The Black Echo

Detective fiction developed in the 19th century. As people moved to urban spaces during the Industrial Revolution, cities became denser and anxieties about living next to potential criminals increased. Policemen became a staple of city life for the first time. Then, Edgar Allan Poe invented the classic detective formula in “Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), a short story that begins with a criminal act and then follows a unique individual with exceptional intellectual power solving the mystery. Novels began investigating the psychology behind criminal behavior and valorizing the individuals equipped to puzzle out clues and motives; Victorian fiction features detectives such as Charles Dickens’s Inspector Bucket from Bleak House (1853), Wilkie Collins’s Franklin Blake from The Moonstone (1868), and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories (1880s-1910s). These works tend to focus on personal conflicts in upper-class settings and showcase the brilliance of the detective’s deductive powers.

While the whodunnit stayed the main form of detective fiction in Europe thanks in part to the popularity of authors Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, a hardboiled version of the genre evolved in the United States in the first half of the 20th century. Prohibition laws led to the rise of organized crime, while distrust in government called for fiction featuring heroes with moral codes stricter than the law. Authors like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler shifted detective fiction to working-class settings; their novels reveal criminal conspiracies that tend to implicate corrupt institutions rather than singular bad guys. These works also tend to showcase the detective’s ethical superiority, emotional intuition, jaded cynicism, and doggedness, rather than intelligence. Often, hardboiled plots end with the rueful understanding that full justice for the powerful and highly connected perpetrators who pull a city’s puppet strings is impossible.

After World War II, detective fiction fractured into various subgenres. However, crime fiction set in Los Angeles took after Chandler’s brand of existentialism, treating modern life as a world gone wrong. The Black Echo is written with Chandler’s legacy in mind; Connelly dresses his novel with cultural artifacts of the 1940s, like early jazz and Edward Hopper’s painting Nighthawks. Like Chandler, Connelly repeatedly uses the Santa Ana winds to signal irrational behavior and highlights the city’s geography. Like Chandler’s famous detective character Philip Marlowe, Harry Bosch is ethically superior to everyone around him, follows his intuition, and crusades for the truth at the expense of his career and personal life. Even Eleanor Wish harkens back to the 1930s and 1940s stock figure of the femme fatale: the woman who uses her femininity to control the men around her.