Lectures

Lecture 12

The Detective Novel

The genre of the detective story was invented in the mid-1800s by Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote the first detective stories: "The Mystery of Marie Roget," "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," and "The Purloined Letter," among others. Several other writers followed Poe's example during the late 1800s, most famously Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes.

Over the years, a "code of ethics" evolved that defined the boundaries of the genre. Most detective stories follow these criteria. Among the most important is the requirement that the author be fair: all of the facts must be given to the reader, so that the reader is able to solve the puzzle if he is astute enough. It is the author's job, also, not to make the truth obvious. Usually, there is a just ending: evil is punished, good is rewarded, and justice prevails.

In 1935, Dorothy Sayers delivered an address at Oxford University on the mystery novel, saying,

Nothing in a detective story need be held true unless the author has vouched for it in his own person. Thus, if the author says, "Jones came back at 10 o'clock," we are entitled to assume that Jones did indeed come home at that time and no other. But if the author says, "The grandfather clock was striking 10 when Jones reached home," then we can feel no certainty as to the time of Jones's arrival, for nothing compels us to accept the testimony of the clock. Nor need we believe the testimony of any character in the story, unless the author himself vouches for that character's integrity.

There are several types of detectives: the amateur detective (that is, an ordinary pertson who takes it upon himself or herself to solve a mystery); the police detective (that is, a trained member of the law enforcement community), and the private detective, sometimes called a private investigator or a private eye (that is, a detective whose profession is to solve mysteries, but who is not a member of the police, and is privately paid by his or her clients).

The Golden Age of "hard-boiled" detective fiction was the period between the two world wars, 1920-39. World War I had created a strong cynicism about the goodness and rightness of the authorities, including the police. Prohibition had created a whole new class of criminals, and further undermined the public's confidence in the government and the police; the Great Depression had created poverty and crime and even more cynicism; the ordinary person felt powerless.

In response to this climate, Raymond Chandler, Carroll John Daly, James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett and others developed a style of detective story known as "hard-boiled." Hard-boiled detectives are smart, tough, and unsentimental. Hard-boiled stories almost always are populated by underworld figures, wealthy people with too much money and too few morals, and occasionally, genuinely good people (these are mostly the victims; innocence is not a good quality to have in a hard-boiled world).

Not all hard-boiled detectives have the same philosophy, however. Hammett's detectives have a core of existentialism: life, they believe, is inherently meaningless. The meaning in life comes from establishing a code by which to live and then adhering to it with enormous self-discipline. Hammett's detectives are cool, objective, and distant; they are willing to lie, steal, and manipulate to solve a case--that is, to protect the good people from the bad ones. Sam Spade, for example, can set aside love in order to choose to do what's right.

By contrast, Chandler's detectives, especially Philip Marlowe, have a sense that there is an order inherent in the world, and that it is their job to try to preserve what little of it they can. Chandler shows Los Angeles in all its gritty, glamorous glory, a place where beauty and corruption exist side-by-side, and very little is what it appears to be. Time after time, he contrasts the real beauty of nature with the false beauty of "civilization." There are very few true innocents in Chandler's novels, but there are a few people who are good; there are many who are bad.

Philip Marlowe is no innocent; he is the good guy, although his definition of "good" probably wouldn't be endorsed by many policemen. He tracks down murderers, but his interest isn't so much in murder as in correcting injustices, in righting wrongs, and in protecting the weak. In his famous essay about detective fiction, "The Simple Art of Murder," Chandler wrote that his detective must be a "knight" whose mission is to protect the weak and see that justice is done: "He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be...a man of honor--by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world."

In the introduction to Trouble is My Business (1950), Chandler wrote that "The emotional basis of any detective story was and had always been that murder will out and justice will be done." But the hardboiled detective story is set in a different sort of world: "...obviously it does not believe that murder will out and justice will be done--unless some very determined individual makes it his business to see that justice is done...Their characters lived in a world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civilization had created the machinery for its own destruction, and was learning to use it with all the moronic delight of a gangster trying out his first machine gun. The law was something to be manipulated for profit and power. The streets were dark with something more than night."

And through those streets walked Philip Marlowe. In a letter to John Houseman, Chandler wrote, "Marlowe and his kind were the last honest men left in our society; they did their assigned jobs and took their wages; they were not acquisitive nor did they try to rise in the world by stepping on other people's faces; they would never try to take over the earth nor would they compensate for their own weakness by pushing other people around. Marlowe's was, in fact, the only attitude that a self-respecting, decent man could maintain in today's rapacious and brutal world."

Sam Spade lived in San Francisco, Philip Marlowe in Los Angeles. In the novels featuring them, and the novels of many other writers of hard-boiled fiction, California is a central character. Their California is a place of stunning and deceptive beauty, a place where glamour is just a thin veneer over grit and corruption, a place where the endless potential of California is twisted by greed for money or power.

Walter Mosely's Easy Rawlins is in the hard-boiled tradition, but with a twist: he is African-American, and thus faces obstacles traditional detectives do not. Devil in a Blue Dress (1990) is the first in a series; it is set in post-World War II Los Angeles, at a time when Los Angeles and the rest of the country are on the brink of huge changes. There is a mention of population shifts in the novel; in the next few years, Los Angeles would grow exponentially. In addition, the postwar world saw the first stirrings of the Civil Rights Movement. Easy Rawlins isn't overtly a social activist, but he has a strong sense of morality. Writer Brigid Brtophy says that the hard-boiled detective is a mythological hero who performs miracles, but instead of superhuman strength or magic, he uses "nothing but common sense, which however, the detective uses to an uncommon, heroic degree." He uses it for the same purpose as a mythic hero uses magic powers or talismans: "the deliverance of the population from a threat." She wasn't writing about Easy Rawlins specifically, but he fits the description.

Following is a list of the Easy Rawlins books:

• Devil in a Blue Dress (1990)
• A Red Death (1991)
• White Butterfly (1992)
• Black Betty (1994)
• A Little Yellow Dog (1996)
• Gone Fishing (1997)
• Bad Boy Brawley Brown (2002)
• Six Easy Pieces (2003)
• Little Scarlet (2004)
• Cinnamon Kiss (2005)
• Blond Faith (2007)

If you'd like more information on any of the topics covered in this lecture, go to the Links page. Enjoy!

Some of the information in this lecture derives from:

1. Deane Mansfield Kelley and Lois A. Marchino, eds. The Longman Anthology of Detective Fiction.
2. Earl F. Bargainnier, The Gentle Art of Murder

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