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The Serpent and the Dove

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Susan Mendus
Susan Mendus
Affiliation:
University of York
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Extract

In his essay ‘The Simple Art of Murder’, Raymond Chandler describes the world of the American detective story as ‘a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities, in which hotels and apartment houses and celebrated restaurants are owned by men who made their money out of brothels, in which a screen star can be the fingerman for a mob, and the nice man down the hall is a boss of the numbers racket; a world where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket, where the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instrument of money making, where no man can walk down a dark street in safety’. Nevertheless, ‘down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He 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 honour, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.’ What are the possibilities of being such a man (or woman) in the world as we know it? The hero of the American detective story (of the Hammett-Chandler genre) is not only a good man, and a man of honour, but also a man who must get things done. In Dashiel Hammett's Red Harvest he is the man who is sent in to clean up the pig-sty that is Poisonville, and in so doing he becomes poisoned himself. He has a choice between being effective and being good, but he cannot be both together. ‘Poisonville is right’, he says despairingly. ‘It's poisoned me.’

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 63 , Issue 245 , July 1988 , pp. 331 - 343
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1988

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References

1 Chandler, Raymond, ‘The Simple Art of Murder’, The Art of the Mystery Story, Haycraft, Howard (ed.) (Grosset and Dunlap, 1946), 236–237.Google Scholar

2 Ibid.

3 Williams, Bernard, ‘Politics and Moral Character’, in Williams, Moral Luck (Cambridge University Press, 1981), 60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Kant, Immanuel, Perpetual PeaceGoogle Scholar. As reprinted in Reiss, H., Kant's Political Writings (Cambridge University Press, 1970), 116.Google Scholar

5 Ibid.

6 Williams, Howard, Kant's Political Philosophy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), 45–16.Google Scholar

7 The example is drawn from Nussbaum, Martha's discussion in The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge University Press, 1986), 32–50.Google Scholar

8 The symposium was originally printed in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume L (1976)Google Scholar. However, Williams has since revised his views on this subject and all references to his paper are to the revised version, which is printed in Moral Luck.

9 ‘Moral Luck’, 25.Google Scholar

10 Nagel, Thomas, ‘Moral Luck’ as reprinted in Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge University Press, 1979), 28, n. 3.Google Scholar

11 ‘Moral Luck’, op. cit., 36–37.Google Scholar

12 Op. cit., 39.

13 Op. cit. 26.

14 Walzer, Michael, ‘Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands’. War and Moral Responsibility, Cohen, M., Nagel, T. and Scanion, T. (eds) (Princeton University Press, 1974), 63.Google Scholar

15 Op. cit., 37.

16 This paper was first presented at the Political Thought conference at New College, Oxford, in January 1987. I am grateful to those present at the conference for their helpful comments and criticisms.