Note: This proposal was originally written for a book collection on Veronica Mars. Thus, the expected essay that was to be produced from it was much longer than those I typically assign. Hence, why there are about 4 paragraphs worth of intro material rather than a single paragraph. If you look up the published essay later this year, you will find that these four paragraphs are largely unchanged and make up what is the introduction of that essay.

Also, you will note that the proposal contains all of the elements necessary to a good thesis proposal or introduction to a research paper. 1) It introduces the subject matter. 2) It frames the essay with the sources that I use to define my subject matter—in other words I use my research to define things like the traditional hard-boiled detective, so that I can clarify how I will use that definition in this specific analysis (showing both the similarities and differences that I will highlight about Veronica Mars in regards to this definition) 3) It introduces the thesis (the last sentence of the fourth paragraph).

Veronica Mars and the Case of the Displaced Detective

In the “Simple Art of Murder,” Raymond Chandler defines his vision of the hard-boiled detective:

He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a weathered phrase, a man of honor by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in the world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life [. . .]

He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. (18)

Barring, of course, the most obvious difference between Chandler’s description of the hard-boiled detective and the character of Veronica Mars—that she is not a “man”—there is only one other clearly significant quality that seems contradictory with the manner in which Veronica Mars chooses to focus on the presentation of its teenage protagonist as a hard-boiled detective than the way that Chandler describes his heroes. While Chandler would prefer that the hard-boiled detective story would describe a kind of noble and objective character in the hard-boiled detective so that “down these mean streets a man must go who himself is not mean” (18), the “mean” hallways of Neptune High do not seem to allow viewers to “not care much” about Veronica’s private life, nor do the situations and experiences of this hard-boiled detective allow for much of a “dispassionate” response of any kind to the meanness and cruelty that stalk those hallways. While Veronica is clearly portrayed as an outsider in the first season of the series, her status in the serial as both detective and victim create problems in defining her as a clearly “hard-boiled” hero in this traditional sense.

Veronica is indeed an outsider in Neptune who fits the description given in John Cawelti’s Adventure, Mystery and Romance of the individualism of hard-boiled heroes, whom he describes as those “who must reject the public ideals and values of society to create his own personal code of ethics and his own set of values” (161). Veronica clearly has the ability to move throughout the stratified class system of Neptune High because she has been exiled from both upper and lower classes. However, Veronica Mars fails to meet, as she does Chandler’s, Cawelti’s requirements for a kind of impersonal and objective detective: “Like the western hero, the tough-guy detective’s action-oriented code of honor enables him to act in a violent world without losing his moral purity and force . . . his unsullied isolation and failure maintain the purity of his stance as a man of honor in a false society” (159). While Veronica’s status as an exiled loner in the “false society” of Neptune High’s divided and divisive social structure enables her to develop a kind of “code of honor” akin to both Chandler and Cawelti’s definitions of a proper hero of this genre due to her “failure” to fit into that social structure, Veronica has been made victim to this society by a “private life” that has more than sullied this teenage girl’s objectivity. As a victim of rape as well as ostracism, Veronica has been rejected physically, emotionally, and socially by Neptune’s “upper classes”—the entitled rich, white kids that make up the 09ers—a class to which she once belonged herself through her connections to the Kane family.

Thus, Veronica seems incapable from the outset of the series and throughout the first season to escape making her situation and her case very, very personal. She has been made a part of it, and she has also made herself a part of it. While the former observation may seem more than obvious given that in part the first large season length story arc of Veronica Mars concerns an investigation that involves her own solution to the mystery of who has victimized her, the latter observation—the notion that Veronica also has in some senses victimized herself—may seem less obvious. However, given the context and environment—the mean streets of a high school—of this apparently hard-boiled inspired detective series, it may become somewhat easier to understand the notion of a hero who has been both forcibly victimized and stigmatized and one who also embraces this same image of victimization and stigmatization themselves. What teenager does not suffer a sense of ostracism at one time or another, and, likewise, what teenager does not wallow in their own sense of “victimhood” as a result of that ostracism?

The brilliance of Veronica Mars is this ability to re-situate and redefine the traditionally defined hard-boiled hero inside the skin of a teenage girl, and it becomes more than necessary to alter the normally impersonal nature of such a hero within the context of a high school drama. Indeed, Veronica Mars resolves her first major case, the murder of Lilly Kane—a murder very personal to Veronica given that the victim was her best friend—by playing both detective and victim. As I will demonstrate, Veronica’s “case” throughout the first season hinges on her playing detective by also playing the victim of crime. As the series unfolds, Veronica’s very personal motivations become all the more personalized as, much as a teenager often does, she redefines her own identity. Though, more specifically, she redefines herself by identifying with someone she admires, Lilly Kane. From her embrace of Lilly’s image as school girl slut to her appropriation of Lilly’s boyfriend as her own and even to her fear of an incestuous relationship with Lilly’s brother, Duncan, Veronica Mars solves the murder of her best friend in a manner only a confused teenaged hard-boiled detective could: by becoming the victim of her own investigation.