Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Raymond Chandler'

A partir du contexte generique, et notamment grace aux ecrits theoriques de l'ecrivain, le but de cette these est de montrer comment chandler reprend les conventions de la "formule" pour les transcender et faire finalement oeuvre litteraire a partir des limitations de la paralitterature. Apres avoir etabli les postulats du genre, qui privilegie le jeu et l'enigme plutot que le recit, on definira la revolution narrative operee par le roman noir americain pour mettre en evidence la tension entre realisme, qui passe notamment par le traitement de la ville de los angeles, et romance lyrique, qui s'appuie sur une instance narrative eminemment rhetorique. Le melodrame chandlerien se definit alors par l'utilisation de la defamiliarisation, de la distance, du protesque, relayes par une figuralite tres marquee dont il convient d'etudier les differents tropes. La vision du monde qui se degage du style et de la structure narrative sera mis en parallele avec la mefiance traditionnelle de la litterature americaine pour la femme : on concluera ainsi que si le texte chandlerien surgit d'une tension metaphorisee dans le traitement du femininin, il ne tend jamais a reduire cette tension mais au contraire travaille a cultiver l'ambivalence
Starting from the generic context, and in particular with the help of his theoretical writings, the aim of this dissertation is to show how chandler uses the conventions of the "formula" to transcend them and eventually create literature out of the limits of what can be called "paraliterature". After having established the postulates of the genre, which favour game and enigma rather than narrative proper, the narrative revolution worked out by the hard-boiled detective novel will be specified as a tension between realism, in particular in the treatment of the city of los angles, and lyrical romance, based on the use of an eminently rhetoric voice. The chandlerian melodrama comes then to be defined in terms of defamiliarisation, distance, and grotesque, relayed by a higly marked figurality, the tropes of which will be studied in detail. The narrative attitude stemming from the style and the narrative structure is then to be set against the traditional suspicion of american literature towards women: the ambivalence towards the feminine is the metaphor for the activity of the text which feeds on contradictions rather than solutions

Raymond Chandler created his detective Philip Marlowe not as the idealisation of heroic individualism as is commonly perceived, but instead as an authentic individual subjected to very real psychological frailties resulting from his traumatic experiences during World War One. Marlowe's characterisation goes beyond the traditional chivalric readings and should instead be interpreted as an authentic representation of a traumatised veteran in American society. Substituting the horror of the trenches for the corruption of the city. Chandler's disillusioned protagonist and his representation of an uncaring American society resonate strongly with the dislocation of the Lost Generation. Consequently, it is profitable to consider Chandler not simply as a generic writer but as a genuine literary figure. This thesis re-examines important primary documents highlighting extensive discrepancies in existing biographical narratives of Chandler's war experience, and unveils an account that is significantly different from that of his biographers, revealing the trauma that troubled Chandler throughout his life. The application of psychological behavioural interpretation to interrogate Chandler's novels demonstrates the variety of post-traumatic symptoms that tormented both Chandler and his protagonist. A close reading of his personal papers reveals the psychological symptoms of PTSD that were subconsciously encoded into Marlowe's characterisation. Marlowe can only be understood a character shaped by Chandler's own experiences. This conflation of the hard-boiled style and war experience has influenced many contemporary crime writers, particularly in the traumatic aftermath of the Vietnam War. The sum of this work offers a new understanding of Chandler's traumatic war experience, how that experience established the traditional archetype of detective fiction, and how this reading of his work allows Chandler to transcend generic limitations to be recognised as a key twentieth century literary figure.

Le mythe du prive occulte le personnage tel qu'il a ete cree par les fondateurs du roman dit "noir": hammett et chandler. Ce personnage a une double origine : il tient a la fois de sherlock holmes et de nick carter. Ses methodes s'opposent a celles des heros du roman de deduction. La raison n'est plus l'arme privilegiee du detective. Elle cede la place a l'action et a l'intuition du joueur de poker. L'intrigue n'est plus l'essentiel. Il n'y a plus de "solution" et l'on debouche sur une "ethique de l'absurde". Le portrait du prive met en valeur son cote anti-heros, sa facade cynique ainsi que l'idealisme profond que dissimule cette facade. Il se rapproche du tough guy d'hemingway dont il partage la misogynie. Son role social est clairement reactionnaire : il contribue a maintenir le statu quo social en preservant la respectabilite des classes aisees. C'est une vision "realiste" de la societe que nous proposent hammett et chandler. En ce sens, ils sortent des limites du genre policier pour penetrer dans un domaine jusque-la reserve a la litterature dite "serieuse". La qualite de leur ecriture les faisait egalement sortir des limites de la "souslitterature". Hammett est le createur d'un style depouille a l'extreme. Il inaugurait l'esthetique du proces-verbal. Influence par le behaviorisme, hammett nous decrit des comportements et utilise une technique dite "exterieure". Chandler commence par s'engager dans ses traces puis se degage peu a peu de son influence, en revenant a une technique romanesque plus traditionnelle, plus conforme a ses ambitions. En effet, le personnage a evolue du continental op a philip marlowe. Cette evolution s'explique par la personnalite de chandler et aussi par l'evolution des conditions economiques et sociales. Hammett est l'ecrivain de la prohibition et de la prosperite, chandler est l'ecrivain de la grande crise. Au continental op, cynique, brutal, ne croyant qu'au chacun pour soi, a succede l'altruiste et chevaleresque marlowe. Une semblable evolution peut etre notee chez hemingway
The myth of the private eye tends to distort our view of the character that was created by hammett and chandler, the founders of the "hard-boiled" detective story. The private eye has a double origin : he is both sherlock holmes and nick carter. His methods have nothing to do with the traditional detective's in so far as reason and logic are no longer his favourite weapons. He resorts to action and to the poker-player's intuition. The plot is no longer essential. No "solution" can be found in hammett's and chandler's novels. The portrait of the private eye brings into light both his "anti-hero" aspect, his cynical pose and the idealism that the pose is meant to hide. He resembles hemingway's tough guy whose misogyny he shares. His social role is unequivocally reactionary since he contributes to maintaining the social status quo by preserving the ruling classes' respectability. Hammett and chandler provide us with a "realistic" vision of american society. Consequently, they broach themes which used to be reserved for "serious" literature. The quality of their style set them apart from the writers of escape literature. Hammett created a style whose main feature was baldness. Influenced by behaviorism, hammett describes behaviours and resorts to an "external" technique. For a time, chandler was his "disciple" but gradually he abandoned hammett's technique which no longer suited him. For the character of the private eye has evolved from the continental op to philip marlowe. Such an evolution can be accounted for by chandler's background and personality but the evolution of economic and social conditions must also be taken into account. Hammett wrote most of his books during the prosperity whereas chandler wrote his after the great depression. The chivalrous and altruistic marlowe succeeded to the cynical continental op. A similar evolution is to be found in hemingway's tough guys

L'image du detective prive "dur-a-cuire" est tres differente de celle du protagoniste du roman de detection classique. Dashiell hammett fonda le genre "hard-boiled", creant des detectives professionnels mais aussi des heros non-detectives. Raymond chandler le suivit sur cette voie en choisissant cependant un personnafge unique. De cela il ressort l'archetype du "tough guy", sorte de chevalier des temps modernes qui suivit son (en)quete. Quelques reperes biographiques sont donnes en relation avec la representation du heros. Le contexte, c'est encore celui de la narration ; les travaux de gerard genette servent ici d'outil methodologique principal. Arme privilegiee du detective, le langage est ensuite evoque, puis aborde sous l'angle de l'humour et de l'argot. Les adaptations des romans a l'ecran sont brievement etudiees, cloturant ainsi la "mise en scene" du heros. La troisieme partie depeint le cadre spatial (urbain et rural) et le contexte humain (les differentes classes sociales et les ethnies auxquelles l'enqueteur se trouve confronte). De plus, le detective prive doit faire face a trois categories de femmes et entretient avec les hommes une relation ambigue. La symbolique de la violence est ensuite analysee. Enfin se pose la question de l'ideologie du roman noir dans le but d'apprecier comment le mythe du "tough guy" peut etre applique a l'image du detective concue par hammett et chandler
The image of the hard-boiled detective is very different from the one of the classical detective story protagonist. Dashiell hammett founded the hard-boiled tradition, creating professional detectives as well as non-detective heroes. Raymond chandler followed him with his unique private-eye character. From that rises the archetype of the "tough guy", the modern knight and his (in) quest. Some biographical landmarks are given in relation with the characterization of the hero. There is also the context of narration ; the works of gerard genette are the main methodological reference for its analysis. Language is seen as the privileged weapon of the hero, then from the angle of humor and slang. The novels adaptations for the screen are briefly examined. The third part depicts the setting (urban and rural) and the human context (the different social classes and ethnies with whom the hero is confronted). Moreover, the private detective has to deal with three kinds of women and he experiences an ambiguous relationship with men. The symbolic aspect of violence is then studied. At last the question of ideology is posed in order to understand how the myth of the tough guy can be applied to the image of the detective created by hammett and chandler

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Tendo em vista a importante contribuição dos estudos culturais e literários para o aprofundamento do debate sobre as narrativas policiais norte-americanas, este estudo pretende levantar singularidades, rupturas e questões de masculinidade(s) associadas à literatura hardboiled, de modo a fundamentar uma investigação de sua reverberação na obra de Rubem Fonseca. Para tal fim, parte-se, principalmente, dos estudos de masculinidade hegemônica empreendidos por R.W. Connell e seus comentadores, e da análise de três dos maiores expoentes fundadores do gênero, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler e Jim Thompson. Considerando essa fundação da literatura policial norte-americana, serão então analisadas quatro obras protagonizadas pelo personagem Mandrake, ―O Caso F.A‖, ―Dia dos Namorados‖, ―Mandrake‖ e o romance A Grande Arte. Pretende-se, assim, observar como o autor se vale dessa tradição da literatura policial, e de suas implicações com questões de masculinidade(s), para criar uma obra de tamanha potência crítica, estilística e política.
Taking into consideration the important contribution of literary and cultural studies to the deepening of debate about North-American detective narratives, this study intends to assemble singularities, disconnections and contemporary masculinity issues associated with hard-boiled literature, aiming to substantiate an investigation of its influence in Rubem Fonseca‘s work. In order to do so, we take as a starting point the studies of hegemonic masculinities, by R.W. Connell and her commentators, and the analysis of three of the genre‘s founding fathers, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Jim Thompson. Considering the foundation of North-American detective novel, four works which has Mandrake as its main character will be analyzed : ―O Caso F.A‖, ―Dia dos Namorados‖, ―Mandrake‖ and the novel A Grande Arte. Seeking to observe how the author utilizes the hard-boiled tradition and its implications in masculinities issues in order to create a work of enormous critical, stylistic and political potency.

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.

Thesis (M.A.)--Indiana University, 2010.
Title from screen (viewed on July 19, 2010). Department of English, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Advisor(s): Robert Rebein, Jonathan Eller, William Touponce. Includes vitae. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 84-86).

Syftet med den här uppsatsen är att genomföra en jämförande studie av den klassiska Hollywood-deckaren, representerad av de tre första filmerna i Thin Man-serien, och film noir. Analysen utgår ifrån Thin Man-filmerna The Thin Man (1934), After the Thin Man (1936) och Another Thin Man (1939) och noir filmerna The Maltese Falcon (1941), Laura (1944), The Big Sleep (1946) och Dark Passage (1947). Den grundläggande teorin för uppsatsen är genreteori och hur den klassiska Hollywood-deckarfilmen skilde sig ifrån film noir. Analysen är uppdelad i fyra kapitel, i vilka olika delar av innehållet i både Thin Man-filmerna och de fyra exemplen av film noir analyseras. De olika kapitlen handlar om manliga huvudkaraktären, den kvinnliga huvudkaraktären, hur de olika filmerna hanterade ämnen berörande sex och sexualitet och hur samhället och människorna representeras i filmerna. Slutsats omfattar sedan en diskussion om uppsatsens resultat och svaret på varför Thin Man-filmerna inte räknas som film noir.

Lesbian Detective Fiction: the outsider within is a creative writing thesis in two parts: a draft lesbian detective novel, titled Fatal Development (75%) and an exegesis containing a critical appraisal of the sub-genre of lesbian detective fiction, and of my own writing process (25%). Creative work: Fatal Development -- It wasn’t the first time I’d seen a dead body, but it didn’t seem to get any easier. -- When Dirk and Stacey discover a body in the courtyard of their Brisbane woolstore apartment, it is close friend and neighbour, Kersten Heller, they turn to for support. The police assume Stuart’s death was an accident, but when it emerges that he was about to take legal action against the woolstore’s developers, Bovine, Kersten decides there must be more to it. Her own apartment has flooded twice in a month and the builders are still in and out repairing defects. She discovers Stuart was not alone on the roof when he fell to his death and the evidence he had collected for his case against Bovine has gone missing. Armed with this knowledge, and fed up with the developer’s ongoing resistance to addressing the building’s structural issues, Kersten organises a class action against Bovine. Kersten draws on her past training as a spy to investigate Stuart’s death, hiding her activities, and details of her past, from her partner, Toni. Her actions bring her under increasing threat as her apartment is defaced, searched and bugged, and she is involved in a car chase across New Farm. Forced to fall back on old skills, old habits and memories return to the surface. When Toni discovers that Kersten has broken her promise to leave the investigation to the police, she walks out. The neighbouring – and heritage-listed – Riverside Coal development site burns to the ground, and Kersten and Dirk uncover evidence of a network of corruption involving developers and local government officials. After she is kidnapped in broad daylight, narrowly escaping from the boot of a moving car, Kersten is confident she is right, but with Toni not returning her calls, and many of the other residents selling up, including Dirk and Stacey, Kersten begins to question her judgment. In a desperate attempt to turn things around, Kersten calls on an old Agency contact to help prove Bovine was involved in Stuart’s death, her kidnapping, and ongoing corruption. To get the evidence she needs, Kersten plays a dangerous game: letting Bovine know she has uncovered their illegal operations in order to draw them into revealing themselves on tape. Hiding alone in a hotel room, Kersten is finally forced to confront her past: When Mirin didn’t come home that night, I was ready to go out and find her myself, disappear, and start a new life together somewhere far away. Instead they pulled me in before I could finish making arrangements, questioned me for hours, turned everything around. It was golden child to problem child in the space of a day. This time, she’s determined, things will turn out differently. Exegesis: The exegesis traces the development of lesbian detective fiction, including its dual origins in detective and lesbian fiction, to compare the current state of the sub-genre with the early texts and to establish the dominant themes and tropes. I focus particularly on Australian examples of the sub-genre, examining in detail Claire McNab’s Denise Cleever series and Jan McKemmish’s A Gap in the Records, in order to position my own lesbian detective novel between these two works. In drafting Fatal Development, I have attempted to include some of the political content and complexity of McKemmish’s work, but with a plot-driven narrative. I examine the dominant tropes and conventions of the sub-genre, such as: lesbian politics; the nature of the crime; method of investigation; sex and romance; and setting. In the final section, I explain the ways in which I have worked within and against the subgenre’s conventions in drafting a contemporary lesbian detective novel: drawing on tradition and subverting reader expectations. Throughout the thesis, I explore in detail the tradition of the fictional lesbian detective as an outsider on the margins of society, disrupting notions of power and gender. While the lesbian detective’s outsider status grants her moral agency and the capacity to achieve justice and generate change, she is never fully accepted. The lesbian detective remains an outsider within. For the lesbian detective, working within a system that ultimately discriminates against her involves conflict and compromise, and a sense of double-play in being part of two worlds but belonging to neither. I explore how this double-consciousness can be applied to the lesbian writer in choosing whether to write for a mainstream or lesbian audience.

Lesbian Detective Fiction: the outsider within is a creative writing thesis in two parts: a draft lesbian detective novel, titled Fatal Development (75%) and an exegesis containing a critical appraisal of the sub-genre of lesbian detective fiction, and of my own writing process (25%). Creative work: Fatal Development -- It wasn’t the first time I’d seen a dead body, but it didn’t seem to get any easier. -- When Dirk and Stacey discover a body in the courtyard of their Brisbane woolstore apartment, it is close friend and neighbour, Kersten Heller, they turn to for support. The police assume Stuart’s death was an accident, but when it emerges that he was about to take legal action against the woolstore’s developers, Bovine, Kersten decides there must be more to it. Her own apartment has flooded twice in a month and the builders are still in and out repairing defects. She discovers Stuart was not alone on the roof when he fell to his death and the evidence he had collected for his case against Bovine has gone missing. Armed with this knowledge, and fed up with the developer’s ongoing resistance to addressing the building’s structural issues, Kersten organises a class action against Bovine. Kersten draws on her past training as a spy to investigate Stuart’s death, hiding her activities, and details of her past, from her partner, Toni. Her actions bring her under increasing threat as her apartment is defaced, searched and bugged, and she is involved in a car chase across New Farm. Forced to fall back on old skills, old habits and memories return to the surface. When Toni discovers that Kersten has broken her promise to leave the investigation to the police, she walks out. The neighbouring – and heritage-listed – Riverside Coal development site burns to the ground, and Kersten and Dirk uncover evidence of a network of corruption involving developers and local government officials. After she is kidnapped in broad daylight, narrowly escaping from the boot of a moving car, Kersten is confident she is right, but with Toni not returning her calls, and many of the other residents selling up, including Dirk and Stacey, Kersten begins to question her judgment. In a desperate attempt to turn things around, Kersten calls on an old Agency contact to help prove Bovine was involved in Stuart’s death, her kidnapping, and ongoing corruption. To get the evidence she needs, Kersten plays a dangerous game: letting Bovine know she has uncovered their illegal operations in order to draw them into revealing themselves on tape. Hiding alone in a hotel room, Kersten is finally forced to confront her past: When Mirin didn’t come home that night, I was ready to go out and find her myself, disappear, and start a new life together somewhere far away. Instead they pulled me in before I could finish making arrangements, questioned me for hours, turned everything around. It was golden child to problem child in the space of a day. This time, she’s determined, things will turn out differently. Exegesis: The exegesis traces the development of lesbian detective fiction, including its dual origins in detective and lesbian fiction, to compare the current state of the sub-genre with the early texts and to establish the dominant themes and tropes. I focus particularly on Australian examples of the sub-genre, examining in detail Claire McNab’s Denise Cleever series and Jan McKemmish’s A Gap in the Records, in order to position my own lesbian detective novel between these two works. In drafting Fatal Development, I have attempted to include some of the political content and complexity of McKemmish’s work, but with a plot-driven narrative. I examine the dominant tropes and conventions of the sub-genre, such as: lesbian politics; the nature of the crime; method of investigation; sex and romance; and setting. In the final section, I explain the ways in which I have worked within and against the subgenre’s conventions in drafting a contemporary lesbian detective novel: drawing on tradition and subverting reader expectations. Throughout the thesis, I explore in detail the tradition of the fictional lesbian detective as an outsider on the margins of society, disrupting notions of power and gender. While the lesbian detective’s outsider status grants her moral agency and the capacity to achieve justice and generate change, she is never fully accepted. The lesbian detective remains an outsider within. For the lesbian detective, working within a system that ultimately discriminates against her involves conflict and compromise, and a sense of double-play in being part of two worlds but belonging to neither. I explore how this double-consciousness can be applied to the lesbian writer in choosing whether to write for a mainstream or lesbian audience.

This thesis reexamines the beginnings of Swedish hardboiled crime literature, in part tracking its lineage to American culture and unpacking Swedish identity. Following the introduction, the second chapter asserts how this genre began as a form of escapism, specifically in Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s Roseanna. The third chapter compares predecessor Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep with Roseanna, and how Sweden’s greater gender tolerance significantly outshining America’s is reflected in literature. The fourth chapter examines how Henning Mankell’s novels fail to fully accept Sweden’s complicity in neo-Nazism as an active component of Swedish identity. The final chapter reveals Helene Tursten’s Detective Inspector Huss engaging with gender and racial relations in unique ways, while also releasing the suppressive qualities found in the Swedish identity post-war. Therefore, this thesis will better contextualize the onset of the genre, and how its lineage reflects the fruits and the damages alike in the Swedish identity.

碩士
國立中正大學
外國語文研究所
99
Raymond Chandler is a famous detective writer in the hardboiled school. In his works, with concise description of style, he portrayed the Los Angeles society in the first half of the twentieth century in the United States. However, among the past academic studies, his first novel The Big Sleep is rarely discussed in terms of the social criticism Chandler intends to present. The Big Sleep is a classic hardboiled fiction, taking the form of first-person narrative. Its protagonist, Philip Marlowe, is like a camera eye, completely reflecting and recording all the stories of Marlowe’s contact with other people, including the police, villains such as gangsters, as well as women from the upper class. Through such frequent contacts under the laconic depiction offered by Chandler, we are able to find out how these groups become corrupt and how they have been criticized. 　　This thesis aims to find and specify Chandler’s social criticism by the help of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts on “field,” “habitus,” and “capital.” The first chapter will start with the analysis of the police field, attempting to establish and explore the logic of police corruption. Chapter two will highlight the exchange of capitals; by observing the ways in which the villains would stop at nothing in the pursuit of interests, we come to understand Chandler’s strong criticism against those lawless yet dominant villains. Chapter three will be based on the study of “habitus”; through Chandler’s criticism on the upper class in terms of money and sexual debauchery, we will discover that the corruption of the upper class starts from within. Therefore, we know that Chandler, as a detective novelist, is not purely satisfied with elaborating mystery and solution; the most important of all, the various social criticisms demonstrated in The Big Sleep confirm his concern and care for the contemporary society.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)
By start of the 1920s, the United States had seen nearly forty years of vast accumulations of wealth by a small group of people, substantial financial speculation and a mass change in the economic base from agricultural to industrial. All of this ended in 1929 in a crushing depression that spread not only across the country, but also around the world. Hard-Boiled detective fiction first reached the reading public early in the decade initially as adventure stories, but quickly became a way for authors to express the stresses these changes were causing on people and society. The detective is the center of the story with the task of reestablishing a certain degree of order or redemption. An important character hallmark of this genre is that he is seldom able to do this, or that the cost is so high a terrible burden remains. His decisions and judgments in this attempt are formed by his relationship with the people or community around him. The goal of this thesis is to look at the issues raised in the context of how the detective relates to a person or community in the story. For analysis, six books were chosen arranged from least level of personal relationship by the detective to the most intimate. The books are Red Harvest, by Dashiell Hammett, The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler, The Galton Case, by Ross MacDonald, Cotton Comes to Harlem, by Chester Himes, Devil in a Blue Dress, by Walter Mosley, and I, the Jury, by Mickey Spillane. In the study of these books, a wide range of topics are presented including political ideologies, corruption, racial discrimination and family strife. Each book provided a wealth of views on these and other subjects that are as relevant today as when they were written.

碩士
國立政治大學
英國語文學研究所
97
Raymond Chandler is a prestigious detective-story writer and the founding father of the hard-boiled detective fiction school, but he is not limited to this sub-genre of the crime fiction. His laconic style and the socially critical depiction of Los Angeles elevates him as a great writer in literature, high-brow and low-brow. Los Angeles city in his depiction becomes another protagonist of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe stories. In this thesis, I attempt to adopt a spatial reading of the Los Angeles city he depicts, so as to explore the meanings of the real and imagined spaces and their possibilities of resistance for future interpretations. Besides the first chapter as the introduction and the last chapter as the conclusion, in Chapter Two, I will first compare the private detective to the flâneur, thereby discovering the contribution of these figures to the discovery and representation of modernity in modern cities. Furthermore, I will utilize Lefebvre’s and Soja’s trialectics of spatiality to examine the real and imagined spaces in Chandler’s novels. By doing so, in Chapter Three I argue that Chandler’s vivid spatial representations of Los Angeles, especially the dark side of the city, are actually the real-and-imagined Thirdspace that represents the dominated spaces against the promotion of Los Angeles as a dream city. In Chapter Four, though Chandler’s spaces convincingly reflect the modernity of Los Angeles as a modern city, I further discover another possible site for the space of representation in his stories: the space of the racial Other. This discovery of another Thirdspace proves Chandler isn’t as much a racist as alleged, and it is the counter-space that provides the possibility of resistance for many future hard-boiled detective fiction writers of different ethnicities, and this can explain why Chandler’s hard-boiled detective has been massively appropriated.