History of crime fiction quite complicated, forcing him to embark on an odyssey through the urban landscape. He is involved with organized crime and other lowlifes on the "mean streets" of, preferably, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, or Chicago. A hard-boiled private eye has an ambivalent attitude towards the police. It is his ambition to save America and rid it of its mean elements all by himself. As Raymond Chandler's protagonist Philip Marlowe—immortalized by actor Humphrey Bogart in the movie adaptation (1946) of the novel "The Big Sleep" (1939)—admits to his client, General Sternwood, he finds it rather tiresome, as an individualist, to
Film adaptation Meryl Streep for the role, Helen became a significant part of the film. However, characters are also sometimes invented to provide the narrative voice. There have been several notable cases of massive inventive adaptation, including the Roland Joffe adaptation of "The Scarlet Letter" with explicit sex between Hester Prynn and the minister and Native American obscene puns into a major character and the film's villain. The Charlie Kaufman and "Donald Kaufman" penned "Adaptation", credited as an adaptation of the novel "The Orchid Thief", was an intentional satire and commentary on the process of film adaptation itself. All of those are