Hard Boiled Detectives

The first detective stories I remember reading are Encyclopedia Brown and a series about boy detectives call The Three Investigators.  Anyone who has read Encyclopedia Brown remembers that it all centered around a nerdy boy who annoyed everyone and found objects misplaced by adults.  The stakes were low and the only really interesting thing about them is the opportunity the reader is afforded to solve the problem based on clues in the stories.  I was never able to do this.
The other series, The Three Investigators, was for a slightly older reader and I devoured it.  I don't remember many of the mysteries the three solved or any other plot points, but I do remember the interaction of the boy detectives and the dangers they would sometimes face.  The stakes were higher in these stories as the mysteries often involved the adults in their lives and in the town they lived.  The boys were never injured, but they faced the possibility of it.  I continued reading mysteries and detective fiction, but these were my first forays into the genre.  I ran through a patch of Sherlock Holmes in my twenties, finding the literary character to be far more interesting than the watered down representations I had seen elsewhere.
My interest in detective fiction peaked when I enrolled in a special topics course called "Crime and Punishment" that focused on crime and detective fiction (not on the Dostoyevsky novel).
This class opened a new world to me in detective fiction.  We started with songs and old accounts from the Newgate Calendar, something like the first true-crime accounts.  This is worth looking into if you are unfamiliar with it.  The thing that stuck with me the most was our section on "hard-boiled" detectives.
These novels were rougher around the edges and were much darker.  The detectives did not always win the day by using their brains, but had to use cunning, deception, and muscle to get their way.  The hard-boiled detective was an even more ambiguous character than Holmes.  These detectives were often private eyes, which freed them from the constraints that law enforcement officials would be bound to.  This meant that they were also often outlaws, or at least operated in a "para-" legal, if not "extra-" legal sense.
These novels paralleled literary naturalism in the sense that they tried to depict a gritty, realistic world.  The detectives were hard because they were forced to be by human nature.

This is all a long introduction to provide context for a recent book I read.  Brett Halliday is one of the mystery authors I most like.  His work, along with John D. MacDonald, Mickey Spillane, Ed McBain, Dashiell Hammett, and others tend to feature a single detective.  The pulpy narratives can be fairly formulaic and the writing is sometimes terrible.  In this novel, Murder is My Business, Halliday's detective Mike Shayne picks up a case from a mother concerned that her son has fallen in with a bad element and may have been killed.  The story features a mayoral race in El Paso, TX, war profiteering, Nazi sympathizers, troubled border crossings, negative stereotypes of Mexicans and immigrants in general, and an overly-circuitous plot to smuggle silver across the border into America.

Back cover artwork for Murder is My Business

The story itself is most interesting for Shayne's actions and attitude.  He attempts to remain aloof from the legal battles that surround him, though he has a personal relationship with many of the involved parties and has a favored outcome.  He enters into the case without a clear motivation besides making money, and even that is uncertain because he is not sure who will ultimately pay him.  Eventually, Shayne will extort money form one of the central figures and mayoral candidate, only to double-cross him immediately and turn him over to the police anyway.
Shayne, like many of the hard-boiled detectives, plays criminals against the police for his own benefit.  Also like many hard-boiled detectives, he has a code of ethics that doesn't necessarily align with the law or with those around him, but is rock solid.  This can be a troubling aspect of these novels because this code can sometimes lead a detective to help someone against their own interests, but it can just as easily lead them to hurting or killing someone, or using illegal means to help the police to arrest someone.  These novels have both a distrust of police for their potential ineptitude and corruption, but also because they are unwilling or unable to go "far enough."  In more than one of these novels, the featured detective will violently coerce confessions from the bad guy to "help" the police make the case against them.  The novels tend not to present any moral ambiguity about this because there is rarely doubt that the detective is wrong.  However, in a real world where hunches are generally wrong and where personal prejudices often masquerade as deduction, this scenario looks more grim and definitely more suspect.
Before this gets too long, I will leave off with some more optimistic notes.  While in that special topics course, we read another author who has become another favorite of mine: Sara Paretsky.  Paretsky adopts many hard-boiled detective tropes but bends their politics a bit by introducing a woman detective.  VI Warshawski is as smart and tough as the other detectives and gets into the same sort of trouble that they do.  Her moral compass tends to read a bit more true and she also tends to be more sympathetic as a character.
I have recently purchased Paretsky's newest novel Shell Game, that I am sure will make an appearance in this blog at some point.