Lawrence Sanders

• Born: March 15, 1920
• Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York
• Died: February 7, 1998
• Place of death: Pompano Beach, Florida

Types of Plot: Police procedural; private investigator; espionage; amateur sleuth; hard-boiled

Principal Series: Edward X. Delaney, 1970-1978; Peter Tangent, 1976-1978; Commandment, 1978-1991; Archy McNally, 1992-1997

Contribution

The range of Lawrence Sanders’s novels covers the classic police procedural, the private investigator, the amateur sleuth, the hard-boiled, and the espionage genres. He made some distinctive contributions to detective fiction by crossing and combining the conventions of the police procedural with those associated with the private investigator and/or the amateur sleuth. By synthesizing these genres, he was able to expand his areas of interest and inquiry, blending the seasoned perceptions of the professional with the original perceptions of the amateur. While working within the tradition of both Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, Sanders added technical innovations of his own, notably in The Anderson Tapes (1970), an entire novel created out of a Joycean montage gleaned from police reports, wiretaps, and listening devices.

Sanders became a best-selling novelist with this first book and remained so with each subsequent novel. Most important, however, is the complexity of the characters he added to detective fiction. They are mature, multifaceted, and perplexing. His heroes probe their criminals with a Dostoevskian level of insight rare in popular crime fiction. Unlike any other practitioner of the genre, Sanders unashamedly took as the principal content in his two major series the most basic ethical and moral precepts of a Judeo-Christian society: the deadly sins and the commandments. He also explored in great depth the qualities that the pursued and the pursuer secretly share.

Biography

Lawrence Sanders was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1920, and was reared and educated in the Midwest, specifically Michigan, Minnesota, and Indiana. He was graduated from Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, earning a bachelor’s degree in literature in 1940. The literary allusions in Sanders’s works attest his formal education. It was the encouragement of a ninth-grade English teacher, however, that caused him to entertain seriously the notion of becoming a professional writer. The English teacher published in the school paper a book review written by the young Sanders; once he saw his byline in print, he knew that he wanted to be a writer.

After four years in the United States Marine Corps, from 1943 to 1946, Sanders returned to New York City and began working in the field of publishing. He worked for several magazines as an editor and as a writer of war stories, men’s adventure stories, and detective fiction. He eventually became feature editor of Mechanix Illustrated and editor of Science and Mechanics. Utilizing information that he had gained in the course of editing articles on surveillance devices, Sanders wrote The Anderson Tapes, an audaciously innovative first novel for a fifty-year-old man—and one that foreshadowed the Watergate break-in.

Since 1970, the year in which The Anderson Tapes was published, Sanders produced novels at the rate of one or more per year. His first novel made him wealthy enough to devote himself full-time to his own writing. Most of his crime novels were best sellers, and several of them were made into successful films. Sanders died in Florida in 1998; however, the Archy McNally series continues under the authorship of Vincent Lardo.

Analysis

Some of Lawrence Sanders’s early works were collected in a book titled Tales of the Wolf (1986). These stories were originally published in detective and men’s magazines in 1968 and 1969 and concern the adventures of Wolf Lannihan, an investigator for International Insurance Investigators, or Triple-I. Wolf Lannihan is a hard-boiled detective who describes women in terms of their sexual lure (“She was a big bosomy Swede with hips that bulged her white uniform”) and criminals by their odor (“He was a greasy little crumb who wore elevator shoes and smelled of sardines”). Like Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, he keeps a pint of Jim Beam in the bottom drawer of his desk for emergencies. These stories follow the pattern of the classic hard-boiled, hard-drinking, irreverent loner who punches his way out of tight spots. While weak on originality, they do have their witty moments and can be read today as parodies of the hard-boiled style of writing popular in the 1930’s.

The Anderson Tapes

It was, however, the first novel that Sanders wrote, The Anderson Tapes, that brought him success as a writer of detective fiction. He had blue-penciled other writers for twenty-odd years as an editor for pulp and science magazines and churned out adventure stories at night during that time. In despair over the abominable writing he was editing, he determined to write an innovative detective novel. The Anderson Tapes became an immediate best seller and was made into a film starring Sean Connery.

Sanders talked about his method of composition in several articles, and the outstanding characteristic of his comments and advice is utter simplicity. Having started out in the 1960’s writing gag lines for cheesecake magazines and fast-paced formula fiction for men’s adventure magazines, war magazines, and mystery pulps, he became adept at writing tight, well-plotted stories to hold the reader’s attention:

When you’re freelancing at seventy-five dollars a story, you have to turn the stuff out fast, and you can’t afford to rewrite. You aren’t getting paid to rewrite. You can’t afford to be clever, either. Forget about how clever you are. Tell the damn story and get on with it. I know a guy who kept rewriting and took eighteen years to finish a novel. What a shame! It was probably better in the first version.

Sanders’s views about the writer’s vocation were refreshingly democratic and pragmatic. He insisted that anyone who can write a postcard can write a novel:

Don’t laugh. That’s true. If you wrote a postcard every day for a year, you’d have 365 postcards. If you wrote a page every day, you’d have a novel. Is that so difficult? If you have something to say and a vocabulary, all you need is a strict routine.

The First Deadly Sin

Sanders’s next novel was The First Deadly Sin (1973), and it was an even bigger success than The Anderson Tapes. Some critics believe it to be his masterpiece because it possesses in rich and varied abundance all the literary devices, techniques, and characters that his readers have come to expect. Although Captain Edward X. Delaney was first seen in the second half of The Anderson Tapes, as he took absolute charge of an invading police force, in The First Deadly Sin, the reader sees him as a complete character in his home territory. A commanding presence, he is a mature, complex man who understands clearly the viper’s tangle of administrative and political infighting. He has operated within the labyrinthine organization of the police force for many years and become a captain, though not without making some uncomfortable compromises.

The key to understanding Edward X. Delaney is the quotation from Fyodor Dostoevski’s Besy (1871-1872; The Possessed, 1913) that Sanders plants in The First Deadly Sin: “If there was no God, how could I be a captain?” Delaney is tortured by the possibility of a world without meaning, and he yearns for an earlier, innocent world that has deteriorated into a miasma of demolished orders and become an existential nightmare in which no authority exists except the law itself. He views himself as a principal agent of this last remaining order, the law. The fallen world he inhabits is very much a wasteland, fragmented by corruption, chaos, and evil. For Delaney, evil exists and is embodied in criminals who break the law. He lives next door to his own precinct on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He cannot separate his integrity from his life as an officer of the law: They are one. Without a god or an order outside himself, Delaney cannot be a captain because the order necessary to create and enforce such hierarchical categories no longer exists. In an earlier time, he might have become a priest, but he realizes that the Church too has fallen victim to bureaucratic chaos and corruption.

Delaney must attend to the smallest details because they may become the keys to solving the mystery, to revealing its order. Delaney possesses an essentially eighteenth century mind; he believes that when one accumulates enough details and facts, they will compose themselves into a total meaningful pattern: Everything must cohere. His work provides the facts and, therefore, controls and determines the outcome. It is that control that gives his life and work meaning. Without it, his world remains an existential void.

Edward X. Delaney is not, however, a dreary thinking machine; he possesses an incisive sense of humor about others and himself. He can be refreshingly sardonic, especially when his wife, Monica, points out his little quirks. A firm believer in women’s intuition, Delaney asks her advice when he finds himself hopelessly mired in the complications of a particularly elaborate series of crimes, such as the serial murders of both The First Deadly Sin and The Third Deadly Sin (1981). It is both the human and the professional Chief Delaney that Gregory Mcdonald parodies in several of his crime novels. In these parodies, he takes the form of Inspector Francis Xavier Flynn of the Boston Police Department, a resourceful, civilized, and impudent supercop.

First Deputy Commissioner Ivar Thorsen, known as the Admiral, appears in all the Deadly Sin novels, serving to call Delaney to adventure. Perpetually beleaguered, he furnishes, as he sips Delaney’s Glenfiddich, three key ingredients to assure Delaney’s success: a description of the complexities of the crime, an analysis of the political pressures deriving from the inability of the New York City Police Department to solve the crime, and protection for Delaney so that he may bring his peculiar and sometimes questionable procedures into play (thus circumventing the bureaucratic barriers that hamper the investigation). Abner Boone, Delaney’s psychologically wounded protégé, appears in most of the Deadly Sin novels. He is described as horse-faced, with a gentle and overly sensitive temperament. He can sympathize with Delaney because they are both disillusioned romantics (Delaney lost his innocence when he saw a German concentration camp in 1945). Delaney trusts Boone because he is without cynicism, and there is nothing he detests more than cynicism and its source, self-pity.

Many of the women in Sanders’s novels are either castrating bitch goddesses or nourishing mother types. Celia Montfort, in The First Deadly Sin, provides the narcissistic Daniel Gideon Blank with what he perceives as a conduit to the primal, amoral energies of primitive man; through Celia, Daniel, who has become a Nietzschean superman, is relieved of any guilt for his actions. Bella Sarazen, whose name embodies her pragmatic and warlike sexuality, performs any act if the price is right in The Second Deadly Sin (1977). The promiscuously alcoholic but loving Millie Goodfellow in The Sixth Commandment (1978) helps the equally alcoholic but clever field investigator Samuel Todd uncover the rotten secrets of Coburn, New York, a dying upstate hamlet steeped in paranoia and guilt.

The Third Deadly Sin and The Fourth Deadly Sin

Of the four major villains in these novels, two are women. Zoe Kohler’s first name, which is derived from the Greek word meaning “life,” ironically defines her function throughout The Third Deadly Sin. Although a victim of Addison’s disease, she moves throughout the novel as the castrating goddess par excellence, luring her victims to hotel rooms, exciting them with the promise of sexual ecstasy, and then slashing their sexual organs to pieces with a knife. She, like Daniel Blank, is one of Sanders’s Midwest monsters, victims of the kind of sexual and emotional repression that only the Puritan Midwest can produce. Zoe Kohler’s psychological and physical illnesses have produced in her a maniacal lust turned upside down, a classic form of sexual repression whose cause is rejection and whose manifestation is vengeful behavior of the most violent kind. The other female villain, the psychologist of The Fourth Deadly Sin (1985), suffers no physical illness that exacerbates her emotional condition. Rather, her anger, which is the fourth deadly sin, is a response to her husband’s extramarital affair. She is a privileged, wealthy, highly educated woman who knows exactly what she is doing; her crime is all the more heinous because it is premeditated.

The most frightening villain in all Sanders’s crime novels, however, is Daniel Gideon Blank; he is also the author’s most complex, believable, and magnificently malignant character. He is taken directly from the Old Testament and Dante’s Inferno. His first name, Daniel, comes from the Hebrew word meaning “God is my judge,” certainly an ironic choice of name because Daniel Blank commits numerous murders throughout the novel. Blank’s middle name, Gideon, refers to a famous Hebrew judge and literally means “a warrior who hews or cuts down his enemies.” The last name of Sanders’s antihero suggests the empty, impotent, and gratuitous nature of the murders he commits.

Blank is an Antichrist figure, Christ become Narcissus—not the Man for Others who sacrifices himself for the salvation of humankind, but the man who sacrifices others for his own salvation, to fill in the Blank, as it were. He identifies himself as “God’s will” and calls himself “God on earth,” particularly at the orgasmic moment of the actual sinking of his weapon into a hapless victim’s skull. He identifies himself with the computer he brings with him to his new job and states, “I am AMROK II.” A true narcissist, Daniel Blank, by identifying himself as AMROK II, sets himself up as both the founder of a church, Jesus Christ, and Peter, whose name means “rock” and who was designated by Christ to be the Church’s first leader.

The key to Delaney’s genius as an investigator can be found in examining his relationship with the criminals themselves. It is a complex relationship that entails serious psychological risks for him because the pursued and the pursuer secretly share some key characteristics. Toward the end of The First Deadly Sin, Delaney writes an article on this Dostoevskian theme:

It was an abstruse examination of the sensual . . . affinity between hunter and hunted, of how, in certain cases, it was necessary for the detective to penetrate and assume the physical body, spirit and soul of the criminal in order to bring him to justice.

Needless to say, Delaney’s wife gently persuades him not to publish it, because he, like Daniel Blank, has been tempted into the destructive element and risks losing himself in it.

Sanders is one of the finest American writers of detective fiction. His style resonates not only with the snappy dialogue of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett but also with the long, balanced sentences of the most accomplished American and British classic writers, such as Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner. His moral enigmas evoke the persistently tormenting conflicts of a Charles Dickens or a Fyodor Dostoevski. Like all serious writers, Sanders was disturbed by important questions. He could evoke and sustain, as few modern writers can, a deeply disturbing sense of sin and courageously plunged into an exploration of the lines between guilt and innocence, responsibility and victimization, heredity and environment. He resisted easy answers to complex situations, entering fully into each case. In trying to determine when human beings become morally responsible and, therefore, guilty of crimes, he struggled alongside his characters. Sanders was one of the most important and innovative writers of crime fiction in the twentieth century.

Principal Series Characters:

• Edward X. Delaney is a retired chief of detectives of the New York City Police Department. Known as “Iron Balls” among longtime departmental members, he is in his mid-fifties. A man of uncompromising integrity who revels in the smallest investigative details, Delaney is well-read, enjoys food enormously, possesses a sardonic sense of humor, and can laugh at himself. He insists that reason must prevail and maintains that his work as a police detective helps to restore a moral order quickly falling into ruins.
• Peter Tangent is a quasi investigator in West Africa for an American oil company. Although not heroic himself, he is capable of recognizing and admiring heroism in others. Initially he comes to West Africa as an exploiter of the political chaos there, but by coming to know a genuine native hero, he loses some of his cynicism.

Bibliography

Anderson, Patrick. The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction. New York: Random House, 2007. Section on Sanders hails the originality of The First Deadly Sin, which Anderson says is one of the first modern thrillers.

Bertens, Hans, and Theo D’haen. Contemporary American Crime Fiction. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Wide-ranging study of the contemporary scene in American crime fiction; helps place Sanders’s varied body of work within its larger milieu.

Kuhne, David. African Settings in Contemporary American Novels. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Work discusses the use of Africa as a setting in American novels and examines The Tangent Objective and The Tangent Factor.

Nelson, William. “Expiatory Symbolism in Lawrence Sanders’ The First Deadly Sin.” Clues: A Journal of Detection 1 (Fall/Winter, 1980): 71-76. Discusses the nature of redemption, both as plot device and as thematic consideration, in Sanders’s novel.

Nelson, William, and Nancy Avery. “Art Where You Least Expect It: Myth and Ritual in the Detective Series.” Modern Fiction Studies 19 (Autumn, 1983): 463-474. Scholarly study of Sanders’s use of mythological and ritualistic elements in his fiction.

Weeks, Linton. “Ghost Writers in the Sky: A Popular Author’s Death No Longer Means the End of a Career.” Washington Post, August 6, 1999, p. C01. Weeks looks at McNally’s Dilemma, which was written after Sanders’s death, and discusses the trend in which publishers continue to release ghostwritten books after the death of a popular author such as V. C. Andrews.