Word: eye
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Marvel of Mobility. Stubborn addicts of the classic whodunit consider the TV Eye a boor. Some paperback browsers, still slavering over Mickey Spillane's sleuthing satyrs, consider him a sissy. But the TV Eye often has more taste than his critics. At his best, he is a healthy step backward toward the hardboiled heroes who swaggered onto the American scene in the novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler...
...years. The world's first detective bureau was established in Paris by Eugene null Vidocq in 1817, but it was not until 1841 that Edgar Allan Poe recognized the adventure available to a man who was a detective without being a public cop. Auguste Dupin, the intellectual Eye who was the hero of Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue, was a Parisian gentleman devoted to the dual task of outthinking a murderer and outwitting the police...
Private Lives. Hammett had been a Private Eye himself. He knew that "house burglary is probably the poorest-paid trade in the world." He had been mistaken for a Prohibition agent, hired by a woman to fire her housekeeper, was friendly with a man who stole a Ferris wheel. And he had stumbled upon a young woman who did not tell him that she thought his work was interesting. Unlike...
Holmes, Hammett's Eyes were driven by no moral obligation; they had a job, and they tried to do it competently. With an irreverent sneer at their proper predecessors, they succeeded and survived because they were tough, not because they were notably intelligent. Things happened to them: they faced pistols, boredom, and bad stomachs from too many foul meals eaten on the run. Hammett's Sam Spade soon found an acceptable running mate in Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe who would tell the girls: "The first time we met, I told you I was a detective...
With Spade and Marlowe as models, hardboiled Private Eye fiction began to crowd the polite puzzlers off America's bookshelves, was in turn hard pressed by the likes of Mickey Spillane and even, strange as it seemed, by mystery stories about honest, intelligent cops...