Crime dramas are the central text of the democratic experiment. Significantly, they're also among the most profitable. Consider television crime fighting, where every form of criminal and social justice is easily achievable with the right amount of pluck, and where no premise is too hackneyed to attract copious numbers of advertisers and less predictably, fans:
-Two hillbillies and their sex-pot sister fight crime in a stock car.
-A slender man and an obese man fight crime
-An elderly woman novelist fights crime
-A good-looking semi-truck driver, a monkey, and some attractive young women truck drivers fight crime
-A handsome white guy in a pricey car, or a talking car, or on a motorcycle, or in a special helicopter fights crime
-A craggy-faced police detective with poor personal hygiene fights crime
-Two tough women cops fight crime
-Any number of victims of botched military experiments fight crime
-An OCD sufferer fights crime
-A funny latino, or black, or Hawaiian, or Cuban American, or Native American man and a handsome white man fight crime
-A handyman fights crime
-Two SoCal studs, a computer nerd, and occasionally, a robot fight crime

Though our class this quarter will not spend much time on Kojack reruns, we *will* be digging into a trunk full of short, mass market crime novels and films to investigate how they configure the relations among political, economic, and sexual power. And unlike TV, which can trend towards the simplistic, our novels try to tell it from both sides: the Righteous Man smoking 'em out of their holes, getting 'em running, and visiting violence on 'em in order to preserve the solidity and harmony of the established order, and the dark-humored outlaws speaking a hip patois and nursing a strong conviction that, in the immortal words of John Rambo, "they drew the first blood, not me".

Required Texts:
Black, Jack. You Can't Win
Le Suer, Meridel. The Girl
Hughes, Dorothy B. In a Lonely Place
Thompson, Jim. Savage Night
Spillane, Mickey. I, the Jury
Himes, Chester. Blind Man With a Pistol