As a child, I read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s autobiographical books about pioneer life on the Great Plains many times. Unlike my own turbulent family, the Ingallses were a loving and inventive household.

I was in sixth grade when my parents bought an old farmhouse in the country, and I got to go to a two-room school like the one where Laura studied and later taught. I was in heaven. As an adult, I don’t think I’d do well with the isolation that the Ingallses faced.

Most of us in America don’t do well when the internet goes down or fuel prices go up. But as a nation, we idealise the myth of the loner hero, the cowboy or the Plains family like the Ingallses, who could survive on their own.

No sooner had Europeans begun to tame the vast wilderness in which they found themselves than they began to idealise it.

Our first major literary hero was the intrepid frontiersman in James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking stories, Natty Bumppo, whose adventures New Yorkers and Bostonians devoured. In America today, we seem to prize the self-reliant ideal more than ever.

Alone in our little houses on wheels, we idealise the emotionally self-sufficient hero. This hero either doesn’t marry, or marries someone who leaves him. He deals with tough people but remains chivalrous to ladies, to children, and the disabled.

Raymond Chandler, in thinking about his detective Philip Marlowe, famously described him as a man who goes down the mean streets, but “who is neither tarnished nor afraid”. He is “a man of honour – by instinct, by inevitability, without thought, and certainly without saying it.”

Romantic knights

Chandler thought of Marlowe as a knight. Like all romantic knights, Marlowe takes justice into his own hands. When HL Mencken and George Jean Nathan founded the Black Mask Quarterly in 1920, they created a formal vehicle for bringing this lone figure to the American people. It is the place where Dashiell Hammett and Chandler got their start as writers.

With ‘The Maltese Falcon’, Hammett created a more attractive hero. Sam Spade, like the Continental Op – or Shane – takes justice into his own hands. Spade exhibits the trait that became a hallmark of all subsequent literary private investigators: the intuitive understanding of human motivations.

Many images

Hammett was a complicated figure. Despite a controversial private life that included drinking binges and an uncontested rape charge, Hammett in some ways was Chandler’s ‘man of honour’.

Hammett created raw individualists who cared for nobody. We were supposed to admire their self-sufficiency, not like them. In ‘The Long Goodbye’, Marlowe is tough with Velma, the former night-club singer who betrays her faithful lover and lands him with a murder rap.

But Marlowe protects the virginal Anne Riordan, not even kissing her when she wants him to, because he doesn’t want her moving into the world of the spoiled.

It is the rich and powerful who cause mischief.  They have retreated into their own isolation, a place where they try to use money and power as a shield between themselves and the rest of the world.

In ‘Indemnity Only’, my first novel, which I wrote with a very conscious eye on Chandler, VI Warshawski is in Chicago’s ultra-wealthy North Shore suburbs, talking to the family of a slain banking executive.

After they try to bribe her, she says, “you guys up here on the North Shore live in some kind of dream world. You think you can buy a cover-up for anything that goes wrong in your lives, just like you (have your maid) to clean up (your filth) and carry it outside for you. It doesn’t work that way.”

In a sense, the villains of the private-eye novel are modern cowboys – cowboys gone bad, so to speak.
When I revisit Chandler’s novels, Marlowe’s loneliness stands out in a physically painful way.

My detective couldn’t survive with so much loneliness.  When I started writing, it was in conscious emulation of the private eye myth. But without my planning it, a community began infiltrating my heroine’s life from the start. It’s the hyper-wealthy criminals she meets who are the loners.

Whenever I go to Washington, I stop at the Lincoln memorial and look up at Mr Lincoln’s wise, kind face. I wish he would come back.

We don’t need the reckless cowboys who are galloping across the world’s range today, despoiling it. But we very much need a person who is willing to be that heroic loner, to stand for justice. In the absence of Lincoln, we will have to make do with our private eyes.