Today the private detective will also investigate insurance claims or handle divorce cases, but his primary function remains what it has always been, to assist those who have money in their unending struggle with those who have not.
It is from this unpromising background that the fictional private detective was recruited.

The mythological private eye differs from his counterpart in real life in two essential ways.
On the one hand, he does not work for a large agency, but is almost always self-employed.
As a free-lance investigator, the fictional detective is responsible to no one but himself and his client.
For this reason, he appears as an independent and self-reliant figure, whose rugged individualism need not be pressed into the mold of a 9 to 5 routine.
On the other hand, the fictional detective does not break strikes or handle divorce cases;
no client would ever think of asking him to do such things.
Whatever his original assignment, the fictional private eye ends up by investigating and solving a crime, usually a murder.
Operating as a one man police force in fact if not in name, he is at once more independent and more dedicated than the police themselves.
He catches criminals not merely because he is paid to do so (frequently he does not receive a fee at all), but because he enjoys his work, because he firmly believes that murder must be punished.
Thus the fictional detective is much more than a simple businessman.
He is, first and foremost, a defender of public morals, a servant of society.

It is this curious blend of rugged individualism and public service which accounts for the great appeal of the mythological detective.
By virtue of his self-reliance, his individualism and his freedom from external restraint, the private eye is a perfect embodiment of the middle class conception of liberty, which amounts to doing what you please and let the devil take the hindmost.
At the same time, because the personal code of the detective coincides with the legal dictates of his society, because he likes to catch criminals, he is in middle class eyes a virtuous man.
In this way, the private detective gets the best of two possible worlds.
He is an individualist but not an anarchist;
he is a public servant but not a cop.
In short, the fictional private eye is a specialized version of Adam Smith's ideal entrepreneur, the man whose private ambitions must always and everywhere promote the public welfare.
In the mystery story, as in The Wealth of Nations, individualism and the social good are two sides of the same benevolent coin.

There is only one catch to this idyllic arrangement: Adam Smith was wrong.
Not only did the ideal entrepreneur not produce the greatest good for the greatest number, he ended by destroying himself, by giving birth to monopoly capitalism.
The rise of the giant corporations in Western Europe and the United States dates from the period 1880-1900.
Now, although the roots of the mystery story in serious literature go back as far as Balzac, Dickens, and Poe, it was not until the closing decades of the 19th century that the private detective became an established figure in popular fiction.
Sherlock Holmes, the ancestor of all private eyes, was born during the 1890s.
Thus the transformation of Adam Smith's ideal entrepreneur into a mythological detective coincides closely with the decline of the real entrepreneur in economic life.
Driven from the marketplace by the course of history, our hero disguises himself as a private detective.
The birth of the myth compensates for the death of the ideal.

Even on the fictional level, however, the contradictions which give rise to the mystery story are not fully resolved.
The individualism and public service of the private detective both stem from his dedication to a personal code of conduct: he enforces the law without being told to do so.
The private eye is therefore a moral man;
but his morality rests upon that of his society.
The basic premise of all mystery stories is that the distinction between good and bad coincides with the distinction between legal and illegal.
Unfortunately, this assumption does not always hold good.
As capitalism in the 20th century has become increasingly dependent upon force and violence for its survival, the private detective is placed in a serious dilemma.
If he is good, he may not be legal;
if he is legal, he may not be good.
It is the gradual unfolding and deepening of this contradiction which creates the inner dialectic of the evolution of the mystery story.

With the advent of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, the development of the modern private detective begins.
Sherlock Holmes is not merely an individualist;
he is very close to being a mental case.
A brief list of the great detective's little idiosyncrasies would provide Dr. Freud with ample food for thought.
Holmes is addicted to the use of cocaine and other refreshing stimulants;
he is prone to semi-catatonic trances induced by the playing of the vioiln;
he is a recluse, an incredible egotist, a confirmed misogynist.
Holmes rebels against the social conventions of his day not on moral but rather on aesthetic grounds.
His eccentricity begins as a defense against boredom.
It was in order to avoid the stuffy routine of middle class life that Holmes became a detective in the first place.
As he informs Watson, "My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of existence.
These little problems help me to do so".
Holmes is a public servant, to be sure;
but the society which he serves bores him to tears.

The curious relationship between Holmes and Scotland Yard provides an important clue to the deeper significance of his eccentric behavior.
Although he is perfectly willing to cooperate with Scotland Yard, Holmes has nothing but contempt for the intelligence and mentality of the police.
They for their part are convinced that Holmes is too "unorthodox" and "theoretical" to make a good detective.
Why do the police find Holmes "unorthodox"?
On the face of it, it is because he employs deductive techniques alien to official police routine.
Another, more interesting explanation, is hinted at by Watson when he observes on several occasions that Holmes would have made a magnificent criminal.
The great detective modestly agrees.
Watson's insight is verified by the mysterious link between Holmes and his arch-opponent, Dr. Moriarty.
The two men resemble each other closely in their cunning, their egotism, their relentlessness.
The first series of Sherlock Holmes adventures ends with Holmes and Moriarty grappling together on the edge of a cliff.
They are presumed to have plunged to a common grave in this fatal embrace.
Linked to Holmes even in death, Moriarty represents the alter-ego of the great detective, the image of what our hero might have become were he not a public servant.
Just as Holmes the eccentric stands behind Holmes the detective, so Holmes the potential criminal lurks behind both.

In the modern English "whodunnit", this insinuation of latent criminality in the detective himself has almost entirely disappeared.
Hercule Poirot and Lord Peter Whimsey (the respective creations of Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers) have retained Holmes' egotism but not his zest for life and eccentric habits.
Poirot and his counterparts are perfectly respectable people;
it is true that they are also extremely dull.
Their dedication to the status quo has been affirmed at the expense of the fascinating but dangerous individualism of a Sherlock Holmes.
The latter's real descendents were unable to take root in England;
they fled from the Victorian parlor and made their way across the stormy Atlantic.
In the American "hardboiled" detective story of the '20s and '30s, the spirit of the mad genius from Baker Street lives on.

Like Holmes, the American private eye rejects the social conventions of his time.
But unlike Holmes, he feels his society to be not merely dull but also corrupt.
Surrounded by crime and violence everywhere, the "hardboiled" private eye can retain his purity only through a life of self-imposed isolation.
His alienation is far more acute than Holmes';
he is not an eccentric but rather an outcast.
With Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe, alienation is represented on a purely physical plane.
Wolfe refuses to ever leave his own house, and spends most of his time drinking beer and playing with orchids.
More profound and more disturbing, however, is the moral isolation of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe.
In a society where everything is for sale, Marlowe is the only man who cannot be bought.
His tough honesty condemns him to a solitary and difficult existence.
Beaten, bruised and exhausted, he pursues the elusive killer through the demi-monde of high society and low morals, always alone, always despised.
In the end, he gets his man, but no one seems to care;
virtue is its own and only reward.
A similar tone of underlying futility and despair pervades the spy thrillers of Eric Ambler and dominates the most famous of all American mystery stories, Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon.
Sam Spade joins forces with a band of adventurers in search of a priceless jeweled statue of a falcon;
but when the bird is found at last, it turns out to be a fake.
Now the detective must save his own skin by informing on the girl he loves, who is also the real murderer.
For Sam Spade, neither crime nor virtue pays;
moreover, it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between the two.

Because the private eye intends to save society in spite of himself, he invariably finds himself in trouble with the police.
The latter are either too stupid to catch the killer or too corrupt to care.
In either case, they do not appreciate the private detective's zeal.
Perry Mason and Hamilton Burger, Nero Wolfe and Inspector Cramer spend more time fighting each other than they do in looking for the criminal.
Frequently enough, the police are themselves in league with the killer;
Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest provides a classic example of this theme.
But even when the police are honest, they do not trust the private eye.
He is, like Phillip Marlowe, too alienated to be reliable.
Finally, in The Maltese Falcon among others, the clash between detective and police is carried to its logical conclusion: Sam Spade becomes the chief murder suspect.
In order to exonerate himself, he is compelled to find the real criminal, who happens to be his girl friend.
What was only a vague suspicion in the case of Sherlock Holmes now appears as a direct accusation: the private eye is in danger of turning into his opposite.

It is the growing contradiction between individualism and public service in the mystery story which creates this fatal dilemma.
By upholding his own personal code of behavior, the private detective has placed himself in opposition to a society whose fabric is permeated with crime and corruption.
That society responds by condemning the private eye as a threat to the status quo, a potential criminal.
If the detective insists upon retaining his personal standards, he must now do so in conscious defiance of his society.
He must, in short, cease to be a detective and become a rebel.
On the other hand, if he wishes to continue in his chosen profession, he must abandon his own code and sacrifice his precious individualism.
Dashiell Hammett resolved this contradiction by ceasing to write mystery stories and turning to other pursuits.
His successors have adopted the opposite alternative.
In order to save the mystery story, they have converted the private detective into an organization man.

The first of two possible variations on this theme is symbolized by Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer.
At first glance, this hero seems to be more rather than less of an individualist than any of his predecessors.
For Hammer, nothing is forbidden.
He kills when he pleases, takes his women where he finds them and always acts as judge, jury and executioner rolled into one.