THE COOLEST P.I.'S by Steven X. Rea
"So you're a private detective. I didn't know they existed, except in books-or else they were greasy little men snooping around hotel corridors. My, you're a mess, aren't you?"
-Lauren Bacall to Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep
Private dick. Private eye. Private investigator. The operative word for these operatives is private. They keep to themselves. They call their own shots, make their own plans, keep their own hours. The rules they break are the ones they made up in the first place. Some of them are smart, some just smart-assed. Hard-boiled, flinty exteriors; sentimental mush-hearts underneath.
That's one kind. There are others: effete greenhouse dandies, cuddly, beshawled old ladies, well-heeled society sleuths, even a few strong-willed dames-the get-out-of-the way- you-dumb-lug- I'll-take-care-of-this-myself variety.
Whatever and whoever, the P.I. in mystery fiction is a maverick hero. A nonconformist with an innate (and sometimes fatal) sense of honor and justice. A seeker of truth. Someone with a strong stomach who maybe doesn't understand why Joe Blow has offed his wife, embezzled his company's funds, and hightailed it to the Bahamas with his twenty-year-old secretary, but who knows there are Joe Blows all over the place and that they'll always be pulling this stuff.
Some of them are packing heat; some are packing steamer trunks for a global jaunt. Some drink too much (Marlowe), others mainline cocaine (Sherlock Holmes). They can wear fedoras or deerstalkers or no hat at all. They can charge a pair of C-notes a day plus expenses or render their services free of charge. The private detective is a puzzle solver, a newsmonger, a voyeur. They are "Sirs" and "Lords," flatfoots and gumshoes. They deal in questions and answers, missing persons and missing things. And corpses ... lots of corpses.
The Nocturnal Ratiocinator And The World's First Consulting Detective C. Auguste Dupin. A brainy Parisian who detested daylight, closeting himself up in his shuttered garret, Dupin-the creation of Edgar Allan Poe-is generally acknowledged to be the first fictional detective. Though he appeared in only three stories, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Mystery of Marie Roget," and "The Purloined Letter," Dupin's m.o.-part armchair analysis (ratiocination is the term Poe coined for this cerebrum-flexing) and part scene-of-the-crime inquiry-became the model for all to follow.
Down These Mean Streets a Man Must Go Philip Marlowe. Raymond Chandler's hard-boiled L.A. dick rarely used a gun but often quoted Flaubert. He kept a bottle of whiskey filed in his desk drawer, and women tried to sit on his lap while he was standing up. He got knocked around a lot by crooked cops and cheap hoods but (through bloody teeth) always spat back a cool bit of flip. Chandler penned seven Marlowe books--The Big Sleep; Farewell, My Lovely; The High Window, The Lady in the Lake; The Little Sister, The Long Goodbye; and the critically maligned Playback--all with plots as tangled as the wiring on a British sports car and characters as real as the ones walking the streets right now. (Ballantine Books)
Sam Spade. In Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, the tall, tough-as-nails Frisco P.I. Sam Spade hunts down his partner's killer (even though Spade hated his guts and was making it with his wife), embroils himself with a leggy redhead named Brigid, and gets sapped over the head while he's looking for a little black bird. (Vintage)
Down These Mean Streets a Swarm Must Follow Lew Archer. Author Ross MacDonald handily carries the Chandler/Hammett torch into the Sixties and Seventies with Archer, a quiet, questioning ex-cop whose cases seem to center around family breakups, missing sons and daughters, and smarmy secrets from the past that come back to haunt his clients. There are eighteen Archer novels, beginning with The Moving Target (1949). With The Drowning Pool, The Zebra-Striped Hearse, The Goodbye Look and Sleeping Beauty, MacDonald stepped from the shadow of his literary mentors, so much so that today Lew Archer is Lew Archer, not Marlowe or Spade in a different cut of suit. (Bantam)
Thomas Kyd. "You want to solve a crime, Granville? Why don't you go arrest your tailor?" That and many other snappy rejoinders run rampant through Timothy Harris' two Kyd novels, Kyd for Hire (Dell) and Good Night and Good-Bye (Dell). A thirty-ish private eye with an office on the corner of Hollywood and Western, Kyd ambles his way through modern-day L.A., rubbing elbows with glamorous show biz types and sleazy porn kings, failing for a couple of beautiful broads in the process. Known to tote a high caliber Mauser when things turn ugly, he can also wax serious: "A gun is just a bad idea waiting for its time."
Spenser. A self-styled gourmet with enough machismo to arm a division of Marines, Robert B. Parker's Bostonbased dick started off in a promising Chandleresque vein with The Godwulf Manuscript (set in the world of academia) and Mortal Stakes (professional baseball), but has since taken a nose dive of remarkable velocity. (Berkley Medallion)
Harry Stoner. Stoner calls Cincinnati home, which probably explains the death wish that got him into the gumshoe racket. Three books by writer Jonathan Valin--The Lime Pit (Avon), Final Notice, and Dead Letter (both Dodd, Mead)--feature Stoner, a soft touch and a bad judge of character, risking life and limb to smash a kiddie prostitution ring, hunt down a library vandal-psycho killer, and figure out who bumped off a college prof trading in government secrets.
Fletch. Irwin Maurice Fletcher, a crack newspaper reporter, goes undercover as a California beach bum to track a millionaire industrialist who wants to have himself offed. Gregory McDonald's Fletch ends with our hero on a plane to Rio, $3 million in unmarked bills under his seat. In Confess, Fletch and Fletch's Fortune the dialogue crackles with vim and vigor, but by the time McDonald gets to Fletch and the Widow Bradley another top sleuthhound has bitten the dust. (Avon)
Hard-boiled Yucks Jack LeVine. "How was she to know that in a matter of hours I would be slugged, drugged, drawn into a warm bath with her hot body, and forced to kiss off my best intentions on the trail of her husband's cold-blooded killer?" That's just one of the queries New York P.I. LeVine puts to himself in Andrew Bergman's Hollywood and LeVine, a funny, loving send-up of the Chandler style and milieu, replete with cameos by Bogart and Bacall. Also: The Big Kiss-Off of 1941.(Ballantine)
Toby Peters. Writer Stuart Kaminsky's mysteries commingle the fictional life of Pepsi-swizzling flatfoot Toby Peters with the likes of Judy Garland, the Marx Brothers, Gary Cooper, William Faulkner, and Errol Flynn. In the best of them--Murder on the Yellow Brick Road, Bullet for a Star, Never Cross a Vampire--Kaminsky's uncanny knack for biographical detail and vivid rendering of L.A. in the Forties makes for more than just a quick, clever read. (Penguin)
A Couple of Poets Sitting Around Sucking Bullets Charlie Bradshaw. In poet Stephen Dobyns'second novel, Saratoga Longshot, a shlumpy, sleepy-eyed upstate New York police detective makes for the Big Apple in search of a girl. In Saratoga Swimmer, Bradshaw has ankled the force and becomes the head security guard at a big Saratoga racing stable. In both books, Dobyns has crafted subtle, suspenseful thrillers and has created, in Bradshaw, a guy of such average dimensions that his sheer normalcy becomes heroic. (Atheneum)
Al Barnes. Nicknamed "Mush Heart" from his ten-year stint as a softy cop in the Seattle homicide division, Barnes moves to the backwater burg of Plains, Montana, ready for an easy job as a deputy sheriff. What this contemplative old coot gets in famed poet Richard Hugo's Death and the Good Life (St. Martin's) is a vicious axe murderer and more twists than a dance party at the Peppermint Lounge.
Death Wears a Union Jack Cordelia Gray. In P.D. James' An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (Popular Library), a fledgling female P.I. inherits an agency from her (male) mentorpartner and goes about trying to prove to herself--and her client--that she's up to the task of detectiving. A sordid mock suicide, a gaggle of strange Cambridge University students, and some truly lethal goings-on set the scene for this complex, richly characterized book. Ms. Gray turns out to be a young, modern heroine with enough pluck and pride to get her through all the carnage--barely.
Sid Halley, Philip Nore. Halley is a moody, crippled former jockey who sets up a detective agency to smash a British racing scam in Dick Francis' Odds Against (Pocket Books). Nore, also a jockey, and an amateur photographer, gets caught up in a blackmail racket (in Francis's Reflex Fawcett). In these and most of Welsh scribe and former jockey Francis' twenty-odd books, the backdrop is racing, the protagonist stoic, and the villains carnivorous slime who will stop at nothing.
Strictly for Swells Nick and Nora Charles. In The Thin Man (Vintage), Dashiell Hammett fashioned a husband-and-wife team so arch, so debonair, and so besotten with cocktails that their charm and wit virtually ooze off the pages. Wisecracking Nick, an ex-detective, has married wisecracking millionairess Nora, and he has no plans beyond fixing them both a shaker of martinis. Of course, through Nora's nudging, Nick finds himself knee-deep in crime, hunting down a missing scientist (the Thin Man) while he slurps down a succession of alcoholic beverages.
Hooper Taliaferro and Dr. Mary Finney; In 1955, under the pseudonym Matthew Head, New York art critic John Canaday scribed Murder at the Flea Club (Perennial Library) a classic bit of classy detection set against the decadent demimonde of a Paris nightclub. Prostitutes (male and female), wealthy widows, languid foreigners and the Flea Club's singer-proprietress are among the characters that the raffish Hooper Taliaferro and his overweight African missionary friend Dr. Finney (the real brains of the team) must contend with if they're to solve the question of who killed... well, we won't get into that. Canaday/Head's first-person narrative is stylishly loop and rife with a sort of easygoing Continentalese.
Detective-Inspector Wilkins. The British Stately Home mystery is resurrected in a pair of seductively silly whodunits by English writer James Anderson, The Case of the Mutilated Mink Coat and The Affair of the Blood-Stained Egg Cosy (Avon). Wilkins and sidekick Detective-Sergeant Leather don't even appear in these drawing room dramas until the thieving, cheating, and poisoning have all been accomplished (about halfway through the books), but the coterie of earls, MPs, Texas millionaires, foreign spies, playboys, French baronesses, and mysterious strangers keep the reader amused, bemused, and totally at a loss as to what's going on.
(Those wishing to follow some of the aforementioned sleuths on their appointed rounds are advised to investigate The Armchair Detective caper: $16 for four quarterly issues of mystery news and views to TAD, 129 West 56th Street, New York, New York 10019.)