About this course:

Class discussion will be very important. After we get going, I will be asking people to make reports or join panels to discuss the assigned texts. Written work, on the other hand, will take the form of a single large term paper. For this reason, it is essential that you choose a good topic and choose it early. I will establish dates later on for submission of topics, conferences with me, and submission of outlines and drafts. To begin with, I want to propose some topic areas. If you have a great idea that falls outside of these areas, feel free to propose it. I'll try to be reasonable.

These are the main topic areas as I see them:

1. A single writer who clearly working in the genre established and developed by Hammett, Chandler, and MacDonald, but has adapted it in some interesting way. The most obvious modes of change are shifts in local and changes in the nature of the Eye. There have been some notable revisions in the gender of the Eye, both female and gay male, that are worth investigating, as in the work of Vera Paretsky and Joseph Hansen. There have also been interesting changes in race, as exemplified by the work of Walter Mosely and Lia Matera. And some very good work has been done in different locales, as by Stephen Dobyns using Saratoga, Jonathan Valin using Cincinnati, and Loren D. Estleman using Detroit. If a key element of the genre (such as point-of-view) is changed, try to say why and with what results.

2. A parallel genre, such as the Police Procedural. A paper in this area should look at the work of a number of people and seek to establish the norms of the genre, just as we will be doing with the Private Eye novel. If you follow this track, you should decide who the major exemplars of this genre are and discuss a number of works by several writers. The point would be partly to look for cultural or ideological differences as well as formal ones.

3, The Private Eye in another medium, such as film. If you follow this track it will be important to look at film versions of some of our key texts (like The Maltese Falcon) and also original film working in what is clearly the same genre (like Chinatown). The point of such a study would be to reach some conclusions about the relationship between genre and media. One might look at PI films, PI TV series, and PI novels, for instance.

4. Deeper into Hammett, Chandler, or MacDonald. This would mean reading biographies, letters, criticism, additional works, and taking a stand within the ongoing critical discourse about one of these writers.

5. Predecessors and contemporaries of Hammett and Chandler. Where did this genre come from? How does the Private Eye novel relate to works by Van Dine, Oppenheim, Edgar Wallace, and other writers of crime fiction in the period before the 1930s?