Prologue

This introduction discusses genre fiction as a narrative structure that relies on familiar conventions, with particularly stark premises informing the mystery or noir genre. It anticipates the following chapters, which avoid historicist or sociological speculations about the rise of a readership for detective fiction, offering instead a variety of formal explanations for the genre’s continuing appeal. These are mostly stylistic stratagems shared by early hard-boiled writers, then elaborately cultivated in noir films, which seem at first to pale next to the often preposterous violence that drives the plots. But those formal maneuvers attest to a need for diversion, for misdirection and delay, that absorbs attention by swaying it from plot alone. Discussion then shifts to a review of each of the chapters to follow.