Like a Bug

                           
     

        Private investigations are only possible for those who assert the independence to conduct them. Asserting this independence takes attitude, and Marlowe, like Socrates, had attitude in spades. The crooked cops or their bosses could rub him out like a bug, without breaking a sweat. The high-rolling crooks sneer at him and his $25-a-day-and-expenses life the way Callicles sneers at Socrates in the Gorgias. "You're a piker Marlowe" LA hoodlum "Mendy" Menendez tells him in The Long Goodbye. "You're a peanut grifter. You're so little it takes a magnifying glass to see you."

• excerpt from
• The City and the Man
• Christopher Flannery
• Claremont Review of Books
• 2013

                          https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/the-city-and-the-man1/