With his fedora and old overcoat, wisecracks, hard drinking, womanising and dislike of authority the private eye is an instantly recognisable figure in 20th-century cinema. Bran Nicol investigates the history of the private eye in film noir and more recent private eye movies, such as Robert Altman's 1973 "masterful" movie The Long Goodbye, and argues his role is to unveil "private spaces, private lives, hidden selves". Nicol notes that the "rootless, transient" gumshoe became a quintessentially noir character, inspired by the 1920s pulp fiction of writers such as Dashiell Hammett and embodying the "desolate, uncertain world" of the 1940s and 50s. It's surprising though that out of hundreds of noir movies, only a "handful" featured private eyes. Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1941) was the first and arguably the best, played by Humphrey Bogart, who also portrayed that other unforgettable shamus, Philip Marlowe, in The Big Sleep (1946). Bogart came closest to the "invulnerable masculine ideal" of hard-boiled crime fiction. An insightful survey of an iconic hero of the silver screen.