Chandler & James Ellroy & Hammett 5-2010

 Reading The Little Sister and The Long Goodbye, I thought of James Ellroy. I admit all I know of Ellroy comes from reading The Black Dahlia and Brown's Requiem and seeing L.A. Confidential. Still, Los Angeles corruption springs back and forth between an aging romantic and a relatively young realist.

And both got me thinking of Hammett, who was alive but not writing in the Forties. What would have made of the corruption? Or does therein lie the answer to Hammett's writer's block? Hammett's detectives know corruption, often they skim close to the edge and maybe even over it, the sort that later appears in Chandler and Ellroy, but the Los Angeles of the latter two is deeper and wider in its corruption. Reality escalated beyond the reach of fiction. Did Hammett become like the Op's boos - too swallowed up with cynicism and pessimism to cope with post-WWII America?

People forget that Chandler started working on the Marlowe stories in the early Thirties. About the same time, Hammett was putting out The Thin Man. I cannot imagine Spade or The Op or Ned Beaumont or the Charleses operating in 1948. I think Erle Stanley Gardner kept turning out Perry Mason stories after WWII, but I never read enough of them to know how he handled the era. 

I think one can read Chandler and understand the causes of the Rodney King riots. I think you can read him and Hammett and find a continuity of American problems going back to the Twenties that surfaced again in the Sixties and remain with us today.

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