Justice and Revenge in Contemporary American Crime Fiction

Stuart Sim

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137469663
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The detective figure in contemporary American crime fiction increasingly relies on revenge to bring about justice in a society where there has been a sharp decline in moral values. This study demonstrates how the notion of the detective as a moral exemplar or heroic ideal breaks down in the works of writers such as James Ellroy and Sara Paretsky.

1

Introduction: The Anti-Detective Figure & the ‘New America’

Abstract: The authors to be studied, and their particular series, are introduced as follows: James Ellroy (The LA Quartet), James Lee Burke (‘Dave Robicheaux’ novels), Walter Mosley (‘Easy Rawlins’ novels), Sara Paretsky (‘V. I. Warshawski’ novels), George Pelecanos (‘The Nick Stefanos Trilogy’). The works are argued to fall within the ‘anti-detective’ category, and to demonstrate evidence of moral decline in contemporary American life that bears out the contentions behind George Packer’s sociological study The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America. Revenge becomes the primary method of achieving justice in this ‘New America’. The study ranges over four cities: Los Angeles, New Orleans, Chicago, and Washington, DC.

Keywords: Anti-detective; George Pelecanos; James Ellroy; James Lee Burke; Sara Paretsky; Walter Mosley

Sim, Stuart. Justice and Revenge in Contemporary American Crime Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137469663.0003.

Compared to life in Western Europe, America can appear a very violent, crime-ridden, and politically corrupt society, especially in terms of life in its major cities. There is a widespread perception in that society of a sharp decline in moral values in recent decades (which comes to a head every time there is a mass shooting, with anguished public debates breaking out about the nation’s gun-control laws). It is a trend that increasingly is drawing the attention of cultural commentators, most notably of late George Packer in his well-received study The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America.¹ Packer’s contention is that there has been an ‘unwinding’ of the establishment structures of America in the later twentieth century that has severely destabilised civil society, leaving something of a moral vacuum in its wake. It is that ‘New America’, and the impact it is having on crime fiction, that I will be exploring in this book.

Crime fiction is arguably the most popular literary genre in the world today, and it takes much of its inspiration from the format of classic American crime fiction of the 1930s to 1950s, with Raymond Chandler’s works becoming particularly influential among practitioners. Chandler’s private investigator (PI) Philip Marlowe is almost a template for the detective figure in subsequent crime fiction, casting a long shadow over the genre, with authors often feeling the need to position their own detectives with regard to his character and actions. Marlowe operates according to his own strict moral code, where loyalty is a major virtue, and he remains a heroic figure no matter how corrupt the society around him may turn out to be (and it generally does). Although he is no saint – his relations with, and attitude towards, women, for example, leave something to be desired in this more feminism-conscious age – Marlowe is broadly speaking on the side of good, and always concerned to protect the weak and vulnerable: as he explains to an acquaintance in The Long Good-Bye, ‘I’m a romantic, Bernie, I hear voices crying in the night and I go see what’s the matter’.² Closure of some kind is always achieved at the end of the Marlowe novels, and crime fiction can be said to provide a window into the moral attitudes and concerns of its time.

The notion of the detective as something of a moral exemplar begins to break down in the later twentieth century, however, as crime fiction takes on a progressively darker tone, picturing a culture in which moral values are in decline in both public and private life – a society apparently sliding into a condition of moral crisis. Neither the justice system nor the legal system are commanding much respect any more, and there is a sense of a growing, and all but irresistible, corruption in the political and business realms. Although this has always been part of the landscape of American crime fiction, it is pushed much further by the authors to be studied here, with increasingly violent measures being adopted to counter it by their detective figures. James Ellroy, for example, can see no other resolution to the moral dilemmas that are arising than individuals taking the law into their own hands and acting in a vigilante fashion. Detectives find themselves compelled to commit criminal acts in order to punish criminals, since the justice system can no longer reliably guarantee that this outcome will occur. This is what Ellroy calls ‘absolute justice’ and it merely perpetuates moral decline, suggesting a society which is rapidly running out of control, where individuals have to make up their moral code pragmatically as they go along – often with disastrous consequences. Crime fiction novels are morality tales, but of late what those tales are saying is becoming more and more disturbing. As Woody Haut points out, it is a genre which has definitely been drifting towards ‘extremism’ of late.³

Concentrating on five authors – James Ellroy, James Lee Burke, Walter Mosley, Sara Paretsky, and George Pelecanos – the moral crisis in recent American life will be charted from the perspective of both the police detective and the PI. By placing the detectives in their most popular series in compromising positions that work against any notion of the detective as heroic ideal, these authors provide telling illustrations of this deterioration in public and private morality. Such fiction has been called ‘anti-detective’, and it undermines the conventions of the classic crime fiction genre where good generally triumphs over evil.⁴ Instead, a particularly harsh, and morally very dubious, form of absolute justice comes to rule instead, which raises the ‘hard-boiled’ genre to a new level with its take on what Andrew Pepper has referred to as the ‘hard-edged, uncompromising vision of a racially divisive urban America in terminal, unremitting decline which increasingly characterise the genre’.⁵ Ellroy, Burke, Mosley, and Pelecanos give us deeply flawed main characters, badly damaged by the ruthless culture in which they live; anti-heroic figures who set poor moral examples for others, and whose actions have little apparent impact on the public good. Closure remains a seemingly unachievable ideal in fiction like this, and the moral relativism that motivates the main characters lends the narratives a distinctly postmodern air. Again, this is not something that is new to American crime fiction (it’s there as early as Dashiel Hammett, generally considered to be the originator of the ‘hard-boiled’ style), but it is emphasised far more by these particular authors than their predecessors. The ‘New America’ that forms the background magnifies some of the most problematical traits of the old one: the suspicion of the state and government in general, the cult of individualism, the worship of money and economic power (America’s ‘default force’ in Packer’s view⁶).

Another characteristic often associated with postmodern fiction is the use of conspiracy as a plot device.⁷ This is certainly an important factor in the work of Ellroy: the LA Quartet is structured around a series of conspiracies working within the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) over a period of years. It is also in Paretsky, whose detective is perpetually struggling against various conspiracies being operated by the corporate world to hide their morally questionable, and sometimes even outright dangerous, working practices from the general public. If more traditional in form than the male authors I’ll be looking at, less anti-detective in orientation and more obviously in dialogue with Chandler (whom she references on several occasions), the overtly feminist cast to her crime fiction succeeds in undermining the heavily masculinist character of the classic genre with all its attendant ideological assumptions. Achieving closure against patriarchy, with its historically entrenched levels of power and privilege, is no less problematical a task in the ‘new America’ than that faced by her male contemporaries.

The focus will be on our subjects’ main series, in which the moral tensions and compromises of their culture are presented in particularly stark form. The manner in which each goes against the grain of the genre’s conventions, and the moral code that underpins these, will form a central concern; as will the issue of whether ‘absolute justice’ can ever be considered a legitimate tactic to adopt, or whether it merely makes a bad situation worse, thereby communicating a sense of hopelessness about the state of the world. Justice is reduced to a string of individual gestures. Each chapter will also investigate how character is built up and how we are drawn into the detective’s despairing and increasingly cynical worldview, so encouraging us to follow their subsequent adventures in what are, in some cases, still unfolding series. The series chosen represent four American cities – Los Angeles, New Orleans, Chicago, and Washington DC – to offer a cross-section of the American urban experience, in a genre where the city has a critical role to play in establishing an atmosphere of moral ambiguity.⁸ Close examination of contemporary American crime fiction suggests that the nation’s official ideological metanarrative of equality and opportunity for all in a culture geared towards material success, popularly referred to as ‘the American Dream’, is for many of the population little better than a fantasy.

Common features can be identified that justify studying these authors as a group distinct from their peers. These are features such as a pronounced turn to revenge and vigilante activity on the part of their protagonists, and a problematization of the conventions of classic American crime fiction as exemplified by writers such as Chandler. We find ourselves in a culture mired in moral crisis, where institutional authority is no longer felt to be trustworthy and there is a widespread perception that the system in general is failing badly. The postmodern theorist Jean-François Lyotard saw ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ as a positive development in recent history that should be promoted for the public good.⁹ What our subjects reveal instead is that it has left a moral vacuum in American society; hence the necessity to move outside the law if criminals are to be brought to justice. (A point worth making is that although Ellroy and Mosley set their series in 1940s–1960s’ America, as authors writing these in the later twentieth century they tell us more about the issues and attitudes of their own time than they do about the earlier period: hence Charles J. Rzepka’s claim that The LA Quartet reveals ‘the cultural neuroses and conspiratorial paranoia of the American 1980s and 1990s’.¹⁰ There is thus no contradiction in studying them alongside Burke, Paretsky, and Pelecanos, with their series’ more contemporary settings.)

As well as Lyotard’s ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’, allusion will also be made to his appropriation of the concept of the ‘sublime’, to signify the limits of human power and the unknowable and uncontrollable forces that lie beyond there.¹¹ His concept of the ‘event’, too, is very applicable to crime fiction, the event constituting an unpredictable occurrence that proceeds to change the lives of those who go through the experience. In Lyotard’s terminology, the event can be described as ‘the impact, on the system, of floods of energy such that the system does not manage to bind and channel this energy’.¹² Crime has precisely that effect on those caught up in it, often with little if any warning, and they have to respond to its situation-changing nature whether they want to or not: crime simply cannot be ignored. Neither, apparently, can it ever really be understood or explained.

I will be situating these authors, therefore, within a context of postmodernity, rather than just postmodernism. The latter is a style whereas the former is a cultural condition, and it is important to differentiate between them. Many writers who have been defined critically as postmodernists have made use of the crime fiction format – Paul Auster in The New York Trilogy being one notable example.¹³ Jeanne C. Ewert has argued that crime fiction ‘...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction: The Anti-Detective Figure the New America
• 2  James Ellroy: The LA Quartet Absolute Justice
• 3  James Lee Burke: Dave Robicheaux Keeping Evil at Bay
• 4  Walter Mosley: Easy Rawlins the African American Experience
• 5  Sara Paretsky: The Female Private Investigator versus Patriarchy
• 6  George Pelecanos: Nick Stefanos The Private Investigator Absolute Justice
• 7  Conclusion: Crime Fiction, Revenge Moral Decline
• Bibliography
• Index