Private Noir

Recently, I have been delving back into detective fiction. As my readers will know, my favorite detective is Mr. Sherlock Holmes, followed closely by Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin. However, this foray into crime detection was informed by a more modern variant: the private eye, as most often characterized by the noir style of filming as popularized by Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder and later perfected by Orson Welles in movies from the middle of the last century. I read four books, each one much different from the others and, though I’m done, I thought it would be worthwhile to categorize this grim, monochromatic genre.

The setting is usually (but not always) Los Angeles in the early-mid part of the last century. Here is the rough-hewn private dick, a life-hardened loner, with a penchant for finding trouble and the skills to fix things. The lexicon of film and literature is filled with tropes from this genre that we all know well.

Perhaps my favorite private detective from that era is Phillip Marlowe, as written by Raymond Chandler. Smart, chivalrous and strong as chilled steel, Chandler’s protagonist is perhaps the archetype for the genre. He doesn’t play by the rules (except his own) , takes no guff from anyone, is almost always in pursuit of a femme fatale, and is perpetually scouring the streets of the Los Angeles underworld. 

In the blue-smoke filled dream-realm, everyone drinks too much, parties devolve into secret orgies and reputations are made and broken by what makes the front page. Almost always, a woman’s reputation is at stake, or a friend disappears into the city’s underbelly, subsumed into a world of rumor, innuendo, sleaze, drugs and despair and behind it all, a wealthy man, paying to keep every blackmailer silent, every damaged reputation out of the papers. Reluctantly, Marlowe wades in, usually to the detriment of his own good name.

This year, I read Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. The story is red hot, and I highly recommend it. What I admired most, though, was Chandler’s economy of line. He writes at a blistering pace. The sentences are like the rattling of a machine gun. The plot moves in an undercurrent, propelled by Marlowe’s first person narrative. His dedication to a friend is tested when the man disappears after a wealthy socialite is found brutally murdered. When her sister appeals to Marlowe for help, he winds up in the sights of the police, the murdered woman’s bevy of lovers, disgraced doctors and her rich, straight-laced father. My favorite line from the book is, “Most people go through life using up half their energy trying to protect a dignity they never had.”

After Marlowe,I flew across the country to a brownstone in Manhattan inhabited by a most unusual detective. I’d read Rex Stout novels before, of course and so was familiar with the author’s unconventional hero, Nero Wolfe, but this time I went back and read the first in a long series of novels, called Fer-de-Lance. 

Stout’s structure is unusual. Mr. Wolfe is a mountain of a man that we would now call deeply obsessive and compulsive. He never leaves his brownstone. He takes interviews with those in need (only if their mystery captures his attention) between 9-11 and 4-6 each day. Otherwise, he is either dining on gourmet meals as prepared by his cook Fritz, or tending to an entire third floor garden of rare and priceless orchids. 

If Wolfe never leaves home, you ask, how can he solve mysteries, as the primary rule of all detection requires going to the scene of the crime and interviewing eyewitnesses? The solution for this is the author's brilliant and original character Archie Goodwin. 

Goodwin does all the footwork and is essentially Nero Wolfe’s field agent. Archie is also the first-person narrator of the stories and relates everything from his notebooks and his interactions with Wolfe. Nero Wolfe is an eccentric who drinks huge amounts of beer (but never to the detriment of his mental acuity) and solves crimes using only his imagination and Archie’s notes. While he acknowledges that other such detectives are men of science, Wolfe considers himself to be an artist of crime solving, allowing his genius to work through Goodwin and others.

Fer-de-Lance, by the way, is the name of the most deadly snake in South America, which is sent to Wolfe when his solutions stray too close to the truth and it is up to Archie Goodwin to zoom about the city, looking for the murderer who hired a machinist to construct a deadly golf club that kills the wrong victim. Lighter in prose than Chandler, but no less intense, the character of Archie Goodwin is that of a knight errant, who wins over his interviewees with charm and wit and an eye for details unrivaled by any but his boss. My favorite line from this book: “I had long since learned from Wolfe that the corner the light doesn’t reach is the one the dime rolled to.”

Second-to-last on my list of private eye detective fiction is I, The Jury, by Mickey Spillane. This story struck me as being the grittiest, pulp novel-style tale I have read in a long time—or maybe ever. Where Chandler never goes too deep on scenes of intimate sex or violence, allowing the reader’s imagination to fill in the blanks, Spillane’s Mike Hammer’s first-person narration is downright sweaty. Licentious descriptions of women, all of whom seem to throw themselves at Hammer, baroque details of murders, pulpy characters and Hammer’s hard-boiled narrative all add up to a little too much for my taste.

Spillane really was considered a pulp novelist, so he knew that sex and violence and alcohol sell, but the mysteries aren’t as interesting in the intellectual sense. Hammer solves them the same way he does everything, with a roaring, overloaded sense of self-importance, a swollen sense of his own right to commute justice, a gun in one hand and a “dame” in the other. 

In this book, the first of a shelf of Mike Hammer stories (I will not say mysteries) Hammer’s best friend and former Army buddy in the war (yes, that war) is brutally murdered. Vowing revenge, Hammer begins a race with the police to find the killer. Along the way, he falls hard for a psychologist (who is also a knockout—all the women in these stories are knockouts, and all come undressed in every scene). As he brutally slams through the backstreets and brothels, looking for the killer and always arriving just too late to stop several more murders. He eventually learns that he’s been duped in the most predictable way ever. The book closes on Hammer making good on his vow to kill the killer, leaving nothing to the imagination, but then, no part of the book actually does. I didn’t have a favorite line from this book, largely because there wasn’t a noble sentiment in the entire thing and since every other page was tastelessly X-rated or thoughtlessly violent, I probably won’t return to Mr. Spillane.

Finally, following a recommendation from a friend who dove into this author’s books with abandon, I read James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia, based loosely on the famous 1947 murder and brutal Ripper-like vivisection of Elizabeth Short, the eponymous victim. Ellroy’s novel is far more noir than I expected and though it started slow, grew into a fascinating novel of illicit sex, self-deception, lust for power, obsession and, the slow madness that comes with it.

Ellroy blends a critical understanding of late 1940s culture in Los Angeles, with an uncanny knowledge of how the police force worked, building a story about two police officers, Bucky Bleichert and Lee Blanchard, both former boxers, hired to fight one another to help pass a bond referendum. 

The duo become best friends and work up through the nebulous ranks of LAPD power, until the murder and investigation of Elizabeth Short drives Blanchard off the reservation. The two officers live together with Kay Lake, a school teacher and former prostitute within an organized crime syndicate ring. Blanchard and Lake and Bleichert form an unusual family, until Blanchard’s emotional crash and disappearance. Bucky’s obsession with Short only serves to drive him to the edge of mania, as he navigates the over-sexed daughter of a corrupt real estate magnate, his marriage to Kay and the ever deepening need to solve the murder.

The novel is beautifully written. Told from the first-person perspective of Bucky Bleichert, the story is deeply honest and in places, extremely graphic. Unlike Spillane’s novel, the behavior is very human, flawed and misguided. There are dark and licentious scenes, but they all serve to bring the plot forward.

Bucky’s is unreliable narration, taking the reader on a long, unwinding mental breakdown, starting in moments of high and joyous celebration, then down into the depths of depravity and ultimately the most carefully hidden and devastating personal truths. As a backdrop, the Short murder becomes a kind of litmus test of madness, where everything up to the point of her grotesque dismemberment is ground worth crossing if it leads to her insane killer. Ellroy asks what there is left of our humanity when the answers we so badly needed are not what we thought they would be. 

My favorite line from this novel was hard to sort out, because the book is a masterpiece of writing. It never sinks to the level of pulp, though it never shies from showing us the true depravity at the heart of all of us. Ellroy’s “hero” is all too corruptible. However, if I have to choose (after all who is making me, if not me?) I’d pick: “Some people don’t respond to civility.”

I’m now fedora-ed out. The inside of my head smells like Chesterfields and cheap booze. The hardboiled detective, burned on a hard life and grim memories of the war; the mystery to be solved, the punches to be thrown, the bullets to be shot and the spectacle of self-destruction, misery and bad decisions made in haste or anger all have an unfortunate way of bringing me down. I like the gritty detectives, the monosyllabic narratives, the noble intent of flawed characters, the mysteries and, of course the images, shadowy, dark, uncertain. I like how uncomplicated the complications are, and how straightforward the action is. 

This is a world modeled on reality, but darker. The men are all noble savages, merely wearing the accouterments of modernity, while living on some morally primitive plain, draped in suits instead of animal skins and drinking whiskey instead of blood. The women are all too beautiful, too voluptuous, too dangerously sexy; each using their feminine wiles to navigate a world that (in most of the novels) still considers them to be the root of all society’s most depraved ills. 

Here the physical takes the place of the intellectual. The fist comes before the probing question, the bullets before deduction. Everyone lies, everyone is untrustworthy, out for themselves alone and everyone stifles their feelings with any substance or activity that pushes away the pain. Although crime noir is just a kind of social commentary on a particular age in our recent history, it nevertheless feels too seedy, too corrupted and too vicious to be anything but a passing fancy for me.

And yet, for all that there is a draw to it. Perhaps it is a kind of animal magnetism in the characters, but I think it is really (in all except Spillane’s case) a brilliance of writing and composition; a truly midcentury modern prose that cuts through the fat and gets right to the bone. I think that's why I like it.