Chapter 11 black revolution

What could be more joyful than crushing a dirty world. We mentioned in the previous section that the war ended and a group of people returning home changed the fate of detective novels.We might as well give an example with a high degree of popularity first, which may be more helpful for readers to understand what happened during this time period. In 1995, a classic film with an extremely civilian perspective defeated the same classic, and won the annual Oscar in one fell swoop.In addition to Forrest Gump, I believe that another character also left a deep impression on the audience, that is Gan's immediate boss on the Vietnam battlefield, Mr. Dan who loves cigarettes.

Mr. Dan was born in a military family, and his ancestors participated in any war in American history - the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the Pacific War, the Korean War, and even the Vietnam War that he himself is experiencing.What frustrates him even more is that every time the war ends, his family will become "martyrs" without exception. Mr. Dan is a simple and rude guy, but this does not prevent him from being loyal to his country and friends, let alone being a good person.Mr Dan ended up much better than his ancestors - at least he survived.In one operation, Mr. Dan was unfortunately injured.Like all wounded soldiers, the government amputated his legs and sent him home.

Being in a wheelchair all day long, receiving a meager pension, being unable to find a job, and being ridiculed by everyone—this is the reward for Mr. Dan's "loyalty to serve the country".He was surprised to find that the whole world was completely different from when he left!My own bravery and loyalty on the battlefield have become my fatal weakness in reality; the minimum sincerity and sympathy in my surroundings have been replaced by deception and use. Mr. Dan suddenly realized that the battlefield is the simplest "lifestyle", where there are only comrades-in-arms and enemies, only victory and defeat, only life and death, it couldn't be simpler.But in reality, my "individual heroism" has completely lost the space to survive. It is very complicated here, and it is a very dirty complicated one.

Lost the loyal Mr. Dan, only simple and rude.He eats, drinks, whores and gambles all day long, hangs out with alcohol and prostitutes; he is beaten bruised and swollen by gangsters or policemen twice in three days, because he is an eyesore in the eyes of the former, and he is a gangster in the eyes of the latter; he scolds the government and God. The son of a bitch, because the world was so unfair to him. Mr. Dan has a personal split: on the one hand, he is hopelessly accompanying the world to fall; on the other hand, he keeps trying to impact and change the world, even though it looks ridiculous.

Well, now our Mr. Dan case moves forward.The reader will be surprised to find that the heroes returning from the battlefields of the Second World War are in exactly the same situation as Mr. Dan.In other words, their situation is even worse. After all, the trauma of the world war on the soul is not comparable to the Vietnam War. For this huge group and the social imagination that this group arouses, people have found a special term to describe them - "Hard-Boiled".In Chinese, we are accustomed to translate this word as "tough guy". Therefore, under this general background, a brand-new detective novel emerged at the historic moment, and overthrew the dominance of classical detective novels.This new novel is known as "tough guy detective novel".

Tough Guy Pie was born in the United States. In fact, as early as the 1930s, a group of writers represented by Daley King (1895-1963) tried to subvert the connotation and form of traditional detective novels and create a new genre of detective novels—although Daley King · King created many excellent classical detective novels.As mentioned in the previous section, the world economy was in the Great Depression at that time, and the US economy was struggling even more.People's lives have lost the most basic economic security, and various crimes and violent incidents have emerged in an endless stream.Since the motives were all derived from poverty, the crimes that appeared in American society during this period had almost no "technical content", and were only a portrayal of human nature and a bloody appearance.Daly King and others seized this social reality and created a large number of crime novels that reflected human nature and social status quo.And this kind of novels are gradually separated from the traditional mystery-solving detective novels and form their own characteristics.

By the middle of the 20th century, objective conditions had matured, and tough-guy detective novels came into being.The founders of this genre are undoubtedly Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) was an independent, tough radical who didn't look like a typical American.He left school at 13 and held various jobs, including as a private eye with the Pinkerton Detective Agency. In 1929, Hammett published his first novel.The protagonist of this work is an unnamed private detective working for a mainland detective agency, a very subversive character.He does not have the sharp intuition and rigorous logic of Sherlock Holmes or Poirot, but only has an ordinary appearance and an unusual heart.He roamed the streets and alleys, kept getting in touch with people of all kinds from all walks of life, and often participated in fights and gang fights. He didn't have the detective demeanor and gentlemanly atmosphere of the "Golden Age" at all.In order to achieve their goals, anonymous detectives often destroy the system of the detective agency, and even trample on all the laws that get in the way.As far as some of his actions are concerned, it is difficult for readers to clearly distinguish the detective from the criminal.

In addition to the subversion of the detective, Hammett's prose is also very different from previous detective novels.His writing style is extremely simple, and he seldom "plays tricks" on plot construction and narrative skills, and almost completely relies on the charm and profound meaning of the story itself to attract readers.Here, the typified features of detective novels are weakened, while literariness and social value are unprecedentedly enhanced. After that, Dashiell Hammett successively created "The Disaster of the Dane Family", ,,, and other works, all of which uphold the subversive nature of the novel.Among them, it has completely surpassed the category of genre literature and has been sublimated into a world classic literary novel.Today, the "Malta Black Eagle Award" named after this book is still one of the most famous and authoritative awards in the field of detectives.

Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) started late in his creative career.As a young man he wrote reviews and poems for magazines in England.After World War I, he became an American director of an oil company, and his writing stalled. At 44, he lost his job and had to start creating again in order to support his family.Like Hammett, his fame also comes from novels. In 1939, Raymond Chandler published his first full-length detective novel "The Long Sleep", which brought him great glory.In the book, Philip Marlowe, a private detective, appears on the stage—he is also a middle-aged man who is greedy for drinking and lust, dares to trample on all rules, and walks between justice and law.After nearly a hundred years, the Detective Writers of America has no hesitation in choosing Marlowe as the "Most Popular Male Detective".

Chandler later created works such as "High Window", "Goodbye, My Love", "The Woman at the Bottom of the Lake", "Little Sister", etc., becoming the best spokesperson for tough guy detective novels, and won the "Laurel in Detective Novels" Poet" title. Chandler is good at grasping the overtones and inner meanings of words, and has a keen observation of places, things, and characters, and his control of writing and words is perfect.The Japanese writer Haruki Murakami once read it more than a dozen times and translated it into Japanese himself.

For the writers of the "Golden Age", plot was everything, and style was often left to the editor; while Chandler believes that "plot may be a nuisance, even if you are good at it", but "a person who does not pay attention to style A writer is not a writer at all to me."We read Chandler, first for his style, then for his California setting, for his jokes, for his social observations, and for the character of Marlowe.In addition, Raymond Chandler had a strong indignation against the mean and corrupt, which also played an important influence on his creation. There is no doubt that Chandler is a very good writer, a good critic, and a sensitive, intelligent person.He wrote his own epitaph, using his witty and witty style: "It is a skill to take a common form and make it unartistic. . . . Consider yourself an artist at times, but be forgotten so that better writers are remembered.” Clearly, Raymond Chandler’s work is in no danger of being forgotten.Regarding his contribution, we will mention it in the next section. Well, let us now summarize some of the characteristics of this new school of detective fiction. 1.The focus of the novel is adjusted from the brain to the heart, the story has changed from a simple intellectual game to a profound philosophical thinking, and the proposition of "human nature" has been praised to an unprecedented height; 2.The novel pays special attention to the interpretation of social issues, because this is the hotbed of "human nature"; 3.Whether it is the depiction of human nature or the interpretation of society, the conclusions are in all likelihood hopeless, if not black, at least gray. 4. "Wenxi" is gradually decreasing, and "martial arts" in a broad sense is obviously increasing; 5.The literariness of the novel has been comprehensively improved; 6.Most of the detectives in the novel have the following characteristics: (a) appears in the first person "I"; (b) The identity is a private detective, but there is no license for various reasons, which is an illegal operation; (c) had an unusually gloomy history, never married or divorced; (d) alcoholic and lustful; (e) was regularly beaten by various people, including the police; (f) Frequent contact with prostitutes, drug dealers, and gangsters; (g) Accepted clients are mostly dirtier than criminals, and the truth revealed is often worse than lies. From these characteristics, it is not difficult to see that the existence and development of tough-guy detective novels rely entirely on the aforementioned "tough-guy phenomenon".In a way, this detective story is the struggle of tough guys against the world.They yearn for the rewards they deserve, they yearn for everything to return to that simple and happy age, and they refuse to accept the status quo that "heroes have no place to show their talents". Compared with the embarrassment of "the end of the road", perhaps the tough guys are more willing to fight to the death.Because, facing the strange and dark world, their struggle must be futile.There are only two endings before us: destruction or complicity. During this period, American hard-boiled detective novels were mostly published in popular magazines.These magazines used cheap, rough wood pulp paper, so the works were also known as "dime fiction".Because it conforms to the characteristics of the times and is full of eye-catching sensory descriptions, the novel has been recognized by the market for a while and has gradually become the mainstream.Soon, tough-guy novels won an overall victory over traditional detective novels, so that today, there are very few writers in the Western world who specialize in the creation of classic detective novels. Critics dubbed this change in detective fiction the "American Revolution."In view of the characteristics of hard-boiled detective novels, this revolution is also known as the "black revolution". The main force of the revolution, in addition to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, there are several others who also contributed a lot. James Caan (1892-1977) wrote The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), a novel about sex and money.The work is spicy and concise, and the handling of "sex" seems relatively normal now, but it was quite out of place at the time.Kane's works give people a feeling of "original ecology", even a little vulgar (this is also a deficiency), which is very in line with the taste of American movies in the 1930s and 1940s.His two masterpieces "The Postman Always Rings Twice" and "Double Indemnity" are not only classic novels, but also made into popular movies. Mickey Spillane (1918-2006) was in a similar situation to Kane.His novels are full of the most primitive sex and violence of tough guy novels-this is certainly one of the means to deepen the theme, but its negative effects cannot be avoided.Spillane's novels have sold more than 200 million copies in the United States, but have never reached the heights of Hammett and Chandler. Georges Simnon (1903-1989) accomplished as much as Hammett and Chandler.He created more than 300 novels in his life, shaping one of the greatest detectives in the history of detective novels—Inspector Maigret.Simnon's works have the characteristics of both classical school and tough guy school, popular yet profound.He is a master of psychology, but he does not add any intuitive psychological descriptions in his works; his works have become a model of pure literary novels, but he has repeatedly claimed that pure literary elements should be discarded in detective novels.Before writing detective novels, Simnon lived in extreme poverty; by the time he closed his pen, he was able to travel around the world on a private yacht. In addition, like W. R．Burnett, Cornell Woolrich, Jonathan Latimer, etc., are all representative writers of tough guy detective novels; and today, Americans Bill Ploccini and Lawrence Block are undoubtedly the best. spokesmen for the two writers we will talk about in the next section. Since it is called a "revolution", it must have an immortal meaning.In addition to "overthrowing an old world", the greatest achievement of a revolution is "creating a new world".From this point of view, the pattern of detective novels in the western world today is entirely due to the "black revolution".Our favorite Hollywood blockbusters, the 007 series, "The Da Vinci Code" and so on, were all born out of this great revolution.And these are what we need to understand in the next section.