Crime Fiction in the Archives: Hunting for Dashiell Hammett in the 1970s

This is an essay about the archive. It considers what the archive is, who or what constitutes it and for what purposes, and how we understand the archiving of knowledge as a disciplinary practice: that is, as a practice of disciplinary power and as a means of producing academic disciplines. It is also an essay about two archives in particular: the Dashiell Hammett Family Papers and the Richard Layman Collection of Dashiell Hammett, both housed in the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at the University of South Carolina. These archives give us a fascinating insight into the fraught business of accruing, or trying to accrue, the materials that would eventually be consecrated in the archive – what was known and, crucially, not known about Hammett's life and writing prior to the publication of the first biographies and critical works. As such, they illuminate the relationship between the gathering of information and the establishing of academic disciplines, in this case, crime fiction as a legitimate area of scholarly inquiry. This is also, therefore, an essay about the emergence of crime fiction studies as a scholarly discipline.