Tarnished Knights

The literary crowd are fond of pointing out that the earliest detective thriller was Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus but although many of the ingredients of crime fiction are present in this classic work, it was the work of more contemporary authors who fashioned the detective genre we know today. Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories were the first works to really cement the ground rules - Yeah I know Poe was there before him with Dupin but Doyle's work had a far greater influence on all that followed,at least in the private detective genre.

It was to Doyle that the movie industry courted - 20th Century Fox made both The Hound of the Baskerville's and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes before the series moved to Universal where the Holmes universe was updated to place him in the modern day.

It was with Prohibition that Hollywood found a distinctive voice of its own within the detective genre. The mean streets were far removed from Holmes's Victorian London and the crime-fighters were far more earthy characters. Dashiell Hammett was perfect for Hollywood - his stories took crime out of the drawing room and placed it on the city streets, those same streets where the battle for law and order was being lost to bands of professional criminals who took advantage of an unpopular and unenforceable prohibition law.

Hammett's Sam Spade first appeared on screen in 1936's Satan met a Lady which was an early version of The Maltese Falcon. The film was not a big success - the public were not yet ready for the hard-boiled world of Spade. And so realising this, Hammett created The Thin Man. The character was much more suited to the screen and a series was launched starring William Powell and Myrna Loy. So successful was the Thin Man series that hordes of imitators popped up. These gentlemen detectives offered a contrast to the working class gangsters of the great crime films of the 30's. Viewers would thrill at the exploits of James Cangney in Public Enemy or Paul Muni in Scarface but it was the social reforms preached by the likes of the Thin Man that appealed to the optimistic post depression audience.

The 1940's were the age of the screen private eye - Humphrey Bogart was most visible as both Sam Spade and Chandler's Phillip Marlowe. It was Chandler who best summed up the world of the private eye - down these mean streets a man must go, who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.

However has time went on those streets became dirtier, even more deadly and the detective did indeed become tarnished as the genre moved into the world of noir...