Sarah's Blog Today

[I. J. Parker]

Sarah Weinman's blog today is full of fascinating mystdery-related subjects. It deals with Marilyn Stasio, the mystery critic for the New York Times but contains among other matters this quote from an exchange between P.D.James and Lawrence Block about the morality of the mystery protagonist:

"L.B.: In the earliest American hard-boiled fiction, there were heroes who were virtually criminals themselves. Even Sam Spade was absolutely a cold-blooded opportunist.

P.D.J.: But he had his own morality, surely?

L.B.: Well, in the sense that he had this code which said that if your partner is murdered you probably ought to do something about it because . . . well, gee, it kind of looks bad if you don't. In ''The Maltese Falcon,'' that's about the closest Sam Spade comes to following the code. But beyond that, sleeping with your partner's wife was all right. Overlooking murder was probably all right, too, if you could get away with it. . . . Some of those early American hard-boiled heroes weren't knights in tarnished armor at all. They were just out for themselves, looking to make a buck.

P.D.J.: But Hammett's hero always tried to give his clients good value for their money.

L.B.: Well, I don't know that that made Sam Spade a moral man. Maybe Hammett's other detective, the Continental Op, had a moral code. But he was a professional private eye who worked as an agency employee. Most of the time he just wanted to get to the end of his cases and get paid, rather than to set society straight. Now Chandler . . . what Raymond Chandler contributed to the mythology was a private detective who was a moral man. Philip Marlowe was a hero who wasn't just looking out for his own ends; he was a man acting for the good of others, a man who was not himself mean, walking down these mean streets . . ."

It strikes me that this touches on one of the ways the mystery community splits into factions. Here, on our forum we have had a discussion of evil and a number of people have rejected moral judgments as imprecise. The hard-boiled faction generally is not troubled too much by issues of ethics -- or at least customary issues of ethics -- in their books. These days, the best sellers are often books that celebrate assassins and successful thieves. Even among the ethical detectives (and I am firmly in that group), we find personalities that are severely flawed in other respects. They drink, have casual sex, smoke, curse, are rude, and pay little attention to personal cleanliness. I'm not sure why this appeals to readers. Perhaps we like to experience a forbidden world vicariously. Perhaps such books give us the freedom that our own, circumscribed lives lack. And perhaps (at least in my case), we get a glimpe of a world that is all too human, warts and all, and that helps us understand better.