Media

...And then came the Reagan/Bush years, and the triumph of the technocrat, the sanctification of corporate greed, and the disengagement of government from the business of life...

...And those things are, of course, easier to jam about in a lecture than the challenging business of trying to explain why a story works...

...But let's talk about television instead...

...Not very reassuring after a decade of cowboy swagger...

...Or that--having just served on the Edgar (Mystery Writers of America) jury for Best First Novel of 1990--I can assure you that the average young mystery writer out there is at least as talented as the average young "mainstream" (whatever the hell that is) novelist...

...Both are vir- tually unwatchable, and both are, I think, highly significant...

...The wunderkind of M.I.T., Krugman is known for his arcane analyses of trade policies and his work with President Reagan's Council of Economic Advisors...

...It's all about "ideas," you see, and it lends itself to all sorts of very modernist-looking narrative experiments (gosh--is a computer telling the story...

...could no longer perform unilaterally in the economic, political, and military spheres as it had once done during the heyday of the "American century...

...There should be "knights"--an image that pops up with amazing frequency in detective tic- tion--willing to be fools for the truth, bear witness for the fight, even though the fight may be temporarily obscured and marching to a hesitant drum...

...Krugman's The Age of Diminished Expectations derives its impact as much from the clarity of its content as from the stature of its author...

...Jessica and Dowling, as presented on the Tube, are merely lucky dabblers: amateurs whose real business lies elsewhere, and for whom the possibility of making a difference is subordinate to the business of preserving the order of things...

...Skillfully monitoring the vital signs, the Cassandras of the latter half of the 1980s had produced several sober, and sobering, reflections on the downward trajectory of American empire...

...Wells...

...You see where I'm tending...

...Also Hamlet and Oedipus...

...Sort of like George Bush telling us all he likes pork rinds...

...BROWN TO FR...

...Never mind that, as American storytellers, any of those fellows make Saul Bellow and John Updike sound like puzzled anthropologists examining an unfa- miliar culture and writing about it in a second language...

...But we need, and we want, to believe there are individuals who see the wrongs of the system, and can somehow right--even in a tiny way--those wrongs...

...What teen-agers, rock entrepreneurs, and college students proclaimed as moral and sexual wisdom had more to do with the social autonomy made possible by affluence, the suburbs, mobility, the pill, and an awkwardly prolonged adolescence than with any advance in the human spirit...

...The brutal and flawed avenger, Mike Hammer, and the disoriented, self-loathing victim, Holden Caulfield, are almost congenital twins (I, the Jury in 1947...

...Because in both the detective, the essential, central, and mythic figure of the detective, is subtly denatured...

...One stars the wonderful Angela BOOKS Lansbury, the other the greatly gifted Tom Bosley...

...That is why, I think, Doyle invented Holmes the year before Jack the Ripper defined the modern city as the scene of absolute and unpredictable risk...

...In reacting to the impersonal forces con- trolling them, prophets like Morrison proposed what Douglas called a "revolution of feeling...

...Now the Private Investigator, invented in 1877 by Arthur Conan Doyle, is a figure the modern age demanded: a private citizen defending the ideas of justice and order in a city that has grown too complex and corrupt, seemingly, to maintain them officially...

...Branded a dreary pessimist, a Southern nabob of negativism, Carter was incapable of convincing the American pub- lic that the U.S...

...John Feffesget deficit, political stagnation, endemic crime and urban blight, in short a decline in national health facilitated in all respects by hypertrophied military muscle...

...Ahh," he ahhed...

...Dowling is a dotty/cute priest who etc., etc...

...By that time the Tube had displaced the book and the big screen as the cutting edge of national mythmaking, and the detectives it gave us were, on the whole, resonant projections of a kind of national longing for populist nobility...

...After a postwar period of unprecedented growth, the American economy settled in the 1970s into what seems to be chronic stagnation...

...The gap between rich and poor has 3May 1991:297...

...James Gamer's "Rockford Files," and Tom Selleck's "Magnum EI...

...The crummy little men peeking in crum- my little motels and the bureaucratized sleuths running down credit checks on their PC's are the reality, and always have been...

...The most popular mystery series of the last few years are "Murder, She Wrote" and the "Father Dowling Mysteries...

...Or I could tell you that I decided I wanted to be a writer because I fell in love with my grandfather's Mickey Spillanes and Ellery Queens when I was thirteen (sure--the covers helped pique my interest), so that when I published my first novel at the age of forty it was less a "career change" than a homecoming...

...Economist Paul Krugman has brought that analysis into the 1990s, translated into dollars and cents...

...all asserted, and most often brilliantly, that we were still a nation of passionate outsiders who could, push come to shove, step in and make a difference...

...Sometimes what we feel most intensely should be most suspect...

...And if I'm fight about that, then the evolution of the private-eye story on television over the last twenty years has a lot to tell us about our ongoing national crisis of self-confidence...

...But you get the point...

...But Miss Marple and Father Brown were serious--as the detec- tive story tradition is fundamentally serious...

...Lansbury's Jessica is a dotty mystery writerwho gets involved, willy-nilly and week after week, in real-life crimes against her will...

...He is not, in other words, the type to write a doomsday book...

...As we know, that revolution quickly devolved into nihilistic excess...

...DOWLING n 1981, I was teaching at Northwestern and had just finished a not-too-bad book on the science fiction of H.G...

...The seventies and early eighties were the heyday of the private eye on the Tube...

...Morning in America had become morning sickness...

...Of course it's a myth...

...We may be in the midst of the age of the establishment triumphant----certainly the present adminis- tration would like us to be--but as long as the inherently dis- ruptive myth of the private eye survives at all, it continues to resist the fate of total domestication...

...But for real...

...It is also why the golden age of the private-eye story, in American literature and American film, is the late forties and fifties, the years in which we were trying to come to terms with our newfound and awesome inter- national power and, at the same time, with our growing dis- ease over the loss of those communal, charitable values that entitled us to wield such power...

...FRANK McCONNELL Up the creek without a compass immy Carter's declaration of an "age of limits" at the beginning of his presidential term was a dose of political realism that, for all its empirical valid- ity, did nothing to further his political career...

...Just as in the forties, we had come through a distressing time that we had, somehow, survived (Vietnam, Watergate), and were anxious to consolidate and understand our survival: was there still an America, and did it still make sense...

...They are detectives, that is, who almost subvert the strong moral and democratic bias of the detective story itself...

...Science fiction--the other thriving popular form--has fared better...

...David Janssen's "Harry O." (who gave his first name to my private eye, if you're interested), Peter Falk's "Columbo" (yeah, he was a cop--but not really, right...

...Paul Kennedy (The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers) and Walter Russell Mead (Mortal Splendor) began the rollback of optimism...

...Auden to my colleague and valued friend Thomas Steiner, have written 296: Commonweal eloquently about the detective story as a permanent model for all storytelling: after all, isn't the ur-form of all story the joke, and isn't the whole idea of telting or hearing a joke waiting for the point--for the punchline or for the revelation of the murderer...

...The hunger so evident in the sixties for meaningful connection to the world was real enough, but the remedy chosen was mad- deningly self-defeating...

...Even when electronically amplified, it sounds like a very old story...

...Press, $17.95, 204 pp...

...Are you going to publish it under your own name...

...Of course, Krugman remains true to his profession, preferring an understated style and balanced presentations to irresponsible predictions...

...Then, in 1981, Ronald Reagan unveiled morning in America...

...And the private eye went over the rainbow...

...I didn't--though I should have--answer, "No, under yours, you toad...

...Forget it...

...This general definition covers such detectives as Holmes in London, Chandler's Philip Marlowe in Los Angeles, or for that matter Batman in Gotham City (remember that Batman, unlike Superman, is one of us--i.e., one of the wounded...

...I could tell you that any number of people, from W.H...

...Krugman's argument is simple...

...Maybe--and this is to our cred- it-no empire in history has experienced such profound anxiety at the very moment of its ascendancy...

...This first is obviously a clone of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple, and the second of Chesterton's Father Brown...

...I'm going to try doing a detective novel," I told him...

...When was the last time you saw a syllabus for "twen- tieth-century American literature" that included Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler or Ross McDonald or James Crumley or Stuart Kaminsky...

...I was chatting in the faculty lounge with a / colleague of mine--very distinguished guy, published in all the right journals--who asked me what I was going to write next...

...Obscurantism had momentarily vanquished realism...

...Bosley's Fr...

...The detective story, that hardiest and most apparently inexhaustible of popular forms, enjoys at best a demimondaine celebrity among the official guardians of our republic of letters...

...will most likely muddle through into the near future, he rates the chances of the bottom dropping out the economy at one in four...

...Reagan's optimism has subsequently proven to be little more than a historic blip...

...The Catcher in the Rye in 1953...

...A vigilante, perhaps: surely a self-appointed, maybe obsessed, representative of the way things ought to be in the midst of a society that has forgotten the way things ought to be...

...PAUL BAUMANN MEDIA DIMMING OF THE PRIVATE EYE FROM FR...

...Though he suspects that the U.S...

...Almost, but not quite...

...It's the kind of book an English professor will gladly--and condescendingly--admit to reading "to unwind": makes him seem a regular guy, you know...

...Economic Policy in the 1990s Paul Krugman M.I.T...

...I want to convince you that the detective story is one of the best--I'd say, the best--indices of how we, as a culture, imagine ourselves and imagine our ability to make sense of our contemporary, circumambient mess...

...The beginning of the 1990s have confn'med the drift of American policy: the savings and loan fiasco, the woefully expensive and questionably ethical war in the Persian Gulf, another recession, a ballooning budTHE AGE OF DIMINISHED EXPECTATIONS U.S...