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A Slow Dance With Evil
| Article
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10783 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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3 / 1993 |
2,178 Words |
| Author
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Mark Schaffer
Mark Schaffer, who lives in Washington, D.C., writes
frequently on fiction and popular culture. He is the coeditor
of the forthcoming More Office Humor and is currently working
on a book about the Warner Brothers television studios of the
fifties. |
A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES
Lawrence Block
New York: William Morrow AND Co., 1992
321 pp., $16.95
Ever since Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op cruised through the San Francisco fog some seventy years ago, the American private eye has held a privileged vantage point for observing the wicked games men and women play in the jungle of cities. The classic detective sagas, for all their emphasis on bare-fisted action and induction, are inextricably linked to the rhythms and textures of a particular city--Hammett's San Francisco, Raymond Chandler's densely baroque L.A., Robert Parker's blue-collar Boston, Charles Willeford's scuzzy Miami, Sarah Paretsky's Chicago. These are literary landscapes to which we gladly return over and over with a trusted guide and confidant, one who knows where you can get an excellent Mexican meal, a rare jazz recording, free parking, and a good local brew.
The detective novel has always been cheap, vicarious city travel literature, admittedly bounded on one side by the seedy hotel districts of L.A. or New York and on the other by stately mansions of the rich and devious. Lately, with the growth of the regional detective novel, crime novel is serving as an unintentional tourist map, cluing us in on great off-the-track blues joints in New Orleans and secluded desert picnic spots in Arizona. One could well argue that the actual job, the case itself, is rapidly becoming a thin pretext for a picturesque meander through little-seen segments of trendy cities, and the story a series of variations and counterpoint of entertaining urban dwellers, both high and low. It's the rare P.I. nowadays who doesn't know his radicchio from his ravioli, her Poland Spring from her Perrier, as well as every scuzzball in town. In some amusing ways it's a throwback to the rarefied culture of Philo Vance and Nick and Nora Charles.
There is a central nagging irony. While many cities have become synonymous with a particular gumshoe, the quintessential city, New York, has not. Who is the New York detective? There has really never been a New York P.I. of the stature of a Sam Spade, a Marlowe, even a Spenser. There have always been tough guy private dicks prowling around deserted nighttime Manhattan streets, yet no icon has emerged, perhaps because the city is just too big, too brutally terrifying, especially in these waning days of empire. In New York, it's the maddening police procedural, not the quasiromantic detective novel that exposes the decaying core or urban malevolence.
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