Guys...I'm scrugglin'

I've been having to encounter this whole situation in a place that has always been my escape: my Detective Fiction class. We're talking a lot about the hard-boiled detective's need to avoid vulnerability of any sort...especially in the realm of love-related adventure.

"So Hammett seems to be suggesting that in Sam Spade's fear of vulnerability, he also pushes away any real relationship he might have had with Effie."

Fuck. Really?

"All of the characters who do let themselves be vulnerable--whose motives to kill are for love--end up dying. They take their chance at the roulette wheel, and it doesn't work out too well for them. And yet Chandler suggests that they have something that Marlowe is missing."

Can we please keep this an environment in which I don't have to think about these things? What happened to detective fiction as an escape from life's problems?