European Journal of American Culture - Volume 40, Issue 1, 2021

This article argues that the criminal plot at the heart of James M. Cain’s 1936 novel Double Indemnity is primarily one targeted against the structures of the modern corporation, embodied in the space of the office. Such an argument situates Cain’s novel as a striking intervention in a long tradition of anti-office discourse, a discourse in which clerical work and its spaces have persistently been framed as exemplifying urban modernity’s deleterious impact upon and occlusion of the supposed ‘frontier values’ of masculinity, individualism and risk. Walter Huff, the novel’s protagonist, is figured as an agent of those values, a ‘frontiersman’ whose assault upon his insurance firm employer constitutes an attempt to reinvest a regulated, systematized world with a sense of the unpredictable wilderness.

This article re-examines the First World War experience of renowned American crime fiction author Raymond Chandler in order to demonstrate that the established biographical account masks an experience more traumatic than previously acknowledged. Like Carlos Baker’s version of Ernest Hemingway’s wartime experience, Frank MacShane’s original biographical account relies heavily on small sections of Chandler’s own correspondence that are taken out of context. Later biographies have reproduced this vague and ambiguous account without much further investigation, which has permitted various theories about Chandler’s work to develop, most notably that his protagonist, the detective Philip Marlowe, is a knight errant. This article utilizes primary documents, including Chandler’s military file and the War Diaries of his battalion, to highlight discrepancies in existing biographical narratives, and unveils an account that is significantly different from that of his biographers. By understanding the true traumatic nature of Chandler’s experiences on the French front line, we are presented with a fresh and original perspective through which to reconsider his work and an understanding of how Chandler’s war experience helped establish the traditional archetype of detective fiction.

In this article I explore Joan Didion’s novel Play It as It Lays (1970) and her family memoir Where I Was From (2003) in order to assess and compare the ways in which she articulates the telling of both fictional character narratives and ostensibly factual historical tales, both taking place in parts of the California with which she is so intimately familiar. In Play It, Maria Wyeth tries to escape her past through the repression, curtailment and editing of her memories. On the winding freeways of Los Angeles, she feels she can remain in the present and blank out painful memories by looking ahead. ‘Never look back at all’ is the California mantra that she tries to personify (Didion 2003: 199). In Where I, Didion analyses her own culpability in the mythologization of her home state and the failure of her own narrative authority. What can Didion’s fiction and non-fiction, both populated and cultivated by unreliable narrators, tell us about the way history is told, myths of origin perpetuated and memory fabricated, and what might this signify about storytelling in California more generally?

Review of: Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation, Imani Perry (2018)

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 294 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-47800-081-5, p/bk, $27.95

Review of: Race and New Religious Movements in the USA: A Documentary Reader, Emily Suzanne Clark and Brad Stoddard (2019)

London: Bloomsbury, 187 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-35006-396-9, p/bk, £21.99

Review of: Dreaming the Graphic Novel: The Novelization of Comics, Paul Williams (2020)

New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 278 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-97880-506-4, h/bk, $120,

ISBN 978-1-97880-507-1, p/bk, $29.95