| Popis: |
James M. Cain did not write detective stories. He wrote stories about murder and love, ones that illustrate motives and explanations, rather than solutions, to the crimes in his works. Cain thus departs from Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler by creating narratives that are marked by a total absence of the figure of the detective. Cain’s work denotes a shift from the detective story to the crime novel or noir fiction, which places more emphasis on the world of the criminal.133 Not only did Cain do away with the detective, but most of his narratives are told from the criminal’s point of view. Despite these pronounced differences in Cain’s work from both Hammett and Chandler, however, the works of the three authors do intersect in their representations of women as key characters against the male protagonists.134 These intersections open up a window through which to read the question of female agency in each author with which this study is concerned, despite the differences between their works. |
