The Origins of Modern Detective Fiction: The British Sleuth

Although the formula for modern detective fiction was invented by the eccentric American genius Edgar Allan Poe, the sub-genre came to its perfection in the work of English writers Wilkie Collins, A. Conan Doyle, G. K. Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, and Agatha Christie. As several literary historians have observed, these stories had their roots in the development of science during the nineteenth century, with its elevation of observation and reason as defining, ideal human characteristics. Small wonder that Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (1887) features Dr. Watson’s being introduced to an eccentric chemist named Sherlock Holmes; their decision to share quarters led to arguably the most successful bromance in literary history. Following Poe’s lead, Doyle cast Watson as a better-than-average intellect, like ours, and our sole means of access to the mind of an eccentric genius. With Holmes, the detective formula was established: scientific method + individual genius + eccentricity = an ideal literary consulting detective.

But when the detective romance emigrated to North American early in the twentieth century, a fundamental evolution was needed to blend it with native culture and literary history. The eccentric genius, or the monster of ratiocination, didn’t fit well with the North American self-conception. Within thirty years, a radically different cultural hero emerged, one grounded in American pop culture, literature, and national character. Instead of the eccentric genius, American writers developed the “tough guy”, a determined investigator with a ready supply of insults, witty retorts, hard fists, and revolvers. The prime virtue of superior intelligence gave way to perseverance and adherence to a code. The ability to dazzle other characters, and the reader, by discovering the subtle signifying clue gave way to dogged persistence in the quest and a refusal to accept defeat. The elitism of the detective, whether Lord Peter Wimsey’s (Sayers) literal status as a nobleman or Holmes’s contempt for the ordinary intellect, evolved into a proletarian hero, a man of the people, whose detecting job was no avocation, but a way of paying the rent – often in arrears.

This is, however, a matter of literary history and pop culture, not commercial viability. The figure of the British sleuth has exerted a consistent hold on the popular imagination in North America, with Doyle, Christie, and American Rex Stout by far outselling the “hard-boiled” American writers, except for Mickey Spillane. Moreover, despite a close affinity between American detectives and film noir in the 1940s and 50s, movies about Holmes and M. Poirot (Christie) have done well at the box office and in television series. At the time of this writing (early 2019), for example, Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes (2009) has grossed an estimated $209,000,000 in the United States; the sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011), has done almost as well (box office information: Imdb.com). Moreover, the American television series Elementary has successfully navigated seven years of prime-time, in this era of intense competition from cable and streaming services, with its two notable variations on the Holmes story: the series transplants Holmes to New York City, and Dr. Watson is played by Lucy Liu. In late 2018, comedians Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly released a spoof, Holmes and Watson, which unsuccessfully attempts to continue the tradition of the British-American collaboration Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother (1975). One final indicator of the hold the British sleuth has on the North American imagination is the proliferation of Sherlock Holmes societies. In July 2017 the website “I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere” compiled a list of 172 Holmes societies active in the United states – far more than in any other country, including the United Kingdom.

Early in the twentieth century a few American writers attempted, with varying degrees of success, to transplant the British sleuth directly onto the American landscape. Some, like the Philo Vance books written under the nom de plume S. S. Van Dyne by a respected editor, had a brief run, with modest success on screen, but have disappeared into relative literary obscurity. Ogden Nash’s quip, “Philo Vance /needs a kick in the pance”, can serve as literary epitaph while summarizing the American response to the effete, aristocratic, know-it-all detective whose time in the public eye was brief. Two cousins from Brooklyn, New York, crafted a similar figure in 1929; Ellery Queen, a crime writer, helps the official police solve baffling mysteries. After nearly twenty books by his creators, the Queen brand was taken over by other writers. Although popular in sales during the Depression and shortly after, and occasionally filmed, these mysteries, featuring a blank page on which the reader, in possession of all the clues the detective has, is invited to solve the crime, have passed into the archives of literary history.

The most lasting effort to adapt the sleuth formula to North America came from the typewriter of funding genius Rex Stout (1886-1975), whose Nero Wolfe sets a very high standard for intellect and eccentricity. Wolfe is morbidly obese, a misogynist, a cultivator of orchids, a connoisseur of fine foods, a consumer of enormous amounts of beer, a schedule junkie, and a genius contemptuous of everyone else’s inferior intellect, who describes himself as “merely a genius, not a god” (Fer-de-Lance, 1934). As is the case with Holmes, the otherness of Wolfe’s lofty intellect and his frequent boorishness are buffered by his amiable narrator/assistant Archie Goodwin, himself somewhat a hybrid of Watson and the American “tough guy” that was evolving during the time that Stout began the series. Like Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, Archie has an eye for the ladies, a determination to see the investigation through to its end, and a willingness to use his fists, or his weapon, to protect his boss and the artificial world Wolfe has created for himself, as well as innocent clients and associates. He is, however, a sanitized Marlowe. He drinks milk rather than bourbon, and his association with the ladies is almost always rated G or PG. He’s Wolfe’s ambassador to the real world, but that world is by no means the “mean streets” Chandler described as the place the fictional detective inhabits. Only Christie and Spillane among the British or American detective writers have enjoyed more world-wide sales than Stout during the twentieth century, and television series based on Stout’s work persisted well into the 1990s.

‘Tough Guys’, Pulp Fiction and the Evolution of the American Detective Story

As this brief survey indicates, the British sleuth has fared well in North American commercial markets, but it has had negligible mainstream literary or popular culture impact, whereas the sub-genre that replaced it has profoundly affected literary history. Before turning to the history of that evolution, we should account for the dissimilar aspirations of these writers. Poet W. H. Auden, in his perceptive 1948 essay “The Guilty Vicarage”, while stating his preference for the whodunit over the American detective story, effectively articulated the core difference between the sub-genres: “I think Mr. [Raymond] Chandler is interested in writing, not detective stories, but serous studies of the criminal milieu, the Great Wrong Place, and his powerful but extremely depressing books should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art” (1948, p. 2). Auden’s insight opened the intellectual floodgate for literary and pop culture historians. The sleuth story seeks to be a lively entertainment, an intellectual contest with the reader, whereas the Tough Guy detective story generally aspires, however precariously, to the status of art. This is not to say that American detective writers, and their occasional European protégés, act out the cliché of the impoverished artist; I know of none who didn’t seek to be paid often and well. But they wanted to be paid for writing something finer than commercial stories.

These American writers looked to an entirely different set of traditions and cultural assumptions to shape the evolving detective. Whereas the continental hero emerges from the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution of the nineteenth century, American writers drew on local literary and cultural sources. As George Grella showed in “Murder and the Mean Streets: The Hard-Boiled Detective Novel” (1970, widely re-printed), high-brow American literature was already rich in alienated, individualistic, frontier heroes, beginning with the protagonist of James Fenimore Cooper’s “Leatherstocking Tales”, in which the original American code hero was introduced. Cotemporaneous with the evolution of the American detective was the giant shadow of Ernest Hemingway, whose protagonists invariably became disaffected with societal and religious mores and therefore looked to a personal code as their only meaningful moral benchmark. In addition to these literary sources, America had a long tradition of “dime novels”, or pulp fiction that told stories of war, cowboys, frontiersmen, and criminals, usually aimed at an audience whose taste demanded sensational plots and adventure. By the early twentieth century, pulp fiction about crime had become very popular, and it was a logical evolution for the pulps to publish stories about police detectives and eventually private detectives. But whereas the Strand, in which Doyle published most of the Holmes stories, demanded a sophisticated plot, the pulps favored toughness and adventure.

Throughout the 1920s, pulps like Dime Detective, Detective Story, Hard-Boiled Detectives, Thrilling Detective, and Detective Fiction Weekly thrilled readers with lurid tales of crime, sex, and violence. In 1920, journalist H. L. Mencken and critic/editor George Jean Nathan launched Black Mask, which would become the most influential of these magazines; six years later, new editor Joseph T. Shaw edged the magazine toward respectability by insisting on a better quality of writing and a moral intention in the work. Early contributors to Black Mask included Dashiell Hammett, Earle Stanley Gardner, and Raymond Chandler. One of the magazine’s great moments came when, in 1929, it published Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon in serial form. Although Black Mask ceased publishing in 1951, it was revived in 1985, and exists today in digital format.

Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961)

The writer who invented the American detective, Dashiell Hammett, was a direct product of the Black Mask school and was the only detective writer, English or American, who actually worked as a real-life detective, for the legendary Pinkerton Agency. Hammett was unique in other ways among his fellow detective writers. He was cited for contempt of Congress because he refused to answer questions about the activities of a left-wing group he supported. Between these events he produced a modest body of work and created three very different detective heroes, one of which would lay the groundwork for the future of the sub-genre.

Hammett’s first venture into detective writing occurred in 1923, with a Black Mask story that introduced his nameless protagonist, the Continental Op (Operative), who would appear in several short stories and two novels. This hero is overweight, drab, tough, violent, determined, and ruthless. He inevitably tells his own story – first person central narration—and the style is flat like the narrator’s appearance. He’s alienated; although he accepts the rules of his agency, he’s also guided by his own internal beliefs, what a detective should do in a world lacking valid moral guidance.

If the Op is drab, Sam Spade is flashy, a trend-setter in San Francisco during the late depression years. Hammett devotes careful attention to Spade’s clothing and appurtenances – he wears and uses the most modern and best things of his time. He lives in a hotel and maintains an office with a devoted secretary. But the third person narrator repeatedly refers to Spade as a “blond Satan”, a daring description for the hero of any popular fiction. Although the epithet is a literal physical description, Spade has demonic properties as well as heroic ones. He has a hair-trigger temper, that gets him into fights with criminals and cops alike, the latter often leaving him bruised and furious. He initiates sexual encounters with his partner’s wife and a client. He assaults suspects and district attorneys with verbal abuse, always insisting on the menace of his toughness as a threat to anyone who challenges him. He lies to clients, associates, policemen, district attorneys, suspects, and criminals with no moral self-reflection, but, like many habitual liars, he demands truth from everyone he encounters. Much more verbally gifted than the Op, Spade’s initial aggressive salvo is the verbal quip. When his partner is murdered, Spade nonchalantly orders workers to remove Archer’s name form the office door. One associate captures Spade’s chosen alienation and suspicion well: “You don’t cash many checks for strangers, do you Sammy?” (p. 115).

Spade clearly establishes the template for the development of the American tough guy, whom Sheldon Grebstein called a “moral pragmatist” in a world broken by crime (“The Tough Hemingway and his Hard-Boiled Children”, p. 19). With no trustworthy external moral compass, Spade, like the Op, functions in a landscape populated by criminals, crooked cops and judges, and untrustworthy associates. He’s guided by a ruthless expediency and his commitment to the code of the detective. Explaining why he’s going to turn a suspect in despite his possibly being in love with her, Spade works through a progression of practical reasons – his practice in San Francisco will be compromised if he doesn’t turn the suspect in. But the code is more abstract than that: detectives are supposed to catch criminals, not let them go free: “It can be done, . . . but it’s not the natural thing” (p. 215). It’s revealing to use poet Wallace Stevens’ favorite term, a “fiction”, to describe the code Spade articulates. In the absence of moral certainty, one elects to believe in something one knows to be a construct, and to invest in that fiction the power to guide decision-making and even world-creation. The fiction isn’t, by definition, true; but it can be, in Stevens’ view, and, I suggest, implicitly those of Hammett, Chandler, and Ross Macdonald, a “supreme fiction”, or one that exhibits the highest possible degree of agreement with reality as we perceive it. This “blonde Satan” is loyal to no one and to no ideal, except to himself and his idea of the detective’s code.

On reflection, the most amazing thing about Spade is that Hammett managed to compress so much original material into a single novel. The Op, and Hammett’s later protagonist, Nick Charles, offer variations on the detective hero, but neither approaches the richness of Spade’s world-view. Charles, in The Thin Man (1934), blends the original American detective and the British sleuth. Once employed by a detective agency, Nick married well and has long since retired, with his primary interest in managing a huge stock portfolio and surpassing Marlowe or any Hemingway character in the consumption of alcohol. His wife teases him about “detecting just for fun” (p. 13) and calls him a “hard guy” (p. 30) when he resumes investigating after a minor gunshot wound. He discovers the killer and explains his process to Nora in the style of a Sherlockian summary of the clues everyone else missed.

Raymond Chandler (1888-1959)

Taking the tough guy detective to more philosophical level, Raymond Chandler introduced wise-cracking and tough-dealing Phillip Marlowe in The Big Sleep (1939). Elegiac titles would characterize Chandler’s books, including Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Lady in the Lake (1943), and The Long Goodbye (1953). By far the finest stylist among the American detective writers, Chandler had hoped to be a poet before he found himself involved in the oil business in Southern California. He poetically described Marlowe in “The Simple Art of Murder” (1944, 1950) thus: “down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid” (p. 198). Tough and verbally aggressive like Spade, who can be mean, Marlowe is also compassionate and determined to set things right, insofar as that is possible. His world is even more fallen than Spade’s, with corruption in high, middle, and low places, and examples of integrity and fortitude scarce exceptions to the rule. Like Spade, he battles crooked cops and officials, but he also takes it on himself to protect the powerless. Marlowe exacts hard revenge for some victims of this fallen world. In The Big Sleep, he feels compassion for a private eye who’s in over his head; he later takes satisfaction in killing the hitman who murdered this investigator. Symbolically, Marlowe has an intense capacity for punishment. He’s beaten, sand-bagged, or sapped more often than any detective, to the point that a realist would insist on a concussion protocol. A film version of Farewell, My Lovely released as Murder, My Sweet (1944) called attention to the extraordinary number of times Marlowe was knocked out, accompanied by spiraling geometric shapes. The device quickly becomes self-parody, and one recalls that no one could survive so many blows to the head without suffering chronic traumatic encephalopathy. But Chandler’s point is that Marlowe is as much a recipient as a distributor of the pain in this world, and that he suffers for others, like his client, an aged, dying general. Whereas Spade “won’t play the sap for” anyone, Marlowe instinctively tries to protect the vulnerable from the mean streets, while holding exploiters to a strict account. In The Long Goodbye, he explains his vocation to one of his few trusted allies: “I hear voices crying in the night, and I go to see what’s the matter. You don’t make a dime that way” (p. 229).

During the 1930s Chandler experimented with a variety of names and identities for his hero in stories published in The Black Mask and elsewhere, eventually settling on “Marlowe” because he saw it as an anagram for (Sir Thomas) Malory, the collector of stories in Le Morte d’Arthur, a principal source for legends of King Arthur and his knights. This association significantly connects Chandler’s hero to those in folklore and literature, and further links Marlowe with the quest romance, one of the archetypes behind serious detective fiction. After all, the Grail quest was a series of adventures demanding the sorting of clues, the searching through a hostile environment, the proving of one’s prowess, and the testing of one’s moral code. That is precisely what Chandler intended to set up as a modern palimpsest: the modern searcher resonates with those heroes of ancient times, but they lived in an age of faith, whereas the modern seeker inhabits a time of doubt; therefore, the landscape is far more ambivalent for Spade or Marlowe than it was for Sir Gawain. As if to reinforce that association, Chandler gives Marlowe an odd habit for a modern adventurer: every novel contains at least one mention of Marlowe’s playing chess. That image encloses The Big Sleep, with Marlowe once lamenting that “Knights had no meaning in this game” (156). In The High Window, Marlowe, exhibiting a self-awareness and irony foreign to Spade or Holmes, calls himself a “shop-stained Galahad” (p. 161).

What keeps Marlowe going through the seven novels Chandler completed is his own private code, loyalty to his client. Often the client fires him; sometimes the client is a criminal; usually the client isn’t worthy of Marlowe’s loyalty or suffering. Threatened by a crooked cop in The Big Sleep, Marlowe says he’s selling what “little guts and intelligence the Lord gave me and a willingness to get pushed around to protect a client” (p. 114). He restrains his lust after the general’s daughters because he won’t betray his client, and he takes on professional criminals to advance the client’s business even after the client has fired him. Like Spade, he believes in the fiction of client loyalty enough to risk everything.

The 1940s and Film Noir

Together, Hammett and Chandler contributed critical materials for the emerging American cinematic phenomenon, film noir. During the 1940s, a type of film exploring cynical or pessimistic themes, with tight dialogue, violence, sexual motifs, and existential (anti)heroes became artistically and commercially influential. Almost always shot in stark black and white, these films explored the edges of American culture, and they found material and inspiration in the detective melodramas created by these pioneers. John Huston’s 1941 adaptation of The Maltese Falcon is often considered the first great noir, and Humphrey Bogart’s performance as Spade set a high standard for subsequent noir and detective films. Bogart would confirm his role as the noir detective (Marlowe) in Howard Hawks’ 1946 The Big Sleep. Dick Powell played Marlowe in Edward Dmytryk’s 1944 Murder, My Sweet. Moreover, Chandler was nominated for an Academy Award for his original screenplay The Blue Dahlia (1946) and he co-wrote, with director Billy Wilder, the adaptation for James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity (1944). The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973), though shot in color, remains a noir classic. Among the most interesting experiments with the film noir detective is Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake (1947), directed by and starring Robert Montgomery. That film attempts to reproduce the first-person central narrative of Chandler’s novels, leading to creative uses of mirrors and reflecting surfaces so the audience can see Marlowe/Montgomery in the act of observing the world. Chandler’s deeply flawed final (completed) novel, Playback (1958), was an effort to re-purpose his rejected filmscript from the 1940s.

Obviously, it would be a mistake to equate the American detective story with film noir. Many noir films aren’t about detectives, and some detective stories don’t lend themselves to noir treatment. But there was a decade-long intersection of these two evolving American art forms, and they were mutually influential. One might hypothesize that neither would have evolved exactly as it did without the other’s impact.

Ross Macdonald (1915-1983)

After Hammett and Chandler created the outline for the American detective novel, Ross Macdonald further modified its direction. Kenneth Millar (Macdonald was a pen name) was a graduate student of Auden’s at the University of Michigan, where he was discouraged from writing a creative dissertation, a detective novel. After completing his Ph.D., he experimented with a variety of principal characters and detective plots until 1949, when, using the nom de plume “John Ross Macdonald”, he introduced Lew Archer in The Moving Target. He changed his pen name, dropping the “John” because of confusion with, and possible infringement on, the work of fellow emerging detective writer John D. MacDonald, whose Travis McGee stories form another variation on the detective tradition. His next book, as “Ross Macdonald”, established Archer as the inheritor of the Spade-Chandler mantle. The Drowning Pool (1950) combined the detective romance with a penetrating critique of criminal influence and quack cures in Southern California.

Although Macdonald professed that he chose the name “Archer” as homage to Miles Archer, Spade’s partner and a victim in The Maltese Falcon, literary historians agree that the real value of the name is to link the hero with the same medieval quest romances Chandler embodied in Marlowe’s chess knights. Macdonald’s version, however, was to affiliate his modern hero with the proletarian warrior of classical legend, the yeoman archer, as opposed to the noble knight. His Archer isn’t flashy like Spade or cocky like Marlowe. He’s a diligent, tough code hero, whose principal virtue is compassion, and whose fate is isolation and loneliness. He’s quick with the quip like Spade and Marlowe, but usually his comments are defensive, not a species of aggression. He does, however, express unforgettable contempt for “the soul-destroying monotony of phonies” in The Drowning Pool (p. 30). And he will fight and even kill as his predecessors did, but less frequently and more reluctantly. He’s divorced, and the failure of his marriage haunts him and informs his interaction with others. His code is the ubiquity of guilt. As Archer says in the Doomsters (1958), “The circuit of guilty time was too much like a snake with its tail in its mouth, consuming itself. If you looked too long, there'd be nothing left of it, or of you. We are all guilty. We have to learn to live with it” (p. 199).

That sense of shared guilt, of being a part of the broken world, drives Archer’s psychological and moral vision. People are flawed rather than evil; any contempt we may feel for the criminal is misplaced. Archer seems at times almost as much the priest as the detective, seeking to mend the brokenness of victims and criminals alike. In The Far Side of the Dollar, for example, he gives a large sum of money to a prostitute who has tried unsuccessfully to sell her body to him, and he later sees beyond the lovely legs of the criminal he exposes as a serial murderer to recognize a flawed soul, a person whose Puritan ethic is so ingrained that she believes her victims, being themselves evil, deserved their fate, of which she was simply the agent. Over a series of eighteen Archer novels, Macdonald etched a powerful representation of a waste land populated by souls in torment.

The core of that vision was the quintessential subject of tragedy, the broken family. This is both the cause of deception and the occasion of evil. As the ancient tragedians knew, the greatest harm flows from family members, and these griefs evolve into hatreds, which can in turn lead to crime. Although crime is a socio-cultural phenomenon in Macdonald’s work, as it was in Chandler’s, the solution lies not in the jailing of criminals, but in the healing of souls. There is a wistful sadness at the conclusion of a typical Archer story; although the criminal is punished and the crime is solved, the root cause, our fallen moral and psychological state, isn’t resolved. With his final novels, The Underground Man and Sleeping Beauty, Macdonald combined his interest in ecology as another kind of “original sin” against the planet, with his constant preoccupation with the failed family, to create some of the most powerful ecological fiction of the past century.

Mickey Spillane (1918-2006)

While Chandler and Macdonald were bringing a new seriousness to the detective novel, Mickey Spillane was taking it back toward its pulp origins. Beginning with the revealingly-titled I, the Jury (1947) through thirteen subsequent novels, and others completed by Max Allan Collins, Spillane created a proto-Nazi tough guy, aptly named Mike Hammer, who, in the tradition of Hammett’s Op, was more the enforcer than the detective. As his name suggests, Hammer is a crude impact instrument, and whoever crosses him, whether cop, crook, or innocent bystander, is likely to get a rather trite insult and a punch in the face, if not something worse. As the titles of several of his novels suggest, reflection and uncertainty aren’t part of the Hammer character. Nor is nuance. Subtle detection isn’t on the menu, but, as his second and third titles (My Gun is Quick and Vengeance is Mine, both 1950) suggest, violent action is. Hammer is a force of aggression and violence, and sexual content is also part of the appeal of these lurid adventure stories posing as detective novels. Readers predisposed toward psychological analysis can speculate about the implications of Hammer’s frequent climactic acts of violence against women, or in one case a transvestite, in which the .45 automatic becomes an obvious phallic surrogate. Although it’s a bit of a stretch to call the Hammer novels detective fiction, Spillane did represent him as a private detective, and his body of work has outsold that of any writer mentioned in this survey except Christie.

Robert B. Parker (1932-2010)

During the final decade of Macdonald’s life, a worthy inheritor of the sub-genre continued the evolution. An academic by training, Robert B. Parker completed his Ph.D. dissertation on urban heroes, including those created by Hammett, Chandler and Macdonald, then fashioned a detective who would carry on the tradition. Spenser (no first name, the surname recalling the Elizabethan poet), based in Boston, is like Marlowe and Archer an ex-cop who found the official force’s protocols confining. He was also a gold gloves boxer, a skill that complements the detective’s role nicely. Beginning with The Godwulf Manuscript (1973), Parker published forty novels about Spenser, with the inevitable effect that the quality is uneven. At his best, however, as in Looking for Rachel Wallace and Early Autumn (both 1980), A Catskill Eagle (1985) and Crimson Joy (1988, with the innovation that certain chapters are narrated from the point of view of the unidentified stalker Spenser is seeking) exhibit a worthy successor to the writers he admired. Unlike those heroes, however, Spenser has a small but loyal group of associates. Whereas Marlowe and Spade were essentially loners, Spenser likes, respects, trusts, and confides in one policeman; he’s in a long-term, generally monogamous, relationship with an accomplished professional woman; and he has a complex relationship with the mysterious African-American Hawk, the only man in Boston who may be tougher than him. Hawk lives on the fringe of the law, and in one novel is offered a contract to murder Spenser. Although Spenser tells a protégé in Early Autumn that he and Hawk aren’t exactly friends, they build a respect and trust that borders on fraternal love. Hawk often saves Spenser’s life, and each man lives by his separate code. Some of the best writing in the Spenser series occurs in Early Autumn, when the detective tries to explain to a disaffected youth how private codes guide his and Hawk’s lives. Parker also wrote novels about Jesse Stone, an ex-detective who became police chief in a New England town, and Sunny Randall, a female detective in Boston. Moreover, he completed Chandler’s unfinished novel, The Poodle Springs Mystery (1958; 1989).

While Parker’s work was carrying on the legacy of Hammett, Chandler and Archer, important new voices were creating new perspectives on the American detective narrative. Until at least Parker’s work, women had been represented stereotypically in American detective stories. Lurid pulp fiction covers set the trend: often women were scantily dressed and heavily made up, many exuding sensuous menace and sometimes foisting weapons. In a disturbing number of cases, the murderer proved to be a woman whose sexual charms weren’t lost on the detective. Other women were impediments to the investigation, or complicit, willingly or not, in the crimes. Parker introduced a more complex female character, Dr. Susan Silverman, with whom Spenser is involved in most of the novels, and one of his best, Looking for Rachel Wallace (1980) concerns Spenser’s coming to terms with his own prejudices against lesbianism.

Sue Grafton, 1941-2017; Laura Lippman, b. 1959; Sara Paretsky, b. 1947.

Shortly after that novel was published, exciting new voices demanded more authentic and rounded views of women – as private detectives. There is some controversy as to who first introduced the female private investigator, but one might make a case for either Sue Grafton (1940-2017) or Sara Paretsky (b. 1947) as the pioneer who broke that glass ceiling. Both published novels in 1982 that featured a tough, wise-cracking, sexually-active, independent woman as the central character. Paretsky’s Indemnity Only introduced V. I Warshawski, a Chicago investigator who had become disillusioned as a lawyer, and A is for Alibi was the debut for Kinsey Millhone and Grafton’s “Alphabet series” of mysteries. Both face problems male detectives never had to confront. Frequently, they have to compensate for size and strength disadvantages against male adversaries; Warshawski and Millhone often use cunning and guile to counter brute strength. Like many of her male predecessors, Millhone is an ex-policewoman, who, like Chandler’s and Macdonald’s heroes, left the force because of frustration with the rules, regulations, and paperwork. Like Marlowe and Archer, she uses her connections with the force to gather information and favors that help her complete her investigations. Unlike them, however, her police past brings complications, often romantic ones. Warshawski also finds herself occasionally tempted to engage inappropriately with clients, or even suspects.

A decade later, Laura Lippman (b. 1959) introduced Tess Monaghan, like her creator an ex-newspaper reporter, who solves crimes in Baltimore. Like Millhone, Tess maintains a physical training regimen to compensate against strength and size disadvantages; she’s a rower in the harbor, whereas Kinsey is a distance runner. Both sometimes resent female clients, witnesses, or suspects as rivals in traditionally male categories of beauty or sexual appeal, but both view themselves as quite apart from these male-defined concepts of approval, in Kinsey’s case often with self-abasing humor. In the eleven Monaghan books, Lippman creates a macro-narrative for Tess to which each new book adds information. During the series Tess loses a lover to murder, becomes involved with and marries a younger rock musician, and, in a stunning twist on the detective story, gives birth to a daughter – an event that profoundly sharpens her, and her husband’s, concerns about the dangers that come with being a detective. In Hush Hush (2015) she tries to come to terms with her conflicting responsibilities while working for a client who has ambivalent relationships with her own daughters. These novelists, and the many who follow them, have added an important dimension, and a thematic correction, to the detective fiction America has produced.

Conclusions

From the time of the early Spenser novels, a preoccupation with the pathology of the American detective has changed the direction of American crime fiction. Spade, the Op, Marlowe, and even Archer were hard-drinking men, and Spenser is a beer snob; these habits were presented as something of a virtue. Lawrence Block (b. 1938) introduced Matthew Scudder, an alcoholic ex- New York cop who can’t get a P.I. license because of his alcoholism and publicity relating to his departure from the force. Scudder persists in detective work which he euphemistically calls doing favors. As the title of the first book in the series, The Sins of the Fathers (1976), suggests, the eighteen Scudder novels feature themes of guilt and atonement. Scudder tithes and visits churches; he eventually joins Alcoholics Anonymous. James Lee Burke’s (b. 1936) Dave Robicheaux, at times a deputy in a Louisiana Parish, at others a police force lieutenant, and sometimes a police consultant, is also in A.A.; a criminal group forcibly introduces whiskey into his system, thereby setting back his recovery, in the introductory Neon Rain (1987). A Vietnam War veteran, Robicheaux also suffers from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, so neither he nor his reader can consistently trust his perceptions, a motif executed brilliantly in the 1993 In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead, in which Robicheaux has conversations, real or hallucinated, with a dead Confederate officer’s ghost.

The career of American detective fiction over almost 100 years has been toughness, evolution, and adaptation. Marlowe’s bottle of bourbon in the desk drawer has given way to Robicheaux’ A.A. visits; the seductress/villainess has been supplanted by the tough woman detective; the relative alienation of Marlowe and Archer has yielded to concentrated support units of friends and associates; and the elegiac tones of the Chandler and Macdonald stories have been replaced by a desperate cry for order in an increasingly disordered universe. But the need for the tough guy detective story is demonstrated by its adaptability, with contemporary writers like Irish metaphysician Ken Bruen (b. 1951) whose Jack Taylor novels, beginning with The Guards (2001), transplant the hard-drinking, alienated ex-cop to Galway, Ireland. Commercial interest in the evolving genre may be linked to the expansion of cable and streaming services, always looking for fresh content. Bruen’s characters and plots formed the basis for Virgin Media Ireland’s series Jack Taylor (nine episodes, 2010-2016). Stories about police detectives abound on broadcast, cable and streaming services.

Clearly, the American private detective figure continues to evolve, because the core appeal of the sub-genre is a realistic variation on the core fiction of all detective stories and films: the need to believe in a safe place, in which criminals, high and low, will be discovered by determined advocates, and will be killed or imprisoned, unable to do more harm. We all know this doesn’t happen consistently in the real world, our own “mean streets”: there are far too many unsolved crimes; wealthy suspects get away with crimes for which poor ones would be convicted; and, as the Innocence Project and similar organizations have shown, far too many innocent people languish in prison or become victims of the death penalty. This last is a double injustice: while the innocent suspect suffers, the criminal goes free, perhaps to prey on other victims. We recognize that is the world in which we live. But the fictional detective, whether an insufferable prig like Holmes, a ruthless tough guy like Spade, or a long-distance runner like Millhone, creates for the artistic moment a refuge in the ideal fiction of a world in which crime really doesn’t pay.

Works Cited:

Auden, W. H. “The Guilty Vicarage.” Harper’s, 1948. Widely reprinted.
Block, Lawrence. The Sins of the Fathers. New York: Harper Collins, 1976.
Bruen, Ken. The Guards. New York: St. Martins Minotaur, 2001.
Burke, James Lee. In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993.
- - -. The Neon Rain. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987.
Chandler, Raymond. “The Simple Art of Murder.” Atlantic Monthly, 1944; expanded in Saturday Review of Literature, 1950 and in Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder. New York, 1950.
- - -. The Big Sleep. New York: Knopf, 1939.
- - -. The Lady in the Lake. New York: Knopf, 1943.
- - -. The Long Goodbye. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953.
Grafton, Sue. A Is for Alibi. New York: Henry Holt, 1982.
Hammett, Dashiell. The Maltese Falcon. New York: Knopf, 1930 (serialized in Black Mask, 1929).
- - -. The Thin Man. New York: Knopf, 1934.
Lippman, Laura. Hush Hush. New York: William Morrow, 2015.
Macdonald, Ross. The Doomsters. New York: Knopf, 1958.
- - -. The Drowning Pool. New York: Knopf, 1950.
- - -. The Far Side of the Dollar. New York: Knopf, 1964.
Paretsky, Sara. Indemnity Only. New York, 1982.
Parker, Robert B. Crimson Joy. New York: Delacorte, 1988.
- - -. Early Autumn. New York: Delacorte, 1980.
- - -. Looking for Rachel Wallace. New York: Delacorte, 1980.
Spillane, Mickey. I, the Jury. Boston: E. P. Dutton, 1947.
Stout, Rex. Fer-de-Lance. New York. Farrar & Rinehart, 1934.

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Citation: Dougherty, David C.. "American Detective Fiction". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 16 April 2019 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=19511, accessed 02 May 2025.]