article on Raymond Chandler and his Philip Marlowe
RMJon23
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/7851
Wednesday 30 December 2009
Why Marlowe is still the chief of detectives
Fifty years after Raymond Chandler died, we need his ‘shop-soiled’
Galahad Philip Marlowe as much as ever to put our mixed-up world to
rights.
Mick Hume
‘But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean,
who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of
story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be
a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to
use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honour – by instinct, by
inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it.
He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any
world.’ Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder
For some of us there may be no such thing as a bad detective novel,
but there are none as good as Raymond Chandler’s. Even if you are
unfamiliar with Chandler and have not read his Philip Marlowe novels,
such is the shadow he cast that you will recognise his universe: a
dark corrupt world where men are weak-hearted tough guys, women are
available vixens and Hollywood dreams are dashed by ugly reality,
while a wisecracking, chain-smoking detective hero stands up for
what’s right. ‘I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I
needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country’, says Marlowe in a
crisis: ‘What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and
left the room.’
When Chandler died 50 years ago on 26 March 1959, The Times obituary
said that ‘in working the common vein of crime fiction, [he] mined the
gold of literature’. Today John Sutherland, emeritus professor of
Modern English Literature at University College London, tells me that
‘Ray Chandler qualifies as the Proust of the hard-boiled detective
novel. For Chandler literary style was all that mattered.’
Standing on the shoulders of Dashiel Hammett – author of Red Harvest
and The Maltese Falcon – Chandler established the ‘realistic’
detective novel that still fills bookshops and websites today. And in
Marlowe, a self-styled ‘shop-soiled Galahad’, Chandler set the
standard for the detective hero as a flawed ‘man of honour’ in a bad
world. In so doing he turned the common murder mystery into a moral
tale of modern life. Our still-rapacious appetite for crime novels
suggests that we still need Marlowe as much as ever to set our mixed-
up world to rights.
Chandler’s own life was as complex as his more incomprehensible plots.
Born in Chicago in 1888, he came to England with his divorced mother
and was educated at Dulwich College. After a brief London career in
the civil service - for which he took British nationality - and as a
journalist, Chandler returned to America in 1912. In the First World
War he enlisted with the Canadian Gordon Highlanders before joining
the new Royal Flying Corps. After the war he became an executive in
the oil business, but was fired for drinking and absenteeism.
Chandler started writing detective noir stories in his forties, during
the Depression, and had his first novel, The Big Sleep, published at
the age of 51. He completed six more Marlowe novels - Farewell, My
Lovely, The High Window, The Little Sister, The Lady in the Lake, The
Long Goodbye and Playback - and wrote film scripts for Hollywood -
notably The Blue Dahlia and Double Indemnity - while living in
California. He was married for 34 years to Kitty, 18 years his senior.
She died in 1954, and a heartbroken Chandler died five years later of
pneumonia linked to his drinking.
Chandler was a self-confessed cultural snob whose ‘hardboiled’ writing
was sneered at by literary critics, though he insisted that the Bard
would have written for Hollywood, too. He was an educated Edwardian
gentleman who gave voice to people from the wrong side of the tracks
in pre- and postwar Los Angeles.
Chandler led the final charge in the American revolution, begun by
pulp magazines such as Black Mask, that overthrew the old English-
dominated order in the mystery novel. He had no time for the phoney
plot twists and cardboard characters deployed by the likes of Agatha
Christie in country house murders, and acknowledged Hammett as the
writer who first ‘gave murder back to the people who commit it for
reasons, not just to provide a corpse’. By the time George Orwell’s
1946 essay was bemoaning the ‘Decline of the English Murder’, Chandler
had already buried that tired genre. As Marlowe says, ‘It’s not that
kind of story… It’s just dark and full of blood.’
Barry Forshaw, whose books include The Rough Guide to Crime Fiction
and British Crime Writing: an Encyclopaedia, says ‘Chandler is the
master. Hammett may have been the original progenitor of the
hardboiled private eye novel, but Chandler refined the form to its nth
degree.’ Mark Billingham, whose Tom Thorne novels have marked him out
as a rising star of crime writing, thinks that without Chandler,
British detective writers ‘would still be writing crime novels set in
vicarages, in which the murder would be nice and bloodless and the
culprit would almost certainly be lower-class or worse, foreign.’
The revolution in content was reflected in one of style. Chandler had
little interest in plotting. When The Big Sleep was turned into a
Hollywood movie, director Bill Wilder and star Humphrey Bogart could
not agree if one character, the family chauffeur, had been murdered or
committed suicide. They wrote to Chandler for clarification of the
plot, ‘and dammit’, he later recalled, ‘I didn’t know either’. His
interest was in human drama, character and emotion, and he brought
them to life through simile-loaded description and dialogue as sharp
as an ice pick in the back of the neck that has often been imitated
but never bettered.
Ian Rankin, whose Rebus novels top many lists of detective writing,
says that: ‘The opening paragraph of The Big Sleep is one of my
favourite openings in all literature. Chandler famously saw his task
as bringing crime fiction back to the mean streets from the stately
homes of the English whodunit. But he did so with style and elegance,
as befits a man with a classical English education.’
Chandler did more than update the detective novel. Most importantly he
turned it into a moral mirror held up to American society. Despite
famously advising aspiring writers that ‘when in doubt, have two guys
come through the door with guns’, little of Chandler fits that simple
stereotype. As American crime writer Jeffrey Deaver has noted, ‘There
are conflicts aplenty in Philip Marlowe’s world, but they’re usually
not the sort that can be solved with a bullet from a .38 or roundhouse
punch to a thug’s chin.’
It was through his investigation of those human conflicts that
Chandler’s work rose above other traditions in crime writing.
Protesting about literary snobbishness towards crime writing, Chandler
lashed out against the elitist categorisation of ‘significant
literature’: ‘If you have to have significance… it is just possible
that the tensions in a novel of murder are the simplest and yet most
complete pattern of the tensions on which we live in this generation.’
This is the deeper enduring appeal of the Chandler crime novel: as a
never-exhausted form for investigating the moral tensions and
contradictions in the modern city and society, and for resolving them
in a way that real life rarely allows.
Although Chandler did not share the Red sympathies of Hammett
(believing that there was ‘hardly a hair’s breadth’ between capitalism
and communism), his novels assume that little is as it appears on the
surface (something which always appealed to an old Marxist such as
me), probing the conflicts between right and wrong, truth and
falsehood, love and hate, passion and power that shape our lives.
At the centre is Marlowe, a man who is not himself mean, a ‘common man
and yet an unusual man’, often lost and alone but never defeated,
making a stand against ‘this strange corrupt world in which we live’,
run by crooks, crooked cops and rich parasites. Chandler wrote that ‘P
Marlowe has as much social conscience as a horse. He has a personal
conscience, which is an entirely different matter’, and that Marlowe
and he ‘do not despise the upper classes because they take baths and
have money; we despise them because they are phoney’. (Chandler also
observed that Marlowe is a fantasy figure because in real life no such
man would be a private detective, a job done by an ‘ex-policeman with
the brains of a turtle or a shabby little hack’.)
Marlowe - the definitive detective - has a strong sense of morality,
though his morals are not those found in the Bible or the Bill of
Rights. His personal conscience believes that law and justice are not
necessarily the same thing – a distinction he shares with Sherlock
Holmes, and has bequeathed to many imitators such as Robert Crais’
cracking Elvis Cole – and that violence and law-breaking can be the
right thing to do. Chandler established the detective as a very human
hero. As Colin Dexter, author of the Inspector Morse novels, has
noted, Marlowe has ‘a big streak of integrity down his spine and a
moral code of his own. But he is no super-hero, acknowledging as he
does his fallibility and his fears’. Chandler was clear that while
Marlowe was a moral public man, ‘I do not care much about his private
life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a
duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a
man of honour in one thing, he is that in all things.’
Marlowe helped to shape generations of fictional detectives on both
sides of the Atlantic. Crime writer Val McDermid says the ‘slumped
figure of Raymond Chandler still casts a big scary shadow over
contemporary crime fiction. Young writers such as Alan Guthrie, Megan
Abbott and Charlie Huston are writing extraordinary books that
wouldn’t be possible without Chandler’s dark brilliance.’ Mark
Billingham notes that Marlowe’s ‘legacy is enormous. Lew Archer, Dave
Robicheaux, Matt Scudder, Harry Bosch, John Rebus and my own Tom
Thorne are but a few of the “tarnished knights” who owe a debt to
Chandler’s original “shop-soiled Galahad”.’ One other thing Marlowe
passed down was the detective’s cultural and intellectual
idiosyncrasies - for Marlowe’s private poetry-reading and solo
replaying of classic chess matches, see the focus on the musical
tastes and foibles of today’s fictional detectives, from Morse’s
classical Oxford erudite snobbishness to Harry Bosch’s identification
with the lonely jazz sax.
Yet just as Chandler moved the detective novel into the modern age,
the fictional detectives of today have evolved – and not always for
the better. Reflecting the moral uncertainties of our times, many
appear less sure of where they stand. For all his self-deprecating
wisecracks it is hard to imagine Marlowe self-consciously wondering,
as Henning Mankell’s Swedish detective Kurt Wallander does, whether
today’s hard cases require ‘policemen who don’t suffer from my
uncertainty and anguish’, while worrying that some local atrocity
signals the end of an entire civilisation.
Today’s detectives often seem more depressed than hardbitten, the
drinking that was part of Marlowe’s macho persona now depicted as a
problem, even an addiction, in line with contemporary concerns. And
those who still smoke are always trying to give up. The detectives are
still flawed heroes, still trying to resolve the conflicts and
contradictions in society, but the ground appears to have shifted
beneath them, taking the line between right and wrong with it. Maybe
somebody should write a crime novel called ‘The Case of the Missing
Moral Compass’.
It seems particularly ironic now to recall that Chandler’s work was
once criticised for being too dark. He responded that his depiction of
the underbelly of LA was a ‘burlesque’, a deliberate exaggeration of
the truth for dramatic effect. Yet the darkest of Chandler appears
clean-cut compared to some crime writing today. Chandler evoked the
spirit of noir through mood-setting and language, not cheap graphic
gore. Now work that is hailed as ‘dark’ often seems close to putrid,
almost unreadable, while some top crime writers such as Patricia
Cornwell have abandoned the detective dissecting a body of evidence
altogether and focus instead on a pathologist dissecting a corpse.
Despite his cynicism and misanthropic streak, as a solitary drinker
who claimed to prefer talking to his cat rather than fellow humans,
some of these writers make Chandler almost seem like an optimistic
humanist. In a rare sympathetic remark about the brutish LA cops,
Marlowe observes that their inhumane behaviour is in a sense
understandable: ‘Civilisation had no meaning for them. All they saw of
it was the failures, the dirt, the dregs, the aberrations and the
disgust.’ You might say much the same of some mystery writers these
days, only without the excuse of experience. And unlike too many of
them, Chandler’s mysteries did not end up inevitably focusing on a
history of child abuse as the secret behind every tragedy.
Chandler’s own prejudices, however, would not mark so highly today.
From the 1980s he was caught in a retrospective backlash against
literary political incorrectness. It is true that Marlowe sometimes
employs language - nigger, shine, pansy - that no hero would use now.
Yet that seems little more than a realistic representation of a man of
his time. More serious accusations of anti-Semitism have been
countered by Chandler’s recent biographers. Those who accuse Chandler
of misogyny, however, might appear on stronger ground: the worst
villains in his novels often turn out to be women. The crime writer
Natasha Cooper, author of the Trish Maguire mysteries, says that ‘his
novels generally appeal more to men than to women, perhaps because he
romanticises the figure of the brave, sad, honest loner, tormented by
wicked, manipulative women and usually seeing the world through the
bottom of a bottle. But the language is fun.’
Yet Chandler should not be seen as an outdated reactionary like Mickey
Spillane, whose comic book ‘Commie-whupping’ detective Mike Hammer
fought the Cold War. Chandler did not self-consciously tackle ‘ishoos’
as many crime writers attempt to do today. But nevertheless his
detective novels produced a cutting indictment of what lay beneath the
brittle veneer of Hollywood and La-la land before and after the war;
as Ian Rankin has it, ‘he took a scalpel and sliced open the shiny
surface of modern America to show a society whose insides were
sclerotic’.
As a private detective, an un-mean man alone, Marlowe belongs to the
old school of American individualism. Today almost all fictional
detectives are serving policemen, especially in Britain but
increasingly in the US. Perhaps that, too, is a reflection of changing
realities, as the power of the state machinery has spread in Britain,
Europe and America. Working from the inside of the machine, fictional
detectives now find themselves hampered by the system rather than
beaten up by the police, few worse than Chief Inspector Chen, Que
Xiaolong’s Shanghai detective trapped within the bureaucracy of the
post-Communist state.
Andy Hayman, former anti-terrorism commander at Scotland Yard, tells
me that while British cops have often dismissed crime fiction as ‘too
exaggerated and hyper-critical’, more have been brought round as
fictional detectives such as Morse or Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect
present a more realistic view of police procedures that has ‘the ring
of authority, less pie-in-the-sky’. He was impressed with a recent
address on the future of policing by veteran crime writer Dame PD
James, who had senior officers ‘spellbound’. It is hard to imagine
policemen speaking so highly of Chandler.
While every detective on TV or in film owes him a debt, many today
might only know Marlowe through the movies of the books (Chandler
considered Humphrey Bogart ‘the genuine article’ in the part, while
Alan Ladd was ‘a small boy’s idea of a tough guy’), or through
affectionate send-ups such as Steve Martin’s Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid
and Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective. The fiftieth anniversary of
Chandler’s death seems a timely excuse for introducing them to ‘P
Marlowe, a simple alcoholic vulgarian who never sleeps with his
clients while on duty’ and ‘marks high on insubordination’. Hamish
Hamilton have marked the half century by reissuing five of his novels
with stylish reproduction early-edition hardback covers.
Chandler’s conclusion about the hero detective in his essay ‘The
Simple Art of Murder’ might sound a touch corny to modern ears, but it
rings true down the years: ‘If there were enough like him, the world
would be a safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be
worth living in.’ Meanwhile we still await the definitive London
detective to walk the mean streets of Dulwich or Westminster or
Walthamstow.
Mick Hume is editor-at-large of spiked.
To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Raymond Chandler,
Hamish Hamilton have reissued five of his most well-known titles with
their original vintage covers. Click here.
reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/7851/