Megan Abbott	The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir
Publications ♦ Die a Little ♦ The Street Was Mine About the Author Film Noir and Hardboiled Links Home Page	“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 urban space. The descendent 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. 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.” Read a review. ISBN: 0-312-29481-6 Published: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002 Pages: 256 Available in bookstores and online at Amazon, Powells, Barnes and Noble and other book retailers.