Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor — by instinct, by inevitability, without the thought of it, and certainly without saying it.
So wrote Raymond Chandler in a 1944 Atlantic Monthly essay, “The Simple Art of Murder,” in which he defended the fiction genre he had come to master, the detective story. Chandler died in 1959, eleven years before the first screen appearance of the detective he surely would have admired and who almost precisely fit this description: Inspector Harry Callahan of the San Francisco Police Department, better known as “Dirty Harry,” played by Clint Eastwood.
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