Motives and Methods of Hardboiled Fiction - Part 5:
Concluding Unhardboiled Postscript

Note: This is intended as a continuation and critique of the four posts that make up the style guide I called “Motives and Methods of Hardboiled Fiction.” That piece was written just as I was beginning to try to write. I wouldn’t necessarily consider the guide to be naive, but having spent some years writing fiction, my perspective on the hardboiled style and its place in the craft has changed. I’m writing this “conclusion” now (2016) to add that new perspective.

Stupidities
Those who have read the blog/style guide this far (all 12 of you) have probably already compiled a list of the stupidities it contains. I have too, and the first stupidity on my list is my classification of good readers and bad. I’ll stand by the basic point that some readers want the author to tell them what to think and feel about the story, while others resent that kind of spoon-feeding and want to figure it out and experience it for themselves. The stupidity was in making a value judgement about it. It isn’t an either/or proposition, anyway. Readers fall on a spectrum as far as their tolerance for authorial intrusion. Some readers want the author to tell them everything; others reject and resent anything the author tells them beyond the hardboiled minimum. Most want a comfortable mix of drama and narrative exposition to guide them through the story at a pace that matches the pace and fertility of their imagination. Suggesting that any reader who was not at the proper end of this spectrum was somehow “bad” is ridiculous.

In fact, the level of tolerance for authorial intrusion is only one of many important characterizations of reader preferences. I, for instance, read very slowly, insisting that I absorb and understand every sentence before I move on. The pacing that works best for me (simple, fast and dense) might be annoying to someone who skims. Another categorization on which I am at one of the tails of the bell curve is the how vs. what of a novel. I am critically interested in how a story is told, how it achieves its effect (hence this analysis). Most readers, it seems to me, are more concerned with the subject of the story. Other categorizations - action vs. character. Ideas vs. feeling, etc., etc. - are also critically important to how a work of fiction fits a particular reader. That readers exist at all points of these continuums seems a fairly self-evident proposition, but it is a truth I consistently ignored in constructing my writing guide.

Another truth I somehow overlooked is that the rules for hardboiled are not always internally consistent. Following one rule may require a writer to break another. The guide suggests a simple do or don’t for every situation - another gross stupidity. In fact, trade-offs, whether conscious or not, are made on every page, every paragraph, every sentence, every word. For instance, the guide presents a general prohibition of summarization. But the narrative summarizations that occur in The Maltese Falcon before and during the relation of the Flitcraft parable are excused on the basis of the overriding value of pacing and focus. What the guide does not say is that this exception is just the tip of the iceberg. Pacing and focus are considerations for every word of a novel. In most instances, they don’t conflict with other goals of hardboiled (or any other style), but when they do, they may override those other goals, or they may be sacrificed to them. This is always a judgement call. Trying to reduce it to a simple rule is hopeless. Writing fiction in a coherent style is a process of mediating among a shifting and clashing tangle of such considerations and doing it with a consistent scheme. For the most part, the guide ignores this complexity, rather than providing a basis for the crucial mediation.

These stupidities might be excused as the simplifying assumptions necessary to make sense of the hardboiled style, except that they leave the impression that the style is somehow “right” (at least for crime and mystery fiction) and that it can be expressed as a cookbook. These are the fallacies I hope to address in this conclusion. A guide that posits a monolithic reader and ignores its own internal conflicts is of very little value as a general approach to writing fiction - even crime fiction.

Chandler Was Wrong

Raymond Chandler makes two interesting and contradictory comments about Hammett in his famous essay, The Simple Art of Murder. On the one hand, he says, “I doubt that Hammett had any deliberate artistic aims whatever ...” (Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder, Ballantine Books, New York, 1972, p. 16). Yet he says of Hammett’s style, “at it’s best, it could say almost anything.” (The Simple Art of Murder, p. 17) I began writing with a strong conviction that Chandler was wrong about Hammett’s artistic intent and the belief that he was absolutely right about the universal effectiveness of Hammett’s hardboiled style. Experience has taught me that Chandler was wrong on both counts.

I have always imagined Hammett holed up in a San Francisco hotel room with a bottle of bourbon and a typewriter, coughing and haggling obsessively with himself over every word, to create the style of The Maltese Falcon. This is probably a highly romanticized image, but it is clear from the consistency of his work to that point, and his own stated goals for it, that he was searching for that style and a vehicle with which to demonstrate its truth and power. If that isn’t an artistic aim, I don’t know what is.

At the same time, I think the style perfected in The Maltese Falcon was never as successful in any of Hammett’s other stories as it was in that one. The hardboiled style is clearly apparent in the Continental Op stories, in which the “distracting question” of the Op’s character undercuts the dramatic potential. That question isn’t nearly as pronounced in Hammett’s first two novels, Red Harvest, and The Dain Curse, but the disappearing first person narrator cannot give these novels anything like the depth of The Maltese Falcon. But the same third person, hardboiled narration that is so perfect for the telling of The Maltese Falcon becomes confusing, opaque, and unsatisfying in The Glass Key, a method of obfuscation rather than illumination. In all of these Hammett stories and novels the style is not significantly different. The reason it works so well in The Maltese Falcon is the perfect coherence of the theme, plot, and characters with the hardboiled style. It may be a chicken-or-egg question whether Hammett devised the story of The Maltese Falcon to fit the hardboiled style or vice versa. But it’s perfectly clear that they were made for each other.

And that is the point. It is the characteristics of the story that determine its fit with the hardboiled style. Looking back at my analysis of the hardboiled style, I see it as a mass of sweeping generalizations. Now, undaunted, I will try to do the same for hardboiled content, on the theory that reconnecting style to content in this way may lead to some useful conclusions.

A Quick and Dirty Characterization of Hardboiled Content

From Puzzle to Mean Streets

Although developed more than half a century earlier by an American - Edgar Allen Poe - by the early 20th century, the dominant form of the mystery was commonly referred to as the British model. It was mystery in the way a puzzle is mysterious, and the drama was chiefly a battle of wits, in which the reader was invited to participate. It was carried out almost exclusively on an intellectual plane. The form was enormously popular, but as a consequence of the burgeoning volume of production, writers were forced to more and more outlandish schemes as the basis for their puzzles. The hardboiled style can be seen as a reaction to this artificiality.

The British mystery takes place in a fundamentally ordered world, in which the characters share common values with their fictional milieu and with their readers. They generally accept and respect social constraints. This basic conformity seems conditioned more on practical and cultural motives rather than any personal morality. At the heart of the mystery is an individual who has transgressed against the social norms. The British mystery is all about the ordered world isolating and punishing the transgressor and bringing the world back into harmony. The fact that the mystery is generally posed as an intellectual problem is clearly an important factor, enabling the nonphysical, nonmoral nature of the British detective to be effective. But the connection is stronger than that. The ordered world actually prefers that the detective be physically weak and squarely, almost unconsciously (that is, without moral angst), within the bounds of the shared social values. His or her nature is intended to highlight the dominance of those values. In the ordered world, no heroic physical stature or exceptional moral strength is required to put things right. The very strength of the social norms is sufficient force. It only requires an exceptional intelligence to shine its light on the iniquity and it will surely shrivel and die, when thus exposed to the stern and united gaze of the public eye.

Hardboiled characters make no such assumptions about generally shared values or respect for laws and custom. They may hope, suspect, or even believe such an order exists in some parts of the wide world, but in the world in which they live, usually an underworld of some sort, they know that dishonesty and corruption are rampant and that anyone, at any time, could be pursuing a hidden course of action to their detriment. Everyone lies, some more viciously than others, some on a grander scale than others, but they all do it. This is the shared expectation: that everyone’s agenda is hidden and that no one will honestly and fully reveal their own except under extreme duress. The source of that duress in the hardboiled mystery is generally a detective (whether police, private, or amateur) whose strength is purely personal, often physical, and almost always moral. The detective cannot depend on the strength of social norms to isolate, or even define, an evil; cannot depend on public institutions (police, government, news media) to stop it. The hardboiled detective is on his own. To combat evil may require superior wits – just as in the British model, but it may require superior physical ability as well, quite unlike the British model, and it will always require a strong, well-defined, and very personal moral commitment to provide some framework and motivation for action in the chaotic world – also largely irrelevant to the British detective.

The typical content of a hardboiled novel springs from the same fundamental world view as its style – the sense of the individual’s isolation and the associated distrust of social interactions and institutions. It sees in the innocent individual a core awareness of truth and justice, and the motivating force of some form of hope. Evil occurs when that innocence either dies or is thwarted by the corruption that is often the result of two or more individuals interacting to project their coordinated force into the world. Man’s social world is generally dishonest and oppressive to the highest values of the individual, and the mythology that is developed in these novels concerns the individual carving out some form of personal justice in a corrupt world.

Justice

The concept of justice is problematic in the hardboiled world. In fact, justice is not even a particularly appropriate term for the outcomes found in most hardboiled novels. Since it is based on the values of an individual, it can take as many forms as there are protagonists. The only defining feature that is constant is the certainty that it has nothing to do with any societal construct. It is totally distinct from, and often at odds with, the law.

Whatever it might be called, hardboiled justice is nothing more than a consolation prize and is generally seen as such. The hardboiled hero must pursue it in whatever form he conceives it, though he wastes little energy wondering why that is so. It is the pursuit of his own particular brand of justice that defines him, but there is little for him in its achievement. It does not bring him love, or belonging, and he has no illusion that it changes anything. Most often, it’s not even a broad-based overthrow of the corrupt world in which he lives. Typically, the best outcome that can be hoped for is a temporary and local victory. The hero’s drive toward love and belonging may remain, but they are often seen as hopelessly out of reach, thwarted by man’s inherent social dysfunction, and the best accommodation that can be reached between the individual and his corrupt world is the kind of adjustment represented by Sam Spade’s acceptance of his San Francisco underworld.

In The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade solves the crime, but there is no sweetness to his victory. Everywhere he looks he has lost. He’s lost Brigid. He has to give up the $1000 Gutman gave him for his trouble. Dundy hates him more than ever. And Iva is now free to pester him without interference from her nuisance husband. Although he was instrumental in it, Spade has no more than a passing interest in the end of the Gutman gang. From the start, his interest has been to track down and capture his partner’s killer. But that interest seems based on nothing more than the expectations placed on his profession. He feels no personal committment to Miles Archer; he doesn’t like or respect him, doesn’t want to maintain their professional association, and he takes little, if any, personal satisfaction in bringing about the arrest of his killer, certainly no satisfaction commensurate with the personal sacrifice he makes to achieve it. The arc of the story leaves him right where he started. Hammett forcefully undercuts the significance of the falcon intrigue with the worthless bird and the offhand, offstage destruction of the Gutman gang. With Spade’s cold dismissal of his dead partner, that mystery is also severely devalued. The solution of the crimes becomes an anticlimax, and the reader’s satisfaction lies instead in the discovery of the surprising depths of Spade’s character. Spade must take his satisfaction in inhabiting that character in a constant state of striving, the infinite act of becoming himself. For the world he inhabits, the outcome of his striving is of little note, the bursting of a tiny bubble in the festering chaos of life.

The Detective

The common problem that is faced in a British mystery is not the deceit and corruption of man’s social constructs; it is the plodding dullness of the bureaucracy entrusted with enforcing them. The criminal hides his iniquity within a fog of clever deceit, a fog which the police are not sufficiently brilliant to penetrate. Detection is the bright light of reason shining through to bring justice to criminal and victim, restoring the happy social order. Observation, knowledge, logic and, often, an obsession with the puzzle, are the characteristics the detective brings to bear on the crime. The detective may work in close coordination with the police, may even be one of them, but he or she is generally distinguished by an excess of these characteristics beyond the levels to be found among the rank and file of law enforcement.

With the example of Prohibition starkly present in everyday America, the plodding dullness of law enforcement in the British mystery was transmogrified into hypocritical corruption in the hardboiled American crime novel. Official corruption calls into question the meaning and value of the social compact. Crime is organized and powerful, operating openly, and often with the connivance of law enforcement. Whether in its own skin, or in the guise of law, politics, business, or religion; it is crime and corruption – not justice - that are seen as the glue of the social order. The criminal is no longer an aberrant individual. He may be an official or unofficial leader of the corrupt order, or just it’s minion, but he is much more likely to have an organization behind him than he would be in a British mystery. In the hardboiled world, the lone individual is much more likely to be the detective, rather than the criminal.

The motivation for detecting is also somewhat different. Where detection, for the British detective, is something of a civic duty and a stimulating challenge, for the American hardboiled detective, it is an existential act, a fundamental expression of his or her being, and one that often comes at the cost of significant personal sacrifice. Sam Spade lives in a city that is hostile to him (in the person of Lt. Dundy). It fears him as a foreign element, a force outside the control of its social system. But Spade has learned to live there, even to flourish, and to have the limited satisfaction of thumbing his nose at Dundy, showing him his incompetence and impotence. It is the satisfaction of knowing that he is, as Hammett has imagined him, a “hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent by-stander or client.” (Introduction to The Maltese Falcon/, New York: Modern Library, 1934 – HMW p.117) For Spade, the act of detection is integral, he does it to define himself.

One similarity between hardboiled and British detectives is their competitive drive. Both play to win. The biggest difference lies in who they conceive of as their opponents. For the British detective, it is typically a well-defined and singular criminal. For the hardboiled American, it can be just about anyone and everyone. Spade thinks “maybe” he loves Brigid, even admits that he would like to protect her from prosecution for her crimes. “[A]ll of me wants to – wants to say the hell with the consequences and do it.” In a British mystery, she would be the love interest and would be rescued and reconciled to living happily ever after with the detective hero. In The Maltese Falcon, this is not an option. Spade can’t let her off the hook because she is his main competition, the very embodiment of the deceitful world he has mastered, and to do so would be to play the sap for her, to lose that mastery that defines him. It genuinely pains him that he can’t fulfill the love he might feel for Brigid, but, like he says, “that’ll pass.” The implication is clear: if he played the sap, for anyone, for any reason, he could never forgive himself.

But Brigid is not the only competitor. Gutman, Wilmer and Cairo all compete in their own ways, and can even join forces to play as a rather dysfunctional team. Dundy and the DA are another source of competition. Spade has his allies - Effie Perine, Tom Polhaus, Sid Wise - but none of them is in a position to play a pivotal role in the competition. It is very much a case of Sam Spade against the world, and this, in hardboiled, is more typical than not.

Love in a Hardboiled World

In the world of The Maltese Falcon, the first law of survival is: trust no one. Almost all of the characters lie, and if they get caught in one lie, they proceed to the next. Not only do they lie, but lies are what they expect from others. This expectation of deceit is fundamental. Gutman’s crew is a nest of vipers, ready to betray each other at the first opportunity. Spade can help Brigid only so far as she can persuade him to trust her, which isn’t far at all, and in the end, that lack of trust effectively poisons any opportunity there may have been for love between them and sends her to death or prison.

In general, love is vanishingly rare in the hardboiled world. Lust is common, and a one-sided love, often depicted as foolish or dangerous, may motivate the drama. But happy, healthy, mutual love is almost never encountered. In a world in which trust is virtually absent, this should not be surprising.

The Maltese Falcon seems to insist on this point rather strenuously. Spade’s final explanation to Brigid lays out the case against love meticulously and at length, and the book ends with a clear victory of hardboiled realism over the fantasy of romantic love. Effie believed in Brigid and in the love she thought she saw developing between Brigid and her boss. She is shocked and heartbroken when she reads in the newspaper that Spade has turned Brigid over to the police. Her reaction is visceral. “I know - I know you’re right. You’re right. But don’t touch me now - not now.” (The Novels of DH, p. 440)

Of course, another factor responsible for this loveless world is its reflex misogyny. It was not an accident that the emblem for the pervasive deceit in The Maltese Falcon was a woman. And it was probably something more fundamental than an “accident of birth” that made such treatment of women a cliché in hardboiled crime fiction. It was certainly rooted in the general air of mistrust that pervades the hardboiled world, but it may have been exaggerated by the view of women as the object of the male lust that is another component of that world. The male protagonists of hardboiled drama were painfully torn by the presence of beautiful, sexually attractive women. On the glandular level, they were irresistably attracted, while their instincts for survival in the hardboiled world warned of the inevitable disaster of trust and love. This push/pull of love and death may be the source of the highly charged image of women in the hardboiled world, and it is certainly a factor in the barren relationships to be found there.

The thwarted relationship between Harry Madox and the good girl Gloria in Hell Hath No Fury is interesting for its much more convincing depiction of love than Effie Perine’s romantic daydreams. Despite the guilt and shame for her lesbian encounter (which was culturally required and thus real in the 1950s), or perhaps because of it (which would be an interesting subject for analysis), Gloria is an innocent, worthy of trust and love, and Harry falls for her. She is opposed by the archetypal hardboiled femme fatale, his boss’s wife, Dolores Harshaw. Mrs. Harshaw is a supreme object of lust, deceitful and dangerous as hell. Harry is forced to work out the effects of his stupidity and lack of moral compass between the two poles of Gloria and Mrs. Harshaw. Both he and the reader are surprised by his discovery of love with Gloria. Of course, it is doomed. When the Harshaw devil woman wins absolute dominion over him, it is an unequivocal rejection of the possibility of love in the hardboiled world.

Hope and Noir

The hardboiled world is bleak, with its near universal distrust of human interactions, but it is not hopeless. The hardboiled hero believes in the efficacy of his actions and his understanding of the social environment in which they take place. Sam Spade knows himself, knows his world and how to survive in it. He has adjusted his expectations to that world, and the implication is that he will go on, achieving the same kind of limited success he achieves in The Maltese Falcon.

By the end of Hell Hath No Fury, Harry Madox can look forward to no such success. He will live under the control of Dolores Harshaw for the rest of his life. He has not adjusted to this fate, he’s been trapped by it. One of the main motivations driving Sam Spade’s actions in The Maltese Falcon is the need to maintain his independence under the constant threat of legal constraint by Dundy and/or the DA, and, at least in the affair of the falcon, he is successful. The actions of Harry Madox bring about a completely different result. Harry thinks he’s as much the “hard and shifty fellow,” as anyone, but he’s clearly beaten at the hardboiled game by the superior play of Mrs. Harshaw.

Charles Williams used the distanced narration to achieve a style that is in almost all respects hardboiled. But the ending of the story takes it into a different world. When he loses the hardboiled game, Harry loses his capacity for independent action, the individual sovereignty that is possibly the most treasured and most fiercely protected right and self-image of the hardboiled hero. Further, Harry understands that it has been his own actions that have left him trapped and helpless in hell. Mistrust, which in hardboiled extends to everyone but the self, is completed with Harry’s recognition that he cannot even trust himself. When the individual realizes that his or her motives and actions are self-defeating and expects nothing from social relationships and institutions except relentless persecution, there’s nowhere left to turn. The individual is driven by malignant fate into the hopeless chaos of noir.

So, hardboiled can be thought of as bounded on one side by the British mystery and by noir on the other. The main factor that differentiates them is the extent of trust they reflect. In the British mystery, not only the individual, but also social relations, norms and institutions are generally benign and straightforward - trustworthy. In hardboiled the individual can trust only him- or herself. In noir, the individual is, or becomes, aware that his or her own thoughts and desires are leading him or her straight to hell and can never be trusted to do otherwise. Another, and related, differentiating factor is the efficacy of the various actors in the drama. Again, in the British mystery, both the individual and society (relationships, norms, and institutions) are involved in the accomplishment of justice. In hardboiled, it is up to the individual, generally without help, and often in the face of resistance from society. In noir, neither individual nor society can accomplish much of anything in the face of a hostile, or at best random, fate.

Half-assed Hardboiled

There’s a lot more that could be said about the standard hardboiled story, about the sex and violence, the tough guys and their criminal ways, but it’s all been said a thousand times. This is the popular image of hardboiled and the reason practitioners like Mickey Spillane and John D. MacDonald, who wrote in styles that are far from hardboiled, are generally considered hardboiled writers. Mike Hammer and Travis McGee certainly qualify as me-against-the-world hardboiled heros. Their worlds fit the mold, and their love lives tend toward the usual doomed relationships. The justice they achieve through their adventures is defined by their own unique moral code, as is typical of hardboiled fiction. It’s easy to see the legacy of The Maltese Falcon in the plot, characters, and themes of Kiss Me Deadly and The Empty Copper Sea.

But the narrative styles of Travis McGee and Mike Hammer bear very little resemblance to the narration of The Maltese Falcon. They are first person narratives that are neither disappearing nor distanced. They are subjective, personal and often far from understated. Hammer and McGee are loose and expansive, explaining every action, every motivation and random impression in the interest of demonstrating their own heroic persona. This was a very popular style, particularly in the 1950s and 60s, and remains popular today, although examples from the heyday now seem hopelessly dated and sophomoric.

Whether these authors and their works should be considered hardboiled is not a particularly interesting or useful question. In terms of the Hardboiled Mystery Writers definition, they clearly conform in terms of content - violent action, colloquial speech and tough characters; and in others - objective viewpoint, impersonal tone, and realism - they don’t. In the simple classification scheme I’ve used in this blog, there are only two choices - British or hardboiled. So it’s probably sufficient to say that they don’t belong to the British school. A more interesting question is: what are the implications of this hybrid, half-hardboiled varient for the craft of crime fiction, for writers, and for readers?