McCann, Intro from Gumshoe America

At the heart of this vision of the New Deal, in sum, lay an image mirrored by the avant-gardist ideals fo writers like Cain and Chandler--the invocation of a latent, collective spirit whose realization would overcome the limits of narrow institutions. The echo was not merely fortuitous. The detective story had always been a liberal genre, centrally concerned with a fundamental premise of liberal theory--the rule of law--and with the tensions fundamental to democratic societies that constantly threw that principle into doubt. Though the complex roots of the genre may lie deep in cultural history, the detective story first sprang to life in its recognizable form in Edgar Allan Poe's stories from the 1840s, when the United States under Andrew Jackson's presidency had recently experienced both the advent of populist democracy and the transformative energies of a "market revolution"--in a society, in short, that had definitively traded its republican and agrarian legacy for a liberal, capitalist order. Employing Arthur Conan Doyle's innovations, the detective story leapt to mass popularity, first in England and then in the United States, near the turn of the century--at a time when the rise of organized capitalism and the evident failure of the unfettered market to deliver a just society gave rise to the first serious challenges to liberalism in both countries. Those key moments in the making of the genre came, in short, during periods when liberalism itself was in profound transition and when the social forces prodding its development threatened to tear the very idea of a liberal society to pieces. The detective story both registered that threat and turned it into a manageable tale, a political myth for that "anxious man" who "emerges as the creation of liberalism." It comes as no surprise, then, that detective fiction experienced its next major period of innovation in the United States during the interwar years, when a whole generation of intellectuals and politicians joined FDR in the effort to adjust liberalism to the special demands of an industialized economy and an urbanized nation. Hard-boiled crime fiction followed a parallel track. (6-7)