1. I've been reading some Raymond Chandler lately & it clarified something that is maybe obvious to everyone else but had never occurred to me: that pervasive police corruption was a necessary precondition for creation of hard-boiled detective novel as a genre.
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5. The social/historical basis for this view is obvious: prohibition created a crisis of legitimacy in policing, reinforced by 1930s social movements focused on police brutality and prison brutality. This legitimacy crisis created no less than 4 distinct genres.
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6. To my mind, the police legitimacy crisis of the 1920s/1930s was the precondition for these separate genres: i) hard-boiled detective ii) G-Man (super-honest federal police) iii) mystery-man adventurer iv) super-hero.
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7. The G-Man genre is semi-forgotten but it was created at the behest of J. Edgar Hoover & his myth-making promoters: the idea of an elite band of super-competent federal police exempt from corruption of local cops. For-runner to our copaganda.pic.twitter.com/2sjnfDXN1W
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8. The Mystery Man genre (the Shadow, the Phantom, the Spider etc.) has deep roots but started flourishing again in 1930s, for same reason as hard-boiled detective & G-Men. Add some science fiction to mix & you get the superhero.https://twitter.com/KurtBusiek/status/1304976226587521030 …
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9. So: the police legitimacy crisis of 1920/1930s created a raft of genres from hard-boiled detective to superhero. I suppose the question is whether the current crisis will create new genres or cause these older ones to return to their origins.
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The overlooked masterpiece: Red Harvest
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have you read the early hardboiled Perry Masons
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The answer to this is Miss Phryne Fisher, she cooperates with the police
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Except that the Phryne Fisher books were written decades later and set in a totally different milieu.
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