Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T09:26:10.948Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

War-on-Crime Fiction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 April 2021

Theodore Martin
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay tells the story of how the War on Crime helped remake American crime fiction in the 1960s and 1970s. Amid starkly racialized public anxieties about rising crime rates and urban uprisings, Lyndon B. Johnson officially launched the War on Crime in 1965. The cultural logic of Johnson's crime war infiltrated various kinds of crime writing in the ensuing decade. Tracking the crime war's influence on the police procedurals of Joseph Wambaugh; the Black radical novels of Sam Greenlee, John A. Williams, and John Edgar Wideman; and the vigilante fiction of Donald Goines and Brian Garfield, I argue that crime fiction in the War-on-Crime era emerged as a key cultural site for managing divergent political responses to a regime of social control that worked by criminalizing both race and revolt. By studying how novelists responded to the formative years of the War on Crime, we can begin to understand the complex role that literature played in alternately contesting and abetting the postwar transformation of the United States into a carceral state.

Type
Essays
Information
PMLA , Volume 136 , Issue 2 , March 2021 , pp. 213 - 228
Copyright
Copyright © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Modern Language Association of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Abbott, Megan E. The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir. Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.Google Scholar
Babb, Valerie. A History of the African American Novel. Cambridge UP, 2017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bendixen, Alfred. “Re-Searching the Premises: The Centrality of Crime Fiction in American Literary Culture.” Introduction. The Centrality of Crime Fiction in American Literary Culture, edited by Bendixen, Olivia Carr Edenfield, , Routledge, 2017, pp. 1–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bould, Mark. “Come Alive by Saying No: An Introduction to Black Power SF.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 34, no. 2, July 2007, pp. 220–40.Google Scholar
Breu, Christopher. Hard-Boiled Masculinities. U of Minnesota P, 2005.Google Scholar
Camp, Jordan T. Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State. U of California P, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cassuto, Leonard. Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Stories. Columbia UP, 2009.Google Scholar
Clover, Joshua. Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings. Verso, 2016.Google Scholar
Collins, Patricia Hill. “A Comparison of Two Works on Black Family Life.” Signs, vol. 14, no. 4, Summer 1989, pp. 875–84.Google Scholar
Darda, Joseph. “Dispatches from the Drug Wars: Ishmael Reed, Oscar Zeta Acosta, and the Viet Cong of America.” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 64, no. 1, Spring 2018, pp. 79–103.Google Scholar
Dussere, Erik. America Is Elsewhere: The Noir Tradition in the Age of Consumer Culture. Oxford UP, 2014.Google Scholar
Ferguson, Roderick A. Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. U of Minnesota P, 2004.Google Scholar
Fiorelli, Julie A. “Imagination Run Riot: Apocalyptic Race-War Novels of the Late 1960s.” Mediations, vol. 28, no. 1, Fall 2014, www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/imagination-run-riot.Google Scholar
Flamm, Michael W. Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s. Columbia UP, 2005.Google Scholar
Fortner, Michael Javen. Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment. Harvard UP, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garfield, Brian. Death Wish. 1972. Overlook Duckworth, 2013.Google Scholar
Gifford, Justin. Pimping Fictions: African American Crime Literature and the Untold Story of Black Pulp Publishing. Temple UP, 2013.Google Scholar
Goines, Donald. Crime Partners. 1974. Holloway House Classics, 2008.Google Scholar
Goldwater, Barry. “Text of Goldwater's Speech Formally Opening Presidential Campaign.” The New York Times, 4 Sept. 1964, www.nytimes.com/1964/09/04/archives/text-of-goldwaters-speech-formally-opening-presidential-campaign.html.Google Scholar
Greenlee, Sam. The Spook Who Sat by the Door. 1969. Brawtley Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Hall, Stuart, et al. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. 1978. 2nd ed., Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heise, Thomas. “Harlem Is Burning: Urban Rioting and the ‘Black Underclass’ in Chester Himes's Blind Man with a Pistol.” African American Review, vol. 41, no. 3, Fall 2007, pp. 487–506.Google Scholar
Hersey, John. The Algiers Motel Incident. 1968. Johns Hopkins UP, 1998.Google Scholar
Higgins, George V. The Friends of Eddie Coyle. 1972. Holt, 2000.Google Scholar
Hinton, Elizabeth. From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America. Harvard UP, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ibrahim, Habiba. Troubling the Family: The Promise of Personhood and the Rise of Multiculturalism. U of Minnesota P, 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jameson, Fredric. Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality. Verso, 2016.Google Scholar
Jefferson, Brian Jordan. “Digitize and Punish: Computerized Crime Mapping and Racialized Carceral Power in Chicago.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 35, no. 5, Oct. 2017, pp. 775–96.Google Scholar
Johnson, Lyndon B. “The President's Address to the Nation on Civil Disorders.” 27 July 1967. The American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/the-presidents-address-the-nation-civil-disorders.Google Scholar
Johnson, Lyndon B. “Special Message to the Congress on Crime in America.” 6 Feb. 1967. The American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/special-message-the-congress-crime-america.Google Scholar
Johnson, Lyndon B. “Special Message to the Congress on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice.” 8 Mar. 1965. The American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/special-message-the-congress-law-enforcement-and-the-administration-justice.Google Scholar
Kohler-Hausmann, Julilly. Getting Tough: Welfare and Imprisonment in 1970s America. Princeton UP, 2017.Google Scholar
Maxwell, William J. F. B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature. Princeton UP, 2015.Google Scholar
McCann, Sean. Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism. Duke UP, 2000.Google Scholar
Mengel, Bradley. Serial Vigilantes of Paperback Fiction: An Encyclopedia from Able Team to Z-Comm. McFarland, 2009.Google Scholar
Moynihan, Daniel Patrick. The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Office of Policy Planning and Research, United States Department of Labor, 1965.Google Scholar
Muhammad, Khalil Gibran. The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. Harvard UP, 2010.Google Scholar
Munby, Jonathan. Under a Bad Sign: Criminal Self-Representation in African American Popular Culture. U of Chicago P, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Murakawa, Naomi. The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America. Oxford UP, 2014.Google Scholar
Nilsson, Louise, et al. “Crime Fiction as World Literature.” Crime Fiction as World Literature, edited by Nilsson, et al. , Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 1–9.Google Scholar
Nishikawa, Kinohi. Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground. U of Chicago P, 2018.Google Scholar
Panek, Leroy Lad. The American Police Novel: A History. McFarland, 2003.Google Scholar
Pepper, Andrew. Unwilling Executioner: Crime Fiction and the State. Oxford UP, 2016.Google Scholar
Rabinowitz, Paula. American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street. Princeton UP, 2014.Google Scholar
Schoenfield, Heather. Building the Prison State: Race and the Politics of Mass Incarceration. U of Chicago P, 2018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schrader, Stuart. Badges without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing. U of California P, 2019.Google Scholar
Schryer, Stephen. Maximum Feasible Participation: American Literature and the War on Poverty. Stanford UP, 2018.Google Scholar
Siegel, Micol. Violence Work: State Power and the Limits of Police. Duke UP, 2018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Simon, Jonathan, et al. Introduction. After the War on Crime: Race, Democracy, and a New Reconstruction, edited by Frampton, Mary Louise et al. , New York UP, 2008, pp. 1–20.Google Scholar
Smith, Erin A. Hard-Boiled: Working Class Readers and Pulp Magazines. Temple UP, 2000.Google Scholar
Stallings, L. H. “‘Im Goin Pimp Whores!’: The Goines Factor and the Theory of a Hip-Hop Neo-Slave Narrative.” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 3, no. 3, Fall 2003, pp. 175–203.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tal, Kali. “That Just Kills Me: Black Militant Near-Future Fiction.” Social Text, vol. 20, no. 2, Summer 2002, pp. 65–91.Google Scholar
Thompson, Heather Ann. “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History.” The Journal of American History, vol. 97, no. 3, Dec. 2010, pp. 703–34.Google Scholar
Wacquant, Loïc. Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Duke UP, 2009.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wambaugh, Joseph. The New Centurions. 1970. Grand Central Publishing, 2008.Google Scholar
Wideman, John Edgar. The Lynchers. 1973. Lulu Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Williams, John A. Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light: A Novel of Some Probability. Northeastern UP, 1969.Google Scholar
Wilson, Christopher P. Cop Knowledge: Police Power and Cultural Narrative in Twentieth-Century America. U of Chicago P, 2000.Google Scholar
Wilson, Christopher P. Learning to Live with Crime: American Crime Narrative in the Neoconservative Turn. Ohio State UP, 2010.Google Scholar