William wrote:
"Describing Spade as 'screwed' -- with all due respect -- is
semantic dancing. For example, he's not dead, in prison, or
insane."
While I agree that Spade is not screwed enough to be noir
screwed, certainly not to a Cain degree, I would say that
sending the woman he loves to prison is everyday language
screwed, in a between a rock and a hard place sense.
"Spade is a hero as is Philip Marlowe and you can fudge it
all you want but he succeeds and lives and all the bad
puppies have been slapped with the newspaper. Don't get me
wrong. The Maltese Falcon may be the best book of its kind
and is a damn fine book of any kind."
Spade does his job. Does that really rise to the ot level of
heroism? I'm currently reading Richard Witts's The Velvet
Underground. It's highly recommended if you're into the
group, but I had to pause at something he said while
describing the influence of Hammett and Chandler on Lou
Reed's writing: "Reed has also mentioned Dashiell Hammett,
similarly gifted in imagery, who was slightly ahead of
Chandler in creating a more 'realistic' crime story genre
where their ethical and incorruptible private detective sees
how hungrily the law and the lawless feed of of greed." While
this would describe Marlowe, Spade is
"ethical and incorruptible"?
"But Spade is a hero no matter what environment he swims in.
All the PIs are."
Uh, they are? All of them? I'm not sure the Continental Op is
always a hero. Is he really a hero in Red Harvest, for
instance? I also find it hard to see the PI in Jonathan
Latimer's Solomon's Graveyard as a hero. Okay, they get right
results, so maybe they're just "not saints," as you put it.
But certainly the PI in Marc Behm's Eye of the Beholder is no
hero, nor the one in Loren Estleman's Peeper. Peter Israel
wrote of a PI who actually did take the money when bribed to
back off a case.
Wade Miller once used the reader's expectation of a PI's
being a hero to hide his true nature (don't want to give it
away by giving the title). And the PI in Dave Zeltserman's
Fast Lane exposes himself as increasingly unheroic as the
book progresses.
Yes, these are exceptions to the overall heroism of PIs in
hardboiled lit, but there are a fair number of these
exceptions.
Mark
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