Detectives - the dominant characters of the 20th Century Discuss

[IdleRich]

Yeah, agreed, the line isn't totally clearly defined but it does exist.
Also, in those Knox rules there is a thing about how accidents can't help the detectives, but really that only applies to the cerebral type and a particular type of of story in which they satisfyingly solve it like a maths problem. In the real world things are more messy and accidents can happen and help people so why not in stories? Particularly in the tupe where the dick gets stuck in to the action.

 

[sufi]

they are all veterans arent they
magnum was in the nam,
columbo was probably in korea
marlow in ww2 europe of course
and god only knows what colonial atrocities clouseau was responsible for

and watson, but not holmes?

 

[william_kent]

skimmed thread but...

I love hardboiled detective fiction

you learn over the years that only having a copy of "Beyond Good and Evil" is not the correct choice of reading matter for a train journey that is going to get diverted for five fucking hours into the darkest depths of Wales

nowadays I will take a "detective: novel and a copy of The Wire with me on a train journey

I love Chandler, but don't ask me to explain the plot of any off his stories... a master stylist, but not of coherent plotting...

 

[sufi]

Yeah, agreed, the line isn't totally clearly defined but it does exist.
Also, in those Knox rules there is a thing about how accidents can't help the detectives, but really that only applies to the cerebral type and a particular type of of story in which they satisfyingly solve it like a maths problem. In the real world things are more messy and accidents can happen and help people so why not in stories? Particularly in the tupe where the dick gets stuck in to the action.

why is it that they feel so formulaic - is it because the archetype has been explored so thoroughly? I think we like that formula, as readers/viewers and you get a bit hooked on it
it must be a very confusing existence to be a real life detective with more fictional peers than actual

 

[Slothrop]

The famous Chandler quote on writing is "when in doubt, have a man walk through the door with a gun in his hand." As you say, he's great but it's the polar opposite of all the carefully constructed Chinese boxes of classic English detective stories.

 

[IdleRich]

they are all veterans arent they
magnum was in the nam,
columbo was probably in korea
marlow in ww2 europe of course
and god only knows what colonial atrocities clouseau was responsible for

In the TV version of Father Brown he fought in WW2 (well, he was army Chaplain) though the original books were written between the wars, dunno why they moved it, but people have a fairly elastic concept of 20th century history and its TV representations. The other day we were watching Maigret (which inspired this thread in fact) and V and I were arguing about when it was set - I checked and again it was confusing cos the story had been written in 31 but on telly the characters referred to the holocaust.

 

[IdleRich]

I love Chandler, but don't ask me to explain the plot of any off his stories... a master stylist, but not of coherent plotting...

Famously Chandler was unable to explain who killed The Chauffeur in The Big Sleep.

 

[Slothrop]

why is it that they feel so formulaic - is it because the archetype has been explored so thoroughly? I think we like that formula, as readers/viewers and you get a bit hooked on it

There's a Thurber short story about meeting a woman at a holiday resort who is massively into detective stories and who has accidentally started reading Macbeth and just parses the whole thing as a detective story - "obviously it wasn't Macbeth or Lady Macbeth, I mean they're the first people you suspect..."

IIRC he eventually concludes that it was Lady Macbeth's father who dunnit - this from taking the line about "had he not resembled my father as he slept" to be a clue that Lady M's father had actually hidden in the bed after being unexpectedly disturbed after doing the deed...

 

[sufi]

quintessential 20c rationalists

(higgins was in deep cover special ops)

 

[Slothrop]

they are all veterans arent they
magnum was in the nam,
columbo was probably in korea
marlow in ww2 europe of course
and god only knows what colonial atrocities clouseau was responsible for

I'm a bit of a fan of Dorothy L Sayers - as far as I can tell, Peter Wimsey had a backstory about shell-shock from the trenches bolted on as she realized that she wanted to write a main character who was more interesting than "what if Bertie Wooster solved crimes".

 

[IdleRich]

why is it that they feel so formulaic - is it because the archetype has been explored so thoroughly? I think we like that formula, as readers/viewers and you get a bit hooked on it
it must be a very confusing existence to be a real life detective with more fictional peers than actual

Yeah. And so many fictional detectives also have to explain that they are real and they won't act like Holmes.
The bit at the end when Poirot/Fletcher/the guy out of Death in Paradise gathers everyone around and explains what happened is the most blatantly formulaic part but everyone loves that (don't they?) so it's hard to remove it.

 

[william_kent]

OK, I'll out myself
love genre fiction
but it's got to be dark...

so..

Locked Room mysteries: OUT! This basically dismisses Christie & all that shit

Psycho-sexulal Drama: IN!

Willeford, Ellroy, Chandler, Ross MacDonald, and so many more

Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night - amazing breakthrough no one has built on

edit: drunk post, don't expect it to make sense to anyone other than me..but..

Sherlock Holmes - jacking up coke - deserves a mention, surely?

 

[WashYourHands]

scandinavian detective series - Google Search

www.google.com

 

[IdleRich]

Famously Chandler was unable to explain who killed The Chauffeur in The Big Sleep.

Interestingly, during a story conference the scriptwriters ran into a loose end that they could not nail down. Who killed the Sternwood’s chauffeur? The novel itself gave few hints. The logic of the plot did not point to any particular beneficiary of the murder. Hawks rang up the novel’s author, Raymond Chandler and asked him. Chandler’s response was “damned if I know.”

 

[sufi]

scandinavian detective series - Google Search

www.google.com

yeah exactly
something else very essential about detective stories is how the format maps onto any setting - US/UK/Belgium but also the South African Lady detective, the various scandi sagas, montalbano, the name of the rose, deckard, willard ... to name but a few

 

[WashYourHands]

The Long Goodbye (1973) ⭐ 7.5 | Comedy, Crime, Drama

1h 52m | X

www.imdb.com

 

[IdleRich]

OK, I'll out myself
love genre fiction
but it's got to be dark...

so..

Locked Room mysteries: OUT! This basically dismisses Christie & all that shit

Psycho-sexulal Drama: IN!

Willeford, Ellroy, Chandler, Ross MacDonald, and so many more

Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night - amazing breakthrough no one has built on

edit: drunk post, don't expect it to make sense to anyone other than me..but..

Sherlock Holmes - jacking up coke - deserves a mention, surely?

I did mention Holmes on coke.. although he has nothing on Douglas Fairbanks' detective in The Mystery of the Leaping Fish...

In this unusually broad comedy for Fairbanks, the acrobatic leading man plays "Coke Ennyday", a cocaine-shooting detective who is a parody of Sherlock Holmes. Ennyday is given to injecting himself from a bandolier of syringes worn across his chest, and liberally helps himself to the contents of a hatbox-sized round container of white powder labeled "COCAINE" on his desk.[

 

[IdleRich]

Was waiting for someone to mention Scandi noir and also locked-room mysteries. Death in Paradise is the most formulaic (and racist) detective show I know, every episode is essentially a disguised locked-room mystery with the number of suspects artificially restricted.

 

[WashYourHands]

yeah exactly
something else very essential about detective stories is how the format maps onto any setting - US/UK/Belgium but also the South African Lady detective, the various scandi sagas, montalbano, the name of the rose, deckard ... to name but a few

 

[william_kent]

I did mention Holmes on coke.. although he has nothing on Douglas Fairbanks' detective in The Mystery of the Leaping Fish...

Nice! I've been drunk the last two nights ( I blame @catalog for last night - I've noticed he has not posted a scan of the label of the "lager" I bought him at the great Northern Dissensus meet up ) so I am not appreciating the carefully crafted nuances embedded in what I imagine to be the enthralling posts that precede this....