Gangsters in Hats

Richard Mayne

• Essays on Detective Fiction edited by Bernard Benstock
  Macmillan, 218 pp, £20.00, February 1984, ISBN 0 333 32195 2
• Dashiell Hammett: A Life at the Edge by William Nolan
  Arthur Barker, 276 pp, £9.95, September 1983, ISBN 0 213 16886 3
• The Life of Dashiell Hammett by Diane Johnson
  Chatto, 344 pp, £12.95, January 1984, ISBN 0 7011 2766 X
• Hellman in Hollywood by Bernard Dick
  Associated University Presses, 183 pp, £14.95, September 1983, ISBN 0 8386 3140 1

One minor pleasure of growing up is being allowed to buy sweets ad lib. The same applies to thrillers and detective stories. But there’s a difference. Few dieticians or gourmets would recommend or gravely evaluate competing brands of candy: yet ‘popular culture’ – including comic strips, trash films, junk videos, and rock music – is reviewed and criticised nowadays alongside opera, chamber music, paintings, novels, poems and plays. The main reason is probably media hype. A second is nostalgic self-indulgence – finding pretexts not to put away childish things. A third, perhaps, is semantic slippage, eliding the difference between ‘a culture’, in the anthropological sense, and ‘culture’ tout court. When millions enjoy something, the interest it arouses need not be aesthetic. George Orwell saw propaganda in boys’ weeklies and ‘the worm’s-eye view of life’ in seaside postcards. He was hardly concerned with Frank Richards as a novelist or (despite his essay’s title) the art of Donald McGill.