Public morality from a private eye.

During an academic conference two years back, I was sitting at the dinner table with a small cluster of Catholic ethicists discussing contemporary moral questions and critiquing the work of several authors when one of my tablemates-aninternationally renowned theologian-turned to ask who l was reading that summer. Given the setting (and my desperate need at that point for a tenure-track teaching position), I probably should have fished up the names of a couple of serious academics and their recent tomes. But we had been hard at the work of scholarly ethics since breakfast, and the sudden arrival of coffee and dessert made me think it was time to shift gears into something more playful.

"Sue Grafton," I said. "She has a new Kinsey Milhone mystery out. And I've been reading a couple of Tony Hillerman's latest stories about Inspector Joe Leaphom and Sergeant Jim Chee."

Without missing a beat the professor from Berkeley arched her brows and smiled with genuine pleasure. "Sue Grafton? I love her! But you really should try Sara Paretsky. Her V. I. Warshawski is the gutsiest investigator I've ever read. She makes Robert B. Parker's Spenser look like a wimp!"

"Spenser? He is a wimp," chimed in a theologian from Loyola. "Have you tried James Lee Burke? He has a New Orleans ex-cop named Dave Robicheaux, who's sort of a cross between John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee and Lawrence Block's Matthew Scudder."

And so for the next 90 minutes we chatted away over cheesecake and decaf, animatedly comparing the courage, brains, and wry wit of our favorite gumshoes, reminding me once again that while detective stories are regularly scorned as low-grade pulp, these mysteries remain the most pervasive and popular genre of modern literature-outselling all competitors and getting translated into languages from Arabic to Zulu. As the books that nobody wants to admit they've read, they would hardly fit Mark Twain's ironic definition of a literary classic.

It doesn't seem odd that detective stories would be such a hit with a group of academic theologians. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes brought an empirical analysis, deductive logic, and scientific method to his work that would have been the envy of any academic researcher.

But it struck me as particularly apt that the detective-story junkies around the dinner table that night were ethicists. For these tales are a lot more about morality than mortality. In spite of the ample portions of gin, guns, and gore served up in such stories, murder mysteries are actually a good deal more than mere thrillers or puzzlers. In the hands of a skilled novelist, such as P. D. James, they are meditations on the nature of good and evil. That strikes me as a pretty fair definition of morality.

In the best detective mysteries, we are confronted with a two-story morality play about crime and punishment. On the surface these tales are about the detective's effort to solve a murder, uncover the motive, means, and identity of the killer (a jealous Colonel Mustard in the library with the candlestick), and bring the said culprit to justice.

It is this level of mystery that usually provides the page-turning and nail-biting thrills that keep us up past our bedtimes. But if puzzles are the only thing going on in these adventures, there is little reason to reread them, and once solved they can be discarded like a flat soda.

When, however, their creators are more than just hacks, these detectives are tangling with a vastly weightier, deadlier mystery. Trolling around in the shadowy basements of our pysches and societies, the best of these lonely shamuses try to unmask the nature of evil itself. Like dark confessor of the human soul, thoughtful detectives are after more than Mrs. Green's motive for poisoning her daughter-in-law. They're looking for something in the human psyche (or family tree or gene pool) that drives all the Mr. and Mrs. Greens to such violence.

So when we spend a couple hundred pages looking over the shoulders of Spenser, Kinsey Milhone, Lew Archer, Jim Chee, and Dave Robicheaux, we're not just learning about their preferred pistol, pilsner, or-among the new yuppie breed-pasta. We're being introduced to the moral universe they inhabit and to the geography of right and wrong in that shadowy world. Poring over their case files, composite sketches of good and evil begin to form in our minds, and we start to develop a sense of what is permitted and forbidden in the terrain of these modern morality plays.

Maybe, then, we ought to do a little investigating of our own, an examination of the gumshoe conscience. Perhaps we should look into the moral lessons we are getting from our favorite investigators and ask whether or not their ethical advice fits with our larger experience and our faith. What are they telling us about the struggle between good and evil, and about morality itself? Is it credible? Let's take a peek.

Edgar Allen Poe created the detective story with his 1841 tale "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," making the genre an American invention. But it wasn't until Dashiell Hammett introduced hard-boiled operatives, such as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, that detective mysteries became a truly American icon. For the four decades before ex-Pinkerton agent Hammett began writing stories for Black Mask magazine in 1929, murder mysteries had been held hostage by British puzzle masters and their slavish American imitators. Beginning with Conan Doyle's 1887 A Study in Scarlet, British creations, such as Sherlock Holmes, G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown, and Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, set the standard for crime fiction: employing brilliant ratiocination to solve brainteasing parlor murders. "Elementary, my dear Watson" became the voice of the detective. So it was only when Hammett introduced the tough, wise cracking private eye and-as Raymond Chandler later put it-"gave murder back to the people who commit it" that the detective story finally found a form and voice as American as baseban and jazz.

Written with a gritty realism evocative of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the early detective stories of Hammett and his two most famous successors were extra-dry martinis made up of equal portions of sex, violence, and snappy back talk, savagely mixed and poured over a seamy urban sprawl. The detectives in these stories were not the amateur gentlemen, lady gardeners, or police inspectors of the British puzzlers but came across as hard, dangerous mensmart-talking cynics with a taste for beautiful women, hard liquor, and smoking pistols. Confirmed bachelors or divorced ex-cops, these loners never seemed to be able to bite their tongues, settle down with a wife, or cozy up to the local law. Still, in spite of their blemishes and flaws, these wisecracking errant knights were always finding work walking into dark corners or taking beatings for damsels and other distressed souls, and their fast-paced stories were giving birth to a hugely popular genre of American fiction.

It didn't take long for their success to start breeding waves and then generations of imitators, and 65 years after Sam Spade first appeared in The Maltese Falcon, detective fiction is still a growth industry. With that growth and the passage of the years, however, there have been some changes, so that although many of today's private eyes bear a resemblance to the tough talking California loners of the '30s and '40s, not very many of them would still be played by Humphrey Bogart. To start with, a number of the new-and toughest-detectives are women, and if female operatives such as Sara Paretsky's V. I. Warshawski and Sue Grafton's Kinsey Milhone resemble any backtalking '40s stars, they would probably be Lauren Bacall and Katherine Hepburn, not Bogie.

And as Charles Nicol noted in a 1987 Harper's article "The Hard-Boiled Go To Brunch," lifestyle changes have also come to the genre. Tobacco and hard liquor, once the staples of the detective diet,are way down-indeed, Matt Scudder and Dave Robicheaux spend half their time looking for the next AA meeting-and when alcohol does show up in these stories, it's usually some microbrewery ale.

Still, though Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe might find all the Perrier and jogging suits a bit strange, the basic plot lines of contemporary detective stories would be familiar territory for them. Hard-boiled or quiche, the current crop of peepers share a common moral vision with their predecessors. At the heart of all these stories is a fairly brutal struggle be between evil and good, a struggle in which evil is gradually unveiled as a lurking, palpable presence, and good takes the form of the detective's moral character. Evil and character, then, are the twin linchpins of these detective mysteries.

The first thing to note about evil in this type of crime fiction is that it's pervasive. As Marilyn Stasio notes in a 1990 New York Times Book Review article "What's Happened to Heroes Is a Crime,' unlike the British parlor puzzlers where murder is an isolated act that needs only to be uncovered and punished, the "postwar American detective does not assume that crime is an aberration in an otherwise benign and orderly universe... To the modern detective, the law uppears impotent, its minions corrupt, and the universe in chaos." In these stories the crime is often a clue or symbol of a deeper, larger malice-a sacrament of a greater evil. Behind many of the white-collar crimes Paretsky's V. I. Warshawski investigates is widespread greed and indifference to the poor,while Hillerman's Leaphorn and Chee continue to come up against a deep-seated spiritual malaise beneath the violation of sacred Navajo places.

Sometimes the crime in a story leads the detective back to some "original sin" in the branches of the family tree. In nearly all of Ross MacDonald's novels, Lew Archer finds the roots of the current felony in the rotting fruit of some adultery or dishonesty committed in the previous generation. Robert B. Parker's Spenser also spends a lot of his time uncovering and fighting crimes that can be traced to childhood abuse or rescuing adolescents from unfit or sadistic parents. And occasionally Spenser, like Archer before him, pauses to bemoan the collapse of the family and evaporation of the moral ties that bind us to others. Evil is in the shallow narcissism that keep us from making commitments and communities that last or in the stupid cruelty with which we treat those who depend on us.

At other times murder is the result of a deeper social sin, and the felon is a symbol of the corruption embedded in the very culture. The society has become the real criminal. Again and again the detective confronts a malignant presence behind the stage props and spotlights of this New Eden. One can almost smell corruption in the orange-blossom-scented air.

This doesn't mean that the felons in these stories don't bear any responsibility for their misdeeds. After all, these are detective stories, not afternoon talk shows, and murderers are almost always punished for their crimes, sometimes gruesomely. It's just that in these mysteries neither evil nor guilt is so neatly compartmentalized. The good detective is always uncovering ways in which our sins and guilt tie us to each other, stripping us of the illusion of innocence or moral superiority, and calling us to some shared sense of compassion. This occurs most effectively when the detective himself has a sense of his own flaws and complicity.

Along with being a pervasive presence in these stories, evil is also a daunting force to be reckoned with, one that win test much more than the detective's powers of deduction. Again, in the British parlor puzzlers, crime is a brainteasing enigma that requires cool brilliance to be solved. Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, and Hercule Poirot-who are more like clinicians than cops-may have courage or physical strength, but they do not often need them to vanquish the villain. In their world it is brain power that will destroy evil. This is not the case for Spade and his descendants. The evil they face will need to be knocked down and beaten back, and this, as Chandler notes, will not happen "unless some very determined individual makes it his business to see that justice is done."

Thus it is only the tenacity and toughness of the detective that holds evil back from its chosen path, keeping others out of harm's way. That is why the character-the moral character-of these back-talking heroes is so critical to these stories.

Admittedly physical courage is the most obvious virtue of these steely-eyed detectives, but it is integrity that forms the cornerstone of their character. For in spite of a willingness to play fast and loose with the law or to get their hands dirty walking around in some pretty messy moral ambiguities, these wisecracking investigators seek to hold fast to some inner sense of right and wrong, some personal code of ethics.

As Parker notes, "their allegiance is not to the law, but to something else, call it order, a sense of the way things ought to be." Usually this integrity shows up in their unwillingness to be bullied, bought, or seduced off the case, and their commitment to do what they think is right is often contrasted with the dishonesty and betrayal of others.

As a Catholic moralist, I'm attracted to the gumshoe's rich and nuanced sense of evil, strong emphasis on character and virtue, and deep sympathy for the underclass. Back when Hammett and Chandler were inventing hard-boiled fiction, Catholic moral theology was still treating evil like it was the mystery in a British parlor puzzler, and the manuals and catechisms that taught us about sin dwelt almost exclusively on the motive, means, and circumstances of individual acts. There was little or no sense of a larger evil that might be handed down from previous generations or embedded in social structures.

Today, however, Catholic morality, like the modern detective, has a richer grasp of original and social sin and is well on the way to rediscovering the importance of character and virtue. Over the past century, but especially in the last 35 years, Catholic social teachings have reminded us again and again of the need to stand in solidarity with and be advocates for the world's poor and oppressed.

Still, it continues to bother me that so many of these detectives are such loners, and that they are so quick to use violence. In his doctoral dissertation, Spenser's creator Robert B. Parker argued that the modern detective is a reincarnation of the lone frontiersman, Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe being Jolmes Fenimore Cooper's Hawkeye transplanted into an urban wilderness. If so, it's hard to miss a uniquely American connection in all this that ties together the rugged individualism of these private investigators and their willingness to use brutal force. In fact, I think these dark morality plays-whether they mean to or not-remind us of something we read about an too often in the papers-the great propensity loners have for violence. To the profoundly lonely soul, the world can be a radically dangerous place, and violence a very reasonable response.

In a sense, then, that may be the final moral message of these stories, that-as God said in Genesis-it's not good for us to be alone. Being cut off from friends and family and living outside of human communities-these things don't make us stronger-they make us less human. As Tony Hillerman has Joe Leaphorn say in The Blessing Way, the vilest comment you could make about somebody was that "he acted like he had no relatives."

Maybe, then, we need more Navajo detectives reminding us that in the real world the answer to evil isn't to be found in the violence of loners but in building friendships, families, and communities and in the work of reconciliation, compassion, and forgiveness. Elementary, my dear Watson.