Foggy Muddle: Narrative, Contingency and Genre Mobility in Dashiell Hammett's The Dain Curse

Title: Foggy Muddle: Narrative, Contingency and Genre Mobility in Dashiell Hammett's The Dain Curse
Creator: Gulddal, Jesper
Relation: Criminal Moves: Towards a Theory of Crime Fiction Mobility p. 113-128
Publisher Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvsn3pht.10
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Resource Type: book chapter
Date: 2019
Description: 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.
Subject: genre negation; popular fiction; circular structure; emblematic representation
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1460096
Identifier: uon:45861
Identifier: ISBN:9781789620580
Language: eng

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