Uneasy Street, or what P.I. fiction did after Chandler and Hammett

How do writers of P.I. stories confront the Olympian presences of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, and when did they start doing it?

Here's a bit from Uneasy Street (1948), Wade Miller's second Max Thursday novel:

"(S)he sounded like a wandering-husband case, probably young, leggy, dissatisfied. And his mind roved curiously. ...

"When he could see her more plainly, Thursday wondered why he had expected her to be young. She was anything but that— a small frail woman, delicately wrinkled, with hair the moonlight couldn’t whiten."

That's one way to confront an imposing model, to challenge it straight on, then to slyly undercut it. It's a brilliant strategy, and it can work if one has the confidence and chops to pull if off, and Miller (pen name for the writing team of Robert Wade and Bill Miller) did. (Wade and Miller were also Whit Masterson, under which name they wrote the novel that Orson Welles adapted as Touch of Evil. So odds are that even if you don't know their names, you've had some contact with Wade and Miller's work.)

Uneasy Street has something of Chandler's yearning romanticism with a tinge of Hammett's witty detachment, the latter possibly because Miller wrote the book in the third person. It's witty without cracking wise, serious without getting maudlin, the way some of Chandler's successors in the 1960s did. It's in the tradition of both great progenitors of hard-boiled crime without being greatly reminiscent of each.  And it's a good place to look if you wonder where private-eye fiction went after Hammett and Chandler.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

What a free-King book deal!

Dana King is pleased to announce that his four novels will be available free on Kindle from June 25 – 29.

Detectives Beyond Borders is pleased to announce that the books are worth reading and that he does not at all regret having paid for them.  King writes hard-hitting, funny crime with a real sense of place and, now and then, a clever spin on an old crime fiction trope.

He is also an eloquent speaker about P.I. fiction and the importance of the Chandlerian hero; his talk on that subject was an unexpected highlight of Bouchercon 2013 in Albany. Here's a bit from a scene with a detective and a Russian mobster in Grind Joint.

"`I talk when I want. Who knows? In five minutes, maybe not want to. Better ask quick before I change my mind, police man. Someone tell me once I am volatile. I like that word. I am volatile."  

"You are peckerhead, Doc thought, kept it to himself."

Make this a Shamus Award-nominated Dana King summer!

© Peter Rozovsky 2014 

Sara Gran in the City of the Dead

Sara Gran's Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead is, among other things, a vivid and haunting evocation of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. It never mentions the words Katrina or hurricane, however, which only adds to the feeling of authenticity.

I imagine that if I'd been trapped in that swampy, rootless, mud-coated hell, I would not talk like a breathless CNN report, either. Instead, I suppose, I would do what the returned, the uprooted, and the left-behind do in Gran's novel and speak, with understandable fear and reticence, about "the storm."

Claire DeWitt ... is a most unconventional PI novel, and I don't mean merely that Gran gives the title character/protagonist a package of quirks, though she does do that. Claire de Witt has lived in a number of cities, imbibing deeply of the eccentricities of all. She's got a bit of Jack Kerouac to her, a bit of Nancy Drew, and a bit of Ghost Dog.

As much fun as the book is, it is immensely moving in places and it constitutes a serious examination of the nature of guilt, good, and revenge and a touching testimony to the importance of friendship. Along the way, it overflows with compassion. But mostly, Gran knows how to tell a story. I'll leave you with one of my favorite examples of the book's verbal zest:

"In the afternoon I went back to Congo Square. This time I went as Elmyra Catalone, African-Italian American recovering crack addict from Memphis, Tennessee, raised Baptist, now occasionally Pentecostal, occasional sex worker, victim of sexual abuse at the hands of a cousin, mother of four children, one dead, one in foster care, one in Angola, one living in the town of Celebration, Florida, with a wife and two children. Elmyra is off the crack cocaine but she likes her liquor and has a schnapps now and then to be sociable."

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Happily married P.I.s and other mold-breakers

Patti Abbott asks "What are some overused character traits found in the typical police or private detective?" and receives a list of entertaining and largely accurate answers, everything from cynicism, marital trouble and excessive drinking to a dubious diet and contempt for authority.

But about fictional P.I.s and cops who go the other way? Who breaks the mold? And how?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010