When Doyle wrote A Study in Scarlet, such social threats were far away. The bigger threats were more protecting Britain from outside influences and maintaining an empire. A Study in Scarlet was, after all, about villains from the western United States coming to London where they would face justice. This is not an uncommon trait in Holmes stories: threats come from afar, either foreign individuals or Britains corrupted by what is foreign. For Doyle and Imperial Britain, life was great because it had remained steady for decades and centuries. What need was there for concern? It's little wonder that Holmes complained of Watson romanticizing their adventures.
And then came World War I. The Great War brought conflict and devastation to Europe, and left an artistic reevaluation in its wake. Pretty much every aspect of the arts underwent some kind of change, and while each one was certainly different, the common trend was experimentation. It was as if there had been a constant undercurrent that the arts were good and beneficial, and they made people and the world better. And yet, if so, how could the world come to such strife? Suddenly, the optimism and social progression that fueled authors like Doyle and Dickens were gone. Even Jane Austen (a century earlier) wrote during a time of war, but it was distant, especially to the gentry Austen wrote about. It's almost easy to read Persuasion and forget why Frederick Wentworth had money when he didn't years before, and Pride and Prejudice features soldiers but only uses the word “War” once to describe the War Office, and not the Napoleonic Wars.
World War I made the world a much smaller, harsher place.
In literature, the post-war period was dominated by “modernism,” a period of experimentation and more interest on the psychologies of individuals as they dealt with the world around them: literature turned inward, on who someone is and why they think as they do. Even though modernism's roots predate the war, this conflict shaped the lives and minds of those who lived through and fought in it, culminating in the “lost generation”: a post war generation trying to come to terms with the war, and whatever reprieve was made by the Roaring Twenties was on its way out with the Stock Market crash of 1929. The Maltese Falcon was published around that time, with, I wonder, some of the same cynicism that undercuts The Great Gatsby: an understanding that the current lifestyle of wealth and extravagance was, like Gatsby, problematic and doomed.
In a world that had come back from a serious war and on the precipice of financial ruin, artists were trying to make sense of it, to figure out how they should act, respond, and understand the world. From this time, we gained such great authors as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce, who showed the Imperial stability Doyle enjoyed was gone, and modernism tried to reconcile an unstable world.
Where then does Dashiell Hammett and the authors of hard boiled detective fiction fit into this?
As far as I can tell, Hammett's never been classified as a modernist writer or a representative of the lost generation. He wrote pulp fiction: not the experimental works of Joyce or the human analyses of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, and much of Hammett’s oeuvre came after many major modernist works were published. I'm not trying to reclaim him or elevate him to their levels, but that doesn't mean his work and the crime fiction authors who would populate the pulp fiction shelves didn't come out of this same era of international conflict and personal strife. Just like the modernists, these authors give us other ways to look at the responses to the world that had to deal with a mass-scale human conflict, the stock market crash, and social issues that couldn’t be ignored.
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