“The
street was mine, all mine.
They gave it to
me gladly and wondered why I wanted it so nice and all alone.”
—Mickey Spillane, One Lonely Night (1951)
The Street Was Mine
considers a recurrent figure in American literature: the solitary
white man moving through the city. The descendant of 19th-century
frontier and western heroes, the figure reemerges in 1930s-’50s
America as the “tough guy.” The Street Was Mine looks to the
tough guy in the works of hardboiled novelists Raymond Chandler (The
Big Sleep) and James M. Cain (Double Indemnity) and their
popular film noir adaptations. Focusing on the way he negotiates
racial and gender “otherness,” this study argues that the tough guy
embodies the promise of an impervious white masculinity amidst the
turmoil of the Depression through the beginnings of the Cold War.
The book concludes with an analysis of Chester Himes, whose Harlem
crime novels (For Love of Imabelle) unleash a ferocious
revisionary critique of the tough guy tradition. "
"...that rare combination--smart and accessible, challenging and
downright fun to read. Megan Abbott's analysis ... connects all the
dots in relating gender, sexuality and race relations in the popular
culture of urban America—it represents the state of the art in
contemporary cultural studies."
—Lisa Duggan, Professor of American Studies and History, New York
University
"Abbott has produced a useful, elegantly simple genealogy of the
hardboiled hero that should enable more scholars and teachers to
make sense of the genre. This study courageously moves back and
forth across gender and race lines, and successfully delineates the
need for containment of the violent, anti-bourgeois hardboiled hero
both inside and outside the text. ... her categories and tropes have
contemporary relevance (and resonances) for any readings of neo-noir
films, detective novels, urban thrillers, and the ongoing
fascination of American audiences for the white male rebel loners."
—Joel Dinerstein, Ithaca College
"The Street Was Mine captures the danger, the aura, the smoky
isolation of hardboiled fiction and film noir. Megan Abbott exposes
the instabilities of race, gender and sexuality that make the 'tough
guy' ... seem not so tough after all. ... Arguing that 'popular
literature can be dangerous' Abbott contributes to our understanding
of U.S. popular culture from the Depression to the Cold War era,
from pulp fiction to Hollywood cinema."
—Carolyn Dever, Professor of English, Vanderbilt University
Table of Contents:
CHAPTER ONE
Introduction
CHAPTER TWO
“I Can Feel Her”: The White Male as Hysteric in James M. Cain and
Raymond Chandler
CHAPTER THREE
“Another Soft-Voiced Big Man I Had Strangely Liked”: Containing
White Male Desire
CHAPTER FOUR
The Woman in White: Race-ing and Erace-ing in Cain and Chandler
CHAPTER FIVE
“Nothing You Can’t Fix”: Hardboiled Fiction’s Hollywood Makeover
CHAPTER SIX
“The Strict Domain of Whitey”: Chester Himes’s Coup
EPILOGUE
“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”
ISBN: 0-312-29481-6
Published: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002
Pages: 256
Available in bookstores and online at
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