IV.

Private-Eye Fiction

Meanwhile, in the United States during the 1920s, another kind of detective story was emerging. This was shaped by the pulp magazines of the time (notably Black Mask), which wanted hard-hitting detective heroes and clipped, tough prose. It also sought to break down the barriers separating detective fiction from popular forms like the thriller and spy story. Authors of this school include Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of Perry Mason, the most famous lawyer-detective of them all; Dashiell Hammett, creator of the Continental Op (in Red Harvest, 1929) and Sam Spade; and Raymond Chandler, whose Philip Marlowe—introduced in The Big Sleep (1939)—is another classic fictional character. In these “hard-boiled” private-eye novels, sleuths worked for money instead of intellectual fun, and murder took place in gutters rather than in drawing rooms. Although these detective stories obeyed all the rules of the genre, the accent was on action, and the puzzle was underplayed. The story’s physical activity (which in some cases degenerated into raw sex and sadism), rather than the puzzle, held the reader’s attention.

Despite the thoughtful work of Ross Macdonald, whose Lew Archer novels ran from the 1940s to the 1970s, private-eye fiction seemed to yield diminishing returns after World War II, until the second-wave feminism of the 1970s produced a significant new offshoot in the figure of the female private eye. Arguably initiated in Britain by P. D. James with An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972), the form emerged at its strongest in the United States in the 1980s, when protagonists such as Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone, Sara Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski, and Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone took on the alienated, anti-system traits of the private eye to convey women’s need to confront their exclusion from power with toughness and independence. In a somewhat parallel move, from the 1990s the experience of racism has been powerfully explored through Walter Mosley’s black private eye Easy Rawlins, and Barbara Neely’s quasi-invisible black amateur detective Blanche White. Gay private eyes of both sexes have also been created by Joseph Hansen, Barbara Wilson, Mary Wings, and others.

The figure of the private eye or otherwise embattled detective has attracted the attention of many “serious” postmodernist writers, as a potent image of the quest for meaning in a possibly meaningless universe. Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jorge Luis Borges, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Thomas Pynchon, Umberto Eco, and Paul Auster have all played with such ideas—a list indicating that detective fiction’s impact is by no means confined to the Anglo-American axis.