Ed Ranks Hardboiled Private Detectives - Part 1

'Bout to solve some crime, yo!

The progenitors of Film Noir: these are those cynical, whiskey-drinking, chain-smoking, fedora-wearing private dicks who are always running into pretty dames with a dangerous side. Although they externally show a hardness and lack of emotion, you know on the inside these are psychologically damaged.  They tend to do things like smoke, appear in black-and-white, drink black coffee (okay, maybe with bourbon added), narrate their adventures in first person, and create piles of dead bodies all over the place. But they're the only ones who can get the job done since the regular cops are too lazy and stupid.

It's often said they originated in pulp fiction (the genre of supposedly "low brow" and salacious stories printed on cheap pulp paper magazines rather than on glossy paper... not the movie named after the same magazines) but in some ways they're not that different from Sherlock Holmes. Just replace the opiates and smarmy deductions with whiskey and a jaded worldview about the broken and corrupt criminal justice system that causes more criminality and corruption than it solves.

First off, honorable mention to author James Hadley Chase, one of the most prolific detective and thriller authors of all time. Alas, he couldn't stick with one character long enough to build up any momentum with one of them in particular. His private dicks include Vic Malloy, Bart Anderson, Dave Fenner, Floyd Jackson, Nelson Ryan, and Dirk Wallace. He couldn't stick with one pen name, as he was also credited at times as James L. Docherty, Raymond Marshall, R. Raymond, and Ambrose Grant.  Want to guess which one of those was his birth name? None of them, of course. His birth name was René Lodge Brabazon Raymond. Hence he goes unranked for confusing the hell out of me.

Let's work our way through the first half of the top 10...

10. Perry Mason 
Author: Erle Stanley Gardner

I know you think my list has already gone off the rails with my first pick, but please allow me to explain. "Perry Fucking Mason?!" You're probably asking. "Hardboiled? Hardboiled like alcoholic, womanizing, gun-toting private eye? He's not even a private eye, he's a defense attorney, Ed you moron!" Well, yes... but also sort of no. First off, you're probably thinking only of Perry Mason the TV show starring Raymond "I whitewashed Japanese fiction long before Scarlett Johansson" Burr. But Perry Mason isn't just the TV show, as the character goes back to a 1933 novel - near the birth of the hardboiled era. And while he never reaches the level of hedonism and self-destruction that the most renowned hardboiled detectives do - the original novelized Perry Mason was no angel. He manufactures and tampers with evidence, and also manipulates witnesses. Which makes him sound like a legit defense attorney. There's that point again though - he's a defense attorney and not a private detective. Well, think of it like this - Perry Mason is not a police detective and yet he's constantly solving crimes. Regular defense attorneys file motions and do court nonsense. But Mason is always gallivanting off on hunches to find the real criminals himself, as his clients are (almost) always innocent. A typical Perry Mason story features an innocent person coming to Mason for help because dumb cops have the wrong person and ends with non-policeman (e.g. private) Mason solving the whole thing (e.g. detective-ing). That's largely the structure of a private dick novel - only with the addition of a court room for atmosphere. Mason's author, Gardner, was also one of the most famous writers in the pulp magazines like Black Mask in which the hardboiled detectives first emerged. Look, I'm not saying Perry Mason is an amazing or a typical hardboiled detective - that's why he's at the bottom here at #10.  I'm just saying open your mind and you'll maybe, sort-of, kinda agree with me. Or not, I won't lose any sleep over it. You can just pretend I put Spenser in this place instead. Spenser was pretty good and we all miss Robert Urich.

From the Same Author: Gardner also wrote about Ken Corning, a crusading lawyer and crime sleuth (obviously the archetype for Mason), as well as Cool and Lam, a private detective firm run by a fat widow named Bertha Cool and an anti-hardboiled detective named Donald Lam who is always getting beat up.

9. Rick Deckard
Author: Philip K. Dick

Stylish A.F.

Yeah, so now we have a sci-fi character right after a defense lawyer, so you're really thinking I might have never actually read a hardboiled fiction novel, huh?  Initially I was thinking I would keep my list concentrated only on the "classic" hardboiled fiction - since later characters like Deckard are really more homages to hardboiled detectives. But then I said, "forget that nonsense," because an homage to a hardboiled detective IS a hardboiled detective. Deckard is more hardboiled in the film interpretation of his character (Blade Runner) than he is in Dick's original novel (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?). The original version of the film features the film-noir style narration to make the connection clear (as if being a blood-thirsty, morally crushed, alcoholic private dick wasn't enough). I don't feel like I need to explain this much further. If you haven't seen Blade Runner, go see it before the sequel ruins its legacy. 

From the Same Author: Uhh, Dick isn't the typical author I was thinking of when I created this section, as I was mainly thinking of using it to show off that some of the most prolific hardboiled writers also had similar characters. But if I had to throw something up here, I suppose A Scanner Darkly is also about a detective. That's all I got. Not really hardboiled but he does lots of drugs, which is close, right?

8. Race Williams 
Author: Carroll John Daly

There would be no hardboiled detectives without Carrol John Daly's Race Williams. Race Williams is the daddy of all these other guys. Race Willaims debuted in the 1933 story Knights of the Open Palm, which featured him as a gruff, acerbic-talking, wise-cracking, shoot first, ask questions later private eye. Oh, and the "Knights" being referred to here are the Klu Klux Klan - who Race Williams fights and beats the shit out of in order to save a boy who witnesses them commit a murder. It's easy to see why a sassy, KKK-fighting private eye would inspire so many copycats. In his heyday Daly was ranked as the top hardboiled writer, above even Dashiell Hammett. There is some criticism that Race Williams didn't actually do much "detecting" in his stories, and instead just stumbled his way into solving crimes with a combination of luck and punching people. Which sort of makes Race Williams the inspiration for Batman too, if you think about it.

From the Same Author: While Race Williams might be the first of Daly's detectives to have a continuing series, he's not really the first hardboiled private eye. That honor does to another character created by Daly, "Three-Gun Terry" Mack, who debuted a month earlier.  Daly also had detectives named Satan Hall (yep, Satan!) and Vee Brown.  Want to know the difference in personalities between all these characters? Eh, there really isn't any.

7. Bill Crane 
Author: Jonathan Latimer

Latimer was a Chicago newspaper journalist who wrote about crime and met with people like Al Capone. He segued from non-fiction to fiction with the creation of his William Crane character.  Bill Crane was, at the time of his 1935 debut in Headed For a Hearse, by no means original. He didn't seem too different from the nameless hard drinking "Continental Op" character created by Hammett (more on him later).  But what Latimer added into the scenario that was a bit different is what is often called a "screwball comedy" addition to the stories. Hey, who doesn't love screwball comedy? The connection between hardboiled detectives and screwball comedies was cemented after Crane, as when the two genres moved to film - screwball comedies and noir films shared many traits. The king of screwball comedy directors, Howard Hawks, was even the director of the film adaption of The Big Sleep, which is as noir-ey and hardboiled as you can get.

From the Same Author: Latimer had another detective named Karl Craven, a St. Louis-based dick whose stories included sex, perversion, blackmail and violence. All good stuff! Latimer also went on to write in the Perry Mason TV show, which I'm casually noting here to continue  justifying my #10.

6. Archie Goodwin 
Author:  Rex Stout

Gonna get all up in dat blue.

This one I need to justify a little as well. No, Rex Stout is NOT a hardboiled writer. And his character Archie Goodwin isn't even the main character of his novels - only the primary supporting character to detective Nero Wolfe (and the narrator, in the way that Watson is in Sherlock Holmes novels). Nero Wolfe stories are definitely not hardboiled at all - they're more traditional mystery stories about a master "armchair" detective like the aforementioned Holmes who is so brilliant that he can solve a case without leaving his office. But in a way, by making Wolfe a kind of fat and lazy detective who didn't even need to leave his office to solve a crime - Stout was poking fun at the classic detective stories by taking the example to the extreme. In that same sense, Stout was also poking fun at the hardboiled stories and writers with Archie Goodwin - a young, handsome, brash, physical, crude private dick who works for Wolfe and does all the legwork. Legwork that often involves fistwork and making out with femme fatales. Honestly, Archie Goodwin is a deconstruction of a hardboiled detective. It's easy to deconstruct things years later, but Stout wrote his first Nero Wolfe story in 1934. That means Stout was deconstructing the emerging hardboiled genre live as it was happening. Which is all kinds of brilliant.

From the Same Author: Stout's detective fiction is pretty much centered around Wolfe and Goodwin, however he did create a female detective named Dol Bonner. She got one novel of her own, and then got spun into the Nero Wolfe continuity as an occasional supporting character. That sucks, but having a female private eye in the 1930s is still somewhat progressive.

So yeah, that's Part 1 of 2. Come back next time for the top 5.