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When critics delineate the evolution of detective fiction, they usually begin with Poe, the inventor of the modem detective story, followed by Dickens and Collins with their police detectives and the watershed moment of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, which subsequently ushers in the Golden Age. American novelists attempt to invest in the Golden Age with some achieving great success but, eventually, are outperformed in the 1920s and 1930s by the best of the pulp fiction writers who have made their way to a gritty urban realism with a particular American bent. This essay draws Dickens from the genre-crossing blurriness of the early portion of that historiography and finds that Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler's preference of him over the Golden Age authors, coupled with Hammett's Pinkerton experiences, forms part of the literary heritage helping to develop the hard-boiled detective. Dickens's early work depends quite a bit on Providence or fate to administer justice, something only marginal in Hammett and Chandler, but his Inspector Bucket in Bleak House forges the link. Focusing on Hammett's writings as seminal to hard-boiled detective fiction, five aspects of a literary kinship between his detectives and Bucket are examined.
Keywords: Bleak House, Detective fiction, Continental Op (The), Inspector Bucket, Sam Spade
Introduction
When we first come upon Inspector Bucket, or rather he comes upon us, we are uncertain whether he arrives from the world of the nineteenth-century supernatural or emerges from the fictional flesh and blood ofDickens's mid-Victorian realism.
Bucket does not appear until the second third of Bleak House when the reader meets him in the chambers of the secretive and conniving lawyer, Mr. Tulkinghom. Without revealing the importance of the conversation, Tulkinghom leads the timid and naïve stationer, Mr. Snagsby, to confide details proving vital to Lady Dedlock's secret, which lies at the heart of the novel's mystery subplot. At the conclusion of his story, Snagsby "gives a great start, and breaks off with-'Dear me, sir, I wasn't aware there was any other gentleman present!'" (361). Snagsby saw no other person besides the lawyer when entering the room, and no one, since, to his knowledge, has come through any of the room's entryways. Yet, there stands Bucket, "a stoutly built, steady-looking, sharp-eyed man in black, of about the...