In the summer of 2016, two notable books were published respectively by Verso and Palgrave Macmillan. The first one, by Fredric Jameson, was entitled Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality. The second, by Peter Swirski, was called American Crime Fiction: A Cultural History of Nobrow Literature as Art. In view of the similarity of their subject matter, with the central place reserved for Raymond Chandler, the comparison between them is as inevitable as it is, ultimately, one-sided. This is because Swirski's book outclasses Jameson's in almost every respect, not least in the sheer pleasure of reading.

Peter Swirski is a noted literary scholar, cultural historian and popular-culture expert, who has a number of books on popular culture to his credit, including several studies of “nobrow” fiction and mass culture. Fredric Jameson is a prominent Marxist, literary critic and cultural theorist whose distinguished career spans several decades, the same decades during which the humanities (in general) and literary studies (in particular) have executed a sharp turn towards theory. This predilection for theory, with everything it implies, such as obscure jargon and theoretical hermeticism, are unfortunately much in evidence throughout Jameson's pamphlet. Indeed, although marketed as a book, at ninety pages The Detections of Totality is at best an inflated essay which, among all its hermeneutic convolutions, misses the single most important point about Chandler, which is that he is fun to read.

In contrast to Jameson, Swirski makes the meeting point between the entertaining and the artistic the fulcrum of his analysis. Chandler was, as he notes, a literary snob whose classical training made him draw firm distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow cultures, but whose literary ambitions drove him to bridge them. “To accept a mediocre form,” he wrote to his fiancée in 1957, “and make something like literature out of it is in itself rather an accomplishment” (95). To describe this ongoing creative engagement between popular genres and highbrow aesthetics, Swirski coins two terms that capture the essence of this cultural double-dipping: “nobrow” and “artertainment”.

“Nobrow” lies at the heart of what is known as nobrow studies, an emerging discipline on the borderline of popular culture and literary studies, championed by Swirski in a series of books which begin with From Lowbrow to Nobrow (2005) and extend to the recent essay collection When Highbrow Meets Lowbrow: Popular Culture and the Rise of Nobrow (2017). As defined in Swirski's contribution to the latter, “nobrow” can refer to a cultural formation, a set of creative intentions and a reception strategy that deliberately bring together the elements which we are often told are incommensurate: high art and mass entertainment. This is even more salient in Swirski's second term, “artertainment.” Whereas “nobrow” has a cultural-studies etymology, punning on the “lowbrow” and “highbrow” designations of, respectively, mass and high culture, “artertainment” refers to the artistic hybrids which cross-pollinate aesthetically and intellectually ambitious projects with popular genres.

This is, of course, not the only difference between the present book and Jameson's. While Jameson takes an associative approach to writing, American Crime Fiction is logical, precise and ground in historical fact and sociological analysis. Ambitious to a fault, The Detections of Totality groans under the weight of postmodernist Heideggerian formalism, which drives Jameson to conclude, for example, that Chandler's books amount to the loss of organic matter to capitalization, or, even more peculiarly, that Chandler's novels do not have villains. In contrast, American Crime Fiction is witty and at times positively entertaining, as noted by the chorus of praise on the back cover as well as on the website of one of the most popular crime fiction writers of recent decades, the multiple New York Times best seller Nelson DeMille.

Swirski has made a career of writing what he calls in the introductory chapter “beachbooks for intellectuals” (23), and American Crime Fiction is a fine example of the genre. But, insofar as nobrow fiction combines high-art content with popular genres, then American Crime Fiction does the same for nonfiction, combining highbrow content with an urbane but distinctly lowbrow style. It proceeds more or less chronologically, tracing the evolutions and revolutions of the panoply of genres which fall under the rubric of crime fiction. Its principal varieties are the classic noir of Dashiell Hammett and the “legal procedurals” (26) of John Grisham, the boilerplate potboilers such as William Faulkner's Sanctuary (1931) and Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not (1937), the metafictional and sociological turn in Raymond Chandler's underappreciated last novel Playback (1958), the evolution of the police procedural into the “urban procedural” (123) in the hands of Ed McBain, and finally the ubiquitous mafia novel, represented by DeMille's ambitious effort to combine the entertainment of The Godfather (1969) and the art of The Great Gatsby (1925) into a quintessential example of artertainment.