THE PRIVATE EYE IS NOT DEAD!
Some people have suggested that modern technology has made the traditional private eye – the dogged hero of so many wonderful novels and films – largely irrelevant. In this era of smart phones, the Internet, GPS and drones, how hard is it to nail your cheating spouse? Your next-door neighbor’s kid could probably get the goods for you.
OK.
You may not want the little snot to know your personal business, so you might
hire a private detective (or, more likely, an “investigative service” with
dozens of ex-cop operatives working on their fifth and sixth pensions). What
used to take 50 pages in a thriller now takes a few strokes on a keyboard. Case
closed. Here’s your bill. It’s unlikely that the electronic “detective” will
uncover the obligatory murder or other mayhem that would fill out the other 150
pages. It’s hard to stumble over a dead body when looking at a computer
screen.
Moreover,
if there are any crimes, the super-sleuth police detectives working at the
city, state and Federal level will solve them before an old-style private
dick’s morning hangover eases. The airwaves are replete with crime dramas where
cops locate criminals using portable fingerprint scanners, embedded GPS chips in
cell phones and surveillance cameras. Then there is the ubiquitous “facial
recognition” technology, where analysts identify suspects by the shape of an
ear or nose.
Does
all this really mean that today one can’t write a private-eye novel?
Au
contraire. People read private eye novels not to see how a crime is solved, but
for other reasons. They want to see injustice punished. And they also like to
see a lone wolf stick his or her finger in the eye of the establishment, while
still maintaining a basic decency.
Miles
Archer is the private eye who gets himself shot at the beginning of Dashiell
Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. His partner, Sam Spade, doesn’t even like
him. In fact, he had an affair with Archer’s wife. (That tells you something
about Archer’s competence as a private investigator, even before he lets
himself be lured into an alley to be plugged.) But Spade is determined to
avenge Archer’s murder.
“When
a man's partner is killed,” Spade says, “he's supposed to do something about it.
It doesn't make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and
you're supposed to do something about it.” And who doesn’t want to be like Raymond
Chandler’s hero, Philip Marlowe, who in The
Big Sleep is insulted by a spoiled rich girl who says he is not very tall.
To which he replies, “Well, I try to be.”
There
is still a need, in fiction and in life, for men and women who, as Chandler
writes, must go “down these mean streets” without being “tarnished nor afraid”
and who will “take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a
due and dispassionate revenge”.
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