Abstract
Hard-nosed female investigators Sara Lund and Saga Norén from the extraordinarily successful Scandinavian TV crime series The Killing and The Bridge are the latest examples of female hard-boiled detectives - dysfunctional loners who solve crimes where no one else succeeds. This article looks at the character construct of the hard-boiled male detective, maps these tropes against social expectations of gender norms and then considers how Sara Paretsky constructs an explicitly feminist “tough guy” private eye in V.I. Warshawski. It then analyses how Paretsky’s negotiation and partial subversion of the tropes of the hard-boiled genre are handled in translation, drawing on the German translation of Indemnity Only.
ON DECEMBER 2, 1993, David Nyhan of the Boston Globe published an article entitled “The Thought Police Strike Again.” In a parody of novelist Raymond Chandler's immortal Los Angeles detective, Philip Marlowe, Nyhan wrote:“I was in my office, on the fringe of the ghetto, feeling gypped because a check had bounced, watching the crazy divorcée in the next office, a real babe who used to be a nifty co-ed before she married her hillbilly. He was a piece of white trash whose holy roller ancestors fought the Indians.
Hard-boiled writer Raymond Chandler created his detective Philip Marlowe not as the idealisation of heroic individualism as is commonly perceived, but as an authentic individual subjected to real psychological frailties resulting from his traumatic experiences during World War One. Marlowe’s characterisation goes beyond the traditional chivalric readings and can instead be interpreted as an authentic representation of a traumatised veteran in American society. Substituting the horror of the trenches for the corruption of the city, Chandler’s disillusioned protagonist and his representation of an uncaring American society resonate strongly with the dislocation of the Lost Generation. Consequently, it is profitable to consider Chandler as both a generic writer and a genuine literary figure. This book re-examines important primary documents highlighting extensive discrepancies in existing biographical narratives of Chandler’s war experience, and unveils an account that is significantly different from that of his biographers. Utilizing psychological behavioural interpretation to interrogate Chandler’s novels demonstrates the variety of post-traumatic symptoms that tormented Chandler and his protagonist. A close reading of his personal papers reveals the war trauma subconsciously encoded in Marlowe’s characterisation. This conflation of the hard-boiled style and war experience – a war noir – has influenced many contemporary crime writers, particularly in the traumatic aftermath of the Vietnam War. This work offers a new understanding of Chandler’s traumatic war experience, how that experience established the traditional archetype of detective fiction, and how this reading of his work allows Chandler to transcend generic limitations to be recognised as a key twentieth century literary figure.
Chapter five reconsiders Chandler’s own war experience to show that Marlowe, like his creator, displayed symptoms of combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Examining the novels for these manifestations, Marlowe’s symptoms appear to fall into the three separate symptom-related categorizations of PTSD. This chapter will also demonstrate how the game of chess becomes a metaphor for the city of Los Angeles that enables the troubled detective to locate himself within a structured and orderly environment. Marlowe reassess and reviews his own case-related actions and dealings by evaluating his movements on the chessboard.
“Philip Marlowe in drag?” – The construct of the hard-boiled detective in feminist appropriation and translation
