On Crime Fiction

Whenever I go out, kids always ask me, “Tyson, what should we be reading?” Of course, I have to ask them, “Well, what’s your favorite genre?” If they tell me crime fiction, I tell them, “go buy the latest Michael Connelly.” “Detective Harry Bosch never disappoints,” I usually add.

But when they tell me they prefer their crime fiction hardboiled, I tell them to jump back sixty years right into a cold hard serving of Raymond Chandler’s pulp fiction.

Now, I'm not here to argue that Chandler’s Philip Marlow is a better detective than ole’ Harry Bosch, but I will say this: Phillip Marlowe is quite a dick. (Hey, that’s what they used to call detectives, I promise.) This particular dick, like Harry Bosch, generally kept to solving crimes in the streets of Los Angeles.

I tell people I grew up in Los Angeles (with a cough over the “County”). So I have an affinity for any story that unfolds there. But even those who never walked over the sawdust covered floors of Philippe’s or stood in the very spot where James Dean scuffled with the bully Buzz Gunderson at the Griffith Observatory, can't help but fall in love with prose like this:

She got up slowly and swayed towards me in a tight black dress that didn’t reflect any light. She had long thighs and she walked with a certain something I hadn’t often seen in bookstores. She was an ash blonde with greenish eyes, beaded lashes, hair waved smoothly back from the ears in which large jet buttons glittered. Her fingernails were silvered. In spite of her get-up she looked as if she would have a hall bedroom accent.

She approached me with enough sex appeal to stampede a businessmen’s lunch and tilted her head to finger a stray, but not very stray, tendril of softly glowing hair. Her smile was tentative, but could be persuaded to be nice.

The Big Sleep, 1939.

That dick’s right about one thing – you don’t often see that certain something in bookstores. Unless, of course, you’re lucky enough to be there with Eliza.