On the last day of '30s month, it's appropriate to note just
how influential Chandler's first Philip Marlowe novel was on
the PI sub-genre.
Marlowe was pretty much fully-formed when he debuted
(as a nameless detective who'd later be dubbed
"Carmady," then change his name to "John Dalmas" when he
moved from BLACK MASK to DIME DETECTIVE) in Chandler's third
short story, "Finger Man." And he set an almost immutable
model that the vast majority of PI writers would follow
slavishly once THE BIG SLEEP was published in 1939.
In the wake of Marlowe, virtually all fictional PIs would
be:
1) Male
2) American
3) 30 to 40 years old (at least when the series starts)
4) Unmarried (usually single, often divorced, occasionally
widowed, but virtually always unmarried)
5) Ex-cops
6) Who operated a one-man agency
7) Located in a large US city
8) Who told their stories in the first person.
Very few PIs who've appeared in Marlowe's wake fail to meet
at least five or six of those eight traits, and a significant
number, perhaps a majority, match the Marlowe paradigm in
every single respect.
Prior to Marlowe, agency ops were almost as numerous as
one-man shows, and there were perhaps as many PI stories told
in the third person as in the first. PIs who did own their
own businesses were as likely to have gotten their prior
experience with a big agency as they were to have been
official law officers. Married detective weren't all that
common, but in the wake of THE THIN MAN, neither were they
unheard of. After Marlowe, the first-person, bachelor ex-cop
operating a one-man agency became almost de rigeur.
The most significant change in PI fiction over the last ten
or twenty years has been the proliferation of women private
eyes, but even they tend to follow the Marlowe paradigm in
most respects. The most popular, Sue Grafton's Kinsey
Milhone, follows it in every repsect save for being
female.
To this day, I still think Hammett's the better writer, but
there's no denying that Chandler's been the most
influential.
JIM DOHERTY
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