Looking for Clues

Rick Henderson from the December 1994 issue

Dixie City Jam, by James Lee Burke, New York: Hyperion, 367 pages, $22.95
Free Fall, By Robert Crais, New York: Bantam, 288 pages, $19.95/4.99 paper
"K" Is for Killer, by Sue Grafton, New York: Henry Holt and Co., 284 pages, $22.95
Black Betty, by Walter Mosley, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 255 pages, $25.99
Walking Shadow, by Robert B. Parker, New York: G. P Putnam's Sons, 270 pages, $19.95
Tunnel Vision, by Sara Peretsky, New York: Delacorte Press, 432 pages, $21.95

In his 1950 essay, "The Simple Art of Murder," Raymond Chandler showed nothing but contempt for the "logic and deduction" model of detective stories made famous by Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy Sayers. Chandler savaged the literary pretensions of those writers, mostly of British descent, who relied upon "the same incomprehensible trick of how somebody stabbed Mrs. Pottington Postlethwaite III with the solid platinum poniard just as she flatted on the top note of the 'Bell Song' from Lakme in the presence of fifteen ill-assorted guests."

Chandler said Sayers and her clever colleagues wrote stories that "do not really come off intellectually as problems, and they do not come off artistically as fiction. They are too contrived, and too little aware of what goes on in the world. They try to be honest, but honesty is an art. [The inferior mystery writer] thinks a complicated murder scheme which baffled the lazy reader, who won't be bothered itemizing the details, will also baffle the police, whose business is with details." Chandler, and Dashiell Hammett two decades earlier, reinvented the detective story with their hard- boiled style, detailing believable events that might happen to actual people.

Although Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, and their literary descendants retain a large following, there are dozens of contemporary writers keeping the realistic crime novel alive. While the writers of science fiction, fantasy, and even romance novels create heroic individuals who inhabit ideal worlds, the author of the hard-boiled crime novel must formulate characters and situations that are constrained by reality. Readers who want to see heroism demonstrated in plausible settings -- and get some fine storytelling in the bargain -- can find plenty to enjoy in hard-boiled detective fiction.

With August Dupin, Edgar Allan Poe created the private "consulting detective" in literature; Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes immortalized the character type. But contemporary society is much removed from 1830s France or Victorian London. The early detectives were brought in after some chaotic event -- usually a murder or robbery -- disrupted the stable order of that time's proper society. For the most part, Dupin and Holmes, although technically private citizens, worked for the police or some other government agency.

By the time Hammett arrived in the 1920s, the world wasn't nearly so orderly. Crime bosses, bad cops, and corrupt politicians had disrupted "decent society," or prevented it from developing in the first place. The boom towns of the American West were easy targets for the rogues and charlatans who inhabited hard-boiled stories. Private investigators were called in because government authorities couldn't be trusted.

For his first novel, Red Harvest (1927), Hammett created the Western town of Personville, "an ugly city of forty thousand people, set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining. Spread over this was a grimy sky that looked as if it had come out of the smelters' stacks.

"The first policeman I saw needed a shave. The second had a couple of buttons off his shabby uniform. The third stood in the center of the city's main intersection -- Broadway and Union Street -- directing traffic, with a cigar in one corner of his mouth. After that I stopped checking them up."

In this environment, any order a detective could restore might be limited to those few individuals within his personal contact. But Hammett didn't write morality plays. His protagonists are themselves corruptible. At the end of The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade turns Brigid O'Shaughnessy over to the police for killing his partner -- not because he believes murder is immoral but because a private eye can't remain in business if his partner's murder is unsolved. And Nick and Nora Charles try to obscure the moral depravity that surrounds them by sinking into an alcoholic haze.

Chandler's creation of Philip Marlowe added a new dimension to the hard-boiled story: the detective as individualist hero. The heroic detective, wrote Chandler, "must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor -- by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it."

Philip Marlowe has sired many literary offspring, private detectives who live heroically in a corrupt society. Today's hard-boiled writers portray a world in which a semblance of order has replaced the chaos of Chandler's day. But it's a malevolent order, imposed by gang leaders, crime bosses, crooked cops, or venal public officials. And this malevolence has begun to seep into the lives of normal people -- some wealthy, some not.

Today's heroic detective serves as the moral center of an immoral society: He (or in some important cases, she) is an efficacious individual whose very presence insinuates an element of chaos in the prevailing malevolent order; to be successful, he must disrupt the corruption around him so that some sense of rationality -- not spontaneous order in the liberal sense, but some sustainable social structure -- can try to reassert itself. The detective also lives by a personal code of morality that forces him to defy the statutory law when necessary. And he faces moral challenges that sometime supersede the mystery he tries to solve. As first-person accounts, these novels also give readers inside knowledge of the detective's thoughts and emotions.

Robert B. Parker, the dean of today's hard-boiled writers, was chosen by Chandler's estate to complete the unfinished Marlowe novel Poodle Springs. Unfortunately, Chandler dealt Parker a rotten hand: In the portion Chandler left behind, he had Marlowe marry and leave the mean streets of Los Angeles for the pampered wealth of the High Desert.

Parker has been on much more solid ground, however, in the two dozen novels featuring his Boston-based detective Spenser. At his best, Spenser is a prototypical hard-boiled hero: He says little, while remaining tough, literate, and funny. And Spenser lives by his own code of ethics. In Paper Doll (1993), for instance, Spenser solves a murder but refuses to turn in the killer because the victim, in Spenser's view, deserved her fate.

In Walking Shadow, Spenser serves as bodyguard to the head of a theater company on whose board sits Susan Silverman, Spenser's longtime love. The director believes he's being stalked, and the impoverished company hires Spenser as his protector, expecting Susan to foot the bills.