A Spectrum of Detectives

From Hard-boiled Marlowe to Harry Bosch to Batman

I love detective novels: Michael Connelly, Walter Mosley, Arthur Conan Doyle, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and more. But my favorites are Connelly and Mosley, mainly because, even though their characters have a tense relationship with the world around them, they are still a part of it. This is in contrast to characters like Hammett’s Continental Op and, in particular, Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. If the misanthropic vibes of these detectives were on a spectrum, Marlowe would be on one end, the borderline sociopathic loner side, whose sense of ethics and justice is the only thing separating him from the criminals he investigates, while Connelly’s Bosch and Ballard and Mosley’s Easy Rawlins and Joe King Oliver are on the other. They have homes; they have friends and family; they have complicated lives outside of their work. They also have backstories, personal histories that inform their decisions in the present. The result is that their professional lives often overlap with the personal. They take their work home with them, literally, metaphorically, for better or for worse (often for the worse). There are often two stories intertwined: the professional mystery and the personal struggle. And each affects the other. Whereas Marlowe and the Continental Op don’t have much of a life outside of their work, especially Marlowe. The Continental Op, at least, has the agency he works for, and friends therein, even if they’re more like what Ron Swanson refers to as “work proximity associates.”

Marlowe is the ultimate loner. What does he do in-between cases? Sit in his office alone drinking whiskey? Probably. What little information we get about him is often gleened from one off, cynical comments about cops he once knew or women who supposedly screwed him over. It is deeply unsatisfying if you are looking for the personal struggle overlapping with the professional. Because all they have is their job. It is what they take personally. And because of the dark state of the criminal underbelly they have to live in, they’re either angry and vengeful (like the Continental Op) or deeply cynical (like Marlowe). It could just be because I’m not a cynical person, and dislike cynicism in general, that I prefer Easy Rawlins and Detective Ballard. While they might have a ribboning of cynicism every now and then, they choose hope and human life over all. Marlowe does too, but I am bewildered as to how, since he seemingly has no reason to other than a tight grip on his ethics. But where did he learn that ethical code, that sense of justice? We are never told. And while that might not bother some, I find it deeply frustrating.

But I cannot deny that the struggle to stay tethered to reality despite the horrors of the world may be precisely what keeps Marlowe interesting. He hasn’t given up yet, but he’s on the edge. As he says to himself again and again in chapter thirteen of The Little Sister, “You’re not human tonight.” It’s as if he’s trying to convince himself that he’s not, because life would be easier that way.

I’m not trying to say that all protagonists should be upstanding members of society with families and 401(k)s. Far from it. What I’m saying is that perhaps you lose opportunities for deep, human stories when those characters have little to no tether to humanity. There’s a reason they’re called hard-boiled detectives. You hard boil eggs with the shell still on. But the problem is, if you want to eat the egg, you have to peel off the shell.

Writers like Connelly and Mosley peel off the shells of their hard-boiled detectives, revealing that the eggs inside are aren’t so hard after all, while Chandler and Hammett barely crack the surface, so we never really know what their characters are made of or what made them that way. The problem is that stories can take the sordid backstory too far, to the point where it feels trope-y, like Batman, the so-called “greatest detective in the world.” Connelly and Mosley’s stories are smart with their characterization, in a way that feels natural and revelatory, able to evolve over time. But there are other writers (especially big Hollywood movie writers and some comic book writers) who give their characters sordid backstories that end up feeling contrived and oversimplified. When a character’s identity (or secret identity) is too locked into their backstory, used to explain every decision of their life, they become a caricature.

So I guess I need to revise my spectrum. If the hard-boiled detective with no backstory and no attachments is on one end, then the contrived, sordid backstory detective whose whole life is run by that history is on the other. And somewhere in the middle are characters like Easy Rawlins, Harry Bosch, Renee Ballard, and Joe King Oliver, whose backstories are an important part of who they are, but do not define them to the point of turning them into a cartoon character like Batman, who can never change, never evolve. We understand why they have chips on their shoulders. But they are complex enough, human enough to not have those chips rule every moment. Sometimes it might even serve them for the worse. Ironically, although Marlowe has no backstory at all, his behavior seems more like Batman than not. In between cases, they spend their time brooding alone in their man-caves. Batman because he is brooding over the death of his parents, and Marlowe brooding over…what? How broken the world is? How everyone he interacts with is corrupt? It’s no surprise that Batman was born out of hard-boiled crime fiction. And no surprise that the most interesting storylines of Batman are the ones that challenge or push beyond the contrivances of his character. The Killing Joke, for example, written by Alan Moore, asks the question of what really separates Batman from his villains, if anything, challenging the idea that he is a hero at all. Because one of the other problems with heroes being motivated solely by their sordid backstories is that those backstories can be used as an excuse for unjust behavior. Batman is a prime example of this. He thinks he’s doing good, but really he’s using the death of his parents to excuse using his massive wealth and power to be a vigilante, meeting out street justice on criminals as part of a personal vendetta, instead of using his wealth and influence to improve the conditions of his community that let crime run amuck in the first place. Batman is a conservative, “law & order” dream come true.

At these two poles of the hard-boiled spectrum, It takes a true master to pull the detectives out of the morass.  Writers like Alan Moore can challenge the strict boundaries of what defines Batman, while Hammett and Chandler can make us care about a story whose protagonists we know close to nothing about. But that is why there are many imitators but no equals amongst those great writers who choose to work in the extremes.