William Marling,Ph.D. Professor of English, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA
Characteristics of the Genre: Villains
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).
The hard-boiled detective novel uses villains differently than does hard-boiled crime fiction. If a narrative has a private eye, there will either be a specific, individualized, bad guy or a culpable class, diffusing blame over a social strata. Casper Gutman of The Maltese Falcon serves as an example of the former. No author lets readers get too close to the villain, but Hammett still gives readers much specific detail about Gutman's physique, his clothes, his habits, his motivations, and his conversational style. Spade meets him three times, and they are conversational equals.
Gutman values Spade enough to invite him on the renewed quest to find the falcon. But Hammett makes sure the reader understands that Gutman is evil, implying that he abuses his daughter Rhea physically. In the film, this memorable role was played in the film by Sidney Greenstreet (shown right).
The novels of Ross Macdonald, on the other hand, often have no single, discernable villain. The "evil" that Lew Archer faces has apparent human faces, but Macdonald disperses blame over a class, a social condition, or he locates it in a distant source, such as Nevada gangsters. In The Galton Case, Macdonald presents a series of briefly detestable characters – Peter Culligan, Maria Galton, John Galton, Gordon Sable. But the revelation that Sable killed Culligan pales before the revelation of the tragic childhood and youth of John Brown. Sable, after all, killed Culligan to save his unstable wife, who had been the victim of Culligan and assorted Reno gangsters, whose brutality Macdonald shows his readers clearly. They are blame-worthy, but the real evil-doers are people who would raise a child as Brown was raised (his mother and stepfather) and the upper classes, living insulated on California hillsides from the perils and promise of "coming to be" someone genuine that Brown has suffered.
In the hard-boiled crime novels of Cain, Woolrich, Thompson and others, however, the protagonist is the bad guy, so "villainy" is constructed differently. Readers are allowed to know, even to empathize with someone who commits crimes, even murder. The police, legal, or investigative structure will be represented by an individual or group who may be brutal or unfair, but who ultimately bring the protagonist to justice. It is not accurate to call these antagonists the "villains," for they represent justice – they are necessary to our sense of proper thematic closure. But their manipulation of the protagonist's life can seem so cavalier – as in the bet between D.A. Sackett and attorney Katz in Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice –
that we begin to sympathize with murderous Frank Chambers, played sympathetically in the film by John Garfield (right). Sackett and Katz become merely the human faces of the legal/insurance structure that "controls" modern life, predicting all of our choices through actuarial statistics. In this sense, the hard-boiled crime novel villainizes the restrictive legal and social structure of modern capitalism. But this romantic rebellion can only be made appealing for so long, before a substitute gratification must be offered: it's no fun to rebel if it leads to your death. The conventions of the genre demand that justice finally be served. If the reader's appetizer is sympathy for the rebel, then his dessert is relief that he does not meet the rebel's fate.
Cain's Double Indemnity is a good example of a second development in the hard-boiled crime novel – to give the power structure a human face. Murderous Walter Huff's antagonist is his office colleague Keyes, the ace actuary and three-dimensional character. Huff respects Keyes' ability, they converse respectfully, and Huff is almost fond of his opponent. This tendency is less often encountered in hard-boiled detective fiction, though recent crime and detective novelists, such as Wambaugh, Higgins, and Ellroy, have found sympathetic opponents useful.