Mark,
Re your comments below:
"However, the hardboiled investigators were most assuredly
not of that class. This gave the narrator, in both cases the
first person investigator, an outsider status from which to
comment on the upper class."
This presupposes that the hard-boiled protagonist is always a
1st-person narrator (usually true, but not always), and that
we will, therefore, see everything through his eyes, and that
the detective in the traditional mystery is always
upper-class (often, but not always, true).
Sam Spade, perhaps the most famous character from the ouvre
of the man who "gave murder back to the people who commit it
for reasons," was the hero of a very objective 3rd person
novel, and we were never privvy to his observations.
And there are any number of popular, well-known sleuths from
the traditional mystery who are as much outsiders as any
hard-boiled PI or cop.
G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown, for example, a Catholic
priest from humble origins in a protestant, and occasionally
virulently anti-Catholic, country is as much as outsider, in
his own way, as the Op, or Spade, or Marlowe.
Earl Derr Biggers, thoughan American using American settings,
used, like S.S. Van Dine, the "British model" in his
mysteries. His series character, Charlie Chan, though an
American citizen and technically the equal of the upper-class
suspects he interacts with, is a non-white who was a servant
prior to becoming a detective. Both his ethnic background and
his "servant class" origins make him as much an outsider in
the "upstairs" world he operates in as any hard-boiled
hero.
"On top of that, the classical mystery was mainly British
(yes, I know Van Dine's were set in the US, but they were
written to the British model, at least the one I've read)
where a person's class is more set from birth (with less
interaction between classes, at least during the time of the
classical mystery, if not still) than the myth of class
mobility would have us believe it is in the US."
That's largely true, exceptions like Van Dine, Biggers, and
Ellery Queen notwithstanding, but again, it doesn't mean that
it's impossible to create a realistic, believable character
within that framework, or that it's necessary for people born
to the the purple to be viewed through the prism of a
sardonic, cynical lower-class gumshoe for them to have
believable motives to murder, or believable reasons to be
murdered.
What you said, originally, and what I agreed with, was that
the reason Hammett, and his followers, seemed to give murder
back to people who committed for reasons other than to
provide a corpse was that they too the trouble to create
characters who were believable, whatever their class, so that
their motives were believable.
At the same time, however, I don't think we can conclude that
good characterization is something that's exclusive to the
hard-boiled or noir schools, nor that bad characterization is
inherent in traditional mysteries.
There are, after all, hard-boiled crime stories with bad
characterization, bad plotting, bad writing, etc, and there
are traditional mysteries that are a pleasure to read because
the characters are credible, the writing sparkiling, the plot
well-constructed, the setting well-realized, etc.
At the time Hammett was first writing, the traditional
mystery, in the hands of many who wrote them, were little
more than prose puzzles with indifferent characters.
Hammett's plots, at least boiled down to the bare basics,
were not all that different from those in traditional
mysteries. There was a crime, an essential clue that only the
Op saw, and a solution that the Op explained at the
end.
What Hammett did, that was done so seldom in the traditional
mystery (at that particular period), was create characters
you could believe would do these things, and describe the
events with such style that, as Chandler put it, he wrote
scenes that "seemed never to have been written before."
It wasn't a question of class, or plot structure. It was a
question of approach and talent at charaterization.
JIM DOHERTY
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