Miscellaneous Monday—Number Thirty-five

"DETECTIVE STORIES," writes one of our authors, "are morality plays dealing with the conflicts between good and evil, cruelty and compassion, justice and injustice." The nearer the law is to administering true justice, of course, the better; but we all know of instances when the law has failed to achieve it in reality. Fiction writers like Raymond Chandler and Clarence E. Mulford ("Clarence who?", you may be wondering) made the most of the altogether too frequent disjunction between law and justice by creating knights-errant who basically would close the gap on their own, despite their own misgivings and often without the approval of the authorities. "Vigilantes!" some would say, and admittedly it's frequently hard to tell the difference between these self-appointed executors of justice and lawless vigilantes.
   Before we get to Chandler and Mulford, however, we deal with Dorothy L. Sayers who, Stephen Hahn tells us, had an "apparent desire to create convincingly probable represen-tations of the social and physical world, by describing these environments in great detail, [which desire] did not obscure for Sayers the importance of the fact that these worlds are fictive." As for plotting, Sayers wrote: "You don't 'get' the Plot—you make that." Above all, says Hahn, Dorothy Sayers, a rationalist in most things including religion, possessed "the imaginative range of a writer who . . . has the power to convince us that we see and feel what we have only read."
   "It was a time of disillusionment, and the public wanted heroes," writes Mary Wertheim. "For readers of detective fiction, Philip Marlowe helped fill the void." As for Raymond Chandler's commitment to the mystery genre, Wertheim asserts that "Chandler's work is 
too complex to fit neatly into the genre of hard-boiled detective fiction. He gave his readers something extra because he believed that the detective story was not intrinsically inferior to other literary forms." Marlowe appeals to the crime fiction public nearly eighty years after his debut because he "still pursues what the reader recognizes as the best quality of justice the client can expect in a universe of murky distinctions."
  John le Carré's characters also seem to inhabit "a universe of murky distinctions," one that gets progressively murkier from one book to the next. There is, writes William Walling, a "disturbing pervasiveness of deception in the typical le Carré plot," and "a bleak sophistica-tion about betrayal." Moreover, starting with his first book and threading its way throughout le Carré's mystery and spy fiction is the depiction of a deplorable division "in the English social system between genuine 'quality' (including, to be sure, moral distinction) and the unearned assumptions of class superiority," one "which animates most of the subsequent novels, with varying degrees of subtlety." [Note: Beware of plot SPOILERS.]
   It's a classic (but purely imaginary) image formulated in fiction over a century ago and echoed by movies and TV: the cowboy who is forced by circumstance—either because there is no local law enforcement, or what purports to be the law is corrupt, or both—to take things into his own hands to see that justice is done. According to Francis M. Nevins, it took the imaginings of "a low-ranking municipal paper-pusher with bifocals" to fix in the reading public's mind the picture of "the open range, among the great cattle herds, in the flimsy shantytowns, roaming across a vast imagined West whose geographic center was a Texas ranch called the Bar-20 and whose human center was a red-thatched, gimp-legged, liquor-swilling, tobacco-spitting young puncher called Hopalong Cassidy," a far cry from the Hoppy you might know from TV and films. The paper-pusher here was Clarence Edward Mulford, civil service clerk, "a competent if undistinguished writer" whose plots "sprawl every which way over the terrain," whose "skills at drawing character and relationship were weak," whose nerve-grating "notions of cowboy and ethnic dialect" quickly wear thin, but whose "grasp of detail and breadth of vision" made him "one of the most remarkable Western writers ever." [Note: Plot SPOILERS for Hopalong Cassidy.]

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"'Where Do Plots Come From?': Dorothy L. Sayers on Literary Invention."
By Stephen Hahn.

First appearance: Columbia Library Columns, February 1988.

Essay (11 pages).

Online at Archive.org (HERE).
   Related: Wikipedia (HERE and HERE).

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"Philip Marlowe, Knight in Blue Serge."
By Mary Wertheim.
First appearance: Columbia Library Columns, February 1988.
Essay (10 pages).

Online at Archive.org (HERE).
   Related: Wikipedia (HERE and HERE).

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"John le Carré: The Doubleness of Class."
By William Walling.
First appearance: Columbia Library Columns, February 1988.
Essay (10 pages).

Online at Archive.org (HERE).
   Related: Wikipedia (HERE).

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"Hopalong Cassidy: Knight of the Frontier."

By Francis M. Nevins, Jr. (born 1943; RambleHouse mini-bio 

HERE and Goodreads entry HERE).

First appearance: Columbia Library Columns, February 1987.
Essay (12 pages).

Online at Archive.org (HERE).
   Related: Wikipedia (HERE and HERE).
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