Detectives
And
Their
Victims
(Continued from Page 5)
figure in a detective story. Of course, our
snooper may be at the right place at the
right time to see Lady Pilfer snitch the
defense plans from the ambassadors’
dispatch case, but if the solution to the
entire case falls in his lap, then is he a
detective?
Of course not. What better example
than Dupin’s deduction that if the
purloined letter wasn’t in any of the places
he looked, and he knew it was in the room,
then it had to be right under his nose
because that was the only place he didn’t
look?
I wish I had a buck for every time that
simple trick has been used in the one
hundred and twenty-some years since it
was written. But you get the idea. The
tradition comes down to us without much
change—using the head to solve what
appears to be an insoluble mystery.
What has changed is the guy who’s
head is being used, and the things he uses
it on. Dupin was a number of steps
removed from even being a private eye.
He was, in fact, more than a little bit
weird, as he never (to my knowledge) left
his suite before the sun had set.
Highly trained mind
What he did have was a highly trained
analytical mind, and he used it well. Poe’s
imitators, and there were hundreds over
the next 75 years, developed different
characters but continued with the ec
centric but superior individual.
Which leads to a dead end. How many
strange geniuses can there be solving
increasingly unbelievable crimes?
The British when they started writing
them, made a hash of the whole thing, and
almost killed off the detective story.
Sherlock Holmes (and I have a two-volume
annotated collection which I have read
from front to back and thus am entitled to
say this), just wasn’t all that hot. If you’ve
read one recently, you’ll see what
I mean—alright for 12 year-olds, but
that’s about it.
Holmes wasn’t the absolute worst, of
course—there are bushels of bad British
stories with incredible plots solved by
unbelievable sleuths without the slightest
bit of action, suspense or dash.
Copying the British
And in this country they are copying
the British. How can good detective stories
be written if people are copying Agatha
Christie’s Hercule Poroit or Miss Marple
or Parker Pyne, ad nauseum? I mean,
when Poroit “begins to use the little grey
cells,” the question that always pops into
my own cranial matter is who gives a
damn? By the time he or Jane Marple get
to the conclusion, your mind is parched
from the arid writing and lifeless
characters. Who cares if Lord Creep
sworth fiendishly devised a system of
introducing trained Anacondas into the
guest bath, to kill off 16 of his fellow heirs
to the Stoneybroke mines? I mean really.
The big change (and if I haven’t gotten
in enough trouble already by saying the
British write crummy detective stories),
came with the introduction of the tough,
realistic American private-eye. The
British can’t hold a candle to him. He
saved the detective story by making it
believeable again.
Dashiell Hammett
Most of the credit goes to Dashiell
Hammett. He took the detective story
away from the effete and put sense and
reality back in. His detectives were not
nice guys doing Aunt Sarah a favor by
solving the crime in between tennis sets,
but instead were hard-edged characters
trying to stay honest by their own stan
dards and make a buck at the same time.
Just like in real life.
That can’t be stressed enough.
Raymond Chandler once wrote that
"Hammett took murder out of the
Venetian vase and dropped it into the
alley. (He) gave murder back to the kind
of people that commit it for reasons, not
just to provide a corpse; and with the
means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling
pistols, curare, and tropical fish.”
The British and their American
imitators didn’t give up (and they haven’t
yet). In her 1929 introduction to The
Omnibus of Crime, Dorothy Sayers wrote,
“the detective story is part of the
literature of escape, and not of expression.
(There is) a possibility that the detective
story will some time come to an end.”
Hand-boiled streets
No wonder she felt that way—she was
writing stories about the exploits, (gen
teel, of course), of Lord Peter Wimsey.
The amazing part is that she wrote that
introduction five years after Hammett had
delivered The Dain Curse, which in
troduced his Continental Op, of the Con
tinental Detective Agency, a purposely
nameless character from the hard-boiled
mean streets of San Francisco, who in that
story had to deal with real-live quack
American faith-healers, a morphine
addicted heroine, and a highly believable,
honest to God murderer who shot people.
Needless to say, Hammett wasn’t
represented in Sayers Omnibus—he could
revitalize the genre, but the hold-outs
weren’t buying. Sayers, Christie, (and a
hundred others) went on writing, and
people went on reading them, but Ham
mett made them old-fashioned, as each
generation of readers has discovered.
And he did the same thing to his
American compatriots. Reading the ad
ventures of Philo Vance or the early Ellery
Queen will show why. They dealt with
nicely packaged little tricks of logic
without relation to what was going on in
the streets.
Spade—Bogart
The gap widened when Hammett
introduced Sam Spade, and Humphrey
Bogart portrayed Spade in The Maltese
Falcon. Spade was tough, un
compromising, but independent of stan
dard morality. While everyone else was
after the bejeweled statuette, Spade was
seeking his partner’s murderer, even
though Spade couldn’t stand him. It was a
point of honor—nobody shoots my partner.
Of course everybody jumped on
Hammett’s bandwagon. And it’s still going
strong, too, right down through Chandler’s
Phillip Marlowe in the Big Sleep, to
Spillane’s Mike Hammer to the present.
Hammett’s tough realism opened the
door to believable police procedural’s too.
the best (in my opinion) being the 87th
Precinct series of Ed McBain. Populated
by realistic characterizations of real-live
cops, McBain depicts the grinding
procedures and human effort that solves
most crimes. Dumb cops, slightly crooked
cops, tired cops—the same types that
collectively perform any organized task,
except here they seek out axe-murders and
psychopathic killers.
It also brought on a whole wave of new
amateur sleuths, but with a difference.
They are real people, caught up in murder
and mystery that is literally up the
reader’s alley—photographers, cab
drivers, reporters, medical examiners,
and even a librarian or two.
Motivation for crime
The solution, in these stories, no longer
depended on the hero’s great knowledge of
Paleontology or Etruscan hieroglyphs,
and the motivation for crime more im
portantly, was made credible. Granted
that fiction depends on the willing
suspension of disbelief, Hammett’s heirs,
unlike their British cousins, discovered as
he had that it needn’t be stretched in order
to tell a good detective story. That in fact,
the reverse was true.
Which brings us down to the present,
and where do we go from here. The
detective story is strong, and doing well.
The first detective novel a writer produces
is good for 4,000 hard covers, and I don’t
know how many paperbacks. Somebody’s
reading them, and coming back for more.
Lots of crap is being produced, too.
Some of the worst comes from Richard
Prather in the form of Shell Scott, an over
grown juvenile delinquent, and John J.
McDonald’s Travis McGee. Scott, blasting
around Hollywood in his chalk-white hair
and Cadillac, humping every broad in the
book, could be out-witted by an aged
paraplegic. McGee, with his sophomoric
sex fantasies of winning the reserved,
abused women who populate each and
every one of his adventures, couldn’t
detect smoke if his upper lip was on fire.
But they’ve got nothing on Donald
Hamilton, and the Matt Helm series. Helm
is a joke that’s been carried through
millions of copies. His stupid stories aren’t
worth the time it takes to read them—no
plot, paper-thin characters and huge glops
of incredible sex. The sort of thing that
turns off readers before they discover the
better stuff.
Lee Archer
But there are, in compensation, some
greats around. One is Ross McDonald’s
Lew Archer. Archer, who was born out of
McDonald’s complex mind during the
closing days of the Second World War,
could be the son of Hammett’s Sam Spade,
grown up in a post-war world cut off from
its moral and philosophical moorings.
Archer’s a detective solving crimes as
part of an unspoken, unstated quest for
human understanding and some sort of
durable inner peace. He’s traveling, at one
level, an Odysseus-like road through the
social and physical horrors of California
today, and reporting with painful realism
just exactly what's going on.
But don't be put off by that. Archer’s a
heavy dude, as rough as they come. For
example—*‘I shot to kill. Una died on her
feet, a a smudged hole in the temple, and
thumped to the floor.” McDonald has
related modern crime in a modern setting,
and put his over-age, divorced, childless
hero smack in the middle of today.
Which means that someone will come
along (if he or she hasn’t already and I just
haven’t read them yet), and advance right
into tomorrow. What that will be like, I
don't know. But as long as there are
writers, there will be detective stories. The
class will again become stilted and dry,
and again someone will break through,
just as it happens in every other type of
literature.
Irresistable appeal
Because the appeal of the detective
story is irresistable, and people will want
more of them. For example:
I held the pen-light between my teeth,
and jimmied the file cabinet lock with my
picks. The first two drawers held nothing
more than the musty records of twenty
years in the freight business, a tattered
and thumb-printed collection of in
ventories, storage receipts and damage
claims.
I found them in the bottom drawer, out
of order and in the wrong file, jammed
between two yellowed brochures for diesel
trucks. I held the pen-light close to the bill
of lading, and then to the copy, and back to
the original.
“Both of them have been tampered
with,” 1 said to myself. “Somebody has
changed the date, which means that the
platinum wire was still in the Stiles St.
warehouse, and something else was
hijacked. Two dead, three wounded, and
the stuff was sitting on a palet, marked
‘baby bottles’ or something. Somebody got
double-crossed.”
I put the papers back the way they had
been, and was locking the file again when
he hit me. The force of the blow shot my
head down into the top of the filing cabinet,
giving the proceedings a nasty one-two
effect I could have done without. Before I
could turn around, he hit me again, and
that was that. I remember the last thing I
thought as I went down was, “Twice in the
same week.”