The Menace of the Post-HardboiledMaverick: Jim Thompson’s Pop. 1280 andModern Television Detective Drama

S U S A N N A L E E

IN CARROLL JOHN DALY’S THE SNARL OF THE BEAST (1926), CONSIDERED THE

first American hardboiled novel, detective Race Williams sums upthe principles of the hardboiled character: ‘‘Right and wrong are

not written on the statutes for me, nor do I find my code of morals inthe essays of long-winded professors. My ethics are my own’’ (12). Inthis statement, reiterated in various forms in Raymond Chandler,Dashiell Hammett, and Mickey Spillane, the idea of the ethical isrendered personal. But in a paradoxical turn, this personal appropria-tion does not dismantle the transcendent nature of the ethical, butsimply releases it from bureaucratic constraints and traditionalinstitutional structures. Scott Christianson writes that hardboiledfiction ‘‘promotes the subversion of, or resistance to, modern culture atthe same time that it props up that culture’’ (145). In a similar manner,it promotes the subversion of received (and transcendent) ethicalprinciples at the same time that it sustains and relies upon them. RaceWilliams’s declaration and the entire hardboiled formula maintain acontinuous balance between universal ethical principles and theliberties of maverick action. Hardboiled fiction sustained this balancethrough the 1930s and 1940s. But in the 1950s and 1960s, JimThompson’s first-person narrators, baleful descendents of the hard-boiled heroes, turned the autonomous status and maverick ethics of theprincipal character into a source of pure menace. In Thompson’s Pop.1280 (1964), the narrator and principal character, Nick Corey, is a

The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 37, No. 1, 2003r 2003 Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, andPO Box 1354, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK

43

sociopathic small-town sheriff whose actions are born from socialDarwinism, messianic delusion, and an inclination to spectacularviolence. Nick Corey turns the hardboiled balance upside down. He isnot a renegade resistant to social contamination and bureaucraticlimitations, but a confused genius interested in destruction. His ethicsare his own, as they were for the hardboiled characters, but thisstatement has now become the menacing proclamation of thesociopath.

Critics have read Thompson’s fiction as social criticism, as sinisterpostmodern documentary. Peter Prescott, in a review for Newsweek,finds in Thompson’s novels ‘‘the absence of any moral center at all’’(90). This absence is situated in the principal character, but is mostoften read as emblematic of an entire contaminated world. Forbiographer Michael McCauley: ‘‘His criminals and their actions areonly the most extreme examples of a whole world gone wrong.’’ So it isfor Kenneth Payne, who sees the ‘‘world gone wrong’’ as emblematic ofthe postmodern condition: ‘‘There is a place for Thompson in thepostmodern . . . his discourse of disintegration undermines the illusionsof American community, exceptionalism, and moral order’’ (127).These readings are valid, but discount a crucial element both ofThompson’s fiction and of the postmodern condition. That element isthe deliberate subversion of the individual as the center of ethics and ofnarratorial coherence. Biographer Robert Polito writes that the visionin Pop. 1280 ‘‘wriggles past private madness, or American rot, touniversal horror’’ (456). But I would propose that the universal horrorcomes precisely from private madnessFfrom Corey, the author andproducer of that horror. It is Corey’s primary responsibility for theworld’s putrefactionFin explicit and deliberate contrast with themoral compasses of Chandler and HammettFthat produces aparticularly sinister postmodern resonance. In this article, I examineThompson’s post-hardboiled contamination of the individual andpropose why it is important to postmodernism. I then consider how theproblem of the individual is being negotiated currently in popularculture.

From the start, Pop. 1280 evokes the hardboiled notion of thecharacter poisoned or compromised by his surroundings. One of thefoundations of the hardboiled formula is the sense of the sinister world,or an inescapably problematic atmosphere. The hardboiled characternarrates his world, lends it a voice and an order, but at the same time

44 Susanna Lee

cannot transcend it. Such is the contradiction embodied in thehardboiled: the detective stands both within and outside thecontamination of the world around him. As Philip Marlowe said atthe end of The Big Sleep, ‘‘Me, I was part of the nastiness now’’ (230). InPop. 1280, Corey articulates a similar abdication: ‘‘All I’d ever done wassheriffin’. It was all I could do. Which was just another way of sayingthat all I could do was nothing’’ (11). But whereas Marlowe absorbedthe nastiness while paradoxically retaining a moral and narratorialsteadiness, Corey has no such foundation and no such inclination tosustain an ethical center. What is more, the nothing that he claims toaccomplish is in fact something: he either perpetrates or orchestratesevery murder in the novel. Chandler wrote that Hammett ‘‘tookmurder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley’’ (‘‘TheSimple Art’’ 58). What Thompson does, to more disturbing effect, istake the hardboiled maverick from a transcendent place and turn himinto a source of disorder and danger.

Pop. 1280 contains numerous ruminations on the sad state of themodern world and on the helplessness of the individual to remedy it.These ruminations are somewhat reminiscent of Marlowe’s moments ofself-examination, but their similarities serve only to underscore theirdifferences. For instance, Corey complains: ‘‘When you’re sorry forsomeone, you want to help them, and when it sinks in on you that youcan’t, that there’s too god-danged many of them, that everywhere youlook there’s someone, millions of someones, and you’re only one manan’ no one else cares an’ - an’ - we were having an oven supper thatnight, which was a good thing since Myra was so long in the bedroomwith Rose’’ (137). On the one hand, it is uncertain whether hismundane ruminations on dinner indicate dullness or disillusion. Itcould seem that Corey is concerned and discouraged about the troublesin Pottsville. But another reading suggests that he has no sustainedinterest in the world around him, that this entire episode ridiculessocial concern and hardboiled compassion. In another moment of socialcontemplation, Corey once more meditates on the emptiness aroundhim: ‘‘The kind of thinkin’ that when you ain’t doing nothing else butthat, why you’re better off dead. Because that’s the emptiness thinkin’and you’re already dead inside, and all you’ll do is spread the stink andthe terror, the weepin’ and the wailin’, the torture, the starvation, theshame of your deadness’’ (198). These contemplations present whatPolito named universal horror, inscribe the narrator within the deadness

The Menace of the Post-Hardboiled Maverick 45

around him, and indicate the emptiness that precludes transcendence.But the very next sentence reads, ‘‘I shuddered, thinking howwonderful was our Creator to create such downright hideous thingsin the world, so that something like murder didn’t seem at all bad bycomparison. Yea, verily, it was indeed merciful and wonderful of Him’’(198). This phrase is unambiguous; the contaminated atmosphere isnot a lamentable predicament, but rather a welcome distraction fromthe narrator’s sociopathic actions. Throughout the novel, ruminationsabout trouble in the modern world are occasions for either entireindifference or merriment. Rather than a constrained sufferer in asinister environment, as critics propose, Corey becomes the producer ofthat environment, the author and narrator of contamination.

Payne writes of Corey as a tormented character: ‘‘Nick is privatelytormented by considerations of right and justice, and part of hiscomplex psychology is a profound sense of their absence from acaricature small-town community’’ (125). He also points to Thomp-son’s ‘‘preoccupation with issues of morality and with the problem ofwhat to make of a Hobbesian American world in the absence of anydiscernible moral consensus’’ (119). The absence of a moral consensus isundeniable. But it is not this absence that produces the poisonousatmosphere, but the absence of a moral policeman. This novel is verymuch about individual agencyFnot about its abolishment, but itsdangerous misuse. The moments when the narrator pretends to be butanother cog in an unfortunate machine inevitably give way tospectacular declarations of his singular accountability. For instance, in amoment of messianic musing, he underscores the problem of origins: ‘‘Isaid I meant I was just doing my job, followin’ the holy precepts laiddown in the Bible. It’s what I’m supposed to do, you know, to punishthe heck out of people for bein’ people. To coax ‘em into revealin’theirselves, an’ them kick the crap out of ‘em’’ (206). And then, ‘‘I justgot to be High Sheriff, because I’ve been peccul-yarly an’ singularlyfitted for it, and I ain’t allowed to give it up. Every now an’ then, Ithink I’m going to get out of it, but always the thoughts are put in myhead and the words in my mouth to hold me in my place. I got to goon an’ on, doin’ the Lord’s work; and all he does is the pointin’ Rose, allhe does is pick out the people an’ I got to exercise His wrath on ‘em’’(209). Articulated in these boisterous assertions is the ambiguousnature of agency. Both declarations start with a humble promise tosustain religious principles, moral and ethical codes and doctrinesFto

46 Susanna Lee

protect universal principles. But the rest of the first sentenceF‘‘It’swhat I’m supposed to do, you know, to punish the heck out of peoplefor bein’ people. To coax ‘em into revealin’ theirselves, an’ them kickthe crap out of ‘em’’Fdeliberately contaminates that same promise. Soit is with the second passage. ‘‘I just got to be High Sheriff, I got to goon an’ on, doin’ the Lord’s work’’ reads as a fanatical sort of dedicationto principles of justice. But then, ‘‘all he does is the pointin’ Rose, allhe does is the pick out the people an’ I got to exercise His wrath on‘em’’ parodies that dedication. The wrath in this statement is not theLord’s, but his. At times, Corey is blatant about this: ‘‘I’m the saviorhimself, Christ on the Cross come right here to Potts County, becauseGod knows I was needed here’’ (179). Payne describes Corey’s messianicfantasies as ‘‘futile gestures in the face of his overriding sense of thevacuum at the center of things’’ (‘‘Pottsville, USA’’ 56). But I wouldcontend that Corey is the source of this vacuum, narrating andcelebrating his own misdeeds. His ironic abdication, ‘‘You can’t fault ajug for being twisted because the hand of the potter slipped’’ (Pop.1280 179), reminiscent of Chandler’s rueful admission, ‘‘I was part ofthe nastiness now,’’ thus reads as a taunt to the reader accustomed toblaming character on culture.

It is true that Corey can be read (and has been read) as insane, thathis messianic declarations could be delusions rather than narratorialmachinations. But in a sense, it does not matter if he is mad. The pointis that the moral policeman is a crucial element of hardboiled fiction; towitness a narrator who claims to be ‘‘part of the nastiness’’ succeednonetheless in a sort of transcendence is part of the hardboiled’s allure.But here, Corey, either mad or incompetent (or both), systematicallysubverts all of the foundations of the hardboiled character. And in sodoing, he dismantles the notion of the transcendent and redemptiveindividual. Instead of being ‘‘part of the nastiness,’’ or a perniciouscharacter among other pernicious characters, Corey is the source of thenastiness in the novelFfor Corey, of course, is not just the murderoussheriff in Pottsville, Pop. 1280, but the narrator. And as such, he is inevery sense responsible for the narrative and its contents. When, in themiddle of the aforementioned declamations, he says to Rose: ‘‘I’ve gotno objection to cleaving unto you for five or ten minutes even if you aresort of a fugitive from the law’’ (208), we see that his messianicdiscourse is both parodic and deliberate. His use of that discourse is anintentional reminder of his personal machinations. So it is the accounts

The Menace of the Post-Hardboiled Maverick 47

of his murders, which, in the guise of blase offhandedness, in factshowcase his actions and his violence. The murders in Pop. 1280 are notmundane elements in an already vicious world, not ‘‘only the mostextreme examples of a whole world gone wrong,’’ as McCauleyproposed, but solitary violations on what seems an innocuouslandscape. For instance, he describes his first two killings: ‘‘Goodnight, ye merry gentlemen, I said. ‘Hail and farewell.’ The Ruby Clarkwhistled. By the time the echo died, Moose and Curly were in the river,each with a bullet pang between his eyes. I waited on the little pier fora minute until the Ruby had gone by. I always say there’s nothingprettier than a steamboat at night’’ (42). Again, when he shoots TomHauck: ‘‘I left him after a while, squirming around in a pool of his ownblood and guts. And then ceasing to squirm. Then, I drove out to theHauck farm. The house was pretty much like most farm houses you seein this part of the country, except it was a little bigger’’ (70). Thesenarrative constructions, with their sudden mutations in tone anddistance, underscore Corey’s role as contaminator of the scene. Thespectacle of murder stands in grotesque contrast to the bucolicsouthern landscape in the first scene, and to a neutral description of theregion in the second. The landscape itself, in these moments, ispleasant, or at least banal. It is the narrator who is the stain upon it,who produces the violence that he then chroniclesFwho causes the‘‘vacuum at the center of things.’’ Robert Polito contends that Corey isthe embodiment of a doomed American dream, a ‘‘myth failed’’ (51).But ‘‘myth that fails’’ is precisely the dream of hardboiled virtue. Thenarrator remains as structuring principle and aesthetic agent, but, assuch, has become a force of destructionFa menace and not a redeemer.

These murders subvert the hardboiled formula of the private eyeswho ‘‘restore moral order to their twilight worlds’’ (Prescott 90). Thisis because Corey, as we see, is the instrument of moral disorder. But itis also because his very narration, his narratorial vision, is precarious.From the start, Nick Corey matches and surpasses classic hardboiledcharacters in metaphor, irony, and verbal vigor. But his account ofevents, significantly, is unreliable, devoid not just of ethical but offactual coherence. For instance, after he orchestrates and witnesses themurder of his wife and her brother/boyfriend, he says, ‘‘I listened, tryin’to hear Myra out in the kitchen. I started puzzlin’ over where Lenniemight be, and thinking maybe I ought to go out and look for himbefore he got into trouble. I was clean out into the living room before I

48 Susanna Lee

suddenly remembered’’ (212). The classic hardboiled detective is asupreme agent of vision, of perception unimpeded (the private ‘‘eye’’).But here, the same narrator who is a perpetrator of murder is a source ofdisorder, an obstacle to reason. Throughout, this novel takes thehardboiled qualities that are emblems of exemplarity, and renders thememblems of danger. ‘‘My ethics are my own,’’ which assumed the moraland subjective solidity of the speaker, now promises chaotic action. Thevision of the first-person narrator, which was the foundation of thehardboiled model, now promises confusion. Corey’s sociopathic voiceand actions are constructed so as to ruin from within the hardboiledexemplarity of the individual. That exemplarity, which enables themain character to determine and narrate the standards of ethics andaesthetics in his world, has become unreliable.

I have insisted on Pop. 1280’s subversion of the exemplaryindividual and the hardboiled formula because that subversion hasimportant implications for postmodernist readings of the novel. Paynewrites, ‘‘There is a place for Thompson in the postmodern . . . hisdiscourse of disintegration undermines the illusions of Americancommunity, exceptionalism, and moral order’’ (127). For ScottChristianson, ‘‘Modernist art and hardboiled detective fiction aredeeply conflictedFwhich is to say that they are both ripe fordeconstruction. Both testify to the fragmentation and meaninglessnessof the modern condition, and its concomitant disintegration of the self,at the same time that they seek to make sense of that world and theresultant self through the literary text’’ (145). If the hardboiled isassociated with modernism, then Thompson’s fiction, with its self-conscious abandonment of sense and of the sense-making subject, canindeed be read as postmodern.

The postmodern is associated with the absence of moral absolutes,the failure of overarching discourses and authorities to guaranteemeaning, and the dismantling of faith in reason and emancipation.Among these failures is that of justice; as Lyotard writes, ‘‘the questionof the legitimacy of science has been indissociably linked to that of thelegitimation of the legislator since the time of Plato’’ (8). Such is thecrisis in Pop. 1280, where problematic (but total) narrative authorityaccompanies a just-as-problematic judicial authority. But to return tothe problem of the individual, uncertain philosophical foundations,declares Lyotard, demand that ethics be grounded in the particular. Thewriter (and in this case the narrator-policeman) does not have recourse

The Menace of the Post-Hardboiled Maverick 49

to extant structures or rules, but rather must produce them: ‘‘Apostmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the texthe writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed bypreestablished rules, and they cannot be judged according to adetermining judgment, by applying familiar categories to the text orto the world. Those rules and categories are what the work of art itselfis looking for’’ (81). But Thompson’s fiction parodies this ‘‘looking forrules and categories’’ completely. Corey is a spectacular failure, both asan overarching representation of judicial authority and as a particularinstance of personal ethics. What is especially interesting is that thesefailuresFthe simultaneous failure of personal conscience and of grandnarrativesFare precisely those that characterized the Second WorldWar, the historical source of the postmodern condition as described byLyotard and Blanchot. Pop. 1280 was published in 1964, three yearsafter the 1961 Eichmann trial and one year after the publication ofHannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. Although there is noindication that he read Arendt, Thompson’s post-hardboiled andpostmodern contamination of the individual is nonetheless reminiscentof the ‘‘banality of evil’’ as represented in Arendt’s writings and inhistorical considerations of the Holocaust. During the Eichmann trialas during the Nuremburg trials, the problem of situating personalblame for systematic atrocities was very much in evidence. Arendtpoints to the assertions at the Eichmann trial and at Nuremberg ‘‘bythe defendants and their counselsFthat this new type of criminal . . .commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nighimpossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong’’ (253). Inthe end, though, the individual on trial is held to be responsible. Andin subsequent years, the controversy around personal responsibility wasbrought to bear on civilians. In Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996),Daniel Goldhagen demonstrates that Nazi atrocities depended onindividual civilian ingenuity, that the murder of innocents was carriedout by a multitude of common citizens.1 Thompson’s Nick Corey,wandering from viciousness to blandness, sometimes within onesentence, embodies and fuses both elements of these atrocities: thesociopathic violence of the administrator and the indifferent sadism ofthe regular citizen. In this sense, Corey is a radical instance andreminder of the failure of the ethical transcendent and the particular.Thompson’s concentration on the contamination of the individual, forthis reason, is perhaps one of the most menacing and authentic

50 Susanna Lee

representations of postmodern circumstances. Corey has turned thehardboiled savior into an annihilatorFof reason and justice andcoherence, but also of empathic presence and of life itself.

R. V. Cassill, in his famous article, ‘‘Fear, Purgation, and the Sopho-clean Light,’’ notes that Thompson’s characters are ‘‘free in thatcatastrophic sense of the word which was vainly ignored by ourfounding fathers’’ (234). Free (unchained and incomprehensible, fromwithin and from without) became catastrophic precisely through thehistorical realities of the Second World War. And once free becamecatastrophic, and remained catastrophic, as it did in Thompson’sfiction, it posed an important problem for the hardboiled formula andfor other cultural representations of the maverick character. When theindividual is not a dependable redeemer, but a terrifying menace, whatbecomes of the renegade? And more importantly, what becomes of theethics and morals that the renegade had embodied? Must these too beabandoned, in a postmodern abdication? To consider this question, Iwould like to turn for a moment to the domain of modern television,and, more specifically, to the television courtroom drama or detectiveprogram. For it is here that the problem of the dangerous andunreliable individual (and in particular the dangerous and unreliablemaintainer of justice) continues to be negotiated.

A fundamental principle of the hardboiled crime novel was theautonomous and exemplary position of the hardboiled detective. WhenDaly’s Race Williams declared, ‘‘Right and wrong are not written onthe statutes for me,’’ the implication is that he could do better than thestatutes; his ingenuity worked best unfettered by institutionalconstraints. The same sense pervades the entire hardboiled formula:that the rules and regulations of the establishment are limiting.2 So itis in The Snarl of the Beast, in The Big Sleep, in Dashiell Hammett’sfiction. Even in Pop. 1280, Corey (who is a policeman) mocks theprofessional detective who spends his time in such establishmentactivities as strike-breaking and immigrant persecution (172). Fordecades, television detective shows too valued a maverick nature.Programs such as Knightrider, Baretta, Magnum PI, Remington Steele,Mannix, The Rockford Files, Columbo, and Mike Hammer presentedcharacters (sometimes a policeman and sometimes an independentdetective) who were embodiments of both ethical virtue and dramaticforce. Writes Dana Cloud about Spenser: For Hire: ‘‘He can shoot badguys, find counseling for a rape victim or reconcile an estranged father

The Menace of the Post-Hardboiled Maverick 51

and son, quote Romantic poetry and wax philosophical on the state ofsociety, make a souffle, and go a round with his buddy Hawk in theboxing ringFall without any sense of personal fragmentation orcontradiction’’ (313). Writes G. Waller on Mickey Spillane’s MikeHammer, ‘‘He is utterly unique in his world, a bona fide star. Alwayswearing a hat and a plain, unfashionable suit and tie, the experienced,self-confident Hammer looks like he stepped out of a hard-boileddetective movie of the 1940s’’ (119). The absence of fragmentationindicates that the individual is the unproblematic center, the narrator,the instrument of drama and justice. These programs, often hardboiledin tone, were popular through the 1970s and 1980s. But the 1990s andthe 2000s have seen a transformation in crime-detective programs. Wesee The Practice rather than the individual detective, NYPD Blue, Lawand Order, an ethic of ‘‘We the People’’ rather than I the Jury. Television,it seems, has substituted the institution for the individual, the team forthe loner, the establishment for the renegade. The title characterdetective drama has completely disappeared from the screen.(Interestingly, programs that concentrate on one main character arefor the most part comedies focusing on human foibles.) Current crimeand detective programs center instead on structural precautions, rulesand regulations, the resolution of criminal problems within theconstraints of institutions. For instance, in episode after episode of ThePractice or Law and Order, ethical principles prosper within establish-ment boundaries. As vexed as these boundaries become, as ambivalentas the characters are about them, their presence, and a continuedinsistence on them, is the foundation of these dramas. In a sense, thisturn to the institution can be read as a 1990s return to modesty, tocivic responsibility over grandiosity. But given the repeated insistenceon the importance of the establishment, on the dangers of crossing theline, on the necessity of maintaining the system even when it provesinadequateFit seems that there is more at stake than modesty. Evenwhen the rigorous constraints of the legal system cause a miscarriage ofjustice (as it can on Law and Order and The Practice), there is always areasonable character, a respected voice of wisdom who defends the vitalimportance of those same constraints. And this insistence, I wouldpropose, is emblematic of a fundamental suspicion of unconstrainedindividual forceFthe sort of force embodied in Thompson’s fiction.

An increasingly common concern in these television programs,interestingly, is the policeman or lawyer who (consciously or, more

52 Susanna Lee

commonly, unconsciously) operates outside the law. Perhaps he is apoliceman who performs an illegal search, resulting in the release of aguilty suspect. Perhaps he is a lawyer who, without actually meaningto, encourages a hit man to murder a criminal who is threatening hisfamily.3 His intentions are honorable. When the results are favorable,the sense of triumph contends with an uneasiness at having stretchedthe rules. When the results are not favorable, dedication to laws andregulations contends with frustration at the inadequacies of thoseregulations. These tensions, which seem to be mounting as the seasonscontinue (the deficiencies in formal judicial structures become moreand more dire), are precisely the sort that could precipitate recourse toa hardboiled solutionFto the renegade initiative of a Mike Hammeror a Philip Marlowe. But the hardboiled solution brings with it thethreat of the hardboiled problemFthat is, the sort of unconstrainedviolence embodied in Thompson’s fiction.

At the close of Pop. 1280, Corey announces, ‘‘I thought and Ithought and then I thought some more, and finally I came to adecision. I decided I don’t no more know what to do than if I was justanother lousy human being!’’ (217). Corey’s implication here is that heis not just another lousy human being: he is Christ Almighty. But thepoint of this sentence and this novel, of course, is that he is a humanbeingFand what is more, that it is as a human being that he causesthe trouble in this world. Nick Corey, though he represents an existinglaw enforcement system, is a free man (‘‘free in that catastrophic sense ofthe word which was vainly ignored by our founding fathers’’). And assuch, he is a menace. Hardboiled fiction in the years since JimThompson has largely eliminated this menace simply by resuscitatingthe classic hardboiled hero. The fiction of Robert Parker, Sue Grafton,and Sara Paretsky, for instance, features characters who, like Marloweand Spade, maintain both a moral and a narrative order. Television toohas produced such characters. But in recent decades, this latter mediumhas relied on another sort of precaution, namely, the constancy and theboundaries of the law enforcement system. Human beings can be lousy,or free, these programs indicate, but the system maintains order. Asociety protected by the system will not go off the rails, will notsuccumb to the ‘‘fragmentation and meaninglessness of the moderncondition, and its concomitant disintegration of the self.’’ It is true, ofcourse, that the system comprises and is represented by individuals(Corey was a policeman, after all), and as such is susceptible to human

The Menace of the Post-Hardboiled Maverick 53

lousiness. But the concentration on the force of the institutionrepresents, nonetheless, a vital protection (or at least a fantasy ofprotection) against the sociopaths, grandiose maniacs, and apatheticciviliansFthe lousy human beings who ushered in the postmoderncondition.

NOTES

1. The information contained in the book, details on a multitude of Germans who willingly

initiated and showed a great deal of creativity in the mass murder of Jews, is and has been

readily available in the archives of courts all over Germany. No one, including Western

historians (Jewish or non-Jewish), had taken the time to locate this evidence, to question its

meaning, to put it together, and to make it public. The controversy that surrounded this

book’s publication in Germany, when its information entered the public consciousness, is an

instance of the embattlement of personal accountability.

2. Jessica Fishman, in an interesting article, ‘‘The Populace and the Police: Models of Social

Control in Reality-Based Crime Television,’’ examines this same ideological contrast in Copsand America’s Most Wanted. Cops, she demonstrates, focuses on the special and inimitable

capacities of policemen, whereas AMW ‘‘urges viewers to right the wrongs of a failed criminal

justice system . . . When ineffectual police get out-smarted and left scratching their heads, the

program calls the public to attention’’ (280).

3. Both examples are from ABC’s The Practice.

Works Cited

Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem. New York: The Viking Press,1963.

Cassill, R. V. ‘‘The Killer Inside Me: Fear, Purgation, and the Sopho-clean Light.’’ Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties. Cardondale:Southern Illinois UP, 1968.

Chandler, Raymond.‘‘The Simple Art of Murder.’’ Atlantic MonthlyDec. 1944, 57–64.

FFF. The Big Sleep. New York: Random House, 1992.

Christianson, Scott R. ‘‘A Heap of Broken Images: HardboiledDetective Fiction and the Discourse(s) of Modernity.’’ The CunningCraft. Ed. Ronald Walker. Macomb: Western Illinois University,1990. 135–49.

Cloud, Dana. ‘‘The Limits of Interpretation: Ambivalence and theStereotype in Spenser: For Hire.’’ Critical Studies in Mass Commu-nication 9:4 (1992): 311–24.

Daly, Carroll John. The Snarl of the Beast. New York: Edward J. Clode,1926.

54 Susanna Lee

Fishman, Jessica. ‘‘The Populace and the Police: Models of SocialControl in Reality-Based Crime Television.’’ Critical Studies inMass Communication 16 (1999): 268–88.

Goldhagen, Daniel. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans andthe Holocaust. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.

Lyotard, Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U ofMinnesota P, 1984.

McCauley, Michael. Jim Thompson: Sleep with the Devil. New York: TheMysterious Press, 1991.

Payne, Kenneth. ‘‘Pottsville, USA: Psychosis and American ‘Empti-ness’ in Jim Thompson’s. Pop. 1280.’’ The International FictionReview 21 (1994): 51–57.

FFF. ‘‘Moral Indistinguishability in the Crime Fiction of JimThompson.’’ The Killer Inside Me and Pop. 1280. The ArkansasReview 5:1–2 (1996): 118–28.

Polito, Robert. Savage Art. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.Prescott, Peter. ‘‘The Cirrhosis of the Soul.’’ Newsweek Nov. 17, 1986:

90.Thompson, Jim. Pop. 1280. New York: Vintage Crime, 1990.Waller, G. ‘‘Mike Hammer and the Detective film of the 1980s.’’

Journal of Popular Film and Television 13:3 (1985): 108–25.

Susanna Lee is assistant professor of French at Georgetown University. Herarticles include ‘‘Flaubert’s blague superieure’’ and ‘‘Au Bonheur des Ogres and AuBonheur des Dames: The dismantling of foundations in the Serie Noire.’’ She iscompleting a book entitled AWorld Abandoned by God: Narrative and the Moveto Secularism.

The Menace of the Post-Hardboiled Maverick 55