Alienation and the Private Dick

From Ken Worpole's "Dockers & Detectives":

[Antonio Gramsci] insisted that one had to engage with and find a way of 'framing the question of what is called popular literature, that is of teh success, among the masses of people, of the feuilleton (adventure stories, thrillers, crime fiction, etc.).... And it is this question which constitutes the greater part of the problem of the new literature as the expression of intellectual and moral renewal: for it is only among the readers of popular fiction that we shall find a sufficient and necessary public to create the cultural base for a new literature.' [Footnote omitted.] And this is why...it was within the genre of the American detective novel that certain writers were able to develop this popular form of literature into a sustained literary critique of urban capitalism, portraying human alienation in much more specific ways than conventional literature was at that point able to do. (31)