Hello, I Must Be Going:
Great Moments of Unconsciousness

According to our resident medical expert, Dr. Lawrence R. (Dick) Tartow, M.D, "The most glaring, and still universal medical mistake in PI novels is the speed with which people recover from being knocked unconscious (i.e. suffering a severe concussion) and the companion fact that with all these repeated whacks on the head with blunt instruments, there has never been a single sub-dural hematoma in the history of mystery writing."

And Richard Makover had this to add "One further comment on head trauma. Not only doesn't anybody get a subdural, many times they don't even suffer either retrograde or anterograde amnesia. Loss of consciousness (a concussion) always creates loss of memory for minutes to hours before the blow was struck and often also for some time after consciousness is regained. But our heroes always remember not only the moment before but often the blow itself! Can't happen that way. Latest example I've seen is Amos Walker in Estleman's otherwise superb The Witchfinder (1998). He's shot in the head and tells us every detail!"

And just in case you think this is all nit-picking and would prefer another opinion, here's what Mark Gunther, M.D. has to say in response to Dr. dick's comments: "Agreed. I would offer as contender the other end of the same process: ease and accuracy with which heroes and villains produce instant, reliable, and safe coma using a single blow. And don't get me going on digging out bullets..."

Nonetheless, private eyes seem to continue to be rendered unconscious with alarming frequency. Maybe the trenchcoat and the gumshoes should come with a football helmet...
.

• "Something like a ton of bricks comes down and...after that...everything goes black."
  (You wanna know how long this tradition has been going on? This is from what is generally considered the very first hard-boiled private eye story, ever!)
  --Three Gun Terry, in "Three Gun Terry" by Carroll John Daly, in 1923!)
  .
• "...he festooned an uppercut smack on my chinstrap...It rocked my conk so far back I could count the rafters overhead. They merged into a jumble as my glimmers went cock-eyed. Then Max corked me again. Then all my fuses short-circuited and I became useless."
  --Dan Turner in Diamonds of Death by Robert Leslie Bellem
  .
• "The man in the back seat made a sudden flashing movement that I sensed rather than saw. A pool of darkness opened at my feet and was far, far deeper than the blackest night. I dived into it. It had no bottom."
  -- Philip Marlowe in Farewell, My Lovely by Chandler
  .
• "She maced me another swat that put me down for the count with bells jangling in my think tank."
  -- Dan Turner again, this time in "Gun From Gotham"
  .
• "He met me head on, and we locked horns like a couple of moose. I had a death grip on his coat, and I felt it
  tearing. And then Bogard brought up his knee and planted it on me in a place I don't like to talk about. I doubled over, sicker than seven hells. Tony Bogard picked up a bottle from the table in the middle of the room and christened me with it, as though I'd been a ship being launched. I went down and out."
  -- Dan once more, in "Beyond Justice"
  .
• "...a red-hot slug maced me across the back of the cranium, knocked me into the middle of nowhere."
  -- Dan again, in "Killer's Keepsake"
  .
• "The sky came down and hit me on the noggin. All the stars in the heavens fell with the sky and danced in my optics, and all at once I was pitching down a long dark tunnel that gulped m like a raw oyster. My head came off and floated away. It wasn,t a head, it was a balloon, and somebody had cut the string. It drifted on a rising current, and the current became a whirlpool of pain filled with India ink.
  .
  Blooey. I didn,t even feel the floor when it bounced me."
  -- Nick Ransom in "Preview of Murder" by -- who else? --Robert Leslie Bellem
  .
• "My head vibrated like strings on a hockshop banjo and my stomach churned."
  -- Nick returns to consciousness, ibid.
  .
• "I had the stunned moment of shock when the lights danced and the visible world went out of focus but was still there. He hit me again. There was no sensation in my head. The bright glare got brighter. There was nothing but hard aching white light. Then there was darkness in which something red wriggled like a germ under a microscope. Then there was nothing bright or wriggling, just darkness and emptiness and a rushing wind and a falling as of great trees."
  -- Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
  .
• "Something came down on the back of my head. It couldn't have been the Queen Mary's anchor; there wasn't enough water around. I dived into a shoreless sea of black ink, pulled folds of black velvet over my head and burrowed into a coal pile. I was out."
  -- Paul Pine in Halo in Blood by Howard Browne
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• "The scene exploded into fire and darkness. I didn't even remember being slugged. Fire and darkness and just before the darkness a sharp flash of nausea."
  -- Philip Marlowe in The Lady in the Lake by Chandler.
  .
• "I felt a blunt shock to the back of my head and a short, sharp pain. The floor dropped out from beneath my feet, and I was falling, diving toward a pool of cool black water. Then I was in the black water, and there was only the water, and nothing left of me. Nothing left at all."
  -- Nick Stefanos in Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go by George Pelecanos
  .
• "A great, hot force exploded against Kurtz's chest and God's own flashbulbs went off in his skull."
  -- the seemingly indestructible Joe Kurtz gets taken down in Dan Simmons' Hard Case.
  
  
• "Dark fog engulfed my brain. My arms and legs turned to jelly... I sprawled to the floor, as limp and uncoordinated as a dropped bunch of rubber bands."
  -- Jake Barrow in No Chance in Hell by Nick Quarry (Marvin Albert)

Of course, there are tons more of these floating around. If you've found a good one, and feel like sending it in to me, go ahead -- knock yourself out!

Oh, and here's a final thought from Professor Dale Stoyer, from the prestigious Buffalo School of Hard Knocks:

The only time I can remember someone talking about the actual dangers of knocking someone unconscious in detective fiction is in John Sandford's (or Camp if you prefer) The Empress File, LuEllen (Kidd's sidekick) puts a potato in a sock to use as a sap because neither is illegal to carry and the potato, she had heard "was soft enough to be non-lethal." She ends up not needing it and has this exchange with Kidd:

"I'm glad you didn't have to slug anybody," I said after a while.
.
"So am I," she said. "I'd do it, but I think..."
.
"What?"
.
"Whacking people on the head...I don't know. The theory sounds OK, with the soft potato and all, but I've got a feeling that some of them might die."

List compiled by Kevin Burton Smith. Thanks to Ron DeSourdis, Dale Stoyer and a cast of thousands for their help with this one.