detective

‘Chalak’ Om and the Case of the Crawling Man

As chronicled by Dr Vatsan – as one more adventure of the world’s foremost forensic expert.

Preliminary note from Om Prakash’s collaborator, Dr Vatsan:

Those that have followed the exploits of the world’s foremost consulting detective will recall that it is on the website of The Wire that the chronicles of my illustrious friend and colleague, Om Prakash, first appeared. Known to an admiring public as ‘Chalak’ Om on account of his astuteness and acumen in disentangling mysteries, he has had an extended and distinguished career. What follows is one more in the long list of his cases that I have been privileged to record.

As I believe I have had occasion to remark on an earlier occasion, Mr ‘Chalak’ Om of Bekar Street yielded to no-one in his esteem for his illustrious predecessor in the art and science of forensic deduction, Mr Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street. So closely did ‘Chalak’ Om model his methods and his career upon the methods and career of Sherlock Holmes that it must surely be beyond the bounds of coincidence that some of the cases unravelled by the former should so closely parallel ones that had been earlier investigated by the latter.

For, and simply as it happens, if there is a battered old tin dispatch-box in the vaults of Cox & Co. carrying Dr Watson’s account of Sherlock Holmes and The Creeping Man, so is there a battered old tin dispatch-box in the vaults of Kak’s & Co. carrying Dr Vatsan’s account of ‘Chalak’ Om and The Crawling Man. If Dr Watson’s account details the curious affair of Professor Presbury, then Dr Vatsan’s account details that of the not-too-distantly homonymous Professor Preyas Bahari. It is the notes pertaining to this latter case that I draw upon in seeking to present, in what follows, the singular events concerning the Professor, his wife, and his cat – bearing in mind, at all times, my friend’s injunction to preserve the utmost tact and discretion that would be called for in the telling of such a tale.

Upon one of those unpleasantly humid mornings of late August of the year 2024, ‘Chalak’ Om and I had just finished our breakfast (he before he had started it, and I after 16 of our landlady’s delicious dosas), when there was a peal upon the door of our barsati at B221, and Mrs Hardhan ushered in a very nervous and daunted-looking woman. She was, in my estimation, in her mid-forties, and despite the soothing and matronly ways which were Mrs Hardhan’s wont in her dealings with disturbed clients, it was clear that our visitor was in a distraught state of mind. Barely had she been invited by Om to seat herself than she burst out in a high-pitched voice: “Oh Mr Om, tell me, what must I do to prevent my husband from throwing his coffee cup at me again?”

“Do not distress yourself, madam,” said Om in his customary reassuring manner.

“Pray gather yourself together, and tell us, without omitting any detail small or large, what has led up to your decision to hurry out of your home to seek our urgent assistance. Tut, it is no great mental feat to deduce haste: the smudged mascara and lipstick tell their own story.”

And with that, Om lit one of his interminable Langar Chhap bidis, leant back on his seat, closed his eyes, and steepled his fingers as the smoke from his bidi swirled about his head.

“I apologise for my earlier outburst, Mr Om,” said our visitor in a calmer voice.

“I shall attempt to present my case as coherently as possible. You should know then that I am the unhappy wife of Preyas Bahari, Professor of Economics at the University—“.

“Pray forgive the interruption, Mrs Bahari. I find it helps me enormously to have some details about the individuals involved in a case. My eternal help in these matters is the good old Index! If you please, Vatsan – ah, thank you! What have we here? Babita the housewife who administered arsenic in her husband’s paratha; Babubhai the broker who crashed the Stock Exchange; and here – Bahari (Preyas), Professor of Economics, author of many articles on the Indian economy;…publications in Journal of Data Manipulation, Quarterly Review of Dodgy Statistics, Studies in Economics Spin; …, pieces in the popular press; …widely celebrated in official circles for demonstrating that poverty in India has been eliminated and for establishing, with what Martin Gardner would call economeritricious rigour, that India’s unemployment rate is actually negative! An ambitious man, would you say, madam?”

“Indeed yes, Mr Om,” said our client, flushing with pride.

“Aiming for the Nobel Prize – that sort of thing?”

“Oh no, Mr Om, not that sort of thing at all. Rather, he would like to move out of the stuffy trappings of academics and into a position of power in Government, whence he hopes, by dint of working hard to please his masters, to move up the bureaucratic ladder so that he can seek and find his place in a plum assignment with the International Minatory Fund or the World Bunkum where, I am given to understand – even if I cannot quite put a figure on it – that the pensions are, you know – ”

“Quite,” said ‘Chalak’ Om drily. “Pray continue.”

“You should know that my husband and I had slipped into the somewhat formulaic routine, at the daily breakfast table, of my asking him if the morning paper had anything of interest to offer, and his responding with a non-committal grunt. A few days ago, however, he reacted to my question by rubbing his palms together and displaying what I thought was a distinctly anticipatory gleam in his eye. He did not, of course, bother to elaborate, being a man of few words. But just a couple of days later, and in response to my routine question, he snarled and hurled his coffee-cup at me, which I succeeded in dodging in the nick of time so that it missed me but found instead his favourite framed portrait of the Economics Minister, now damaged by coffee stains and causing him to get into an even worse frame of mind. Is my husband going mad, Mr Om? What explains his throwing the coffee cup at me? Must I endure this every morning for the rest of my life?”

“Pray be precise as to detail: the dates, madam, the dates! On which day did the happy response occur, and on which day the angry one?”

“I have heard of your passion for detail, Mr Om,” said our client, “so that though I was in a hurry when I left my home, I remembered to pick up the newspapers of August 22 and August 24 when the two events occurred. Here are the papers.”

“Splendid, Mrs Bahari, splendid – I could not have asked for a more perfect client!” Om went through the proffered newspapers rapidly, and when he looked up again, no one but I, the one man who knew every variation of his mood and temper, could have sensed in him that excitement which comes from discovery, however suppressed its external manifestation.

Also read: The Return of ‘Chalak’ Om: The Adventure of the Media Vampire

“Today is the 25th, and the cup-throwing incident has occurred just once: yesterday. It seems to me that you are unduly worried about the possibility of its indefinite recurrence. But to get down to the reason for why it happened: I would like you to try and recall everything of even a slightly odd nature that might have occurred between the 22nd and the 24th of August.”

“I do not know if this is of any great significance, but I believe I should mention what occurred on the night of August 23rd or early morning of August 24th. Before I come to that, you should know that my husband is a generally sound sleeper, and often fails to awaken even when Chipku settles on his stomach in the middle of the night – oh, I should have explained, Mr Om: Chipku is our cat, who sleeps with us. A clingy, huggy, darling cat, who loves her food and can hardly be separated from it –”

“No doubt all of this is of the greatest general interest, madam, not to say of particular gratification for lovers of feline pets,” said Om with some asperity, “but may I request you to proceed with a focus on the principal and relevant aspects of your account?”

“I thought you wanted me to omit no detail however slight,” replied our visitor, with a touch of petulance. “But to resume: my husband, as I said, is a generally sound sleeper who scarcely gets out of bed during the course of the night, so you will conceive of my astonishment when, in response to a scuffling sound, I got up from my sleep, only to find that my husband was not in bed. When I switched on the flash of my mobile phone, I discovered him crouched by the foot of the desk at which he often works. When I asked to know what he was doing there, he replied peevishly that it was all my fault for keeping Chipku’s Miaow biscuits on the desk: he said that the packet containing the biscuits had listed over, scattering a lot of them on the floor, and that he had been gathering them up and returning them to the packet from which they had spilled out. I asked him to get back into bed, which he did, sullenly. I should have thought no more of this if it were not for his wholly uncharacteristic broken sleep and even more uncharacteristic concern for spilt biscuits in the middle of the night, taken together with the incident of the coffee cup on the following morning.”

“And where,” enquired Om, “was – er – Chipku when all of this was happening?”

“Why, in bed, between me and my husband, where she always sleeps.”

“That is most suggestive.”

“Are you drawing attention to some peculiar feature of the case, Om?” asked I.

“To the curious incident of the cat in the night-time.”

“But the cat did nothing in the night-time.”

“That,” remarked Om, “is the curious incident. I have been given to understand that the beast is a glutt – that is to say, something of an epicure. How is it that she failed to attack the biscuits the moment they spilt over on to the floor? There is no mystery: no biscuits ever spilt over. That was sheer bluff on the part of your husband, Mrs Bahari. Tell me, did you have occasion to examine the pajamas he slept in that night?”

“Yes, I did, before the pajamas went into the washing machine.”

“And were the pajamas scuffed and somewhat dirty at the knees?”

“Yes, Mr Om!”

“Ah! The ‘case’, such as it is, is solved.”

“Please tell me, Mr Om, that my cup-hurling husband is not a psychopath!”

‘That he certainly is not. But then again, he is something only a little less unsettling than a psychopath, to wit: a sycophant. Let me explain. If you had bothered to examine the newspapers of the 22nd and 24th of August before rushing over to consult me, you would not have failed to observe these two notices that your husband has circled in red. The first, appearing on the 22nd, announces a scheme for lateral entry into government involving the hiring of some 45 candidates under the auspices of the Union Public Service Commission. Hence the rubbing of the palms and the gleam in the eye at breakfast on the morning of the 22nd; with his record of spinning nice stories about the state of the economy, he thought a Joint Secretaryship – and everything else that that would entail – was a cinch. But after the Opposition’s objection to the scheme, and its swift withdrawal via a notice published in the newspapers on the 24th (here it is, circled by your husband), things changed drastically for him: hence the snarl and the hurled cup of coffee. On the night of the 23rd, what you found your husband doing – and this is testified to by the state of his pajamas at the knees – was crawling. He was practising what he intended to do for his bureaucratic and political masters, once he was appointed as Joint Secretary, up until the time he secured that prized job at the IMF or the World Bank. Madam, be assured that even if your husband should be in something of a bad mood for the next few days, he will overcome his disappointment in due course. After all, you cannot expect to keep a good sycophant down for ever. Sooner or later there should be other opportunities for inappropriate backdoor entries.”

With that, I saw a somewhat relieved, if also considerably chastened, Mrs Bahari to the door. As I turned around, ‘Chalak’ Om said: “Now that the case has been brought to a satisfactory conclusion, what say you, my dear Vatsan, to the prospect of lunch at the dhaba round the corner? They serve a mean baingan ka bharta there, and the price should suit us. That is surely no trivial consideration. For, despite whatever various Crawling Men may have to say about poverty and hunger and inflation and unemployment in the country today, for many of hoi polloi (which includes you and me), the wolf is never very far from the door!”

Athur Kannan Thayil is a Chennai-based economist who sometimes writes under the name of S. Subramanian.

In ‘Jaane Jaan’, Director Sujoy Ghosh Tries Too Hard to Impress His Audience But Fails to Engage

Inspired by a Japanese detective novel, the film fails to work on the little details and concentrates too much on style.

Director Sujoy Ghosh has always been a curious case for Hindi cinema. Gloriously nutty to be dismissed [even in misfires like his recent Lust Stories 2 segment], and yet undercooked during several key moments. A great grip over the air he creates in scenes, but also an imitative quality that seems to have set in since his first ‘blockbuster’ in Kahaani (2012). Since Vidya Balan pulled the rug from under all of us, more than a decade ago, Ghosh has made one sequel, remade a Spanish thriller, and now followed it up with another adaptation of a popular novel, The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino – who was also the inspiration behind Vasan Bala’s Monica! O My Darling (2022).

Jaane Jaan – borrowing its name from the haunting Laxmikant-Pyarelal number, sung by Lata Mangeshkar and filmed on Helen in Inteqam (1969) – ends up more of as an acting showcase [for at least two of its three leads] rather than the detective piece it is meant to be. The premise of Higashino’s novel also served as source material for the wildly successful Drishyam franchise. One wonders if Ghosh is going to mine the same source material and if so, what else will he bring to it. A fresh point-of-view? Some smart choices that subvert the audience’s expectations in important scenes? Unfortunately, very little in Jaane Jaan feels born out of love.

Sujoy Ghosh’s fingerprints are all over this adaptation – and it is visible in some very deliberate choices. Like the way he weaponises his protagonist’s femininity. It has been a recurring theme since the first Kahaani and in Badla, where he recast the male protagonist with Taapsee Pannu. It makes the divorced single mother of Maya D’Souza (Kareena Kapoor Khan) almost tailor-made for Ghosh’s oeuvre. The film is set in misty Kalimpong – where everything appears hazier than usual – which is another one of Ghosh’s favourites. Kahaani 2 (2016) was partly shot here as well.

Maya and her daughter, Tara, are neighbours to Naren (a scene-stealing Jaideep Ahlawat) – a gifted-but-depressed Math teacher at a local high school. Maya runs a cafe, Naren goes there every morning to collect his egg fried rice to carry as his lunch. Maya’s colleague at the cafe – a wasted Lin Laishram – is relegated to giggling like a teenager each time Naren enters the cafe. They know Naren likes Maya, they tell her. She dismisses them, even though she sees his blushing pockmarked face everyday. “Like the sun,” as a character says at one point.

Just when Maya, Tara and Naren’s world seems almost too blissful, a shadow lurks. Maya’s ex-husband (Saurabh Sachdeva) returns and you can immediately see the trauma he has inflicted, with a single expression on Maya’s face. A crime is committed, a body needs to be disposed of. It’s an interestingly staged scene of crime, one that isn’t clinically premeditated, but one that’s slowly built towards, concluding with a few seconds of anguish and desperation. Kapoor-Khan is excellent in the scene – conveying the feeling of being violated by a man’s mere presence, and remaining tactful, as her observant neighbour comes to check up on her as a corpse lies in her living room.

It is a superb mix of actors – Kapoor-Khan known for her starry charisma is supposed to take on the more studied styles of Vijay Varma and Ahlawat. On paper, it is a combination made in heaven. However, it rarely lives up to its potential. An awkwardness remains between the three actors – the performances never blending in together, instead remaining as three distinct elements at the end of a scene. Naren’s mathematical analogies feel forced and amateurish in some scenes. Most of these scenes feel tentative – uncertain of ‘how much math is too much math?’ for the blockbuster audience. Vijay Varma – rarely trusted with such ‘positive’ characters – smartly employs his charming, rom-com lead persona as a front to uncover the rot beneath the surface.

A major problem with Sujoy Ghosh’s Jaane Jaan – even while perfectly ‘consumable’ and ‘engaging’ in the moment with good moodiness and lovely actors – never becomes particularly memorable. A ‘reveal’, two-thirds into the film, about why Naren has been helping Maya and Tara – never really hits you with a wallop of unexpected warmth in a cold film like this. It is apparent from the first scene itself. The inter-cutting of an interrogation with a martial arts duel feels like the film is trying too hard to draw attention to its craft. The visual language seems to have a severe Japanese manga hangover, Avik Mukhopadhyay’s frames trying hard to mimic those panels. It feels vacuously stylish in more than one place.

Not every detective drama needs to reinvent the wheel like Park Chan-wook did in Decision To Leave (2022). It is possible to remain faithful to the tropes and still end up with a respectable and compelling film. Jaane Jaan seems obsessed with delivering catharsis to its audience, without caring about how it gets there. A detective story that doesn’t care about the little details, is arguably one of the most agonising viewing experiences. Sujoy Ghosh is still in nowhereland.

Reinventing Literary Form: Olga Tokarczuk’s ‘Tender Narrator’ in Our Times

In ‘Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead’, the author opens up space for the mystery novel to become a vehicle for social commentary and a critique of prevalent socio-political and ecological ills.

Can the inarticulate denizens of the natural world—the deer, the magpies, the white foxes, even the beetles—become characters with agency, even in a non-fabulist story seemingly about crime? The ‘tender narrator’ of Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2009, trans. 2018) achieves this difficult feat, as we shall see in this review essay. Indeed, the recent conferral of Emerging Europe’s Artistic Achievement for 2020 to Tokarczuk for her concept of the ‘tender narrator’, presented in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech is a fitting tribute to this important writer who has enlivened the discourse on literary form and the modes of narration possible in the novel.

Olga Tokarczuk
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
Riverhead, 2019

The conventional murder mystery, with its clue-puzzle structure, suspense and technique of withholding information until the final disclosure of the criminal’s identity (confirming the detective’s ratiocinative prowess), has been subjected to a variety of creative modifications since the advent of the genre with Edgar Allan Poe’s introduction of the sleuth C. Auguste Dupin in the story ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841). Agatha Christie’s technically innovative The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) and Endless Night (1967) introduced the device of narrator as criminal. The conventions of the genre have been further transformed by masters such as Jorge Luis Borges (in his story ‘Death and the Compass’ (1944, trans. 1954)), with a redirection from epistemological questions (whodunit) to ontological questions (who am I/what is the nature of being?).

The decoding of the narration of the story of the crime (with its inevitable gaps and omissions) and the subsequent investigation of the ‘real’ sequence of events by the detective (see Tzvetan Todorov’s ‘The Typology of Detective Fiction’) has often hinged on the presence of an inept or unreliable narrator. For instance, think of the Watson figure in Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective fiction, reconfigured by Christie in the above cited atypical mystery novels. The reader then joins in this activity of detection as reading against the grain of the narrator’s description, filling in the missing elements en route to a resolution of the mystery. Furthermore, such experimentation with form has opened space for the mystery novel to become a vehicle for social commentary and a critique of prevalent socio-political and ecological ills, as we find in the case of Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.

Tokarczuk launches a wide-ranging critique of the institutional hypocrisies that permit the indiscriminate hunting of animals and generalised indifference to the violation of animal rights in this book, which also features a number of unsolved murders of human beings. The vehicle for this is Janina Dusejko, an elderly astrologist and narrator, resident of a remote part of the Polish countryside who plays a pivotal role in the discovery of the series of crimes. Her anger at the cruelty underpinning the practice of hunting is fuelled in part by a sensibility moulded by the poetry of William Blake and a first-hand perception of the damage being done to the environment by the human species, eventually leading up to the unusual denouement. Her narration, as a person deemed eccentric and even a mad old woman by the authorities and many in the community, shapes our sense of the unfolding of the grim sequence of events, with an undercurrent of black humour.

As Tokarczuk says in her 2018 acceptance speech:

“Tenderness is the art of personifying, of sharing feelings, and thus endlessly discovering similarities. Creating stories means constantly bringing things to life, giving an existence to all the tiny pieces of the world that are represented by human experiences, the situations people have endured and their memories. Tenderness personalises everything to which it relates, making it possible to give it a voice, to give it the space and the time to come into existence, and to be expressed. It is thanks to tenderness that the teapot starts to talk. Tenderness is the most modest form of love. It is the kind of love that does not appear in the scriptures or the gospels, no one swears by it, no one cites it. It has no special emblems or symbols, nor does it lead to crime, or prompt envy.”

Tokarczuk’s ‘tender narrator’ is nicely embodied in the novel earlier cited. However, Janina lacks complete self-knowledge and is not an omniscient narrator. The extension of sympathies into the realm of society and nature, without idealization, that George Eliot espoused, as a key function of art, is exemplified here (as in Eliot’s Middlemarch, 1872). On occasion, this hyper-empathy for the ‘other’ tilts into absurdity as Janina’s quest for justice unravels. The influence of Blake is pervasive as well, especially his outrage at man’s infringements on the autonomy of the natural world and criticism of the propensity to think in dualistic terms. Blake’s poetic vision suffuses the novel, from the title to the epigraphs to each chapter.

For instance, the title is taken from ‘The Proverbs of Hell’, from Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93). As Alok Bhalla points out, in this poem Blake makes a scathing indictment of institutionalized heaven and its representatives, the ‘Angels’ in the aristocracy, church and clergy, in the name of the poor and ordinary, the ‘Devils’ consigned to Hell as outsiders. The specific context of Polish history and the years of genocidal violence whose legacy is still being reckoned with may be a further reason for invoking Blake’s line “Drive your cart and plough through the bones of the dead”, since, in many ways, the task of moving beyond a history of extreme violence still remains incomplete. This is echoed in the novel in the depiction of pits with bones strewn in them, a reference to the fate of the Polish Jews, also a possible metaphor for narrow self-interest rather a sense of connectedness with the universe.

Janina helps a friend translate Blake’s poetry into Polish, encompassing the vision underpinning his work and literalizing it in her own crusade. In the process, a subtle critique of the era of the Anthropocene comes to the fore. For the notion of the tender narrator, in Tokarczuk’s rendering, does not preclude the possibility of nemesis visited upon those responsible for excesses damaging the very basis for human existence. There is a dystopic vision of the present in the book’s concluding chapters, with the fraying of ties and isolation of those who possess the ability to make deeper connections with the ecosphere.

Polish Novelist Olga Tokarczuk. Photo: Reuters

Despite this, the novel exemplifies a blurring of boundaries between kinds of literature, as poetry meets the whodunit, and the parable meets the existential novel. We do move beyond overused first-person narration, as critically debunked in Tokarczuk’s Nobel acceptance speech, to a mode of narration that gives a voice to outsiders, as well as to the otherwise voiceless dogs, deer, magpies, white foxes (and beetles) that appear intriguingly in the text.

Straightforward resolution may no longer be possible, in this new mode of narration of genocidal violence and trauma as well as the resistance to and countering of lingering effects. Instead the ‘fourth-person’ narrator that Tocarczuk postulates in her acceptance speech steps out of the horizon of all the characters, generating the likelihood of restoration of the multiplicity of stories and modes of storytelling.

This becomes a crucial avenue of resistance in the age of relentless climate change – also, we might add, the time of pandemics, rising authoritarianism and consequent fragmentation of human connectedness in the name of the public good. Regardless, the murder mystery will never be the same as a result of Tokarczuk’s deployment of the tender narrator in this distinctive novel.

Tarun K. Saint is an independent scholar and writer. He is the author of Witnessing Partition: Memory, History, Fiction, based on his doctoral dissertation.

How the ‘Good Guy With a Gun’ Became a Deadly American Fantasy

The archetype can be traced back to 1920s detective fiction, when gruff, gun-toting, cigarette-smoking mavericks became heroic figures.

At the end of May, it happened again. A mass shooter killed 12 people, this time at a municipal centre in Virginia Beach. Employees had been forbidden to carry guns at work, and some lamented that this policy had prevented “good guys” from taking out the shooter.

This trope – “the good guy with a gun” – has become commonplace among gun rights activists.

Where did it come from?

On December 21, 2012 – one week after Adam Lanza shot and killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut – National Rifle Association executive vice president Wayne LaPierre announced during a press conference that “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

Ever since then, in response to each mass shooting, pro-gun pundits, politicians and social media users parrot some version of the slogan, followed by calls to arm the teachers, arm the churchgoers or arm the office workers. And whenever an armed citizen takes out a criminal, conservative media outlets pounce on the story.

But “the good guy with the gun” archetype dates to long before LaPierre’s 2012 press conference.

There’s a reason his words resonated so deeply. He had tapped into a uniquely American archetype, one whose origins I trace back to American pulp crime fiction in my book Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Decline of Moral Authority.

Other cultures have their detective fiction. But it was specifically in America that the “good guy with a gun” became a heroic figure and a cultural fantasy.

‘When I fire, there ain’t no guessing’

Beginning in the 1920s, a certain type of protagonist started appearing in American crime fiction. He often wore a trench coat and smoked cigarettes. He didn’t talk much. He was honourable, individualistic – and armed.

These characters were dubbed “hard-boiled,” a term that originated in the late 19th century to describe “hard, shrewd, keen men who neither asked nor expected sympathy nor gave any, who could not be imposed upon.”

The word didn’t describe someone who was simply tough; it communicated a persona, an attitude, an entire way of being.

Most scholars credit Carroll John Daly with writing the first hard-boiled detective story. Titled Three Gun Terry, it was published in Black Mask magazine in May 1923.

“Show me the man,” the protagonist, Terry Mack, announces, “and if he’s drawing on me and is a man what really needs a good killing, why, I’m the boy to do it.”

Terry also lets the reader know that he’s a sure shot: “When I fire, there ain’t no guessing contest as to where the bullet is going.”

From the start, the gun was a crucial accessory. Since the detective only shot at bad guys and because he never missed, there was nothing to fear.

Part of the popularity of this character type had to do with the times. In an era of Prohibition, organised crime, government corruption and rising populism, the public was drawn to the idea of a well-armed, well-meaning maverick – someone who could heroically come to the defense of regular people. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, stories that featured these characters became wildly popular.

Taking the baton from Daly, authors like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler became titans of the genre.

Their stories’ plots differed, but their protagonists were mostly the same: tough-talking, straight-shooting private detectives.

In an early Hammett story, the detective shoots a gun out of a man’s hand and then quips he’s a “fair shot – no more, no less.”

In a 1945 article, Raymond Chandler attempted to define this type of protagonist:

“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. … He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it.”

As movies became more popular, the archetype bled into the silver screen. Humphrey Bogart played Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe to great acclaim.

By the end of the 20th century, the fearless, gun-toting good guy had become a cultural hero. He had appeared on magazine covers, movie posters, in television credits and in video games.

Selling a fantasy

Gun rights enthusiasts have embraced the idea of the “good guy” as a model to emulate – a character role that just needed real people to step in and play it. The NRA store even sells T-shirts with LaPierre’s slogan, and encourages buyers to “show everyone that you’re the ‘good guy’” by buying the T-shirt.

The problem with this archetype is that it’s just that: an archetype. A fictional fantasy.

In pulp fiction, the detectives never miss. Their timing is precise and their motives are irreproachable. They never accidentally shoot themselves or an innocent bystander. Rarely are they mentally unstable or blinded by rage. When they clash with the police, it’s often because they’re doing the police’s job better than the police can.

Another aspect of the fantasy involves looking the part. The “good guy with a gun” isn’t just any guy – it’s a white one.

In Three Gun Terry, the detective apprehends the villain, Manual Sparo, with some tough words: “‘Speak English,’ I says. I’m none too gentle because it won’t do him any good now.”

In Daly’s Snarl of the Beast, the protagonist, Race Williams, takes on a grunting, monstrous immigrant villain.

Could this explain why, in 2018, when a black man with a gun tried to stop a shooting in a mall in Alabama – and the police shot and killed him – the NRA, usually eager to champion good guys with guns, didn’t comment?

A reality check

Most gun enthusiasts don’t measure up to the fictional ideal of the steady, righteous and sure shot.

In fact, research has shown that gun-toting independence unleashes much more chaos and carnage than heroism. A 2017 National Bureau of Economic Research study revealed that right-to-carry laws increase, rather than decrease, violent crime. Higher rates of gun ownership is correlated with higher homicide rates. Gun possession is correlated with increased road rage.

There have been times when a civilian with a gun successfully intervened in a shooting, but these instances are rare. Those who carry guns often have their own guns used against them. And a civilian with a gun is more likely to be killed than to kill an attacker.

Even in instances where a person is paid to stand guard with a gun, there’s no guarantee that he’ll fulfill this duty.

Hard-boiled novels have sold in the hundreds of millions. The movies and television shows they inspired have reached millions more.

What started as entertainment has turned into a durable American fantasy.

Maintaining it has become a deadly American obsession.

Susanna Lee, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, Georgetown University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.