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The literary investigator has been around for little more than 100 years. The world's first detective bureau was established in Paris by Eugene null Vidocq in 1817, but it was not until 1841 that Edgar Allan Poe recognized the adventure available to a man who was a detective without being a public cop. Auguste Dupin, the intellectual Eye who was the hero of Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue, was a Parisian gentleman devoted to the dual task of outthinking a murderer and outwitting the police.
The pattern was contagious, and neither Poe nor his immediate successors seemed anxious to move it back to America. The first big geographical jump came in 1887, when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle brought him to London in the guise of Sherlock Holmes. Like Dupin, Holmes was an intellectual athlete, and socially he was a marvel of mobility, at home with scholars, society bluebloods, police inspectors. "Holmes," wrote Social Historian David Bazelon, "despite his eccentricities, is essentially an English gentleman acting to preserve a moral way of life." From Dickens' unfinished teaser, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, to the 20th century whimsy of Dorothy L. Sayers, crime was cleaned up until it became an intellectual puzzle, as safe for the amusement of high-chokered ladies as it was satisfying to the fantasies of high-angled gentlemen.
Even after the mystery came back to the U.S., through the first two decades of the 20th century, crimes were committed in the grand old English manner. Murder was still a puzzle, and whether S. S. Van Dine, Ellery Queen or H C Bailey were writing the rules, the mari who found the answer was a citizen of superior intellect. Whatever he collected for the job, he actually worked for intellectual satisfaction. It was not until 1929 that a slim, sardonic operator named Samuel Dashiell Hammett published Red Harvest and gave murder—to say nothing of lesser crimes—back to the people who are ordinarily involved.
Private Lives. Hammett had been a Private Eye himself. He knew that "house burglary is probably the poorest-paid trade in the world." He had been mistaken for a Prohibition agent, hired by a woman to fire her housekeeper, was friendly with a man who stole a Ferris wheel. And he had stumbled upon a young woman who did not tell him that she thought his work was interesting. Unlike
Holmes, Hammett's Eyes were driven by no moral obligation; they had a job, and they tried to do it competently. With an irreverent sneer at their proper predecessors, they succeeded and survived because they were tough, not because they were notably intelligent. Things happened to them: they faced pistols, boredom, and bad stomachs from too many foul meals eaten on the run. Hammett's Sam Spade soon found an acceptable running mate in Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe who would tell the girls: "The first time we met, I told you I was a detective. Get it through your lovely head. I work at it, lady. I don't play at it." At his best, the TV Private Eye operates in that tradition.
With Spade and Marlowe as models, hardboiled Private Eye fiction began to crowd the polite puzzlers off America's bookshelves, was in turn hard pressed by the likes of Mickey Spillane and even, strange as it seemed, by mystery stories about honest, intelligent cops.