Criminal pleasures, pleasurable crime. (pleasures of reading detective stories) From: Style | Date: September 22, 1995| Author: Forter, Gregory | COPYRIGHT 1995 Northern Illinois University. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan.  All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group.Copyright information

I. "I LIKED SOMEBODY BEING DEAD"

What is it in the hard-boiled novel that hooks me, binds me to it, arrests me in the tracks of an otherwise intractable desire? Where, to be precise, am I to locate the pleasure I take in that novel - a pleasure that is at least compulsive in that I am driven to repeat it, and that entails an interruptive thickening of a reading that might otherwise proceed too quickly, of a text we habitually characterize as thin? Taking seriously some of th...