I've often mentioned in online musings that I discovered the detective novel via a bit of young reader's naïveté. In the wake of Chinatown, a host of new detective films rolled out of Hollywood. I was a little young to catch them in theaters, but movie-tie-in editions or re-issues led to my dipping a toe into the water of the hardboiled reading universe, starting probably with Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely.
I ran across Lew Archer around then as well in a combo of The Drowning Pool movie tie-in and the TV movie based on The Underground Man, and those books tipped the line of dominoes.
Since I'm blogging again with a little more frequency, I thought I'd throw out a few of my favorite hardboiled novels, maybe obvious or maybe not. I'm working from memory, so my fondness above all is what prevails here. This is by no means a definitive list nor is it a complete list.
1. The Chill by Ross Macdonald
Far from my first Lew Archer, it remains a standout for me. It's post
Galton Case and Macdonald's transitional period where his style and psychological themes matured as he dealt with the pain of his troubled daughter's struggles.
As a younger reader, it struck me most for it's pace and the momentous twist that often gets a classical reading by scholars. It's the tale of a
young bride who takes a powder on her honeymoon. Lew's hired to find her and warns us early he should have walked away from the job offer. He's soon embroiled with university professors, a murder, possibly false testimony and a great deal more. All of the Archers are slim books. This one reads like lightning yet never seems rushed or condensed.
I guess it's special too because my old man read it first and liked it a great deal. We clashed on some topics but rarely books, and he read much of my collection back in the day and liked a good detective tale himself.
SEE ALSO: ARCHER AT THE BEACH
2. “The Gutting of Couffignal” by Dashiell Hammett
I found
The Maltese Falcon somewhere in the mix of paperbacks at Waldenbooks when browsing other
titles. I was gaining a knowledge of the hardboiled school when I gave it a try. I didn't like Sam Spade and The Continental Op--who I met first in
The Dain Curse--quite as much as I did Chandler's Marlowe as my tastes were developing. I sensed what I've come to call the romance of Chandler. Granted he had crime in the hands of criminals and all that, but the style, the humor, and elements that would shape
film noir appealed to me more. Hammett seemed a little more pragmatic, at least as I thought of it. However, I found a battered used 1967 Dell paperback copy of
The Big Knockover at my favorite used book shop, The Book Nook in Alexandria, LA.
I know it's a story and not a novel, but many of Hammett's novels, like Chandler's, took shape in novellas. (Chandler, of course, called it cannibalizing.) It's kind of
Die Hard on a private island. This one's an island of the very rich. The Op is on hand to guard wedding presents when the only bridge to the island's dynamited and a band of robbers with machine guns mounted on a car rush in on a raid. The Op has to take them on, and he's up for the job. It's a men's adventure tale. There's a mystery twist, of course, but I read it as action first as a kid. It took time for it to grow on me in other ways. It was really in re-reading with more mature and sophisticated eyes that I've come to see the magic Hammett had going on and to appreciate the Hammett style.
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3. The Judas Goat by Robert B. Parker
A review of this one, the fifth book in Parker's Spenser series, popped up in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine as I was finding my way in understanding the mystery genre.
Spenser had been around for a while by then and his friend Hawk had been introduced as a respected adversary in earlier books. Spenser doesn't take assassination cases, the review noted, but he is up for a bounty hunt. Hired to track down a group of terrorists responsible for the death of a client's loved one, Spenser does some globe hopping with Hawk helping out. The humor is powerful in this one, and the action is plentiful and brutal at times. EQMM reviews used to grouse about a lack of detection in Spenser books, but I always found them engaging with or without a puzzle, and this one was a great introduction. Everything culminates in a brutal battle with bad guys in an Olympic village.
5. When the Sacred Ginmill Closes by Lawrence Block
I discovered Matthew Scudder by way of
Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and the fabulous story
"A Candle for the Bag Lady." He's an ex-cop, driven to "serious drinking" by the accidental death of a child as he stopped a holdup and one of his bullets ricocheted. Via the gateway of that story and Block's column in
Writer's Digest, I moved on to the early Scudder novels, and back to the novella "Out the Window" via a second hadn
AHMM. After a significant character arc culminated in
Eight Million Ways to Die (1982
), the series paused until the prequel,
Ginmill (1986
) that grew out of the novella "By the Dawn's Early Light" in the collection
The Eyes Have It edited by Bob Randisi.
It's set in Scudder's serious drinking days. There's a holdup at an after hours club, and Scudder's pressed into tracking down the perpetrators while simultaneously working on other cases. Dave Van Ronk's song "Last Call" that provides the book's title, is a core element as Scudder contemplates his existence and his drinking life. Happily that's readily found online these days. You can listen along with Matt as he experiences the song's spiritual resonance.
6. S is for Silence by Sue Grafton
When I was teaching horror, mystery and suspense in the classroom, I could never get through a lecture slide about Sue Grafton without tearing up as I read her daughter Jamie Clark's remark upon her mom's death and the culmination of the alphabet detective series about female P.I. Kinsey Millhone:
“...out of the deep abiding love and respect for our dear sweet Sue, as far as we in the family are concerned, the alphabet now ends at Y.”
Z is for Zero was never to be, but the twenty-five book series documenting Kinsey's adventures is quite substantial. For me, S, No. 19, is a standout.
It's a character study with Kinsey's 1987 case harkening back, via alternating chapters, to the 1953 disappearance of a woman named Violet Sullivan. Flashbacks paint a picture of the fifties world and a snapshot of Violet's rebellious nature with a new car a pivotal element. It's a little different and definitely a great glimpse of Kinsey at work.
Again, those are just a few, but they, for me, are great excursions into the hardboiled world.
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