Detectives - the dominant characters of the 20th Century Discuss

[Murphy]

Ellroy overthought the whole thing in particular directions, but i think sees himself as a continuation of this heritage trail
he goes in for this chopped out language that is kind of like the succinctness of a gritty hardbioiled gumshoe but can come over affected
also i think he over enjoys the fascistic hyperviolence Frank Millar also. as i was saying upthread it's' close to "real life crime" stories experience
doesnt ellroy bump off the detective character in one book and go alng with with the cops instead?

look at the Met and their involvement in the Daniel Morgan killing, he sniffed too close to a trough

 

[IdleRich]

Mosely with the Easy Rawlins stuff probably deserves a mention...

 

[william_kent]

Ellroy overthought the whole thing in particular directions, but i think sees himself as a continuation of this heritage trail
he goes in for this chopped out language that is kind of like the succinctness of a gritty hardbioiled gumshoe but can come over affected
also i think he over enjoys the fascistic hyperviolence Frank Millar also. as i was saying upthread it's' close to "real life crime" stories experience
doesnt ellroy bump off the detective character in one book and go alng with with the cops instead?

Elloy is interesting

How many of you would admit to sniffing soiled underwear?

Too many words, editor demands brevity, Jimmy "my mommy may have ben murdered" Ellroy complies, we get "White Jazz"

loses it with American bore-whatever-it-is-called
bought Perfidia, still in the gravity's rainbow pile

still - LA Quartet is a masterpiece

I'm still sad that the film cut out the Disney conspiracy stuff

 

[IdleRich]

Admit it? He's positively proud... and there is no maybe about his mum's murder is there?

 

[william_kent]

Admit it? He's positively proud... and there is no maybe about his mum's murder is there?

Yeah, I'm learning the art of understatement

I've lost at least 2 copies of personally signed copies of the Black Dahlia

for some reason if you lend someone an Ellroy novel that has been signed by the author it WILL NOT RETURN

even if it has MY NAME inscribed

......

 

[sufi]

All the NCSI CSI GCSE franchises, infinitely terrible, you can paint anything on this guff

Most narratives are detective formats these days, add a family for some emotion, partnerships, corruption, tits

including a lot of current affairs/ journalistic narratives describing so-called facts, history, reality etc

 

[william_kent]

Admit it? He's positively proud... and there is no maybe about his mum's murder is there?

Oh he admits it, no doubt! But would i? Any takers,,,

 

[IdleRich]

Good evening peepers, prowlers, pederasts, panty-sniffers, punks and pimps. I'm James Ellroy, the demon dog with the hog-log, the foul owl with the death growl, the white knight of the far right, and the slick trick with the donkey dick. I'm the author of 16 books, masterpieces all; they precede all my future masterpieces. These books will leave you reamed, steamed and drycleaned, tie-dyed, swept to the side, true-blued, tattooed and bah fongooed. These are books for the whole fuckin' family, if the name of your family is Manson

 

[sufi]

Oh he admits it, no doubt! But would i? Any takers,,,

make a thread

 

[william_kent]

make a thread

Err... might have to watch my wording...

in case anyone may have misinterpreted, my thoughts were along the lines of: if you are writing fiction how much of your perverted inner world are you prepared to reveal?

Ellroy just came right out with it, and I can attest to this, I have sat in some arts centre and heard him say, "yeah, I broke into houses, I sniffed panties"

even if I had a perverted inner world, not sure how much I would want to explicitly reveal... it's not like Ellroy couldn't have said a 'buddy of mine broke into old ladies houses and he sniffed etc.,", but he chose to say "I AM A PERVERT"

 

[william_kent]

Admit it? He's positively proud... and there is no maybe about his mum's murder is there?

mummy murdered

for ellroy yeah

but what I missed out:

was it the 'Black Dahlia" killer
that did for her?

 

[sufi]

direct descendent of the cowboy

The Rockford Files​

The Rockford Files is an American detective drama television series starring James Garner that aired on the NBC network between September 13, 1974, and January 10, 1980, and has remained in syndication to the present day. Garner portrays Los Angeles–based private investigator Jim Rockford, with Noah Beery Jr. in the supporting role of his father, Joseph "Rocky" Rockford, a retired truck driver. The show was created by Roy Huggins and Stephen J. Cannell. Huggins had created the television show Maverick (1957–1962), which starred Garner, and he wanted to recapture that magic in a 'modern-day' detective setting. In 2002, The Rockford Files was ranked No. 39 on TV Guide's 50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time.[1]

 

[catalog]

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....

I was hungover on Saturday after seeing @william_kent where he bought me loads of augustinner helles. Nothing for it but go for a long walk. Top night.

 

[catalog]

This is exactly what I'm looking for.

But with that start bit it seems to me you're saying something that reminds me a little of the standard explanation for why people like to believe in Conspiracy Theories; the idea that there is someone behind it all with reasons for what they do is comforting in a strange way even if that person is evil.

And so a detective who can put everything together, figure it out and solve it is comforting, cos that very process implies again that there is a solution, there is an explanation and even if the normal person can't see it, we know that a funny little Belgian man with over-active grey cells can.

Yeah I think that's the same spirit. Wd want answers dagnammit! That's where the noir stuff begins to get interesting, or indeed Holmes. When you realise there's no answers. Or the answer plunges you into a whole new reality tunnel (thinking eh of Chinatown, la confidential)

 

[catalog]

One thing that ties in with this a little I think... Sherlock Holmes (and also, is it, Dupont in the Murders in the Rue Morgue?) are almost magic geniuses who instantly solve the problems.

We are all very familiar with Holmes providing impossibly accurate descriptions of someone ten seconds after meeting them - "The left cuff of your shirt was slightly more frayed which could only mean..." - and in TMITRM there is a bit where the narrator is walking along lost in reverie and the detective breaks into his thoughts to answer the exact question he was struggling with. He explains this by saying "I saw you pause by that wall and then look at the sky..." and reconstructs his entire train of thought this way.

In each case this is entertaining but completely ridiculous, there are many possible reasons for the frayed cuff or pausing by the wall, yet the detective unerringly picks the correct choice in hilariously long chains.

But by Poirot this kind of incredible power of deduction has been abandoned. In parallel with humanity's increasing uncertainty Poirot is not as superhuman as Holmes, however compared to later, more modern detectives he still has an impossible level of certainty.

Does that make sense? And do you agree?

It does, but I don't know enough about the two detectives.... To me, they both seemed to have completely superhuman abilities. But it would also make sense that the superhuman-ness deteriorates as the form/genre matures and turns back on itself.

 

[jenks]

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.

Dr. Grimesby Roylott in Speckled Band - I have lost count of the number of times I have taught it and shown the Jeremy Brett version to Y9 classes.

 

[Slothrop]

We are all very very familiar with Holmes providing impossibly accurate descriptions of someone ten seconds after meeting them - "The left cuff of your shirt was slightly more frayed which could only mean..." - and in TMITRM there is a bit where the narrator is walking along lost in reverie and the detective breaks into his thoughts to answer the exact question he was struggling with. He explains this by saying "I saw you pause by that wall and then look at the sky..." and reconstructs his entire train of thought this way.

In each case this is entertaining but completely ridiculous, there are many possible reasons for the frayed cuff or pausing by the wall, yet the detective unerringly picks the correct choice in hilariously long chains.

Pratchett:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1654.Terry_Pratchett

Samuel Vimes dreamed about Clues. He had a jaundiced view of Clues. He instinctively distrusted them. They got in the way. And he distrusted the kind of person who’d take one look at another man and say in a lordly voice to his companion, “Ah, my dear sir, I can tell you nothing except that he is a left-handed stonemason who has spent some years in the merchant navy and has recently fallen on hard times,” and then unroll a lot of supercilious commentary about calluses and stance and the state of a man’s boots, when exactly the same comments could apply to a man who was wearing his old clothes because he’d been doing a spot of home bricklaying for a new barbecue pit, and had been tattooed once when he was drunk and seventeen and in fact got seasick on a wet pavement. What arrogance! What an insult to the rich and chaotic variety of the human experience!

 

[Mr. Tea]

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

I was just thinking, you could have fun translating Holmes from London ca. 1890 to LA ca. 1990, in a story where he and Watson are on the train of a ruthless gang of crack dealers - except Holmes keeps accidentally-on-purpose sabotaging their own investigation, since this gang sells the best crack, and he's their biggest customer.

 

[version]

 

[version]

The themed or eccentric serial killer's one way to expand the detective novel. You develop the killer into as much of a character as the detective, e.g. the Thomas Harris stuff.