Crime Fiction - the hard boiled detective

A synopsis of the key argument of Felicity Plunkett’s 2002 article “The Monkey’s Mask and the Poetics of Excision” and demonstration of how it is relevant to Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep and Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask.

Note: this was originally presented as a multi-media video essay: https://youtu.be/cncc66Yodq0 What follows is a transcript which has been lightly edited for style and flow.

Synopsis

Felicity Plunkett does not think much of Finola Moorhead and her review of the “lesbian detective verse novel” The Monkey’s Mask.

In an article published in the book Unemployed at Last! Plunkett argues that Moorhead wants to erase key features of Porter’s text—especially the bisexuality and ambiguity—so that it adheres more closely to her expectations of the detective crime genre. To quote Plunkett: “Her case is predominantly about what the book doesn’t do”.

Plunkett uses this perspective to highlight the way Porter does in fact use excision—what she leaves out—to question and parody the conventions of hard-boiled detective fiction, especially where they touch on assumptions about gender and sexuality.

Relevance to The Monkey’s Mask

The Monkey’s Mask belongs to the detective genre and contains many of its tropes, but at the same time has “deep currents of transgressiveness and lawlessness” (Plunkett 73). As Plunkett observes, it “resists the closure traditionally associated with [hard-boiled crime fiction]” (73).

The genre conventionally revolves around a hardboiled but honourable detective, who gets dragged into a sordid case. He (“it’s always a he”) ultimately emerges as the shining knight who saves the day. Porter is using these expectations to “subvert patriarchal, heterosexual codes of conduct” (Hobby and White quoted in Plunkett 74).

This is hardboiled detective fiction, but it parodies the genre in important ways. Most obviously, it is rendered as poetry, and its protagonist is a gay woman. This is not a typical narrative about a man’s man, solving a crime and setting things right. Significantly, Porter has left out the neat denouement—Jill never tells her client, Mickey’s parents, the real story.

“A striking absence in the text is the absence of mourning for Mickey” (Plunkett 81). Porter’s detective, Jill Fitzpatrick, does not remain aloof from the case but is dragged into it, in fact almost becomes the victim of the crime she is investigating. In this way, Plunkett argues, Porter uses the poetics of excision to evoke the lack of mourning in the text, and gives Jill the voice that was taken away from Mickey.

Relevance to The Big Sleep

Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep is a hard-boiled detective story written in the 1930s. Can Plunkett’s analysis of The Monkey’s Mask tell us anything about this older and much more conventional example of the genre?

At first, it seems that this is a canonical version of “hard-boiled detective fiction”. Chandler practically invented the genre after all. But what does Chandler leave out?

Just as Plunkett argues of The Monkey’s Mask, The Big Sleep too lacks moral closure. Jill keeps the truth about Mickey’s murder from her parents. Marlowe declines to reveal the details of Vivian and Carmen’s lives to General Sternwood. The good guy does not win.

Plunkett says Porter’s Jill Fitzpatrick becomes “fused and confused with the identity of the person sought” (81). Chandler hints at this happening to Marlowe. Is he replacing Reagan as the general’s confidante? And more notably, he comes close to being another of Carmen’s victims, and being dragged into the case he is investigating just as much as Jill was.

Also central to Plunkett’s argument in The Poetics of Excision is the absence of the elegiac form and the excision of death. Death surrounds Marlowe, and yet he is untouched by it. There are no elegies for Carmen’s victims, or for the victims of the numerous characters murdered by the gangsters and petty criminals of the story. No one mourns them. The fact that Chandler left this sense of moral closure and mourning out of his text contributes to its poetic effect as hard-boiled “noir” fiction.

While it does not parody the genre as explicitly as Porter, there is ambiguity in Chandler’s text, for example regarding Geiger’s sexuality. Howard Hawks’s movie interpretation erases this entirely, but even in the book it is glanced at sideways, hinted at as a sordid aspect of these people who move in the shadows of the underworld. It was a motivating factor in Lundgren’s murder of Brody, to protect the nature of their relationship. And of course there is the famous ambiguity around the murder of the chauffeur, whose identity even Chandler claimed not to know.

By putting Plunkett’s lens on The Big Sleep, we can see that Chandler is engaging in his own “poetics of excision”. He leaves us plenty of room to wonder if Marlowe can really claim the moral high ground, or if he, as he says himself, becomes “part of the nastiness”.

References

• Chandler R (2008) The Big Sleep, Penguin Books, Melbourne, Victoria.
• Plunkett F (2002) ‘The Monkey’s Mask and the Poetics of Excision’, in Stewart KA and Shirley W (eds) Unemployed at Last! University of New England, Armidale.
• Porter D (1994) The Monkey’s Mask, Pan Macmillan, Sydney.