One of the hallmarks of both the classic hardboiled novel and film noir is the level of graphic violence meted out either to or by the detective. The body count in Hammett's Red Harvest (1929) is staggering; the torture scene in The Glass Key (1931) even suggests a certain masochistic propensity for voluptuous anguish in the detective. The fascination with, even admiration of, violent crime (and, concomitantly, the new type of crime fiction) worried a number of intellectuals in the 1940s. For J.B. Priestley, hardboiled fiction was a foreign import about a ‘particular America’, ‘a fungus world, of greed, of calculated violence and a cold sensuality’ whose existence appalled him. Yet he conceded that such sensibility increasingly permeated contemporary fiction and film precisely because its aesthetics offered uncomfortable truths about modern urban life (1940: 75–6). Both George Orwell and Bertolt Brecht saw the popular turn to crime and violence as a symptom of moral equivocation that helped to glorify the pursuit of power. They equated capitalism and fascism through the violence both generated and exploited. In Brecht's Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui (The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, 1941) Al Capone's mafia becomes the template for a gangster version of fascism. Taking the example of James Hadley Chase's No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1939), Orwell dismissed the genre as pornographic, vulgar pulp, penned in almost incomprehensible gangster argot.