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The Hard-Boiled Dick

kevinburtonsmith

A Personal Checklist by James Sandoe

Originally compiled in 1952 for his friend Arthur Lovell, a Chicago bookseller, and intended to be distributed exclusively as a gift to some of Lovell’s close friends and a few select customers, JAMES SANDOE‘s suggested reading list of hard-boiled private eye novels that he personally deemed worthy has been reprinted (and revised) several times, but remains a highly regarded early overview of the genre.

At times snarky and bitchy (but always intriguing), it later popped up in the January 1968 issue of The Armchair Detective, and in The Mystery Story (1976; edited by John Ball), which is where I lifted the following version from. Sloppy at times (the syntax and the formatting are all over the place) and breath-takingly opinionated at others (something Sandoe himself cops to), the list is still well worth reading, and a great lead-in to some writers you may not have heard of.

I’ve tried to clean up and standardize the formatting a little, but here goes…

INTRODUCTION (1976)

Dupin, Holmes, Father Brown and Philo Vance are all, in one sense, private eyes in that their salaries do not come from city hall. But that is not the sense in which we understand the phrase. It begins in Black Mask, explodes into Dashiell Hammett, and probably dies out with Mickey Spillane. Lew Archer persists, so laden with laurels that they may account for his weariness. So does Travis McGee.* Scarred and given to bouts of meditation, McGee is a little bemused by his own knight errantry. (“Maybe I could be stirred only by the wounded ducklings.” Bright Orange … , Fawcett, 1969, page 51.) There have been British imitators (all, so far as I know, negligible) and so few notable latter-day prac­titioners worth remembrance that the vein seems to have been worked out. Happily, such prophecy is dangerous. Witness the revival of the Gothic as Phyllis Whitney reports it, or the tolling of bells for the mystery as a whole which began, as Howard Haycraft shows before the nineteenth century was out.

So, living, dead, or due for resurrection, what is a “private eye”? The Continental Op works for an agency (as Hammett worked for Pinkerton); Sam Spade has Effie see to the erasure of Archer’s name from the door; Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, like Macdonald’s Archer, has been a cop but is now a loner. McGee is a “salvage expert” drawn past his reluctance into ac­tion against malefactors.

There are others who should and will be evoked but these are preeminent. So what makes them all, diversely, “private eyes”? After all, there is great disparity among them.

Perhaps they are all, in their diverse ways, knights errant. Even the Op whose heart (or sensibilty) is en­gaged even when it’s just another assignment (“It was a wandering daughter job”) from the old man.

Describing the private eye is like executing a col­lage. Certain elements seem constant, for all that they actually weren’t: the shabby office with buzzing flies­–except for the dead ones on the windowsill–down the corridor from a creaking elevator with a sulky and aged operator, a bottle of booze in the desk drawer, a shabby restaurant nearby serving leaden eggs and greasy bacon, and the streets of San Francisco or Los Angeles stretching away toward the mountains and the ocean. A sense of used paper cups and of looks still sharp from tired eyes. Integrity, along with knight errantry, is their common possession-even with the awful Spillane. That, and a sense of operating alone. The Op may lean on the agency for special informaion, but in practice he works by himself. The entirely egregious Mike Hammer, whose sensibility was re­flected in the title of his first novel, I, The Jury, is a poor relation, smug and priggish even when cutting his killers, preferably women, to slow death.

But there has to be more than flyblown offices, integrity, and a California setting to distinguish the private eye. “Hard-boiled” may help a bit for all that Chandler seems sometimes soft-boiled to the point of being underdone. (McGee, like Marlowe, seems to observe this without being able to alter his convictions.)

The private eye must be willing to assume the bop in the alley, the cop at his door at three o’clock in the morning, the shabby bungalow with a bleary and sul­len drunk trying to catch him across the forehead with a wine bottle. He will have a wearily suspicious sense of the shallow lifting stairs to the elegant door of the elegant house on the other side of town.

His eyes will look narrowly at gaming tables and past them to the door in the wall that opens rarely dur­ing the evening. He may be the angrily ineffective shepherd of the dependent lamb at his side whose claws reach at money while her richly lipped mouth speaks a lie that has a muddling truth in it. He drives wearily but warily, doggedly wondering if there are still any orange groves in Arcata and then remember­ing that there aren’t. He is wearily awake and if there is always, somewhere, the bed, he is never sure what will be in it. Meanwhile he drives down mean streets and, as the litany demands, Turk, Geary, Fillmore, Sepulveda, Wilshire, Lexington, Fifth and Mason, Beekman Place, Cay West, and Biscayne Boulevard, until they reach a glimpse and a gasp of the ocean or a brush of the thin air at Tahoe where they have slot machines on all four corners and another in the center of the street.

If the .38 is in his shoulder holster, he may find himself trying to remember whether or not it’s loaded. He is pressed dully by the possibility that he might need to use it, but he is more aware of the hairpin curves that lead to the shabby cabin with the sagging porch always up the hill from the road.

Another bond between these disparate characters is a sense of imminent violence, of a lurking of evil often overlapping another such premonition and blurring the picture. There is also a promise (often more than a promise) of tired beds. Money is generally a factor, although the eye himself never has much of it and may indeed wonder how he’ll pay the bills gath­ering dust above the drawer with the booze in it.

I am persuaded that the private eye who flour­ished from the twenties into the sixties is by now an endangered species (a sophomore sociologist could give us charts, graphs and tables to show why the aard­vark is more active). Therefore, I have ventured to reprint the contents of a booklet which the iate Arthur Lovell some years ago asked me to prepare as a sort of Christmas card for his friends. Barzun and Taylor (page 610) have thought well of it perhaps in part be­cause it is as candidly personal as their judgments (with which it is often a fine game to disagree). On this occa­sion I have ventured to add some further notes and the sincere regret that many of the books cited are long out of print and difficult to come by.

First and last, I return with most admiration to Hammett, then warm to Chandler but wish that he didn’t vitiate himself in part by self-doubts and a boyish excess of romanticism. Ross Macdonald is, after all, a synthetic and Archer an allegation. John D. MacDonald has, in spite of a formula he outwits very astutely, a vitality that will probably continue to be underestimated, because, like McGee, he is his own man. I remember as an ex-librarian, some years back, giving as nearly a full set of John D. MacDonald as I could assemble to our university library with the stipu­lation that, however uncomfortable for the system, the paperback originals should be catalogued as though they were in hardcover. I doubt that MacDonald him­self worries much about preservation in university libraries which, twenty years ago, might have scrapped Black Mask if anyone had offered them a file of it. By now it has become a valuable research item.

* And more the private avenger than the private eye, as Barzun and Taylor neatly remark in A Catalog of Crime, page 292.

Here with some titles and my assessments of them:

“Both the admirers and the detractors of the current blood-bosoms-and-brandy [or, may I add, parenthetically, boom-lay-boom-lay-boom-lay-boom-J.S.] school of fic­tional detectives trace such capers back to Dashiell Hammett, and Mr. Hammett is alternately praised for re­creating the detective story or damned for destroying it. Most of these critics seem completely unaware of what Mr. Hammett’s work is really like.
“It is possible, it is true, to see some faint foreshadowing of the current private eye of books, screen and air in Sam Spade of The Maltese Falcon; but Spade appeared only in that novel and three short stories. The bulk of Mr. Ham­mett’s detective writing was devoted to the anonymous Continental· Op, who is the central character of three novels and at least twenty-five short stories and novelettes.
“In these Op stories Mr. Hammett did indeed revitalize the detective story, not only by the quality of his objective and realistic writing, but also by trying to depict believably the actual work of a private operative. And almost every characteristic of these stories has vanished completely from the work of the contemporaries who claim to be ‘of the school of Hammett.’
“The Op is fortyish and a little heavier than he should be. He appears only in cases which might logically be brought to a private detective. He is on excellent terms with the police. He carefully avoids emotional involve­ments with the people in a case. He stays sober when work­ing. He is no lone wolf, but a cog in a large and efficient organization. He is tough in self-defense, but completely devoid of sadism. Many of his cases involve no physical violence; in those which inevitably do, the violence is writ­ten with understatement. He describes one of his own most dangerous situations as ‘a game that made up in tenseness what it lacked in action,’ and the description fits most of his adventures.” 

NOVELETTE: $106,000 Blood Money (1943, reprinted from Bl.ack Mask, 1927, and since reprinted as Blood Money and The Big Knockover).
SHORT STORIES (with introductions by Ellery Queen): The Adventures of Sam Spade, and Other Stories (1945); “Too Many Have Lived,” “They Can Only Hang You Once,” “A Man Called Spade,” “The Assistant Murderer,” “Nightshade,” “The Judge Laughed Last,” “His Brother’s Keeper.” (Also issued as They Can Only Hang You Once.)
The Continental Op (1945); “Fly Paper,” “Death on Pine Street,” “Zigzags of Treachery,” “The Farewell Murder.” The Creeping Siamese ( 1950); “The Creeping Siamese,” “The Man Who Killed Dan Odams,” “The Nails in Mr. Cayterer,” “The Joke on Eloise Morey,” “Tom, Dick, or Harry,” “This King Business.”
 Dead Yellow Women (1947); “Dead Yellow Women,” “The Golden Horseshoe,” “House Dick,” “Who Killed Bob Teal?” “The Green Elephant,” “The Hairy One.” Hammett Homicides (1946); “The House on Turk Street,” “The Girl with the Silver Eyes,” “Night Shots,” “The Main Death,” “Two Sharp Knives,” “Ruffian’s Wife.”
Nightmare Town; “Nightmare Town,” “The Scorched Face,” “Albert ·Pastor at Home,” “Corkscrew.”
The Return of the Continental Op (1945); “The Whosis Kid,” “The Gutting of Couffignal,” “Death and Company,” “One Hour,” “The Tenth Clue.”
Woman in the Dark (1952): “Arson Plus,” “Slippery Fin­gers,” “The Black Hat that Wasn’t There,” “Woman in the Dark,” “Afraid of a Gun,” “Holiday,” “The Man Who Stood in the Way.”
A Man Named Thin ( 1962). Hammett has suffered almost as much scholarly inquiry as Chandler in recent years and we have had telling glimpses of him from the remembrance of Lillian Hellman in An Un­finished Woman (1969) and Pentimento (1974). And that ab­sorbing first draft of The Thin Man(from which he salvaged only the name Wynant) has been published in City of San Francisco, November 4, 1975, pages 32A-33 (pages 1-12 separately paged). It is sound, spare Hammett and teasing. Although less spare, Joe Gores’s excellent novel, Hammett (Putnam, 1975) suggests that Gores one day might continue it to its conclusion without Nick, Nora or Asta.

These then are the hard-boiled tales which a cou­ple of decades of reading and a dangerous number of years at reviewing have called into memory as worth the coursing. The writers and tales noted here are themselves of very unequal merit and it’s quite possible that the quality which appeared to me to rescue an otherwise routine imitation from boredom will not affect another reader in the same way. Still the notes may be useful for simplifying the appalling process of rooting out the weeds and at the very least they pro­vide a plump sitting duck for blasting.

I shall of course regret this omission or that other one as soon as the list is irretrievably beyond my care, just as I shall be dogged by the doubt that X or Y war­ranted admission after all. And this self-constituting torment may be some relief to the reader who finds himself particularly resentful of an omission or an inclusion.

— James Sandoe

FURTHER INVESTIGATION

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