Gestures of Legitimisation: The Scholarly Treatment of Dashiell Hammett until 1980

This essay explores a rhetorical trend in early scholarship of Dashiell Hammett’s fiction: moments where scholars legitimise both Dashiell Hammett’s literature and the scholarly study of his work. For decades, scholars tried to reason with Hammett and detective fiction, as if experimenting with different ways to approach the genre and its authors. Based on this rhetorical analysis, this essay argues that the study of detective fiction is something chimerical rather than canonical. Detective fiction explores issues common to literary scholarship, but nevertheless exists as something distinct and unique, operating differently and therefore requiring analytical approaches distinct from more traditional approaches, even if they amalgamate some of their principles and techniques. This raises questions about whether the scholarly study of detective fiction should be assimilated into other avenues of literary scholarship, or should it remain distinct, using the same tools and methods to study something others do not.