The first private eye of the pulps, Carroll John Daly's 'Race' Williams, made his debut in a story called 'Knights of the Open Palm,' which was published in a special Ku Klux Klan issue of Black Mask. (Lee Server points out that Daly, who was a relatively clumsy writer, at least had the distinction of authoring one of the anti-Klan entries.) Notice also that one of Raymond Chandler's earliest stories, 'Noon Street Nemesis,' originally published in Detective Fiction Weekly in May 1936, is set almost entirely in a black section of Los Angeles. When the story first appeared, the editors of the journal deleted all references to the race of the characters, but Chandler made sure that the deletions were restored for the reprinted version, 'Pickup on Noon Street,' in The Simple Art of Murder.
Perhaps more importantly, the complex plot of Chandler's 1940 novel, Farewell, My Lovely, is set in motion by ex-con Moose Malloy's killing of a black man in an all-black bar on L.A.'s (Central Avenue. The investigation of the crime is assigned to a worn-out white policeman named Nulty, who does nothing. Even Philip Marlowe, who twice uses the word nigger in casual conversation, seems resigned to the fact that the murder of black people is of no concern to the legal system. As the novel proceeds, other corpses (belonging to the white race) pile up quickly, and it is easy for most readers to forget the first death. In a sense, however, the neglect of the black man is precisely the point. Chandler's major theme is that 'law is where you buy it,' and the novel as a whole is designed to illustrate that crime is treated differently in different areas of town. During a period when high-modernist fiction was usually centered on the isolated consciousness of middle-class characters, Chandler used the lowly private-eye formula to map an entire society; and in Farewell, My Lovely, he shows that crime on the lowest social level of Los Angeles is on a single continuum with crime on the highest level. Hence the evocative opening chapters of the book, which give us closely observed pictures of a black community on Central Avenue, are linked by cause and effect to the later chapters, which take us to Jessie Horlan's decrepit house on West 54th Street, to Lindsay Marriot's smart residence above the Coast Highway, and to Lewin Lockridge Grayle's stately mansion near the ocean. We also meet a series of detectives who represent different constituencies: the ineffectual, incompetent Nulty, who works in the poorest district; the sinister Blaine and his dull-witted partner 'Hemingway,' who are the hired minions of the gangsters and con men in Bay City; and the intelligent, persistent Randall, who investigates crimes for Central Homicide.
This social geography was not entirely lost in the Scott-Dmytryk-Paxton film adaptation of the novel, entitled Murder, My Sweet. Indeed the Scott unit at RKO had been established for the purpose of making social-realist movies. However, given the Hollywood censorship code and the racial climate of 1944, it was impossible for RKO to show the police as corrupt or to put Chandler's original opening on the screen. The film therefore devises a sinister scene in a police station, which looks vaguely like a third-degree interrogation, and it shows Moose Malloy breaking up a working-class bar filled with white men in hard hats. Not until 1975, in the Dick Richards version of Farewell, My Lovely, did the movies attempt a reasonably faithful reproduction of what Chandler had written, but even then, Hollywood seemed nervous about the tone of Chandler's work. The Richards film is only mildly critical of the cops, and it insists that Moose Malloy killed the black man in 'self-defense.' It also turns Philip Marlowe into an overt liberal who befriends an interracial couple and their small son. 14
The idea that blacks and whites might be brothers under the skin had already been suggested more indirectly on the first page of The High Window, the novel Raymond Chandler wrote immediately after Farewell, My Lovely. Marlowe encounters a lawn ornament in front of Elizabeth Bright Murdock's pretentious house in the Oak Knoll section of Pasadena: 'a little painted Negro in white riding breeches and a green jacket and a red cap,' who looks a bit sad, as if he were becoming 'discouraged' from waiting so long. Each time Marlowe enters or exits the house, he pats the ornament on the head, and occasionally he speaks to it. During his initial visit, he turns to the figure and says 'Brother, you and me both' (Stories and Early Novels, 988). On his way out after first meeting Mrs. Murdock, he mutters, 'Brother, it's even worse than I expected' (1002). At the end of the novel, one of his last gestures is to give the ornament a farewell pat.
For some readers today, a joke of this kind may seem condescending; but the lawn ornament tells us everything we need to know about the ruthless, repressive Mrs.
Murdock, and it helps to establish Marlowe's class position as a paid servant of the vulgar rich. (For a manifestly racist treatment of black people in hard-boiled literature of the period, see the novels of Chandler's contemporary Jonathan Latimer.) Furthermore, there is an intriguing historical circumstance that makes the comparison between Marlowe and a black man not entirely inappropriate. The heyday of tough-guy realism, which produced Chandler, James M. Cain, Horace McCoy, and the other white writers whom Edmund Wilson describes as 'poets of the tabloid murder,' was also a major period of socialprotest literature by African Americans, and the black social-protest novelists especially Richard Wright and Chester Himeswere intensely and necessarily preoccupied with murder and mean streets. Wright's Native Son and The Outsider were plotted like thrillers, and so was Himes's If He Hollers, Let Him Go; in fact, as Mike Davis points out, Himes's skillfully crafted early work could be placed among the finest examples of Los Angeles noir, offering a ''brilliant and disturbing analysis of the psychotic dynamics of racism in the land of sunshine' (43).
Himes was rarely discussed in such terms during his lifetime, but at the suggestion of Marcel Duhamel, editor of Gallimard's Serie noire, he eventually became a successful writer of tough detective fiction. In the years after the war, French critics saw a connection between the white tough guys and the black protest writers, who could be assimilated into a left-existentialism that Jean-Paul Sartre and many of his followers believed was at the very heart of the American novel. Hence both groups were given a cultural acceptance in France that they had not fully received in the United States. Significantly, Wright himself was living in Paris, and The Outsider, which he wrote during those years, has a good deal in common with Sartre's own novel about crime, Les jeux sont faits. Himes, too, moved to Paris in the early 1950s, and most of his early crime novels were first published in French; his most commercial work was done for the Serie noire, and he was the first non-French author to receive the Grand Prix de la literature policiere, which was awarded in 1958 for La reine des pommes (A Rage in Harlem).
It would be wrong to fully equate either the hard-boiled school or the black social-protest novelists with European existentialism. The overwhelming sense of alienation, entrapment, and paranoia in Wright's and Himes's fiction rises out of a relentless social fact rather than a Kafkaesque abstraction, and the somewhat similar themes in the white writers can be traced back to the main tradition of naturalism and social realism in the American novel. But even though the three distinct cultural formations have separate histories, they share a common ground. The tough school of literature and film is filled with motifs that can be explained in vaguely existentialist terms; and as Roger Rosenblatt observes, the single place where 'modern black and white heroes come closest to each other in terms of common atmosphere and situations is in the literature of the existentialists.' 15 Wright and Himes therefore might have had as much to contribute to the French discourse on film noir as Chandler and Graham Greene.16 If they did not, the reason is that Hollywood in the 1940s and 19950s did not adapt black novelists, or even show many black characters on the screen.
Most films noirs of the 1940s are staged in artificially white settings, with occasional black figures as extras in the backgrounds. The African-American writer Wanda Coleman has commented on this phenomenon in an article for The Los Angeles Times Magazine (17 October 1993), in which she also admits that she loves to watch old thrillers on TV. 'Nothing cinematic excites me more than film noir,' she remarks; even so, there often comes a moment when her suspension of disbelief is shattered. The black Pullman porters, musicians, shoeshine boys, janitors, maids, and nightclub singers in these films are created out of a narrow range of stereotypes, and they painfully remind Coleman that, 'like murder, the cultural subtext will out': 'My husband groans and my son laughs. Someone black has suddenly appeared onscreen. My stomach tightens and I feel the rage start to rise. . . . To enjoy that sentimental journey back to yesteryear, I have to pretend I live in a perfect world. . . . I have to force myself back through the door, back into the movie' (6).
Some black players in the 1940s were treated in relatively dignified ways, in part because the movie industry and the U.S. government were attempting to liberalize race relations during World War II. But in the era before the full-scale civil rights movement, film noir made no overt attempt to criticize the segregated society, and it never presented anything from a black point of view. Even a breakthrough actor like Canada Lee, who gave impressive but
