The American Century: Literature since 1945 731toughly realistic sympathy for their struggles. It depends, above all, on dialogue:
a stylized vernacular that has the smell of authenticity, and draws the reader into
a world of rough justice, hard money, and fast deals. Leonard developed a similar
sympathy for his morally dubious characters through an equally vigorous use of
their speech. Voice is as important to him as it is to Higgins. And, in works from
Fifty-Two Pickup (1974) through La Brava (1983) to Glitz (1985) and beyond, he has
used a variety of urban settings in which to place his humanized villains. There are
no true villains in the work of Ellroy either. In his case, however, it is because
there appears to be no moral code here to distinguish heroes from villains, or to hint
at the possibility of redemption. What Ellroy describes, with darkly comic venom
and in a prose as strung out as a telegraph wire, is a world of violence and betrayal
and corruption – where the ugliness just keeps on getting uglier. This is particularly
noticeable in his Los Angeles Quartet, consisting of The Black Dahlia (1987), The Big
Nowhere (1988), L.A. Confidential (1990), and White Jazz (1992). Written in what
sometimes seems like a frenetic shorthand, the quartet charts crime and corruption
in the City of Angels from the end of World War II to the election of John F. Kennedy.
It is not so much a series of mystery novels as an absurdist vision of urban hell.
Higgins sets The Friends of Eddie Coyle in Boston, Leonard has used a variety of
urban settings including Detroit, Atlantic City, and Miami Beach; in his Underworld
USA trilogy (American Tabloid (1995), The Cold Six Thousand (2001), Blood’s a
Rover (2007)) Ellroy appears to take all America, or its underbelly, for his canvas.
This reflects a general gravitation of mystery writing beyond its traditional locations
and into new areas such as New Orleans in the books of James Lee Burke (1936–) or
Boston in those of Robert B. Parker (1932–2010). The novels of Parker, such as
Mortal Stakes (1975) and Paper Doll (1993), and the Dave Robicheaux series of
novels by Burke (among them, Neon Rain (1987), Black Cherry Blues (1989),
Crusader’s Cross (2005), and Swan Peak (2008)), also measure the further
development of the private eye character into a person of considerable sophistication
and internal conflict. But more interesting, perhaps, than this have been two other
seminal developments. The hardboiled and mystery traditions have recently been
reconstructed as a vehicle for feminism. They have also been subject to radical
revision and rewriting along racial lines. The private eye originated as a descendant
of the frontier hero, carrying with him a freight of assumptions about gender and
race. White, male, and unattached, he negotiated a world controlled and corrupted
by men like him. Women were mostly distractions, where they were not dangerous
femmes fatales. Men and women of other races were scarcely noticed by him at all.
And although he constantly exposed social corruption, he almost never registered
the racial segregation and institutional racism that were an integral part of it. That
all changed from about the 1970s on. In the process, the mystery genre further
revealed itself as a field of possibilities, with a capacity both to register historical
change and to reflect and address pressing social issues.
Among American women writers of mystery fiction, Sara Paretsky (1947–) is
particularly notable. With her first novel, Indemnity Only (1982), Paretsky introduced
a private investigator, Victoria Iphigenia Warshawski, known as Vic or V.I., whoGGray_c05.indd 731ray_c 05 .indd 731 8 8/1/2011 7:31:42 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 42 PM