Detective novels & movies - Martin Novelli

Martin gave us a very good overview on detective novels and pulp fiction.

Here is a summary of his presentation to us.

A SHORT  GUIDE TO HARD-BOILED  DETECTIVES

I. General Characteristics

1. Code of Honor: "When a man's partner is killed, he has to do something  about it."

2. Urban: City as Decadent Frontier

3. Former soldier and/or police officer

4. No Family (generally)

5. Plain Office

6. Plain Car

7. Plain Apartment

8. Sometimes has a Secretary (secretly in love)

9. Good Cop/Bad Cop Relations

10. Physically Tough

11. Cynical/Sardonic/Ironic

12. Sharp Verbal Patter

13. Investigation More Important Than Solution

II. Sources

1) The American Western  hero becomes urbanized. Action moves from the open range to city streets.

2) Edgar  Allen Poe (1800-1849)- Auguste Dupin eccentric French  crimes-solver; see:

"Murders in the Rue Morgue"; "The Purloined Letter"; "The Mystery of Marie Roget." Arthur Conan  Doyle (1859-1930) -Sherlock Holmes eccentric English crime-solver

(and Dr. Watson).

III. Hard-Boiled Detective vs. Armchair Detective

Urban Setting..................................Rural or Suburban Setting

Limited  Number  of Suspects...............Indefinite Number of Suspects

Detective "investigates" a situation.•••.•• Detective "solves" a crime

Detective "may" have colleagues.......... Detective has an assistant

Detective basically "mobile"•....•..•..•.••Detective basically "static"

Detective/police are antagonists...........Detective/police co-operate

Police often corrupt..........................Police usually honest

Much violent action..................•....••.Little violent action until climax

Organized crime common..................Organized crime rare

Sexual situations..............................No sexual situations

Usually 1st person narration...............Usually 3rd person narration

Hard-Boiled  Detectives: A Partial Bibliography

"The myths of the detective novel satisfy the secret nostalgia of modern  man, who, knowing himself to be fallen and limited, dreams  one day of becoming an exceptional character, a hero."- Mircea Eliade

"But you have there the myth of the essential white American. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never melted.- D.H. Lawrence

If you wish to start (or continue) to read hard-boiled  detective novels, here is a partial list of names to pursue.

First, the obvious choices: Dashiell Hammett; Raymond Chandler; Ross Macdonald; Lawrence Block (Matt Scudder); Sara Paretsky (V.I. Warshawsky); Sue Grafton (Kinsey Milhone); Walter Mosley (Easy Rawlins); and Dennis Lehane (Patrick Kenzie & Angie Gennaro).

Second, other important writers  in alphabetical  order:
Linda Barnes (Carlotta Carlyle)
James Lee Burke (Dave Robicheaux)
Robert Crais (Elvis Cole)
James Crumley  (C.A. Sughrue/Milo Milodragovich)
Lindsay Davis (Marcius  Didius Falco [set in the Roman Empire @70 C.E.])
Stephen Dobyns (Charlie  Bradshaw)
Loren D. Estleman (Amos Walker)
Janet  Evanovich (Stephanie Plum)
Stephen Greenleaf  (John  Marshall Tanner)
Joseph Hansen (Dave Brandstetter)
Stuart Kiminsky (Toby Peters)
Laura Lippman  (Tess Monaghan)
John  D, MacDonald (Travis  McGee)
Marcia Muller (Sharon  McCone)
Robert B. Parker (Spencer)
Bill Pronzini (Nameless)
S.J. Rozan (Lydia Chin)
Mickey Spillane (Mike Hammer)
Andrew Vachss (Burke)
Jonathan Valin (Harry Stoner)

FILMNOIR

FilmNoir (French for "black film" or "dark film") was first applied to Hollywood films by the French critic Nino Frank in 1946. The term was not applied by American filmmakers, at the time, to anything being made in Hollywood. Before the term was adopted by American film historians, mm critics, and filmmakers, most of the mms now considered noir were labelled "melodramas."

Hollywood's "classic" noir period is generally considered extending from the 1940s to the late 1950s. Many of the stories and attitudes in these mms derive from the bard-boiled detective fiction and the hard-boiled crime fiction (they are not the same thing) of the 1930s and 1940s. The decline of film noir in America in the late 1950s did not see the end of these films. Filmmakers all around the world began to make noir mms of their own and continue to do so until the present day.

In America, film noir had an influential revival in the 1970s, many of them reflecting the political, social, cultural, sexual, etc., etc. turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s. Oddly, even today,fi/m noir is hard  to define and the debates continue to rage as to what exactly defines noir. The film historian  Mark  Bould has written  that noir remains "an elusive phenomenon....always out of reach."

Or, simply, as r.Im analyst Eddie Muller put it:

"If a private eye is hired by an old geezer to prove his wife's cheating on him and the shamus discovers long-buried  family secrets and solves a couple of murders before returning to his lonely office- that's [hard-boiled] detective fiction.

"If the same private eye gets seduced by the geezer’s wife, kills the old coot for her, gets double-crossed by his lover and ends up shot to death by his old partner from the police force- I can say with complete assurance: you are wallowing in NOIR."

The Best of Classic Film Noir (selected by the staff of FACETS VIDEO in Chicago)

The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

The Big Clock (1952)

The Big Heat (1953)

The Big Sleep (1946)

The Blue Dahlia 1945)

Cape Fear (1962)

Caught (1949)

Cornered (1945)

The City That Never Sleeps (1953)

Clash by Night (1952)

Conflict (1945)

Criss Cross (1949)

Crossfire (1947) D.O.A. (1949) Dead End (1937)

Dead Lucky (1960)

Detour (1946)

Double Indemnity (1944)

Force of Evil (1949)

Gilda (1946)

Gun Crazy (1950)

He Walked by Night (1948)

High Sie"a (1941)

Hitchhiker (1953)

In a Lonely Place (1950)

Killer's Kiss (1955)

The Killers (1964)

The Killing (1956)

Addendum

"Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown."

Kiss Me, Deadly (1955)

Kiss of Death (1947)

The Lady from Shanghai (1948)

Laura (1944)

Leave Her to Heaven (1945)

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

Moonrise (1948)

Murder, My Sweet (1944)

The Naked City (1948)

Niagara (1953)

Odds Against Tomorrow (1959)

On Dangerous Ground (1951)

Out of the Past (1947)

Pick Up on South Street (1953)

The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)

Raw Deal (1948)

Road House (1948)

Scarlet Street (1945)

The Set Up (1949)

Strangers on a Train (1951)

Sudden Fear (1952)

Sunset Boulevard (1950)

Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

T-Men (1947)

Touch of Evil (1958)

Try and Get Me (1950) Underworld U.S.A. (1961)

White Heat (1949)

If you haven't seen it (and even if you have long ago) one of the greatest American films - and certainly one of the greatest noirs and, as such, possibly the most pessimistic film ever made by a Hollywood studio- is Chinatown (1974), a diabolically clever film that is

actually a film noir pretending to be a hard-boiled  detective film.

FYI

Dickos, Andrew: Street with No Name: A History of Classic American Film Noir

Kaplan, E. Ann: Women in Film Noir

Naremore, James: More Than Night: FilmNoir in its Contexts

Osteen, Mark: Nightmare Alley: Film Noir and the American Dream

Silver, Alain & Elizabeth Ward: The FilmNoir Encyclopedia

Mode: "Compressed Present  in conjunction  with a Long Past"

"A Traditional man of virtue in an immoral and corrupt world. His toughness and cynicism form a protective coloration protecting the essence of his character which is honorable and noble. Honor and integrity mean more than fame and fortune."

"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 be 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 a 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 truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fir for adventure. He has a range of awareness  that startles you, but it belongs to him by right,  because it belongs to the world he lives in."

Raymond  Chandler: The Simple Art of Murder

"I would have stayed in the town where I was born and worked in the hardware store and married the boss's daughter and had five kids and read them the funny paper on Sunday morning and smacked  their heads when they got out of line and squabbled  with the wife about how much spending  money they were to get and what programs they could have on the radio or TV set. I might even have got rich- small town rich, an eight-room house, two cars in the garage, chicken every Sunday  and the Reader's Digest on the living room table, the wife with a cast-iron  permanent and me with a brain like a sack of Portland cement. You take it, friend. I’ll take the big sordid dirty crowded city."

Raymond Chandler: The Long Goodbye

"But….a fellow of Marlowe's type shouldn't get married because he is a lonely man, a poor man, a dangerous man, yet a sympathetic man, and somehow none of this goes with marriage. I think he will always have a fairly shabby  office, a lonely house, a number  of affairs but no permanent connection. I think he will always be awakened at some inconvenient hour by some inconvenient person to do some inconvenient job. It seems to me that that is his destiny- possibly not the best destiny in the world, but it belongs to him. No one will ever make him rich, because he is destined to be poor. But somehow, I think  he would not have it otherwise, and therefore I feel [the] idea be should be married, even to a very nice girl, is quite out of character. I see him always in a lonely street, in lonely rooms, puzzled but never quite defeated.•."

Raymond Chandler: Letter of February 21, 1959(Chandler died on March 26, 1959)