Descriptive Digressions

Abstract

This chapter seizes on Hammett’s intriguing early insight that detection requires description more than violence—indeed that, at the genre’s best, description trumps narrative. Chandler and Ross Macdonald extended that premise in elaborate renderings of furniture and wardrobes, of authentic locales and even facial features as a means of inventively diverting attention in order to sustain it. In the process, objects become all but haunted, returning us to plot in a heightened state of awareness, tightening the hold of the past on the present. Admittedly, that descriptive impulse in its frequency and obtrusiveness can come to verge on parody. But as the interruptions of misdirection and diversion occur ever more self-consciously, they also increasingly draw our gaze to the configuration of the whole.