Between Law and Crime: The Chivalric ‘Criminal’ Detective

Abstract

An important strand within Hollywood crime series of the 1930s and 1940s focuses on the figure of the criminal detective whose roots are less in the classical detective mode than in the strain of criminal-centred fiction that had emerged out of it in the United Kingdom and France at the end of the nineteenth century. Criminal adventurers such as E.W. Hornung’s Raffles, Maurice Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin and Allain and Souvestre’s Fantômas provide the background types for the emergence of Jack Boyle’s Boston Blackie, Louis Joseph Vance’s Lone Wolf, Leslie Charteris’ The Saint, and Michael Arlen’s Falcon, all of whom subsequently became Hollywood criminal detectives.¹ Hollywood’s representation of these figures makes them either reformed criminals or dubious in their motivation, but also depicts them as honourable and selflessly chivalric, albeit in a rough-hewn form of gallantry in the case of Boston Blackie, to allow them to become detectives. Because of residual associations of criminality, they inhabit a world of peril that provides excitement and suspense, even if the threat of arrest and imprisonment is only ever simulated in order to open up a criminal space within which they can operate. This is particularly the case with Boston Blackie and the Lone Wolf whose adventures are predicated on a repeated false accusation of crime and their continued pretence that they are still criminals in order to facilitate their detection.