1. 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

2. 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.

3. 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

4. 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.

5. -- 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

6. 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.

7. 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

8. 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.

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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.