excellent retrospective on the work of reclusive novelist Ernest Bramah (creator of the granddaddy of all blind detectives, Max Carrados), but also a most entertaining piece by Kevin Burton Smith about politics and private eyes. Just in time for this year’s U.S. presidential contest. As he explains:[T]he P.I. novel is arguably the most political of all the subgenres of crime fiction. Cozies and amateur sleuth mysteries tend to be closed (and relatively complacent) worlds, and too often spy fiction and thrillers reduce politics to the cartoon level. The police detective, meanwhile, particularly in procedurals, is shackled by the bonds of organization. But hard-boiled detective fiction, with its dysfunctional, loner dicks moving easily through all levels of society, following the clues where they may, seems perfectly suited to asking those rude and impertinent questions. And the P.I. genre is arguably where all that hard-boiled cynicism about politics got codified in the first place.Smith doesn’t limit his remarks to crime novels constructed overtly around political machinations (though he does mention Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key (1931) and Mark Coggins’ recent Runoff), but instead extends his commentary to cover gumshoe yarns that address or challenge social or justice issues that have been brought on by politics. “When you’re writing about law, justice and society,” he quotes Sara Paretsky as saying, “you are either challenging or supporting the status quo. ... I don’t know how much more political a writer can be.” Thus, Smith manages to corral within his commentary Linda L. Richards’ Death Was the Other Woman (in which gender issues are a point of contention) and Michael Harvey’s 2007 novel, The Chicago Way (which focuses in significant part on the corrupt practices of the powerful).
Nor does Smith try--thank goodness--to guess who Philip Marlowe might vote for this year (Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton?), or muse on whether Mike Hammer would have found John “100 Years War” McCain a sufficiently competent or conservative candidate. (He does, however, pull a quite wonderful related Marlowe quote out of The Lady in the Lake: “Politics ... asks for the highest type of men, and there’s nothing in it to attract the highest type of men. So, we have to work with what we get ...”)
Rather, critic Smith simply makes clear the inevitable intersection between political fact and crime fiction.
[A]lthough it’s rarely completely partisan, it’s easy enough to see much hard-boiled private eye fiction as political. As for the cynicism, it’s there as well, left or right, in the fact that these are “private” investigators, answerable to nobody but themselves (and maybe--but not always--their clients). They’re not part of the police or any other public, official agencies that ultimately serve those in power. And so private eye novels lift the lid, revealing corruption in places of authority and power, be it the police ([Raymond] Chandler’s notorious Bay City), government (Hammett’s The Glass Key or Red Harvest), or even the boardrooms of industry (almost everything Paretsky’s ever written). Not a campaign poster in sight, but it’s all politics. Even the decision not to take a political stand could in itself be considered a political stand.By the way, this same issue of Mystery Scene features an interview with veteran author Ed Gorman, whose latest novel, Sleeping Dogs, unleashes a new series starring political speechwriter and sleuth-by-necessity Dev Conrad. In the book, Conrad has just signed onto the unexpectedly troubled re-election campaign of a U.S. senator, and must deal with dirty tricks, campaign sabotage, a suicide, and his increasing suspicions about the very man he’s supposed to be helping stay in Congress. Gorman apparently drew from his own professional background of putting words into the mouths of politicians, but as he notes, “everything’s changed” since he worked the campaign arena in the 1980s.
My favorite quote comes in answer to interviewer Linda Siebels’ comment that, while she “laughed out loud” at Gorman’s tale, “it’s a very cynical look at politics.” You can almost hear the shaking of Gorman’s head, as he responds, “Have you watched the news lately? I honestly think I restrained myself.”
Unfortunately, these two pieces are not available on the Web. But copies of Mystery Scene will set you back only $7.50 apiece. Less than any politician is likely to ask of you.
READ MORE: “Our Vote Goes to Phillips,” by J. Kingston Pierce (The Rap Sheet); “Death in the City--Runoff,” by Betsey Culp (San Francisco Flier).
No comments:
Post a Comment