Toward a pulp criminology: The Vee Brown and Needle Mike series

Abstract

AbstractThe detective/crime pulp series Vee Brown (Carroll John Daly) and Needle Mike (William E. Barrett) incorporate elements of contemporaneous criminological theory into their narratives as explanatory devices for social deviance. Initially, they align themselves along the dominant etiological divide of the 1920s and 1930s: intrinsic tendencies versus environmental factors, respectively. Over the course of individual stories and series arcs, internal contradictions arise in the representations of these positions, which are resolved, to some degree, in the contemporaneous anomie theory of Robert Merton. The protagonists' idiosyncratic engagement with the popular arts—Tin Pan Alley music and tattooing—becomes the metaphoric vehicle to reframe the individual/milieu conflict in terms of institutional inscriptions of individuals more constructivist than purely functionalist in nature.