<div>On 5/14/06, Carl Remick <<a href="mailto:carlremick@hotmail.com">carlremick@hotmail.com</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Chandler was basically a Romantic, offering this often-cited portrait of the private eye as knight-errant in a corrupt modern society:  ""Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness." (From "The Simple Art of Murder") Carl</blockquote><div> On 5/14/06, joanna <<a href="mailto:123hop@comcast.net">123hop@comcast.net</a>> wrote:Chandler wrote one of the most romantic stories I've ever read "Red "Wind." His character, Marlowe, can fall for men (Long Goodbye) as well as women (Red Wind), which is also a plus. But the older I get, the more I like Cain and Hammet for being, well, less mannered." Joanna  </div></div>I don't disagree anything specific here.  But let us suppose for a moment I were to puff-up a book called "Law, Death, Capitalism in the Hard-Boiled Novel."  I think that I would argue that these novels were dystopian-individualistic romanticism.  The private eye is declasse in a traditional way but the private eye also positions himself on the margins of the class system in other ways analogous to criminal lumpens, jazz artists and other marginal bohemians.  To a large extent the hard-boiled private eye and similar genres is a response to urbanism and bureaucracy that I find much more interesting than say Heidegger's response.  (A discussion of Heidegger is the clue that led here.)  But mostly I think a collection of essays on "Philosophy and the Hard-Boiled Novel" would be a fun and interesting diversion.