"Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid," Raymond Chandler wrote in 1950's "The Simple Art of Murder," smacking the ascot off the drawing-room mystery and all its crime-solving dilettante dandies. "He must be ... a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it." Chandler was laying down the archetype of the hardboiled detective, the hero with a thousand trench coats; he might as well have been summoning Patrick Kenzie, the dark-city crusader... More >>>