WITTGENSTEIN & NORBERT DAVIS

Hard-boiled Wit:
Ludwig Wittgenstein and Norbert Davis
Josef Hoffmann
1. Introduction: Wittgenstein read Davis
Rosro Cottage
Renvyle P.O.
Co Galway
Eire
4.6.48
Dear Norman,
Thanks a lot for the detective mags. I had, before they arrived, been reading a detective story by
Dorothy Sayers, and it was so bl... foul that it depressed me. Then when I opened one of your mags
it was like getting out of a stuffy room into the fresh air. And, talking of detective fiction, Id like
you to make an enquiry for me when once youve got nothing better to do. A couple of years ago I
read with great pleasure a detective story called Rendezvous With Fear by a man Norbert
Davis. I enjoyed it so much that I gave it not only to Smythies but also to Moore to read and both
shared my high opinion of it. For, though, as you know, Ive read hundreds of stories that amused
me and that I liked reading, I think Ive only read two perhaps that Id call good stuff, and Daviss is
one of them. Some weeks ago I found it again by a queer coincidence in a village in Ireland, it has
appeared in an edition called Cherry Tree books, something like Penguin. Now Id like you to ask
at a bookshop if Norbert Davis has written other books, and what kind. (Hes an American.) It may
sound crazy, but when I recently re-read the story I liked it again so much that I thought Id really
like to write to the author and thank him. If this is nuts dont be surprised, for so am I. I shouldnt
be surprised if he had written quite a lot and only this one story were really good.
Affectionately
Ludwig

This letter is quoted in Norman Malcolms book Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir. Malcolm
added the following footnote after Norbert Daviss name: As I recall, I was unable to obtain any
information about this author.
The American philosopher Norman Malcolm was a student of Wittgensteins at Cambridge and
later became a much esteemed correspondence partner and supplier of the latest detective pulps
from the United States. It would appear, however, that Malcolm did not take his friend Ludwigs
desire to read more by Davis all that seriously. In 1948 he could have got hold of some short stories
and books by Norbert Davis without much difficulty. After years of writing for the pulp magazines,
Davis had managed in the 1940s to have his detective stories published in book form. Between
1943 and 1947 four such books appeared: The Mouse in the Mountain (1943; the paperback
issues were called Rendezvous with Fear and Dead Little Rich Girl); Sallys in the Alley
(1943); Oh Murderer Mine (1946); Murder Picks the Jury (1947).
No more books followed. In 1949, at the age of 40, Norbert Davis took his life.
The fact that Wittgensteins attempt to get in touch with Davis failed is tragic somehow. If
anyone could have helped Norbert Davis then, in my view, it was Ludwig Wittgenstein. He was an
influential philosopher who managed throughout his entire life to rope his wealthy friends and
relatives into supporting hapless individuals, in particular writers and artists.
Wittgensteins enthusiasm for Norbert Daviss first novel is understandable. This particular
novel betrays, as do other texts by Davis, a similar mode of thinking and writing, a kind of elective
affinity to Wittgensteins own work. What is more, in his earlier years Wittgenstein had been
repeatedly haunted by thoughts of suicide. Three of his brothers had ended their lives by suicide.
In fact, suicide was part and parcel of the whole milieu in which he spent his earlier life in Austria .
In his biography, Ray Monk refers to that milieu as a Laboratory for Self-destruction.
Today, a half a century later, it is impossible to make up for Malcolms neglect to inquire about
Davis and so historically cancel out that non-encounter between him and Wittgenstein. It is
possible, however, to address the question of why Wittgenstein estimated Norbert Daviss novel so
highly that he felt a need to thank him personally for it.
2. Wittgenstein as a culture lover and crime fiction reader
In 1948, three years before his death, Wittgenstein was a famous philosopher who was supported
by people like Bertrand Russell, George Moore, John Maynard Keynes, and not least, by his siblings
in Austria. He came from one of the richest and culturally most influential families in Vienna at the
end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Brahms, Mahler, Klimt, and Grillparzer were just some of the
guests to visit the Wittgenstein home. Ludwigs older brother Paul became a famous pianist. It was
for him that Ravel composed his Piano Concerto in D Major for Left Hand; Paul Wittgenstein had
lost his right arm in the First World War.
As a child already, Ludwig Wittgenstein had got to know and love the literature and music of the
German speaking region, maintaining throughout his whole life a particular leaning towards
classical music. As for literature, he was especially taken by the works of Goethe, Mrike, Keller,
Hebel, Lenau, and Nestroy, though he also liked Tolstoy, Dostoievski, Sterne, Lewis Carrol,
Dickens, and the young Joyce. In 1914, through the editor of the Austrian magazine Der Brenner,
Wittgenstein had a donation of 100,000 Kronen (about !100,000 today) distributed among
penniless Austrian artists, including, among others, Rilke, Trakl, Lasker-Schler, Kokoschka,
Haecker, and Dubler.
Between 1926 and 1928, Wittgenstein, together with Paul Engelmann, a disciple of the modernist
architect Adolf Loos, supervised the construction of the so-called Wittgenstein Palais on
Kundmanngasse in Vienna for his sister Gretl. Both the exterior and the interior of the house were
designed in a style similar to that of Loos and the Bauhaus. Once his tasks were completed,
Wittgenstein liked to go and see westerns, above all Tom Mix films, together with Engelmann.
Later, in Cambridge, he developed an enthusiasm for American review films which he preferred to
watch from the front row of the cinema.
It cannot be established conclusively when exactly Wittgenstein began reading crime fiction,
though it had definitely become a fixed component of his reading material after his return to
Cambridge in 1929. His preference was for Street & Smiths Detective Story Magazine, a
monthly pulp magazine which he read, more or less regularly, up until his death. Wittgenstein
liked this magazine so much that he quoted it in the last lecture he gave as a fellow of Trinity
College. That is not all. In his letters to Norman Malcolm he mentions several times how important
the magazine was for him, much more important than the leading philosophy magazine of the time,
Mind. In the context of paper rationing in England he wrote to Malcolm on 8.9.1945: Thanks a
lot for the mags. ... The one way in which the ending of Lend-Lease really hits me is by producing a
shortage of detective mags in this country. I can only hope Lord Keynes will make this quite clear
in Washington. For I say: if the U.S.A. wont give us detective mags we cant give them philosophy
...
A letter dated 15.3.1948 contains the following lines: Your mags are wonderful. How people can
read Mind if they could read Street & Smith beats me. If philosophy has anything to do with
wisdom theres certainly not a grain of that in Mind, and quite often a grain in the detective
stories.
Mind came off even more negatively in another comparison made in his letter of 30.10.1945: If
I read your mags I often wonder how anyone can read Mind with all its impotence and bankruptcy
when they could read Street & Smith mags. Well, everyone to his taste.
Wittgensteins preference in crime fiction was not exclusively for hard-boiled detective stories,
as Ray Monks biography would have us believe. M. OC. Drury, a close friend of Wittgensteins,
recalled a conversation he once had about crime fiction with Wittgenstein in 1936 during which
Wittgenstein praised Agatha Christie, claiming that it required a specifically English talent to be
able to write such books. For Wittgenstein, Christies crime stories were a pure delight. Not only
were the plots cleverly worked out, the characters too, were so well portrayed that they seemed like
real people. On once being recommended to read Chestertons Father Brown stories, Wittgenstein
turned up his nose: Oh no, I couldnt stand the idea of a Roman Catholic priest playing the part of
a detective. I dont want that.
In light of that conversation with Drury in the mid-1930s, it can be safely assumed that
Wittgensteins taste complied with that of his time, and that he therefore partook of all the
developments in crime fiction. His liking for the more modern literary style of the hard-boiled
detective stories probably developed when they had made their way into almost all the crime story
magazines, including Street & Smiths Detective Story Magazine on the model of the
Black Mask. As Ray Monk points out, in the 1930s and 40s, Detective Story Magazine
carried works by Black Mask authors such as Raymond Chandler, Carroll John Daly, Erle Stanley
Gardner, Cornell Woolrich and Norbert Davis. Wittgenstein, however, always speaks of detective
stories, which would lead one to presume that the other sub-genres in crime fiction, such as
gangster or action stories and psycho-thrillers, did not appeal to him as much. Most of the
detective stories of the hard-boiled school had basic elements in common with the classical
whodunits, so that the change in the reading publics habits could take place gradually.
3. The characteristic features of Norbert Davis detective stories
Norbert Davis was no realist. He was not interested in depicting reality in the raw, nor in
presenting characters, scenes and dialogues that seemed as if they were borrowed from harsh
everyday life. What characterises Davis as a hard-boiled writer is the cutting and curt linguistic and
narrative style he chose in order to portray a thoroughly corrupt and violent world. Often the
vocabulary is bold and simple, the short, precise sentences stylistically well honed.
Occasionally he even uses internal rhyme and alliteration: A Lady gets
a Lift, Target for Teresa, A Break for a Bum, Give the Devil his Due, and Latin in Art (from
The Adventures of Max Latin). Daviss dialogues ooze sarcasm. Pathos, sentimentality or
naivety of any kind are averse to his hardened protagonists. The best example of this is his private
detective Doan. In one scene in The Mouse in the Mountain the bandit Garcia lies dead on the
ground after an exchange of shots. A Mexican officer examines him:
Dead, said the tall man. That is unfortunate.
For him, Doan agreed.
Daviss plots, characters, and basic character constellations betray a marked proximity to the
classical whodunits. Figures such as Max Latin or Doan represent a blend of the invariably
unequalled master detective and the hard drinking rough-shod private eye. Also borrowed from the
tried and tested range of traditional forms are plot elements and scenes such as the configuration of
potential perpetrators and victims in a closed society (for example, in Holocaust House), or the
concluding summary by the detective who solves the case before an astonished audience.
Daviss combination of elements from different narrative styles succeeds because he ironically
stretches the forms of both kinds of detective story to breaking point and seasons both plot and
dialogue with a touch of humour. The humour of his verbal and situation comedy is often achieved
by leaving out elements in customary forms of communication, and especially by taking what
people say (but do not necessarily mean) obstinately literally like a reductio ad absurdum. As a
result, Daviss humour takes on anarchic and bizarre features, similar to those of Marx Brothers
films. Here is a sample from Give the Devil his Due:
... You are Max Latin, and you call yourself a private inquiry agent, and you are the
undercover owner of this restaurant.
Well, how do I do, said Latin. Im glad to know me.
And another from The Mouse in the Mountain:
Friend, said Henshaw, ... Im in the plumbing business Better Bathrooms for a Better
America. Whats your line?
Crime, Doan told him.
You mean youre a public enemy? Henshaw asked, interested.
There have been rumors to that effect, Doan said. But I claim Im a private detective.
This clever, laconic, and sarcastic narrative style is surely the main reason why Daviss novel
appealed to Wittgenstein so much. Incidentally, a Davis comment such as ... Latin, said Latin is
quite in keeping with Wittgensteins Mr. Scot is no Scot (in his Philosophical Investigations,
part ii).
4. The proximity of Wittgensteins mode of thinking, writing, and life to that of the
hard-boiled school
As in both the traditional and the more modern detective stories, the main concern in
Wittgensteins work is with transparency, with arriving at certainty about facts, at a correct view
and elucidation of the real connections by means of eliminating deceptions and apparent
constructs. Wittgensteins wish was to expose pretence, hypocrisy, puffiness, slovenliness and
obscuration, which are as widespread in the realms of philosophy and science as they are in the
avaricious world of commerce. He compared many contemporary philosophers to cheats and
businessmen who capitalised on poor districts, and saw it as his task to put a stop to such activities
by his colleagues.
Given that Wittgensteins philosophical work, like the typical detective story, dealt with the
exposure of deception, he naturally approached facts in a way that was reminiscent of a detectives
approach to solving problems. 129 of his Philosophical Investigations reads like a summary
of Poes Purloined Letter, a story in which a stolen letter remains concealed from the eyes of the
investigators simply by being placed openly on a card-rack, visible to all at any time. Wittgenstein
writes: The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity
and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something because it is always before ones eyes.)
Individual sentences in 99 of his Philosophical Investigations may even contain an allusion
to a typical element of crime fiction, namely, the locked room mystery: ... if I say >I have locked
the man up fast in the room there is only one door left open< then I simply havent locked him
in at all; his being locked in is a sham. ... An enclosure with a hole in it is as good as none.
Are the following lines from 293 of Philosophical Investigations not almost a parodistic
portrayal of the typical scene in which the master detective recapitulates the events of the crime
before a confounded audience, eliminating a red herring that had misled the investigations.
Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a beetle. No one can look into anyone
elses box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. Here it
would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even
imagine such a thing constantly changing. But suppose the word beetle had a use in these
peoples language? If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no
place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty. No,
one can divide through by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is.
115 points in a similar direction: A picture held us captive.
Wittgenstein devoted his repeated attention to the influence of our cultural surroundings on the
way we view things. Davis too, refers to such influences again and again, in a particularly sarcastic
manner at the beginning of chapter 3 of Sallys in the Alley:
The Mojave Desert at sunset looks remarkably like a painting of a sunset on the Mojave Desert
which, when you come to think of it, is really quite surprising. Except that the real article doesnt
show such good color sense as the average painting does. Yellows and purples and reds and
various other violent sub-units of the spectrum are splashed all over the sky, in a monumental
exhibition of bad taste. They keep moving and blurring and changing around, like the color
movies they show in insane asylums to keep the idiots quiet.
In some of Wittgensteins writings on the task of philosophy, all that is necessary is to substitute a
few words those marked in bold type in the following in order to illustrate their affinity to crime
fiction:
A detectives problem has the form: I dont know my way about (123 PI).

The work of the detective consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose. (127
PI)
What is your aim working as a detective? To shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.
(309 PI)
In his remarks on this statement, Wittgenstein expert Joachim Schulte further underlines its
similarity, in form and content, to the attitude of a private detective la Philip Marlowe to a female
client, as it were, the threatened fly. In Schultes eyes, the fact that the fly has fallen into the trap
means it is in considerable danger, not just because of a total lack of orientation, but because it has
become so completely entangled that it cannot free itself. The man who comes to the aid of such an
imprisoned client is indeed a veritable saviour in her hour of need.
Not only did Wittgenstein distrust abstruse, mysterious sounding waffle in philosophy, he also
regarded the equation of mathematical logic and science as a misconception. In this sense Ray
Monk may be correct in assuming that Wittgenstein was better able to identify with the approach of
the hardened American private detective than with the methods of a Sherlock Holmes or Hercule
Poirot. And just as the new style down-to-earth private eye was opposed to the old style detective
and his apparently logical deductions, Wittgenstein too was keen to distance himself from the
representatives of a mathematization of philosophy and science. For him, the fundamentals of
mathematical logic were based on mere agreements, that is to say, human inventions, and were
thus totally different from the laws of nature.
When writing his Tractatus, Wittgenstein had already come to the conclusion that science and
philosophy were far removed from those things in life which are of greatest importance to the
individual: 6.52 We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the
problems of life remain completely untouched. Norbert Davis seems to have shared this
viewpoint, as illustrated above all in the last chapter of Oh Murderer Mine. At one stage in the
narrative, Doans dog Carstairs, a Great Dane, chases the dim-witted arrest-happy campus
policeman Humphrey into the swimming pool, completely ignoring Doans admonitions. In turn,
Doan is also ignored by the two university lecturers Eric and Melissa, who are locked in passionate
embrace.
Carstairs ignored him. Carstairs was contemplating the frothy, turgid water in the pool with
the remotely sadistic indifference of a scientist studying a pinned-down bug.
And Eric and Melissa ignored him too. For the moment they were too occupied with each other
to have any interest in external affairs. Melissas arms were about Erics neck and he was holding
her so closely that no bio-chemist or meteorologist or physicist or psychologist or any other
scientist could have presented a logical explanation of how it was that she could breathe.
The Tractatus puts it more succinctly, under 6.43: The world of the happy man is a different
one from that of the unhappy man.
Like the above mentioned fly bottle metaphor, Wittgensteins remarks on the work of the
philosopher betray a disillusioned and bitter, if tenacious and dogged attitude to his profession and
one that is sometimes redolent of, among other things, the particular professional attitude and
street wisdom of the private detective of the hard-boiled school. As the founder of so-called
ordinary language philosophy, Wittgenstein was more likely to be sympathetic towards detectives
who spoke the language of ordinary people and grappled, despite the hard knocks with, everyday
problems and real opponents, than towards the classical detectives who caught criminals on the
basis of their ingenious gift of association, or even their clairvoyant capacities.
Wittgensteins preference for the working methods of hard-boiled detectives can also be easily
demonstrated by the use of slightly modified quotations from his Philosophical
Investigations:
In the detectives work we do not draw conclusions. (599)
Here it is difficult as it were to keep our heads up, to see that we must stick to the subjects of
our every-day thinking, and not go astray and imagine that we have to reconstruct extreme
subtleties, which in turn we are after all quite unable to reconstruct with the means at our
disposal. We feel as we had to repair a torn spiders web with our fingers. (106)
We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and ... we are unable to walk. We want
to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground! (107)
I can look for him when he is not there, but not hang him when he is not there. (462)
The results of a detectives work are the uncovering of one or another piece of plain nonsense
and of bumps that he has got by running its head up against the limits prescribed. These bumps
make us see the value of the discovery. (119)
Could such terms not also be used to describe the philosophy of the tough private eye? In You
Can Die Anyday, Max Latin puts it somewhat more bluntly and briefly: ... so I went right ahead
anyway. I couldnt wait to investigate. I had to poke my neck out.
It is quite possible that some of Wittgensteins remarks on the theme of the rules of the game, on
being guided, and on reading might well have been inspired by the narrative technique of crime
fiction, by that subtle tactic of keeping the reader on tenterhooks until the finale. For example, in
652 of Philosophical Investigations we read:
>He measured him with a hostile glance and said ....< The reader of the narrative understands
this; he has no doubt in his mind. ... But it is possible that the hostile glance and the words later
prove to have been pretence, or that the reader is kept in doubt whether they are so or not, and so
that he really does guess at a possible interpretation. But then the main thing he guesses at is a
context. He says to himself for example: The two men who are here so hostile to one another are
in reality friends, etc. etc.

A central theme in Wittgensteins late writings is the question of what rules are, how they can be
recognised, drawn up, and obeyed. This brings us to another reason why he favoured American
detective stories such as those by Davis. It is a well known fact that private detectives like Max
Latin or Doan neither adhere to the rules of logical deduction nor to those of law or social
conventions. Instead, they think and act as the situation demands, breaking rules, changing them,
or merely pretending to comply with them.
Wittgensteins deliberations on the theme of rules had their roots in internal developments
within philosophy. Yet they also have to be seen against the backdrop of the fundamental change
that took place in peoples consciousness in the face of the social turmoil of the first half of the
twentieth century, which had invalidated rules regarded as self-evident until then. One feature of
the experience of the generations who lived through the First and Second World Wars and the
critical inter-war period was insecurity, lost certainty, as regards which values and rules could still
aspire to validity. Such an experience gives rise to a need for orientation, certainty, and security, for
reliable rules for individual and social life which were worth keeping and defending unyieldingly
against attack. Yet in view of the myriad opinions, proposals, declarations and world views
circulating and competing in the public arena in free societies, it was difficult even for intelligent
people to establish binding rules and certainties. This intellectual state is reflected not only in the
philosophy of the time, but also in literature and films, and in particular in that narrative domain
encompassed by the term noir.
It was common to consider the writers of those black stories as having an intellectual affinity
with the French existentialists, though this is not always the case. Some noir writers have closer
ties with other philosophies, for example that of Karl Marx, Charles Peirce, or Ludwig
Wittgenstein. Wittgensteins view of his time was presumably more gloomy and elitist than
that of many noir writers, as is illustrated, for example, at one point in the foreword to his
Philosophical Investigations: It is not impossible that it should fall to the lot of this work, in
its poverty and in the darkness of this time, to bring light into one brain or another but, of course,
it is not likely.
Another possible point of identification for Wittgenstein with hard-boiled crime fiction could well
have been the particular role that the new private detective assumed in society. He was a lone
fighter caught between the fronts of the rich upper class and the desolate world of poverty, between
city administration and the police force on the one hand, and the underworld on the other.
Wittgenstein too saw himself in the role of the lonesome warrior, pitting his energies against both
the bourgeois academic life style and the narrow-mindedness and meanness of normal people
against whom he had railed frequently, especially in his younger years. Like the modern private
detective, Wittgenstein seemed to move in various social camps or milieus without feeling at home
in any of them.
Wittgensteins attitude to life, more precisely, the type of masculinity and the ideals of
truthfulness and honour he admired, betray common features with those of Dashiell Hammett and
other writers of the hard-boiled school. Like Hammett, it was not enough for Wittgenstein to
merely prove his worth at that battlefield in life that seemed to have been allocated to him, namely,
his desk. Both men found it unbearable not to be active like other men at the real front, where what
was at stake was life and death, and where they could demonstrate their bravery. In wartime they
could direct their aggressive impulses against real enemies, reaping recognition while at the same
time keeping under control, or covering up, their self-destructive potential. Although neither
Wittgenstein nor Hammett enjoyed good health, they both managed to have themselves recruited
for wartime service. During the First World War Wittgenstein refused military positions that would
have prevented him from doing gun battle with enemy soldiers. As a lone observer at the front, he
was persistent in battle, intervened in troop action directly where necessary, and was awarded a
medal for bravery. During the Second World War he gave up his teaching post in Cambridge to
work at Guys Hospital, thus making his contribution to the war against the Nazis. He justified his
decision as follows: I feel I will die slowly if I stay there. I would rather take a chance of dying
quickly.
Hammett had contracted tuberculosis during the First World War and therefore could not fight at
the front, however, he only gave up his job as a Pinkerton detective when ill-health finally forced
him to. Yet despite his advanced years and unfit state, he succeeded by all sorts of tricks in being
despatched to the front as a soldier during the Second World War.
Another common element in the attitudes of Hammett and Wittgenstein to life in general was
that they both despised the easy life and were not interested in money. For a time both of them had
strong leanings towards communism. Wittgenstein travelled to Russia in 1935 with the intention of
working there but returned to England disappointed. During the McCarthy era, Hammett chose to
go to prison with his Marxist friends out of loyalty. After the First World War, Wittgenstein chose
to stay on longer in a prisoner-of-war camp out of attachment to his comrades and refused an early
discharge. Like Chandler or Davis, Wittgenstein and Hammett also had no illusions about the fact
that people and things could be easily bought. Sallys in the Alley contains some rather vicious
statements to this effect. On one occasion, when Doan gets into a tussle with Susan Sally, a good-
looking Hollywood actress, her worried agent calls out:
Hit her in the stomach!
What? said Doan, startled. The shadow jiggled both fists in an agony of apprehension. Not in
the face! Dont hit her face! Thirty-five hundred dollars a week!
Towards the end of the story, Doan and Harriet, a patriotic but rather naive companion, engage
in the following conversation with the Nazi MacAdoo:
Goering is going to be hung after we win the war," Harriet told him.
MacAdoo looked at her. Dont be silly. The Kaiser didnt have much more than a hundred
million dollars, and nobody hung him. Goering is worth two or three billion by this time, and
besides that he has heavy influence in England and the United States.
How do you know? Doan asked.
Read the papers. Who do you think is paying for all this bilge about Goering being a harmless,
jolly fat man with a love for medals and a heart of gold? Stuff like that isnt printed for free.
Particularly not after the guy involved has murdered a half million civilians with his air force. I
shouldnt wonder but what hell wind up as president of the Reich under a, pause for laughter,
democratic government.
In view of their socially privileged status, Wittgensteins and Hammetts attitudes to life and work
may seem ambivalent, which could also be one of the reasons for their unease, the dissatisfaction,
and perhaps even their inability to produce one masterpiece after another, as other writers were
obviously able to do. From the publication of his novel The Thin Man in 1934 to his death in 1961,
Hammett was never again in a position to complete another work despite desperate attempts. In
the foreword to his Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein wrote resignedly that he would have
liked to produce a good book but that there was no time left to improve it. After several
unsuccessful attempts to weld my results together into such a whole, I realized that I should never
succeed. The best that I could write would never be more than philosophical remarks ... That
reminds me of Chandlers lament in a letter to Sandoe: I am continually finding myself with scenes
that I wont discard and that dont want to fit in. ... The mere idea of being committed in advance to
a certain pattern appalls me.
A glance at Daviss publications reveals that he drafted a considerable number of characters and
wrote innumerable novelettes and short stories but produced only very few novels, and they are
extremely short. He too, was obviously lacking the ability to produce an extensive, well conceived
oeuvre. However, as very little is known about the conditions under which Davis lived and worked,
all I can do is subscribe to John D. MacDonalds evaluation of him as a typical pulp writer: I never
met Norbert Davis, but I have no reason to suspect that he was any less eccentric, or less anxious, in
that penny-a-word environment than any of the rest of us.
5. Wittgenstein a philosopher with a hard-boiled style?
In many ways, Wittgensteins style of writing betrays an affinity to the prose of the Black Mask
school, especially to that of Norbert Davis. Wittgenstein had an abhorrence of what he called
waffle, and was almost obsessed with a brief, precise, logical form of expression. He tormented
people around him by constantly correcting mistakes in their syntax. Both in his private texts and
conversations, and in his dairy entries, letters, and philosophical writings, he tended towards
coarse, hard-boiled expressions and sarcastic humour. He had a preference for laconic turns of
phrase intended to illustrate a thought in a flash. The term wise crack might be used to put his
style of writing philosophy in an appropriate nutshell, were it not already reserved for the sharp-
witted dialogues of Philip Marlowe and his colleagues.
Wittgensteins translators (from German into English and vice versa) were apparently so
painfully embarrassed by his provocative sarcasm that they occasionally went to great trouble to
mellow the tone of the original text, transposing it into a more scholarly, bourgeois key, as I shall
show later. One reason for this procedure may have been that they did not wish to expose
Wittgensteins work to the danger of being considered lacking in seriousness and thus not being
received appropriately. As one of the editors of the works published posthumously, Georg Henrik
von Wright, emphasises, Wittgenstein had acquired the reputation of being a cultural ignoramus
not least because of his Spartan way of life and his dislike for the Cambridge milieu. Furthermore,
many contemporaries found him impolite, blunt, barefaced, even cruel. In view of such reproaches
and prejudices, it may have seemed appropriate to the translators to soften or defuse those of
Wittgensteins expressions that might have confirmed such prejudices against his person and his
work. Thus for a long time, biographical works made no mention of, or at least ignored, the fact
that in his later years he was a passionate reader of crime stories and even spoke about them in his
lectures.
Let us now turn to some original texts by Wittgenstein that document his hard-boiled style.
On 9.7.1916, that is to say, while serving in the war, Wittgenstein made the following entry in his
diary in secret writing: Dont get worked up about people. People are black scoundrels.
His diary entry of 19.8.1916 repeats the sentence: Surrounded by meanness.
In a letter to Paul Engelmann dated 16.1.1918 he writes: I am clear about one thing: I am far too
bad to be able to theorize about myself; in fact I shall either remain a swine or else I shall improve,
and thats that! Only lets cut out the transcendental twaddle when the whole thing is as plain as a
sock on the jaw.
In a later letter: Perhaps I should first have to be shattered completely by a blow from outside,
before new life could enter this corpse.
On postcards sent to Gilbert Pattison, Wittgenstein resorted to particularly drastic phrases: Of
Chamberlains diplomacy in Munich he writes on one card: "In case you want an Emetic, there it
is. He concludes another postcard greeting with the words: ... I am, old God, yours in bloodyness,
Ludwig.
Both Wittgensteins private and philosophical notes contain phrases
that could have come from a crime story:
I see someone pointing a gun and say >I expect a report<. The shot is fired. (PI 442)
I watch a slow match burning, in high excitement follow the progress of the burning and its
approach to the explosive. (PI 576)
In December 1929 Wittgenstein reported a dream about a man called Vertsag: He opens fire
with a machine-gun at a cyclist behind him who writhes with pain and is mercilessly gunned to the
ground with several shots. Vertsag has driven past, and now comes a young, poor-looking girl on a
cycle and she too is shot at by Vertsag as he drives on. And these shots, when they hit her breast
make a bubbling sound like an almost empty kettle over a flame.
The hard-boiled crime stories of the 1940s frequently contain accounts of torture scenes and pain
endurance rites. A favourite plot element is the state of complete uncertainty in which the detective
or the victim of the crime find themselves. In his way of examining philosophical problems,
Wittgenstein succeeded in blending these two elements:
... several people standing in a ring, and me among them. One of us, sometimes this one,
sometimes that, is connected to the poles of an electrical machine without our being able to see
this. I observe the faces of the others and try to see which of us has just been electrified. Then I
say: Now I know who it is; for its myself. (PI 409)
The following German sentence Da mich das Feuer brennen wird, wenn ich die Hand
hineinstecke: das ist Sicherheit. is rendered as follows in the English version: I shall get burnt if I
put my hand in the fire: that is certainty. (PI 474) Were the German to have been translated
literally, it would read: That fire will burn me if I put my hand into it: that is certainty.
Wittgensteins German text makes a particularly sharp point due to the fact that the German word
Sicherheit means both certainty and security. The second connotation is absent from the English
word certainty. The syntactical alteration also diminishes the harshness of the expression.
Almost nothing is sacred to the hard-boiled private detectives. Their impertinence and
unscrupulousness overwhelms not only their opponents and their competitors, but even their
clients. In Daviss short stories, the detective figures play a particularly cunning game with the
people they encounter. The following statement by Wittgenstein could also have been made by a
trickster such as Detective Max Latin: Someone says to me: >Shew the children a game.< I teach
them gaming with dice, and the other says >I didnt mean that sort of game.< (PI, note added to
70)
The same unsentimental, self-mocking humour with regard to his own profession can be found,
expressed in equally mordant tones, in Wittgensteins statements on the philosopher: I am sitting
with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again >I know that thats a tree<, pointing to a
tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell them: >This fellow isnt insane.
We are only doing philosophy.< (On Certainty 467)
The relationship between life and death has always been a fundamental preoccupation in
philosophy, as in crime fiction. Daviss novel The Mouse in the Mountain could well have been
inspired Wittgenstein to the following statement: And so, too, a corpse seems to us quite
inaccessible to pain. Our attitude to what is alive and to what is dead, is not the same. All our
reactions are different. (PI 284)
Daviss story contains a piece of dialogue that humorously illustrates Wittgensteins claim. After
private detective Doan shoots gangster Bautiste Bonofile in a struggle, Doans companion Janet
asks, worried: Is he hurt? Not a bit, said Doan. Hes just dead.
A few pages later, Doan puts forward a variation on logical problem contained in the proposition,
A Cretan says, All Cretans are liars :
Yes, I lied to him.
Well, arent you ashamed ? You involved me, too.
You shouldnt have believed me, Doan said...
Why not ? Janet demanded indignantly.
Because Im a detective, Doan said. Detectives never tell the truth if they can help it. They lie
all the time. Its just business.
Not all detectives!
Doan nodded, seriously now. Yes. Every detective ever born, and every one who ever will be.
Honest.
****
This article first appeared in CADS #44, October 2003. Copyright 2003, 2006 by Josef Hoffmann.
CADS is a British mystery fanzine published irregularly by Geoff Bradley, 9 Vicarage Hill, South
Benfleet, Essex SS7 1PA, England. For a sample issue, send 5.50 (UK) or $11 (US/Canada,
airmail). Please make checks payable to G. H. Bradley.

It should also be noted that Josef has a further article PI Wittgenstein and
Language-games from Detective Stories in CADS 48, October 2005.