Where private dicks like Sam Spade were wise, urban, cynical, hard-drinking, and suspicious of "dames," Frank and Joe Hardy were innocent, suburban, fresh-faced, and clean-living.
When the journalist asks how he got the woman to talk to him, he replies: "I listened," prompting the reporter to reply: "All the other private dicks I use spend their time hacking phone messages".
Some of the spark between the two is the stuff of genre: jazz as the dangerous sound of the other side of the tracks was part of the atmosphere private dicks moved through on the margins of America.
Compared with America, where bail bondsmen, bounty hunters and licensed private dicks all make plausible heroes, the choices for a British crime writer are limited.Most of the work now done by private detectives involves tracing assets and finding out whether people who say they are broke really are.
Nobody does smarmy, mostly heroic confidence – confidence that made private dicks worthy of stereotype – like Black and, now that he's proven his Marvel-taming mettle (Iron Man 3), he has the clout, skills and experience to make The Nice Guys exactly how he wants.
It swaps the private dicks for two literary academics – Maud Bailey and Roland Mitchell – who use their skills in textual analysis to follow a series of arcane clues in order to unravel a mystery surrounding two Victorian poets (Randolph Ash and Christabel LaMotte).
Meanwhile, Dezenhall's private dicks discovered that the couple were bunco artists with rap sheets for prior extortion schemes.
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Have we just puffed one too many times from the paranoia wicky stick, or has the New York Times been following us for the last few days like trench coat clad private dicks?
