Davis on Chandler

[kelber at mindspring.com]

This is kind of an interesting take on Marlowe that I hadn't seen before.  Noir detectives are poised halfway between the cops and the underworld, owing allegiance to neither, but having the sensibilities of both.  With cop-like sensibilities, it's easy to see how a noir-detective could be pushed into the spewing racist-xenophobic mode.  Rorschach, in Watchmen, is a prime example.

Its the essence of the noir hero that he seeks redemption for something in his past.  In the promo video for IV, Doc refers to setting up drug busts for the cops, etc.  For someone like Doc, this would be a heavy load to carry.  I didn't get a sense in the book about how complicit he'd been with the cops in the past.  Can anyone enlighten me?  

Laura
-----Original Message-----
>From: Heikki Raudaskoski <hraudask at sun3.oulu.fi>

>
>
>"Marlowe, the avenging burgher, totters precariously on the
>precipice of fascist paranoia. Each successive Chandler novel
>focuses on a new target of Marlowe's dislike: Blacks, Asians,
>gays, 'greasers', and, always, women. In this regard it is
>useful to recall the genealogy of the hardboiled detective hero:
>the special 1923 issue of The Black Mask on the Ku Klux Klan
>that introduced Carroll John Daly's nativist detective 'Race
>Williams' as the prototype of tough guy crusaders against
>(foreign-born) corruption." Mike Davis, _City of Quartz_.
>Pimlico 1998. P. 91 n42.
>
>
>Nothing as refreshing as a swig of good old self-righteous type
>leftist [or elsewhere, rightist] sensitivity every now and then.
>
>
>Heikki