Unless the Threat of Death Is Behind Them: Hard-Boiled Fiction and Film Noir

6 A Puzzle of Character

s i x A Puzzle of Character I A look back over the books and authors we’ve discussed so far reveals several patterns in the development of hard-boiled fiction in the 1930s and ’40s. As we noted, the genre began with the work of detective-story writers in the twenties (most notably Dashiell Hammett) and reached a high point in Hammett’s career with the 1930 publication of The Maltese Falcon, a work that would serve as a model for Raymond Chandler’s fiction over the next two decades. The Hammett style of hard-boiled detective story positioned itself, according to Chandler’s 1944 essay “The Simple Art of Murder,” as a more realistic , and thus in literary terms more serious, alternative to the form as it had developed in England, France, and America in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a tradition that originated with Poe’s invention of the detective genre in the 1840s. Poe’s three Dupin stories—“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841),“The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (1842–43), and “The Purloined Letter” (1844)—established the tradition of what I have called elsewhere the analytic detective story,1 a narrative whose structure and emotional dynamic turn upon the analysis of clues and the deductive solution of a crime—though 172 Unless the Threat of Death Is Behind Them in the Dupin stories it’s often more the appearance of analysis and deduction than the reality. The tradition of analytic detective fiction that grew out of Poe’s tales ultimately included authors such as Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, Israel Zangwill, Gaston Leroux, Jacques Futrelle, E. C. Bentley, Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, S. S. Van Dine, Rex Stout, and Ellery Queen, to name only a few of Hammett’s more prominent predecessors or contemporaries. As the analytic detective story developed in the first three decades of the twentieth century, it came to be governed more and more by what was known as the “fair play” method of composition, the notion that, as Willard Huntington Wright (who wrote the Philo Vance novels under the pseudonym S. S. Van Dine) put it, “the reader must have equal opportunity with the detective for solving the mystery,” and to that end “all clues must be plainly stated and described ” and “the culprit must turn out to be a person who has played a more or less prominent part in the story.”2 With the fair-play method the story’s battle of wits between detective and criminal became in effect a battle of wits between reader and author, a contest to see whether the reader, who’d been given equal access along with the detective to the clues in the case, could arrive at the correct solution to the mystery before the detective revealed it at the story’s close. And the test of an author’s skill was the ingenuity with which he prolonged this battle of wits while still being able, without cheating, to surprise the reader at the story’s conclusion, a surprise best achieved, as Wright says, by the answer to the mystery already being present “in the printed word, so that if the reader should go back over the book he would find that the solution had been there all the time if he had had sufficient shrewdness to grasp it” (TAMS, 40). Several essays published in the 1920s by prominent practitioners such as R. Austin Freeman, Willard Huntington Wright, and Dorothy Sayers made explicit the necessity of the fair-play method in analytic detective fiction, Freeman noting that “the tacit understanding of the author with the reader” in this kind of story “is that the problem is susceptible of solution by the latter by reasoning from the facts given; and such solution should be actually possible.”3 But what also seems clear in these critical examinations is that the fair-play method rested upon a basic understanding of the detective novel as not falling “under the head of fiction in the ordinary sense” but belonging rather “in the category of riddles,” of its being “in fact, a complicated and extended puzzle cast in fictional form,” as Wright argues, a fictional form whose “structure and mechanism” resemble those of “a cross-word puzzle” with its solution depending “wholly on mental processes—. . . the fitting together of apparently unrelated parts” (TAMS, 35–36). Many of these 1920s essays...