The time has come for a split: Private Detective

The kind thing of split that I like :) - no need to change a thousand wicks or examples,jut split of a subtrope that's been budding off naturally.

I want to make a new Hard Boiled Detective trope (carrying over some of the desciption, and maybe the Bogart image) and leave Private Detective the supertrope for all manners of private eyes (good or bad). Hard Boiled Detective will be the subtrope for the Raymond Chandler inspired Noir-esque detective, and Great Detective the sister subtrope for the Holmes-like, more idealized consulting detective.

If anyone knows any reason why this split couldn't be performed, Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Peace.

edited 2nd Sep '10 1:45:18 PM by Vree

Why can't we leave Private Detective as is and just create Hard Boiled Detective?

Not all Hard Boiled Detectives are private eyes, anyway.

edited 2nd Sep '10 1:56:12 PM by SeanMurrayI

Private Detective is quite simply, "A professional detective not directly affiliated with a police department in any official sense (although many will have contacts in the department, and it's not uncommon for members of this profession to have been either police officers or previously worked in law-enforcement, as many of the skill sets overlap), a Private Detective takes on cases that private citizens bring to them".

The Great Detective, Little Old Lady Investigates, the Kid Detective are all subcategories of Private Detective. Virtually all Hard Boiled Detectives are Private Detectives as well.

In other words, I have no objection to the split at all

edited 2nd Sep '10 3:24:28 PM by Madrugada

I approve of this split as proposed by the OP.

Well, there are really three main types of detectives: The police detective, who works for the police and must solve the cases he's assigned, the Private Detective, who works for himself or a private agency and solves cases he's hired for, and the Amateur Sleuth, who works for nobody and just solves cases as they come for no payment.

A Great Detective can really be any of the three, though traditionally, he'll be an Amateur Sleuth or Private Detective and have the police detective act as Inspector Lestrade. A Kid Detective or Little Old Lady Investigates character is usually an Amateur Sleuth. The hard-boiled Private Eye type is a subset of the Private Detective and ought to be split off.

Sounds like a perfectly reasonable split to me.

Agreed. Nero Wolfe and Hercule Poirot are Private Detectives, for example, but they aren't hard-boiled at all.

edited 3rd Sep '10 7:40:51 AM by Cidolfas

Go ahead and split.

Yeah, good suggestion. I recommend adding Gumshoe as a redirect.

Am coming a little late to the party, but it sounds like a fair idea to me...

Is anyone going to do this?

Something I was wondering: Is there any kind of trope that could cover hardboiled protagonists in general? There's a certain kind of world-weary, sort of existentialist type in noir fiction. Sometimes they are Villain Protagonists like Neff in Double Indemnity and pretty much every Jim Thompson protagonist. There's also someone like Saiga in Speed Grapher who is Marlowe-like in being a Knight in Sour Armor, but isn't a detective (he's an Intrepid Reporter).

edited 19th Oct '10 11:04:00 AM by Jordan

Isn't there a War Weary Hero trope? (I may have the name wrong.)

^^ Knight in Sour Armor would cover a number of them,I think.

Yeah, the heroic kind is probably covered by the Knight in Sour Armor. Not sure about someone like Neff though. He's probably either a type 5 anti-hero or just a Villain Protagonist. Jim Thompson might have been a bad example since several of his protagonists are out and out Ax-Crazy. Another good/better example would be Cohen Bros protagonists like those in Millers Crossing and The Man Who Wasn't There.

The really dark ones are basically AntiHeroes. Then there's Snark Knight — that covers some of them as well.

edited 19th Oct '10 3:45:23 PM by Madrugada

This thread expired after 60 days of inactivity.

Unlocked and bumping this. It still needs to be done. Vree, you still interested in doing it?

edited 21st Jan '11 7:16:38 PM by Madrugada

Bumping again. This needs to be either finished or killed off.

I might be willing to take a shot at this. Give me a day to collect my thoughts, and I'll see if I can come up with a prototype. This is definitely something I think we need.

Note: I also think we should have the Hard Boiled Genre split off from Film Noir, since a large amount of the genre is not film, and many noir works are not detective fiction. But that's an argument for another day.

Let's figure out what needs to be split and into what so we can do it right.

I agree that Film Noir and Hardboiled Detective should be separate. There's a lot of Noir that isn't HBD, although most HBD movies were Noir or close to it.

As I said, I think that's a separate (if related) discussion, and should probably have its own thread. Adding the character trope Hard Boiled Detective seems relatively straight-forward. (I'll do it through YKTTW, but with a pointer back to this discussion.)

I'm currently still in the planning stages, and will probably sandbox before going to YKTTW, so feel free to discuss in the meantime. I'll keep an eye on the thread.

YKTTW launched here.

Good basic write-up.

Ok, someone pushed the launch button on Hardboiled Detective before I was quite ready, but I decided to just go with it. I've done a first pass at cleaning up Private Detective to match. I'm going to be working on entry-pimping now, but this thread can probably be closed, unless someone wants to clean up Private Detective a little more.