Darkly Perfect World

This book explores how American crime fiction and film have changed in the twentieth century. It shows a noir ethos committed to "authenticating alienation": subjectivity managed through radical polarization of "self" and "other." The author demonstrates that Chandler and Dashiell Hammett arrive at this subject within and against the colonial adventure genre. While the renegades of Joseph Conrad and Louis Becke project a figure vulnerable to shifts in cultural context, the noir protagonist exemplifies alienated selfhood and often performs a "continental operation" against the slippages of the colonial adventurer. But even as Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, and other noir virtuosi persist with this revision of late Victorian adventure, Chester Himes, Dorothy Hughes, and John Okada experiment with hard-boiled alienation for a subversion of noir that resonates throughout literary postmodernism. In their respective avant-garde novels, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, and Paul Auster expose what K.W. Jeter terms the "darkly perfect world" of noir, giving rise to the con men and "connected guys" of contemporary films noirs such as Bryan Singer's The Usual Suspects, David Fincher's Seven, Christopher Nolan's Memento, and Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs.