The American Century: Literature since 1945 729to lspy on him, he and his companion Ruthie slip into madness. Ruthie attacks and
chops him to pieces with an axe. And Bigger leaves us in a condition, a plight that
somehow epitomises all Thompson’s major characters. “The darkness and myself.
Everything else was gone,” Bigger confides, as he drags what is left of him through
the basement. “Death was here,” he concludes. “And he smelled good.”
There were several notable generic developments in crime and hardboiled fiction
during the three decades or so following World War II. These included the emergence
of police procedural fiction and a kind of crime novel in which motivation rather
than detection was central. The police procedural form, in which the role of
protagonist is given to an entire unit of police officers, was introduced by Lawrence
Treat (1903–1998). However, the writer who achieved most marked success with it
was Evan Hunter (1926–2005), working under the name of Ed McBain, who
produced more than forty novels set in the 87th Precinct of a thinly disguised
New York City. The detectiveless crime novel, in turn, became the particular forte of
Patricia Highsmith (1921–1995). Her first novel, Strangers on a Train (1950), set the
pattern and established her claustrophobic, irrational, perilous fictive world.
Here, and in other novels like This Sweet Sickness (1960), strangers are emotionally
tied to each other through acts of violence. People are twinned, find themselves with
secret sharers of their lives, in relationships that vacillate between love and hatred.
Highsmith seems especially interested in acts of doubling and disguise that expose
the darker side of life, and the murkier depths of human personality. This is especially
so in her most popular books, about the pleasant, totally amoral young American
Tom Ripley. The first and probably the best of these, The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955),
offers a sardonic variation on The Ambassadors by Henry James as Ripley, despatched
to rescue a wealthy young man from the cultural fleshpots of Europe, ends up by
murdering him and assuming his identity. There are no puzzles in Highsmith’s
work, justice is rarely done in them, and the emphasis is generally on the perpetrator
of the crime rather than the victim or detector. What there is, besides this shift of
emphasis, is a disconcerting dissolution of the boundaries that serve to keep society
safe and ourselves comfortable: between reality and fantasy, the permissible and
forbidden, good and evil.
Other women writers besides Highsmith began to explore the possibilities of
crime and mystery at the same time as her: among them Leigh Brackett (1915–1978),
whose first novel, No Good from a Corpse, was published in 1944, and Helen Nielsen
(1918–2002), whose books include Detour (1953) and Shot on Location (1970).
Other male writers, in turn, added a subtler shading and tone to the generic field of
mystery writing. Rex Stout (1886–1975), for instance, introduced an eccentric
armchair detective called Nero Wolfe in Fer-de-Lance (1934). Joined with his
sidekick, a variation on the hardboiled private eye named Archie Goodwin, the two
became the most successful team in American mystery fiction. Equally successful,
and more interesting, were the protagonists in the novels of John D. MacDonald
(1916–1986) and Ross Macdonald (1915–1983). John D. MacDonald produced a
series of 21 novels with Travis McGee as their hero. An unofficial private eye, and an
intelligent, honest con man who swindles the swindlers, McGee is a character ofGGray_c05.indd 729ray_c 05 .indd 729 8 8/1/2011 7:31:41 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 41 PM