They drove once more in silence, Ham glowering at the belching lorry in front of him, Justin staring in perplexity at the foreign country he had represented half his life (Le Carré, The Constant Gardener, 2005).

Looking back at some of the classics of detective fiction and early spy-fiction reminds us that setting is more than just a backdrop or a physical place: it is a social, political and historical context, and a terrain the detective or spy must navigate. In some ways, it is easier to appreciate the importance of the setting as context from a distance, in places and times far from our own.

The ‘hard-boiled’ detective novel – typified by the 1930s and 1940s novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and made popular by the pulp magazine, Black Mask – situated the detective in a hostile urban environment. Drawing on the traditions of the outlaw of America’s Wild West, the private eye was a lone, moral hero on the ‘mean streets’ of America. Porter argues that the “new urban reality” (2003: 96) of the 1920s gave rise to the hard-boiled detective and a new symbolic landscape for American crime fiction (2003: 102):

The time was ripe for the emergence in a popular literary genre of a disabused, anti-authoritarian, muckraking hero, who, instead of fleeing to Europe, like the sophisticates of lost generation fiction, stayed at home to confront crime and corruption on the increasingly unlovely streets of modern urban America (Porter, 2003: 96).

Cawelti sees the modern city as one of the most important aspects of hardboiled detective fiction (1976: 140), represented as exciting, decadent and exotic but also as a morally bankrupt wasteland, rife with feminine sexuality and danger (1976: 153, 6). Hammett’s San Francisco and Chandler’s Los Angeles – with their prohibition-fuelled organised crime and corruption – are more than mere backdrops. Rather, they are socio-political sites, and the source of evil against which the Continental Op, Sam Spade, and his Los Angeles counterpart, Philip Marlowe, battle. Chandler described the hard-boiled detective stories that appeared in Black Mask:

Their characters lived in a world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civilisation had created the machinery for its own destruction… The streets were dark with something more than night (quoted in Hiney, 1997: 90).

Ward and Silver argue that Chandler described Los Angeles as no one else had, “with a style that was at once realistic, cynical, and romantic” (1987: 1). His Los Angeles is a “city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness” (Chandler, A Long Goodbye, in Later Novels and Other Writings, 1995: 645).

Chandler placed a great deal of emphasis on atmosphere and style, precisely capturing the detail of a location (Porter, 2003: 104). Knight notes that Chandler’s chapters often begin with an actual Los Angeles address (2004: 120):

Newton street, between Third and Fourth, was a block of cheap clothing stores, pawnshops, arcades of slot machines, mean hotels in front of which furtive-eyed men slid words delicately along their cigarettes, without moving their lips (‘Spanish Blood’ in Stories and Early Novels, 1995: 212).

Marlowe is often driving (Knight, 2004: 120). He does much of his thinking in the car, and the outskirts of Los Angeles, with its desert and the ocean, are as much a part of the city setting as its streets, speakeasies, and hotels:

After a while there was a faint smell of ocean. Not very much, but as if they had kept this much to remind people this had once been a clean open beach where the waves came in and creamed and the wind blew and you could smell something besides hot fat and cold sweat (Farewell My Lovely, 1949: 39).

Hammett’s Continental Op spends more time walking the streets, demonstrating the skills that Hammett himself learned working for Pinkertons1, tailing suspects and following up leads. In ‘The Big Knockover’, The Op receives a tip-off that there is a major bank robbery planned:

Outside, I turned down toward Kearny Street, strolling along, thinking that Larrouy’s joint had been full of crooks this one night, and that there seemed to be more than a sprinkling of prominent visitors in our midst. A shadow in a doorway interrupted my brainwork. The shadow said, Ps-s-s-s! (2005; 330-331).

Despite the tip-off the Op does not prevent the robbery of two of San Francisco’s biggest banks, which nets millions for the thieves and leaves sixteen police and twelve civilians dead. The hit was highly organised, involving 150 gangsters from around the country:

The getaway was north on Montgomery to Columbus. Along Columbus the parade melted, a few cars at a time, into side streets. The police ran into an ambush between Washington and Jackson, and by the time they had shot their way through it the bandit cars had scattered all over the city. A lot of ‘em have been picked up since then – empty (Hammett, 2005; 330-331).

While Chandler used actual addresses and Los Angeles landmarks, Hammett usually obscured his locations, for example, renaming the Bellevue ‘the Belvedere’ and the St. Francis ‘the St Mark’ (Nolan, 1983: 94). Sam Spade’s address is never revealed; however, Joe Gores, in his novel Hammett, used internal evidence in the novel to show Spade’s apartment was one of Hammett’s own, and also located his office in the same way (Nolan, 1983: 94).

Just as Hammett disguised his locations, in his fiction San Francisco’s fog is alternatively obscuring and revealing the city’s truths. For example, in the moments before Spade discovers that his partner has been murdered:

Where Bush Street roofed Stockton before slipping downhill to Chinatown, Spade paid his fare and left the taxicab. San Francisco’s night fog, thin, clammy and penetrant, blurred the street. A few yards from where Spade had dismissed the taxicab a small group of men stood looking up an alley (The Maltese Falcon, 2002: 11).

Cawelti labels the spy story “a near relative” to the detective story (2004: 286), noting similarities and cross influences (2004: 329). Cawelti and Rosenberg note, for example, that the figure of the cool, detached secret agent owes much to Chandler’s Marlowe (1987: 75), and that Le Carré’s early novels were influenced by the classical and hard-boiled detective novels (1987: 157).The spy novel tends to feature a more international setting. As Cawelti notes:

Whether the action all takes place in one country or the agent is sent on a secret mission from one country to another, the background is a conflict of international political interests (1987: 55).

The real terrain in the classic spy novel is, however, an interior and political one. Intrinsic to the setting of many post-World War II spy novels is the agency to which the operative is or was attached and the wider intelligence community. Le Carré’s agents, for example, are employed by “The Circus” or British Secret Service. The intrigues, bureaucracy, politics, secrecy and betrayals within the agency are central to the setting and plot. Cawelti and Rosenberg note that as well as a “major espionage bureaucracy with worldwide branches and the power to play an important role in shaping history” (1987:180), the Circus is:

a perverted family with siblings constantly squabbling with each other for their father’s attention. Many of the major departments are given code names taken from family life: there are “mothers” or comptrollers. “babysitters” or bodyguards, “housekeepers” or specialists in cover-ups, and the Saratt “nursery” or clandestine training program (1987: 180-181).

The spy’s landscape may be worldly, but the intelligence community to which she or he belongs is confined. Homberger argues that Le Carré’s The Looking Glass War is an examination of a “closed community” (1986: 58) and the consequences of belonging to it (1986: 58). As Hitz notes:

The clandestine world of spies and spy runners is a universe apart. It has its own rules, its own code of behaviour, its own heroes. It is hard for an outsider to penetrate this inner sanctum (2004: 181-2).

Creating a world such as this for the reader takes effort, skill, and inside knowledge; Both Chandler and Hammett knew their city’s streets and inhabitants, in intimate detail. Le Carré was still a British secret agent when he wrote When the Spy Came in from the Cold, and Hammett was a former Pinkerton’s man. Chandler, it appears, made it all up – so with good research, it appears, anything is possible.

Bibliography
Cawelti, John. G. 1976. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Cawelti, John. G. 2004. Mystery, Violence and Popular Culture. Wisconsin; University of Wisconsin Press.
Cawelti, John. G. and Rosenberg, Bruce A. 1987. The Spy Story. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Chandler, Raymond. 1995. Raymond Chandler: Later Novels and Other Writings. New York: The Library of America.
Chandler, Raymond. 1995. Raymond Chandler: Stories and Early Novels. New York: The Library of America.
Hammett, Dashiell. 2005. The Big Knockover. London: Orion Books.
Hammett, Dashiell. 2002. The Maltese Falcon. London: Orion Books.
Hiney, Tom. 1997. Raymond Chandler: A Biography. London: Chatto andWindus.
Hitz, Frederick P. 2004. The Great Game: The myth and reality of espionage. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Homberger, Eric. 1986. John Le Carré. London: Methuen.
Le Carré. 2005. The Constant Gardener. Sydney: Hodder and Stoughton.
Knight, Stephen. 2004. Crime Fiction 1800-2000: Detection, Death, Diversity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Nolan, William. F. 1983. Dashiell Hammett: A Life at the Edge. London: Arthur Barker Limited.
Porter Dennis. 2003. ‘The private eye.’ The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. Priestman, Martin. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ward, Elizabeth, and Silver, Alain. 1987. Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles. New York: The Overlook Press.

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