His Domestic Noir

In “Casual Notes on the Mystery Novel,” written in 1949, Raymond Chandler advised that “a really good detective never gets married.” Chandler was always careful not to entangle his best-known protagonist, Philip Marlowe — the star of seven novels, including The Big Sleep, from 1939 — in any sort of long-term romance. He believed such abiding affairs sapped vital tension from mysteries by introducing a type of suspense “antagonistic to the detective’s struggle to solve the problem.” This philosophy has long been a guiding principle for American noir fiction. Hence the genre’s hist­ory of steadfast bachelor heroes, from Frank Chambers, the drifter who narrates James M. Cain’s ­classic The Postman Always Rings Twice, to Bud White, Ed Exley, and Jack Vincennes, the policemen at the centre of James Ellroy’s neo‑noir L.A. Confidential.

It wasn’t until 2012 that Gillian...