Detectives on drugs: contamination and containment in US crime fiction

In Detectives on Drugs, I trace the drug-using detective through the past hundred years of American detective novels to argue that the detective on drugs is a key figure for understanding the formal development of the genre, but also the genre’s inherent thematic and ideological complications, contradictions, and paradoxes. These complications mostly swirl around discourses of contamination and containment. The fictional detective, within these poles, has been long read as a vehicle for fears about societal contamination and fantasies about containing these varied threats. The vexing detective on drugs, I argue, is an ostensible pillar of containment already and always “contaminated,”— a walking contradiction where these fears and fantasies unspool and refigure. In this project, I trace detectives’ contact with narcotics across American subgeneric developments to explore the implications of drug contact. In the first chapter, I examine drug contact in novels by Dashiell Hammet, Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane to reveal how it shaped the hardboiled archetype as a problematic ideal of white masculinity. In the second chapter, I trace how the police procedural refigures these identitarian concerns via a pointed textual and paratextual containment of the hardboiled detective on drugs in the work of Ed McBain, Chester Himes, and James Ellroy. In the third chapter, I examine the postmodern turn in American crime fiction by focusing on the narcotic agent’s identity panic in the works of William S. Burroughs and Philip K. Dick. In the final chapter, I present the works of Sara Gran as an example of productive genre subversion via drug contact. Through these lenses, I argue that the detective on drugs is a signal figure in American detective fiction that has helped shape form and style, but also key generic themes about crime, race, gender, and identity.