Crime novels are often seen as low-brow fiction. The author can entertain with murders and murderers as a puzzle which is eventually solved, and the reader puts the book down with nothing but the thrills to show for it. But the best crime novels also teach us things about the world and our perspective of it.
In Signs Taken
for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms Franco Moretti
describes the role of the detective in classical crime fiction, “Since Poe,
detectives have reflected a scientific
ideal: the detective discovers the causal links between events: to unravel the
mystery is to trace them back to a law.”
(144) The criminal is the exception to society, the outsider. “His defeat is
the victory and the purge of a society no longer conceived of as a contract
between independent entities, but
rather as an organism or social body”
(135). Thus it is the role of the detective to conquer over and purge society of
the undesired criminal element.
Sherlock Holmes does this by a scientific work
of tracing clues of an act to find the cause of the act. The crime of the criminal
consists in acting as an individual. The criminal breaks the laws of society,
yet his very act of law-breaking is involuntarily entangled in greater laws of
physics and human behaviour. It is this reality which makes the science of
Sherlock Holmes possible. Though the criminal seeks to hide in the mass, he
leaves clues of his individuality on the machinery and accessories he attempts
to hide behind, which makes detection possible.
Such is the case in “A Case of
Identity”, where the perpetrator is detected by the typewriter he uses. Thus
the role of Sherlock Holmes in society is to be the counterweight to the
criminals, which restores the balance of society and perpetuates the status quo.
The greater laws of science and human behaviour enable Holmes to reduce the
meaning of an entire plot to a conclusion, a simple unified meaning. In
Sherlock Holmes, “God”, a single organizing principle, is present. His world is
ordered and makes sense. There all answers can be found for someone who knows
how to read the signs.
Hard-boiled
detective fiction shows us a very different reality. In Raymond Chandler’s “Red
Wind” we are introduced into a dark malevolent world of chaos:
"There was a desert wind blowing that
night. It was one of those dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make
your nerves jump and your skin itch. On
nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study
their husband’s necks. Anything can happen" (134).
What is the role of detective
Marlowe in this hostile environment? In the midst of corrupt police, unfaithful
spouses and a world on the brink of anarchy, Marlowe clearly emerges as the
hero of the story. Yet in what actions or attributes does his heroism lie? He
cannot be as Holmes the doctor purging society of its undesired elements; such
a purge in Marlowe’s society would mean genocide. He cannot hope to restore any
semblance of order or civility, since these virtues seem to have been lost long
ago. Marlowe’s society is one where God is absent. There is no unifying
principle which orders and makes sense of events and experiences, and society
seems to be a matter of egocentric entities fighting against each other in a
world of chance. Raymond Chandler himself describes his idea of Marlowe as a hero.
In “The Simple Art of Murder” Raymond Chandler writes, “down these mean streets
a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid...He
must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.”
(991-992) What makes him the best man in his world?
In order to find that out we cannot simply look at his
actions, but rather we ask: What is the motivation behind Marlowe’s work? In
“Red Wind” he rejects any price for his services, although he risks getting
killed for them several times. In other stories he does take payment for his
work, but it seems unlikely that he does his job simply for money. As he says
in “Red Wind”, “I’m not in this for money” (157). All we learn from Chandler in
“The Simple Art of Murder” is, “the story is his adventure in search of a
hidden truth.” Except for searching for the perpetrator of the individual
crimes in the stories, there seems to be a deeper search which permeates
Marlowe’s being.
Marlowe appears as the Heideggerian
poet; the hero of the night of the Gods. The world described in “Red Wind”
seems familiar to the world Heidegger describes in the essay “What Are Poets
For?” from Poetry, Language, Thought:
“At this night’s midnight, the destitution of the time is greatest. Then the
destitute time is no longer able even to experience its own destitution”
(90-91). The world is marked by the “default of God”: The absence of a God who
gathers a people to himself. Here I will take God to mean the gathering or
unifying principle which orders the world. This world, which Heidegger says is
without ground (without a foundation) hangs in the abyss. So the
question is, why does someone like Marlowe, who by the author’s own description is
the best man in his world, spend his time in the most depraved and sordid
surroundings? Why does he deal with the very darkest sides of society? Maybe
Heidegger’s poet can give us a clue. “In the age of the world’s night, the
abyss of the world must be experienced and endured. But for this it is necessary
that there be those who reach into the abyss” (90). What is the purpose of
reaching into the abyss? According to Heidegger, once the world has entered
into the night of the gods there can be no salvation in the sudden return of
the gods or by the appearance of a new god. There can be no “back to normal”
without people experiencing what Heidegger calls “a turn” rather than a return.
As Heidegger points out, “The salvation must come from where there is a turn
with mortals in their nature” (115-116), and “there is a turn with mortals when
these find the way to their own nature. That nature lies in this, that mortals
reach into the abyss sooner than the heavenly powers” (91).
What
is the role of the poet in such a time? Heidegger remarks, “It is a necessary
part of the poet’s nature that, before he can be truly a poet in such an age,
the time’s destitution must have made the whole being and vocation of the poet
a poetic question for him” (92). Although Marlowe needs money to live, he is
not in his job for money. As Heidegger goes on to say, “Poets are the mortals
who...sense the trace of the fugitive gods, stay on the gods’ tracks, and so
trace for their kindred mortals the way towards the turning” (92). Marlowe is
on a hunt which very much differs from Sherlock Holmes'. Rather than doing a
scientific work by tracing causal links between events back to a law, Marlowe
is on an ontological discovery into the very abyss of human society and human
nature. This is not a journey for weak minds. As Heidegger puts it, “Are there
mortals who reach sooner into the abyss of the destitute and its destituteness?
These, the most mortal among mortals, would be the most daring, the most
ventured” (116). “He who is more venturesome than that ground ventures to where
all ground breaks off – into the abyss. . . .Those men who are . . . more venturesome
must also will more strongly” (116).
It
is a journey full of uncertainty into the darkness. “He among mortals who must,
sooner than other mortals and otherwise than they, reach into the abyss, comes
to know the marks that the abyss remarks. For the poet, these are the traces of
the fugitive gods.” (91) Unlike Holmes, Marlowe is on a mission where there may
not even be an answer. As Heidegger remarks,
“Traces are often
inconspicuous, and are always the legacy of a directive that is barely divined. To be a poet in a destitute age
means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive
gods. This is why the poet in the time of the world’s night utters the holy.
That is why, in Holderlin’s language,
the world’s night is the holy night” (92).
The nature of Marlowe’s search resembles a scene in
“Red Wind” where he opens up the door to a dark room, “I went into near
darkness. Street light filtered in and touched a high spot here and
there . . . There was a queer smell in the air” (148). Entering into near darkness
Marlowe can detect traces of things. These traces may lead him to conclusions,
but it is hard to know if those conclusions are right. Similarly, the chess
problem Marlowe has set out on the table remains unsolved throughout the entire
story. There is no eureka-moment where everything becomes clear. There are
hints and clues, but no final solution. According to Heidegger, this is how the
search for Being must be in an age marked by the “default of God”:
“The
closer the world’s night draws toward midnight, the more exclusively does the destitute prevail, in such a way that
it withdraws its very nature and presence. Not only is the holy lost as the track toward the godhead; even the traces
leading to that lost track are well-nigh
obliterated. The more obscure the traces become the less can a single mortal, reaching into the abyss, attend there to
intimations and signs. It is then all the more strictly
true that each man gets farthest if he goes only as far as he can go along the
way allotted to him” (92).
In
an age of chaos, it is not possible to have the certainty of Sherlock Holmes.
It may be impossible to solve the entire riddle, or make out clear shapes of
meaning in the darkness. Yet it is this very darkness, the very destituteness
of the world and the default of the gods, which renders mortals able to reach
into the abyss sooner than the heavenly powers, and thereby find a way to their
own nature.
Yet
there is an element in hard-boiled detective fiction that makes Heidegger’s
theory an incomplete description of Marlowe’s search. Heidegger envisions
altruistic poets who “trace for their kindred mortals the way towards the
turning,” yet there is no indication in Chandler that Marlowe thought much
about a “turning” or any kind of revolution in public consciousness. In “On Raymond
Chandler” Jameson quotes Chandler writing, “My theory was that the readers just
thought they cared about nothing but
the action; that really, although they didn’t know it, the thing they cared
about, and that I cared about, was the creation of emotion through dialogue and
description” (122-123). In other words, where Heidegger sees the ontological
discovery as a means to an end, Chandler (and by association Marlowe) seems to
see the discovery or search as an end in itself. Instead of focusing on the
action leading to a certain revelatory end, Chandler gives us the experience of
a good man in a destitute world “in search of a hidden truth.”
Chandler, Raymond. “Red Wind” in Penzler 134-160
---. “The Simple Art of Murder” in Raymond
Chandler: Later Novels and Other Writings, New York: The Library of America. 1995. Print.
Heidegger, Martin. Poetry,
Language, Thought, New York: Perennial. 2001. Print.
Jameson, Frederic. “On Raymond Chandler” in Most and Stowe 122-148
Moretti, Franco. Signs Taken for
Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, London and New York: Verso. 1997. Print.
Most, Glenn W. and Stowe, William W. ed. The Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary Theory, San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovic Publishers. 1983.
Print.
Penzler, Otto, ed. The Black
Lizard Big Book of Pulps, New York: Vintage Books. 2007. Print