# There Is No Hope Road *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 27 Aug 2001* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### Dan'l Danehy-Oakes *27 Aug 2001, 09:40* > Tony Ellis (no, really!) wrote: > There you have it: solving the mystery in detective fiction brings order, > solving it in film noir brings the discovery that there -is- no order. Well, yes, but before film noir was Dashiell Hammett, (whose THE MALTESE FALCON is, in essence, the ur-text of film noir: but it was a novel before it was a film). In Hammett's world, and especially that of his unnamed hero, the Continental Op, we have precisely the world of the Norse sagas -- there is ultimately no order, no justice, but honor demands that we act as if there were and, bring them to pass where we can. > Broadly speaking I would agree with what I take to be the general > consensus: that this is precisely the sort of mystery Gene Wolfe > does not write. But at least one important exception springs > immediately to mind: The Fifth Head of Cerberus. In both the first > and the final novellas, the 'detective' far from solving a mystery > becomes ensnared in one. The universe remains corrupt and unsolved. But then, 5HC is almost exactly a portrait of an fallen but unsaved world; it is precisely in such a world that the hardboiled detective story and the feelm nwah take place. (And there is no hope, as near as I can tell, for the redemption of Number Five Wolf(e)* and/or "Dr Mars(c)h," leaving 5HC one of the most unbearably depressing books I have ever read.) ----- * (Any relation to Number Ten Ox?) ----- > In fact it's just hit me: the seedy underworlds of St Anne and St > Croix are pure film noir, complete with criminal kingpin, bent > cops, and femmes fatales. Does anyone else think "Mean Streets: > The Fifth Head of Cerberus Considered as Film Noir" sounds like > a good title for a Wolfe essay? How about "The Detective of Nightmares?" -- yes, it's a workable title. --Dan'l ---