(3 of 4)
Black Mask's early contributors rejected the class-conscious plots and genteel style of the British school of crime writing. "Hammett gave murder back to the people who commit it," said Chandler, who found the details of British mysteries as unexciting as "spillikins in the parlor." Hammett's early hero, the Continental Op, is a nameless abstraction of the hard-boiled ethic: "I pass up about twenty-five or thirty thousand of honest gain because I like being a detective, like the work. And liking work makes you want to do it as well as you can." His connection to women is like kissing dry ice: "You think I'm a man and you're a woman," he says to a female culprit. "That's wrong. I'm a manhunter and you're something that has been running in front of me." He later shoots the lady in the leg to prevent her escape.
By today's behavioral standards, the Continental Op is a head case. But his blunt vernacular helped to establish the voice that influenced generations of American writers. Like that other homegrown art form, jazz, the hard-boiled style relied on a formula but encouraged improvisation. James M. Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice) counterpointed violence with steamy sexuality; Chandler's signature note of sarcastic charm can be heard in the opening of his 1936 story Goldfish: "I wasn't doing any work that day, just catching up on my foot-dangling." Currently, Parker's Spenser sings the best sassy blues: "Ideal options aren't something I have much to do with. Most of the time I'm shuttling between bad and worse." Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer prefers stride (when he's not playing chopsticks), and John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee fuses bebop and rap: "Go get the lady with the unusual haircut and add her to the stack. Go get Meyer and the boat and bring the boat around. Use the big anchor and the power takeoff winch to pull the Flush out of the mangroves. Cork up the Munequita and rig a pump and float her." The form has also had its share of parodies. The best was S.J. Perelman's Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer: "I shifted my two hundred pounds slightly, lazily set fire to a finger, and watched it burn down."
In place of intricate plotting, hidden clues and surprise solutions, American detective fiction relies on character and language. Both are aggressively egalitarian, rejecting fancy airs and flowery talk. Here is Marlowe recalling a visit to a client: "I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars." He and his kin are cynical, terse and masters of an amiably menacing tone that echoes the classic response to insult of Owen Wister's The Virginian: "When you call me that, smile."