Marlowe as I've always picture him, by comic great David Lloyd (V for Vendetta)
I was thinking recently of an idea for a story or essay about the books a man re-reads and what’s going on in his life at those times. So I started making a mental list of books I have typically read once a year or every other year or so, a habit I have fallen out of at this phase in my life. That short list consisted of, among others (Great Gatsby, 1984), Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. I’m not much closer to writing that wider story, but I am renewed in my curiosity about the recurring protagonist of Chandler’s novels, the detective Philip Marlowe.
I first read Marlowe in my teens, a fertile time in which I stocked my imagination with a rich pantheon of heroes, most of whom were men I wanted to resemble. I was captivated at once, as so many readers have been, by Chandler’s style, and read then every one of his novels and most of his stories. I have read many of them multiple times, none more so than The Long Goodbye, his masterpiece. The Marlowe novels are simply the great American private eye books, not the first or the most numerous but arguably the most imitated. Chandler put the “I” in “I was sitting in my office” and the “she” in “when she walked in.” Marlowe, who entered in 1939 in The Big Sleep and exited in 1958 in Playback, set the tone: solitary, stoic, wisecracking, tough, cynical, romantic, sentimental, and sexy. Chandler wrote in simple but mostly elegant straight-forward first person narration that stuck to the facts but had a poetic and compelling attention to detail, characterization, pace, dialogue and atmosphere.
Did I want to be like Marlowe? Hell yes. He could take a sapping, had an answer for everything, and women loved him. Bogart played him. Did I want to write like Chandler? You bet. This guy tossed off great copy and lines like, “She looked as out of place as a pearl onion on a banana split” or “what’s the matter, pal, aisle not big enough for your personality?” As with all my heroes, though, there were limits, differences between them and me, and maybe it was these differences that first made me dig deeper into the Marlowe mythos. Or maybe it was just growing up.
See, over the years I started to wonder things about Marlowe that made him look like not such an attractive character. For starters, why did the guy live alone? Always alone? As you read and re-read the books you get the definite idea that he has no family, few friends and no permanent lovers. This seemed ruggedly independent to me as a young man and absurd or pathetic to me as an older one. Then there was the drinking. Attitudes toward drinking have changed since Marlowe’s day, but few if any of us think we can do our jobs with numerous nips from the bottle of bourbon in the desk drawer. Was Marlowe an addict, what we call nowadays “the functioning alcoholic?” This is a theme he wrestles with in The Long Goodbye and a question Chandler, himself acquainted with the demon, leaves unanswered.
There’s a lot of unanswered questions about Marlowe, mostly because, even though he talks about himself in the books a little, the scenes that bring him into focus are his interactions with other characters, and from them we draw our observations – he is handsome, he is tough, it is hard to tell him apart from a cop or a thug. This is part of Chandler’s winning style. But for me, delving into Marlowe came hand in hand with swallowing some tough pills about Chandler’s writing.
A hell of a lot more can be written about the crime, mystery or detective story than could be written here, and a hell of a lot has. No question Chandler was instrumental to the development of American letters in general and crime fiction in particular. But upon re-reading, the Marlowe stories start to seem to me a little formulaic and naïve, something Chandler himself acknowledged when he explained that the underworld of L.A. or any other setting simply isn’t as small and connected as it is in his novels and stories.
In Marlowe novels, Marlowe always gets a case that he takes more because doing so adheres to his work ethic than because it’s a legitimate problem for him to solve. Almost always it involves a woman in peril. Very soon, what begins as a simple matter of “find the girl” puts Marlowe between two large, resourceful forces – on one hand, a gangster, on the other, the police. Marlowe, like his predecessor Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, starts the story not knowing the script and with the parts all moving. He follows along until he can get enough clues to overtake the action, insert himself into it, and reign it all in with words and a minimum of gunplay. But meanwhile we get what has by now become convention. Marlowe finds a body or two. Someone hits Marlowe over the head. Someone drops by to rough Marlowe up and tell him to “keep his nose clean.” Two cops threaten to pull him in and hold him if he won’t talk – and he doesn’t. One or more femme fatales tries to push her tongue through Marlowe’s teeth. Marlowe reveals the true meaning of a clue or clues he has been holding onto for some time.
All of this is not bad in itself but dates the work and confines it to genre, something I think Chandler must have known and which frustrated him during his lifetime. Does everyone in L.A. have a friend that is a mobster? Are old, sympathetic cops always partnered with younger, angrier ones?
There are speculative answers to all of these questions, of course, and fans and observers of the work have provided them over the years. Why does Marlowe live alone? As a private investigator with no employees he is a small businessman that works all the time in an industry that does not obey standard hours. Marlowe says in one of the novels that he wouldn’t be surprised to meet his end in a dark alley somewhere. Is he a drunk? He may be, and this may contribute to a more fundamental problem: Marlowe thinks the world of law enforcement, public or private, is as corrupt as much of society, and so he has chosen to reject it, even if he must live in solitude with his personal, existential code of honor. This places him neatly between the cops and the robbers. Unlike them he doesn’t value his role in a guild or fraternity. Rather, he values individuals and individual acts of righteousness, however small.
I have not read enough about Chandler, though I have read some of his letters and notebooks. I think what little I know of him has put me off from wanting to know too much about his life, which involved some significant challenges and disappointments. Still, I think I know that Chandler didn’t set out to be a detective writer but, having become one, and one of the best, he did value the work, though he was always critical of it and himself and wanted to branch out into other kinds of literature, especially the kind of fantasy stories that we today would call “magical realism.” He also wanted to contribute significantly to the body of Anglo-American letters. So I think if he could read this he’d see in it familiar criticisms and have a response for them. Part of that response might be to agree with them but to point out that these conventions are part of the joy and flavor of this particular avenue of fiction. Of course there are two cops – that’s how we did it in the ‘40s, kid. Still, inside, I think he’d be hurt.
And hurting him would be the last thing I’d want to do. Because, criticisms and all, I love his work, and as I look back on these books now not as things I have read but things I have re-read, I believe their value exists not just as cultural or canonical artifacts but as what they have meant to me personally. And what is that?
That’s the story I haven’t written yet. It’ll be a story about what was going on in a man’s life when he first encountered certain books as a boy, and re-read those books during his first adolescent crush, the broken hearts to come, his triumphs and disasters at school and on the job, in his family and his relationships. The books provide a baseline for his emotions and his ideas. There’s some reason or reasons he revisits them. For me, they probably provide meaning and context but also something more; the roots of identity. Marlowe shouldn’t be that strange to me because I was Marlowe, when I was 15, 18, 22, 30. He may, like an old jacket, not fit me so well any more. But that is hardly Raymond Chandler’s problem.
In Marlowe novels, Marlowe always gets a case that he takes more because doing so adheres to his work ethic than because it’s a legitimate problem for him to solve.
Sort of. I would say Marlowe's driven by something like duty or virtue. He's not Hammett's Sam Spade, or the Continental Op, both of whom seem slightly “more amoral”–Op even more so than Spade, who often just seems…indifferent, a bit aloof (one of his interesting attributes). Marlowe's fairly cynical, of course, but still wants to see justice done. He's a cop, more or less, and even a bit of English detective remaining (ie the chess combinations etc)–Spade's desperate, needs the work. The Op,as in Red Harvest ( probably the greatest noir, and not even really urban or the usual city scenes), may also be desperate, but really…he's not so different than the perps and union mobsters he's being paid to track down….or so it seems to me.
The Long Goodbye is classic, but I wouldn't rate it “as classic” as say Farewell My Lovely, The Big Sleep, or that dark novella Red Wind (Lady of the Lake also quite copacetic)–I consider Farewell My Lovely the quintessential Chandler noir: jazzy, sexy, Fitzgeraldish, yet still noir, a hint of politics–sort of the wrong side of Hollywood. Velma. That's a scary dame. Chandler hints at a nearly Dantean like city at times—HammettVille's more like…. chaos.
With TLG, Chandler seemed a bit tired, slightly ..hackish; he already knew the formula, sort of phoned it in.
In Marlowe novels, Marlowe always gets a case that he takes more because doing so adheres to his work ethic than because it’s a legitimate problem for him to solve.
Sort of. I would say Marlowe's driven by something like duty or virtue. He's not Hammett's Sam Spade, or the Continental Op, both of whom seem slightly “more amoral”–Op even more so than Spade, who often just seems…indifferent, a bit aloof (one of his interesting attributes). Marlowe's fairly cynical, of course, but still wants to see justice done. He's a cop, more or less, and even a bit of English detective remaining (ie the chess combinations etc)–Spade's desperate, needs the work. The Op,as in Red Harvest ( probably the greatest noir, and not even really urban or the usual city scenes), may also be desperate, but really…he's not so different than the perps and union mobsters he's being paid to track down….or so it seems to me.
The Long Goodbye is classic, but I wouldn't rate it “as classic” as say Farewell My Lovely, The Big Sleep, or that dark novella Red Wind (Lady of the Lake also quite copacetic)–I consider Farewell My Lovely the quintessential Chandler noir: jazzy, sexy, Fitzgeraldish, yet still noir, a hint of politics–sort of the wrong side of Hollywood. Velma. That's a scary dame. Chandler hints at a nearly Dantean like city at times—HammettVille's more like…. chaos.
With TLG, Chandler seemed a bit tired, slightly ..hackish; he already knew the formula, sort of phoned it in.