Detectives

The detective is an icon of American masculinity that articulates the myth of the lone hero. The detective narrative is concerned, above all, with the investigation of the hero's masculinity, which must be tested and proved by solving the case. Detective heroes, who offer models of ideal manhood, have also embodied changing social attitudes toward masculinity.

Edgar Allan Poe's character C. Auguste Dupin is the literary father of all fictional detectives, including Arthur Conan Doyle's famous British sleuth Sherlock Holmes. The sleuth is characterized by the superior skills of deduction and observation associated with manhood in Victorian culture. By the 1920s and 1930s, an increasing emphasis on aggressiveness, sexuality, and the body in American constructions of male identity generated new kinds of detective figures. The hard-boiled private eye, popularized by writers such as Raymond [Page 131]Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, represented a shift to a tough and street-smart hero, while film detective series followed the adventures of suave gentlemen detectives such as the Falcon and the Thin Man.

The hard-boiled detective was brought to the screen during the 1940s and 1950s, as American men struggled with the displacements of World War II and returning veterans faced a changed society, unemployment, shifting gender roles, alienation, and often disablement. During this period, film noir movies such as The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Touch of Evil (1958) offered audiences tough but traumatized heroes who expressed and worked through this postwar disillusionment.

Cold War concerns for security and fears of organized crime in the late 1940s and 1950s resulted in the emergence of the “cop” in films such as The Naked City (1948) and television's Dragnet. The cop put his duty first and kept his emotions and desires in check. However, the domestic turbulence of the late 1960s and 1970s, President Richard M. Nixon's hard-line politics regarding crime, America's emasculation caused by the Vietnam War, and a loss of confidence in the police culminated in the popularization of the vigilante cop. Exemplified by Harry Callahan (played by Clint Eastwood) who first appeared in 1971 in Dirty Harry, this detective/hero used violence, autonomy, and defiance of established legal authority to rid society of crime.

By the 1980s, the impact of second-wave feminism had thrown social conceptions of masculinity into flux and created conflicting images in the media. In this environment, the “new man” appeared. Exemplified by Thomas Magnum (played by Tom Selleck) of television's Magnum P.I., the new man possessed a feminized masculinity that was sensitive and fashionable. In a backlash to these new qualities the “retributive man,” appeared. The character John McClane (played by Bruce Willis) in the movie Die Hard (1988), exhibits the hypermasculinity characteristic of this type.

During the 1990s, society witnessed a new appreciation of masculinity that was both intellectually astute and physically and emotionally vulnerable. This shift prompted a return to a thinking detective—the criminalist. Personified by Dr. Sloan (Dick van Dyke) of television's Diagnosis Murder, the criminalist employs observation, forensic science, and profiling to solve a case. With this emphasis on intelligence and sensitivity, rather than muscularity, new kinds of detective heroes have emerged, including female, older, and African-American detectives. Thus, in conjunction with social changes, the icon of the detective continues to evolve beyond the traditional white male hero, offering audiences an expression of American society's shifting images of masculinity.

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