Reviews of The American Roman Noir

     "Relying on a stunning array of historical data -- changes in work habits, styles of automobiles, architecture, and appliances, the use of new materials in manufacturing -- Marling demonstrates dramatic changes in the nature and quality of American life. Such changes emphasized speed, efficiency, and constant mutability. Marling further charts the shifts in aesthetic design from Victorian rococo to the smooth lines of art nouveau which also connoted a movement from synecdochial to metonymic appearance. He does an exemplary job of revealing the ways in which these alterations in cultural phenomena suggest major shifts in fundamental values.

     "In each of the three central chapters, Marling blends biography, a defining social incident, and analyses of two novels by each of his subjects. With Dashiell Hammett he emphasizes the effect the Fatty Arbuckle case, which Hammett investigated as a Pinkerton agent, had upon the novelist. For Hammett the fabula of the prodigal "was about the tension between individuals who have and spend, apart from talent and ability, and the self-enforced social conformity of the working class that formed the audience…" In The Red Harvest he discovered a style that approximated the sleek, new design of life, and the conventions of the fabula are fairly easy to detect. The Maltese Falcon reveals signs of Hammett's experience as a writer of advertising copy, and the work hinges on the elaboration of the fabula as well as on a discussion of an intricate dichotomy of smooth and rough images.
   ………..

   "The American Roman Noir is a well-written, extraordinarily well-researched study. Its insights, which abound throughout, are original and provocative and demonstrate the virtues of thorough interdisciplinary research. Marling has a secure grasp of contemporary critical theory, yet theory never becomes an end in itself. This book is impressive for the breadth and depth of its scholarship and represents a truly important addition to genre studies and scholarship on detective fiction."

                David Madden, Modern Fiction Studies, 42: 4, Winter 1996, 840-43.
 

     "In the 1980s William Marling published books on Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler that remain the best general introductions to these writers. These earlier critical studies are filled with biographical, historical, and cultural facts that also dominate Marling's most recent book, The American Roman Noir, but in the 1980s Marling subordinated these materials to his aesthetic claims about Hammett and Chandler, for example, that "Hammett's work as a significant place in major American literature" and that in studying Chandler it is crucial to understand "exactly how his fictions work" and how he exceeded "the limits of [his] genre." In the 1990s Marling has moved on with the rest of the profession, into what he himself calls narrative theory and cultural materialism (x). The result is a book that will delight those looking for a new kind of American Studies, even as it will dismay those who see structuralism and the New Historicism as more or less engaging ways to put the author and his or her text at the absolute periphery of literary study.

     "Marling's aim is nothing less than to explore "the relations between the detective novel, art nouveau, economic history, film, and advertising," especially as these relations can be identified in the works of Dashiell Hammett, James. M. Cain, and Raymond Chandler (x). Throughout the period from 1927 to the end of World War II, in cultural phenomena as diverse as design theory, economics, the history of film, and in popular literary genres such as the detective novel, Marling sees pervasive evidence of what he calls "a master narrative about consumerism" (xi), typically embodied in "the fabula of prodigality" (xii). This thematic concern is especially crucial to detective fiction of the period, though Marling notes other incarnations as diverse as The Jazz Singer and The Great Gatsby. To understand Hammett, Cain, and Chandler in their cultural context is therefore to illuminate the era as well as this strand of its fiction."

       Robert Merrill, American Literature, 69: 3, September 1997, 634-35.