What are Private Eye Stories Really About?
A few months ago I surveyed the history of private eye novels and recommended six of my favorites. I recently talked to a well-read friend who had taken me up on all six. While he liked them, he complained that the protagonist — the private eye himself — was never fully fleshed out.
He’s right, but that doesn’t bother me. I’ve never seen the private eye as a particularly compelling character in himself. He’s more of a framing device for the rest of the story.
Many readers, writers and critics seem to disagree. They see the private eye as a type of hero, a modern knight or cowboy with codes of honor and chivalry and a series of quests to fulfill. One well-known version of this came from Raymond Chandler himself:
In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things. He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness. The story is his adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure.
I rolled my eyes the first time I read that, and it looks even sillier now. Chandler was getting carried away here, and he wouldn’t have been the great writer he was if he had really stuck to this kind of caricature. Let his successor Ross Macdonald explain:
While there may be “a quality of redemption” in a good novel, it belongs to the whole work and is not the private property of one of the characters. No hero of serious fiction could act within a moral straitjacket requiring him to be consistently virtuous and unafraid… The detective-as-redeemer is a backward step in the direction of sentimental romance, and an over-simplified world of good guys and bad guys.
Fortunately in the writing of his books Chandler toned down his Watsonian enthusiasm for his detective’s moral superiority. The detective Marlowe, who tells his own stories in the first person, and sometimes admits to being afraid, has a self-deflating wit which takes the curse off his knight-errantry.
Nonetheless, Marlowe was still a little too much of an ideal type, and what makes Macdonald so important is that he excised this romantic streak and made his hero a more fully-rounded human being:
Another difference between Chandler and me is in our use of language. My narrator Archer’s wider and less rigidly stylized range of expression, at least in more recent novels, is related to a central difference between him and Marlowe. Marlowe’s voice is limited by his role as the hardboiled hero. He must speak within his limits as a character, and these limits are quite narrowly conceived. Chandler tried to relax them in The Long Goodbye, but he was old and the language failed to respond. He was trapped like the late Hemingway in an unnecessarily limited idea of self, hero, and language.
This in turn made it possible to write serious literature in the detective mode. But unlike most narrators, the private eye still resists the spotlight:
I could never write of Archer: “He is the hero, he is everything.” It is true that his actions carry the story, his comments on it reflect my attitudes (but deeper attitudes remain implicit), and Archer or a narrator like him is indispensable to the kind of books I write. But he is not their emotional center…
An author’s heavy emotional investment in a narrator-hero can get in the way of the story and blur its meanings, as some of Chandler’s books demonstrate. A less encumbered narrator permits greater flexibility, and fidelity to the intricate truths of life. I don’t have to celebrate Archer’s physical or sexual prowess, or work at making him consistently funny and charming. He can be self-forgetful, almost transparent at times, and concentrate as good detectives (and good writers) do, on the people whose problems he is investigating. These other people are for me the main thing: they are often more intimately related to me and my life than Lew Archer is. He is the obvious self-projection which holds the eye (my eye as well as the reader’s) while more secret selves creep out of the woodwork behind the locked door.
I started reading private eye novels after a long stretch of “serious” literary fiction, and I can see now why they felt like such a breath of fresh air. The literary novelist is tempted to make their protagonist a writer, professor, artist or other self-projection, and spend lots of time indulging in their neuroses and struggles. The private eye is in some ways also a stand-in for the author, but he resists this kind of navel-gazing; he’s always observing and reacting, always turning the camera back onto the other characters, often prodding them into action.
If you do force the camera back onto the private eye himself, you might discover a bundle of nerves, as in Elliott Gould’s Marlowe in The Long Goodbye, or something more tragic, as in Donald Westlake’s Mitch Tobin books. But the most interesting version of this character probably doesn’t even work as a detective, as I suggested in another post about Renata Adler and other “smart women adrift” writers.
Too many writers have succumbed instead to the detective-as-hero myth, and the best example of this is probably John D. MacDonald and his hero Travis McGee, the subject of a very popular series in the ’60s and ’70s. The two MacDonalds disliked each other, and it’s easy to see why. McGee is a male wish-fulfillment fantasy, a bachelor living on a houseboat whose clients are all buxom young women who he beds along the way. The books are full of heavy-handed Robert Heinlein-style lectures on The Right Way to Live and everything wrong with modern society. They’re still fun in parts — he’s a far better writer than Heinlein — but I could only get through a couple of them. (I’ve heard that his earlier non-McGee novels are better.)
Anyway, I was not surprised when two commenters showed up on that previous post to admonish me for leaving out McGee. His shadow hangs heavy over anyone writing private eye novels today, much as Mike Hammer must have loomed over the previous generation. There’s always that question of whether you’re writing about the private eye himself or really using him to tell another story. I think the fact that Ross MacDonald has had so much more influence on non-private eye novelists (like Gillian Flynn, for example, whose Gone Girl takes its title from a Ross MacDonald story) is an argument in his favor. But I guess in the end it’s a matter of taste.
