Genres change with the times

Donald E. Westlake

Elmore Leonard wrote westerns before he turned his attention to crime novels. After Robert B. Parker made his name writing novels about a hardboiled private investigator named Spenser, he tried his hand at writing westerns.

To Donald E. Westlake, this switch from one genre to another was nothing dramatic. The heroes in each were essentially the same men.

In a 1982 talk at the Smithsonian Institution, repeated two years later at a gathering of mystery writers, Westlake traced the history of hardboiled detective stories. "Both the western and the hardboiled detective story are involved with the same ritual subject," Westlake said. "The chivalrous man in an unchivalrous world."

The western came first and was extremely popular for many years. After World War I, writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler put the western in modern dress, moving the action from the dusty streets of cowtowns to the mean streets of big cities.

Westlake argued that the private eye novel was dead and that contemporary writers — this was the 1980s — were just turning out pale imitations of Hammett and Chandler. Parker and many others apparently didn't get the message, for they kept writing successful private detective novels, hardboiled and otherwise.

But just as Hammett and Chandler updated the western hero, so other writers have updated the hardboiled detective. Sue Grafton and others showed us that women, too, could be hardboiled. Stuart Kaminsky in his Toby Peters series showed us that a hardboiled private investigator can be funny. Westlake himself showed us that hardboiled crime fiction can be written from the criminal's point of view, as he did in his Parker novels.

I am currently reading a novel by Alice Henderson called A Solitude of Wolverines featuring a tough, no-nonsense biologist, not a detective. She works alone in the Montana Rockies where something mysterious is going on and someone is trying to harm her. The nearby town is decidedly unfriendly, and a wealthy rancher keeps cutting the fence to let his cattle graze on the wildlife preserve. Are we in a detective story or a western or what?