Some other other opinions on mystery, detective novels

[Mark Kohut]

Some high generalizing literary historians suggest that the mystery story 
as a genre did not happen until the mid-19th Century---Poe, others--- because none could really have been written until the world turned 'problematic'....until social cohesion was shot to hell......

When the world became a puzzle to be solved, then a P.I. became a metaphysician, so to speak. 

As mentioned, detective novels, California noir, were a low culture creation....real 'pulp fiction'....written, as Alice Wellinton always sez, for the working class first. 

The California P.I. is on the side of the little guy against the rich and powerful...no wonder Pynchon pays homage.

The Black Mask tough guy noir always had his own code of behaviour. Because society's values were corrrupt. He was, as Chandler alluded to so cutely in his first novel, The Big Sleep, --in a tapestry Marlowe comments on---a knight errant (usually) rescuing ladies in trouble. 

As 'literature', the best novels work because of the the critique of society and character(s) in the writing, through the writing....That's why that rascist moron with the earliest tough guy stories failed to last. 

Even Edmund Wilson, who famously condemned the whole genre, later wrote Chandler had some worth....His rep has simply gone higher, by the 'critical establishment' during the lifetime
of we plisters.....[John Bailey, English scholar/critic, NYRofB regular, widower of Iris Murdoch, wrote, often quoting Iris, the introduction to
the Everyman collection of all of Chandler's stories.]

A---and, perusing this bibliography of noir I have from the library, there is increasing work picking up on the argument that writers like Hammett, Chandler and MacDonald have "created' the image of California most readers who do not live there have...[just sayin']

P.S. Seems there is a major article finding Hammett's influence all over V.
FYI.