1. I've been reading some Raymond Chandler lately & it clarified something that is maybe obvious to everyone else but had never occurred to me: that pervasive police corruption was a necessary precondition for creation of hard-boiled detective novel as a genre.

2. In High Window, Philip Marlowe tells 2 cops a story about why he doesn't like telling them everything he knows, "the Cassidy Case." TL;dr: A rich guy kills his secretary & himself but cops (to please rich guys family) makes it look like the opposite.

3. The difference between the old-school locked-door gentlemen detective (say Holmes or Perroit) & a hard-boiled dick like Spade or Marlowe resides in different relation to police: for Holmes, cops are idiots, for Marlowe they are corrupt. Different rational.

4. For Marlowe, cops aren't dumb (although sometimes are) but bad: torturers (lots of allusions to the 3rd degree), in the pocket of the wealthy, indifferent to truth. The heroism of Marlowe (which is, in truth, romantic hokum) is he cares about the values they only profess.

5. The social/historical basis for this view is obvious: prohibition created a crisis of legitimacy in policing, reinforced by 1930s social movements focused on police brutality and prison brutality. This legitimacy crisis created no less than 4 distinct genres.

6. To my mind, the police legitimacy crisis of the 1920s/1930s was the precondition for these separate genres: i) hard-boiled detective ii) G-Man (super-honest federal police) iii) mystery-man adventurer iv) super-hero.

7. The G-Man genre is semi-forgotten but it was created at the behest of J. Edgar Hoover & his myth-making promoters: the idea of an elite band of super-competent federal police exempt from corruption of local cops. For-runner to our copaganda.

8. The Mystery Man genre (the Shadow, the Phantom, the Spider etc.) has deep roots but started flourishing again in 1930s, for same reason as hard-boiled detective & G-Men. Add some science fiction to mix & you get the superhero. https://twitter.com/KurtBusiek/status/1304976226587521030

9. So: the police legitimacy crisis of 1920/1930s created a raft of genres from hard-boiled detective to superhero. I suppose the question is whether the current crisis will create new genres or cause these older ones to return to their origins.