SOURCE: Pettengell, Michael. “The Expanding Darkness: Naturalistic Motifs in Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction and the Film Noir.” Clues 12, no. 1 (spring 1991): 43-55.

In the following essay, Pettengell contends that hard-boiled detective fiction is part of the Naturalistic literary movement in American literature because it emphasizes common experiences and everyday life.

Although Naturalism as a literary type of American fiction is defined by the work of a relatively small group of writers spanning a short period of time; the influences and implications of the movement branched out (much like Norris' “Octopus”) into almost every artistic endeavor of the twentieth century.

It is not surprising that the ideas of these, for the most part, elite writers filtered down into popular art. It is again no surprise that these ideas which dealt with the realistic squalor of life, the unexplainable violence of man-against-man, the unforeseeable hand of fate, and the unimportance of man...