A remarkable number of US literature’s most recognizable criminals reside in mid-twentieth-century fiction. Between 1934 and 1958, James M. Cain gave us Frank Chambers and Walter Huff; Patricia Highsmith gave us Charles Bruno and Tom Ripley; Richard Wright gave us Bigger Thomas and Cross Damon; Jim Thompson gave us Lou Ford and Doc McCoy; Dorothy B. Hughes gave us Dix Steele. Many other once-estimable authors of the middle decades of the century—like Horace McCoy, Vera Caspary, Charles Willeford, and Willard Motley—wrote novels centrally concerned with what it felt like to be a criminal. What, it is only natural to wonder, was this midcentury preoccupation with crime all about? Consider what midcentury crime fiction was not about: detectives. Although scholars of twentieth-century US literature often use the phrases crime fiction and detective fiction interchangeably, the detective and the criminal were, by midcentury, the anchoring protagonists of two distinct genres. While hardboiled detectives continued to dominate the literary marketplace of pulp magazines and paperback originals in the 1940s and 1950s, they were soon accompanied on the shelves by a different kind of crime fiction, which was

中文翻译：

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犯罪小说和黑人犯罪

大量美国文学中最知名的罪犯生活在二十世纪中叶的小说中。1934 年至 1958 年间，詹姆斯·M·凯恩 (James M. Cain) 给了我们弗兰克·钱伯斯 (Frank Chambers) 和沃尔特·赫夫 (Walter Huff)；帕特里夏·海史密斯 (Patricia Highsmith) 给了我们查尔斯·布鲁诺 (Charles Bruno) 和汤姆·里普利 (Tom Ripley)；理查德赖特给了我们更大的托马斯和克罗斯达蒙；Jim Thompson 给了我们 Lou Ford 和 Doc McCoy；Dorothy B. Hughes 给了我们 Dix Steele。本世纪中叶的许多其他曾经备受推崇的作家——如霍勒斯·麦考伊、维拉·卡斯帕里、查尔斯·威尔福德和威拉德·莫特利——写的小说主要关注作为一名罪犯的感觉。很自然地想知道，这个世纪中叶对犯罪的全神贯注是什么？想想中世纪的犯罪小说不是关于什么的：侦探。尽管 20 世纪美国文学的学者经常交替使用犯罪小说和侦探小说这两个词，但到本世纪中叶，侦探和罪犯已成为两种不同类型的主要主角。虽然在 1940 年代和 1950 年代，顽固的侦探继续主导着低俗杂志和平装原著的文学市场，但很快就出现了另一种犯罪小说