Raymond Chandler's Spatial Interrogations: Relocating the Detective-Frontiersman

This article examines Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler's archetypal private eye, within the context of contemporary historical discourses which theorised the figure of the ‘frontiersman’. It builds upon established scholarship that connects the frontiersman and detective as archetypes of white masculine American heroism, but argues that such criticism is insufficiently engaged with the frontier's spatial characteristics and their implications for the detective. Seeking to redress this, I claim that the detective's conceptual inheritance of the frontiersman's mantle is manifest most clearly in a shared approach to the navigation and ‘conquest’ of space. In closing, I offer the office as an exemplary space of post-frontier modernity.