Inherent Vice; Borges' Death and the Compass; The Man Who Was Thursday perhaps fits too, also the second part of Molloy's centred on a detective looking for Molloy.I don't know what that is, sounds intriguing.
I'm thinking of a list of detective things I would call avant-garde or experimental, feel free to add to this list.
NY Trilogy - three novellas by Paul Auster
Alphaville - film directed by Godard
Les Gommes - novel by Alan Robbe-Grillet
The Voyeur - novel by ARG
Successive Slidings of Pleasure - film directed by ARG
The Man Without A Map - film directed by Teshigahara, and whaddya know, turns out it's an adaptation of that book you just mentioned!
What else? There must be loads out there.
I've watched a lot of noise too... and neo-niirs and so on. I thought Brick was s very interesting film.I watch a ton of film noir, more noir's than I can remember. Noir is usually more hardboiled than to do with scientific reasoning like in Poe. My understanding is that writers and directors wanted to portray the seedier sides of life while being working under 'codes' so if not centred on detectives, always had a 'law' element. Curiously I don't watch much if any British film noir as what I have seen hasn't been hardboiled enough for me. But then you have the 'Dragnet' police procedural stuff that you could argue is as much propaganda for police recruitment as entertainment. There's been loads of films like that, The Blue Lamp is a British one from the 50s, recruiting for the police after WW2. I've watched noirs, forget the name, that is just showing off the police technology of the time. And although I say this and watch a lot of film noir, I don't really have an answer, so it's an enjoyable thread.
Dupin is also a wealthy dilettante who solves these sorts of puzzles for amusement, IIRC.I have watched most of the Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe movies but still can't put them into words. I have read relatively little of Chandler and Hammett. I think they are the two most important 20th century detectives and most of it is down to their humour and the tough guy personas. Before that you have Dupin from Poe who was much more reasonable. He never would have got into a fight to find out the truth.
True, but I think he also just duffs up a few blokes with his fists. There's also that scene where a really massive guy who's a blacksmith or something, who by rights ought to be able to snap Holmes in half like a twig, starts menacing him, and Holmes responds by grabbing an iron bar that's just handily lying there and bends it in half with his bare hands.He carries a swordstick I believe.
That is certainly one way of dividing the great detectives - which ones were prepared to fight and which weren't.
I think the other thing about hardboiled detectives is that where Poirot and Holmes are kind-of detached observers, who just gather information without influencing the course of events, characters like Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe tend to get stuck in and provoke people and cause the situation to develop in new ways and then draw some conclusion from (say) who just walked in and pointed a gun at them.