Oil and the Hard-Boiled

This chapter examines the relationship between oil and the hard-boiled mode in Cherokee author Thomas King’s Cold Skies (2018). Uniting the fields of crime fiction and petrocriticism, the chapter first traces how the hard-boiled developed alongside twentieth-century American petromobility. It then analyses how King uses hard-boiled conventions to make legible how oil is both an abstracted commodity associated with pleasure and power and a material substance tied to settler-colonial extractivism and dispossession of Indigenous land. Consequently, I argue to address contemporary oil dependency, we must understand and ultimately rewrite our relationship with the American century and with genre.