Who the hell is Arbogast?

Raymond Chandler liked the name Arbogast so much that he used it at least three times (The High Window, "Trouble Is My Business," Farewell, My Lovely). The hero of S.J. Perleman's detective-story spoof "Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer" has his office in the Arbogast building.

Milton Arbogast is a private investigator in Robert Bloch's novel Psycho and a movie based on it that you may have heard of. And the guy in the Studebaker who picks up the hitchhiking Vince Parry in David Goodis' Dark Passage? You guessed it: He's another in the honorable line of crime- and horror-fictional Arbogasts.

Arbogasts have been Frankish generals and Irish saints, but does anyone know why the humorously euphonious name (at least to non-Arbogasts) crops up so often in the work of celebrated crime writers? Have I missed any Arbogasts? What are your favorite odd character names in crime or other fiction?

  © Peter Rozovsky 2012

Two professions, one of them odd, for fictional amateur sleuths

I've discussed amateur sleuths from time to time in this space, usually with emphasis on their professions, from high school history teacher to shady antiques dealer and beyond.

Implicit in any such discussion is the question of believability. How plausible is it that a stripper or real estate agent or nice old lady would get involved in solving a crime, usually a murder?

Robert Bloch's Mark Clayburn in Shooting Star is one of the odder combinations. He's a one-eyed private investigator who is also a literary agent. Further, he has entered the former profession after his flourishing business in the latter fell apart as a result of the same set of events that cost him one eye. How likely the combination is, I don't know, but it does make for some atmospheric touches — the weary P.I. musing about sending out manuscripts rather than about pounding pavement.

Elsewhere on the amateur-sleuth front, Bill Ott begins a review of Anna Blundy's The Bad News Bible with the declaration that "It’s odd that there aren’t more foreign-correspondent series leads in crime fiction. The job requires a classic hard-boiled hero—tough talking, cynical to the bone, and capable of ingesting prodigious amounts of booze and cigarettes—and the work entails jumping from one dangerous venue to another ... "

What ever could he mean? There are tons of foreign-correspondent sleuths in crime fiction. There's Dan Fesperman's, and um —

Maybe Ott is right. What other foreign-correspondent sleuths can you think of? Do such characters make good crime-fiction protagonists? And why are there so few of them, other than that American newspaper are closing down their foreign bureaus because news is too expensive?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008