Saturday. A chill fall morning. A blanket of light fog lay over Iola. The tiny burg was quiet, as usual, slow to rouse. Except for one place.
Across town, a drab family of brick buildings clung to the city’s north side like carbuncles on the back of a monkey’s ankle. Inside, a festival was taking place. A reading festival.
Unsuspecting families mingled cheerfully in the sun-raked hallways of Allen Community College. Children played and laughed. Neighbors high-fived. No one keeled over, not really. A good fest overall. A swell fest.
Meanwhile, in the library, a man, Tony Piazza, fiddled with his laptop and a campus-issue video projector. He kept one eye on the door, where a few festival-goers entered and quietly took their seats; the other one he sort of just rolled around.
At 11 a.m., the crowd of about 20 grew hushed as Piazza took to the lectern where he delivered a thrilling and richly informative lecture on the history of crime fiction and its evolution from books to movies — the keynote speech at this year’s Iola Family Reading Festival.
IT WAS an auspicious time for a talk on detectives. According to the Turner Classic Movie channel, we’re in the midst of “Noirvember” — an entire month devoted to the art of Film Noir.
For participants in this parochial celebration it means a steady diet of hard-boiled cinema or country-house murder mysteries. Right now, in fact, in dimly lit corners of Twitter (#noirvember), people are posting favorite GIFs from “The Lady of Shanghai,” “Double Indemnity,” “The Maltese Falcon,” “Laura,” “The Third Man.” And, of course, “The Big Sleep.”
“How many of you have seen this movie?” Piazza asked, cueing up a clip of Howard Hawks’ 1946 classic.
Based on the Raymond Chandler novel of the same name, “The Big Sleep” stars Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, whose steamy real-life love affair injected a carnal allure into a film whose advertised subject is crime but whose palpable subtext is sex.
“The chemistry between these two,” said Piazza, clicking play. “Just watch.”
The famous scene ends with the smoky-voiced Bacall looking over her shoulder toward Bogie’s private detective Philip Marlowe: “You know how to whistle, don’t you?” she asks with a delicious grin. “Just put your lips together and blow.”
“If you haven’t seen this movie,” Piazza advised, “see it.”
THE HISTORY of the genre, on the whole, of course, revolves more around the brain than it does the loins.
Accordingly, in his hour-long mystery tour, Piazza, who dates his own love of detective fiction to the days when he was swapping his “Hardy Boys” for his sisters’ “Bobbsey Twins,” provides a neat taxonomy of the many “cerebral” detectives that buttress the literature of crime: Edgar Allen Poe’s brainy August Dupin, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Rex Stout’s obese, orchid-loving Nero Wolfe, Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, S.S. Van Dine’s playboy Philo Vance (a favorite of T.S. Eliot).
All of these heroes, though flawed in their own compelling ways (Sherlock injected cocaine to drown his malaise, for example, and Nero Wolfe overate), were unequaled in their “powers of analysis and deduction,” explained Piazza. “It was always satisfying to see them work through the process, to find some truth.”
Piazza’s definition of what qualifies as mystery fiction is refreshingly elastic, ranging from Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex” — “You know,” said Piazza, “it’s basically a ‘who killed King Laius?’” — to the long-running television series “Murder She Wrote” (an “Americanization of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple”).
A NEW STRAIN of American detective fiction emerged in the mid-1920s, which, with its solitary hero and hard-boiled setting, replaced the staid intellectual-detective with a laconic, whiskey-soaked knight errant of the urban class.
Dashiell Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon” (1929) — made into another terrific Humphrey Bogart movie in 1941 — steered a course that many writers would follow. Most notably, Raymond Chandler. “I love Chandler’s writing,” said Piazza, who owns the full roster of Chandler’s novels (not to mention Hammett’s and Van Dine’s). “Part of what I love in any book I read is just the sense of place. The time, the era. The ’40s in L.A. seem so romantic. Going down to La Jolla and the race track — just the whole milieu.”
For Chandler, though, more than any of his peers, language was the thing. He perfected, in his detective Philip Marlowe, all the verbal signposts that we’ve come to associate with that hard-bitten brand of private dick: The florid wisecracks (“She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket”) and the outrageous similes (“He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake.”).
Above all else, though, the private detective was a man alone.
“Usually the private eye is independent, and usually at odds with the police department,” said Piazza. “It was the same with Sherlock Holmes. It’s a theme. There’s always this conflict between the structure and then this free-wheeling individual, who plays a bit outside the rules. We like them because they’re a little bit individual, they’ve broken away somehow. But they always end up coming to the truth.”
IN THIS mini master class, Piazza, a well-regarded theater and communications instructor at ACC, returned again and again to these questions: What is it that compels us about mystery stories? What do we find attractive in these hero-detectives?
Paraphrasing a 1944 article by the great literary critic Edmund Wilson, Piazza attempts a theory. “Part of it is that the world is such a dark confusing place, where so much is going on. Even now, obviously, just look at the chaos we have in our current environment. People like to have a story where you can dig through and find out, somehow, that good triumphs, that bad guys get caught. That we can bring order to it somehow.”
Elsewhere, another critic has put it more graphically: Our fascination with crime stories is “evidence not of the popular appetite for blood but of the popular readiness to wipe it up.”
Still, Wilson, who Piazza quotes, detested crime books. In 1945, the distinguished literary critic yielded to the suggestion that he spend a week reading a batch of detective fiction, including Agatha Christie, the author of hundreds of detective stories, among them “Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” At the end of this trip through the dark back passage of genre fiction, Wilson published his sour response to the ordeal in an essay called: “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?”
But it’s in part thanks to Wilson that we have what is still the best, or at least the most romantic, definition of the fictional detective.
In a magazine article some months after Wilson’s essay first appeared, Chandler tried his hand at expressing the essence of the street-level sleuth: “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. … He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it.”
And so, to echo Piazza, that is why we are drawn to crime fiction, searching, in the darkening anxiety of the moment, for the good man — or woman — to light the way.
