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Down These Mean Streets

‘It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.’

For quite a few years, whenever I travelled abroad, I took Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe stories along for the journey. Or sometimes they were a prescription for recovery when I was feeling mouldy. Marlowe’s lonely pursuit of a case through a baffling trail of murder and mayhem, mixing drinks, dispensing wisecracks and attracting enough knocks on the head to floor Mike Tyson, could blot out airport delays, cramped hours in flight or feverish nights wrestling with the bedclothes.

Most often he figured in The Big Sleep, dressed to kill, as in the quotation above, or in The Long Goodbye, his penultimate appearance. The complete cycle of half a dozen titles (seven including the last, less known Playback) was just sizeable enough to allow a measured rotation before one returned, refreshed, to the favourites.

Chandler himself defined literature as ‘any sort of writing that generates its own heat’, which fairly describes his own best work. No other crime writer could work the same narcotic chemistry in my experience. I relished the hyperbole (‘a rough sky-blue sports coat not wider at the shoulders than a two-car garage’), the terse dialogue, the cast of outsize gangsters, millionaires, petty crooks, embittered law enforcers and femmes fatale

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‘It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.’

For quite a few years, whenever I travelled abroad, I took Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe stories along for the journey. Or sometimes they were a prescription for recovery when I was feeling mouldy. Marlowe’s lonely pursuit of a case through a baffling trail of murder and mayhem, mixing drinks, dispensing wisecracks and attracting enough knocks on the head to floor Mike Tyson, could blot out airport delays, cramped hours in flight or feverish nights wrestling with the bedclothes. Most often he figured in The Big Sleep, dressed to kill, as in the quotation above, or in The Long Goodbye, his penultimate appearance. The complete cycle of half a dozen titles (seven including the last, less known Playback) was just sizeable enough to allow a measured rotation before one returned, refreshed, to the favourites. Chandler himself defined literature as ‘any sort of writing that generates its own heat’, which fairly describes his own best work. No other crime writer could work the same narcotic chemistry in my experience. I relished the hyperbole (‘a rough sky-blue sports coat not wider at the shoulders than a two-car garage’), the terse dialogue, the cast of outsize gangsters, millionaires, petty crooks, embittered law enforcers and femmes fatales who crossed their legs a little carelessly. And Marlowe, for ever pitted against the black knights of the beautiful corrupt city, on $25 a day plus expenses. Chandler’s creation spawned a movie genre, and survived dozens of successors and parodies, notably his friend S. J. Perelman’s brilliant Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer. Then Tom Hiney’s biography revealed the writer’s strange sad life. His first Philip Marlowe thriller was his first full-length novel, published when he was 50. His writing was redemptive: he taught himself to compose popular fiction for the pulp mystery magazines after being fired for drunkenness from a well-paid job in the oil industry. The Big Sleep was the closest to those earlier stories. The Long Goodbye, his second-to-last, fourteen years later, is dark, paranoid, haunted by nightmare fears and the alcoholic breakdown he was experiencing himself. In the 1940s, between the early years of poetry-writing obscurity and the last lost years after the death of his wife and only close friend Cissy, nineteen years older than himself, Chandler became the highest paid writer in Hollywood. Chandler polished the hardboiled style for American thriller-writing already staked out by Dashiell Hammett. He was famously uninterested in plots and not much good at them. Marlowe’s cases advance in a chaotic ricochet of random events which defy rereading. After directing The Big Sleep Howard Hawks claimed that neither he, the scriptwriter, nor Chandler himself could work out who killed one of the victims. The writer found the best way to keep readers guessing was not to know himself what the dénouement would be until he came to write it: not so much the whodunit as the ‘what the hell happened’. Conversely, he excelled in superb evocations of place, infused with suspense, which so often in thrillers are inert links between the action. He spent almost his entire adult life in and around Los Angeles, moving house dozens of times. As a result he knew every fold in the foothills that could hide a body, the heights where the oil dynasts built their mansions, the downtown boulevards and dusty suburbs: ‘I was living that year in a house on Yucca Avenue in the Laurel Canyon district. It was a small hillside house on a dead-end street with a long flight of redwood steps to the front door and a grove of eucalyptus trees across the way . . . The rent was low, partly because the owner wanted to be able to come back on short notice, and partly because of the steps.’ To tauten the pace he used techniques perfected in his pulp stories: typing on slips of paper that held a dozen lines at most, he packed atmosphere into a dense unskippable narrative. Use of the first person allowed him to record Marlowe’s own wary, deadpan voice assessing the scenario. Between compressed chunks of atmospheric detail and strenuous bouts of action he added the mystery: ‘The hunch I had was as vague as the heat waves that danced above the sidewalk . . .’ He was more interested in character than plot, especially in Marlowe, his alter ego. Because the point of view is Marlowe’s we hardly see him, except in the famous first paragraph of The Big Sleep (though we know he plays chess against himself, strikes matches on his thumbnail and routinely turns down propositions from women with dangerous curves). Hollywood for once reflected an image worthy of the original. Bogart, in Hawks’s The Big Sleep, was less conventionally good-looking than Chandler’s concept, but his whippet build and tortured expression fused with the part of the hard man with a conscience. He had enough substance to stand in for the rude, witty, cynical, short-fused, fallible, literate, romantic Marlowe (whose personality is said equally to have left its mark on the actor). The detective wears Bogart’s face along with the hat, mac and cigarette as he stalks General Sternwood’s blackmailer into a vortex of vice and crime – rather surprisingly via a shady second-hand bookstore. Marlowe is often wrong in predicting trouble for clients or himself. In Farewell, My Lovely, he fails to prevent a murder, is knocked out three times, drugged and locked up, never mind the pistol count. He is off the scale in terms of political incorrectness: the women he meets in the same adventure come in two sizes – Anne Riordan, redhead (‘it was a nice face, a face you could get to like’), and Mrs Grayle, ‘a blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window’. The one thing he never suffers from is esprit de l’escalier. His smoking and drinking habits would have him banned from third-millennium California. He sometimes dips into maudlin sentiment. Possibly least fashionable today is the idealism inherent in Chandler’s concept of his streetwise Galahad: ‘Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid . . .’ Compare and contrast with the accelerated casual violence of such successors in print as James Ellroy’s LA Confidential, or Quentin Tarantino’s blood-spattered, archly amoral celluloid pastiche Pulp Fiction. Yet the ironic self-awareness and parodic tinge of the writing are essentially modern in tone. So are the wisecracks and gruff asides that the lone operator wields against the hostile world. He is the timeless hero, the fall guy aware of the odds stacked against prevailing justice. ‘I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.’ Minor characters acquire dignity and pathos, like Harry Jones, the sad small-time grifter who dies rather than tell the gangster Canino where his awful girlfriend Agnes is. Incidental characters are impaled on a single grotesque trait: Chandler owed his break into Hollywood screen-writing partly to the director Billy Wilder, who read The High Window and commented, ‘How often do you read a description of a character that says he had hair growing out of his ear long enough to catch a moth?’ Technique is one thing: philosophy another. Chandler was profoundly aware of what binds society, and what tears it apart. In the Marlowe canon, race and religion aren’t the motivating forces of violence that preoccupy our cities today. But when he strips off layers of social hypocrisy little is outdated in his revelations of the love, lust, greed and venality underlying crime, mostly in high places. His cynical understanding of the power of money to buy silence and respectability is contemporary and entirely persuasive. In The Long Goodbye Marlowe, musing on how the media tycoon Harlan Potter employs public relations men to present a clean-living image of himself, concisely defines the process of what we now call spin. The corrupting impulse latent in law enforcement is another obsessive theme. The Lady in the Lake, set in the cool uplands, has memorable portraits of two cops, a country police chief and a city lieutenant, eventually pitted against each other. The Big Sleep’s notoriously opaque plot delves into the overlap of glamour, addiction and organized crime. In The High Window the action revolves around a rare coin, the Brasher Doubloon, and the solution lies in the title. The Little Sister leads Marlowe through dingy rooming houses, corpse-strewn hotel rooms and the Hollywood fringes in search of Orrin P. Quest, Orfamay’s missing brother (Chandler collected names as others collect antiques); but collapses into bathos with the preposterous Dolores Gonzales (‘She was exquisite, she was dark, she was deadly’). Playback, which is set in San Diego, verges on self-parody, and is less often reprinted. The Long Goodbye, written before Playback, is Chandler’s most complex work. The construction is uneasy because he put as much of himself into two other lost souls as he did into Marlowe, an awkwardness which compounds the mood of claustrophobic menace. The private eye is searching for his elusive married-to-money drinking friend Terry Lennox, who apparently committed suicide after murdering his wife; but at the heart of the mystery is the guilt of a blocked bestseller writer, Roger Wade, who suspects he did something terrible during an amnesiac binge. The Big Sleep was published in March 1939, when Hitler was threatening Europe; The Last Goodbye appeared in 1954, the era of McCarthy’s anti-Communist witch hunts: after the enemy without, the enemy within. The almost pathological obsession with alcohol bears out the autobiographical slew in the creative process. But Chandler wrestled with self-indulgence and won, against the odds. The Long Goodbye is a fine, memorable work of fiction, Marlowe’s hardest, sharpest trawl through the American way of life, from Cell 3 in the felony block to the Idle Valley cocktail set’s vicious party exchanges. ‘We’re a big rough rich wild people and crime is the price we pay for it . . .’ He finally says yes to the rich and lovely Linda Loring, and when they say goodbye they die a little. The Long Goodbye has been my personal favourite ever since it helped me through an especially trying journey. Stranded at Heathrow, I bought a copy just in time to deal with a delayed flight to Casablanca; but Marlowe and I missed the last connection to Marrakech which went ahead with my friend on it. No matter: Marlowe had worse things thrown at him, and he always came through in the end.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 8 © Anne Boston 2005


About the contributor

Anne Boston, writer and editor, is about to visit Los Angeles for the first time. In former lives she worked on the staff of Nova, Cosmopolitan, the Sunday Times and Country Living.

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