TV Noir |
CLOSING SCENES
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The Investigative Journey
There is nothing so deceptive as the distance of a light upon a pitch-dark night, and sometimes the glimmer seemed to be far away upon the horizon and sometimes it might have been within a few yards of us.
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902)
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902)
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Most noir stories involve some sort of investigative journey—seeking of truths, the solving of a mystery, the completion of a puzzle. The noir investigator is typically a private eye or a plainclothes policeman, but not always so: there are insurance investigators, investigative reporters, snoops and spies, fixers and hired guns, masked detectives, phantasmic detectives, serial-killing detectives, alien-hunting detectives, and so on. Paladin of Have Gun– Will Travel (1957–1963)—the title comes from his calling card—is a troubleshoot- ing detective in cowboy clothes who embodies the knightly, chivalric essence of an archetype transferable to almost any genre. David Janssen, who played detectives in Richard Diamond and Harry O, likened the modern sleuth to the Western gunslinger: “The hero is invincible; he gets the girl and never marries her; the convertible car has replaced the horse.” nearly all of the heroes (or antiheroes) discussed in this book undertake, at one time or another, a quest of detection.
As a literary creation, the investigator originated with Edgar Allan Poe in The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841). his c. Augustin Dupin is an independently wealthy, un- cannily observant Parisian who lives by night and regards the police as dim-witted competitors. The Dupin stories reflect a taste for the macabre and a particular fascination with scientific methodology, elements that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would capitalize on a few decades later with his Sherlock Holmes tales. Holmes, like Dupin, solves his crimes through forensic analysis and intellectual prowess. confronted with a corpus delicti, he gathers testimony, assembles evidence, and formulates a hypothesis to deter- mine the likely culprit. extrapolated upon by the likes of Agatha christie and Dorothy L. sayers, the classic (and mostly British) whodunit reigned until the 1920s—when Dashiell Hammett, an American, and a former Pinkerton detective, thoroughly upended it with a new type of mystery, hardboiled and of the streets. Hammett, as Raymond chandler, his heir apparent, liked to say, “took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it in the alley.” |
Batman: The Animated Series (1992).
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Abridged from TV NOIR by Allen Glover. Published by Abrams Press. All rights reserved.