Given my missing eye and intubation rasp, I could play Squint, a mob boss who cornered the market for glasses and is taking care of business by eliminating opticians who can’t see the lay of the land.
My tag-line: ‘I got my eye on you.’
The Lenny Line: ‘Yeah, and it won’t wipe off so easy.’
Belzer’s line: ‘Rumor has it, he’g got an eye-socket fulla diamonds.’
Ice-T retort: ‘Yeah, head fulla rocks, I hear ya.’
It can now be argued that SVU has a wide, deep influence on how plots are shaped, which in turn warps how people think about the world of crime, the courts, and life’s warped shapes.
We get to have Mike Post’s theme be played by a real group on real instruments. I’m sick of his keyboard demo being enough for Dick Wolf.
Visual arts he supports, but music is just background tone.
Speaking of influential, if more fluid, formats of storytelling, the Raymond Burr 1950s PERRY MASON sets up a varied, solid pattern. Crimes range, story is set up in varying ways, and unravelingthe mystery, from clues and inconsistencies, can lead to courtroom breakdowns and confessions or surprise revelations astute viewers might have caught. They play fair.
COLOMBO owes a lot to this iteration of PERRY MASON.
LAW AND ORDER, on the other hand, is a double echo of THE NAKED CITY, by way of DRAGNET, with courtroom drama from the pulps.
John Grisham, a lawyer who writes thrillers, revived this legal melodrama pulp sub-genre.
None of which matters except when handled well, allowing good stories to be told well.
Types of melodramas focused on professions or those pursuing them formed the bulk of the pulps. Cop, Doctor, Lawyer, Detective, Athlete, Pilot, Explorer, Soldier, Rich Altruists with Secret Identities, Men of Mystery; on all these and others novels of adventure and action condensed.
Doc Savage, The Shadow, Green Hornet, led to superheroes, which grew from The Scarlet Pimpernel and its bastard child, Zorro. The Lone Ranger by way of Zorro became Batman, riding the cape of Superman, who ushered in a horde of heroes in tights.
Myth was mined, muscle beach beefcake became a norm.
Were comic book artists portraying superheroes as latently gay? Was this an underground wave from an oppressed group? Did LGBTQ+ subterfuge liberate inner heroism?
One wonders, because the leap from pulp novels to comic books transformed men in rumpled suits and the occasional opera cape to men in tights that clung like wet paint to over-developed physiques.
The Shadow wore suits and overcoats and a cloak, with a Trilby hat to hide his face. He used twin .45s. Overlapping him, Superman arose on the comics strips and books wearing tights — a form-fitting, revealing costume that might as well not be there at times.
Homoerotic adventures, rivals, and relationships followed him like kryptonite.
From the 1930s on, Superheroes tended to reference the übermenschen as an oblique misinterpretation of Nietzsche’s concept of the Super Man. This gradually soaked in to become a standard for all super duper heroes with mythic powers.
White supremacy fed into it, warping things further.
Pulp detectives spanned a range of both ethnic and racial types. Sure, most were stereotyped badly but at least they weren’t all white.
Superheroes were for decades all white and all proud defenders of Western Culture Imperatives, such as free-market Capitalism. No Robin Hood re-distribution of wealth for superheroes.
They reflected US culture, in other words, which remains an ugly mess of fear, greed, and hate.
Detectives solved local crimes and put things back into order, no matter how artificial or fragile that social order would be. In part, detective fiction reassured class awareness for those who felt comfortable.
Superheroes saved the world. They took on villains representing existential threats. It was mythic, grandiose fabulism.
Detectives stayed local. They upheld the rule of law, no matter how corrupt, and punished, at least revealed, crimes and criminals.
This is why detective and police procedural fiction is so popular. Ever since it arose in the 1860s from a real London detective being sent to a real country manor house to solve a murder, and the resultant newspaper accounts and, soon, books of fiction featuring this new beast, The Detective, such stories have captivated readers.
Refer to The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher by Kate Summerscale for a superbly readable account of this true story that sparked detective fiction’s reign.
Agatha Christie is the best-selling writer of fiction in history, for example. It has staying power and near-universal appeal, and ranges from tea-cozy to tongue-in-cheek through whodunnits and locked-room puzzlers to hard-boiled to noir to serious portraits of detectives and police procedurals. These days, there is Nordic Noir, too.
As a type, the detective is endlessly reinvented because the function served is so key to society.
Detective fiction both reassures the literate middle class — remember them? — and upholds the ideals of an organized hierarchy that kept society cohesive, if not entirely together. Yes, such once held sway.
Noir got cynical with such notions, coming from the universal crimes and corruption of WW II. Disillusioned writers called out the lack of law, the rule of big money, and the gains of psychopaths. Crime meant politics for noir writers, and a private code of ethics was all one could try to maintain.
Remember, the body in the box at the start of every murder mystery is you, the reader. It represents a world being spilled from, then put back into, a societal box of Things Worth Preserving. That’s the goal.
A former FBI agent, an ex cop, and alcoholic priest, a house wife, a grandmother, aunt, or sister, anyone can be the detective, but taking the role means playing out its implications. Restore order. Make sense of apparent chaos. Bring things back within acceptable bounds. Polite society will thank you and buy your stories by the gross.
Let’s end with seeds for a good historical mystery novel.
Fats Waller, the jazz pianist, performer, and composer, was once kidnaped, blindfolded, and hustled off to an unknown location. When his blindfold was removed, in walked Al Capone, who apologized for any rough treatment Waller might have suffered. He explained, “It’s my birthday and you’re gonna play for me, huh?”
Not being suicidal or stupid, Waller played — for three days and nights. It was a blow-out the stops party, befitting the little caesar of Chicago.
Waller reportedly took naps. He also had hundred-dollar bills stuffed into his pockets when revelers made requests.
Eventually he was blindfolded again and hustled back, pockets full of Benjamins, to where he’d been grabbed from. He never spoke publicly about it, but did tell a few relatives and close, trusted friends.
Now wouldn’t that make a great set-up for a detective story?
For a superhero story, you’d need a super villain, usually modeled on the mad scientists from the pulps, working on a world-threatening weapon, an infernal device, a monstrous machine that just had to be stopped.
Ratchet up the mythic overtones and set the underpinning references to narcissistic despots on overkill, then introduce your man in tights and his comic relief and handy exposition excuse sidekick.
See a pattern emerging? We’ve drifted further from reality as we hide our heads in stories meant to reassure us. Maybe that’s the problem in the real world, too, huh?
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