Inspired by Charles Lipson’s recent post on the difference between hard-boiled detective fiction and the gentleman/woman detective fiction we associate with the English, I’ve begun thinking about detective fiction—what it is and why we read what we read.
As I pointed out to Charles the distinction isn’t between British detective fiction and American but between drawing room and hard-boiled. The four best-selling American authors of detective fiction are Erle Stanley Gardner, Mickey Spillane, Evan Hunter (Ed McBain), and Rex Stout. Of those only one, Mickey Spillane, is associated with the hard-boiled style of detective fiction although I, personally, would more characterize Spillane as the “splat!” school. As Jean Kerr put it, Mike Hammer novels aren’t so much whodunits as “wit whats”.
Erle Stanley Gardner (Perry Mason) and Rex Stout (Nero Wolfe) fit neatly into the gentleman detective style although Stout cleverly split the difference between the gentleman detective and hard-boiled with Nero Wolfe as the gentleman detective and his henchman and amanuensis, Archie Goodwin, filling the role of the hard-boiled detective. Evan Hunter’s forte was the police procedural, a subgenre that’s come to dominate American detective fiction and which for some reason or other I associate with the French.
Why did the hard-boiled detective subgenre arise in the United States? My wife astutely noted that it grew up in the depths of the Depression of the 1930s when everything seemed to have spun out of control and it very much looked as though things would never get any better. That’s the world of the hard-boiled detective. Here’s how Charles Lipson characterized it:
Here’s my take. In the hard-boiled American genre, the whole world is steeped in evil sharpies. We aren’t totally focused, as we are in classic English mysteries, in finding the single person who committed the murder (given that everyone in a small, well-defined group has a plausible motive–and perhaps some clues pointing in their direction).
In the American genre, the whole underworld is implicated. Lots of them “done it.†The problem is not just finding one guy. It is unraveling the whole tangled mess of lies and crimes. Since the private eye must travel constantly in that underworld, his (or her) problem is maintaining a moral compass while all about him have none.
Why, then, have police procedurals become so important in the United States? I think that they grew up in the post-war world when the U. S. government was at its peak of repute, just having defeated the Germans and the Japanese (as we see it) nearly single-handedly.
Keep in mind that despite Americans’ fondness for Hammett and Chandler with their Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, neither author even approaches either the 500 lb. gorilla of mystery, Agatha Christie, or the second in line, Georges Simenon, either one of whom have sold 100s of millions more books than any American writer of detective fiction.
