For PIs, John Shannon's Jack Liffey has a daughter, usually living with his
ex-wife but providing plenty of complications when she isn't.
For spies, Charlie Muffin's wife, Edith, died as a result of his career.
(I'm reading Charlie Muffin, U.S.A., now, and I should have read this series
in order.)
Joy
JIM DOHERTY listed some cops and spies' marital status:
> Re your comment below:
>
> "Harry Bosch has a 5 year old daughter with Eleanor Wish."
>
> Yeah, but Harry's a cop, and, at one time, he was Elly's husband.
>
> It's not at all unusual for the heroes of police procedurals to be married
> and have kids. And it shouldn't be. Police procedurals are supposed to
> be accurate depictions of law enforcement in real life, and in real life,
> most cops are married (or at least have been, at one time or another) and
> have kids.
>
> Off-hand, McBain's Steve Carella, Creasey's George Gideon, Waugh's Fred
> Fellows, Wilcox's Frank Hastings, Procter's Harry Martineau, Sjowall &
> Wahloo's Martin Beck, and Treat's Mitch Taylor are all husbands (or
> ex-husbands) and fathers.
>
> In the arena of the hard-boiled private eye, however, husbands and fathers
> are lot less frequent. Gores's Dan Kearney (and we glimpse very little of
> his family life in the books), and Pronzini's "Nameless," who adopted a
> little girl with his wife Kerry a few books ago, are among the very few.
>
> I imagine spies who are married with children are fairly unusual, too.
> James Bond married a woman in ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE, but was
> almost immediately widowed, and, with another woman, fathered a child in
> YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE, but, at least in the original Fleming Canon, was
> completely unaware of it. Hamilton's Matt Helm had three kids, but they
> all came along during the hiatus from the secret agent biz preceding DEATH
> OF A CITIZEN.
>
> It's not hard-boiledness of a character, per se, that works against family
> life in crime fiction. It's the expectations that come with the
> particular sub-genre. We expect PI's and spies to be lone wolves, because
> PI's and spies, in fiction, are mythical figure. This is so pervasive an
> expectation that, as James pointed out, Brett Halliday had to kill off
> Mike Shayne's wife because a hard-boiled PI who was a family man struck
> too dissonant a note (at least for movie producers).
>
> We don't necessarly expect that of realistically depicted policemen, who,
> for all their tougness and colloquial mode of expression, are far less
> likely to be figures of myth.
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