Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

1.1.7 Conclusions
What made the detective magazines so popular were their heroic figures at the
centre of the action. In fact, “the hard-boiled cop or, especially, private detective was the
idealization of the lone individual, representing justice and decency, pitted against virulent
gangs, corrupt politicians, or other agencies who violated that sense of goodness with
which most readers identified” (Penzler 2007:xi).This can still be found in the noir
productions that were then adapted over the years from these hard-boiled stories but which
were made to serve often less heroic themes. Similarly to jazz, the hard-boiled private
detective remains a wholly American invention, and it was certainly created and given life
by the criminal and investigative freedom that the pulp fiction magazines indulged.
Although this kind of magazine contained a wide variety of genre fiction, the traditional
pulps greatly focused on detective novels and mystery stories.
The term today has somewhat lost its meaning, as short stories of this type have
changed into a different breed of creative writing, though undeniably pulp fiction has
contributed to the evolution of the hero popular fiction of today. However, back in the
thirties and forties pulp was a descriptive term which revealed the mass reading
preferences of the Americans at that time, their social concerns, and certain attitudes
towards political life too. Produced on poor quality paper, these magazines were aimed at
the lower social classes and were an alternative to more elitist publications. They managed
to satisfy the tastes of the lower working classes and immigrants, and to address their
desires and anxieties, especially during the years that followed the Depression era. In fact,
many people would see them as an escape from reality, as a form of evasion, where readers
were able to identify with protagonists who were also in flight from reality.
Considered as a fruitful source with many of the core ingredients that formed film
noir in Hollywood in the forties, hard-boiled novels were purchased by the studios due to
the increasing interest the public was showing for these kinds of book. They were also
choked with advertisements suggesting the commercial viability of such subject matters.
Their covers were brilliantly coloured (frequently with young women in peril or as object
of desire) marked by graphic and explicit sensationalism and a terse writing style, mainly
in the first-person, that emphasised action and adventure over introspection. In this way,
millions of copies of this new, uniquely American literature were sold every week.
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