Neither Tarnished Nor Afraid

By R.Z. Sheppard

The novel rode out of Spain on the horse and donkey of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and the modern short story had its early masters in Russia, France and England. But the hard-boiled detective was born in America. His popularity has remained in force for half a century. He can be seen on countless shelves of paperbacks and hardcovers, and he has appeared on prime time since the first vacuum tube was plugged in. The TV series Spenser: For Hire and Mike Hammer are two of his latest hangouts. As he was in the films of the '40s, so he is today, in Raymond Chandler's memorable phrase, a man "who is neither tarnished nor afraid" as he walks down America's mean streets.

Good cases have been made for locating his origins in the boot steps of the lonesome pioneer. Robert B. Parker, creator of Spenser, a private investigator so sure of himself that he needs only one name, even wrote a Ph.D. thesis on the subject. According to the traditional ideal, to survive with dignity on the American frontier required a touch of ruthlessness and a personal code of honor. "When the wilderness disappeared at the end of the 19th century," says Parker, the hero "became a man, alone, facing an urban wilderness." A more precise definition of the breed came naturally enough from Chandler, the American-born, British-educated creator of Philip Marlowe, the detective who got more similes to the mile than anybody before or since ("as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food"). Laid down in his essay The Simple Art of Murder, Chandler's description of the fictional American detective has the power of an ecclesiastical oath: "He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man's money dishonestly and no man's insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks--that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness."

These are the essentials for obstinate individualism, a national trait elevated to a romance that not only endures but thrives. The literary descendants of Chandler and his contemporaries James M. Cain and Dashiell Hammett have unleashed stalkers of the urban wildernesses across the country. Parker and George V. Higgins cover Boston; Elmore Leonard and Loren D. Estleman have a lock on Detroit; Stephen Greenleaf and Bill Pronzini have staked out San Francisco, and Washington is in the hands of Ross Thomas. In Cincinnati, the territory belongs to Jonathan Valin.

Tough investigators are concentrated mostly in New York and in California, the Olduvai Gorge of the chivalrous gumshoe. By far the best known are the West Coast trio of Hammett's Sam Spade, Chandler's Marlowe and Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer. Occasional readers of the form tend to confuse Ross with John D. MacDonald and Gregory Mcdonald. The first was born Kenneth Millar in 1915 and died three years ago of Alzheimer's disease. The second is 69 and lives in Florida, as does his popular P.I. Travis McGee, the "tinhorn knight on a stumbling Rosinante from Rent-A-Steed." The third is a former Boston Globe critic and the inventor of the flippant Fletch, whose snooping is sanctioned by a press card rather than a badge.

Location is as important to detective fiction as it is to the real estate business. The glitz centers of the Sunbelt offer the irresistible drama of drug traffic played against a background of pastel, stucco and palm fronds. Joseph Hansen (Fadeout, A Smile in His Lifetime, Gravedigger) offers an alternative to the macho, down-at-the-heels stereotype. He is David Brandstetter, a Southern California insurance investigator who is affluent, well dressed and homosexual. This subgenre is bicoastal; see George Baxt's novels, beginning with A Queer Kind of Death. The protagonist is a gay New York City police detective named Pharaoh Love. Other successful challenges to the bruiser class are Sara Paretsky's Chicago sleuth, Ms. V.I. Warshawski (Deadlock), and George C. Chesbro's Robert Frederickson, a dwarf with a doctorate in criminology and a black belt in karate.

The classic shamus prefers a snub-nosed .38, made in the U.S.A. He is invariably single (Philip Marlowe was a bachelor until Chandler's last, unfinished novel; Lew Archer lives alone, as does Spenser, although Spenser keeps company with Susan Silverman, a compassionate shrink). He is also short of cash and careless about his clothing. He is a two-fisted drinker (even though James Crumley's Milo Milodragovitch goes for peppermint schnapps) and sometimes drops his guard long enough to reveal a flash of erudition (Marlowe has atrocious taste in socks but can quote Browning). Touches of class cater to the tough-guy fantasies of the literati. Albert Camus, whose spare existential novels were influenced by U.S. detective fiction, looked like Humphrey Bogart portraying Sam Spade. Hemingway followed in the footsteps of Mark Twain and Ring Lardner. But it is hard to read such terse narratives as The Killers and To Have and Have Not without imagining gumshoe tracks leading back to Black Mask magazine.

America's native writing style developed--at a penny a word--in the highly degradable pulp pages of this monthly. At no extra cost, Black Mask came wrapped in an irony. It was founded with $500 in 1920 by the journalist and scholar H.L. Mencken and the playwright George Jean Nathan as a way of financing the unprofitable Smart Set, their magazine of uptown wit and sophisticated prose. The "louse," as Mencken called his detective journal, was an immediate success, and in six months he sold it for $100,000, the price of 10 million words.

Black Mask's early contributors rejected the class-conscious plots and genteel style of the British school of crime writing. "Hammett gave murder back to the people who commit it," said Chandler, who found the details of British mysteries as unexciting as "spillikins in the parlor." Hammett's early hero, the Continental Op, is a nameless abstraction of the hard-boiled ethic: "I pass up about twenty-five or thirty thousand of honest gain because I like being a detective, like the work. And liking work makes you want to do it as well as you can." His connection to women is like kissing dry ice: "You think I'm a man and you're a woman," he says to a female culprit. "That's wrong. I'm a manhunter and you're something that has been running in front of me." He later shoots the lady in the leg to prevent her escape.

By today's behavioral standards, the Continental Op is a head case. But his blunt vernacular helped to establish the voice that influenced generations of American writers. Like that other homegrown art form, jazz, the hard-boiled style relied on a formula but encouraged improvisation. James M. Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice) counterpointed violence with steamy sexuality; Chandler's signature note of sarcastic charm can be heard in the opening of his 1936 story Goldfish: "I wasn't doing any work that day, just catching up on my foot-dangling." Currently, Parker's Spenser sings the best sassy blues: "Ideal options aren't something I have much to do with. Most of the time I'm shuttling between bad and worse." Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer prefers stride (when he's not playing chopsticks), and John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee fuses bebop and rap: "Go get the lady with the unusual haircut and add her to the stack. Go get Meyer and the boat and bring the boat around. Use the big anchor and the power takeoff winch to pull the Flush out of the mangroves. Cork up the Munequita and rig a pump and float her." The form has also had its share of parodies. The best was S.J. Perelman's Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer: "I shifted my two hundred pounds slightly, lazily set fire to a finger, and watched it burn down."

In place of intricate plotting, hidden clues and surprise solutions, American detective fiction relies on character and language. Both are aggressively egalitarian, rejecting fancy airs and flowery talk. Here is Marlowe recalling a visit to a client: "I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars." He and his kin are cynical, terse and masters of an amiably menacing tone that echoes the classic response to insult of Owen Wister's The Virginian: "When you call me that, smile."

But even hard-boiled can be overdone. Says Evan Hunter, who as Ed McBain has written more than three dozen books in the 87th Precinct series: "For me, 'hard-boiled' means not turning away from a dead body and going into the hall to vomit. It means going into a morgue and smelling a stench that makes you want to wash your hands for days." In short, unflinching realism, a misunderstood term. Says Elmore Leonard, the macabre ironist of crime and punishment: "If I were to ever write a private-eye story, and try to make it as realistic as the stories I do write, what would he do? Private detectives don't do that much. You gather information in divorce cases, or spend a lot of time finding bail bondsmen."

From the start, the genre has taken shape and tone from the demands of its audience. The American male likes to believe that he is reading it like it is, and the novel of the modern knight-errant is very much a male genre. It operates on the rigid belief that the world is rotten; to think otherwise is dangerous and unmanly. A corollary view is that the deck is stacked against the decent little guy or distressed damsel. The evidence often seems overwhelming. The shattering aftereffects of World War I, the rise of organized crime during Prohibition, the disillusionment of the Depression, all paralleled the development of the gallant equalizer. Today he is likely to deal with government corruption, financial fraud and environmental threats. "I don't consider my newest book, Barrier Island, as hard-boiled fiction," says John D. MacDonald. "It's about a land scam in islands off the Mississippi coast." The detective story is one of the few fiction forms that deal directly with the seamier side of American life. To improvise on Mencken, himself an American institution no less secure than the one he launched with Black Mask, no one ever went broke overestimating the appetite for that.

With reporting by William Sonzski/Boston, with other bureaus