While British mysteries may be dominated by eccentric geniuses who solve crimes with their wits and denounce the murderer amidst a group of suspects in the drawing room of a stately old house, the American flavour of the genre brought us the professional private investigator just trying to make a living in a tough racket and who solves his cases mostly by getting knocked down and getting back up again. These are usually flawed men in an unethical world working for morally ambiguous ends.
These are the classic hard-boiled detectives.
Sam Spade in Dashiell Hammett’s Maltese Falcon might be one of the names that springs to mind when you hear the term “hard-boiled detective” but the employee of the Continental Detective Agency, known only as the Continental Op in Hammett’s earlier 1929 novel Red Harvest, has a stronger claim to helping create the genre. In this action-packed story, the Op comes to Personville to meet with the reform-minded publisher of the local newspaper only to find his client has been murdered. The corrupt father of the murdered newspaper man hires the Op to clean up the gangs that are threatening his control of the town and murders mount as the detective plays the bad guys against one another. Although the Op realizes that “He who fights with monsters must take care lest he thereby become a monster,” he finds it satisfying to manipulate the gangsters into killing one another and ends by arranging to have the governor declare a state of martial law, sacking the crooked local cops.
Humphrey Bogart brought Raymond Chandler’s private investigator Philip Marlowe to the screen in The Big Sleep but the cinematic version can’t pack in all the twists, turns, double-crosses and convoluted puzzles featured in the novel. Marlowe is hired to meet with a man blackmailing the wild youngest daughter of a wealthy invalid. In the course of his first meeting with the rich General Sternwood, Marlowe learns in passing that Regan, the bootlegger husband of Sternwood’s other daughter, is missing and has been presumed to have run off with a gangster’s wife. He is annoyed that in the course of the blackmail investigation, everyone assumes he has been hired by the General to find Regan. Several murders and fist-fights later, the blackmail case is resolved and Marlowe decides to do what everyone thought he was doing in the first place, which leads to more fights, murders, and some truly great dialogue.
Ross MacDonald’s detective Lew Archer continues in Marlowe’s footsteps. In The Drowning Pool, Archer is hired to track down a the writer of a poison pen letter but is soon in the middle of a murder investigation when a rich woman is found drowned in the family’s suburban L.A. swimming pool. The multiple suspects include members of the drowned woman’s family, a local oil magnate looking to drill on the family’s lands and Archer himself. As in other Archer novels, MacDonald explores the changing dynamics of American life, dysfunctional families and the widening gap between the haves and have-nots. These themes are handled in a well-plotted story with a satisfying twist of an ending.
Private detective Mike Hammer, introduced in Mickey Spillane’s I, the Jury, is perhaps the ultimate hard-boiled tough guy. There is nothing that will stop Hammer’s quest for vigilante vengeance when the war buddy who saved his life is brutally murdered. The beatings and the murders keep coming as Hammer determines which of the many suspects killed his friend. The Hammer novels have been called sexist, racist, misogynist, violent and lurid but critics have also noted that Spillane has a “flair for fast-action writing.” If you have the stomach, Mike Hammer makes for an exciting read.
Come to your local library to find out whodunnit.
A Good Read is a column by Tri-City librarians that is published on Wednesdays. Michael DeKoven works at Port Moody Public Library.
