Private eyes have been accused of a lot of things. Murder, kidnapping, obstruction of justice, spitting on the sidewalk, you name it, they've worn the collar. From time to time, private eyes have even been tagged as proletariat soldiers in the great class war. Yep, private eyes are Commies.
It's true that many writers have had left-wing leanings. Joseph Hansen, for example, who writes the excellent Dave Brandstetter mysteries, has written extensively about liberal causes. The father of hardboiled fiction himself, Dashiell Hammett, was a Marxist. But crime fiction, like most popular literature, is generally conservative, and it's easier to point to examples like Mickey Spillane's gun-toting Red hater Mike Hammer.
It's also true that private eyes traditionally distrust authority in any form and in particular tend to suspect institutionalized authority. Institutions tend to accumulate power and make it available to a few at the top, and as in Lord Acton's famous quote, power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Interestingly, one institution that is generally viewed as incorruptible is organized crime, which has its own rigid code of conduct. The penalties for breaking this code are harsh (to say the least!).
Robert B. Parker in a well-known essay argues that private eyes belong in the chivalric tradition of works like Le Morte D'Arthur (Chandler almost named his hero Mallory) and more recent works such as Westerns. While many private eyes have been cast as knights errant, virtually every detective belongs to a more American tradition: the rugged individualist. America had been a frontier nation since the first settlers arrived, and the frontier called for men who could rely on themselves. Men like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett became well known and admired for their (sometimes fictional) resourcefulness in the face of danger. Later, it was the cowboys of the old west who found themselves romanticized. In the twentieth century, these men moved to the city and hung out a shingle as private eyes.
Hardboiled fiction was created in the Roaring Twenties, a time of great moral ambivalence. World War I had seen great leaps in technology put to work turning men into hamburger. Prohibition turned ordinary citizens into criminals every time they took a drink and made hypocrisy a feature of public life, while enriching the most brutal of the criminal underclass and turning these bootleggers into folk heroes. Attempts to organize labor led to frequently violent confrontations between common workers and thugs hired by their bosses.
Hammett Time
Enter Dashiell Hammett. He'd been a Pinkerton detective for many years but left after working a strikebreaking operation in Butte, Montana. While there he'd been asked to kill a labor leader, Frank Little, who was in fact later assassinated. With first-hand knowledge of crime and detection and good reason to be suspicious of the powers-that-be in society, he was well suited to creating a new type of protagonist. In the Continental Op, his first detective, he created a man who could handle himself in any situation and could handle any situation by himself, with or without the sanction of the law. Cynical but scrupulously honest, governed by an unwritten code of conduct, he was a two-fisted man of action. Hammett told this stories in an urban dialect full of machine-gun dialog and underworld idioms, a lean and muscular style that matched the action.
Red Harvest, an early Op novel based on Hammett's experiences in Butte, is the most overtly political of his works, as the unnamed detective cleans up a town corrupt from top to bottom, but several of his other works have political echoes. In "The Gutting Of Couffignal", the Op stops a massive robbery in a high-class town, turning down a large bribe in the process.
Down These Mean Streets
In 1939 a slim novel entitled The Big Sleep appeared. Its author, Raymond Chandler, further depoliticized the private eye by making him alienated and alone. Fictional detectives, loners or not, tend to work by themselves, and as a hired man is an outsider in most situations he encounters. Chandler took these traits and ran with them. Personal relationships are tenuous at best in his novels; true love never triumphs, friendship is rarely rewarded, and even when detective Philip Marlowe cracks the case, it's not a happy ending Marlowe rarely finds anything more than the solace that he's acted rightly. Civic corruption had become part of the landscape, accepted without comment.
Chandler also wrote the most famous private eye manifesto, an essay titled "The Simple Art of Murder". Those looking for leftist tendencies can make hay out of the lines "He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man…" But the real key to Marlowe's character is "But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid... He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor…"
One Lonely Knight
Chandler's vision of the private eye was almost universally influential, but within ten years a new writer came along who was destined to write the best selling detective stories of all time. The writer was Mickey Spillane, and his creation was Mike Hammer. From his first appearance in I, The Jury in 1947, Hammer was extremely popular. Spillane not only resurrected the shoot-first style of his idol, Carroll John Daly, but added both strong sexual content and explicit right-wing rhetoric. The six books in the essential Mike Hammer canon were published between 1947 and 1952, and only in One Lonely Night does Hammer deal explicitly (and violently) with Communists, but the paranoia of the times rages through all the books. When Spillane resumed the series in 1962 the Reds popped up a little more often, but the Red Scare had by then spent itself.
Spillane's had the good fortune to write his strongest work when his black-and-white, us-versus-them worldview was shared by most of the people in the United States. Americans felt threatened, by crime, by the spread of Communism, and by the demand to be heard by African-Americans, feminists, and others, which would ultimately produce the Civil Rights movement. People wanted easy targets, and they wanted them dealt with in Hammer's direct way. Spillane's work, however, never found the acceptance among other writers that it did in his audience, and he's had little lasting influence.
Get Hip, Baby
The Cuban Missle Crisis. Watts. Kent State. Suddenly it was cool to be an antihero, to denounce Society, to tell the Man where to get off, not to mention getting off yourself . The Sixties had arrived, and with them, a new group of more introspective, intellectual private eyes. A big influence on this group was Ross Macdonald, whose Lew Archer books became very popular even as private eyes in general declined. In the late sixties and early seventies, new novels appeared by writers such as Hansen, Michael Collins, and Bill Pronzini, which did away with many of the familiar trappings of the genre while revitalizing its core (sometimes influence skips a generation; Robert B. Parker's Spenser is descended directly from Marlowe).
These detectives mostly left their politics at home. The books they inhabited were more realistic, populated with real people instead of cardboard thugs and femmes fatales, and set not in seedy dives and dark alleys, but at the end of your street. Inevitably, these men ran into hippies, Black Panthers, drug dealers, and other people of the times, and generally accepted them on their own terms while still living by a private code. People wanted to know that wrongs would be righted (even if rights were wronged - for example, watch Dirty Harry); they wanted the bad guys to get what was coming to them, and while lone wolf private eye may have been a reluctant hero, he was still a hero nonetheless.
The tolerance extended to other characters in the novels eventually embraced the detective himself, and the straight white male was joined by females (Marcia Muller's Sharon McCone) and members of every ethnic group (Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins, S. J. Rozan's Lydia Chin) and sexual persuasion (Hansen's Dave Brandstetter). While much has been made of this outside the books themselves, it's interesting that within their pages these new detectives are generally accepted by the other characters with only a few surprised remarks.
Today the private investigator has joined the mainstream of American life. He's a device that can be used to tell any story. As the frontier keeps shrinking here on Earth he's been used in other genres such as science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Social upheaval seems to rejuvenate these mysteries, but as the Sixties and the last big change in society fade further into the past, it's hard to say what the future holds for private eyes.
What we can say is that he'll be there, in one form or another, fighting for what he believes in, a good man despite his faults, responsible to no one and answering only to himself. Hammett would be proud.
