What influenced Modernism: Detective Fiction Post-War

Dashiell Hammett's being an American and a Pinkerton detective weren't the only reasons he became a successful author with a style so distinct from Doyle's. A lot can happen over a span of 40 years; namely, the first world war, and the stock market crash.

When Doyle wrote A Study in Scarlet, such social threats were far away. The bigger threats were more protecting Britain from outside influences and maintaining an empire. A Study in Scarlet was, after all, about villains from the western United States coming to London where they would face justice. This is not an uncommon trait in Holmes stories: threats come from afar, either foreign individuals or Britains corrupted by what is foreign. For Doyle and Imperial Britain, life was great because it had remained steady for decades and centuries. What need was there for concern? It's little wonder that Holmes complained of Watson romanticizing their adventures.

And then came World War I. The Great War brought conflict and devastation to Europe, and left an artistic reevaluation in its wake. Pretty much every aspect of the arts underwent some kind of change, and while each one was certainly different, the common trend was experimentation. It was as if there had been a constant undercurrent that the arts were good and beneficial, and they made people and the world better. And yet, if so, how could the world come to such strife? Suddenly, the optimism and social progression that fueled authors like Doyle and Dickens were gone. Even Jane Austen (a century earlier) wrote during a time of war, but it was distant, especially to the gentry Austen wrote about. It's almost easy to read Persuasion and forget why Frederick Wentworth had money when he didn't years before, and Pride and Prejudice features soldiers but only uses the word “War” once to describe the War Office, and not the Napoleonic Wars.

World War I made the world a much smaller, harsher place.

In literature, the post-war period was dominated by “modernism,” a period of experimentation and more interest on the psychologies of individuals as they dealt with the world around them: literature turned inward, on who someone is and why they think as they do. Even though modernism's roots predate the war, this conflict shaped the lives and minds of those who lived through and fought in it, culminating in the “lost generation”: a post war generation trying to come to terms with the war, and whatever reprieve was made by the Roaring Twenties was on its way out with the Stock Market crash of 1929. The Maltese Falcon was published around that time, with, I wonder, some of the same cynicism that undercuts The Great Gatsby: an understanding that the current lifestyle of wealth and extravagance was, like Gatsby, problematic and doomed.

In a world that had come back from a serious war and on the precipice of financial ruin, artists were trying to make sense of it, to figure out how they should act, respond, and understand the world. From this time, we gained such great authors as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce, who showed the Imperial stability Doyle enjoyed was gone, and modernism tried to reconcile an unstable world.

Where then does Dashiell Hammett and the authors of hard boiled detective fiction fit into this?

As far as I can tell, Hammett's never been classified as a modernist writer or a representative of the lost generation. He wrote pulp fiction: not the experimental works of Joyce or the human analyses of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, and much of Hammett’s oeuvre came after many major modernist works were published. I'm not trying to reclaim him or elevate him to their levels, but that doesn't mean his work and the crime fiction authors who would populate the pulp fiction shelves didn't come out of this same era of international conflict and personal strife. Just like the modernists, these authors give us other ways to look at the responses to the world that had to deal with a mass-scale human conflict, the stock market crash, and social issues that couldn’t be ignored.

Socially Distinct: The Underlying influence of Noblesse Oblige

In my last post, introducing Sam Spade, Dashiell Hammett and the evolution of the hard boiled detective, I compared the professions of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Dashiell Hammett and how these professions influenced the development of their fictional detectives.

In this post, I want to discuss the cultural climate that surrounded these two writers.

Yeah. Get ready for some serious oversimplification. These are the kinds of things people write books about, and I have 600 words. To help, I’m using a rather simple concept at the center of these distinctions: noblesse oblige.

Noblesse oblige literally means “nobility obliges” and is the concept that the nobility and aristocratic classes have, by virtue of their position and (inherited) wealth, an obligation to help the lower classes. This was generally put into practice by hiring servants and farmers, while the nobility was able to live off of interest, inheritances, and revenue so they could live a life of leisure. The result was a rigid social hierarchy without much social mobility: you died in the station you were born into.

It's kind of like Feudalism with fewer serfs and more servants.

I want to use this concept because it's a principle that gives us a glimpse at broad social and cultural structures. It's an interesting way to look at some of the main differences that crop up in Doyle and Hammett's world building because both lived in societies governed primarily by money: who had, who didn’t, who earned it, who wanted it and what they’d do to get it.

First, Doyle. At the end of the Victorian Era and the beginning of the modern era, when Holmes was gunning the letters VR (Victoria Regina, or Queen Victoria) into the wall of his Baker Street room, there was a rising middle class, but still an aristocratic hierarchy. Doyle, a conservative physician, wasn't interested in strong critiques of this hierarchy: he was interested in maintaining it. In short, noblesse oblige, while not addressed outright in Holmes stories, has left its mark on Doyle and his writing, evidenced in Doyle's tendency to maintain the status quo: people who inherited money and position on top, tradesmen and businessmen in the middle, and unskilled laborers on the bottom, and the less “English” someone was, the lower they sat. As a result, the people Holmes encounters tend to be satisfied with their position and finances. There may be some interest in earning a bit more here and there, but many of the villains Holmes encounters, like Milverton, have or are trying to earn enough money so they could change their social standing. In short, a Holmes villain is usually one who wants more: more money, more prestige, more power.

Then there's Hammett, coming from an American tradition devoid of the noblesse oblige. Hammett’s America was a culture where people earned their money. Industrialists like John D. Rockefeller, William Randolph Hearst, and Andrew Carnegie loomed large, men who came from very little, and became extremely powerful and wealthy. I'm not saying Hammett aspired to their levels of success (Hammett actually quit the Pinkertons because he disagreed with their strikebreaking practices), but he came from a culture where money was earned, not inherited, and where there was not a sense of superiority based on inherited titles and wealth. The result is Hammett and those that would follow him, (Raymond Chandler in particular) would be more critical of social establishments, the wealthy, and inheritances, with greed becoming a more universal vice and more characters who lie, complicating the detective's task.

The result is Hammett gave himself much more leeway, many more shades of gray to explore than Doyle explored. Characters become much more mobile socially, ethically, and even geographically, while station, lineage, and money, either don't mean anything, or do more harm than good. It's harder to pin anything down or identify where it belongs. It's easier to lie and just as easy to doubt. Holmes usually only had to doubt the honesty of the villains. Spade has to doubt everyone's honesty.

In short, Doyle adhered to the concept of noblesse oblige. Noblesse oblige and a rigid social hierarchy kept people in place, and people were satisfied with their social situation because there was little social mobility. Hammett and his hard boiled compatriots dealt with a world without that rigidity, and if honesty and hard work didn't get you a better position, some lies and crime might: people got where they are not through noble virtue and blood, but through questionable and illegal practices.

If you want to see justice meted out and feel like the world is a safe, stable place, read Holmes stories. If you want a world that's more cynical, mistrusting, but arguably more realistic, read a good hard boiled detective novel.

Write what you know: The Physician and the Detective

A common adage among writers is "write what you know"; doing so lends credibility to your work because you're able to write authentically. This is not to say it's impossible for writers to make up stuff or write about professions or lives beyond their own, but a story written by someone who personally knows and understands the subject matter is much more likely to be believed. I write about composition and literature because it's what I study and teach. If I were to try blogging about, say chemistry, I'd need to do loads of research and even then what I'd write would be inferior.

This brings us to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, physician. Doyle had a humble medical practice before becoming an author, with his fiction, Sherlock Holmes in particular, becoming so successful he began writing full time. Extrapolating from his medical training, it's safe to assume Doyle understood the value of symptoms. A doctor's job is to heal the sick, but they first have to identify the condition, with their symptoms: in the same way a physician would look at the type of rash or hear the tenor of a cough, Sherlock Holmes reads people: external signs indicate deeper meaning only to those with the right understanding. In this regard, medical treatment and detective work are both professions that deal with external ailments where the sufferer lacks the skills and knowledge to properly diagnose and treat the symptoms.

This symptomatological approach to detective work is not exclusive to Holmes: the detective's job is, after all, to detect, but where Doyle drew on his medical training to create a detective, Dashiell Hammett drew on his experience as a detective to create a detective. Dashiell Hammett worked for a time as a Pinkerton detective. 

This contrast shows itself in these authors’ approaches to their genres and their characters. Doyle created a romanticized, idealized detective, and not just in literature: within Holmes stories themselves, Holmes is the best of the best, solving cases others are unable to solve, and far more interested in the mystery than any financial gain. Hammett's detectives, Sam Spade, Nick Charles, and the Continental Op, were run of the mill detectives. Sure, they had impressive success rates, but, within the story world, they're just regular, albeit talented, detectives doing a gritty, unpopular, shady job, trying to keep their work private. To ironically quote Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock Holmes, “I'm a private detective; the last thing I need is a public image” (Sherlock “A Scandal in Belgravia”, 2012).

This variation in style leads to variations in how the authors morally approach issues. Holmes worked to maintain social normativity: to return everything to a pre-crisis equilibrium. This leads to a morally black and white, romanticized story world: there are bad people doing bad things, so Holmes is brought in not just to rectify the wrongs in the case, but to set right social situations.

The worlds of Hammett's fiction are not that stark, and people are not simply good or bad: some are better than others and some are worse, but there are many more shades of gray, many of them rather dark, particularly on the part of the detectives themselves. Sam Spade is as stoic as he is devious: his motivations aren't clear until they absolutely have to be revealed, so it isn't clear whose benefit he's looking out for: his own, the common good, or the client’s. This ambiguity is only accented by the range of fraudulent, devious characters Spade has to deal with.

In short, the original professions of these authors shows itself in their writing, resulting in very different detectives. The physician, a man whose goal was to heal the sick gave us the nigh unstoppable detective who healed social wounds. The real-life detective, a man whose job was to snoop and sneak, to investigate where he might not be wanted in places others might not want to go, introduced us to a more cynical detective.

And what’s a cynical detective without a cynical world? Dashiell Hammett gave Spade a much more nuanced, but also much bleaker, darker, world to have to deal with than Doyle gave Holmes; story worlds born not only of the detectives’ or authors’ world views, but of the cultural climates both authors inhabited.

More of that in the next post.