiece. In "Innocent Blood," Miss
James has written a novel vastly dependent upon the genre that she handles
with such success, but a novel clear and true. It is immensely readable, bright,
almost satisfying with its artful plot and careful psychological dossiers. The
themes of "Innocent Blood" are respectably literary: the quest for personal
identity, the irrational love and strain of duty between parents and children,
husband and wife.
Philippa Rose Palfrey, a cool, accomplished young woman about to go
up to Cambridge, decides to discover her real parents. She is 18, and under
English law can claim her birth certificate. For years she has lived as the
adopted daughter of Maurice Palfrey, a debonair sociologist and television
explicator of contemporary life, and Hilda, his passive wife, a woman whose
lone finicky pleasure seems to be cooking and serving gourmet meals. Kind
enough, good enough, the Palfreys have impressed Philippa with their

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deadening sense of responsibility toward her, as though she were yet another
sociological sample fostered under perfect conditions. Given this made-up
version of family life, who would not choose the facts? Philippa's gloss on her
actual parentage-that she is the illegitimate daughter of a spirited maid by the
master of a noble household-is an inauthentic as her life with Hilda and
Maurice. "Innocent Blood" begins in the honorable novelistic tradition of the
orphan's search for the past, and Miss James's self-assured heroine is given full
warning by the Government counselor: "We all have our fantasies in order to
live. Sometimes relinquishing them can be extraordinarily painful, not a rebirth
into something exciting and new but a kind of death."
Let examine how the genre is nowdays…

5. THE GENRE NOWADAYS

The tendency today is the psychological novel, that is to say, the emphasis of
the novel is on why things are done and how human relationships are. Some of
the best known authors are Josephine Tey, Ambler and Ngaio Marsh. A
subgroup among the detective novels appeared after IIWW and especially
during the Cold War years, namely spy stories, with John Le Carre as the most
interesting writer of this genre.
Besides the Mystery Writers of America was born in 1945 and it is an
organisation dedicated to elevate the standards of mystery fiction and also the
economic status of its members. Every year they award the Edgar prizes
(named after E. Allan Poe), which are excitedly awaited by the writers of the
genre.

6. CONCLUSION
Considered as a minor genre in literature and many times even despised by
critics, the detective and mystery novel is the widest read genre in present
literature. Some well-known authors like Le Carré or Ken Follet write detective
novels at high speed. The features of the genre have change since Allan Poe
invented this type of writing, but it still attracts millions of readers throughout
the world, and what is more these novels also provide scripts for excellent

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films. What is really clear is that the opinion of the critics does not always
coincide with the opinion of the readers.
From an educational point of view, the knowledge about British and
American culture (history and literature) should become part of every literary
student’s basic competence since there are hidden influences at work beneath
the textual surface: these may be socio-cultural, inter and intratextual. The
literary student has to discover these, and wherever necessary apply them in
further socio-cultural, to facilitate the study of cultural themes, as our students
must be aware of their current social reality within the international scene.
See partially the film based on Le Carré’s The Constant Gardener (2001) or
read a book review.

7. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Albert, Edward (1990): A History of English Literature. Walton-on-Thames.
Ford, B. (1983): The New Pelican Guide to English Literature. London:
Hardmonsworth.
www.britannica.com
Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia 2001. Microsoft Corporation.
Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, 1999. Detroit, St. James

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