ABSTRACT
Robert Skinner’s cameo encapsulates the essence of the hard-boiled dick. The low-lit, monochromatic, American film noir of the 1940s springs to mind, with its city of mystery and shadows, violence and vengeance. Through the mist steps the messianic ‘man in the mac’, dispenser of commonsense justice, alone in his mission. The image is archetypal-the warrior knight, the tough cowboy, the intrepid explorer-he is the representative of Man, and yet more than a man, he is the focus of morality, the mythic hero. He is the controlled centre surrounded by chaos, and an effective reading must involve identification with this mediator of action, truth, and finally pleasure and relief through closure. Both the form and the content of this scenario are iconically masculine, in a literary and cultural sense. The popular cliché survives now through parody, in such figures as Sellers’ Clouseau, but the image endures as one of the folk heroes of modern popular culture. The fact that the detective hero transferred so easily on to film resulted from his position in fiction as reified spectacle, his knowing, evaluative gaze centred the text for consumption by a subservient reader/viewer. The origin of the detective story stressed the romantic, transcendentqualities of the criminal: Eugène François Vidocq (17751857), the first chief of the Sûreté and instigator of the first detective agency, Le Bureau des Renseignements, commented in his own autobiography Mémoirs :
In every million men there are ten who put themselves above everything, even the law, and I am one of them.2
