Another thought on authorial musings on detectives

This is, of course, the last paragraphs of Chandler's essay, "The Simple Art of Murder." I had hoped that getting stuff down here about detectives and detecting in the last post would free me of them. Unfortunately, that hasn't happened yet. A thought struck me so strongly that I had to return and deal with Chandler's essay one more time.

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"In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor--by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I'm quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things.

He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man's money dishonestly and no man's insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks--that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.

The story is this man's adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in. If there were enough like him the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in."

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Chandler is fairly specific about the detective who walks down the mean streets of LA. or Chicago or New York or Boston or Philadelphia: he is an honorable man, a proud man, a poor man, a common man, a decent man, an honest man who speaks the truth.

Actually this man sounded more familiar the more I thought about it. I believe I've encountered him somewhere else. Along with those paved urban streets, could he also have walked down the dusty unpaved streets of a small town out west?

Gary Cooper's Marshall Will Kane in High Noon for example.

Alan Ladd as Shane?

Richard Boone as Paladin in Have Gun--Will Travel.

or John Wayne

or Jimmy Stewart

or Clint Eastwood

or James Arness as Marshall Matt Dillon in that quintessential TV Western--Gunsmoke.


What do you think? Is Chandler's description limited to the detective or is he somehow a basic element of American mythology--the loner who comes in when legitimate authority is unable to handle the situation, deals with it in his own simple, straightforward way, and then rides off and is never seen again, until he is needed to set things straight once more.

Any comments?