Hardboiled detective
The Hardboiled Detective (also: hard-boiled , Engl. For "hard-nosed investigator") is an archetypal figure in the Anglo-American crime novel .
properties
The hardboiled detective is only committed to his own ideas of law. “My ethics are my own”, says Race Williams, for example, the forefather of all hardened private detectives created by Carroll John Daly in The Snarl of the Beast (1927). This type of figure has an illusion-free to cynical view of the world. He himself stands on the verge of legality , tends to vigilante justice and takes little consideration of applicable laws. If necessary, he also makes use of a firearm and lives in a latent or open conflict with the police - the latter often also because he used to be a police officer or a judicial employee himself and has quit the service. For example, Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe was a former assistant to the district attorney who accused him of insubordination , as Marlowe notes in The Big Sleep (1939), not without professional pride.
The behavior of the hardboiled detective corresponds to an ideal of masculinity oriented towards strength and hardness. He is usually a chain smoker and appreciates hard liquor. His relationship with the opposite sex is complex or ambivalent. He is interested in female acquaintances and sexual adventures, but mostly shows a misogynistic attitude. As far as the classic broken fictional characters of the 1930s to 1950s are concerned, a more nuanced picture has recently been drawn of these archetypal character traits.
As an investigator, he acts in a social environment that is characterized by violence and corruption at all levels - including the state and police authorities . Against this background, he reacts with verbal and physical violence, on the one hand to obtain information through intimidation, on the other hand to assert himself in the dangerous and often life-threatening situations that he repeatedly gets into in the course of his investigative work. Individual hardboiled detectives such as Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer show not only the high level of violence typical of the character, but also a real pleasure in raw violence.
history
The womenless, lonely and violent heroes of James Fenimore Cooper , Herman Melville and Jack London are considered to be literary forerunners of this type . In the detective novel, these loners are transplanted from the wilderness into the city as hardboiled detective in the 20th century . This type experiences a literarily remarkable first expression in the characters of Philip Marlowe (by Raymond Chandler) and Sam Spade (by Dashiell Hammett ), both of whom were to migrate from literature to the cinema of film noir .
The type proved to be exportable and adaptable in the period that followed. The American Sara Paretsky created the figure of the private detective VI Warshawski in 1982, who can be characterized as an emancipated hardboiled detective . Another contemporary figure is the private investigator Burke, an ex-criminal who hunts down pedophile sex offenders and who was a hero in the novels of New Yorker Andrew Vachss from 1985 to 2008 . In France , the Parisian author Léo Malet is likely to have created the first hardboiled detective with Nestor Burma ; in Denmark, Dan Turèll with his nameless journalist, whom he had appeared in twelve novels since Mord i mørket (1981) and acted like a Chandler character. The German-Turkish investigator Kemal Kayankaya by the author Jakob Arjouni is such a figure in German-language crime fiction ; he, too, came with Doris Dörrie's film Happy Birthday, Turk! to the movies.
literature
- Gabriele Dietze : Hardboiled Woman. Gender warfare in American detective novel. Europäische Verlags-Anstalt, Hamburg 1997, ISBN 3-434-50411-7 (also dissertation, Berlin, Free University, 1996: Genre and Gender ).
- Nina Schindler (Ed.): The murder book. Everything about crime novels. Claassen, Hildesheim 1997, ISBN 3-546-00122-2 .
- Martin Compart (Ed.): Noir 2000. A reader (= DuMont Noir. 22). DuMont, Cologne 2000, ISBN 3-7701-5018-X .
- Jerold G. Abrams: From Sherlock Holmes to the Hard-Boiled Detective in Film Noir. In: Mark T. Conard (Ed.): The Philosophy of Film Noir. The University Press of Kentucky, Lexington KY 2006, pp. 69-88, ISBN 0-8131-2377-1 .
- Armin Jaemmrich: Hard-boiled stories and films noirs: Amoral, cynical, pessimistic? An analysis of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Cornell Woolrich, WR Burnett and other authors, as well as relevant films noirs. A. Jaemmrich, Frankfurt am Main 2012, ISBN 978-3-00-039216-0 .
- Hannah Scharf: Wolf Haas and the detective novel. Conversation between traditional genre structures and innovation. Diplomica Verlag, Hamburg 2014, ISBN 978-3-8428-7129-8 .