This chapter examines the role that the crime novel played in exposing and, conversely, smoothing out the ill effects of capitalism, and of drawing attention to the intersections between crime, business, and the law. It argues that crime fiction’s ability to expose violent wrongdoing speaks to a wafer-thin ethical code in twentieth-century American society whereby the appearance of sanction and punishment trumps substantive claims to rightness and justice. The chapter also explores gendered and racial noir fiction, particularly in the works of the African American novelist Chester Himes. Ultimately, the chapter reveals the ambivalent politics of much American crime fiction: between, on the one hand, the desire for community and for a workable notion of the public and, on the other, the incorporation of this notion of the public by private enterprise and the allure of greed, profit, and gain.

This chapter examines the problem of the region in world crime fiction – the extent to which a regional approach to crime fiction offers a way of moving between the national and global. It focusses on the Mediterranean and what is called Mediterranean or Southern European noir and examines works by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Jean-Claude Izzo, Andrea Camilleri and, more pointedly, the Mexican writers Subcomandante Marcos and Paco Ignacio Taibo II. It seeks to tease out the complications produced, first, by attempts to locate what is distinctively Mediterranean in Mediterranean noir, and second, by attendant moves to distinguish between different taxonomies of geographical and political space. Attention is paid to the fusion of cultures central to and produced by an understanding of the Mediterranean as matrix and to the ways this cultural mixing has also been exploited by organized crime networks for profit. However, to fully interrogate the place and problem of the region in world crime fiction, and to tease out its political possibilities, this chapter looks at the complex entanglements between texts, readers, publishers and contexts, and hence new ways of doing critique.

There is a tendency to want to fix crime fiction: to fix the boundaries of what constitutes the genre, its typologies, and hence what it is and more importantly what it is not. Following Tzvetan Todorov's categorization of detective fiction into the subgenres of the ‘whodunnit’, the ‘thriller’ and the ‘suspense novel’, and his claim that all ‘types’ can be understood as an interplay between the story of the crime and the story of the investigation, where one supplants or suppresses the other (1977: 42–50), this move has spawned further attempts to refine its typologies (Malmgren 2001) and its formal and political characteristics. Crime fiction is ‘fixed’ either as a conservative genre that privileges, consciously or otherwise, an essentially ‘bourgeois’ worldview (Mandel 1984; Porter 1981) or as a deviant, radical genre, which unsettles basic presumptions about law, property and morality (Collins 1992; Hilfer 1992). Even where crime fiction is seen to move between polarities, the tendency is to see this movement as preordained – the ‘victory of public knowledge and civic solidarity over the dangers of private desires’ (McCann 2000: 4) – or a more general move towards ‘the restitution of social order’ in response to ‘unease about the potential chaos of the social world’ (Evans 2009: 19). There is a related tendency to want to fix crime novels according to national traditions and to identify crime fiction as exhibiting certain features or characteristics particular to these traditions. Hence we have studies of British, French, Irish, US, Japanese, Italian and Spanish crime fiction, to name a few, though it should be acknowledged that many of these studies also draw attention to the problems of a nation-centred approach and to the inherent transnationality of crime fiction as a genre (Gorrara 2009; Pezzotti 2014; Cliff 2018).

Thankfully, there has been a backlash against this move to designate, to fix, to tie down. Just as Scaggs describes crime fiction as ‘unclassifiable’ (2005: 1) and points to its ‘generic (and sub-generic) flexibility and porosity’ (2005: 2), Horsley proposes a ‘dialogic approach’ that emphasizes ‘the ambiguity, or indeed contradictoriness, of individual texts and the different ways of reading them’ (2005: 2).

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.

World War II holds a celebrated position in the benign meta-narrative of American foreign relations. This narrative holds that the United States is a benevolent nation whose foreign policy is based not on pure self-interest but rather on the greater good of all humankind. As H. W. Brands suggests: ‘If a single theme pervades the history of American thinking about the world, it is that the United States has a peculiar obligation to better the lot of humanity… Americans have commonly spoken and acted as though the salvation of the world depended on them.’ According to this meta-narrative, the US has only ever engaged in foreign policy that, while it may have advanced the national interest, also served some higher purpose in the history of human progress: the Spanish–American War was fought to free the Cuban people and others from domination by imperial Spain; World War I was fought to ‘make the world safe for democracy’; World War II was designed to defeat the evils of Nazism and Japanese expansionism whilst establishing the ‘Four Freedoms’ for all peoples; the Cold War was pursued in order to defend the rights of free peoples everywhere against totalitarian aggression and subversion; and the New World Order and more recently the ‘War on Terror’ were established to defend civilised peoples the world over against the uncertainties and dangers of the post-Cold War era.

In the early stages of planning for this book, we were struck by a number of related circumstances. First, working as we both did then in American Studies departments in the United Kingdom, we had noticed a growing preference for using films to ‘teach’ American history and were both excited and concerned by such a development. From our own experiences, we knew that films which featured episodes and events from American history engaged the interest of students and potentially raised some intriguing questions about historical truth, realism, genre, Hollywood and ideology. The assumption that Hollywood films constituted unambiguous and unproblematic historical texts, however, needed to be well and truly resisted. About the same time, we started to notice the sheer number of contemporary Hollywood films being made that focused on American history as their subject. Indeed, a steady flow of new releases throughout the late 1980s and 1990s suggested a growing interest both on the part of filmmakers and audiences in questions of public history, nation and national identity. Glory, Born on the Fourth of July, Heaven and Earth, Malcolm X and JFK were followed in quick succession by Saving Private Ryan, Nixon, The Thin Red Line, Three Kings, Amistad, Ride with the Devil, U-571, The Patriot, Pearl Harbor and Black Hawk Down. The initial impetus for this book, therefore, came from a desire to explore Hollywood's renewed interest in American history and analyse these films in pedagogical terms.

In the giddy optimism that accompanied the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the attendant disintegration of the Cold War, commentators, particularly from the American right, looked to a rose-tinted future in which the United States bestrode the world as its only superpower. Most famously, or notoriously, Francis Fukuyama, then the Deputy Director of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, argued that the ‘triumph of the West’ was evidenced ‘in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism’ and that the end of the Cold War marked ‘the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the ultimate form of human government'. Fukuyama's predictions about the hegemonic global dominance of a form of Western liberal democracy coded as American may have come to pass, but the implicit global stability and order that he might have expected to result from such a situation has not materialised. Rather, the post-Cold War era has done much to justify the fears of other commentators who believed the world would be a far more dangerous and unpredictable place following the end of the ideological struggle between East and West. International stability, far from being assured by the unfettered spread of liberal democracy and market capitalism, has been threatened by the forces of ethnic nationalism, religious fundamentalism, international terrorism and other emergent threats to security.

There are a number of points of departure for this chapter, and this book as a whole. The first relates to the vexed question of historical accuracy and the now familiar complaint that Hollywood films deliberately falsify the historical record, as though that record itself is somehow inviolate and unchanging. As we argued in the Introduction, we begin from the assumption that what should concern us when considering how the past is represented is not so much the issue of how accurately films represent history but rather what they can reveal to us about the ways in which history is told and how film's engagement with history has been shaped by the material conditions under which filmmakers construct their narratives and audiences watch and make sense of them. We are interested primarily in the ways in which filmmakers have used, and are using, American history as a way of engaging with the question of what ‘America’ stands for, culturally and politically, in the post-Cold War world. In this particular chapter, what interests us, therefore, is how an event as sanctified as the American Revolution – one that continues to occupy a privileged position in the benign meta-narrative of American history – is used and transformed by filmmakers both to reveal something about the event itself and to shed some light on our own cultural and political moment. What is at stake here is not only the question of how or indeed whether Hollywood's role as public historian has changed.

Hollywood has not typically enjoyed a good reputation as a purveyor of history. American filmmakers are frequently condemned for rewriting history, for providing an ‘arrogant distortion of the historical record’ or even for the ‘rape of US history’. Films made about particular episodes or events from America's past are often accused of providing a disturbingly falsified picture of ‘what really happened’; they consistently privilege action and drama over historical accuracy; they simplify the complexities and contingencies of the past by attempting to impose clear-cut resolutions on the ‘mess’ of history; and their aim is to entertain audiences and make money for their producers rather than to represent the past in a fresh light or encourage audiences to critically reflect on this past in new ways. As Robert Brent Toplin puts it, critics of historical feature films would seem to hold the unshakeable view that: ‘To learn about history, go to a book, not to a movie’.

Since at least the 1970s, however, many historians have been increasingly willing to recognise the value of Hollywood films as both tools for teaching and as resources for helping to interpret American history. A small library of books on the subject of historical films and regular articles and forums in major journals such as American Historical Review and the Journal of American History attest to the seriousness with which many historians now treat feature films that focus on historical events or characters.

The unpopularity of slavery as a subject for Hollywood is underlined by the significantly larger proportion of films made about the American Civil War. The Civil War has traditionally occupied a hallowed place in the benign meta-narrative of American history, one in which the bloody divisions between North and South are incorporated into a larger story of nation in which the sacrifice, suffering and bravery of both sides are equally celebrated. As such, Hollywood, one of the key ‘players’ in shaping the nature and ideological content of American public history, has played an important role in transforming the Civil War, to use David Thelen's words, from a ‘story of bitter, irreconcilable conflict between two societies and between two sets of values’ into one of ‘human courage and bravery exhibited by all’. This chapter focuses on the ways in which a range of post-Cold War films about the Civil War – Glory (1989), Gettsyburg (1993), Ride with the Devil (1999) and Cold Mountain (2003) – have engaged with this benign meta-narrative; that is, whether or to what extent they have challenged or reinforced an affirmative notion of national identity and how their engagement with such concerns speaks about the numerous, complex ways in which ‘America’ is being re-constituted domestically and internationally in the post-Cold War world.

If contemporary filmmakers have felt compelled to do away with the explicit racism of pre-Civil Rights Hollywood movie-making and make African-Americans the subjects rather than the objects of their gaze, then the vexed question of how successfully have their ambitions been realised needs to be addressed. For while there has long been a slow trickle of ‘worthy’ films made by white liberal directors whose integrationist politics usually requires initially hostile black and white protagonists to put aside their differences and prejudices and join forces to tackle some kind of ‘outside’ threat (that is, In the Heat of the Night, Mississippi Burning and The Hurricane), there has also been a small but growing number of films made by African-American directors (that is, Spike Lee, Mario Van Peebles) whose focus is predominantly African-American subjects and which tend to privilege conflict and confrontation rather than reconciliation and assimilation. Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X, Panther and Dead Presidents would be examples of this type of film.

Such a distinction has provoked scholars like Manthia Diawara and Ed Guerrero to differentiate between what they refer to as ‘Black independent cinema’ or ‘a new black film wave’ and mainstream Hollywood cinema, although Diawara in particular is careful to draw attention to the multiple ways in which ‘mainstream cinema … feeds on independent cinema and appropriates its themes and narrative forms’. Nonetheless, despite such cross-fertilisation, the appropriateness of such a distinction, for Guerrero at least, remains. The lines of demarcation are clear.