Having read Dashiell Hammett’s ‘Red Harvest’ right after Raymond Chandler’s ‘The big sleep’ I constantly broke my immersion on many occasions to compare the two. There was something about Red Harvest that didn’t sit right with me.

On paper I should have enjoyed this novel more. It had a lot more to say about politics and crimes long reach into the halls of power. Yet I grew wary of the sort of pleasure a novel like this brings. Not that it is anything other than a great, fun novel but there’s so much here that fundamentally influences the make up of an American myth.

A lowly grunt with his own brand of justice and work ethic, swoops down on a backwater and saves the day. Think of Client Eastwood’s ‘Dirty Harry’, Bruce Willis in ‘Die Hard’, John Grisham’s novel ‘the Last Juror’ or of any number of policemen on TV shows. It’s an “everyman” -often with a badge- navigating the seedy underbelly of America with cynicism and grit defining them. They’ve all got drinking problems, they’re usually single with a long list of put downs to hurl at salacious women who throw themselves at out heroes. They occasionally get beaten up but are always hyper competent.

While Red Harvest is a great read it’s also a distilled essence of an entire genre. Chandler’s novel by contrast seems to offer a more believable detective in Marlowe. He’s not just floating across the world in someways immune to it or above it. By the end Marlowe hasn’t cleaned up town, his enemies aren’t scattered to the wind or even pure evil and he’s clearly affected by the whole process. The story seems to be driven not by one scheme running across another but by more human urges and mistakes.

When I finished ‘Red Harvest’ I realised I had stumbled onto the final word on this entire genre. Not in the difference between the two novels but in how ‘the Shield’  adapts it to TV. ‘the Shield’ isn’t quite prestige drama though it owes its existence to it. It is “copaganda” so to speak much like the endless pro-police tv shows that American media creates but also highlights the truth of a slogan like “ACAB” in every episode. It has all the genre tropes, stereotypes, plot points and delusions you can trace all the way back to a Holmes novel or just to a season of CSI.

Yet what drives the Shield, never curious about the socio-political context like ‘the Wire’ is just the gradual truth about a character like the one in these detective novels. A hyper competent man with his own brand of justice who goes against the law with his loyal minions isn’t saving the world. Sooner or later he gets greedy because it’s easy. The law isn’t out to get him, it saves him and launders his sins – it thrives when it creates such men. He isn’t looking out for the corrupt world and fallen people around him, no he looks down on them and exploits them, his stoic world view hiding a desperate needs to dominate and be admired by his victims and his tribe.

In the Shield detective Vic Mackey is corrupt, corrupts his friends, destroys lives, commits crimes, swears oaths about honour and loyalty and ultimately betrays all his friends and oaths leading his sworn brothers to their deaths or arrests all the while saving his own skin – the only real skills the this genre pushes forwards. Self preservation  and honour in Ronin doesn’t seem too different from the virtues of Bandits. Yet he is interchangeable with any of the protagonists in these detective novels, we just see where this kind of story ends.