Wasteland: pastiche, genre and the influence of Henry James and Ernest Hemingway on hard-boiled detective fiction

Wasteland consists of my historical novel, Wasteland, and an analysis of Henry James’s The American (1877), Ernest Hemingway's Sun Also Rises (1926), and hard-boiled fiction as a pastiche. 

The novel, set in 1920s Edinburgh, is a hard-boiled pastiche that adapts the genre’s formula using first-person narration and the loner-male protagonist to reexamine the tough-guy hero through the lens of war trauma while exploring post-First World War anxieties of Lithuanians in Scotland. Wasteland uses the schism between rich and poor, citizens and immigrants, and estranged sons and fathers as its dramatic context, while its use of history and genre aims to demonstrate that hard-boiled fiction remains a relevant and replenishing formula. 

The analysis begins with a contextualisation of why I wrote a hard-boiled novel set in 1920s Edinburgh before offering a detailed overview of hard-boiled fiction–from its inception in Black Mask magazine to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and how post-Chandler it evolved to encompass psychology, feminism, the black experience and homosexuality etc. Next, I explore how Henry James’s The American (1877) depicts examples of hard-boiled attitudes and tropes in early Modernist literature, ideas developed further in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) as expressions of post-war anxiety and disillusion, focusing particularly on the notion of damaged masculinity and arguing that we can interpret Hemingway’s Lady Brett as a precursor of the femme-fatale archetype. I contrast the novels with examples from Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1929) and Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939). Lastly, I discuss hard-boiled fiction as a pastiche. The analysis examines Tzvetan Todorov’s “The Typology of Detective Fiction” (1977) in contrast with Fredric Jameson's views that pastiche is a “blank parody”. I assert that John Barth's view of postmodern writing as a literature of replenishment represents an alternative way of understanding pastiche. The commentary proposes that hard-boiled fiction’s dexterity enables the form to replenish itself, therefore remaining relevant today.