Detective Fiction – The Hero / Heroine

The first protagonists were usually detectives. As the genre evolved, he or she became a

policeman, an insurance salesman, a politician, a reporter, a crook, unemployed, or a bystander

sucked into events. However, as the genre branched and crossed with other forms of popular

fiction, most hard-boiled heroes and heroines have retained identifiable characteristics.

The protagonist embarks on a journey of discovery, like the heroes of classic Western

mythology, such as Odysseus, Percival, and Lancelot, in order to attain a goal or to recover

something lost. These figures faced dangers, challenges, and temptations that were physical,

moral, material, and sexual. Success depended on the acquisition of special knowledge, or on an

all-powerful sponsor (a god, patron, muse), fidelity to whom permitted success. There is a

personal cost to the protagonist. Classic detectives, from Poe's Dupin to Doyle's Sherlock

Holmes and Chesterton's Father Brown, clearly fit this definition. They answer to a higher

authority, whether God or Reason; they have special powers; and they undertake journeys that

put right wrongs and restore the wholeness of persons, families, or communities. In Adventure,

Mystery, Romance scholar John Cawelti has shown how these characteristics develop in

detective fiction. Robert Skinner has developed this topos specially for the hard-boiled

hero/heroine. 1

It is significant for the hard-boiled protagonist that the genre began during the urbanization of

Europe and North America, against a background of still-fresh frontier mythology in the latter.

This made for heroes and heroines who were urban and urbane, familiar with the intricacies and

elites of the city, but still possessed of practical "know-how" and an aggressive attitude toward

"unknown geography" and its inhabitants. This breadth of knowledge and abilities, deployed on

behalf of a private person, is a transformation of the divine sponsorship in myth that became a

key feature of the American detective tale with Allen Pinkerton and his stories of the "private

eye." The "eye" is by implication all-seeing, just as it appeared on Pinkerton's business card.

Privately hired omniscience represents a secularization of supernatural power, and Old Cap

Collier and the pulp heroes mentioned earlier appeared just as the first commercial security

forces were supplementing inefficient, small public police forces.

These detectives were obviously different from Sherlock Holmes or other English detectives of

the same period; they were also different from Poe's Dupin. They saw the world from the

perspective of the average citizen, the "man on the street," rather than from an educated,

aristocratic one. Most scholars feel that a specific historic development accounts for this tone —

the settling of the American West, with the resulting populist traditions. William Ruehlmann and

Marcus Klein have described how this modified the classic archetype and narrative. 2 Briefly, by

the era of Pinkerton, the U.S. had become a populist country. Hawthorne, Melville, and James

may have characterized American "high culture," but traditions of popular music, popular art,

and popular literature took hold among the masses. As Richard Slotkin has shown, elements of

Native American myth combined with frontier tall tales to make heroes of Daniel Boone, Davy

Crockett, and Annie Oakley. 3 These hero/ines spoke the vernacular (the language of the people)

or even a regional patois, a verbal distinction that hard-boiled fiction recaptures. They also

shared physical toughness. They could withstand heat and cold, arduous journeys, or

sleeplessness. If they were not superior in size, power, or speed, they acquitted themselves well

in one-on-one competitions, such as shooting, fistfights, card-playing, horse or auto-racing, and

the verbal joust. Usually it required a gang to defeat the popular hero in a fight, and no number

were a verbal match. "Wit and grit" was the phrase associated with these heroes between 1865

and 1900.

These characteristics in sum outline the hard-boiled hero/ine in the classic period of 1920

through 1950. The protagonist was usually a detective of the "private eye" variety, or

functionally similar. He or she used special expertise to restore a loss, which could mean finding

a missing object or bringing a murderer to justice. They did so for little or no money, often

simply for justice. They met challenges, trials, obstacles, and temporary defeats — were

kidnapped, beaten, shot, knifed, snubbed, humiliated, and dismissed as inferiors. It became a

ritual that the protagonist had to pass out, either from a beating or drugs. The symbolic meaning

of this — the hero's passage into the underworld — is clear from the classics. Often, in the

narratives of Hammett and sometimes Chandler and Macdonald, the hero has significant dreams

that relate to the theme. Hard-boiled protagonists who lose consciousness regain it with greater

strength or clarity or ability, and thereby solve the case. The hard-boiled hero or heroine also

carries on the tradition of verbal prowess: he or she can use language against opponents and is

conscious of words and their effects.

More recently Kathleen Klein, in The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre (University of

Illinois Press, 1995) has surveyed nearly 300 female detectives and taken up the question of

whether or not the genre can actually be progressive. Taking a feminist viewpoint, she

documents the parallels in social history and the women's rights movement. A very useful and

provocative study

1 Skinner, The New Hard-Boiled Dicks (San Bernardino, CA: Brownstone Books, 1995), 7-20;

Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, Romance Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 65-72,

142-54. 2 William Ruehlmann, Saint With a Gun: The Unlawful American Private Eye, 21-59;

Klein, Easterns, Westerns and Private Eyes, 133-77. 3 Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through

Detective Fiction – The Code

When the protagonist is a detective, she or he is presumed to have a set of ethics or moral values.

These are called "the detective code," or simply "the code," when discussing the genre. The

basics of the code are best summarized by Richard Layman in his discussion of what James

Wright of the Pinkerton Detective Agency taught Dashiell Hammett. To summarize, the

detective should be anonymous, eschew publicity, be close-mouthed, and secretive. He or she

protects good people from bad people, who do not live by the rules; thus, one may break the

rules in dealing with them. The detective ignores rules and conventions of behavior, because the

client pays for this. Loyalty to the client is very important, but may be superceded by a personal

sense of justice or the rule of law. The detective must keep an emotional distance from the

people in the case, retain an objective point of view, and consider all pertinent clues.

The classic articulations of the detective code are those delivered by Sam Spade at the end of

Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon and by Philip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler's The Big

Sleep. But these set-pieces are already variations on the basic credo above. Spade's speech

stresses his loyalty to his ex-partner, his profession, his sense of self-preservation, and his refusal

to be a romantic "sap."

When a man's partner is killed he's supposed to do something about it. It doesn't make any

difference what you thought of him…. Then it happens we were in the detective business. Well,

when one of your organization gets killed it's bad business to let the killer get away with it. It's

bad all around – bad for that one organization, bad for every detective everywhere…. Since I've

also got something on you, I couldn't be sure that you wouldn't decide to shoot a hole in me some

day…. I don't even like the idea of thinking that there might be one chance in a hundred that

you'd played me for a sucker. (183-84)

This is already a narrower, more cynical version of the code. Not surprisingly, Chandler

liberalized Philip Marlowe's code in The Big Sleep, stressing his "insubordination" of authority

and his personal thriftiness, instead of a narrow professionalism.

I'm thirty-three years old, went to college once and can still speak English if there's any demand

for it. There isn't much in my trade. I worked for Mr. Wilde, the District Attorney, as an

investigator once. … I was fired. For insubordination. I test very high on insubordination… (7)

Marlowe charges $25 a day and expenses. For solving General Sternwood's blackmail case, he

merits "fifty dollars and a little gasoline" (69), which he volunteers to return when his client

complains:

"I'd like to offer you your money back. It may mean nothing to you. It might mean something to

me."

"What does it mean to you?"

"It means I refused payment for an unsatisfactory job. That's all." (127-8)

When Vivian Regan supposes that money motivates Marlowe, he mocks her:

"All I have the itch for is money. I am so money greedy that for twenty-five bucks a day and

expenses, mostly gasoline and whiskey, I do my thinking myself, what there is of it; I risk my

whole future, the hatred of the cops and of Eddie Mars and his pals, I dodge bullets and eat saps

and say thank you very much, if you have any trouble, I hope you'll think of me, I'll just leave

one of my cards in case anything comes up." (137-38)

Marlowe also defines more clearly than Spade did the detective's relation to the law. When Mona

Mars asserts that "as long as people gamble there will be places for them to gamble, Marlowe

tells her: "That's just protective thinking. Once outside the law you're all the way outside….

Don't try to sell me on any high-souled racketeers. They don't come in that pattern" (117). But

Marlowe doesn't believe in toadying to the police either: "It's against my principles to tell as

much as I've told [the police] tonight, without consulting [the client]. As for the cover-up, I've

been in the police business myself, you know. They come a dime a dozen in any big city. Cops

get very large and emphatic when an outsider tries to hide anything, but they do the same things

themselves every other day…." (69-70).

Most versions of the "code" share these common points. The private eye is 1) dedicated to the

client, 2) economical, if not thrifty, in his expenses and personal habits, 3) loyal to his

profession, 4) cooperative, to some degree, with the police, 4) concerned with self-survival, and

5) unwilling to be duped by anyone. Later detectives, such as Archer, Spenser, and Warshawski,

add a considerable amount of empathetic humanism to the first feature above.

Detective Fiction – Themes

To discuss theme, one must first grasp the difference between the apparent plot and the revealed

plot. In the apparent plot of The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade is helping Brigid to find a valuable

object and to discover who killed his partner, or so readers think while reading. But when they

have finished, readers can see that, in retrospect, Spade betrayed and sacrificed her, so as not to

be killed like his partner. This is the revealed plot. In the apparent plot of Farewell, My Lovely,

Philip Marlowe is looking for Moose Malloy and delivering ransom for a necklace, but in the

revealed plot he has uncovered the lower class and criminal origins of a wealthy, socialite wife,

who then kills her old boyfriend, flees, and later commits suicide. The revealed plot often gives

readers the dark side of the author's theme or beliefs, so it must be taken seriously. Ever since

French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan demonstrated how the revealed plot of Poe's "The

Purloined Letter" concerned Poe's conflict over his parentage, critics have treated the revealed

plot as if it were the writer's unconscious. Sometimes this is true, but the revealed plot can also

be the object of conscious, methodical craft, as in Ross Macdonald's works. The apparent and

revealed plots must merge plausibly in the denouement for a proper sense of closure. Some of

the more common apparent plots involve:

-- the search for a reputedly valuable object that turns out to be worthless. The Maltese

Falcon borrowed this motif from Arthur Canon Doyle's "The Sign of Four," and it has

been popular ever since. It can be reversed, as in Cotton Comes to Harlem, where the

apparently worthless bale of cotton actually did contain the missing money.

-- an apparent crime that the revealed plot shows to be a repetition of an earlier crime. In

Ross Macdonald's The Underground Man, Stanley Broadhurst disappears, running off

with a woman, just as his father Leo ran off with a woman years earlier. Archer will find

them literally buried one atop the other. In The Postman Always Rings Twice, Frank

Chambers is finally convicted of murder for accidentally killing his wife in a car

accident, when he was acquitted of deliberately killing her (then) husband in a faked

accident earlier.

-- the wealthy family with a problem or secret. The Sternwoods, the Grayles, the Galtons, and the

Broadhursts need detectives to straighten out their messy lives. Those who believe that the rich

are scandalous but not in need of correction from their inferiors probably read novelists of the

English School or S.S. Van Dine. The hard-boiled novel recruited a readership during the

Depression and afterwards in part by appealing to prejudices against the rich, and it has worked

them shamelessly ever since. Of course, the rich have valuable things to lose and the means to

hire detectives; many of the rich or their ancestors were once poor, so the story of their ascent

can be scandalous. Paradoxically, the hard-boiled novel often views the rich as prospering

through evil means and yet naïve about evil. The detective must be especially vigilant about his

code when dealing with the rich, who will seduce him by money and manners. In fact, the

detective's parsimony will be most emphasized in novels where wealth is investigated, because

the circulation of money must be viewed suspiciously.

-- the antagonist who is a double of the detective or the author. Edgar Allan Poe is usually

credited with inventing this motif in his story "William Wilson." Hammett played with it,

in his character Clyde Wynant, who looks like the author, in The Thin Man. Raymond

Chandler provided Marlowe with a double in Rusty Regan of The Big Sleep, and he wrote

the genre's first masterpiece of this type, The Long Goodbye, in which he developed three

psychological faces of himself. In The Galton Case Lew Archer essentially investigates

the past of a character much like author Ross Macdonald. Paul Auster is a contemporary

author who uses the motif in his quasi-detective (but not hard-boiled) novels.

-- cleaning up a corrupt town. Although developed in the pulps as far back as the 1870s

and 1880s, this plot motif was more often seen in the western and the crime novel until

Hammett's Red Harvest. Mickey Spillane is the genre's great town-cleaner, taking on the

Mafia or the Communist Party in such novels as My Gun Is Quick and One Lonely Night.

Detective Fiction – Villains

The hard-boiled detective novel uses villains differently than does hard-boiled crime fiction. If a

narrative has a private eye, there will either be a specific, individualized, bad guy or a culpable

class, diffusing blame over a social strata. Casper Gutman of The Maltese Falcon serves as an

example of the former. No author lets readers get too close to the villain, but Hammett still gives

readers much specific detail about Gutman's physique, his clothes, his habits, his motivations,

and his conversational style. Spade meets him three times, and they are conversational equals.

Gutman values Spade enough to invite him on the renewed quest to find the falcon. But

Hammett makes sure the reader understands that Gutman is evil, implying that he abuses his

daughter Rhea physically. In the film, this memorable role was played in the film by Sidney

Greenstreet.

The novels of Ross Macdonald, on the other hand, often have no single, discernable villain. The

"evil" that Lew Archer faces has apparent human faces, but Macdonald disperses blame over a

class, a social condition, or he locates it in a distant source, such as Nevada gangsters. In The

Galton Case, Macdonald presents a series of briefly detestable characters – Peter Culligan, Maria

Galton, John Galton, Gordon Sable. But the revelation that Sable killed Culligan pales before the

revelation of the tragic childhood and youth of John Brown. Sable, after all, killed Culligan to

save his unstable wife, who had been the victim of Culligan and assorted Reno gangsters, whose

brutality Macdonald shows his readers clearly. They are blame-worthy, but the real evil-doers

are people who would raise a child as Brown was raised (his mother and stepfather) and the

upper classes, living insulated on California hillsides from the perils and promise of "coming to

be" someone genuine that Brown has suffered.

In the hard-boiled crime novels of Cain, Woolrich, Thompson and others, however, the

protagonist is the bad guy, so "villainy" is constructed differently. Readers are allowed to know,

even to empathize with someone who commits crimes, even murder. The police, legal, or

investigative structure will be represented by an individual or group who may be brutal or unfair,

but who ultimately bring the protagonist to justice. It is not accurate to call these antagonists the

"villains," for they represent justice – they are necessary to our sense of proper thematic closure.

But their manipulation of the protagonist's life can seem so cavalier – as in the bet between D.A.

Sackett and attorney Katz in Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice – that we begin to

sympathize with murderous Frank Chambers, played sympathetically in the film by John

Garfield (right). Sackett and Katz become merely the human faces of the legal/insurance

structure that "controls" modern life, predicting all of our choices through actuarial statistics. In

this sense, the hard-boiled crime novel villainizes the restrictive legal and social structure of

modern capitalism. But this romantic rebellion can only be made appealing for so long, before a

substitute gratification must be offered: it's no fun to rebel if it leads to your death. The

conventions of the genre demand that justice finally be served. If the reader's appetizer is

sympathy for the rebel, then his dessert is relief that he does not meet the rebel's fate.

Cain's Double Indemnity is a good example of a second development in the hard-boiled crime

novel – to give the power structure a human face. Murderous Walter Huff's antagonist is his

office colleague Keyes, the ace actuary and three-dimensional character. Huff respects Keyes'

ability, they converse respectfully, and Huff is almost fond of his opponent. This tendency is less

often encountered in hard-boiled detective fiction, though recent crime and detective novelists,

such as Wambaugh, Higgins, and Ellroy, have found sympathetic opponents useful.

Detective Fiction – The Femme Fatale

The femme fatale, defined simply, is an irresistibly attractive woman, especially one who leads

men into danger. In hard-boiled fiction, she is usually the protagonist's romantic interest. There

have not yet been any hommes fatales (though they abound in gothic and romance fiction). The

protagonist's involvement with her may range from mild flirtation to passionate sex, but in the

denouement he must reject or leave her, for the revealed plot shows her to be one of the causes of

the crime.

Like the hard-boiled hero, the femme fatale dates to classic myth. An example is Circe, who

turned Odysseus' men into swine in Book X of The Odyssey and the Sirens, whose beauty and

alluring song attracted his sailors in Book XII. Odysseus vanquishes the first with a magic root

from Hermes and the second by sealing his men's ears with wax. The necessity of extra-human

help in resisting the femme fatale's sexual temptation is an ancient feature of the archetype;

adherance to the "code" fills this role in the hard-boiled novel. Mary Ann Doane's feminist study

explains how "erotic barter" figures in this fiction as well as in film noir. 1

In the Middle Ages, Christianity refashioned this archetype as a devil, called the succubus. The

hard-boiled novel, as William Marling has shown, draws on this concept of a female sexual spirit

who visits men in their sleep and has sexual intercourse with them. Succubae were thought to

disguise themselves in women and to be identifiable by such features as small, pointed teeth,

pointed ears, and sharp noses. 2 To contrast with the succubus, medieval Grail Romances

developed several more noble types: the compassionate Queen, La belle dame sans Merci (to

modernize, a "heartbreaker"), and the true love. An important attribute of the hero became his

ability to distinguish between types of women and to respond accordingly, to discern "good

women" from bad. The femme fatale has been roundly condemned as misogynist by feminist

literary criticism, though in most (and especially contemporary) hard-boiled narrative the reader

is more apt to find modern female characters with some archetypal traits, and female characters

unrelated to the archetype at all, rather than the pure archetype. Hammett's Dinah Brand (Red

Harvest) and Janet Henry (The Glass Key) are early examples of femmes fatales who defy the

misogynist label. More recently, scholarship on film noir has seen the role of femme fatale as

empowering, pointing to Bette Davis and Kathleen Turner, among others.

One of the purest archetypal representations, however, also comes from Hammett. Gabrielle

Dain in The Dain Curse is sexually attractive, belongs to a cult, uses drugs, and has small,

pointed ears and teeth. The detective has to imprison her in a cottage to see her through delirium

tremens and exorcise her lust. Raymond Chandler gave the same physical features to murderous,

sex-obsessed Carmen Sternwood in The Big Sleep. Had he succumbed to her, Marlowe would

have been shot at the novel's end. Other classic femme fatale characters (not pure archetypes) are

Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon, Velma Valento/Helen Grayle in Farewell, My

Lovely, Cora in The Postman Always Rings Twice and Phyllis in Double Indemnity. These

characters are more individuated and less archetypal in appearance and personality. Authors tend

to deploy the femme fatale in signature fashion. Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer novels are

filled with buxom blonde killers. Ross Macdonald treats his female characters much more

sympathetically and psychologically; few qualify as archetypal. James M. Cain lessened his use

after Double Indemnity; his widowed heroine in Mildred Pierce (1941, not covered in this study)

makes her way alone through the Depression. Use of the archetype has not been restricted to

male writers. Honey West, the detective created by Gloria and Forest Fickling, embodied many

archetypal conventions in her "blonde bombshell" appearance. The femme fatale appears in

many contemporary works. Even those writers who avoid the archetype or "unmask" it, such as

Sara Paretsky and Sue Grafton, sometimes use it negatively.

A good example of how the femme fatale is used creatively is Hammett's The Maltese Falcon.

There Sam Spade is attracted to three women, a motif that echoes the ancient Greek Fates, who

tell men the future. He is involved in an adulterous affair with his partner's wife, Iva Archer. His

secretary, Effie Perrine, is a tom-boyish, competent girl-next-door who would make the perfect

spouse. Brigid O'Shaughnessy, the femme fatale, seems to promise sensuality and wealth, but

Spade sees through her – and uses her when she thinks she is using him. The novel's end leaves

Spade alienated from Effie, who is, ironically, mad that he rejected the "romance" of Brigid,

while Iva knocks at the door. It is a grim morality play about making your bed and lying in it.

The femme fatale in movies predates the advent of film noir. Theda Bara and Marlene Dietrich

already played the role in the silent era. The type appears in the 1930s crime movies and then in

film noir. Bette Davis was an early example and later used the conventions to portray strong

characters (Beyond the Forest, The Letter). Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Crawford (right), who

had played strong-willed, working women in the 1930s, enhanced their fading careers in the

1940s by playing some of the most dramatic femmes fatales: Stanwyck in Double Indemnity,

Clash by Night and Witness to Murder; Crawford in The Damned Don't Cry, Possessed and

Sudden Fear. Ida Lupino was one of the most convincingly human of the movie femmes fatale

(The Asphalt Jungle), contrasting with the icy eroticism of Stanwyck (High Sierra; Beware, My

Lovely; While the City Sleeps). Other notable performances include Lana Turner's in The

Postman Always Rings Twice, Joan Bennett's in Scarlet Street and Rita Hayworth's in Gilda and

The Lady from Shanghai.

Detective Fiction – Imagery

Detective fiction knows no metaphoric bounds today, but texts of the classic period make use of

common kinds of imagery. The images per se vary, but they cluster around the opposition of

hard versus soft, and smooth versus rough. This might seem obvious, but it has some history.

The terms "hard-boiled" and "soft-boiled" derive from American commonplaces about eggs.

Now that they come in boxes from the store, eggs are less metaphorically central than they once

were. Fifty years ago most Americans knew to the minute how long they wanted their breakfast

eggs immersed in boiling water. A "two-minute egg" had a runny, liquefied yolk, while a "ten-

minute egg" was solid throughout. The distinction between hard throughout and soft inside but

hard outside was widely known. The "hard-boiled" was in opposition to the "brittle," for under

the shell might be softness.

This imagery complimented another about sap. A people closer to nature, whose syrup came

from maples, knew that "sap" was sticky stuff leaking from trees, which also had hard exteriors.

The noun "sap" grew up after the Civil War and appears in Mark Twain's work ( "saphead") to

refer to someone who is foolish, whose mental processes are not structured and contained. The

verb "to sap" meant to hit someone over the head with a blackjack, causing the victim to become

"soft." By the time it appeared in hard-boiled narrative, "sap" meant "sucker" or weak -- the

opposite of "hard-boiled." Sap and soft-boiled correspond to sentiment, gratitude, and romantic

love, which would weaken the hard-boiled hero/ine.

The contrast between the smooth and the rough is an extension of the distinction between the

hard and the soft, with the added meaning of "modern" vs. "old-fashioned." During the classic

hard-boiled period, the smooth was urged upon consumers in clothing (ready-made clothes

instead of home-spun) in home appliances (gas and electric ovens, instead of coal stoves) and

transportation (the automobile, instead of the horse). Protagonists of hard-boiled fiction tend to

be clean-shaven, dress in smooth fabrics, drive cars, live in apartments (often efficiencies), and

to use modern products. As I argue in The American Roman Noir, hardness and refusal to "play

the sap" are usually synecdochal representions of the modern economy. 1

Chandler stands out as the great creator of imagery in the genre and one of the greatest in

American literature. Philip Marlowe's world abounds in comparisons, giving the detective the

complexion of a polymath. Chandler's metaphors are mostly similes. They most often describe a

character memorably on first appearance, saving the author effort when the character reappears.

Thus Carmen Sternwood in the first four pages of The Big Sleep walks "as if she were floating,"

has teeth "as shiny as porcelain," lowers her eyelashes like "a theatre curtain," sucks her thumb

"like a baby with a comforter," and "went up the stairs like a deer" (2-4). The reader understands

that she is infantile, transparently cunning, and energetic. "Artificial" seems to be the concept

Chandler had in mind; he returns to it later in the novel: Carmen acts "as if [she had] artificial

lips and had to be manipulated by springs" (147). A description such as the later reminds us of

Victorian machinery – exposed and clumsy. Even here the author indirectly values the modern:

that which is seamless, functional, and rhythmic. Chandler often uses similes in early

descriptions of characters and then invokes them again later.

Chandler mined a few subjects for his metaphors, all of which can be seen contributing to his

description of General Sternwood in The Big Sleep. Chandler's primary referents were time,

mass, motion and inertia. The General "nodded, as if his neck were afraid of the weight of his

head" (7). But Chandler also used California life and the daily culture of Los Angeles: The

General's "few locks of white hair clung to his scalp, like wild flowers fighting for life on a bare

rock" (6). Chandler was intensely conscious of death and disease: The General's orchids are

"plants with nasty meaty fingers and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men" (5).

Chandler spent his days at home writing, in a domestic, even kitchen-bound, existence: The

General's greenhouse is like a "slow oven," where Marlowe feels "trussed like a turkey

1 William Marling, The American Roman Noir, 39-92. See also William Marling Raymond

Chandler. Boston: Twayne, 1986.

Detective Fiction – Evolution

Many detective novelists originally observed the central tenets of the mystery genre, which hold

that readers be presented with all the suspects, that no clues be hidden from the audience and that

the crime be plausible. They were not concerned with baffling or intricate plots to the extent that

writers of the English school were, but they still created and preserved mysteries. There was

presumed to be a much closer thematic relation between the apparent and revealed plots than in

the English school.

But the hard-boiled genre had no sooner come into focus than writers began to innovate, as is

typical of genre fiction. Writers look for ways to win new readers; they strive to keep the genre

tuned to contemporary mood. Competing for the same audience were crime fiction and crime

movies, which had already discovered that they could reverse the criminal/police equation,

making interesting or even sympathetic protagonists from outlaws. Some of these had already

appeared in frontier myth and Western fiction. Public rectitude and the movie censors, however,

demanded that crime be punished in movies. Insofar as a criminal protagonist approached the

status of "hero," he had to be justified as a child of hard times, born in a ghetto, homeless during

the Depression, or scarred by one of the World Wars. This made him society's victim, occupying

the same social margin inhabited by the private eye. Unlike the private eye, who could "see"

through people, events, mores, and social strata, the criminal hero saw the rest of society as

impenetrably walled off, incomprehensible. No knowledge or skill or manners would vault him

over to the other side, where the winners, the lucky, and the rich lived. Thus, his or her whole life

assumed the "fated" tone that was usually restricted to the discovery portion of the private eye

novel. In David Madden's invaluable collection on the "tough guy novelists," Joyce Carol Oates

famously remarked of James M. Cain's heroes that their knowledge of the world seems "limited

to the radius of their desire." Desire is key: not possessed of the private eye's "vision," the

criminal protagonist usually seems to act out of desire, which s/he believes is the universal

common denominator. Overlooked by readers is the fact that, when the criminal is a first-person

narrator, s/he knows the outcome already but suppresses it. Readers, however, attend to crime

fiction or movies only partially because of their identification with desire and its objects. They

also know that there is a "corrective" to pure desire, be it arrest or death. The reader's prurient

identification is balanced by acceptance of this fate. The reading motive becomes: How far can

desire proceed before the inevitable punishment? Both the private eye and the crime novels

feature hero/ines who pay a price for pursuing an object or a quest and who are left the wiser, but

the crime novel's wisdom is far darker. At its most dire, there is statement of Cornell Woolrich:

―First you dream, then you die.‖

The hard-boiled novel began to branch as Raymond Chandler, in the late 1940s and early 1950s,

sought to make it not only a vehicle of social comment but of autobiographical reflection. After

The Long Goodbye (1953), some hard-boiled fiction began to shed its toughness and some of the

"code." Ross Macdonald came to the fore of this "progressive" edge of the genre in The Galton

Case (1959) and took it to fulfillment in The Underground Man (1971). Scholars such as Eric

Mottram believe that this exhausted the "formal" possibilities of the genre, for Lew Archer

"finally sees the genre into impossibility, moving into fictions of self-deception and self

expenditure." 1

Archer had descendents – Robert Parker's Spenser, for example – but it is true that hard-boiled

fiction branches like kudzu after Macdonald. Some authors availed themselves of techniques

made familiar through Modernist texts; works such as Higgins' 1974 novel Cogan's Trade (see

below) consisted of fragments of conversation overheard and assembled by the reader. This

novel paved the way for The Sopranos television series. Other writers followed the contemporary

lines of development represented by ethnic literature and renascent regionalism. After the

African-American detective came the woman, the Jewish, the Native American, the Creole, and

the Asian-American detective. In the 1980s there were detectives whose beats were Detroit or

Boston, Cincinnati or Chicago, New Orleans, or Indianapolis. In the 1990s there were art-

dealing, cab-driving, and handicapped detectives. "A detective for everyone" reflects the fact that

the genre has adapted to another change: the fragmentation of mass media markets, begun by

cable television in the 1980s. Niche marketing may seem like a diminution, but it's well to

remember that hard-boiled fiction began as niche fiction, and it's still quite strong.

The Los Angeles Detective Novel

Los Angeles has long been the chief locale of the American detective novel. The world of its

racial minorities, however, was marginalized by the Perry Masons and Phillip Marlowes and

then repressed by the LAPD procedural. It has been reclaimed by Ezekial ―Easy‖ Rawlins, the

African-American detective of Walter Mosley. The background of Devil in a Blue Dress (1990),

from details of the 1940s to the protagonist’s early job in an aircraft plant, is indebted to Chester

Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), but from there Mosley recaptures the ―Central‖

district of Chandler and extends the geography of the LA detective to the black communities of

Watts and Compton. Worried about paying his mortgage, Easy takes $100 to find a blonde,

Daphne Monet, who favors nightclubs on the black side of town. She has stolen $30,000 of her

white patron’s money which, after an immersion in the world of sexual debauchery and race

politics that leads her to kill one man, she splits with Easy and his violent sidekick Mouse. Easy

has a distant and antagonistic relation to the LAPD; instead, Mosley thematizes Easy’s pride in

home ownership and ends the novel with him watering his yard and pondering the morality of

the justice that has transpired. In A Red Death (1991), Easy owns apartment buildings he bought

with stolen money that he recovered and kept. Pursued by the IRS, he cooperates by spying on a

union organizer, and again extortion and murder have underworld roots. The third Easy Rawlins

novel, White Butterfly (1994), is set in 1956. Easy helps police investigate the murders of four

young women, one of whom, a UCLA student and daughter of a city official, led a double life as

a stripper. These novels prize the vernacular details of African-American life, but emphasize the

constant compromises required to ―get along with the Man.‖

Mosley’s recent work has departed from the genre; his mantle has been taken up by Gar

Anthony Haywood, whose detective Aaron Gunner operates from an office behind a Watts

barber-shop in Fear of the Dark (1989) and All the Lucky Ones are Dead {2000). Haywood’s

novels are more driven by dialog and less violent than Mosley’s. Most recently Paula Woods has

brought the African-American LA sleuth novel full circle, introducing black LAPD Detective

Charlotte Justice (Inner City Blues [1999], Stormy Weather [2001], Dirty Laundry [2005], and

Strange Bedfellows [2006]).

Lucha Corpi and Michael Nava have created Chicano/a detectives. In Corpi’s Eulogy for a

Brown Angel (1992), Detective Gloria Damasco and her friend find a four-year-old boy dead

during a Chicano Civil Rights march in Los Angeles in 1970. She returns to the case eighteen

years later, employing a ―dark gift‖ that allows her to dream and to see answers to problems.

Cactus Blood (1995) is set in Delano during the farmworkers’ strike of 1973, and Black Widow’s

Wardrobe (2000) delves into folklore. Nava weaves Chicano history and folklore in his stories of

detective Henry Rios, a gay lawyer, who moves from San Francisco to Los Angeles in How

Town (1990) and investigates the city in The Hidden Law (1992), The Death of Friends (1996),

The Burning Plain (1997) and Rag and Bone (2001).

The contemporary LA detective novel shows breadth and depth. Michael Connelly, who

worked as a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times, updates the romantic LA detective to

include the reality of time cards and weekend rotations in his 12 ―Harry Bosch‖ L.A.P.D. novels

published between 1996 and 2008. Another police procedural writer, T. Jefferson Parker, has

written 15 novels set mostly in Orange County or San Diego. Better known is Jonathan

Kellerman, whose child psychologist detective Alex Delaware stars in 21 novels. Denise

Hamilton, another ex-Times reporter, has written five detective novels about reporter Eve

Diamond, who investigates crime in the local Latino, Asian, and Russian communities. LA’s

Orthodox Jewish community provides the settings for Faye Kellerman’s 17 novels about police

detective Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus, and Rochelle Majer Krich has nine Jewish-themed PI

novels. There is a throwback: Stuart Kaminsky’s Toby Petersis a private detective who

investigates film stars in 1940s Hollywood. Kem Nunn has pioneered a ―surfer/noir‖ variation

of the detective in a trilogy (Tapping the Source, 1984; Dogs of Winter, 1997; and Tijuana

Straits, 2004) that pursues the environmental themes to which Macdonald, an avid birder, turned

in The Underground Man (1971), set during the 1964 Coyote Canyon fire, and Sleeping Beauty

(1973), whose central event is the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill.

Although LA gained a place in detective fiction rather late, it has become an iconic locale.

Films such as Chinatown have reinforced the mystique. Combining important industries such as

oil, aviation, and cinema with terrain stretching from the Pacific over mountains to high desert,

Los Angeles has offered writers endless possibilities. Its twentieth-century evolution into a

highly multicultural city presages LA’s continued importance in the genre.

1 Eric Mottram, "Ross Macdonald and the Past of a Formula," Art in Crime Writing:Essays on

Detective Fiction, Ed.Bernard Benstock (New York: St. Martin's, 1983), 98.