Behind Black Mask: Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction

The fictional characters Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, quintessential lone wolves who earned their living in a violent world guided only by their individual moral codes, personify the genre known as "hard-boiled" detective fiction. Originating in the 1920s, this literary form developed with a distinctive voice and style, which was exemplified by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler in the stories they wrote for the magazine Black Mask and which has endured well into the 21st century.

Black Mask began publication in 1920, and although its fortunes rose and fell before it finally ceased publication in 1951, the magazine and its rivals (collectively known as the "pulps") changed the face of the detective story (a class of mystery story). Many critics believe the hard-boiled detective genre was born with the publication of "The Road Home" (by Dashiell Hammett, writing under the pseudonym Peter Collinson) and "The False Burton Combs" (by Carroll John Daly) in the November 1922 issue of Black Mask. The movement hit its stride the following year with the appearance of Daly's creations Terry Mack and Race Williams, who were considered to be the genre's first real hard-boiled detectives. In describing himself, Race Williams described the individuals who would dominate the genre for the next 20 years: "I'm what you might call the middle man," he says, "just a half-way house between the dicks and the crooks . . . but my conscience is clear; I never bumped off a guy who didn't need it."

In 1923 the magazine debuted one of Hammett's creations, the Continental Op, an unnamed detective specifically described by the writer as "hard boiled." An ex-detective himself, Hammett began writing in 1922. The following year 6 of his stories were published, 3 of them in Black Mask. In all, the magazine published over 50 Hammett pieces between 1923 and 1936, including four novel serializations. An author of over 80 short stories and five novels, Hammett possessed a terse writing style, and, through his creation of cynical characters and complex plotlines, he was able to bring a new energy to detective fiction, establishing a style other writers would seek to emulate.

The works of Hammett and his contemporaries reflected the life of the 1920s, a decade of prohibition, speakeasies, and bootleggers. Corruption seemed rampant, and gangsters were viewed as part villain, part hero. As the hard-boiled detective genre developed, it offered stories that captured the perceived reality of life during this period. Fiction appearing in Black Mask and other pulps featured tough-guy protagonists, loners who obeyed a private code of ethics and sought a small degree of justice in a less-than-perfect world. Stylistically the stories favored harsh realism and terse dialogue.

By 1930 Black Mask's circulation had risen to more than 100,000. In subsequent years, however, sales declined owing to the effects of the Great Depression, the introduction of rival magazines, and the desertion of many of the magazine's best writers, including Hammett, who left to devote his talents to the more lucrative fields of movie and radio writing. By 1935 sales had fallen to 60,000.

Although the Depression dealt a major blow to the magazine, it also gave it a new star: Raymond Chandler. After losing his job with an oil company, 50-year-old Chandler decided to become a writer. His first Black Mask story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot," appeared in December 1933, featuring a hero named Mallory, the precursor to Chandler's signature creation, Philip Marlowe, who debuted six years later in the novel The Big Sleep (1939). "Blackmailers Don't Shoot" shares the style that marked Black Mask fiction overall: wisecracks, one-liners, underworld lingo, and metaphors such as "a city where pretty faces are as common as runs in dollar stockings." Marlowe, like Hammett's Sam Spade introduced in The Maltese Falcon (1930), was a tough private eye who, nevertheless, lived by an inviolable code of honor.

While Black Mask and the pulps faded, the hard-boiled detective genre remained popular, albeit in a somewhat altered form. One star practitioner was Mickey Spillane, who began writing for the pulps in the 1930s and continued to write into the 21st century. Spillane's creation, Mike Hammer, is unquestionably a representative of the "hard-boiled" detective school. Introduced in the 1947 novel I, the Jury, Hammer was still plying his trade in Black Alley, published in 1996. Although his character echoes those of previous writers, Spillane's style differs from that of his predecessors in its use of scenes containing graphic sex and sadism.

The genre's first female practitioner is said by some to be Marcia Muller, whose protagonist, Sharon McCone, appeared in 1977 in Edwin of the Iron Shoes. The debate over the genre's survival continues, with some critics believing that writers such as James Ellroy, Joseph Wambaugh, Lawrence Block, Robert B. Parker, and Sue Grafton are heirs to the Black Mask legacy, and others arguing that hard-boiled detectives have disappeared as sensibilities have changed and machismo has gone out of fashion. Whether today's writers fit the mold is a matter of conjecture, but on late-night television, the attraction of Humphrey Bogart's portrayal of Philip Marlowe remains as potent, as masculine, as hard-boiled a tribute to the genre as one could wish.

Lee Bontecou: An Artist Lost and Found

In the 1960s Lee Bontecou was one of the brightest stars of the American art world. Her assemblages-- reliefs constructed of canvas and various other materials stretched over welded steel frames and held together with wire--brought a new vitality to American sculpture. Her usage of everyday materials and resources that otherwise would have been considered junk shared a sensibility with the contemporary Italian movement known as arte povera ("poor art"), but the roughness and brutality of her somber forms and colors seemed rooted in the aggressive power and confidence of American abstract expressionism. In the years since, Bontecou has followed a course very different from that of the typical artist, and therefore her first major retrospective exhibition (Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective), which opened in October 2003 at the University of California's Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, was entirely different in nature from the usual retrospective.

After 1971 Bontecou ceased showing new work, and, although her sculptures of the 1960s continued to be widely respected, she all but disappeared as a vital presence in the contemporary art world. Her withdrawal, in fact, became something of a modern legend. Why would an artist of such extraordinary talent, at the peak of her career, leave it all behind? More puzzling still was the widely held assumption that she had quit working altogether. Had she lost her inspiration? Or had the most prominent female artist to have created work that could compete on equal terms with that of the leading male artists of her generation simply retreated into motherhood and a quiet family life?

The Hammer exhibition, along with Bontecou's sudden willingness to speak with a few curators and journalists, finally provided some insight into some of these questions. Examining the statements the artist has made, there appears to be no simple answer as to why she kept such a low profile for so long. Never one to socialize heavily with other artists, Bontecou had little interest in the goings on of the art world even in the 1960s, and the endemic competitiveness and quest for fame and fortune were simply not among her priorities. Moreover, she felt no affinity with either pop art or minimalism, the movements dominating American art in her heyday. There is no clearer expression of her withdrawal than what the artist herself told Calvin Tomkins, a columnist for The New Yorker, in 2003: "I needed a rest. I wanted to explore and expand. I just didn't want to have to make things, and finish things, and show them every two years."

Although Bontecou may have turned her back on the art world, we now know that she most decidedly did not turn her back on art itself. For 20 years, from 1971 until 1991, she taught in the art department at Brooklyn College, practically in the backyard of the New York City gallery scene. This revelation seems to have caught most of the art world totally by surprise. Most important, she has worked continuously on her drawings and sculptures and is still active today. Her isolation, and the self-imposed lack of pressure to exhibit, apparently freed her to develop her work in her own way, under her own rules, to suit herself alone.

As the word retrospective implies, it is a chance to "look back" over the artist's career, and in general parlance it has come to mean a chance to look back over and reevaluate that with which we are already somewhat familiar. Lee Bontecou's retrospective, in contrast, gave the world its very first glimpse of the work of 30 years. Rather than offering the opportunity to review her oeuvre, this exhibition gave us the rare chance to discover it whole. After a long gestation period in near total isolation, we were suddenly allowed to absorb a large body of work in its entirety, all at once.

And what exactly has this extraordinary artist been doing for over 30 years? Bontecou still produces both drawings and sculptures, and, as before, the sculptures develop separately from the drawings. (Now some of the sculptures are suspended from the ceiling rather than projecting from the walls.) The anthropomorphic forms, which began appearing in her work in the late 1960s, are still there; but in contrast to the flowers and fish of the earlier work, they appear now, as often as not, in the form of floating eyeballs or winglike shapes. The new sculptures are still obsessive in their detail, yet their elements are lighter, more colorful, and certainly less menacing than the gaping black voids that characterized her early reliefs. Bontecou does not insist on a dogmatic interpretation of any of her work; she leaves the viewer to take from it what he or she finds there, with little overt guidance.

Minor Marriage: The Case against Maternal Instinct

The idea of a human maternal instinct--a woman's innate disposition to care for children, particularly her own--has been the subject of great debate among social psychologists, anthropologists, and sociobiologists alike, but an unusual social practice from northern Taiwan may have done a great deal to dispel conventional notions that this instinct is in fact inherent in humans. Dubbed "minor marriage," this practice was documented to have occurred between 1905 and 1945 by the Stanford University anthropologist Arthur Wolf and involved Taiwanese mothers trading away their daughters to other families in a manner that directly contradicts the precepts of the instinctual mother-child bond.

A mother's giving her children away (or even practicing infanticide) is not in and of itself a rare event, as child adoption indicates. Adoption that occurs well after the point that a bond theoretically forms between the child and its birth mother also is a well-documented phenomenon. In most cases, however, child adoption is the result of necessity, with the outcome of the adoption typically intended to benefit the child; the adopting parent(s) are ideally selected based on their ability to offer better child care than the birth parent(s).

The Taiwanese practice of minor marriage is unusual in that it was designed to benefit the birth mother and her household, not the child. (The same, of course, may be said of infanticide.) Mothers gave up their daughters even in cases where the birth parents were more than capable of providing for their children. In terms of the strict transaction, the mother gave away her daughter, who was viewed as an economic liability, and adopted an intended daughter-in-law, who was seen as an investment in the future. The adopted girl was immediately betrothed to the adopting mother's son, and the couple would be formally married shortly after both children reached puberty; thus the term minor marriage.

While the majority of these adoptions took place before the girls reached their first birthday, the birth mothers nonetheless raised their daughters through the early stages of infancy, when maternal instinct is presumed by its proponents to create a powerful mother-child bond. However, this theoretical attachment, for which there is substantial psychological and sociological evidence, did little to deter Taiwanese mothers from exchanging their infant daughters.

The stated motivations for the practice were varied, but none seemed to include ensuring a benefit for the female children involved. By giving away their daughters at an early age, Taiwanese households avoided having to pay large dowries when it came time for the young girls to marry. Moreover, by raising their own future daughters-in-law, mothers could ensure that their sons would receive "suitable" wives and that the traditions of the household would be maintained. These traditions included caring for the elders of the family, which meant that the adopting mothers were in many ways planning for their own retirement by ensuring that their future daughters-in-law would be motivated to care for their adopted parents in their old age. Again, the practice of minor marriage was designed to benefit the adopting mother, not the adopted child, by manipulating kinship ties.

We are thus confronted with several questions. Was the Taiwanese minor marriage practice (which has since died out) a mere anomaly, or does it cast real doubt on the idea of an "inherent" maternal instinct that creates a mother-child bond? Is maternal instinct genetic or merely a learned behavior that can be reshaped by a prevailing cultural practice, such as minor marriage? If maternal instinct is genetic, are there populations where the trait is less prevalent, such as those observed by Wolf in northern Taiwan? Regardless of whether it is cultural or genetic, is maternal instinct a beneficial trait, which would explain why the practice of minor marriage "failed" and died out? Although Wolf's research has raised many questions, one fact has been made crystal clear: maternal instinct is not inescapable, but exceptions to it (or what may look like exceptions) are rare. For the time being, however, the debate over "nature or nurture" (genetics versus culture) continues.