REINVENTING THE INVESTIGATORS

by James Lincoln Warren

By now, regular visitors to Criminal Brief will certainly have learned that the current (April 2008) issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine contains stories by three Criminal Briefers, and that Robert Lopresti has the cover story, I have the lead story, and Leigh Lundin and I have both had our stories excerpted on line. (See Leigh’s post yesterday for links to same.) Rob ebulliently pointed out the fabulous cover art before discussing the nature of his cover-winning story and Leigh almost apologized for indulging in some well-deserved BSP. Well, I’m certainly not going to apologize for indulging in a brief strut — it would be disingenuous to pretend that Criminal Brief was not conceived as a vehicle for publicizing mystery short fiction in general and the regular contributors’ writings in particular.

Thinking about the hat trick got me considering what it is that us’n writers do in our attempts to breathe life into our time-honored genre. Let’s face it: mysteries essentially have only one plot, and the fun in reading them is to be had in seeing how that plot is dressed up anew each time. Sometimes that simply means reinventing the investigators.

Making a detective relevant to his times has a long history. Auguste Dupin was very much a product of Poe’s 19th century high Romanticism. Sherlock Holmes may now be a gaslight period piece, but he was cutting-edge contemporary when he first appeared. Poirot began his career in Great War Britain and his mannerisms and attitudes are very much part of his generation, especially his interest in psychology, which had gotten a big leg up in public consciousness through Freud and psychoanalysis. The tough guy detectives of the 20s and 30s were born out of the rough and tumble days of Depression and Prohibition, followed by the most destructive war in history. The noir-imbued 40s gave way to the reflective musings of Lew Archer, the first detective that actually seemed to have a past, and then to the “knight in slightly tarnished armor” Travis McGee, who bespoke the 60s with its invention of beach counter-culture. Following McGee’s lead, in the 70s, the hard-boiled guys started to pop up in towns other than Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York, and given that (1) locale is always a character in travelogues, and that (2) hard-boiled detective stories are all travelogues, the genre expanded rapidly. Dennis Lynds under his many pseudonyms, but especially as Michael Collins, gave us the detective as social critic, and that role has been a necessary ingredient ever since. Then there are the ethnic detectives, beginning with Tony Hillerman’s Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, followed by Walter Moseley and more, and then the subcultural detectives, like John Morgan Wilson’s gay detective Ben Justice, and also the damaged detectives, like Mike Connelly’s Harry Bosch. 1

2 The detectives in “Cold Reason” were invented for similar reasons — I was trying to keep the P.I. genre up to date without sacrificing the conventions so associated with it. The idea for the two principals came about in this wise: I have two friends, David Ferreria, a Filipino-American entertainment lawyer, and Ara Maloyan, an Armenian civil engineer with American citizenship. A third friend could not wrap his tongue around their foreign names and always referred to them as “David Ferrari” and “Ara Malone”. “Sounds like a cop buddy show,” I observed. “Cagney and Lacey. Starsky and Hutch. Ferrari and Malone.”

And in the back of my head lurked the whispered question, Why not?

One of the P.I series I most admire is Joe Gores’ inimitable DKA Files, a truly ground-breaking cycle of stories. Gores based his series on his personal experience as a P.I. working mainly as a repo man for an independent firm, and in so doing invented the Private Eye Procedural. The DKA Files were to P.I fiction what “Hill Street Blues” was to the cop show, introducing the delicious complexities of the ensemble cast.

That’s what I wanted to do with Ferrari and Malone, so I invented California Operatives, Inc., or “Cal Ops”. Ferrari is obviously Italian, so I made him from New York and christened him “Carmine” after a couple of Italians of my acquaintance in the Big Apple. Malone is obviously an Irish name, so my choice for him was either to make him descended from the Irish diaspora following the 1844-1849 famine in Ireland, which most likely would have made him an East Coast guy, or to have him come from the much earlier wave of Scots-Irish immigrants who settled in the Deep South and Texas in the early 19th century. I chose the latter, since I already had an East Coast character in Carmine, and because I’d always wanted to write about a character who was a former Texas Ranger. Getting Malone’s first name was a lot harder than with Ferrari’s. At first I called him “Kurt”, thinking that if he was from old Texas stock he was sure to have some German blood, but after Paul Guyot vetoed that, I finally came up with “Custer” in a moment of giddy inspiration. Cus Malone. Perfect. But I made it clear that while Cus’s parents may have been racist rednecks to give him such an anti-Indian name, Malone himself was much more enlightened than that.

This was necessary for reasons beyond mere political correctness, because Cal Ops had to be multi-racial. I could not see how it would work otherwise in Los Angeles, which is one of the most culturally diverse and cosmopolitan cities in the world. (And then there’s the fact that my Italian and Irishman were inspired by a Filipino and an Armenian in the first place.) And the agency had to be socially relevant. So Carmine’s and Cus’s employees had to be Ashkenazic Jewish, African-American, Latino, and Korean, reflecting the four largest ethnic demographies in the city. (I think I might need to add an Iranian before too long, too.)

Finally, I confronted the question of forensic science, the six hundred pound gorilla in the room of contemporary crime fiction. As much as I am grateful for its use in real life crime-fighting, as a writer I admit to loathing the very existence of DNA. DNA is the deus ex machina of our time. But to avoid technology entirely was to completely give up on writing private eye stories for our own times. So I decided to feature gadgetry prominently, but only as a means to advance the plot, and never as a means to resolve it.

I decided to embark on the Cal Ops saga because as a Los Angeles writer, I felt that avoiding the private eye genre was tantamount to literary cowardice. Sooner or later, I had to suck it up and do it or not face myself in the mirror. But the only way I could do it was to reinvent the investigators. You let me know if I succeeded or not.

1. Yes, I know that Bosch is a cop, but the Bosch stories are firmly in the P.I. tradition. [↩]
2. Painting by Edward Kinsella III. Click on the image to visit his blog. [↩]