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Hollywood’s Detectives

Part of the Crime Files Series Book Series

DOI: 10.1057/9780230358676

ISBN: 978-1-349-36767-2

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK - Springer Journals

Oct 27, 2015

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Chapter 1Exploring Detective Films in the 1930s and 1940s: Genre, Society and Hollywood

Mason, Fran

Pages: 1 –27

[Hollywood’s version of the whodunnit in the 1930s and 1940s was not always of the classical style associated with the progenitors of the literary detective genre (Poe and Conan Doyle) or the writers of Golden Age clue-puzzle mysteries (such as Christie and Chesterton). The whodunnit does,...
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Chapter 2‘Such Lovely Friends’: Class and Crime in ‘The Thin Man’ Series

Mason, Fran

Pages: 28 –50

[Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc.’s (MGM) ‘The Thin Man’ films are unusual among the detective crime series of the 1930s and 1940s because they maintained their A-Movie status as main features throughout their run. Other crime series topped the bill at times, usually because they were mid-level product...
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Chapter 3Between Law and Crime: The Chivalric ‘Criminal’ Detective

Mason, Fran

Pages: 51 –78

[An important strand within Hollywood crime series of the 1930s and 1940s focuses on the figure of the criminal detective whose roots are less in the classical detective mode than in the strain of criminal-centred fiction that had emerged out of it in the United Kingdom and France at the end of...
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Chapter 4Englishness and America: Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes

Mason, Fran

Pages: 79 –105

[The ‘Sherlock Holmes’ series of films, originally produced by Twentieth Century Fox for two period versions in 1939 (both released as headlining movies), and then by Universal, after the series was revived and updated to the contemporary period in 1942, are a curious example of the detective...
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Chapter 5Ordering the World: The Uncompromising Logic of Charlie Chan and Mr Moto

Mason, Fran

Pages: 106 –130

[Detective series involving Asian detectives were very popular in Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s and, indeed, the most prolific of the Hollywood detective crime series in this period was the ‘Charlie Chan’ series, which produced 44 films between 1931 and 1949, after two early silent films and...
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Chapter 6The Rise of the Hard-boiled Detective

Mason, Fran

Pages: 131 –156

[Although the hard-boiled style has been regarded as a dominant mode of the detective film in Hollywood in the 1940s, as Steve Neale describes (2000: 72), the number of hard-boiled films in this period that actually have a detective, in the conventional form of the private eye, is much less than...
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Chapter 7Conclusion: Noir Detectives, Rogue Cops, Undercover Men and Police Procedurals

Mason, Fran

Pages: 157 –170

[The crime series persisted into the late 1940s, but the detective crime genre in this period, and into the 1950s, became increasingly fractured, as if the comforting formal style of the mystery series could no longer contain the complexity of post-war American society. A range of thrillers and...

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