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Tough investigators are concentrated mostly in New York and in California, the Olduvai Gorge of the chivalrous gumshoe. By far the best known are the West Coast trio of Hammett's Sam Spade, Chandler's Marlowe and Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer. Occasional readers of the form tend to confuse Ross with John D. MacDonald and Gregory Mcdonald. The first was born Kenneth Millar in 1915 and died three years ago of Alzheimer's disease. The second is 69 and lives in Florida, as does his popular P.I. Travis McGee, the "tinhorn knight on a stumbling Rosinante from Rent-A-Steed." The third is a former Boston Globe critic and the inventor of the flippant Fletch, whose snooping is sanctioned by a press card rather than a badge.
Location is as important to detective fiction as it is to the real estate business. The glitz centers of the Sunbelt offer the irresistible drama of drug traffic played against a background of pastel, stucco and palm fronds. Joseph Hansen (Fadeout, A Smile in His Lifetime, Gravedigger) offers an alternative to the macho, down-at-the-heels stereotype. He is David Brandstetter, a Southern California insurance investigator who is affluent, well dressed and homosexual. This subgenre is bicoastal; see George Baxt's novels, beginning with A Queer Kind of Death. The protagonist is a gay New York City police detective named Pharaoh Love. Other successful challenges to the bruiser class are Sara Paretsky's Chicago sleuth, Ms. V.I. Warshawski (Deadlock), and George C. Chesbro's Robert Frederickson, a dwarf with a doctorate in criminology and a black belt in karate.
The classic shamus prefers a snub-nosed .38, made in the U.S.A. He is invariably single (Philip Marlowe was a bachelor until Chandler's last, unfinished novel; Lew Archer lives alone, as does Spenser, although Spenser keeps company with Susan Silverman, a compassionate shrink). He is also short of cash and careless about his clothing. He is a two-fisted drinker (even though James Crumley's Milo Milodragovitch goes for peppermint schnapps) and sometimes drops his guard long enough to reveal a flash of erudition (Marlowe has atrocious taste in socks but can quote Browning). Touches of class cater to the tough-guy fantasies of the literati. Albert Camus, whose spare existential novels were influenced by U.S. detective fiction, looked like Humphrey Bogart portraying Sam Spade. Hemingway followed in the footsteps of Mark Twain and Ring Lardner. But it is hard to read such terse narratives as The Killers and To Have and Have Not without imagining gumshoe tracks leading back to Black Mask magazine.
America's native writing style developed--at a penny a word--in the highly degradable pulp pages of this monthly. At no extra cost, Black Mask came wrapped in an irony. It was founded with $500 in 1920 by the journalist and scholar H.L. Mencken and the playwright George Jean Nathan as a way of financing the unprofitable Smart Set, their magazine of uptown wit and sophisticated prose. The "louse," as Mencken called his detective journal, was an immediate success, and in six months he sold it for $100,000, the price of 10 million words.