those hard-boiled young women
Robert B. Parker (1932–2010) in his 1971 doctoral dissertation “The Violent Hero, Wilderness Hero, and the Urban Reality: A Study of the Private Eye in the Novels of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald” placed the hard-boiled private detective in a romantic tradition dating back to James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, a tradition Parker himself was soon to revitalize with the appearance of Spenser in The Godwulf Manuscript (1973).
Hammett’s Sam Spade, Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, and Macdonald’s Lew Archer were cool, flippant, and irreverent, governed by an idiosyncratic code of honor and the determination to live life as much on their own terms as one is able. They were outsiders and loners whose moral compass not infrequently put them at odds with conventional morality, mores, and the letter of the law in a world where the cops were apt to be crooked, the politicians seedy and corrupt, and society’s upper crust decadent and depraved. They were more likely to show their toughness by taking a beating than by handing one out, and they solved cases less by clever deduction than by poking around the hornet’s nest until they stirred up a denouement.
After Spenser came a new golden era of such finely drawn figures as James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux, Walter Moseley’s Easy Rawlins, Sara Paretsky’s V I Warshawksi, Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone, and Robert Crais’s Elvis Cole, to name but a few. Burke, Paretsky, et al., may not rank with the very best novelists of their generation, but they may not be so far behind either. As Parker noted (Charles L.P. Silet, Robert B. Parker Author Interview on Writing Mysteries: “Five Pages a Day”), the quality of the writing is what matters, and this is limited only by the author’s talent and ability, not by genre. I would quibble with Parker only by way of extrapolating that the best writers transcend genre, as for instance, Dostoevsky with Crime and Punishment, Robert Stone with DogSoldiers, and Cormac McCarthy with No Country for Old Men.
Some of the real action these days is in Europe, especially Scandinavia, where the protagonist is likely to be a cop but remains an individualistic outsider, bound by a stringent code, whatever his quirks, flaws, and all too human foibles. To my mind the best of them writing today, American or European, are Ian Rankin, whose John Rebus prowls the streets and pubs of Edinburgh while listening to music played in the dorms when I was in college 1970–1973, and Henning Mankell from Sweden, who I think of not as a writer of mysteries or thrillers but simply a novelist, and quite a good one.
On the cusp of the 21st century, Carol O’Connell debuted Kathy Mallory in the 1994 novel Mallory’s Oracle. Some ten years later Mallory was joined by her Swedish spiritual cousin Lisbeth Salander, one of the two protagonists of Steig Larsson’s Millennium trilogy now all the rage, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest.
Mallory was abandoned on the streets of New York at the age of six, cared for to the extent she was cared for at all by prostitutes, a child sociopath living by her wits and thievery until taken in by a cop and his wife who became her foster parents. She followed in the footsteps of her foster father and became a police detective, but she plays by her rules. Mallory’s maxim is, “If you didn’t catch me, I didn’t do it.” She instinctively bucks authority, and authority puts up with her only because she gets results. She has no scruples about breaking the rules if that is what it takes to get them.
Salander’s childhood was every bit as harrowing than Mallory’s. A victim of rape and abuse, with a history of violence, she is determined by the authorities to be mentally incompetent and placed under a guardianship. Her first guardian is a kindly man who is sympathetic to this strange, clearly troubled and just as clearly very bright girl with multiple piercings and tattoos, but when he suffers a stroke, he is replaced by a middle-aged weasel who does not have her best interests at heart, for which Salander will see that he receives his just desserts. She supplements the Taser and mace packed in her knapsack with a hammer on the principle that you can take care of a lot of problems with a good hammer.
Mallory and Salander are women others cross only at their peril. They are loners who keep a small circle of friends at arm’s length while remaining in their way fiercely devoted and protective. They are not inclined to explain themselves, much apologize for anything. To be open is to be vulnerable, and vulnerability must be guarded against at all costs.
Both women are freakishly intelligent, among other things world-class computer hackers. Mallory is drop-dead beautiful, Salander less conventionally attractive but no less desirable. If all this seems to require a bit much suspension of disbelief, well that rather goes with the territory. Spade, Marlowe, and Archer routinely shrug off the effects of being sapped and pistol whipped with no more than a passing headache, while Korean War vet Spenser beats the crap out of hooligans half his age and enjoys terrific sex with the love of his life, lovely übershrink Susan Silverman, in some pretty contemporary settings.
What Parker traced to Natty Bumppo is itself part of a broader tradition of the Romantic outsider who sometimes flaunts and is sometimes merely indifferent to the conventions and approval of society. The Byronic hero, bohemian artist, and hard-boiled detective are not so distant kin. They may be jaded and made cynical by the ways of man and the world. The hard edge they adopt to protect themselves from being hurt may condemn them to turn away from those for whom they care most (Spenser being a notable exception to this last trait). Yet they are after their fashion idealists too who take their stand against hypocrisy and philistinism and evildoers who are rich, respected, powerful, and seemingly immune to justice. They never give up on the quest for authenticity, whatever its cost and whether it is to be had in the end or not. They are heroes for a dark time.
postscript 1 June 2010
A better title, or perhaps a subtitle, for this one would be “notes toward a future essay.” Or perhaps multiple essays, considering themes of kinship between the hard-boiled detective and the bohemian and of Mallory and Salander as distinctive variations on the type, just as Spenser represented a substantive variation on his predeccesors. To do that I would have to go back and reread some Hammett, Chandler, McDonald, and O’Connell, at the minimum. That would be fun but would require time at the expense of other projects. Maybe some day.
David :: May.31.2010 :: House Red: Literary and Intellectual :: No Comments »