Violence In Sara Paretsky's Fire Sale

Jane Doe
ENG 111-01
Prof. Daniela Newland
Essay 1 Draft 1
07 Jan. 2015

Violence in Sara Paretsky’s Fire Sale
Compared to its predecessor, the classic detective novel as exemplified by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy L. Sayers, traditional American hard-boiled fiction has been occupied by more violence from its inception. Crime in the hard-boiled tradition, Andrew Pepper observes in The Contemporary American Crime Novel, differs from crime in the classic tradition in that it is “not only endemic, a connective tissue which could sour and soil relations between all social groups, but [. . .] an inevitable part of the institutional superstructure of American life” (10).
Unlike the middle- or upper-class British detectives,

Use of violence in hard-boiled detective fiction is hardly remarkable—as Lewis D. Moore writes, “the genre never relinquishes [it] as a theme for the exploration of modern American culture” (49). What is remarkable, however, is the skill with which hard-boiled writers since the formation of the genre have layered violence in their narratives: while the plot contains the most obvious, overt instances of brutality, they also infuse their texts with non-plot devices like characters, language, and setting, achieving an intensity of violence that cannot be constructed by plot

Driven by a desire for profit and power, these corporations operate in the absence of a moral imperative, a philosophy that serves to perpetually widen the chasm between company executives and a tired, underpaid workforce, whose members have little choice but to succumb to the—at times Dickensian— conditions imposed by their employer. The violence that arises from this constellation goes beyond the physical brutality that traditionally inhabits the hard-boiled detective genre as it is shaped by a dynamic of economic dependence; it is as much a violence of financial pressure through low payments as of rough work