William Marling,Ph.D. Professor of English, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA
Characteristics of Detective Fiction:
The Evolution of the Genre
Updated 12/5/09
Classic Writers
Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar)
Development of Hard-Boiled Narrative
Early Female Authors of Hard-Boiled Writing
Chester Himes and Early Afro-American Detectives
Major Works
Red Harvest (1927) by Dashiell Hammett
The Maltese Falcon (1929) by Dashiell Hammett
The Glass Key (1931) by Dashiell Hammett
The Big Sleep (1939) by Raymond Chandler
Farewell, My Lovely (1940) by Raymond Chandler
The Long Goodbye (1953) by Raymond Chandler
The Galton Case (1959) by Ross Macdonald
The Underground Man (1971) by Ross Macdonald
Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965) by Chester Himes
Characteristics of the Genre
Imagery in Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction
Criticism, 1930 to the Present
Detective Fiction in Comics, Radio, and Television
Film Noir
Reactions against Early Crime Movies
More Film Noir (brief takes on The Glass Key (1942), Murder, My Sweet (1944), Farewell, My Lovely (1975), The Big Sleep (1946), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946, 1981), The Lady in the Lake (1947), The Lady From Shanghai (1949), Criss Cross (1949), D.O.A. ((1950), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Sunset Boulevard (1950), Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Touch of Evil (1958), Chinatown (1974), Taxi Driver (1976), Body Heat (1981), and The Ususual Suspects (1995).
Many detective novelists originally observed the central tenets of the mystery genre, which hold that readers be presented with all the suspects, that no clues be hidden from the audience and that the crime be plausible. They were not concerned with baffling or intricate plots to the extent that writers of the English school were, but they still created and preserved mysteries. There was presumed to be a much closer thematic relation between the apparent and revealed plots than in the English school.
But the hard-boiled genre had no sooner come into focus than writers began to innovate, as is typical of genre fiction. Writers look for ways to win new readers; they strive to keep the genre tuned to contemporary mood. Competing for the same audience were crime fiction and crime movies, which had already discovered that they could reverse the criminal/police equation, making interesting or even sympathetic protagonists from outlaws. Some of these had already appeared in frontier myth and Western fiction. Public rectitude and the movie censors, however, demanded that crime be punished in movies. Insofar as a criminal protagonist approached the status of "hero," he had to be justified as a child of hard times, born in a ghetto, homeless during the Depression, or scarred by one of the World Wars. This made him society's victim, occupying the same social margin inhabited by the private eye. Unlike the private eye, who could "see" through people, events, mores, and social strata, the criminal hero saw the rest of society as impenetrably walled off, incomprehensible. No knowledge or skill or manners would vault him over to the other side, where the winners, the lucky, and the rich lived. Thus, his or her whole life assumed the "fated" tone that was usually restricted to the discovery portion of the private eye novel. In David Madden's invaluable collection on the "tough guy novelists," Joyce Carol Oates famously remarked of James M. Cain's heroes that their 
knowledge of the world seems "limited to the radius of their desire." Desire is key: not possessed of the private eye's "vision," the criminal protagonist usually seems to act out of desire, which s/he believes is the universal common denominator. Overlooked by readers is the fact that, when the criminal is a first-person narrator, s/he knows the outcome already but suppresses it. Readers, however, attend to crime fiction or movies only partially because of their identification with desire and its objects. They also know that there is a "corrective" to pure desire, be it arrest or death. The reader's prurient identification is balanced by acceptance of this fate. The reading motive becomes: How far can desire proceed before the inevitable punishment? Both the private eye and the crime novels feature hero/ines who pay a price for pursuing an object or a quest and who are left 
the wiser, but the crime novel's wisdom is far darker. At its most dire, there is statement of Cornell Woolrich (left): "First you dream, then you die."
The hard-boiled novel began to branch as Raymond Chandler, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, sought to make it not only a vehicle of social comment but of autobiographical reflection. After The Long Goodbye (1953), some hard-boiled fiction began to shed its toughness and some of the "code." Ross Macdonald came to the fore of this "progressive" edge of the genre in The Galton Case (1959) and took it to fulfillment in The Underground Man (1971). Scholars such as Eric Mottram believe that this exhausted the "formal" possibilities of the genre, for Lew Archer "finally sees the genre into impossibility, moving into fictions of self-deception and self expenditure." 1
Archer had descendents – Robert Parker's Spenser, for example – but it is true that hard-boiled fiction branches like kudzu after Macdonald. Some authors availed themselves of techniques made familiar through Modernist texts; works such as Higgins' 1974 novel Cogan's Trade (see below) consisted of fragments of conversation overheard and assembled by the reader. This novel paved the way for The Sopranos television series. Other writers followed the contemporary lines of development represented by ethnic literature and renascent regionalism. After the African-American detective came the woman, the Jewish, the Native American, the Creole, and the Asian-American detective. In the 1980s there were detectives whose beats were Detroit or Boston, Cincinnati or Chicago, New Orleans, or Indianapolis. In the 1990s there were art-dealing, cab-driving, and handicapped detectives. "A detective for everyone" reflects the fact that the genre has adapted to another change: the fragmentation of mass media markets, begun by cable television in the 1980s. Niche marketing may seem like a diminution, but it's well to remember that hard-boiled fiction began as niche fiction, and it's still quite strong.
The Los Angeles Detective Novel
Los Angeles has long been the chief locale of the American detective novel. The world of its racial minorities, however, was marginalized by the Perry Masons and Phillip Marlowes and then repressed by the LAPD procedural. It has been reclaimed by Ezekial “Easy” Rawlins, the African-American detective of Walter Mosley. The background of Devil in a Blue Dress (1990), from details of the 1940s to the protagonist’s early job in an aircraft plant, is indebted to Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), but from there Mosley recaptures the “Central” district of Chandler and extends the geography of the LA detective to the black communities of Watts and Compton. Worried about paying his mortgage, Easy takes $100 to find a blonde, Daphne Monet, who favors nightclubs on the black side of town. She has stolen $30,000 of her white patron’s money which, after an immersion in the world of sexual debauchery and race politics that leads her to kill one man, she splits with Easy and his violent sidekick Mouse. Easy has a distant and antagonistic relation to the LAPD; instead, Mosley thematizes Easy’s pride in home ownership and ends the novel with him watering his yard and pondering the morality of the justice that has transpired. In A Red Death (1991), Easy owns apartment buildings he bought with stolen money that he recovered and kept. Pursued by the IRS, he cooperates by spying on a union organizer, and again extortion and murder have underworld roots. The third Easy Rawlins novel, White Butterfly (1994), is set in 1956. Easy helps police investigate the murders of four young women, one of whom, a UCLA student and daughter of a city official, led a double life as a stripper. These novels prize the vernacular details of African-American life, but emphasize the constant compromises required to “get along with the Man.”
Mosley’s recent work has departed from the genre; his mantle has been taken up by Gar Anthony Haywood, whose detective Aaron Gunner operates from an office behind a Watts barber-shop in Fear of the Dark (1989) and All the Lucky Ones are Dead {2000). Haywood’s novels are more driven by dialog and less violent than Mosley’s. Most recently Paula Woods has brought the African-American LA sleuth novel full circle, introducing black LAPD Detective Charlotte Justice (Inner City Blues [1999], Stormy Weather [2001], Dirty Laundry [2005], and Strange Bedfellows [2006]).
Lucha Corpi and Michael Nava have created Chicano/a detectives. In Corpi’s Eulogy for a Brown Angel (1992), Detective Gloria Damasco and her friend find a four-year-old boy dead during a Chicano Civil Rights march in Los Angeles in 1970. She returns to the case eighteen years later, employing a “dark gift” that allows her to dream and to see answers to problems. Cactus Blood (1995) is set in Delano during the farmworkers’ strike of 1973, and Black Widow’s Wardrobe (2000) delves into folklore. Nava weaves Chicano history and folklore in his stories of detective Henry Rios, a gay lawyer, who moves from San Francisco to Los Angeles in How Town (1990) and investigates the city in The Hidden Law (1992), The Death of Friends (1996), The Burning Plain (1997) and Rag and Bone (2001).
The contemporary LA detective novel shows breadth and depth. Michael Connelly, who worked as a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times, updates the romantic LA detective to include the reality of time cards and weekend rotations in his 12 “Harry Bosch” L.A.P.D. novels published between 1996 and 2008. Another police procedural writer, T. Jefferson Parker, has written 15 novels set mostly in Orange County or San Diego. Better known is Jonathan Kellerman, whose child psychologist detective Alex Delaware stars in 21 novels. Denise Hamilton, another ex-Times reporter, has written five detective novels about reporter Eve Diamond, who investigates crime in the local Latino, Asian, and Russian communities. LA’s Orthodox Jewish community provides the settings for Faye Kellerman’s 17 novels about police detective Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus, and Rochelle Majer Krich has nine Jewish-themed PI novels. There is a throwback: Stuart Kaminsky’s Toby Petersis a private detective who investigates film stars in 1940s Hollywood. Kem Nunn has pioneered a “surfer/noir” variation of the detective in a trilogy (Tapping the Source, 1984; Dogs of Winter, 1997; and Tijuana Straits, 2004) that pursues the environmental themes to which Macdonald, an avid birder, turned in The Underground Man (1971), set during the 1964 Coyote Canyon fire, and Sleeping Beauty (1973), whose central event is the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill.
Although LA gained a place in detective fiction rather late, it has become an iconic locale. Films such as Chinatown have reinforced the mystique. Combining important industries such as oil, aviation, and cinema with terrain stretching from the Pacific over mountains to high desert, Los Angeles has offered writers endless possibilities. Its twentieth-century evolution into a highly multicultural city presages LA’s continued importance in the genre.
1 Eric Mottram, "Ross Macdonald and the Past of a Formula," Art in Crime Writing:Essays on Detective Fiction, Ed.Bernard Benstock (New York: St. Martin's, 1983), 98.