#pulp detectives

EDIT: This post was written prior to this article and me learning more extensively about what the horrendous bag of shit Dashiell Hammett was. I'll leave the section up because it doesn't change the quality of the character or it's influence, but I retract any and all endorsement towards Hammett and his writing, and will no longer speak about the man in any capacity other than disgust.

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I look forward to that review series of yours then, chances are you've probably read more on them than I have, but I'm gonna comment a bit on the three you mentioned and the general history of that archetype.

The pulp detectives along the Spade/Marlowe/Op line, let's call em "Private Eye" for short, are arguably the simplest, most to the point of all pulp hero archetypes, the most standard protagonists you can add to a usual pulp novel to the point that their looks and personalities have become synonymous with the whole idea of pulp. A lot, a staggering amount really, of these characters as a result end up being interchangeable, more of a look and general attitude than fully-fledged characters, often because they are the ideal protagonists for stories where you don't want the protagonist to hog up too much attention, you want to invest readers in a conspiracy or a doomed love affair or political drama and you need a solid man of action or brains to get us to where the really interesting characters are supposed to be.

More than perhaps any other kind of pulp hero, these guys are completely dependent on the quality of the writing to carry them, which is why you usually hear people bring up the names of their stories or authors much more often than the protagonists themselves. I'd heard a lot about Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler when I was getting into detective fiction, but hardly anything much about Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe.

I suspect part of why these characters are often interchangeable is because of the genre shift that led to their creation. Detective/mystery dime novels and pulps were popular since their inception, and in the early 1910s, the most popular of it's kind was Nick Carter, crimefighting super detective star of what we usually call the "hero pulp" or single-character magazine, a format that became dormant in the 1920s following the cancellation of the Nick Carter Magazine and would be revived when The Shadow debuted in 1931.

It was during the 20s that the "Private Eye" became such a dominant archetype thanks to the debut of Black Mask Magazine, the most famous of detective pulps, and Carroll John Daly's Race Williams. Race Williams was not the first, that would be Three-Gun Terry, also created by Daly, but they were basically the same character and Williams was the one who went on to be popular and published for over 30 years, and therefore commonly considered the first of the future hard-boiled Private Eyes. Race Williams was a notable departure from previous detectives due to barely being one, instead more of a defiantly illiterate trigger-happy jerk who only seems to care about how extra can he charge for killing people on the job. As Robert Sampson put it:

“Race Williams is often credited with being the first hard-boiled detective. That strains the definition of detective. Williams is a hired adventurer who may occasionally detect if he blunders into a clue the size of a bathtub and painted bright pink. He has little use for clues, even less for chains of reasoning.”

Black Mask specialized from the start in much sleazier, more intricate or violent stories than their contemporaries, all the violence and gore and sex that, again, have become synonymous with "pulp" despite being an incredibly small part of it, and it was through the rise of it's most popular crime fiction writers that it became such a staple of pulp detective fiction, most notably, Dashiell Hammett.

My main image of the Op is from Christopher Lloyd's performance of him for Fly Paper, and while I understand that he's not the right look or age, Christopher Lloyd is one of my favorite actors and it was what got me to look into the character. While today he's considerably less known than the other two, Continental Op came first, and it was the Op that set groundwork for the Private Eye's longevity, who had to come in and actually provide a good model so future Private Eyes would not have to keep pace with Race Williams's murder gorilla antics, the reason why there is such a thing as a "private eye genre".

It's in Op that we see one of the things that have made the Private Eye sustainable as a replacement or alternative to the Great Detectives or Costumed Crimefighters: the fact that they don't need to be extraordinary. Op was a short, overweight, middle-aged detective living on booze through sleepless nights, who we knew little about personally, but we got to learn a great deal about his ethics and philosophies and worldview as he became our POV into the great troubles he got into. As clever and impressively manipulative as he could be, he was grounded in a reality that could never be afforded to Holmes or Carter or The Shadow, a reality that most people would prefer not to be part of in escapist fiction. Steady, disillusioned, terse, coldly violent and cooly pragmatic, but ultimately reliable and honorable. I'd argue Op is not just Hammett's greatest character but also the best embodiment of his virtues as a writer.

Hammett's well-known for his incredibly dramatic life story prior to becoming a pulp writer, where he actually used to work as a private detective (and learned it from someone he'd eventually be said to use as inspiration for the Op) for the Pinkertons, left to join the Army, was discharged due to tuberculosis, and had to rejoin the Pinkertons to pay for his treatment, until the murder of labour organizer Frank Little by the Pinkertons (and Hammett's claim that he was hired to murder a union organizer in the same town Little was killed and refused it) caused Hammett to leave them and instead write fiction based on his experiences. Hammett was writing about several of his own experiences, and his disillusionment with law enforcement, the upper class, and the Pinkertons is completely inseperable from his writing and something that shows up most prominently in the Op stories, as Op is the kind of deeply personal character that lends to great stories, but doesn't exactly lend itself to long-running franchise material. As this article elaborates:

A middle-aged hero who did society’s dirty work on very little sleep, who showed up whether he wanted to or not, who was seemingly indifferent to solitude and the absence of support yet willing to pursue the rich and hold their feet to the fire—this wasn’t a person whose daily life Americans envied but someone they wanted on their side. And, as it turned out, it was the sort of person more and more Americans were forced to be.

The Op faced "the grim problem of existence” and the “dark realities of the moment” on a daily basis. He believed that prominent families were just as involved—perhaps more so—as street-level grifters. Cultural realities and the involvement of the upper classes became still grimmer and darker in the years just after Red Harvest was published as a novel.

The Op couldn’t do much about the corruption and murders that surrounded him, but he could “speak the truth, frankly and boldly.” His reports from Personville were like fireside chats from someone who didn’t have a fireplace and wasn’t sure he’d ever get the chance to sit by one.

I suspect Sam Spade, in turn, was created to be sort of the anti-Op, in the sense that Hammett needed a popular man of action to create a less-morose story around, and so he came up with his own take on a more Race Williams type of detective. Gone was the cynical, middle-aged, realistic and nameless narrator stuck on a daily grind for the agency he needs to rely on for a paycheck, and in his place enters the camera-ready "blonde Satan", shifty and unorthodox and only slightly more ethical than the villains he's confronted with and who's his own boss, who's gonna star in the film adaptations and his own radio series and be popular as a character in his own right.

I don't have much to say about Sam Spade other than he was one of the most significant hard-boiled private eyes, before those really kicked into popularity for the 40s, and that he's an asshole, but I do think that he's made somewhat more interesting by the sheer contrast he poses to the Op, whom I obviously prefer. And it's interesting that, while Spade is still the background player to the general conspiracy surrounding the Maltese Falcon, he also seems very much designed to be the star of the show in a way a lot of these other characters aren't, a character who isn't just the POV detective necessary for a detective story to happen but also a strong personality for things to happen to.

And thus we come to Marlowe. The one who's likely behind most people's first contact with pulp fiction protagonists, of at least one variant. If Three-Gun Terry and Race Williams were the first Private Eyes, The Continental Op set the groundwork, and Sam Spade staked the claim of stardom, it was Marlowe that would bring all of these together to forever define the Private Eye archetype as a pop culture icon, long past the time period of his popularity, the one who easily had the most imitators following his debut.

He's Humphrey Bogart in a fedora and trenchcoat staring out of Venetian blinds out of a dingy office with a half-empty bottle on his desk. He's a a battered and bruised romantic prone to loneliness and melancholic musings immediately followed by the smart mouth and wisecracking attitude that went on to define a lot of these characters. He's got a complicated relationship with law enforcement and comes across corruption on all levels of society, not too anti-establishment but not friendly enough with cops to be one of them. He is not college-educated, but he's clever and resourceful. He's tough and can take care of himself, but not too tough that nobody can get the better of him in a scrap. He's smart enough to catch the bad guys by surprise, but not smart enough to stay outta trouble, see?

Not a character I am ever particularly compelled to seek out other than what I've experienced so far, in putting these characters together I've come to the conclusion that I actually like the Op the most out of these three, but Marlowe is a very effective character and one most responsible for the general versatility that's made the Private Eye one of the most imitated and iconic protagonists of pop culture, even if ultimately their names and personal lifes hardly matter. All too fitting for the thankless lives these characters have to lead.

I gave a talk tonight on hardboiled detectives and how Hollywood has flattened the private investigator over the years and it was so much fun! These ideas have been bouncing around in my brain for more than a year now and it felt SO GOOD to finally formally share them with people!

The Spider, a 1930s comics pulp detective character who got two movie serials back in 1938 and 1941 played by Warren Hull. It’s kinda hard to make out but those white lines on his cape really are spiderwebs.