The concept of “action” is a key term in the humanities, the social sciences, and beyond. It has played a prominent role in sociology ever since it was established as an academic discipline in the late nineteenth century. In philosophy, it has always been linked with questions of practical rationality, and reemerged as a central topic of analytic philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century, pioneered in the work of Donald Davidson and others. More recently, new developments in cognitive science have attracted attention to hitherto neglected dimensions of the concept and its empirical foundations. As to sociology, Max Weber's famous Economy and Society opens with an enormously influential fourfold schema of types of social action, arranged according to their degree of rationality. Talcott Parsons' The Structure of Social Action synthesized the theoretical achievements of the “founding fathers,” using an action-theoretical framework and emphasizing the function of normative orientations for the social coordination of individual acts. It is easy to name more prominent sociologists standing for the importance of action theory in the discipline, among them Dewey's friend George Herbert Mead whose approach to action arguably offers the most radical alternative to methodological individualism.

“Im Anfang war die Tat! (In the beginning was the act.)” Faust, part I / “Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht. (World history is the Last Judgment.)” Schiller / When the elegant exercises of Hume's skeptical empiricism woke Kant from the dogmatic slumbers of his Continental rationalism, surely no one could have predicted the prodigious symphonies of German Transcendental Idealism to follow. Not, of course, that these were composed by Kant himself, but his “Copernican Revolution” in epistemology prepared the way for them, as surely as the German compositions of the later Mozart prepared the way for Beethoven and Brahms - and, eventually, for the monstrous syntheses of Wagner. David Hume's secure place in the history of philosophy rests not on the construction of any philosophical system: quite simply, his essays constitute the most thorough job of deconstruction in modern intellectual history. (It is a pity, attributable, perhaps, to the French origins of the critical school - in French tradition, Locke has always been respected, Hume ignored - that modern deconstructionists have so neglected Hume. There are so many lessons available there, not only in the elegant simplicity of his arguments, but in the admirable lucidity of his Enlightenment prose.) In the third canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Byron speaks of Gibbon, the most eminent of Enlightenment historians, as having “Sapp[ed] a solemn creed with solemn sneer” (III, st. 107).

Over eighty years ago, half a century before the term “cognitive science” had even been coined, John Dewey developed his view of mind, thought, and language in ongoing dialogue with the biological and psychological sciences of his day. He drew on empirical research in a number of fields, including biology, neuroscience, anthropology, cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, social psychology, and linguistics. Dewey's approach thus offers a model of how philosophy and the cognitive sciences can productively work together. The sciences reveal aspects of the deepest workings of the mind. Philosophy evaluates the underlying assumptions and methods of the sciences, and it places the empirical research on cognition in its broader human context, in order to determine what it means for our lives. In a nutshell, Dewey's theory of mind is naturalistic, non-reductive, and process-oriented. His view is naturalistic in that it employs empirical research drawn from a number of natural and social sciences. It eschews explanations that rely on supernatural notions, rejecting any idea of a non-empirical ego or pure rationality. However, even though Dewey appropriated modes of inquiry characteristic of the sciences, he took great care to avoid the reductionist tendencies that limit the explanatory scope of certain sciences.

Which first, the good news or the bad news? In honor of optimists who test their commitments by rising above the worst, I submit a three-part package of disheartening wisdom. W. J. T. Mitchell on pictures and words: “The history of culture is in part the story of a protracted struggle for dominance between pictorial and linguistic signs, each claiming for itself certain proprietary rights on a 'nature' to which only it has access.” John Barrell on efforts to shelter the two arts of picturemaking and wordmaking under one critical label: “ 'Romanticism' has never become a well-established term in the discussion of English painting, and art historians do not seem, on the whole, to have found the term of great explanatory power even when applied to such obvious subjects as Turner, Palmer, or Blake himself.” And finally, the most quotable line ever written about all relations among all arts, Susanne Langer's heartstopping proclamation that “there are no happy marriages in art - only successful rape.” These warnings open suitably dark themes that we would be mistaken to bypass, because they are fundamentally true to life. Awesome combinations of failure, difference, distance, lag, divergence, and conflict establish the relations of texts and images in the Romantic period to such a degree that we cannot hope to understand those relations without them. Any elevation of spirits about the future of scholarship in “literature and the visual arts,” as it has come to be standardized in a phrase, can only be achieved by climbing a mountainous collection of depressing realities.

Unlike British spy fiction which has tended to concern itself with issues of empire, the spy in American writing initially carried the status of a fighter for independence. James Fenimore Cooper's The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground (1821), generally taken as the prototype of the genre, is concerned with distinguishing its protagonist from a “common spy,” as Cooper explained in his 1831 introduction. The novel centers on the activities of Harvey Birch, an American who uses his occupation as a peddler to travel between the rival forces during the War of Independence and gather information on the whereabouts of the English soldiers. The prevailing ethic in The Spy of military honor is based on overt bravery, in other words on the very quality which Birch's role debars him from showing. Others may declare their loyalty verbally; he has to screen his commitment behind the discourse of trade, even at the risk of being pronounced a traitor. Others wear the uniform of their calling; he goes through a whole series of disguises. Birch performs like an actor within an uncongenial context. Cooper thus, like many succeeding crime and mystery novelists, has to nudge the reader toward revelatory details, but without giving too much away. Throughout the novel he exploits incomplete lighting where figures - especially Birch - cannot be seen clearly; and he draws our attention to dress, especially the clothing which muffles the face of Birch.

This is the story of a feminist counter-tradition in the crime and mystery fiction genre, and the story of that counter-tradition's impact. The late 1970s and early 1980s saw American writers Marcia Muller, Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky, independently of each other, each creating a female private eye/ investigator character; all three novelists subsequently developed commercially successful and popular series based on their mold-breaking female private eye creations. Positioned at the center of the narrative, in the familiar first-person voice of the hard-boiled tradition embodied by Chandler's Philip Marlowe, characters such as Sharon McCone, Kinsey Millhone, and V. I. Warshawski were allowed agency, intelligence and action. These were pioneering constructions of the modern female detective figure; as more women writers featuring strong central women characters came on board throughout the 1980s and 1990s, from both the USA and the UK, a range of feminist sensibilities came to bear on the genre, and it has never looked back. Now, at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, it is not only safe to say, but perhaps imperative to understand, that crime and mystery fiction really has not been the same since the birth of these three gumshoes, and many more like them.

“The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter, eh?” Sam Spade remarks in The Maltese Falcon. “Gaudy” describes something excessively garish or showy, and “gaudier,” of course, even more so; although “patter” connotes the smooth, practiced speech used by hucksters to attract customers or by magicians to distract audiences, its primary meaning, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is “thieves' lingo.” This word choice suggests that Spade - a modernist private eye attuned to social façades - thinks of being a crook as a performance, even a crudely exaggerated one.

For postmodernist novelists, too, crime is largely a matter of appearances. Indeed, the generic elements linked to solving the mystery in a detective story - observing ambiguous signs and constructing a possible narrative from them - characterize postmodernist fiction in general. Some novels emphasize these hermeneutic and epistemological aspects so markedly that they have been labeled “anti-detective fiction,” “postmodern mysteries,” “deconstructive mysteries,” or “metaphysical detective stories.” Investigation is so overdetermined, one might say, that in some instances - like William Hjortsberg's novel Falling Angel or Christopher Nolan's film Memento - the private eye himself turns out to be the criminal he pursues.

Before the word “mafia” entered the American vocabulary, the bad guy portrayed in literature, dramas, radio programs, film and television was more often than not a bandit, a thief, a thug, or some other version of an outlaw who did bad deeds in dastardly ways that were more often than not discovered and punished by traditional social powers. The word “gangster” came to be used to represent the urban version of such a bad guy who worked with a band of criminals. The gangster as we know him today is a mix of fact and fiction. First appearing in the newspapers and newsreels of the 1920s, the gangster figure has grown to heroic proportions. Disseminated through powerful mass media exposure, the gangster subliminally serves as a cultural icon, reflecting changing notions of masculinity and socio-economic class in the United States.

The gangster, typically represented by a male figure, emerged in response to the evolution of corporate capitalism in the early twentieth century. Although criminal gangs had long occupied American cities, Prohibition and the desperate poverty brought on by the Great Depression in the 1930s provided opportunities for individual crime leaders to emerge and thrive. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, the exploits of gangsters such as Al Capone, John Dillinger, “Baby Face” Nelson and “Pretty Boy” Floyd became national news, fueled fictional accounts and captured the popular imagination. These real-life gangsters became more than ordinary criminals by committing their crimes with dashing and daring bravado; they were all blatant transgressors of the boundaries between good and evil, right and wrong, and rich and poor. As corporate capitalism promoted consumerism and widened the gap between rich and poor, Americans became infatuated with the gangster, whose stylish dress and fancy cars yet humble origins defied the boundaries separating social classes.

There is an infamous moment in Dashiell Hammett's 1929 novel Red Harvest where his detective, the Continental Op, wakes up bleary-eyed from a laudanum-induced slumber to find his right hand wrapped around “the blue and white handle” of an ice pick whose “needle-sharp blade” has been “buried in Dinah Brand's left breast.” Its significance lies not in the fact that Brand has been murdered but rather for the way in which it seems to implicate Hammett's detective in the act itself. Just as revealing is the Op's inability to discount himself as a suspect, at least until the end of the novel when his innocence is finally confirmed. Red Harvest is often cited as the first hardboiled American crime novel, but the fact that it might also constitute the first American roman noir draws attention to the close relationship between what we might tentatively call these different subgenres of crime writing. In the end, the Op's investigative prowess brings order, and the law, to the western US city of Personville and, as such, it might be premature to argue for its classification as a noir novel (as opposed to a hard-boiled detective novel), but in other ways the similarities between Red Harvest and works by writers such as Horace McCoy, James M. Cain, David Goodis and Jim Thompson are beyond refutation. Before Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and even Paul Cain's Fast One (1932), Hammett deployed many of the traits or features that would later be cited as characteristic of a “noir” sensibility: an unknowable, morally compromised protagonist who is implicated in the sordid world he inhabits, an overwhelming sense of fatalism and bleakness, and a socio-political critique that yields nothing and goes nowhere.

In 1851, Herman Melville confessed to possessing a criminal democratic philosophy. He worried, however, that his chosen interlocutor, Nathaniel Hawthorne, might not appreciate this subversive formulation and instead cleave to an “aristocracy of the brain.” “So,” he wrote Hawthorne, “when you see or hear of my ruthless democracy on all sides, you may possibly feel a touch of a shrink, or something of that sort.” Melville presumed that Hawthorne's “shrink” would stem not merely from intellectual or class prejudice but from a moral repugnance, admitting, “It is but nature to be shy of a mortal who boldly declares that a thief in jail is as honorable a personage as Gen. George Washington.”

Melville should have been nervous. His equation between the thief and the founder promoted a version of America and its literature that many writers in Hawthorne's circle found deeply objectionable. While Melville suggested that a truly “ruthless” America would embrace egalitarianism through sympathy with the criminal, authors, such as Hawthorne's favorite literary critic, Edwin Whipple, attacked popular crime writing precisely because it promoted this leveling identification. He lambasted what he called the “Romance of Rascality” for teaching “the fact that a man excites moral reprobation is his claim upon our sympathy” and that “the old gentlemen of '76 . . . fought for an equality in evil as well as good.”

The following essay sketches a brief history of this “equality in evil.” It tracks popular American crime writing from seventeenth-century execution sermons through eighteenth-century novels and then concludes with the courtroom journalism that electrified the antebellum era. In short, it examines how debates over sympathy for the criminal structured these texts and, ultimately, shaped Melville's “ruthless” American literature.

Race is ubiquitous and powerful in American crime fiction, as central in the genre as it is in American society; however, in fiction as in life, race matters are frequently denied, displaced, or otherwise so thoroughly disguised that many readers overlook them. Despite the tremendous expansion of serious critical interest in popular fiction generally and in crime fiction in particular during the final decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first, few critics have examined the workings of race in crime fiction, with most critical attention to race limited to examining texts by writers of color with detectives of color. While such analyses have been helpful to the larger critical project of comprehensively mapping the genre, limiting discussion of race to texts in which race is directly addressed and in which the race at issue is not white serves to disguise further the actual roles of race in American crime fiction. Whiteness - its boundaries, its value, its meanings and perceived threats to its dominance - has been a primary concern of crime fiction throughout its history in the US.

Although even sketchily tracing the evolution of American crime fiction is beyond the scope of this essay, it is worth remembering that crime fiction grew out of mass fascination with true crime narratives and that in the US the popular appetite for crime stories was fed partly by newspapers' crime reporting, especially their police report columns.

“Hard-boiled” is the style most people think of when they refer to the American crime story: tough-talking, streetwise men; beautiful, treacherous women; a mysterious city, dark, in Raymond Chandler's famous phrase, “with something more than night”; a disenchanted hero who strives, usually without resounding success, to bring a small measure of justice to his (or, more recently, her) world. The main elements of the style are so widely known that they have achieved something close to mythic stature. Merely invoking a few of its hallmarks is enough to plunge us into a deeply familiar world whose features seem to well up out of the dark recesses of the collective imagination.

That resonance at once illuminates and conceals the writing it surrounds. On the one hand, the sheer familiarity of its conventions points to the genuinely central place of the hard-boiled crime story in the popular culture of the United States. Along with a handful of comparable popular narratives, it is one in the repertoire of mass cultural codes whose rules are instantly recognizable and endlessly available for variation. On the other hand, the very familiarity of the hard-boiled style tends to over-inflate its prominence and to tie it too closely to a narrow idea of national character, while also obscuring the richness of the fiction itself. The once commonplace assumption that the American crime story simply is the hard-boiled story downplays the variety in the history of American crime narrative. It also threatens to reduce hard-boiled fiction to a kind of unauthored mythos, making it too easy to forget that the style emerged out of a distinct time and place and that it has been put to use by a number of talented artists who found in its elements the means to pursue quite varied ambitions.

“These tales of ratiocination,” Edgar Allan Poe explained to a correspondent in 1846, “owe most of their popularity to being something in a new key.” Poe was referring to his three stories written in the early to mid 1840s featuring C. Auguste Dupin (“The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” and “The Purloined Letter”).The “new key” was, of course, what we have come to call “detective fiction,” and Poe, as the form's first truly modern exponent, was aware that his stories were enjoying an unprecedented popularity with the reading public. In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Poe introduced readers to the Parisian polymath, Dupin. He was a man for whom ordinary men “wore windows in their bosoms.” Such are Dupin's powers that not only can he seemingly read the narrator's thoughts at the very instant he is thinking them, but he can explain the whole chain of reasoning that had led to his thoughts merely by observing the sequence of expressions on his face. Coming across a case in the newspaper - the grisly killings of Madame L'Espanaye and her daughter in their apparently locked lodgings in the Rue Morgue - Dupin displays his analytical prowess, unraveling the seemingly insoluble mystery.

Over forty-two years ago, Truman Capote wrote a bestselling book, In Cold Blood, and loudly proclaimed that he had invented a newart form. As Capote told George Plimpton in a long interview: “journalism, reportage, could be forced to yield a serious new art form: the 'nonfiction novel,'” and that “a crime, the study of one such, might provide the broad scope I needed to write the kind of book I wanted to write. Moreover, the human heart being what it is, murder was a theme not likely to darken and yellow with time.”

Whether or not Capote invented something called the “nonfiction novel,” he ushered in the serious, extensive, non-fiction treatment of murder. In the years since In Cold Blood appeared, the genre of true crime regularly appears on the bestseller list. It is related to crime fiction, certainly - but it might equally well be grouped with documentary or read alongside romance fiction. And while its readers have a deep engagement with the genre that is very different from the engagement of readers of crime fiction, its writers are often forced to occupy a position - in relation to victims, criminals and police - that is complex and contradictory. In this essay I will be tracing the history and development of this hybrid genre, as well as examining some of the tensions - between reader, writer, criminal and cops - that are at its heart.

In Cold Blood made reading about gory crime - in this case, the random murder of a farm family in Holcomb, Kansas - respectable. Moreover, despite its French epigraph it insisted on the Americanness of the victims - and the killers. It ushered in a theme which has since been richly mined by true crime authors: that violent crime is an act that can fundamentally reshape a community and create or lay bare the unspoken fears between members of that community.

When coroners and medical examiners decide that the corpse before them is the victim of homicide, they announce their findings with a ringing locution: “by a person or persons unknown.” And while the identity of the killer may truly be a cipher in the real world, within the confines of a detective novel, the perpetrator is known to us. He or she is hiding in plain sight among the array of characters in the book. What we do not know is who it is, which other characters are involved, why they did what they did, and how they pulled it off. Resolving all these questions - questions whose answers are somewhere in the text - becomes, for readers, a mental itch that we cannot scratch. We just have to know the answers. Looking for clues in a detective story is like searching for a mislaid housekey; we soon become more fixated on the fact that we cannot find it than on the necessity of the thing itself. When the author of a detective story hooks us in this way, our inflamed curiosity drives us to read with fierce attention and all due speed.

The enormous popularity of mystery and crime writing can be attributed largely to the way it structures our reading experience. There is a serious problem (a dead body, a missing child, stolen money) and there is a serious and talented person who takes up its investigation. We readers can be participants in the puzzle-solving, or we can be mere observers, but in any case we know that there will be a solution to the mystery by the end. (Certain postmodern texts play with these expectations, as Susan Elizabeth Sweeney's chapter in this volume points out.) A mystery story makes a very clear pact with its reader: “If you will endure confusion, obfuscation and false leads, I will reveal all in the end. Read me, and you will be enlightened.”

“Presence” is an important concept in contemporary urban law enforcement practice. Since the late 1960s, evolving strategies and practices in police departments the world over have emphasized the benefits of increased police presence - putting more officers on the streets, increasing the frequency of car patrols, and so forth. Making the police more present, in practical terms, means making them more visible, the assumption being that the spectacle of police power makes easier and more effective the exercise of that power. In fact, this is not so new a concept. From the beginning, police were meant to have presence. When in 1829 Sir Robert Peel replaced the archaic Watch with London's Metropolitan Police Force, generally considered the first urban institution worthy of the name, he dressed his men to impress. The sight of a tall-bonneted, bright-buttoned “bobby” presumably being more likely to give a malfeasant pause for thought than that of a Watchman looking like every other lad down the pub.

Uniformed police, marked by that garb as privileged members of a government-sanctioned, paramilitary organization with broad discretionary powers, function today as in Peel's time as walking deterrents, visible signs of state power and surveillance. As such, urban police forces have in recent years deployed their officers not so much according to an individual's expertise or affinity with specific neighborhoods and communities, but in response to statistical mappings of criminal behavior, assigning more personnel to areas where the threat to people and to property is perceived to be greatest. Ironically, then, seeing more cops frequently means an area is more dangerous, not less. If assessed by that metric, current popular culture is a mighty perilous place. However fortunately far one might be from the grim realities of urban crime, however mercifully infrequent one’s personal encounters with police in their professional capacity might be, we are never more than a click away from cops.

For most, if not all, of the twentieth century, a consensus has existed among fans, collectors and critics of detective fiction about its development in the United States. The origin is in Edgar Allan Poe's “tales of ratiocination” of the early 1840s. There follows a long dry spell, a “fallow” period of about fifty years until Sherlock Holmes takes America by storm, and inspires some famous but ultimately minor writers (such as Jacques Futrelle). Between the 1890s and the 1920s, the real action is in Great Britain, where a “golden age” of tightly woven puzzles and country houses full of amusing guests is presided over by Agatha Christie and imitated by Americans like S. S. Van Dine. American detective fiction only comes into its own with the emergence of the hard-boiled style out of the “pulps” in the 1920s. In rebellion against a British style that seemed contrived and dull, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler produced something quintessentially American, like jazz. The iconic American detective novel is an improvisation on the themes the early hard-boiled writers laid out: urban settings, conspiracies among thugs and powerful men, deceptive women, and an underlying pessimism about human nature and American society.