This book considers a recurrent figure in American literature: the solitary white man moving through urban space. The descendent of Nineteenth-century frontier and western heroes, the figure re-emerges in 1930-50s America as the 'tough guy'. The Street Was Mine looks to the tough guy in the works of hardboiled novelists Raymond Chandler ( The Big Sleep ) and James M. Cain ( Double Indemnity ) and their popular film noir adaptations. Focusing on the way he negotiates racial and gender 'otherness', this study argues that the tough guy embodies the promise of an impervious white masculinity amidst the turmoil of the Depression through the beginnings of the Cold War, closing with an analysis of Chester Himes, whose Harlem crime novels ( For Love of Imabelle ) unleash a ferocious revisionary critique of the tough guy tradition.
Introduction 'I Can Feel Her': The White Male as Hysteric in James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler 'Another Soft-Voiced Big Man I Had Strangely Liked': Containing White Male Desire The Woman in White: Race-ing and Erace-ing in Cain and Chandler 'Nothing You Can't Fix': Hardboiled Fiction's Hollywood Makeover 'The Strict Domain of Whitey': Chester Himes's Coup Epilogue Appendix Bibliography
