Benjamin A. Railton's Blog

[Forty years agothis weekend, Nintendo released itsfirst game system, and video gaming and American culture changed significantly.So this week I’ll blog about a handful of other games that likewise changedthings, leading up to a weekend post on Nintendo!]

On threetakeaways from the pioneering educational game.

I used“pioneering” there not just for the Dad Joke-worthy pun (although duh), butalso because it highlights the most obvious and important historical issue withThe Oregon Trail, one Iwrote about in this blogpost: the absence of Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and reallyany ethnic American communities from its vision of the West. I didn’t noticethat absence at all as a kid enthralled by the game, and that’s precisely thepoint: Oregon Trail played intostereotypical visions of American pioneers, and indeed like allpopular art that traffics in stereotypes it also amplified and furtherentrenched those limiting images. I’m not suggesting that the game should havefocused centrally on Native American communities, nor that a children’s videogame had to include graphic depictions of war; every game has the right tochoose its own subject and to present it in a way that’s appropriate for itsaudience. But a game set in the mid-19th century American West needsat least to include the communities and cultures that are part of that world,and on that question Oregon Trailcame up very short.

With thatmost important thing said, there are also other historical lessons we can learnfrom what Oregon Trail’s designersdid choose to include. Another one that would be easy to miss (and that I’lladmit I hadn’t thought about at all until brainstorming topics for this post)is the deeply solitary nature of the Trail as the game portrays it. I didn’thave a chance to play the game while researching this post, but as I rememberit at least the player really doesn’t see any other wagons or people betweenleaving Independence,Missouri and arriving in Oregon. Perhaps players do encounter waystationsfor supplies or the like along the way, but I’m thinking here about othertravelers, about the idea of wagontrains (which as I understand it were a typical way for families to traversethe Trail). I understand the game’s goal of forcing players to deal withall the myriad challenges themselves, rather than offering them the possibilityof relying upon other families for aid—but that choice does seem to reinforceanother stereotypical American image, that of “ruggedindividuals” (rather than what to my mind is a far more shared historicalexperience, of communal survival).

I don’twant to emphasize only frustrations with the game’s portrayal of its historicalsubjects, though. After all, there are reasons why Oregon Trail was one of the most successful video games of its era,and indeed why it remains successful today, as it’s one of the only games frommy childhood that my sons have also heard of and played. And one of the thingsI think Oregon Trail does best iscapture the profoundly fraught and contingent nature of life (and death) in itsmid-19th century moment. The most famous such element is theconstant threat of illness, especially that damndysentery. But while some such negative outcomes (like getting one of thosediseases) were mostly due to chance and bad luck, many others emphasizedcontingency—how one bad decision could produce disastrous and even fataloutcomes, not only immediately (ie, if you choose to ford a river that’s toodeep or wild) but also far down the road (ie, if you purchase the wrongsupplies and end up stuck or dead hundreds of miles later). Given hindsight,the past can sometimes feel inevitable or predetermined—but it was of coursejust as contingent and unfolding as our present and future, and in its specificbut significant way Oregon Trail highlightedthose realities quite potently.

NextGameStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Video games, past or present, you’d analyze?

[Forty years agothis weekend, Nintendo released itsfirst game system, and video gaming and American culture changed significantly.So this week I’ll blog about a handful of other games that likewise changedthings, leading up to a weekend post on Nintendo!]

On three of themany ways Namco’s smash 1980 launch helped changedthe game(s).

1)     Character: Arcade and video games had certainlydiversified in the decade or so since the release of yesterday’s subject Pong, with the biggest hits in the yearsbefore Pac Man arrived space shooterslike Space Invadersand Asteroids.But one thing that no game had quite featured until the little yellow dude wasa recognizable and marketablemain character, one who could become the mascot and (literal) face of thegame and franchise. That focus allowed the game to include another innovation: cutscenes in between levels,brief mini-movies featuring that main character in wacky adventures. It allowedfor hugely successful sequels like 1981’s Ms. Pac-Manthat would not have been possible without a distinct character at the heart ofthe franchise. And it paved the way for many of the most popular video gamesand franchises of all time: the Mario Brothers, Sonic the Hedgehog, Kirby, theAngry Birds, and more.

2)     Artificial Intelligence: One of the game’s vitalcoding innovations was that the enemies—the four cute but deadly “ghosts” (Blinky,Inky, Pinky, and Clyde, natch) who pursue Pac-Man as he tries to eat all thosedelicious dots and fruits—were programmedwith artificial intelligence and could respond to the player’s moves. Idon’t imagine it was the most sophisticated such AI—ExMachina this wasn’t, that is—but nonetheless, even the idea that everytime you played Pac-Man, you couldhave an entirely different experience depending on your own choices and whateffects they had on the ghosts’ behaviors was a profoundly new element to videogaming. I talked in Monday’s post about the flexible and interactive qualitiesto video games; of course that was somewhat true even with the Pong’s of the world, but addingartificial intelligence in this way (and at any level of complexity) reallybegan to illustrate the possibilities for that kind of player-gameinteractivity.

3)     Winnability: That artificial intelligence andits promises of constantly evolving gameplay certainly contribute to a sense ofPac-Man as a particularly replayablearcade and video game, one that grossed over $1billion in quarters (!) in its first year of release. But another importantelement was Pac-Man’s seeming yetelusive sense of winnabililty; as Atari’sChris Crawford put it in an 1982 interview with Byte magazine, “An important trait of any game is the illusion ofwinnability ... The most successful game in this respect is Pac-Man, which appears winnable to mostplayers, yet is never quite winnable.” Indeed, Pac-Man was designedto have no final level, although apparently if a player beats 255consecutive levels, a bizarrely split-screen and supposedly unbeatable 256thfinal level does appear. Even that strange, glitch-like detail, however,would only add to that sense of potential yet also ephemeral winnability,making playing Pac-Man again andagain that much more appealing. Which, for nearly forty years now, is just whatgamers have done.

NextGameStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Video games, past or present, you’d analyze?

[Forty years agothis weekend, Nintendo released itsfirst game system, and video gaming and American culture changed significantly.So this week I’ll blog about a handful of other games that likewise changedthings, leading up to a weekend post on Nintendo!]

On twolesser-known and telling moments in the history of the first blockbuster arcadegame.

While I’m surevideo game historians would point to manymoments and games as possible origin points for the genre, some as thathyperlinked timeline indicates from as early as the 1940s, there’s no doubtthat high on any such list would be Atari’s 1972 arcade release Pong.Debuting in late November 1972, Pongwould quickly become a national and worldwide phenomenon, helping establish theviability of video game arcadesin commercial spaces (and then eventually in spaces all their own),contributing (if in a complex way on which more in a moment) to the successfullaunch of the first home gaming system (theMagnavox Odyssey), spawning numerous sequels andcopycat games, and generally changing the landscape of not only gaming andtechnology, but also entertainment, social spaces and interactions, andchildhood. If that seems like an awful lot to attribute to one video game,well, that was the remarkable power of those two white paddles and thatfrustratingly bouncy little white ball. Indeed, I would say that only StarWars measures up to Pong whenit comes to 1970s popular culture landmarks that have influenced the nexthalf-century of American and human life.

That overallinfluence is pretty well-known, but in researching this post I learned about acouple of a lesser-known and equally telling moments in Pong’s early history. For one thing, the game was the subject of a1974 lawsuitfrom Magnavox (and its parent company Sanders Associates). In May 1972Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell had attended a Magnavox event and seen ademonstration of the company’sown table tennis game, and he himself later admitted that seeing the gameprompted him to ask his own employee, engineer Allan Alcorn,to make a table tennis game for Atari; as Bushnell put it, “The fact is that Iabsolutely did see the Odyssey game and I didn't think it was very clever.” Despiteprotesting innocence from any patent infringement, Bushnell and Atari decidedto settle out of court with Magnavox, with the caseconcluding in June 1976. I can’t really weigh in on the merits of thelawsuit; the two games do look pretty similar to me, but I suppose all tabletennis games, especially in that very early era of game design, would likelyseem similar. What I can say, however, is that the subsequent history of videogames has been defined again and again bycompeting games and systems, a trend very much foreshadowed by Pong’scontroversial relationship to Magnavox table tennis.

The othertelling moment is far less weighty than a lawsuit, but just as sociallysignificant I’d say. In describing why and how Pong became such an arcade hit, Bushnellwould later note, “It was very common to have a girl with a quarter in handpull a guy off a bar stool and say, 'I'd like to play Pong and there'snobody to play.' It was a way you could play games, you were sitting shoulderto shoulder, you could talk, you could laugh, you could challenge each other... As you became better friends, you could put down your beer and hug. Youcould put your arm around the person. You could play left-handed if you sodesired. In fact, there are a lot of people who have come up to me over theyears and said, 'I met my wife playing Pong,' and that's kind of a nicething to have achieved.” This is of course another important side to theflexible and interactive qualities of video games that I highlighted inyesterday’s post—while of course many games can be played solo (not Pong, though, at least not in its firstarcade iteration—it was two-player only), there is a fundamentally socialelement to gaming, and perhaps especially to arcade gaming. The art is oftencreated, that is, through a communal experience, and one that, as Bushnell’squote illustrates, links to other communal experiences like socialinteractions, friendship, and romantic relationships. All part of what Pong helped initiate as well!

NextGameStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Video games, past or present, you’d analyze?

[Thisweekend marks the 100th birthday of the great crime novelist Elmore Leonard. So thisweek I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of phenomenal crime and mystery writers,leading up this weekend post on Elmore himself!]

One of thehighest cultural compliments an author can receive is for their works to beadapted for other media, and very few American writers have been adapted asfrequently as Elmore Leonard. So here are LeonardStudying and AmericanStudies takeawaysfrom five such adaptations for film and TV:

1)     3:10 to Yuma (1957): BeforeLeonard settled into his groove as a writer of contemporary crime fiction, hestarted (as so many 20th century genre writers did) with Westerns.One of his most successful early short stories was “Three-Tento Yuma” (1953), which was also one of his first works to be adapted as afilm. It’s an excellent story that was made into a strong film, as is also thecase with the 2007 remake; but I think the broader AmericanStudies point is justhow ubiquitous Westernswere in mid-century, to the point that even one of our best contemporarycrime writers began with that more historical genre.

2)     The Big Bounce (1969): Leonard’sfirst contemporary crime novel was 1969’s TheBig Bounce, and it was enough of a smash that it was adapted into afilm in the same year. Unfortunately, the adaptation was, let’s say, lesssuccessful—indeed, in 2009Leonard called it “the second-worst movie ever made,” with the first beingthe 2004 remake! Rather than further bury those two films, I’ll just note howunique and strongly developed Leonard’s storytelling and style were at thisstill-early point, which is evidenced both by the immediate adaptation and bythe difficulty of adapting him well.

3)     Get Shorty (1995): Leonardpublished 22 novels in the 21 years between The Big Bounce and GetShorty (1990), and a number of them were likewise adapted. But I think GetShorty represents a significant turning point in his career, as it’s both acrime novel and a novel about Hollywood, one clearly based on Leonard’s owncomplicated and often frustrating experiences with film adaptations of hisworks and that industry overall (ironically enough, Get Shorty is one ofthe more successful such adaptations). Few of our novelists have careers bothlong and successful enough where they can arrive at such a meta-point, and it’sfascinating to trace Leonard’s journey through that lens.

4)     Touch (1997): I’dsay those three stages (Westerns, crime novels, and meta-fiction) reflect themost prominent beats in Leonard’s career arc overall. But of course anyone asprolific as Leonard has of course also ventured into other territory, and oneof the more interesting examples is Touch(1987), a black comic thriller that satires evangelicals, the mass media, and thecommercialization of religion in late 20th century America. Fromwhat I can tell, the 1997 film adaptation doesn’t work as either comedy,thriller, or satire—but the fact that this off-brand Leonard novel stillgarnered an adaptation reflects just how much the man could do no wrong.

5)     Justified(2010-2015, 2023): I said most of what I’d want to say about this fabulous TVshow, an adaptation of Leonard’snovels and stories about U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (especially “Fire inthe Hole”), in that hyperlinked weeklong series. (I couldn’t get into the2023 reboot, based on Leonard’s non-Givens-related 1980novel City Primeval.) I’ll just add this: Timothy Olyphant’s RaylanGivens and Walton Goggins’ Boyd Crowder are two of the greatest characters everput on the small screen, and (with all due respect to those two great actorsand everyone involved with the show) that too is a testament to Elmore Leonard’sstunning talents.

Nextseries starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Crime or mystery novelists you’d share?

[Thiscoming weekend marks the 100th birthday of the great crime novelist Elmore Leonard. Sothis week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of phenomenal crime and mystery writers,leading up a weekend post on Elmore himself!]

On the multiple layers of revelations built into the best mystery fiction(major SPOILER ALERT for those who haven’t read Scott Turow’s novel or seen theHarrison Ford film or the Jake Gyllenhaal TV series,and might at some point).

Even before this week’s series, I’ve blogged frequently enough about mystery fiction (and films) to illustratejust how seriously I take the genre as art well worth our analytical time.There are lots of reasons why, but a prominent one would have to be just howmuch the genre, by its very nature, can teach us about society. That is, thedetective’s job, or at least a necessary corollary to his or her job, is tolearn about the world around him or her, whether specific (as in AgathaChristie’s town of St. Mary Mead or Ross MacDonald’s California) or broad (as in the mysteries of human nature with which Sherlock Holmes seems so frequently to grapple). And while it’s notimpossible for those deductive revelations to include inspiring lessons (aboutlove or courage in the face of threats, for example), the genre’s naturelikewise means that most of the time the lessons entail literal falls frominnocence, recognitions of the guilt not only in those who commit crimes but(much of the time) in the world as a whole.

I know of few mystery novels that better exemplify those multi-layered,sobering revelations about the world than Scott Turow’s legal thriller Presumed Innocent (1987). Turow’s first-person narrator, prosecutor RustySabich, stands accused of killing the woman with whom he was having anextra-marital affair; the evidence against Rusty is overwhelming, and althoughhe is eventually acquitted, the cause is simply another level of guilt: Rustyand his lawyer discover that the case’s judge has been taking bribes, and usethe information as leverage to force an acquittal. Moreover, virtually everyother character in the novel is guilty of something significant as well; thecop who first investigates the case, for example, is a longtime friend ofRusty’s and illegally disposes of evidence in an (unsuccessful) attempt toshield Rusty from suspicion. Rusty’s story and world are so choked with guilt,so driven by it from start to finish, in fact, that the title begins to feelless like a legal concept and more like a sardonic social commentary.

Moreover (double SPOILER ALERT for this paragraph!), the novel’s finalrevelation adds two intimate and even more compelling falls from innocence tothe mix. In the closing pages, Rusty discovers evidence that makes clear thatthe murderer was his wife, who had uncovered the affair, confronted and killedthe mistress, and then tried to frame Rusty for the crime instead (going so faras to plant his semen at the scene of the crime). Even on its own terms, thisfall from innocence, connected as it is to the woman with whom he has spent hislife and has a family, is the novel’s most shocking and damning. But Rustychooses not to turn his wife in, and the reason is his recognition of thestory’s fundamental layer of guilt, its original sin, the fall from innocencethat started it all: his affair. Which is to say, the book’s ultimaterevelation is that its first-person narrator, its voice and perspective, and(as in almost any first-person book) its most intimate connection to itsaudience, is the most guilty party of all.

Specialpost this weekend,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Crime or mystery stories or writers you’d share?

[Thiscoming weekend marks the 100th birthday of the great crime novelist Elmore Leonard. Sothis week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of phenomenal crime and mystery writers,leading up a weekend post on Elmore himself!]

[NB. Thisis a post that originally appeared a few years back, and since then French haspublished a trio of standalonemysteries that are justas excellent as her Murder Squad books, just FYI!]

On twoways to AmericanStudy the talented and popular Irish mystery novelist.

Although Tana French was apparently born in Vermont (afact I only learned while researching this post, for the record) and retainsher American citizenship (ditto), I’m not going to pretend that her series ofsix (to date) bestselling mystery novels set in and around her longtime homecity of Dublin isn’t deeply and crucially Irish. As virtually every post inthis week’s series has reflected, mystery novels are almost always as muchabout their settings as their plots: Ross MacDonald’s Southern California, TonyHillerman’s Southwest, and Attica Locke’s Houston are all central and crucialpresences in their mysteries (as of course are Dupin’s Paris, Miss Marple’s St.Mary Mead, and many more). Moreover, one of Tana French’s most important andingenious formal choices—to rotate the first-person narration of her booksbetween different detectives in Dublin’s Murder Squad, introducing suchdetectives in earlier books and then shifting the narration to them in laterones—has allowed her novels to trace the distinct Irish backgrounds andsituations, experiences and heritages, lives and identities, of her sixdetective-narrators just as fully as those of her murder victims and theirworlds. I’m no IrishStudier (obviously), but I’d be hard-pressed to imagine thatany writer has captured 21st century Ireland with more breadth anddepth than has French in her stunning series.

YetFrench’s novels can and do still speak to us AmericanStudiers, and here I’llhighlight one thematic and one formal such transatlantic connection. Each ofthe six novels has dealt with different central themes; while all of them couldbe productively linked to American contexts, I would argue that that’sparticularly the case with her best novel to date, Broken Harbour (2012).Without spoiling anything, I’ll say that the crimes and mysteries of Broken Harbour (including thoseinvolving the detective-narrator as well, as always with French) unfold in afamily, home, and community economically and psychologically devastated by the mortgageand financial crises of 2008. One of French’s greatest skills is herability to take such social and cultural issues and connect them to universalhuman questions and themes, and Brokenlinks that post-2008 historical moment to a layered and powerful examination ofboth the ideals and the limits (and of course the dangers) of home and family.I would link all those aspects of French’s amazing novel to a parallel but moredistinctly American text, Karl TaroGreenfeld’s psychological and horror thriller short story “Horned Men” (2012).[Greenfeld’s 2015 novelThe Subprimes seems tomine the same vein, but I haven’t had a chance to read that yet.] On their own,but even more as a pairing, French’s and Greenfeld’s stories present and plumbthe very human horrors in these recent histories.

French’sformal use of the rotating first-person narrators can also be interestinglyconnected to American contexts and mysteries. As I wrote in this poston Lethem and O’Brien, first-person narration is always a trickyelement of mystery fiction, and French’s novels largely sidestep the questionsI raised in that post; I don’t believe we’re supposed to see these narrators aswriting their stories, but they’re clearly remembering them from someunspecified future point (they consistently, purposefully use foreshadowing,for example). But what I’m particularly interested in is the way that Frenchuses her first-person narrations to explore the personal and psychologicalsides to these police detectives. As always, feel free to correct me, dearreaders, but my sense of mystery novels is that they tend more often to presentpolice protagonists with third-person narration (as does Hillerman), and otherprotagonists (whether private detectives like Lew Archer or sidekicks likeDr.Watson) with first-person narration. If that is indeed the case, it wouldseem to me that it might relate to our sense of police officers as publicfigures, ones whose roles are less tied to their private or personal identitiesthan might be those of private detectives or others. Whereas French’s narratorsand novels make clear that the lines between private and public, personal andprofessional, are as blurry and ambiguous for police detectives as they are forall of us.

Last crimefiction tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Crime or mystery novelists you’d share?

[Thiscoming weekend marks the 100th birthday of the great crime novelist Elmore Leonard. Sothis week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of phenomenal crime and mystery writers,leading up a weekend post on Elmore himself!]

This isgoing to be one of my link-tastic posts, as I’ve already written about thegreat Attica Locke many times in this space but had to include her in this week’sseries as well. So check out:

Thispost on why her first two mystery novels grabbed me like they did;

Thispost featuring her 2017 novel Bluebird, Bluebird;

Thispost on Locke as a worthy successor to the great Walter Mosley;

And thispost on her 2019 novel Heaven, My Home.

I haven’thad a chance yet to check out Locke’s latest book GuideMe Home (2024), the third novel in her Highway 59 series about TexasRanger Darren Mathews. But I hope all those prior posts reflect just how highlyI think of this contemporary crime novelist, who also happens to be one of ourmost thoughtful and talented 21st writers.

Next crimefiction tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Crime or mystery novelists you’d share?

[Thiscoming weekend marks the 100th birthday of the great crime novelist Elmore Leonard. Sothis week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of phenomenal crime and mystery writers,leading up a weekend post on Elmore himself!]

On a great mystery series that captures the lure of the Southwest, then andnow.

There were a lot of reasons why Colorado’s Mesa VerdeNational Park stood out to me amongthe many amazing stops on my family’s 1990 trip to visit Southwestern U.S. NationalParks. Exploring thousand year old cliff dwellings, hiking out to the site of long-preserved petroglyphs, surprising alone coyote at a sunset ruin—these are the kinds of experiences that willhit a 13 year old AmericanStudier in a particular way. But perhaps the mostalluring aspect of Mesa Verde is its central mystery: the question of why the Anasazi people abruptly abandoned their cliffdwellings less than a century intotheir time there, and what happened to them after their departure. Archaeologists and historians have a variety of theories, but to some degree the Anasazi’s fate will alwaysremain a mystery—and will thus keep young AmericanStudiers (and all the rest ofus) coming back to Mesa Verde.

Even without an event as striking as the Anasazi’s departure, the dominantfeatures of the Southwest’s human landscape—villages atop isolated mesas, dwellings inthe sides of gaping canyons, petroglyphs carved in the rock and sand—lendthemselves nicely to the mysteriously inclined. No one capitalized on thatelement more fully, nor more effectively, than Tony Hillerman, the University of New Mexico journalism professor whowrote (among his more than 30 total books) a series of 18 phenomenal mysteriesfocused on Navajo policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee (now also two of the three main characters in theexcellent TV seriesDark Winds). I may be misremembering for dramatic effect, but I’mpretty sure I was reading one of the best novels in the series, A Thief of Time (1988), during that family National Park vacation—and I know that I won’tever think of New Mexico’s canyons and ruins without thinking of how Hillermancaptures them in the hugely atmospheric, spooky, and pitch-perfect opening tothat novel.

Hillerman and his Navajo mysteries (as they’re usually collectively known)also interestingly complement another Southwestern writer about whom I’vewritten in this space: Mary Hunter Austin. An Oklahoma native and decorated World War II veteran, Hillerman moved toNew Mexico for his UNM job and, like Austin, found himself more and more deeplyinterested in and attached to the region and its histories, cultures, andcommunities. (As he chronicles in his wonderful memoir.) While I can’t say for sure how the Navajo felt aboutHillerman’s books, from everything I have seen they recognized, as I believe would any reader, that Hillerman treated hisfocal cultures and communities with the same abiding respect and admiration hedid his protagonist policemen and the landscapes they patrolled. Perhaps theone thing that links the many different Southwestern authors and artists about whom I’ve blogged over the years is how much they found themselves drawn to the Southwest—to its places, toits histories, and, certainly, to its very American stories.

Next crimefiction tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Crime or mystery novelists you’d share?

[Thiscoming weekend marks the 100th birthday of the great crime novelist Elmore Leonard. Sothis week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of phenomenal crime and mystery writers,leading up a weekend post on Elmore himself!]

On the author who exemplifies one of the most American literary genres—andwhose novels will send the best kind of chills down your spine.

When I was initially thinkingabout what to include in this blog’s purview, just about exactly 15 years ago, Iwent back and forth on whether to include topics that are particularly, deeplypersonal, authors or texts or events that have captivated my attention andinterest at various moments in my life (and still do) but that aren’tnecessarily quite as far-reaching in their significance as others on which I’lltry to focus in this space. But what I have realized, more and more fully asthis blog has developed over those almost fifteen years since, is a combinationof two things: everything here ishere, first and foremost, because I care deeply about it, so it’s kind of sillyto try to parse out which ones I care about for which reasons; and the centralreason why I care about these things enough to consider ‘em as topics isn’tjust that they make me happy, but that I think they’re meaningful and powerfulenough to merit our attention. Which is to say: I love the movie Willow (that’s right, I do), but I’m probablynot going to create an entry on it (although don’t hold me to that). But Ross MacDonald’sseries of hardboiled PI novels? Yes, yes I will.

At one early point in my plansfor a dissertation—and I do mean early; I was the kind of high school nerd whowas already thinking of dissertation options—I thought about tracing the 20thcentury evolution of the hardboiled PI novel,from Dashiell Hammett to RaymondChandler, Mickey Spillane to Ross MacDonald, and up to the female authors(Marcia Muller, Sara Paretksy, Sue Grafton) and protagonists who dominated the80s and 90s in the genre. The character type is one of the most genuinely andmeaningfully American in any artistic medium, and so we can certainly identifycore elements of our national identity in each time period across thosedifferent authors—Hammett’s cynical and bitter PIs in the late 20s and early30s shifting to Chandler’s more intellectual Phillip Marlowe in the 40s, forexample. In the 50s and 60s, Spillane and MacDonald created amazinglycontrasting PIs: Spillane’sMike Hammer is an old-school hard-ass and misogynist, a creature of themasculine 50s, someone who watches a woman strip naked for him, thinks tohimself that “she was a real blonde,” and then shoots her dead in cold blood amoment later; while MacDonald’s Lew Archer is a romantic idealist, an echo ofthe Beats and counter-cultures of these decades, someone who often articulatesa cynical perspective aloud but whose narration is consistently lyrical andimpassioned, sympathizing with the worst in who and what he finds in the courseof his investigations and consistently seeking the best in them (includingfalling in love multiple times, and never once, to my knowledge, shooting oneof them in cold blood).

Archer’s voice and MacDonald’sprose style are consistently pitch-perfect, and make any one of the twenty orso books in the series (which MacDonald published between 1949 and 1976, whilepublishing a number of other works under other names; MacDonald itself was apseudonym for Kenneth Millar) well worth a read. But in the series’ bestnovels—and I think the high-water marks are TheChill (1964), TheUnderground Man (1971), and SleepingBeauty (1973)—MacDonald also creates rich and layeredmulti-generational historical mysteries, plots that stretch back decades andinvolve literally dozens of characters, different families and settings anderas, and a wide range of core social and political issues. The structures ofthese novels are ridiculously tight and impressive and the payoffs deeplysatisfying (let’s just say that The Chillin particular is very aptly named), but this historical depth makes these booksa lot more than just pleasure reads; they are American sagas without question,tracing families and relationships and identities and places across much of the20th century, considering how both one very full and compellingworld (that of Southern California) and the diverse and changing nation that itin many ways encapsulates grew and decayed, lived and died, from the end ofWorld War II to the post-Vietnam and -Watergate era.

Every time I’vegone back to MacDonald in the nearly four decades since my first encounters,I’ve found new aspects within these texts, new ways in which they can help meunderstand not only the mysteries of love and relationships and family (as can,say, Agatha Christie or Conan Doyle as well), but also of American identity. Thereis perhaps no character type more American than the hardboiled PI, and no PImore worth our time and attention than Lew Archer. Next crime fiction tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Crime or mystery novelists you’d share?

[50years ago this week, Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier met in Manila for theirthird and final professional boxing bout. So this week on the blog I’ve steppedinto the ring with posts on a handful of contexts for that significantsports story, leading up to this tribute to one of our best sportsscholars!]

I’vewritten about LouMoore a few times already in this space, including his now-defunct butreally excellent The Professorand the Pugilist blog. But I wanted to pay tribute to him at the end ofthis week’s blog series for three specific reasons:

1)     His book IFight For a Living: Boxing and the Battle for Black Manhood, 1880-1915 (2017),which is the best scholarly work about boxing and American history I’veencountered;

2)     His next book WeWill Win the Day: The Civil Rights Movement, the Black Athlete, and the Questfor Equality (2017), which provides a vital context for Muhammad Ali’sactivisms;

3)     And the really excellent Story Maps that he shares on hiswebsite, which include ones on the Jack Johnson riots and Muhammad Ali and theBlack press.

There’sjust no better voice on the histories of sports, race, and America than Lou!

Next seriesstarts Monday,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Sports studiers you’d share?