AUDASE

Hard-boiled, hard-edged and Hollywood

OLIVER HARRIS

Times Literary Supplement

THE LEGENDARY DETECTIVE

The private eye in fact and fiction

In 1972 Fidel Castro’s Ministry of the Interior announced a competition to develop the crime genre in Cuba. They wanted stories that would deter anti-social behaviour, promote vigilance and establish heroes so principled they didn’t even swear. The contest attracted no entries. The Ministry’s miscalculation reflects the complexity of the genre’s appeal. Does crime fiction, as some have argued, serve as a prop to the status quo, reinforcing the law and even, via the palliative presence of a detective, helping accommodate us to social injustice? Or is it quite the opposite: a means of critique, shining a light into otherwise unexplored corners? In truth, the genre thrives on this duality. As the failure of the Cuban competition suggests, didacticism is a turn-off. What the putative crime writers of Havana wanted was to explore corruption. What readers wanted, then as now, was not a morality tale but stories of jaded men and women playing by their own rules.

No figure embodies this ambivalent appeal as effectively as the private eye. The legendary PI emerges via true-crime tales and pulp fictions to supplant the cowboy as modern hero: a romantic loner mistrusted by both police and crooks, playing both ends against the middle. It is this rugged individualist that John Walton’s eye-opening research tears to pieces. In The Legendary Detective: The private eye in fact and fiction, Walton asks how the American detective of collective memory arises out of one of the country’s most controversial and partisan industries.

While the relatively centralized states of nineteenth-century Britain and France were developing their own municipal detective agencies, the American investigator was born of a legal vacuum. The first generation belonged to the railway age, a response to the absence of federal policing across state lines. The second generation got rich servicing the era’s corporate monopolies. Most PIs were salarymen, and their employers were bound to big business. By the end of the century, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency employed more than 1,000 operatives in industrial espionage alone, predominantly targeting subversion among their clients’ workforces. When, in 1892, the Carnegie Steel Company experienced a strike against wage reductions, Pinkerton mustered a force of 300 guards. The law forbade the transport of private armed forces across state lines so the Pinkerton men came on one train, their guns and ammunition on another. Four workers died in the ensuing stand-off. During the Cripple Creek Miners’ Strike of 1903, Pinkerton agents bombed the Independence Railroad depot, killing thirteen strikers before attempting to pin the blame on the miners themselves. At the core of this violence was what the La Follette Committee, set up in 1936 to investigate the dark side of industrial relations, called the munitions dealer–detective agency connection. Arms manufacturers such as Federal Laboratories Inc shared friends, board members and anti-union sentiments with the investigative agencies they served. Federal supplied the tear gas and Thompson sub-machine guns.

Walton asks how we got from this to Dick Tracy’s Secret Detecto Kit, given out free with Quaker’s cereal in the 1930s. He discusses the PI in relation to the sociologist Everett Hughes’s concept of “good people and dirty work”: society’s means of dealing with repugnant yet apparently necessary activities in its midst (Hughes applied the concept to concentration camp guards and lynch mobs). The idea of necessarily “dirty” jobs lets a community convert polite silence into morally digestible legend. The fact that PI agencies arose alongside a booming popular culture industry allowed this process to flourish. Just as self-justifying memoirs by investigators inspired the pulps, so the heroism of the fictional PI fed back into field reports and PR puffs. Exercises in publicity such as Allan Pinkerton’s Criminal Reminiscences and Detective Sketches (1878) and The Masked War (1913) by his rival agency’s boss William Burns put the emphasis squarely on fighting dastardly criminals, despite the minimal involvement of their agencies in such low-profit work. Walton pursues the idea of fictionalization as legitimation, digging deep into previously untapped archives to unearth the reality of an industry that was happy to be preserved in myth.

One Pinkerton operative who achieved an enviable reputation for strike-breaking and surveillance was Dashiell Hammett. If his first novel, Red Harvest (1929), achieves exceptional richness of detail in its presentation of labour conflict and local corruption in “Poisonville”, it may be due to his personal involvement in the 1920 miners’ struggle on which it’s based. As in The Maltese Falcon, appearing in the same year, Hammett’s first-hand experience of political sleaze, industrial violence and the everyday routine of an agent allowed for a realism that brought hard-boiled fiction to new heights.

Nathan Ward’s brief but dogged new study of Hammett’s life, The Lost Detective, focuses on the early years, in a quest to show how the writer emerged from the detective. Hammett joined Pinkerton in 1915, aged twenty-one. His first published work appeared in 1922, the year he left the world of real investigation, but Pinkerton had given him the street knowledge needed to stand out amid a host of less credible competitors. Less expectedly, it also gave him a training in prose style: reports for clients had to meet expectations of concision and unsentimental “objectivity”. Hammett, who had left school at fourteen, took pride in his finesse, accepting that his skill in writing enhanced his in-house reputation. This crisp, objective approach gave his novels a cinematic style it would take cinema itself a decade to catch up with. It also allows Ward to position Hammett in a broader narrative of American literature, as Ward draws a parallel with the influence of another exacting style sheet – that of the Kansas City Star – on a young Ernest Hemingway’s stripped-back prose. Both backgrounds provided tools for the construction of a self-consciously hard-edged literature. In his famous essay of 1944, “The Simple Art of Murder”, Raymond Chandler went so far as to align Hammett with Whitman in the larger triumph of American letters against artifice, a “revolutionary debunking of both the language and material of fiction”.

With Hammett’s own reports missing from the Pinkerton archives (possibly suggesting the sensitivity of the work he was engaged in), much of the connection between his literary life and his earlier employment rests on anecdote. The anecdotes that his family and friends remember him repeating carry an element of guilt mixed with tough-guy pride, most significantly one involving Hammett being offered $5,000 to kill a left-wing agitator. The novels, accordingly, gain a hint of exculpation.

the myth of the PI crystallized when its creators found the right balance of cynicism and moral sensibility

In Walton’s account, the myth of the PI crystallized when its creators found the right balance of cynicism and moral sensibility. This moment can be identified more precisely with Hammett’s creation of Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. Spade defined the PI as lone operator, in contrast to Hammett’s previous fictional detective, the Continental Op, whose very name is lost to the agency he serves. Spade runs his own show, allowing him a marginally less complicit passage through a society corrupt on all sides. In his detachment, he exemplifies what Ross McDonald called the investigator as a “poor man’s sociologist”. But Spade’s appeal, and the appeal of the genre at its best, goes beyond sociology to deliver something akin to a mass-market existentialism: the claustrophobic thrill of characters fighting their way through a world without values of its own. As an alibi for a less than reflective profession, it proved unbeatable.

By the time Spade was immortalized on screen by Humphrey Bogart in 1941, the age of the PI was waning; labour work was against most agency policy, crime investigation was handled by others. But on screen they were about to come into their own. Two attempts at adapting The Maltese Falcon in the more comic mode of earlier detective films had flopped, but when John Huston placed Bogart opposite Mary Astor’s Brigid O’Shaughnessy and turned up the angst and eroticism, a cinematic style was born.

If hard-boiled novels found a new glamour in grit, film noir perfected the look. The essays in Kiss the Blood off My Hands seek fresh angles on a genre that has attracted so much scholarship that the academic field has its own worn tropes: German Expressionism, post-war ambience, gender politics. Several essays in Robert Miklitsch’s edited collection advance the study of film noir by attending to previously neglected aspects of style: sound, for example (Krin Gabbard looks at love songs; Neil Verma places the genre back in the lost context of the period’s hugely popular radio dramas, an old technology recovered via digital means). In a similar vein, Vivian Sobchack considers the use of back projections to convey the impression of driving: a cost-cutting measure turned to its own expressive ends in his chosen example, Detour (1945), where these juddering views can convey inner torment as effectively as any retrospective voiceover.

Other essays revisit and qualify the received truths of noir studies, none quite as extensively received as the co-dependency of PI and femme fatale. Debate has centred on whether these icons of dangerous feminine sexuality simply revisit old misogynist fantasies, or if they might communicate a potentially liberating new power. Both Philippa Gates and Julie Grossman find a more nuanced approach. Gates points towards the frequency with which female leads take on the role of hard-boiled investigator themselves – see, for example Jill (Betty Grable) in I Wake Up Screaming (1941), or Ann Hamilton (Katharine Hepburn) in Undercurrent (1946). Grossman, meanwhile, argues that women’s concerns are fundamental to the genre, not just its shadowy margin. If films such as Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944) and Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950) dramatize the oppressiveness of a dominant masculine culture it may be connected to the fact that they are based on novels by women (by Vera Caspary and Dorothy Hughes respectively). Indeed, the influence of women on the noir world, as both writers and audience, is evident in how the studios themselves perceived the films, frequently classed as “melodramas” rather than noir, and even seen in close relation to melodrama’s subgenre, the “woman’s picture”.

This touches on a fundamental problem for any historian of noir: it never actually existed. It was French critics, cut off from American cinema during the war, who first coined the phrase when five years’ worth of Hollywood crashed into Paris in one moody and exhilarating haul. In fact, cinematic effects that the French found so expressive of malaise could often be the result of wartime constraints (dim lighting helped cloak cheap sets; elliptical transitions were sometimes the consequence of hastily written scripts being shot on the fly). But the success of the phrase suggests the cineastes were justified in recognizing a new desire on the part of American filmmakers to find innovative means for the expression of social and psychological unease.

If we are searching for the source of this unease we need look no further than Hollywood itself. It is no coincidence, Mark Osteen argues in his essay “A Little Larceny: Labour, leisure and loyalty in the ’50s noir heist film”, that the first true heist movies appeared in 1950, between the first and second round of hearings by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Liberal Hollywood figures such as Huston had tried to fight back with the Committee for the First Amendment, but resistance crumbled as the blacklist grew. In The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Huston tells the story of a robbery gang imploding under the pressure of mutual suspicion and multiple betrayals. In Osteen’s reading, the gang expresses the failed ideals of solidarity. But it can also serve a reverse purpose, he argues, portraying the limitations of corporations themselves. In the criminal mastermind’s selection of participants for their specialized skills (safecracker, driver, thug etc) and impeccable attention to timing in the heist’s execution, Osteen sees a critique of Fordist factories and new scientific management techniques for optimizing workers’ performance. Time and again, the heist should go like clockwork, but human frailty intervenes.

At a time when direct political criticism was taboo, these were the means by which it could survive. But how much judgement did the audiences of the 1940s and 50s discern? In their genre-defining Panorama du film noir américain 1941–53 (1955), Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton depicted their chosen canon as casting a disapproving gaze over contemporary American society. But they were conscious of the ideological complexity involved when an imperial power invades your cinemas so seductively. Like its hard-boiled predecessors, film noir set urban decay alongside unprecedented wealth, exposed the greed and violence behind both, and at its heart it placed the private eye, an everyman defined by a job he finds distasteful but is bound to by financial necessity. Here was modern life laid bare, and it had never looked so alluring. Sometimes realism is the best propaganda.

Oliver Harris is the author of the Nick Belsey series of novels. The latest one, The House of Fame, is due to be published next month.