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The moral fiction of Raymond Chandler

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The moral fiction of Raymond Chandler

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Content THE MORAL FICTION OF RAYMOND CHANDLER
by
Kenneth Philip Boas
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment for the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
May 1992
Copyright 1992 Kenneth Philip Boas
UMI Number: DP23164
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11
Table of Contents
Introduction . . . . .page 1
Chapter I
The Moral Framework of Chandler's Novels... page 10
Chapter II
The Politics and Culture of Southern California:
Corruption and Illusion as Milieu for Chandler's
Fiction........................................ page 43
Chapter III
The Detective Story Genre: The Pulps and the
Hardboiled Detective......................... page 88
Chapter IV
Moral Transformation of the Hard-boiled
Genre page 137
Chapter V
Chandler's The Long Goodbye: His Fictional
Response to the HUAC Hearings in Hollywood:
Chandler's Moral Fiction page 220
Conclusion page 331
References page 334
1
Introduction
The historical context from which springs popular
as well as mainstream literature helps to create the
themes and types of characters in that literature. The
twenties and thirties in America saw the rise of the
enormously popular pulp magazine market. Herbert Ruhm
in his introduction to The Hard-Boiled Detective:
Stories From Black Mask Magazine 1920-1951, notes that,
Black Mask and the other pulps were so
popular because they provided the principal
entertainment for millions.... At their
height between the two world wars there were
over 200 pulp magazines providing a variety
of entertainment for their 25 million readers
(xvi-xvii).
The country, emerging from a bloody world war and
then entering into a catastrophic depression needed an
avenue of simplistic escape through which it could
relate to and find comfort in a clear-cut value system.
The characters of the pulps were clearly drawn, and the
hero, bigger than life, was able to defeat the forces
of chaos and violence which had, in real life, no doubt
left the people of America feeling helpless and
insecure. Pulp fiction's prescribed system of good
versus evil and of justice winning out at the end was
something the reader could rely upon week after week,
whether the market was science fiction, romance, the
western, or hardboiled detective fiction. "The
2
paperbacks were a microcosm of American fantasies about
the real world," writes Geoffrey O'Brien in his preface
to his work on the hard-boiled paperback industry,
HardBoiled America: The Lurid Years of Paperbacks. He
continues, speaking specifically about the hard-boiled
novels, yet his words are applicable as well to the
earlier hard-boiled pulp market:
They took the ordinary streets, the
dives, the tenements, the cheap hotels, and
invested them with mystery— with poetry even-
-turning them into the stuff of mythology.
Shamelessly exploitative, they made their
points with a maximum of directness. No trace
of subtlety was permitted to cloud the
violent and erotic visions that were their
essence, and that very lack of subtlety
lifted them out of this world. The people
they depicted seemed to exist in some
impossibly energetic super-America parallel
to the one we know.
(5)
The literature of popular culture and tough
guy realism was affordable ( "...the pulp magazines
sold for ten cents and never more than twenty-five"
[Ruhm,xvi]), and it was a safe avenue to walk down,
permitting their readers, notes O'Brien, "Even allowing
for generous doses of fantasy and melodrama, ...to get
a coherent picture of the underside of American life
from the works of Hammett, James M. Cain, Raymond
Chandler, Horace McCoy, David Goodis, Ross MacDonald,
John D. MacDonald, and such latter-day practitioners as
3
George V. Higgins, Robert Parker, and Donald Westlake"
(68) .
By the Forties, with the Depression practically
over and a new world war beginning, a cynical and
hardboiled sense of realism had firmly set in, and
consequently, the more fantastic outlet of the pulp
market (masked phantoms, super-powered avengers, flying
spidermen, etc.) began to dry up. But in its place,
the paperback industry began to flourish, and the novel
of crime and mystery continued its popularity, as did
the hardboiled detective hero. O'Brien writes:.
Wartime sales indicate the extent to
which people were using books to escape from
the war. It was undoubtedly during— if not
because of— the war that the paperbacks won
full market acceptance. (38)
O'Brien analyzes this period in terms of a state
of consciousness in which the "line between reality and
fantasy blurs, and the images within gain ascendancy
and are perceived as real." He thinks something like
this happened on a national scale in postwar America
(94). He writes:
The Thirties pulp hero in mask and cape,
battling the Purple Menace or the Green
Menace, has by 194 7 become a down-to-earth
Mike Hammer battling the Red Menace. Fantasy
had become reality.... For the moment, the
ugliness of the world has triumphed over all
attempts to hide from it. The ultrareal, the
undeniable sordid surfaces of everyday places
and everyday lives suddenly glow strangely
4
and at once are luminous. It is as if
everybody were hungry for reality, although
this has nothing to do with realism; it has,
however, everything to do with the new
palpable fleshiness of every popular art
form, like the three-dimensional fists and
torsos that protrude from the book covers. It
is a kind of fever, and the afflicted look
for something very solid indeed, as if
materiality in itself would cure them or
stabilize them. Theology having failed, it
becomes witchcraft's turn. (95)
Raymond Chandler wrote mystery stories for the
pulp magazines and then began to write hardboiled
private detective novels during this period. He wanted
to master this genre, but he always wanted to do more.
His concern was with an imaginative tradition
represented by classic American writers: a dialectic
which opposes cultural nostalgia or the claim for
order, against the idealization of freedom. The
detective story became his vehicle for developing this
tradition and for discovering how far he could go in
exploring the American dialogue between the yea-sayers
and the nay-sayers.
Chandler's work is centered around the moral
issues of man in society, and are the same moral issues
which are at the center of all the vital literature of
the American tradition. From the beginning of American
history the moral impulse was the strongest aspect of
5
the way Americans expressed themselves. The ideal of
the moral unity of humanity was to become the one
single most essential basis for the doctrine of
equality. And Chandler has created a hero, who, while
he appeals to the popular culture, is, as Chandler
called him, "the American Mind" of this mainstream
tradition: that is, he is the democrat, the common
man: equal to and no better or worse than anyone else,
and motivated by democratic and moral values which were
the impetus of the American revolution and the American
democratic experiment
John Gardner's work, On Moral Fiction, has
provided me with a set of premises on art and morality
which I will introduce as the basis upon which
Chandler's hero, Philip Marlowe, functions, and which,
in turn, can become the philosophical framework for the
moral fiction of Chandler.
Of course, Chandler died eighteen years before
Gardner's On Moral Fiction was published, but this does
not negate the validity of applying Gardner's basic
premises of art and morality to the Chandler canon.
Morality is timeless and eternal. Gardner states:
The true artist is the one who— directly
assisted by the techniques of his art, his
art's mechanisms for helping him see clearly-
-can distinguish between conventional
6
morality and the morality which tends to work
for all people throughout the ages. (50)
Gardner's premises set forth that which
characterizes moral fiction, under the basic assumption
that true art must be moral— that is, life-affirming--
moral in its process of creation and moral in what it
says. He recognizes the extent to which the word
morality, much less an entire theory of moral fiction,
has become anathema to our contemporary American
culture and its literature. In this respect, his
ideas are, like Chandler's hero, a throwback to another
time, and to another America. They comprise, as does
Philip Marlowe and his quest for truth and justice, a
dream about America and literature which:
...clarifies life, and establishes models of
human action and virtue, casts nets toward
the future, carefully judges our right and
wrong direction, celebrates and mourns,
invents prayers and weapons, designs visions
worth trying to make fact. (Gardner, 77)
Chandler's detective makes decisions about right
and wrong based on his very human moral standards.
Grounding such moral judgement on human character has
its precedence in Emerson. For Emerson, the single
human being, not God, not religious or political
doctrine, is the moral starting place of all judgment
and choice. In "Self-Reliance", seemingly reversing
7 !
the premise of traditional religious codes as the basis
for society's moral imperative Emerson writes:
Character is higher than intellect.... a
true man belongs to no other time or place,
but is the center of things. Where he is, i
there is nature. He measures you and all men j
and all events... Character, reality, reminds
you of nothing else; it takes the place of
the whole creation. (153-54)
For Chandler this is also true, and his hero Philip j
Marlowe is that single human being. It is through the |
i
judgments and choices Marlowe makes that affirm a moral
standard in the midst of contradiction, ambiguity, and
corruption. The stresses and strains of our culture
I
converge on Marlowe: a man acutely aware of himself and
his moral code in a world where all contingencies are
tentative and transitional.
Chandler's hero is alone, yet tries to connect to
the human community, which only wants to exploit him. !
His enlightened moral judgments tell him that human
relationships are empty and meaningless if they are not j
I
supported by the un-compromised sense of self. To !
withdraw (to solitary chess games, his lonely rooms, j
his solitary dinners), to show independence, are j
I
necessary acts of renewal for Marlowe, and in the j
American culture as he knows it, these acts of j
i
I
withdrawal are a continuing ritual for the criticism J
and healing of the dullness and vacuity of social life.
The first chapter of this study will introduce
Marlowe and structure a frame for Chandler's six novels
based upon moral premises about fiction, and Chandler's
insistence on a moral code for his hero. Chapter two
will historically survey Southern California during the
twenties ,thirties, and forties in an attempt to reveal
the political realities which helped shape the Los
Angeles of Chandler's fiction. Chapter three will
survey the pulp market of this same period,
specifically the development of the hard-boiled
detective genre, and Chandler's attempt to follow its
formula yet transcend it and achieve serious fiction.
Chapter four will develop Gardner's ideas about moral
fiction and the discovery process of the artist and how
this can be applied to Marlowe's discovery process as a
detective, and will then read the early novels in this
regard. Chapter five will survey the criticism of
Chandler's last novel, The Long Goodbye, and then
develop a reading of this work in terms of the
political climate of red-baiting and HUAC hearings
being held in Hollywood while Chandler is writing this
novel.
Chandler presents us a world much like the world
of Melville's The Confidence Man. Chandler's fiction
reveals America and its democratic culture, on board a
ship full of hustlers. In Chandler's case the ship has
become the city of Los Angeles, and Chandler's hero is j
placed among a dialectic of irreconcilables, and that
is where the obscure signs of ultimate good faith and
moral affirmation must be measured. Surely there is no
j
exit from the American reality of the city; it is j
America, and it is within its limits that Marlowe must {
j
discover his code of honor and truth. 1
Even in the hopelessly materialistic and decadent i
America of Chandler's time, his hero is in an I
unyielding, passionate search for moral good faith. And !
i
xt xs this search and the challenge against
estrangement, alienation, and isolation as a process of ;
I
living, not as dogma, that enables Chandler to j
i
transcend his chosen genre and write great literature. j
j
10
Chapter # 1 THE MORAL FRAMEWORK OF CHANDLER'S NOVELS
Raymond Chandler wrote six novels between the
years 1939 and 1953. In the first novel, The Big Sleep
(1939), Chandler introduces us to Philip Marlowe, a Los
Angeles private detective, and in the rest of the
novels, Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The High Window
(1942), Ladv of the Lake (1943), The Little Sister
(1949), and The Long Goodbye (1953), we continue to
follow Marlowe through the "mean streets" of Los
Angeles. In the first person voice of Chandler's hero,
we have unfolded for us a tough and realistic, yet
ultimately moral saga of an American city and its
people. Chandler takes his hero into the depths of our
American culture: from the established and respected
money of Pasadena, to the new and not-so-respected
money of Hollywood: from the sordid and poverty-
stricken petty crook, to the corrupt police and the
gangsters they protect and Chandler does not flinch
in showing us ourselves at our worst. For Chandler's
detective, experience has taught him that evil is
endemic to the social order, and Marlowe has become
knowing about the pervasive corruption of society.
Chandler ascribes this pervasive evil to American
11
materialism and greed, yet he will not allow his hero
to capitulate to it, and insists that Marlowe remain
faithful to a moral standard.
In the fourteen years which span Chandler's
novels, Los Angeles grows into a neon-lighted capital
of corruption and greed, pandering its blighted but
glamorous wares to a populace hungry for instant relief
after the despair and carnage of the depression and the
Second World War. Chandler's fiction accurately, if not
melodramatically, reflects this reality. In these
years, the values of democratic idealism, at least on
the government level goodwill, justice and truth, a
glorification of the common man, and equality under the
law seem to have been transformed and perverted in
the drive toward money and power and fame: organized
crime became big business, organized labor was red
baited, and cities were embroiled in corruption; mayors
and police chiefs were indicted one after the other in
Los Angeles in the thirties, for example. The American
citizen knew the voice of political corruption spoke
louder than any democratic ideals espoused by the
politician or the history book. The comman man and
woman could do very little about the widespread
corruption in their society; it had become one of those
unalterable facts of life, like bread and sex, and they
12
could only try to live within their society's violent
boundaries without getting hurt or stepping on any
well-shod toes.
The law, inviolable and sacred as the keystone of
a rational and moral democratic society, becomes
hopelessly tainted in this corrupted air. The law and
its enforcement, based on justice, becomes, in
Chandler's vision, helplessly impotent when confronted
with insatiable people in power who place themselves
above and beyond it.
Given this depressing reality Los Angeles, 1939-
1953 one might wonder how one honest man, in
realistic fiction, could ameliorate this situation and
still survive. And, in fact, over the period of years,
although he does survive, Chandler's hero is adversely
affected by the culture in which he must work. Marlowe
clearly becomes more bitter and cynical and tired: the
young, eager, well-dressed detective in the first
novel, The Big Sleep, going to call on the multi
millionaire oil rich Sternwood family in 1939, is not
the same man in the last two novels, The Little Sister
of '49 and The Long Goodbye of '53.
By 1949 Los Angeles has lost, irrevocably, the
pre-World War II innocence and small-town feeling
Marlowe remembers about it:
13
I used to like this town, I said, just to be
saying something and not to be thinking too
hard. A long time ago there were trees along
Wilshire Boulevard. Beverly Hills was a
country town. Westwood was bare hills and
lots offering at eleven hundred dollars and
no takers. Hollywood was a bunch of frame
houses on the inter-urban line. Los Angeles
was just a big dry sunny place with ugly
homes and no style, but goodhearted and
peaceful. It had theclimate they just yap
about now. People used to sleep out on their
porches. Little groups who thought they were
intellectual used to call it the Athens of
America. It wasn't that, but it wasn't a
neon-lighted slum either. (Chandler.The
Little Sister. 180)
And what Marlowe sees in its place, by these later
novels, as he moves through the streets of the city, is
a neon savagery and a callous inhumanity which
permeates even to the roadside cafe. Once a symbol of
the democratic ideal, the cafe, with its hot home-
cooking and good-mannered optimism about life, has
become, for Chandler, a symbol of this ideal gone very
sour: cold, and inedible, and laced throughout with
ill-humored hostility.
I ate dinner at a place near Thousand Oaks.
Bad but quick. Feed 'em and throw 'em out.
Lots of business. We can't bother with you
sitting over your second cup of coffee,
mister. You're using money space. See those
people over there behind the rope? They want
to eat here. They could do better at home
out of a can. They're just restless, like
you. They have to get the car out and go
somewhere. Suckerbait for the racketeers
that have taken over the restaurants. Here
14
we go again. You're not human tonight,
Marlowe.
(The Little Sister, 2 9)
Chandler's hero here is cynical and disillusioned;
America has quickly gone to seed, and he sees himself
going along for the ride. As he says, "Marlowe, you're
not human tonight." He understands his cynicism, but
that does not help.
As he drives through the city, Marlowe sees
clearly what has become of this Athens of America and
it does turn him bitter. He realizes this idealized
America can never be attained, and this realization is,
perhaps, what gives to his graphic descriptions of the
streets of the city such a cynical and even puritanical
overtone. He is almost like a parent who sees his or
her child go very wrong, yet remembers the sweet
promise of the child's innocent youth. His reflections
on the past end with his observations of the present:
Now we get characters like this
Steelgrave owning restaurants. We get guys
like that fat boy that balled me out back
there. We've got the big money, the sharp
shooters, the percentage workers, the fast
dollar boys, the hoodlums out of New York and
Chicago and Detroit and Cleveland.
We've got the flash restaurants and
night clubs they run, and the hotels and
apartment houses they own, and the drifters
and con men and female bandits that live in
them. The luxury trade, the pansy decorator,
the lesbian dress designer, the riff-raff of
15
a big hard-boiled city with no more
personality than a paper cup.
Out in the fancy suburbs, dear old Dad
is reading the sports page in front of a
picture window, with his shoes off, thinking
he is high class because he has a three-car
garage. Mom is in front of her princess
dresser trying to paint the suitcases out
from under her eyes. And junior is clamped on
to the telephone calling up a succession of
highschool girls that talk pidgin English and
carry contraceptives in their make-up
kits....
Real cities have something else, some
individual bony structure under the muck.
Los Angeles has Hollywood and hates it. It
ought to consider itself damn lucky. Without
Hollywood it would be a mail-order city.
Everything in the catalogue you could get
better somewhere else.
(The Little Sister. 180-181)
Yet, despite the impossible-to-avoid truth of
Marlowe's own growing cynicism in the increasingly
immoral world he travels through, one thing about him
does not change, and that is the personal moral
standard upon which he operates as a private detective.
Marlowe is a seeker of truth and justice from first
novel to last, and he is allowed by Chandler to arrive
at the "hidden truth" in each novel only through the
auspices of this moral standard. He may abandon his
vision for America, seeing clearly how it has failed,
but he never abandons the moral imperatives which, in a
sense, place him in a state of grace, and which,
despite the danger and evil surrounding him, enable him
to survive, integrity uncompromised. Marlowe is, and
16
Chandler says it best in his definitive essay on the
detective story, "The Simple Art of Murder" (1944):
... a man of honor by instinct, by
inevitability, without thought of it, and
certainly without saying it...if he is a man of
honor in one thing, he is that in all
things.... The story is this man's adventure in
search of a hidden truth, and it would be no
adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for
adventure." (193-94)
This instinctual honor, or moral standard,
intrinsic to the character of his hero, becomes the
critical redemptive factor in Chandler's vision of the
American society. Marlowe's morality revolves around
his continuing quest for justice: justice for those who
have been wronged, rich or poor, powerful or helpless;
justice is truly blind for Marlowe; it is a quest which
becomes increasingly ambiguous and frustrating, forcing
him to seek not only for the factual solutions to the
various mysteries he confronts, but for a moral stance
toward the events in which he has become enmeshed.
Marlowe, says Cawelti and many other critics, "seeks a
grail, a moral justice transcending the tawdry and
corrupt routines of society's legality"(181).
Marlowe's morality has been extensively commented
on by the critics. John G. Cawelti's observations in
his book Adventure, Mystery,and Romance can serve as an
excellent summary of what Chandler's critics in general
have said about Marlowe's morality, including his
17
biographer, Frank McShane (The Life of Raymond
Chandler), the early critic Philip Durham (Down These
Mean Streets). as well as later and recent critics such
as Jerry Speir (Raymond Chandler), Julian Symons,
Jacques Barzun, Patricia Highsmith, and Russell Davies
(essays by these last four have been anthologized in
Miriam Gross'The World of Raymond Chandler), and
others. Cawelti sees Marlowe as "a lone ranger who
somehow redeems the world by bravery and decency"{17 6).
But at the same time he understands that Chandler "was
enough of a realist to want his hero to be a plausible
contemporary figure with some of the frustrations and
difficulties of the twentieth-century antihero"(176-
77). As Richard Schikel puts it in his essay in
Commentary. "Raymond Chandler, Private Eye", Marlowe is
a "moral man, who refuses to play the game of life in a
conventionally immoral or amoral way," and he
consequently is doomed to an isolation and loneliness
that he hides "behind a protective \set of tough-guy
mannerisms"(159).
Chandler creates a highly realistic Los Angeles of
his time, unmitigating in its criminality and
immorality, and he places in the middle of it a man who
would seem to be a throwback to Arthurian England, or
perhaps to some Jeffersonian concept of the ideal
18
democratic common citizen,, with a healthy dose of Natty
Bumppo, Cooper's path-finder, and the civil disobedient
Thoreau thrown in for good measure.
He is Arthurian because he is a modern knight. He
is a man of honor in all things, always on a quest for
the contemporary holy grail truth and justice. He is
Jeffersonian because "he is a common man or he could
not go among common people" (The Simple Art of Murder,
Chandler 193).
Yet, in the Jeffersonian mode, Chandler's hero
raises the common to its democratic heights of
individuality and resourcefulness, glorifying the
citizen as the light of American democracy, and not
merely as its lowest common denominator.
In the mold of Natty Bumppo, who Robert Penn
Warren in Democracy and Poetry (1975) calls "the
mythical image of the perfect democrat, morally self-
disciplined to respect both nature and man," Marlowe
is the loner, alienated from the civilization around
him, yet still able to move through it, the true
pathfinder, faithful to values which a new nation, even
in Cooper's days, found expedient to abandon for the
sake of our "manifest destiny”. Los Angeles becomes,
for Marlowe, literally America's last frontier, but
unlike Natty Bumppo, who had Chingachgook, Marlowe has
19
only his intuitive sense of direction, moral direction
in this case, to guide him.
And, like Thoreau, and John Brown, the man Thoreau
so passionately defends, Marlowe must resist the law of
the State for the higher law of his conscience,
withstanding the consequences which his disobedience to
the law brings, sure that his stand is a just one.
When Thoreau befriended and defended John Brown,
housing and helping a wanted co-conspirator of Brown's
to escape, he evoked the wrath not only of the law of
the land, but of his genteel New England community as
well. But this did not mean as much to Thoreau as the
moral position he knew he must take. When Emerson
visited Thoreau in jail, after Thoreau refused to pay
his poll tax, Emerson asked him what he was doing in
there. Thoreau's famous reply, "What are you doing out
there?" is something Marlowe very well might have said
while remaining loyal to a client or a principle at his
own expense.
Marlowe did not allow the wrath of the law, nor
the persecution by the police and the gangster, nor
even the more subtle pressure brought to bear by the
rich, keep him from listening to and serving the voice
of his conscience. He listens, as did Natty Bumppo,
20
and Thoreau, and John Brown, and he is then able to act
with a moral certainty.
Integral to the moral position of these American
defenders of liberty and human dignity was a simple
life-style which kept them from distraction and
compromise. Like Thoreau at Walden Pond, Marlowe's
life is one of simplicity. His Walden is a one-and-a-
half room office with last year's magazines and last
year's dust, and "one single apartment with a pull-down
bed" (Gardiner and Walker 230). He has reduced his
life to the barest essentials; the trappings of modern
civilization will not seduce him.
If Marlowe is some hybrid throwback to an
honorable democratic dream, what place then does he
have in the Los Angeles, or the America, for that
matter, of the nineteen-forties and fifties? Why has
Chandler created such an anomaly and gone to such pains
to keep him and his process of detection uncompromised,
most unlike the heroes of hard-boiled American
detective fiction of the time; men like Carroll John
Daly's Race Williams, Hammett's nameless Continental
Op, Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer, and the various
amateur heroes of Leter Dent, George Harmon Coxe, Curt
Hamlin, Frederick Nebel, Norbert Davis, and others?
Although these heroes do have a moral vision which is
21
unwavering, the essence of the code for this genre,
they are reckless in their pursuit of justice, even to
the point of vengence at times, and any means become
justified in accomplishing their ends. This is far from
the case for Chandler's Marlowe.
Chandler is not satisfied with literature as a
mirror-image of the society and nothing more. If he
were, alongside the realism of the corrupt and strange
world he gives us in his fiction would be a hero who
fits this world: a hero who was, if not equally corrupt
and strange, then one for whom expedience and violence
were more important than justice and morality, and
certainly not a hero for whom a chaste sense of the
moral was truly an obsession.
In a 1947 letter to Charles Morton of The Atlantic
Monthly. Chandler complains about the state of
literature and what it was becoming. He recognizes the
obvious skill and perception and wit and honesty good
novels ought to have. He admits that the literature
with which he was concerned had a subject, and a sharp
immediate sense of life. And he was hard put to say
exactly what it, contemporary literature, does not
have, "but that thing, whatever it is, is more
important than what it does have..."
He finally closes in on "that thing." He writes:
22
...but essentially, I believe, that what is
lacking is an emotional quality. Even when
they deal with death, and they often do, they
are not tragic. I suppose that is to be
expected. An age which is incapable of
poetry is incapable of any kind of
literature except the cleverness of a
decadence. The boys can say anything,their
scenes are almost tiresomely neat, they have
all the facts and all the answers, but they
are little men who have forgotten how to
pray. As the world grows smaller, so the
minds of men grow smaller, more compact, and
more empty. These are the machine-minders
ofliterature. (Raymond Chandler Speaking ,
74-75)
Chandler insisted on a poetic vision of life: a
literature where death was tragic, where character and
morality were bound with and not absent from the
melodramatic milieu of the hard-boiled, big-city
detective story. He insisted upon this in his own art,
and in the character of his hero.
That Chandler chose as a vehicle for his art the
formula of detective fiction, might appear antithetical
to the principle of the expression of emotion and the
creative process. Chandler understood this not to be
the case. In his later years he wrote that "my whole
career is based on the idea that the formula doesn't
matter, the thing that counts is what you do with the
formula; that is to say, it is a matter of style"
(McShane 63).
23
fictional detective, Philip Marlowe, not merely to fit
a well-established popular formula, but because
Chandler wanted to write fiction which captured the
rhythms of the American streets and the men and women
who lived their. He wanted to write for the popular
culture, but he wanted to use the hard-boiled detective
formula to explore the moral issues of our society in
the tradition of serious fiction and to treat such
contemporary moral and cultural themes as romantic
illusion, destructive innocence, and the conflict
between individual moral feeling and the collective
routines of society.
Chandler's disillusionment with the broken promise
of American democracy reverberates in his fiction, and
is continuously heard in the voice of his hero.
Marlowe's sharp and witty repartee is used to parry his
despair acquired with the realization that the American
dream had turned to nightmare.
Robert Penn Warren, in his Jefferson lectures of
1974 to the National Foundation for the Humanities
(collected in Democracy and Poetry), lends some
historical perspective, in terms of this
disillusionment, and explains that the early
Jeffersonian dream, even to the early American dreamers
like Cooper, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, has
24
"assumed the shape of what was the Jacksonian
nightmare" (Warren, 5 ). While these early writers'
understanding of the change in shape that had taken
place in the American dream is not a confirmation of
Chandler's vision of society, it does create a
foundation of disillusionment with the American ideal
and the attempt to create a restorative factor in
literature to confront the nightmarish reality of this
change.
Like the early democrats Cooper, Emerson, Thoreau,
and Whitman, Chandler believed that the American dream
had become a nightmare a mid-twentieth century
version, to be sure, but in many ways, the same
recurring nightmare. Chandler's Los Angeles was
Cooper's corrupted town, sending Natty Bumppo deeper
into the wilderness, Thoreau's Concord, sending him to
Walden Pond, Whitman's Manhattan: "crowded with petty
grotesques, malformations, phantoms..." (Warren,p.9).
Emerson's report of the nightmare is most famous.
The following passage expresses his deep concern about
the democratic masses he felt were closing in on him:
Leave this hypocritical prating about the
masses.
Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their
demands and influence.... I wish not to concede
anything to them, but to tame, to kill, divide,
and break them up, and draw individuals out of
them....I do not wish any mass at all, but honest
25
men only...and no shovel-handed, narrow-brained
gin drinking million Stockingers or Lazzaroni at
all....Away with this hurrah of masses, and let
us have the considered vote of simple men spoken
on their honor and their conscience."
(Emerson, in Warren 5)
For all this berating of the masses, Emerson,
nevertheless, did have some hope for a democracy still:
a democracy of masses turned into responsible
individuals: "the considered vote of single men, spoken
on their honor and their conscience" And, likewise,
Cooper, for all his criticism of American democracy,
particularly its tendency toward plutocracy and the
tyranny of majority rule combined with the "money-
getting principle," nevertheless still had Natty
Bumppo, as Warren points out. Even as an old man in
The Pioneer, in what was surely a fallen world, he was
clearly a "self more clearly, freestandingly, and
magnanimously a 'self' than even Jefferson, Emerson, or
Whitman dared to dream" (Warren 7-8).
When Thoreau declared that "any man more right
than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one," and
that he wanted nothing to do with "the world's dirty
institutions," he too was speaking to the nightmare
tyranny and conformity of the majority that was so
feared and hated by Cooper and Emerson. In fact, it
seems that the very process of democracy a rule by
26
the people is here attacked by Thoreau and his fellow
artists. But what they call for in its place is the
free, compassionate, and responsible individual, the
common man liberated from the base commonality of the
many, but a common man still. When viewed from the
Jeffersonian ideal this is not anti-democratic at all,
but the contrary; it recognizes the lost heroic stature
which should be basic to humanity and to a democratic
society, but which has been replaced by, as Whitman saw
it in Democratic Vistas: "a sort of dry and flat
Sahara” and cities "crowded with petty grotesques,
malformations, phantoms, playing meaningless antics"
(Warren 9). Like these early poets, and Warren
himself, Chandler would not entirely forsake the
Jeffersonian dream. He wrote about the nightmarish and
corrupt city, but with the moral hero Marlowe, Chandler
has created a kind of personified fictional model of a
moral standard which fully affirms the lost dream, even
in the middle of the decadence, and which he felt must
be injected into the sick American society so that
America has a chance to retrieve or at least to know
again our perhaps irretrievable American democratic
ideal.
Chandler said, in 1945, in a letter to Dale
Warren, publicity director of Houghton Mifflin, that he
27
chose to write melodrama, "because when I looked around
me it was the only kind of writing I saw that was
relatively honest and yet was not trying to put over
somebody's party line" (Gardiner and Walker 24).
A few years later, 1949, again on the subject of
mystery and melodrama, Chandler defined the mystery
writer's material in a letter to Bernice Baumgarten,
his literary agent in New York:
melodrama an exaggeration of violence and
fear beyond what we normally experience in
life. (I say normally: no writer ever
approximated the life of the Nazi
concentration camps.) The means he uses are
realistic in the sense that such things
happen to people like those in places like
these; but this realism is superficial; the
potential of emotion is overcharged, the
compression of time and event is a violation
of probability, and although such things
happen, they do not happen so fast and in
such a tight frame of logic to so closely
knit a group of people. (Gardiner and
Walker 53-54)
However, for Chandler, the mystery and its
melodramatic climate were not employed to merely
provide the reader with another whodunit, to simply
search for a specific criminal. Chandler despised the
classical closed-room murder mystery and its
pretentious and characterless jigsaw-puzzle-like
machinations. Chandler himself explained what he was
28
after in his fiction. He said his mystery was a search
for a:
raison d'etre, a meaning in character and
relationship, what the hell went on rather
than who done it. The story can be violent
or calm, brutal or elegant, but the emphasis
is always on people, not on facts, and there
is always something to be discovered before
the thing makes sense.... (Gardiner and
Walker 57)
This sounds more like a description of high art,
literature in its search for profundity and truth, and
not a pulp detective fiction formula.
Chandler used the formula of the tale of detection
for another reason besides its use of the American
idiom and the language of the common man, and for its
popular appeal. He believed that the tensions in a
novel of murder were "the simplest and yet most
complete pattern of the tensions on which we live in
this generation" (Gardiner and Walker 52-53).
W. H. Auden recognized Chandler's unique artistry
cloaked behind the detective fiction formula and as
well recognized the same pattern of tensions Chandler
writes about: Auden, the Anglican, defines the pattern
as a dialectic of innocence and guilt, through which
the revelation of presence of guilt, the murder, leads
to the false location of guilt, then to the location of
guilt, then to the location of real guilt, to a
29
catharsis, the arrest or death of the murderer, to
finally a restoration of the state of innocence. And,
in an essay entitled "The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on
the Detective Story, by an Addict," which first
appeared in Harper's, May 1968, Auden cuts Chandler out
of the herd of detective story writers and says about
him:
Actually, whatever he may say, I think Mr.
Chandler
is interested in writing, not detective stories,
but serious studies of a criminal milieu, the
Great Wrong Place, and his powerful, but extremely
depressing books should be read and judged, not as
escape literature, but as works of art.
(Auden, p.408)
Auden's insight is a sharp one. The Great Wrong
Place, as he calls it, is the Los Angeles of Chandler's
time. And although its inhabitants may not have been
born with original sin as Auden might have it, they
have certainly acquired, in Chandler's fiction, a firm
knowledge of the nature of evil and all of its big city
American manifestations.
If Chandler is not satisfied with the contemporary
literature of America, neither is he satisfied with the
American society in which he lives and from which the
literature he criticizes springs. If Chandler was not
interested in establishing genuine moral and
democratic affirmation in his fiction, he no doubt
30
would have created a fiction of the grotesque and of
the grotesque alone, like so much of the hard- boiled
genre of his time. His hero would have been, like so
many others, merely one with a fast gun that saw plenty
of use, and a manner or set of idiosyncrasies as
ridiculous and pretentious as the pulp market would
allow. (Which was very ridiculous indeed. Chapter
three of this dissertation will elaborate.) If
Chandler were satisfied with his culture and its
standards, his hero, Philip Marlowe, would not be set
so dramatically and philosophically apart from the
society in which he functions.
If one reads the hard-boiled detective fiction of
the 1930's and 1940's one clearly sees that expedient
morality is the main ingredient of the genre. The
detective hero, although he does bring the murderer to
justice, (usually the justice of the grave),
nevertheless is very fast and loose with his moral
vision and his gun; moral principles are to be
discarded at the drop of a scented handkerchief in the
hedonistic, gratuitously violent machinations the hero
must employ to solve his case.
Chandler will not capitulate to this expediency.
Although he applies the formula of the mystery genre,
he makes of it moral fiction "art" which, in John
31
Gardner's words in On Moral Fiction, "seeks to improve
life, not debase it" (Gardner, 5). He is creating art,
which "seeks to hold off, at least for a while, the
twilight of the gods and us" (Gardner 5).
Chandler's hero is not hedonistic, not
gratuitously violent, and not immoral. He plays chess
with a book, eats dinner alone at a coffee shop, and
many nights drinks himself to sleep. He kills once in
six novels, to save the life of the woman who saved
his, sleeps with one woman, not his client, in the last
novel, (who he later marries, in an unfinished work),
and continues to tolerate no end of abuse and
persecution at the hands of the crooks and the police
because he insists on remaining loyal to his clients.
Interestingly revealing as to Marlowe's character
is Chandler's unconscious frame, if it can be called
that, for the six novels. In the first novel, The Big
Sleep. Marlowe kills a man. The man he kills, Lash
Canino, is a sadistic, cold-blooded gun for hire, who
had, earlier in the novel, at gunpoint, fed a cyanide-
laced glass of liquor to a man Marlowe admired and
liked (which is itself unusual). This while an unarmed
Marlowe helplessly and covertly stood by and listened
to it happen. When he finally meets Canino and kills
him, Marlowe acts to save the woman who had earlier
32
saved his life; he is being fired upon by Canino, and
refuses to shoot Canino in the back when he has the
chance to do so. Chandler takes great care in this
scene and in his depiction of Canino throughout, so
that the reader has no doubt about Marlowe's moral
justification in killing him. In fact, when Canino
finally falls, the reader identifies with the killing—
-that is, Marlowe has acted for us all.
In The Long Goodbve, the last novel, Marlowe makes
love to a woman. This is the only time this happens in
the six novels up to and including this one. The act
is one of emotional, intellectual, and sexual
involvement; however, it lasts but one night. The
relationship between Linda Loring and Marlowe began
fairly early in the book and does not end even when the
novel closes. (In Playback, Chandler's 1958 novel
adapted from his 1948 screen play, Marlowe talks to
Linda Loring on the phone. She is in Paris, and has
called him to tell him she is divorced and wants to
marry him. He accepts.) They had talked about
marriage in The Long Goodbve, but Marlowe, despite his
feelings for her, rejected the idea easily. "It
wouldn't last six months," he said. "American wives
take in too damn much territory." And in the
uncompleted The Poodle Springs Story, (recently
33
uncompleted The Poodle Springs Story, (recently
completed by Robert B. Parker) they are actually
married but Marlowe was right. Chandler says about
the marriage: "He loves her and they are beautifully
matched in bed, but there is trouble looming."
Chandler realized it was a mistake and says in a letter
to Maurice Guinness at the time he was writing this
last uncompleted work:
...a fellow of Marlowe's type shouldn't get
married, because he is a lonely man, a poor
man, a dangerous man, and yet a sympathetic
man, and somehow none of this goes with
marriage....
I see him always in a lonely street, in
lonely rooms, puzzled, but never quite
defeated.... P.S. I am writing him married to
a rich woman and swamped by money, but I
don't think it will last. (Gardiner and
Walker 258)
Chandler died before more than four chapters could be
written. (Parker has the two in a continuous verbal
sparring match, loving but uneasy, and before the novel
is half-way through, they agree that the marriage will
not work, even though they love each other. Marlowe's
profession is just too all encompassing, and Linda's
wealth and her accustomed lifestyle make Marlowe
uncomfortable and just don't allow the two of them to
remain together. By the end of the book (Parker's
completed version) they are separated.)
34
as if Chandler has structured a moral frame for his
hero which initiates him into his profession in the
first novel, and which awards him with love in the
last.
Marlowe's first and only kill is a morally
righteous act, in that justice is done and the innocent
are protected, and there is no need for Chandler to
repeat himself. Marlowe has been initiated into the
violent world he must travel, and this rite of passage
is a successful one. As readers, we become aware that
Marlowe is capable of killing someone if it is
justifiable, beyond any reasonable doubt. And that
awareness on the part of the reader, coupled with
Marlowe's ability to avoid having to kill again, yet
still bring about his own particular and satisfying
justice, is enough to carry Marlowe through five more
novels without the need for further proof of his
willingness and ability to kill. Chandler is
interested in something else.
Marlowe's only onstage sexual relationship turns
into a marriage, or at least would have if Chandler had
lived to complete The Poodle Springs Story. Chandler's
intention, less one misunderstands, was not to make his
hero celibate, and Chandler himself acknowledged that
Marlowe was the type to have a number of affairs, but
35
hero celibate, and Chandler himself acknowledged that
Marlowe was the type to have a number of affairs, but
no permanent connections. Michael Mason in his 1977
essay "Marlowe, Men And Women" included in the
anthology of crticism on Chandler entitled The World of
Raymond Chandler, edited by Miriam Gross, argues that
Chandler's work includes "a cluster of themes that
gives the novels a strongly homosexual cast"(90). His
argument stresses the number of female killers and
likeable men in the novels, and attributes this to
Chandler's and Marlowes's latent homosexuality and
mysogyny. McShane, in his biography of Chandler, cites
an earlier example of this kind of indictment, an
indignant pamphlet called Love and Death by the critic
Gershon Legman, written in 1949, which espouses the
theory that Marlowe is homosexual. Chandler replied, in
a letter to a Mr. Ibberson, who had written Chandler
asking for a description of Marlowe, and who had
mentioned Legman's theory, that:
you can certainly dismiss the remarks of
Mr. G. Legman, since Mr. Legman seems to me
to belong to that rather numerous class of
American neurotics which cannot conceive of a
close friendship between a couple of men
other than homosexual. (McShane, 203)
McShane dismisses Legman's and other similar
assertions on the grounds that there is no evidence to
36
other hand, there is a great deal of evidence to prove
Chandler's heterosexuality"(203-204).
Mason's more recent argument seems to also
overlook the moral nature of Marlowe's character. As a
professional and as a moral human being, Marlowe will
not exploit his clients nor any one else. Offstage,
Marlowe is normal, but moral still. "I do not care
much about his private life," Chandler said in "The
Simple Art of Murder," in defining his hero, "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 man of honor in one thing, he is
that in all things" (The Simple Art of Murder, 193_).
This last remark is even more interesting when we
realize that Linda Loring, the woman Marlowe eventually
does marry, is the American version of a duchess. Her
father, who owns a large newspaper chain, among other
things, is one of the richest and most powerful men in
California. Linda Loring lives in a castle brought
stone by stone from England, and her community is the
exclusive Idle Valley, one protected by guards and a
gate to keep out the riff-raff, like Marlowe. Again,
Chandler's hero, the common man, rises to the heights
of his democratic potential, crossing all class lines
to form a union based on mutual love and respect. The
37
dignity of America's democratic promise is realized, if
only temporarily.
Within this unusual, but highly symbolic
framework, Chandler has created a moral force in the
person of Philip Marlowe a force which, like John
Gardner's definition of moral fiction, is "in sworn
opposition to chaos," and which "builds temporary walls
against life's leveling force...." (Gardner 6).It is
precisely this moral force which separates Chandler's
work from the hard-boiled detective fiction of his day
and makes of it serious literature. Chandler saw his
literature as that which not only reflects the
community, but helps create it by putting society to it
greatest tests and setting forth the conditions for
society's survival. In this sense, his literature is a
record of communalized experience, "a nourishment of
the soul", (so Warren defines poetry and avers about
literature) , "and indeed of society, in that it keeps
alive the sense of self and the correlated sense of
community" (Warren, 92). Through Marlowe, Chandler is
able to affirm the best that the moral community of
American democracy has to offer. Marlowe, in each
novel, is confronted by a society facing its ultimate
test and threat, its ultimate breakdown into chaos,
murder, and his definitive moral standard enables him
38
novel, is confronted by a society facing its ultimate
test and threat, its ultimate breakdown into chaos,
murder, and his definitive moral standard enables him
to find the truth and restore the conditions necessary
for society's survival.
Wallace Stevens' poem, "Notes Toward a Supreme
Fiction," may help to clarify this idea which emerges
in.Chandler's fiction, of the creation of a
"communalized experience" infused with the moral power
to help society survive, and as well perhaps empower
the idea of the frame which seems to hold his fiction.
In the poem, which is about creative power, Stevens
sets the idea of an "immaculate beginning" and an
"immaculate end," and, between the two, "we move...as
if blood newly come" In this movement the poem
creates, "an elixir, and excitation, a pure power"
(209).
Now Stevens is talking about what poetry does, and
he is speaking strictly about aesthetics about the
poem, the imagination, the creative force. He is not
talking about culture or morals when he writes:
The poem refreshes life so that we share,
for a moment, the first ideal...it satisfies
belief in an immaculate beginning
And sends us winged by an unconscious will,
to an immaculate end. (Stevens 209)
39
a "pure power" which emerges from and yet is intrinsic
to art, which, in Stevens's words, "refreshes life,"
and, in Gardner's, "affirms life": that quality of art,
aesthetic or moral, which reaches to the deepest ideal
of beauty and truth; and enables us as a community to
"share, for a moment, the first ideal...."
It would be, perhaps, a too-finely-drawn analogy
to call Marlowe's first and only kill an immaculate
beginning and his act of sexual love an immaculate end.
But perhaps not. Both acts are immaculate in the sense
that they are pure, and never repeated; they are the
result of a moral conviction as to what is right. They
are, "winged" by Marlowe's instinctual unconscious, by
his moral imperative. We share with Marlowe a renewed
life-affirming power, even in death, and certainly in
sex. This power or "elixir" breathes new life into
poetry, and into the fiction of Chandler, and into the
culture itself.
When Marlowe kills his act allows life to continue
to flourish by removing the evil that tries to claim it
for its own. In art, Gardner inextricably binds
morality and love. He quotes, in On Moral Fiction,
John Fowles' Daniel Martin as one example of moral
fiction: "No true compassion without will, no true
will without compassion." And is not this marriage of
40
will and compassion the same "unconscious will" to
which Stevens refers, which sends us "winged...to an
immaculate end"? And is it not this "unconscious
will", bound with the truth of Marlowe's compassion,
which sends Marlowe, in the last novel, into the sexual
love, that could symbolize, in Stevens' aesthetic, "the
elixir, and excitation, a pure power," and could
symbolize for Gardner that which "celebrates life's
potential offering a vision unmistakably and
unsentimentally rooted in love" (Gardner 13)?
After Marlowe has killed Canino, he "began to
laugh like a loon." The woman whose life he has just
saved says bitterly: "Did you have to kill him?"
I stopped laughing as suddenly as I had
started...
"Yes," she said softly, "I suppose you did."
(The Long
Goodbve. 189) Marlowe's laughter, the sudden silence,
the horror which is swirling down on them, and the
realization by the woman that Marlowe did what he had
to do, combine to present Chandler's artistic rendering
of the moral seriousness of the act he has had his hero
commit. At the same time, the scene baptizes, purges,
and purifies, by the rain, a soft voice, and by death,
so that Marlowe, in a very real sense, is at an
"immaculate beginning" in his career. And there is an
41
"immaculate end" in the last novel, represented by the
act of sexual love and its aftermath.
We said goodbye. I watched the cab out of
sight. I went back up the steps and into the
bedroom and pulled the bed to pieces and remade
it. There was a long dark hair on one of the
pillows. There was a lump of lead at the pit
of my stomach.
The French have a phrase for it. The
bastards have a phrase for everything and they
are always right.
To say goodbye is to die a little.
(The Long Goodbve,
300)
The long dark hair on his pillow, the lump of lead
at the pit of his stomach, and the French phrase, here
combine to give us Chandler at his emotional best.
Marlowe, the tough guy, is here overcome by one long
dark hair on his pillow. He understands that he has
died a little. Surely this is "an immaculate end," a
death which has come from life, and is, therefore, for
Marlowe, a "pure power," a creative, affirming, and
moral reality in this, the last novel.
In contemporary American fiction, so Gardner
avers, with its celebration of absurdity, nihilism,
confusion and chaos, moral standards and democratic
purpose seem to have been subsumed, and texture and
manipulative structure have become king; the age has
become one of spiritual mediocrity, and "confusion and
42
doubt have become the primary civilized emotions"
(Gardner, 97). However contemporary this criticism may
be, Gardner's critical perspective is a product of an
American culture and a literary reality which has been
emerging since well before the post-modern era with
which he is specifically concerned.
Chandler's work is certain testament to that. Set
within the hotbed of southern California corruption, it
becomes moral fiction because of its hero and his
vision. Chandler's fictional Los Angeles and its
people, in the forties and fifties, are as deeply
imbued with decadence, nihilism, and disregard for
moral and democratic ideals as any slice of American
fictional culture we might care to examine, including
•>*
the sixties and seventies to which Gardner points..
Marlowe, in this world, becomes for Chandler and for
the reader, the restorative factor, the antidote, the
model for the forgotten American dream. As such, he
becomes a personification of all that John Gardner
holds essential for the creation of moral fiction and
for the moral artist.
Chapter #2. THE POLITICS AND CULTURE OF SOUTHERN
CALIFORNIA: CORRUPTION AND ILLUSION AS MILIEU FOR
CHANDLER'S FICTION
California, the department-store state. The most
of everything and the best of nothing.
Raymond Chandler
Los Angeles is a middle-aged obese woman from
somewhere in the Middle-West, lying naked in the sun.
Myron Brinig
Chandler's first novel, written in 1939, concerned
the children of the oil-rich, influential Sternwood
family. They were involved in blackmail and murder and
were mixed up with the mobster/gambler element which
controlled the vice in Los Angeles at the time. These
themes, and the corruption of government officials and
police, carry through to the very last novel he wrote,
The Long Goodbve. Chandler rarely digresses into the
local politics of the time, and his plots are basically
products of his creative imagination. But his material
and his milieu is clearly emerging and taking form from
the corrupt environment which was Los Angeles of the
1930's, 1940's, and early 1950's.
To properly discuss the depths of corruption
Chandler portrays, and to accurately assess the
depression and despair the Chandler hero seems to
44
succumb to because of this corruption, it is necessary
to examine the historical and political realities of
Los Angeles during these years.
By the late 1930's, when Chandler had already
written his early Black Mask and Dime Detective stories
and was beginning The Big Sleep, U.S. Attorney General
Frank Murphy characterized Los Angeles as "one of the
most corrupt and graft-ridden cities in the U.S."
(Gottlieb and Wolt 224). Chandler was very much aware
of the perverse and sordid climate which had Los
Angeles in its grip at this time, and his novels became
saturated with this same atmosphere, fictionalized and
shaped for the specific needs of his plots and
characters, but certainly true to the uniquely corrupt
nature of the city and its real-life situation.
Chandler was not attempting to recreate incidents from
Los Angeles's political/cultural history, even though a
number of his scenes and characters are modeled closely
on historical events and real-life people. (Examples
will be discussed below.) Rather, Chandler's primary
concern was to be able to infuse his fiction with the
same kind of attitudes and emotions that he felt were
afflicting and corrupting Los Angeles. He felt a
disease of greed and perversity had been eating at the
core of the American democratic spirit and mind for
45
many years (and was reflected in the amorality of the
hard-boiled genre), and seemed to be destroying the
very best that America and its dream for democratic
society had offered, at least theoretically, since its
inception. Los Angles became the last frontier and the
final resting place of both this dream and this
disease: the city of angels, drawing hundreds of
thousands from the heartland of the nation to a new
beginning, a better place, a fulfillment of the
promises that had been made to them by right of birth.
But the promises and dreams were unkept and
unattainable, and the subsequent vulnerability,
desperation, and despair created a breeding ground for
the disease of greed and corruption. The nature of the
city changed, as Chandler7 s hero observed, from a
little Athens to a decadent Rome during the twenties
and thirties.
Los Angeles, in the 1920's and 1930's, was a city
with a small town midwestern flavor, filled with
fundamentalist churches and cult movements like the
Four Square Gospel, the I AM cult, and Mankind United,
a cult whose founders "succeeded in establishing
contact with a superhuman race of little men with
metallic heads who dwell in the center of the earth"
(Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on
46
the Land. 2 65), and numerous others. At the head of
these movements were revivalist preachers like Aimee
Semple McPherson, and cult leaders like Guy W. Ballard
and his wife Edna Ballard, and Arthur Bell, and
congregations from Cedar City, Iowa, and Manhattan,
Kansas, looking for promised luxuries, energy and
power; a despairing population seeking spiritual hope
where economic prosperity was nowhere to be found
(McWilliams, Chap.xiii). It was, during these years, a
city of water conspiracies, i.e., the Owens Valley
tragedy, and water charlatans like Charles Mallory
Hatfield, known as "Hatfield the Rainmaker". A city of
anti-labor plots and red-baiting: throughout the
twenties and thirties, Los Angeles, McWilliams writes,
was "the last citadel of the open shop, ...the paradise
of the professional patriot and the red-baiter" (293);
a city of small-town transplanted boosters.
By 1937, two years before Chandler's first novel,
this small town phase was coming to an end. "Los
Angeles was emerging from its fundamentalist period.
In its place was developing a new sprawling Los
Angeles a modern metropolis with freeways and smog
and the new powerful anti-Communism of Howard Hughes"
(Gottlieb and Wolt 236-237). With the growth of the
modern city came its natural counterpart, the growth of
47
organized crime. Chandler, through Marlowe, tries to
explain this phenomenon in The Long Goodbve, written in
1953, but applicable to Los Angeles even as early as
the 1920s. Marlowe is talking to Bernie Ohls, an
honest cop and old associate, about gamblers and
gambling. Ohls wants to stop gambling because he
blames gambling for people losing their hard-earned
dollars to the "fast money boys." Marlowe takes issue
with this thinking.
You're a damn good cop, Bernie, but just
the same you're all wet. In one way, cops
are all the same. They all blame the wrong
thing. If a guy loses his paycheck at a crap
table, stop gambling. If he gets drunk, stop
liquor. If he kills somebody in a car crash,
stop making automobiles. If he gets pinched
with a girl in a hotel room, stop sexual
intercourse. If he falls downstairs, stop
building houses....We don't have mobs and
crime syndicates and goon squads because we
have crooked politicians and their stooges
in City Hall and the legislatures. Crime
isn't a disease, it's a symptom....We're a
big, rough, rich wild people and crime is the
price we pay for it, and organized crime is
the price we pay for organization.
We'll have it with us a long time.
Organized crime is just the dirty side of the
sharp dollar.
(Chandler 213)
This endemic crime and corruption became, in
Chandler's vision, an essential aspect of our national
character. By 1937, the syndicate controlled all
48
gambling in Los Angeles. James Richardson, a reporter
at the time, takes note.
Things were pretty bad (1939-1940). A
syndicate of gamblers and vice-mongers had
the city in its grip. The syndicate owned
the police department. I knew all the boys in
the syndicate. They had been around a long
time, and they really had the town organized.
They had it so well organized that when
Scarface A1 Capone came out from Chicago to
look the field over with the thought of
taking charge himself, he was rousted out of
his hotel room and put on a train back to
Chicago. And the boys who did the rousting
and who told him to get out and stay out were
the cops owned body and soul by the
syndicate.
(Richardson 213)
This is only one of many notable examples of the
sorry state that was Los Angeles as it moved into its
fifth decade of the 20th century. The late 1920''s and
throughout the 1930's saw Los Angeles become embedded
in a morass of legislative and police involvement with
corruption and the syndicate. Hollywood, as well,
became notorious for its sex scandals and high living.
And the monied gentry were establishing themselves in
Beverly Hills and Pasadena, areas of otherworldly
luxury and elitism. Chandler was to capture all this
and make fiction of it in his novels in the years to
come.
The conglomeration of forces operating for control
of the power and wealth in Los Angeles during this time
49
(the late 1920's through the '40's) consisted basically
of a large group of monied gamblers who ran the
prostitution and vice throughout the city and who were
financed by those politicians they were able to buy and
influence, and the Los Angeles Times, owned by the Otis
Chandler family (no relation to Raymond) and its
business and political affiliates perhaps the single
most powerful force in twentieth-century southern
California history. Along for the ride were the
individual politicians and police, mayors, DAs, and
police chiefs who were able to wield control through
graft and corruption on a regular basis.
Although Chandler did not start writing until the
mid-1930's, and his novels were all written from 1939
to 1953, he lived in Los Angeles throughout the 192 0s
and 1930s, and was certainly aware of its headline
stories of scandal and corruption. This seems to be
verified by simply looking at a couple of the news
stories which broke during this period and then looking
at Chandler's fiction. A few examples should verify
this.
It is important to note that more than merely
documenting the similarities between Los Angeles
history and Chandler's fiction, the following is
presented so that the fiction of Chandler can be
50
appreciated for its highly realistic flavor, and for
its ability to imaginatively capture the ambiance of
this period.
In 1949, Chandler's fifth novel, The Little
Sister, was published. This was his Hollywood novel;
that is, here, after years of work for the studios,
Chandler was able to zero in on the different strata of
Hollywood life while moving his detective through a
number of mysteries and murders and finally out the
other side into truth. Along the way Marlowe realizes
that the key piece of evidence in the case is a
photograph of his client, a beautiful up-and-coming
Hollywood starlet. In the photo she is seated next to
Steelgrave, her lover, in a booth of a restaurant owned
by this notorious Hollywood gambler and racketeer,
formerly from the East and clearly connected to
organized crime. The photo would not have been
important except that it could and will be dated by a
newspaper headline visible in the picture. When
Marlowe learns that the picture was taken on the same
night that Steelgrave was supposed to be locked in the
county jail, and that it was on this night that
Steelgrave's arch rival, Stein, was gunned down in
front of his apartment, the photograph takes obvious
significance.
51
Twenty years earlier, Benny "Bugsy" Siegel became
involved in a very similar incident. Siegel was a
transplanted New York gangster recently moved to
Beverly Hills, one of the most vicious gangsters of the
1920s, and a partner with Lepke Buchalter in Murder,
Inc., the contract-for-kill organization which operated
for many years within the extended family of organized
crime,
"Bugsy" had landed himself in the county jail on a
grand jury indictment charging him with the murder of
Harry Greenberg, who had been shot in gangster fashion
as he ate at the wheel of his auto in a quiet side
street of Hollywood. "Big Greenie" had been rubbed out
because he might have been a witness against Lepke
Buchalter, who was awaiting trial on a narcotics charge
in New York, and Bugsy, as everyone knew, would do
anything for a friend. Because of his friendship with
Dr. Benjamin Blank, the county jail physician, Bugsy
had a private room in the county jail with a nice soft
bed and had been getting out of jail at nights. It
seems that Bugsy had been given permission, through Dr.
Blank, to leave the jail to have some dental work done.
Of the forty-nine days he served in the county lock-up,
he was out eighteen of those nights. He typically left
52
jail in a Sheriff's office car driven by Deputy Sheriff
Pascoe (Richardson,91).
James H. Richardson, then the city editor of the
Los Angeles Examiner, and later the author of For the
Life of Me: Memoirs of a City Editor (1954), had been
investigating Siegal for some time, and had wind of his
scheme with Dr. Blank. In fact, Richardson had one of
his young reporters, Bill Hyie, get inside Siegal's
Beverly Hills mansion as a houseboy, and, once safely
ensconced, had managed to discover Bugsy's files on Dr.
Blank.
With this kind of documented evidence in hand,
Richardson had his reporters waiting at the jail to
tail and photograph Bugsy on his nightly sojourns "to
the dentist." One night Bugsy and Pascoe went to
Lindy's, a cozy little eating place on Wilshire
Boulevard, and there Bugsy met Wendy Barrie, a pretty
actress over from England. Richardson's photographers
got pictures of them (Bugsy, Barrie, and Deputy Sheriff
Pascoe), as they left Lindy's around 2 am. Bugsy was
furious at the explosion of flash bulbs, but Pascoe,
scared, dragged the enraged Siegel to the car and they
got away in a hurry.
When the story broke on page one of the Examiner,
all hell broke loose around County Jail. The goats
53
turned out to be Dr. Benjamin Blank and Jimmy Pascoe.
Blank resigned and Pascoe was banished to some sub
station .
In Chandler's novel, The Little Sister, the
photograph of the racketeer and the beautiful starlet
becomes the axis around which the novel revolves.
Because of it, four people are murdered, including the
racketeer, and a fifth (the starlet) is blackmailed.
And before it is over Marlowe has become thoroughly
bitter about the so-called Hollywood dream he wants to
believe. "Me and my beautiful dream," he says
remorsefully, about the beautiful woman who has become
lost to the nightmarish and sordid tangle of sex,
money, and power.
So Chandler, then, in this case, has taken a
headline story of the 1920s and used it as a
springboard from which to develop the plot
complications of his Hollywood novel of 1949. Of
course he does more : this novel is not primarily about
gangsters or even about Hollywood, but about a lost
innocence: it is an elegy to an American dream lost to
greed and illusion. But what he has done with Bugsy
Siegel, Wendy Barrie, and the County Jail scandal, is
really a perfect example of what Chandler is doing in
his art. That is, he is taking the reality of our
54
history, and turning it into an expansive metaphor for
the degeneration of the American democratic moral
standard.
Another example of Chandler's knowledge and use of
the political realities of his adopted city may be seen
in the Tony Cornero story. Cornero was a bootlegger
during Prohibition, and, after repeal, he shifted his
enterprise to a new field. He purchased a ship and
began operating it as a gambling ship off the coast of
Los Angeles County and he was making big money. He
insisted his ship was operating outside the territorial
waters of the United States, and he therefore claimed
immunity under maritime law.
In Chandler's second novel, Farewell, My Lovely,
written in 1940, the independent and powerful gambler,
Laird Brunette, operates from his two gambling ships
off the Bay City (Santa Monica) Coast and outside U.S.
territorial waters, where he is safe from harassment.
Chandler does not use any more of the Cornero story
than the ship operating outside the U.S. limits, its
owner, gambler Laird Brunette, an obvious facsimile of
Cornero, and the influence one man can have over an
entire city. But this is enough to make it clear that
Chandler is again making use of Los Angeles history to
help him with his fiction, and again he reshapes
55
reality, transforming it into metaphor so that he
might comment on and take issue with, through Marlowe's
adherence to a moral code, the immorality of this place
and time.
Chandler was always disturbed by the city's
corruption, but he was even more disturbed and
frustrated that the realistic, hard-boiled fiction of
his era could do no more than reflect the contemporary
reality, yet never provide in that fiction what
Chandler called "a quality of redemption" which must be
"in everything that can be called art" (The Simple Art
of Murder 193).
For Chandler, there had to be more to the
realistic "hard-boiled" novel than the brutal portrait
of a society gone very wrong. Even the ameliorating
factor of the tough hero of the detective fiction genre
who fights for justice was not enough, if this
redemptive quality was missing, as it generally was.
Yet Chandler is writing realism, and this meant
that his fiction had to be steeped in the political and
historical reality of his time. Chandler was writing
about a world "that is not a fragrant world, but is the
world you live in..." (Murder 193).
As he describes it in The Simple Art of Murder, it
is:
56
A world in which gangsters can rule
nations and almost rule cities, in which
hotels and apartment houses and celebrated
restaurants are owned by men who made their
money out of brothels, in which a screen star
can be the finger man for a mob, and the nice
man down the hall is a boss of the numbers
racket; a world where a judge with a cellar
full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail
for having a pint in his pocket, where the
mayor of your town may have condoned murder
as an instrument of money-making, where no
man can walk down a dark street in safety
because law and order are things we talk
about but refrain from practicing; a world
where you may witness a holdup in broad
daylight and see who did it, but you will
walk quickly back into the crowd rather than
tell anyone, because the holdup men may have
friends with long guns, or the police may not
like your testimony, and in any case the
shyster for the defense will be allowed to
abuse and vilify you in open court, before a
jury of selected morons, without any but the
most perfunctory interference from a
political judge.
(Murder 192-93)
The stuff of the real world was as close to
Chandler as the nearest news-stand, and he could not
and did not ignore it. The two specific examples above
are perhaps the most directly related to actual
historical events, but Chandler's novels are filled
with the same kind of sordid, perverse, and unlawful
practices that Los Angeles was heir to during these
years.
Vivian Sternwood cynically remarks to Marlowe, in
The Big Sleep, that their chauffeur has a police record
57
because "he didn't know the right people. That's all a
police record means in this rotten crime-ridden
country" (52). Marlowe disagrees with her, but
Chandler has allowed the maw to be opened here, and has
revealed Los Angeles through the eyes of one of its
richest and most decadent citizens.
Kidnapping, disappearances, and homicides filled
the newspapers of the 1920s, and elections were
frequently won or lost on the basis of current crime
conditions. The powerful Los Angeles Times was apt to
use crime for its own political purposes. When a pro-
Chandler (the owner of the Times) administration was in
power, the paper downplayed the city's law-and-order
problems, and when an anti-Times administration took
power, the city suddenly became overrun by criminals
(Richardson 200) .
The 1920s, years when Chandler was working his way
up the corporate ladder of an oil syndicate and not
doing any writing at all, were years which saw the
disgraceful downfall of two consecutive City Hall
administrations. Chandler absorbed and stored for
future use the glaring reality of the hard-boiled life
of Los Angeles: a city with perhaps less fear and more
blatant wheeling-dealing than more established eastern
metropolises, with reputations to protect. Los Angeles
58
was a rip-roaring frontier town come of age; for twenty
years, until 1938, the office of the chief of police
and the mayor's office in City Hall exemplified the
nature of the political corruption endemic during these
years in Los Angeles.
In Chandler's last novel, The Long Goodbye,
published in 1953, we are shown a number of different
types of police. One of these is Sheriff Petersen.
Although written twenty years after the infamous reign
of Charlie Sebastian, chief of the Los Angeles police
department and then mayor of Los Angeles, Chandler
obviously has remembered a profile personality sketch
of the once-popular Sebastian and uses it bitingly and
humorously in describing Sheriff Petersen and in
reflecting on the election of cops to public office,
and on Los Angeles' seeming inability to see past a
handsome face.
Jimmy Richardson also remembers Sebastian and
describes him this way: "Police Chief Charlie
Sebastian was about the handsomest man I've ever known.
When he rode horseback at the head of a parade, doffing
his peaked cap, his gold badge glittering, men cheered
and women rolled their eyes and sighed" (123).
Chandler's remarks about Petersen, who we see-in
this one chapter and never again in the novel, are
59
worth quoting at length. They are typical Chandlerese,
and cut to the essence of his humorously cynical
critique of the Los Angeles public hero, and , as well,
of that peculiar American malaise, characterized by an
unthinking, blindly accepting American public, so
susceptible to widespread corruption.
...Sheriff Peterson held court in the
middle of a collection of testimonials from a
grateful public to his twenty years of
faithful public service.
The walls were loaded with photographs
of horses and Sheriff Peterson made a
personal appearance in every photograph. The
corners of his carved desk were horses'
heads. His ink well was a mounted polished
horse's hoof and his pens were planted in the
mate to it filled with white sand....On the
middle of a spotless desk blotter lay a bag
of Bull Durham and a pack of brown cigarette
papers. Peterson rolled his own. He could
roll one with one hand on horseback and often
did, especially when leading a parade on a
big white horse with a Mexican saddle loaded
with beautiful Mexican silverwork. On
horseback he wore a flat-crowned Mexican
sombrero. He rode beautifully and his horse
always knew exactly when to be quiet, when to
act up so that the Sheriff with his calm
inscrutable smile could bring the horse back
under control with one hand. The Sheriff had
a good act. He had a handsome hawk-like
profile, getting a little saggy under the
chin by now, but he knew how to hold his head
so it wouldn't show too much. He put a lot
of work into having his picture taken. He was
in his middle fifties and his father, a Dane,
had left him a lot of money. The Sheriff
didn't look like a Dane, because his hair was
dark and his skin was brown and he had the
impassive poise of a cigar store Indian and
about the same kind of brains. But nobody
ever called him a crook. There had been
crooks in his department and they had fooled
60
him as well as they had fooled the public,
but none of the crookedness rubbed off on
Sheriff Peterson. He just went right on
getting elected without even trying, riding
white horses at the head of parades, and
questioning suspects in front of cameras.
That's what the captions said. As a matter
of fact he never questioned anybody. He
wouldn't have known how. He just sat at his
desk looking sternly at the suspect, showing
his profile to the camera. The flashbulbs
would go off, the cameraman would thank the
Sheriff deferentially, and the suspect would
be removed nothaving opened his mouth, and
the Sheriff would go home to his ranch in the
San Fernando valley. There he could always
be reached. If you couldn't reach him in
person, you could talk to one of his horses.
Once in a while, come election time, some
misguided politician would try to get Sheriff
Peterson's job, and would be apt to call him
things like the Guy with the Built-in Profile
or the Ham that Smokes Itself, but it didn't
get him anywhere. Sheriff Peterson just went
right on getting re-elected, a living
testimonial to the fact that you can hold an
important public office forever in our
country with no qualifications for it but a
clean nose, a photogenic face, and a close
mouth. If on top of that you look good on a
horse, you are unbeatable.
(The Long Goodbye 218-219).
What is obviously taking place in Los Angeles at
this time, from the early 1920s until 1938 and the
election of Fletcher Bowron, is that a climate of
political and cultural corruption seems to permeate not
only the highest reaches of City Hall but the lowest as
well, to include the fourth-class hirelings looking for
a quick dollar and the little man and little woman from
every neighborhood who had come to Los Angeles from
61
across America looking for a private paradise, a
celluloid fantasy which turned to dust before it ever
became real.
What is essential here, and what has a profound
effect on Chandler and his fiction, is that in the
midst of this era of incredible anarchy and decadence,
democratic values, personal and communal, are being
eroded. They are shrinking with every crooked
politician who gets rich and fixes an election, and
with every sex scandal or murder covered- up and
protected, and with every poor sucker who takes the
bait from some get-rich-quick scheme or evangelical
hype.
This disease was like a cancer. And everywhere it
appeared it found neighboring cells to join its
relentless attack on the host, refusing to be slowed by
the so-called built-in immune system the body had
created in its own defense. The corruption was too
deeply imbedded; money, sex, power, pretension, greed,
and lust were too strong a conglomeration of forces for
the sickly host and its badly-eroded immune system of
truth, justice, equality, and commonality on which
American democracy relied for its strength.
Marlowe can look back and remember the Los Angeles
of a simpler time. In The Little Sister. Chandler's
62
1947 Hollywood novel, he is as cynical as we will ever
see him, yet is thinking back to a Los Angeles of a
quieter time: " Los Angeles was just a big, dry, sunny
place with ugly homes and no style, but good hearted
and peaceful (180). But the years have not gone by
without taking their toll. The climate of corruption
has changed and embittered even Marlowe; his vision of
the human condition has become darker, almost
despairing, as the description of Hollywood below makes
apparent. What has affected and created the ambiance of
Chandler's fiction perhaps most dramatically, however,
is what this climate has done to the people of Los
Angeles. We see these people as Chandler's characters,
major and minor, close or at an abstract distance, and
we see how they have turned into something they are
not, something almost monstrous and grotesque. At one
point in The Little Sister, Marlowe reflects upon the
Hollywood influence and its ability to pervert:
Wonderful what Hollywood will do to a
nobody. It will make a radiant glamour queen
out of a drab little wench who ought to be
ironing a truck driver's shirts, a he-man
hero with shining blue eyes and a brilliant
smile reeking of sexual charm out of some
overgrown kid who was meant to go to work
with a lunchbox. Out of a Texas carhop, with
the literacy of a character in a comic strip,
it will make an international courtesan,
married six times to six millionaires and so
blase and decadent at the end of it that her
63
idea of a thrill is to seduce a furniture
mover in a sweaty undershirt. (156)
Chandler was highly sensitive to his surroundings
and for fifteen years worked in the midst of the
seething cauldron that was big-city Los Angeles. He
absorbed the everyday happenings of his town into his
imagination and then eventually he synthesized them
into his fiction. As Chandler brilliantly shows in his
novels, the city was controlled by slick crooks aligned
with established power, and given favorable press by
publishing magnates whose vested interests lay with
protecting and covering this same criminal element.
The words of a reporter in Chandler's last novel, makes
the nature of this conspiracy clear:
Newspapers are owned and published by
rich men. Rich men all belong to the same
club. Sure, there's competition hard tough
competition for circulation, for news beats,
for exclusive stories. Just so long as it
doesn't damage the prestige and privileges
and position of the owners. If it does, down
comes the lid.
(The Long Goodbye 54)
Another example will make this even clearer.
After ex-mayor Sebastian's demise, Los Angeles was
itself facing another crooked mayor who was also forced
to resign because of his corrupt connections. In
describing this story, James Richardson sounds a lot
64
like Chandler, as he writes the story of "Doc" Karr, a
City Hall reporter for the Los Angeles Times who:
took over the town in the days that followed
Charlie Sebastian's resignation.... One man,
one smart man can move in and take over a
city and run it and Doc Karr was a smart guy.
That is, he was smart up to a certain point
as all such smart guys are; and then he made
his mistake, a dumb, stupid mistake, and once
again the city administration was upset in
the stench of corruption. (Richardson 93)
After Sebastian's resignation, Karr chose his own
man for mayor and persuaded enough of the city council
to vote for him. The man he chose, chairman of the
Harbor Commission, and a man "who didn't have much on
the ball," was Frederick T. Woodman. Karr pulled the
strings and Woodman didn't make a move without first
consulting Karr. Of course, the Times had no objection
to what Doc Karr, their City Hall reporter, was doing.
At this time Doc Karr was involved in a regular
poker game, one of his obsessions, at the old Press
Club on Hill Street. His good friend Burle Strong (for
the purposes of Richardson's story, a fictitious name
used to protect this reporter's identity), another
Times reporter who covered the State legislature
sessions at Sacramento, joined Karr for their poker
games and, it seems, some womanizing at Karr's
apartment. The problem arose around Strong's wife, a
woman very much in love with her husband, who became
65
jealous of Doc Karr and the devotion her husband was
showing to him and their card games. She had heard of
Richardson through the Sebastian case, and when she
heard about the other women she called him one day with
the story that the DA's office was looking into graft
at City Hall. It seems someone at City Hall had taken
money from some black gamblers who wanted to open
Central Avenue for gambling and prostitution and
Strong's wife declared that Doc Karr was mixed up in it
right up to his neck (Richardson 95). (In Chandler's
second novel, Farewell, Mv Lovely (1941), a double
murder in a black bar and gambling emporium on Central
Avenue opens the story and sends Marlowe, a witness to
the crimes, on a complicated chase.)
Richardson explains what happened:
Two Central Avenue gamblers, George
Brown and George Henderson, had heard about
Doc Karr and how he had the mayor of Los
Angeles in his pocket. They also heard how
Doc loved to play poker so they figured Doc
would be amenable to a proposition. The
proposition was for them to be permitted to
open up a block on Central Avenue for
gambling and gals, for which they would be
ready to pay the price in cash for protection from
police interference. (Richardson 98)
Once the investigation was started, Brown, in
exchange for immunity, told the DA the whole story.
"The price," he confessed, "was $25,000 down with
66
regular monthly payments. For that Karr would see to
it that the Sergeant in charge of the vice squad would
be 'fixed,' and that everyone all along the line would
be 'fixed' too" (Richardson 99). But the big thing was
that Brown had told Tom Woolwine, the DA, that Karr had
told him (Brown) that part of the money goes to Mayor
Woodman. The scheme was to be rigged as a campaign
contribution to Woodman's campaign chest for the next
election. When Chandler later wrote about his
hardboiled genre and said that "the realist in murder
writes of a world in which gangsters can rule nations
and almost rule cities," he might have been talking
about Doc Karr and his rise and fall in Los Angeles.
A grand jury was convened to call Woodman and get
him under oath. In the meantime, Jimmy Richardson won
a full confession from Doc Karr. Karr was frank. Brown
and Henderson had propositioned him and he took the
proposition right to the mayor. He finally convinced
the mayor who wanted no part of the plan at first---
eventually selling him on the idea when the campaign
contribution scheme was broached. Woodman needed
campaign money the oldest rationale of all for the
civil servant of democracy to forsake his obligations
and moral standards.
67
The story broke and the mayor was indicted by the
Grand Jury on a charge of accepting a bribe, was tried,
and was found not guilty. Doc Karr lost his job at the
Times and wound up selling popcorn and hotdogs from a
portable stand in the park. The whole mess caused such
a furor that Woodman didn't run for election and
another city administration went under thanks to
greed, corruption, and good investigative reporting.
But the truth of the matter remains that the scandal
may never have been exposed were it not for the jealous
wife of Burle Strong, who had been told the dirty
details by her husband to appease her wrath. He used
Karr's promise of some of the money coming their way to
try and calm her. The money was not enough; her
jealousy and anger could not be appeased and like a
Chandler novel the whole thing exploded because of
the passionate and impulsive reactions of a minor
character (Richardson 98-105).
Los Angeles became the hottest news city in the
country. And, with the discovery of sound for motion
pictures in 1927, Hollywood was beginning its golden
days, and its tremendous salaries and extravagant
lifestyles added only another element to the corruption
and crime spilling into the streets of Los Angeles.
68
And, as well, it was all spilling into the creative
imagination of Raymond Chandler.
In 1929, Alexander Pantages, the multimillionaire
theatre owner, was thrown into the county jail after
being convicted of an offense against a young girl. It
had been a sensational story. James Richardson, at
this time working as a publicity agent for Universal
Studios, writes about the numerous actresses he had to
protect because of their dope addictions and even of
the numerous actresses whose mothers were in jail for
being drug addicts (Richardson 105).
And this was only a start. Many scandals were to
follow: the murder of William Desmond Taylor, one of
the first big-name directors in Hollywood; the "Fatty"
Arbuckle scandal, in which Arbuckle was accused of
causing the death of a beautiful girl by inserting a
bottle in her vagina, after which she leapt to her
death from the window of the room they were sharing;
the case of Clara Phillips dubbed the "Tiger Woman"-
— who used a hammer to kill a girl she thought was
taking her husband from her, and who escaped from jail
and was later recaptured in Central America.
Perhaps the most shocking political case in
this era, if one example among the multitudes can be
called the most shocking, was the 1938 independent
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investigation by a member of the Los Angeles County
Grand Jury, Clifford Clinton, of ties between the
Mayor, Frank Shaw, and the gambling and prostitution
operating openly throughout the city of Los Angeles.
Shaw was elected mayor in 1933, the year of Chandler's
first short story. Then a city councilman, he won the
1933 election because of his promises to create a "New
Deal for Los Angeles," then in the midst of brutal
anti-labor/anti-"red" police tactics and extremely high
unemployment (more than 300,000 in the fall of 1933).
In fact, in Los Angeles County, the notorious Red
Squad, actually, an anti-Red squad, led by Red Hynes,
flourished in these early years of the 1930s, with as
much editorial support as the Los Angeles Times could
give it. "The policy of this department," the Times
quoted Hynes, "...has been concerned mainly with the
protection of the rights, privileges, and interests of
the vast majority of the law-abiding citizens of Los
Angeles, and not with protecting any asserted rights of
known enemies of our government with their fantastic
and hair-splitting free speech rights" (Gottlieb and
Wolt 220). Reporting citizen complaints as a matter
of course, the Times, the mayor, and the police
commissioner backed the Red Squad. The Red Squad ran
roughshod over suspected communists in the labor
70
movement: "The more the police beats them up and wrecks
their headquarters, the better," Police Commissioner
Mark Pierce declared (Gottlieb 222).
In 1937 Shaw was again elected mayor, having run
against liberal supervisor John Anson Ford. Shaw, even
in his first term as mayor, had quickly gone back on
his reform policies and become the Los Angeles Times'
man, re-instituting the Red Squad and strengthening the
police anti-labor violence. In the Los Angeles Railway
strike of 1934, for instance, 600 police patrolled the
yards, and Hynes of the Red Squad took a leave of
absence to advise railway employers (for $7000). Four
years later, with the Times support and its red-baiting
anti-Ford campaign, Shaw won the mayoral election, but
by only 25,000 votes.
When Clifford Clinton began to document, in 1938,
a long list of gambling joints and prostitution houses
which operated against the law, and the links between
them and the Shaw government, his findings, not
unexpectedly, were not followed up by the DA or the
Grand Jury, and were ridiculed by the Times. His house
was bombed after he exposed the Shaw administration
kickbacks to the Grand Jury foreman. And one of his
top investigators, Harry Raymond, about to testify on
contributions to the Shaw campaign from the gambling
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syndicate, was mortally injured when a bomb exploded
his car as he went to start it one day.
Harry Raymond had been a tough and honest cop in
Los Angeles, a former chief of the San Diego Police
Department, an investigator for the DA, and at his
death a private investigator, working for the Grand
Jury. James Richardson, an old friend of Raymond's,
was with him when he died, and reported that with his
dying breath Raymond whispered the name of Earl
Kynette, a Red Squad investigator, as the perpetrator
of the bombing.
The bombing of Harry Raymond shocked the city.
After intensive investigation the police found the room
where Kynette spied on Harry, and they found where
Kynette himself had bought the pipe for the bomb. He
was arrested, indicted, and, on June 16, 1938, he and
another member of the LA police department were
convicted of the bombing. Kynette was sent to San
Quentin. The Red Squad was abolished, and a recall
election removed from public office Frank Shaw and his
brother Joe and the entire Shaw administration.
Even though the Los Angeles Times, led by
publisher Harry Chandler, gave him plenty of front page
support, Shaw and his machine were ousted from City
Hall, and Superior Court judge Fletcher Bowron, won a
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landslide election. The first honest mayor of Los
Angeles in many years began what was to be his first of
four terms in office reelected in 1941, '45, and '49.
Richardson tells the story in his Memoirs, and it
makes for fascinating reading in that it involves an
insidious political cartel of law enforcement agencies,
the mayor's office, crooked cops and small-time
gangsters, and creates an atmosphere over the Los
Angeles scene as tainted and corrupt as if Raymond
Chandler had written it for the Hollywood screen.
Chandler surely absorbed and understood what this
quiet town had become over the twenty years he lived
there. And his fiction, both directly and indirectly,
encompasses this corrupt atmosphere and the cynical
nature of the power structure of Los Angeles.
These are perhaps the major examples, during
the 1920s and 1930s, of the undermining of the American
ideal of democracy, in Los Angeles, of which Chandler
was obviously aware. Los Angeles drew to its palm
trees, neon-lighted, hard-boiled streets the best and
the worst from America's heartland: hardworking farmers
and industrial and blue-collar workers, young beauty
queens from Iowa and Kansas, young and innocent muscle-
bound boys from everywhere and all of them out of
work after 1929, and migrating by the hundreds of
73
thousands to California and its promise of Hollywood
discovery and riches. Innocents and decent people
seeking only a place in the sun for themselves and
their families, but because of this innocence and
vulnerability, they were ready prey for the slick con-
artistry for which Los Angeles was king. The Doc Karrs
and the gamblers, the imported syndicate swindlers, the
crooked politicians, and their respectable underworld
financiers, flourished for two decades in Los Angeles.
The obvious vice and corruption inside and around
City Hall and the police department was only one factor
contributing to the corrupt milieu Chandler was to
capture in his fiction. As well as being sunk in the
miasma of criminal city administrations, with their
ties to syndicate vice, the city was a magnet
attracting every bizarre quasi-religious and
psychological movement and con artist with a smooth
spiel. As such, LA sucked to its evangelical and
hustler-oriented center a great many people whose
transient and unhappy lives, or whose wealthy but
unsatisfying existences, made them natural victims to
the promises of salvation and easy money these
movements offered.
Chandler's use of this bizarre religious
phenomenon in his fiction is seen in Farewell, My
74
Lovely (1940), in which a so-called psychic and his
American Indian medium play a major role. For
Chandler, the psychic and his rich clientele become
representative of the symbiotic relationship between
the people of Los Angeles and their "spiritual
leaders." Both were necessary for each other, both fed
on each other, victim and victimizer, creating between
the two a climate of need, satisfaction, and need
again, like that of the drug addict and his pusher,
that was to become so debilitating to the self-reliance
and self-respect of the community. This climate of
need helped to aggravate and intensify the attitude of
moral defeatism ripe at the time in this disillusioned
but starry-eyed American city. Chandler treats the
victims of this so-called psychic with the same cynical
yet sympathetic tone he reserves for all of the small
time victims of greedy crooks and con-artists. The con-
artist himself, in Farewell, My Lovely, for example,
Chandler attacks without mercy, through the biting
language of Marlowe. And the crook becomes the object
of Chandler's heartfelt hatred of all such exploitation
of human weakness and insecurity. In the end, the
psychic, like all the other crooks in Chandler's work,
receives his fair measure of justice. But in real life
Los Angeles it didn't work that way.
75
To fully appreciate this strange phenomenon of
religious fervor and con artistry, which for Chandler
became a part of the nightmarish and immoral society he
was to write about, some brief history is necessary.
Where did all these suckers come from, and what was it
about their personalities and psychology that made them
so susceptible to the various hypes to which they
succumbed so readily?
In the decade 1920-1930, over 2,000,000 people
moved into California, 72 percent of whom settled in
southern California, with Los Angeles County recording
a gain of 1,272,037. The migration into southern
California in this decade has been characterized as the
largest internal immigration in the history of the
American people. The city of Los Angeles reported a
population increase of 661,375 or a gain of 114
percent for the decade.
The great migration into southern California and
Los Angeles from 1920 to 1930 was also the first
migration of the automobile age. Carey McWilliams, in
Southern California: An Island on the Land, documents
this migration.
"Like a swarm of invading locusts,"
wrote Mildred Adams, "migrants crept in over
all the roads....For wings, they had rattle
trap automobiles, their fenders tied with
string, and curtains flapping in the breeze;
76
loaded with babies, bedding, bundles, a tin
tub tied on behind, a bicycle or a baby
carriage balanced precariously on the top.
Often they came with no finds and no
prospects, apparently trusting that heaven
would provide for them....They camped on the
outskirts of town, and their camps became the
new suburbs. (135)
The Raymond Chandler family, Raymond and his
mother, one of these early immigrant families,
prospered in Los Angeles in the 1920s because of the
oil industry along with motion pictures, two
important factors in attracting this great influx to
southern California. (In the thirties, the economic
depression, and the dust storms in Texas and Oklahoma
brought a new wave of poor immigrants to Los Angeles.)
After the first world war, fabulously rich oil strikes
were made in southern California. Money from motion
picture production and payrolls, the oil strikes, and
the booming tourist trade touched off the real-estate
frenzy of the 1920s, and this attracted even more
people.
Who were these immigrants coming to Los Angeles in
such great numbers and later peopling the novels of
Raymond Chandler? And why were they such prime suckers
for the crooks, quacks, and con men, the faith healers,
mystics, and prophets that called to them?
77
One way to approach this question is through Carey
McWilliams' analysis of this period. McWilliams, editor
of The Nation for many years, wrote, in 1946, Southern
California: An Island on the Land, a fascinating book
which documents the phenomenon of this place from its
earliest history until 1946. He feels that although the
great boom of the 1920s saw millions of dollars of
income pour into Los Angeles, what was happening in
fact was the undermining of the social structure of the
community and the warping of its institutions ending,
with the crash, in a decade that was to shake the city
to its foundations. The decade, instead of a time of
industrial middle-class prosperity, was, as we have
already seen, to a certain extent one protracted and
corrupt debauch. Perhaps from this perspective it is
understandable that with the onset of the depression,
Los Angelenos would be confused and desperate,
vulnerable to the panoply of con and hype which
promised them everything they had lost or never had and
so hungrily wanted.
Chandler, then, living in the midst of one decade
of debauchery and decadence and another decade of
despair and depression, is slowly distilling this
fantastic spectrum of people, attitudes, and a moral
78
and aesthetic roller-coaster ride into his fiction that
strikingly captures this unique city.
From 1900 to 1920 Los Angeles was essentially
a city with a village mentality. By 1913 Willard
Huntington Wright could explain in "The Smart Set",
(quoted in McWilliams), that the character of Los
Angeles had been formed by the
rural pietist obsessed with the spirit of
village fellowship, of suburban
respectability....Hypocrisy, like a vast
fungus, has spread over the city's
surface .... Los Angeles is overrun with
militant moralists, connoisseurs of sin,
experts of biological purity. (158)
This village virus, Wright felt, was because "the
inhabitants of Los Angeles are culled largely from the
smaller cities of the Middle West:
leading citizens' from Wichita ... honorary
pallbearers from Emmitsburg; good templars
from Sedalia; honest spinsters from Grundy
Center all commonplace people .... These good
folks brought with them a complete stock of
rural beliefs, pieties, superstitions, and
habits the middle west bed hours, the
middle west love of corned beef, the church
bell, Munsey's magazine, union suits and
missionary societies. They brought also a
complacent and intransigent aversion to
late dinners, malt liquors, grand opera, and
hussies.... There are other evidences in L.A.
of the village spirit.... Everyone is
interested in everyone else. Snooping is the
popular pastime, gossiping the popular
practice. Privacy is impossible. This
village democracy naturally invades the
social life of Los Angeles.
(Wright, as quoted in McWilliams 158)
79
(Chandler's The Little Sister features an entire
family from Manhattan, Kansas, who fit perfectly with
Wright's ideas about pietism, hypocrisy, and militant
moralism so perfectly, in fact, that six murders are
committed in the course of the novel, all justified in
the name of respectability and middle class values,
but, of course, they are committed because of greed,
passion, and the desire for power.)
After 1920, the city began to leave behind its
village spirit. Although never forsaking these roots
entirely, with the new wave of immigrants coming into
town, cultural changes began to occur which would turn
Los Angeles into the very opposite of what had been
promised to all these early mid-western immigrants.
With the sudden boom of the 1920s, the rise of
organized crime, prohibition, and a new post-war
acceptance of violence and corruption as part of the
status quo, the village life of Los Angeles was over,
and the city began to emerge.
The motion-picture industry also attracted odd and
freakish types: dwarfs, pygmies, one-eyed sailors,
showpeople, misfits, and 50,000 wonderstruck girls.
The easy money of Hollywood drew pimps, gamblers,
racketeers, and confidence men. The increasing fame of
southern California lured much of the wealth of the
80
Coolidge prosperity to the region. And, while many
wealthy people came with this wave of migration,
settling in Pasadena and Santa Barbara and Hollywood
and Beverly Hills, a majority of the migrants were
lower middle class, as noted: the lumpen proletariat of
L.A., the Okies of Bell Gardens, the Arkies of Monterey
Park.
By 1925 Los Angeles had noticeably begun to
change. As Louis Adamic (quoted in McWilliams) has
said, "The people on the top in L.A., the Big Men...
are the businessmen, the Babbitts. They are
the promoters, who are blowing down the
city's windpipe with all their might, hoping
to inflate the place to a size that will be
reckoned the largest city in the country in
the world.... These men are the high priests
of the Chamber of Commerce whose religion is
ultimate profits.
(This sounds like something Chandler would say, as does
the rest of this passage. It certainly reflects the
same attitudes which permeate Chandler's work.)
They are some of them grim, inhuman
individuals with a terrifying singleness of
purpose. They see a tremendous opportunity to
enrich themselves beyond anything they could
have hoped for ten or even five years ago,
and they mean to make the most of it.... And
trailing after these big boys is a mob of
lesser fellows, thousands of minor realtors,
boomers, promoters, contractors, agents,
salesmen, bunko-men, officeholders, lawyers,
and preachers all driven by the same
motives of wealth, power, and personal
glory.... They exploit the 'come-ons' and one
another, envy the big boys, their wives
81
gather in women's clubs, listen to swamis and
yogis and English lecturers, join 'love
cults' and love clubs in Hollywood and
Pasadena, and their children jazz and drink
and rush around on roadsters - Then there are
the Folks... they are the retired farmers,
grocers, Ford agents, hardware merchants, and
shoe merchants from the Middle West and other
parts of the U.S., thousands and tens of
thousands of them.... They sold out their
farms and businesses in the Middle West or
wherever they used to live, and now they are
here in California sunny California to
restand to regain their vigor, enjoy climate,
look at pretty scenery, live in little
bungalows with a palm tree orbanana plant in
front, and eat in cafeterias. Toil-brokenand
bleached out, they flock to Los Angeles,
fugitives from the simple, inexorable justice
of life, from hardlabor and drudgery, from
cold winters and blistering summers of the
prairies.
(Adamic, in McWilliams 160)
Chandler's novels are filled with these types: the
rich and powerful and their children, consumed with
boredom and the obsessive need for kicks; the worn-out
"folk", trying to survive; and the exploiters, "grim,
inhuman", and all too human, parasites upon the tens of
thousands ready and willing to believe anything.
By 1940, the transformation from village to city
which had begun in the twenties was complete, and Los
Angeles finally began to assume the structure of a
city; its village spirit and complacent midwestern
standards had all but disappeared. In their place was
formed a hard, cynical, meaningless, violent and
corrupt metropolis peopled with misfit migrants from
82
all over the U.S. As Bertrand Russell once said of
this period: "Los Angeles represents the ultimate
segregation of the unfit" (McWilliams 181)-.
When Chandler wrote his definitive essay on
detective fiction,"The Simple Art of Murder", he talked
about what, for him, was needed in the hard-boiled
American detective hero. He emphasized that the hero
"must be a complete man and a common man....He is a
common man or he could not go among common people"
(193). This is important in understanding Chandler's
entire conception of his hero the democratic citizen
in a democracy turned inside out. And, as well, this
idea of the common is essential in understanding the
nature of the people of Los Angeles and the characters
of Chandler's fiction. For Chandler, and for others
who have thought about the phenomenon of the Los
Angeles reality, the people among whom he places his
hero are the end result of what has emerged from the
150 years of the American democratic experiment.
It is their very commonplaceness that earmarks
them as Angelenos. The ordinariness of these folk,
even given the diversity of their roots and cultural
background and experience, accounts for their
commonplaceness. When brought together into the
anonymity of Los Angeles, they not only become
83
anonymous, but their diversity becomes their lowest
common denominator, and thus defines their commonality.
"There is no L.A. face," wrote Garet Garrett (as quoted
in McWilliams). Los Angeles was, according to Garrett,
"the truest conceivable representation of the whole
American face, urban, big town, little town, all
together" (181). McWilliams understands also that "the
commonplaceness of Los Angeles is the commonplaceness
of America, caricatured and distorted and exaggerated"
(McWilliams 181).
McWilliams, in trying to understand this
phenomenon of commonplaceness he felt earmarked the
masses of Los Angeles'' newly arrived citizens, quotes
Frank Lloyd Wright: "It is as if you tipped the United
States up, so all the commonplace people slid down
there into southern California" (181). In southern
California the migrants of America have been stripped
of their natural settings. McWilliams is very
perceptive about what this cultural atmosphere has done
to the people:
Here their essential commonplaceness stands
out garishly in the harsh illumination of the
sun. Here every wart is revealed, every
wrinkle underscored, every eccentricity
emphasized.
(McWilliams 181)
84
The Los Angeles Chandler portrays so vividly is a
real American city that seems to have a spell cast upon
it a city in which walked the somnambulists of middle
America dreaming their days and nights in fantasies of
Hollywood-induced visions, hollow and bizarre religious
practices, and round upon round of meaningless
diversions. The fabric of the community is unraveling
at an alarming rate, and the underpinnings of security,
self-respect, and democratic moral standards are
dissolving in the acid of the beautiful dreamlike
hallucination the city has conjured in their place.
It is easy to understand why the violence Chandler
centers his work around became so much a part of this
disintegrating tissue of Los Angeles. And it is easy
to understand why murder, the ultimate breakdown within
the community, became the axis around which Chandler
spun his tales. For it is with murder and the
complexities involved in detecting the truth about
murder within the community, that Chandler was able to
decisively penetrate to the heart of Los Angeles, the
American city fallen so far and so hard from its moral
and democratic dreams.
"All visitors from the East," writes Edmund Wilson
(as quoted in McWilliams), "know the strange spell of
unreality which seems to make human experience on the
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coast as hollow as the life of a troll-nest where
everything is out in the open instead of being
underground" (233). But within this hollow life, the
hollow men who inhabit it, the citizens of L.A., are
not able to adapt to its culture, because there isn't
any everything is unrelated to everything else, the
garish neon images on constant display impose
subliminal messages and create a permanent "impression
of unreality." If what does not in fact exist, the
unreal, can be said to be the adhesive of a culture,
then this aspect of unreality is that adhesive; the
commonality of Los Angeles is woven throughout with the
warp and weft of the unreal, and it therefore helps to
define it. The seeming contradiction of commonlity as a
defining aspect of Los Angeles culture, while at the
same time asserting that the culture and its people are
hollow, and in their diversity inhabit a non-culture,
becomes resolved with this perspective.
The constant stream of migration into Los Angeles
has made the city a vast drama of maladjustment;
racial, familial, civic, and personal. There seems to
be a devoid sense of one's self-importance as a member
of a viable society. McWilliams' observes:
When so many people have nothing meaningful to do
with their time, nothing real with which to occupy
their minds, they indulge in fantasy, in silly
86
daydreams, in perversions, and, occasionally, in
monstrous crimes. Social neuroticism is a
distinct phenomenon in L.A L.A. is the kind of
place where perversion is perverted and
prostitution prostituted.
(McWilliams 239)
Los Angeles, then, coming of age in the late
1920s and early 1930s, was a blueprint of the American
character ordinary and complex: with desires and
dreams, frustrations and despair: greedy and corrupt,
vulnerable and desperate and this blueprint is both
unreal and commonplace, which perhaps explains the
incredible tensions and incredible dullness of our
nature. Chandler places Marlowe, a commmon man able to
go among common people, in the middle of it all, to
find a "hidden truth" about ourselves and about our
community.
Chandler attempts to silhouette this vision of
the Los Angeles gestalt in all of his novels. As the
years pass and Chandler and Marlowe become more cynical
and morose about the reality of the American city that
is Los Angeles, and, as they both become more inured to
the broken promises of the American made-in-Hollywood
dream, the writing becomes more bitter, and Marlowe
seems to hold less and less hope for his romantic
quest. However, it is the city itself which shapes and
reshapes the nature of the quest, for the city and its
87
strange inhabitants have a life of their own, and call
to Marlowe out of their needs and nightmares.
88
Chapter 3 THE DETECTIVE STORY GENRE: THE PULPS AND THE
HARDBOILED DETECTIVE
It is just possible that the tensions in a novel
of murder are the simplest and yet most complete
pattern of the tensions in which we live in this
generation.
Raymond
Chandler
The American public has, since the Civil War,
increased the amount it has read tremendously. Jay
Martin, in Harvests of Change, a study of American
literature from 1865 to 1914, notes that "following the
Civil War, mass literature entered a period of
astonishing growth. The number of magazines published
mounted from 200 in 1860 to 1800 by the end of the
century" (Martin 18). He lists the numerous ways in
which books and magazines were circulated to the
public, who were increasingly voracious for the printed
word. "The subscription plan was the most sensational
of post-war sales methods", but books were sold in
stores, from book stores to department stores to the
neighborhood dry goods store, sold door-to-door by
canvassers and agents of publishing houses, sold at
public auctions in New York and even offered free with
89
the purchase of a fifty-cent bottle of patent medicine.
It was, as Martin calls it, "an age of books, of print,
of oratory, an age of word." The public mind was
"intoxicated by words." And, until the copyright laws
were passed in 1891, prices were very low and
"paperback books were able to be manufactured and
distributed at extremely low prices. Literature was
meant for the masses" (Martin 18).
Exactly right. And the masses were having a very
difficult time with the literary rebellion reaching
full stride in 1920.
Nathanael West, in The Day of the Locust, best
captures the spirit which pervades this rebellion,
perhaps defined most aptly as the 'grotesque'. West is
writing about the modern world that offers only
"disbelief, sterility, frustration" (Van O'Connor 9).
In The Day of the Locust, the people of Hollywood, like
Chandler's characters twenty- five years later, could
be Americans anywhere; the Hollywood facade provides
the perfect metaphor for a disillusioned people, with a
restless and not-so-latent violence ready to break the
surface at any time. William Van O'Connor, in his
excellent book , The Grotesque; An American Genre,
interprets West's description of the Hollywood crowds:
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The crowds of Hollywood are described as
people who have discovered that, 'sunshine
isn't enough... Their boredom becomes more
and more terrible. They realize they've been
tricked and burn with resentment. Everyday
of their lives they read the newspapers and
went to the movies. Both fed them on
lynchings, murder,sex, crimes, explosions,
wrecks, love nests, fires,revolutions, wars.'
These are the people who composethe strange
half-human mob which riots. The Dav ofthe
Locust is about the California dream world,
and beyond that about the search for meaning
and about the modern confusions of illusion
with reality.
(Van O'Connor 9)
What West has created in his work, as O'Connor
insightfully points out, is a grotesque image of
1'humane condition that is to be found throughout the
fiction of the 1920's, and into contemporary times.
The 19th century sensibilities of order, rationality,
clear comic and tragic perspectives, a universe given
purpose by a moral force, and the harmonies of a
mechanistic, biologic, and social blueprint, all have a
common thread "the belief that man may rely on
spiritual and rational forces in the universe" (Van
O' Connor 17) .
But for West and the generation preceding and
following him there is no such pervasive belief.
Instead, theirs is a nonbelief, or at best an
existential belief that any forces that do exist reside
within the mind of man and woman and must find their
91
meaning from human action. Further, notes O'Connor,
these existential forces encompass all of the human
possibilities, and at least half of these embrace a
"deep bestiality and dark irrationality" which is
indulged and does dominate in many cases.
In its reaction against the genteel tradition and
in its response or non-response to war, corruption,
revolution, the death of God, the writings of Freud and
Marx, and violent criminality, modern literature has
sought a literature of the grotesque, of the ugly, of
the violent, of the hardboiled, in the hope that from
the realistic and even nightmarish imagery of the
fiction can emerge a poetic beauty that is true to our
time and our lives.
However, as strong a strain as the terror-filled
side of the mind imposes upon American fiction, there
is an equally strong strain of innocence which carries
throughout American fiction as well. It is this
curious juxtaposition which has created our American
literary heroes, and which has created the tension and
conflict so essential in great literature.
Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman, celebrate the
innocence of the soul, and write of the recovery of
this innocence as the final striving of the American
dream. Cooper's leatherstocking tales certainly
92
provide a paean to the self-exiled hero and the
American West as symbols of innocence, while Twain,
writing of the common man, created an indigenous form
of fiction which revolved around the innocent hero---
Huckleberry Finn doing what was right, even if it
meant, in his own mind, eternal damnation. And this
tradition of innocence did not die with the rise of
naturalism and realism at the turn of the century. We
find it, as O'Connor notes, even with some of the
writers of the grotesque: in Anderson's reach "for the
American soul and a return to some blessedness that has
disappeared"; in Thomas Wolfe's "romantic search and
his anguished cry that he cannot go home again" (Van
O'Connor 23-25). And perhaps the greatest tribute to
innocence in all American literature is Faulkner's "The
Bear." When young Ike McCaslin, a latter-day
Leatherstocking, is finally granted sight of the bear,
this scene becomes a great symbol of hope and of the
recovery of lost innocence in the world. Ike has
forsaken all trappings of the modern hunter, has left
his rifle and knife behind, has become lost, and has
surrendered his hopes. He is at one with nature,
without conscious or unconscious intentions to do harm;
he is now able to see the bear, the great symbol of
primal innocence and strength.
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Serious literature was perhaps too realistic, too
ugly; the sublime found within the grotesque, that Mann
described, was too difficult to locate, for the popular
mind. Nevertheless, the reading public had gone
through the same awakening, with different particulars,
as had the avant garde writers and the educated elite,
and no longer would settle for the genteel bourgeois
fiction of Scribner's, Harper's, and William Dean
Howells. (Although even Howells could not publish a
story with Richard Watson Gilder because it discussed
labor agitation and unionism.)
After all, it was the common man who fought in
Europe, who knew the taste of blood, the sight of
thousands dead in frozen fields, the sound of guns
firing like some symphonic nightmare. It was the
little man and woman who tried to survive in American
cities of the 1920's while the mobster and politician
conspired and organized methods to get rich from
gambling, prostitution, prohibition, protection
rackets, murder, fear, and terror. It would be too
much to expect that the people of America, so close to
the violence and radical changes of the real 20th
century world, would seek to escape into the bourgeois
alternative of the 19th century. Yet they ,
nevertheless, did want to escape into fiction. But they
94
wanted realism: the realism of violence and sexuality
and big-city crime and corruption, and they wanted it
with a hero who could rise above all this and make
things come out right in the end. The traditional
strain of moral idealism was still strong among the
reading masses.
Most literary movements, serious or popular,
spring forth because there is a need within the culture
for a new and truer voice, a new attitude. The pulps
answered this need for the millions of Americans who
were facing an era unlike any in history an era
faster, louder, more violent, more overtly sexual, and
more frankly uninhibited than any they had known or had
read.
By 1889, Frank Munsey, soon to be the father of
the pulps, was floundering as a weekly story publisher,
while Street & Smith, another pulp giant, went into the
dime novel business and was having great success.
Munsey kept modifying his publication, trimming his
titles, aiming his stories at juveniles and adults
instead of children, starting another magazine called
Munsev's (aimed at the general adult audience), and at
the same time using cheaper paper, eventually switching
to a rough wood-pulp paper because he thought the
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story was more important than the paper it was printed
on.
Street and Smith followed Munsey into the pulps,
and started specializing, coming out with Detective
Story, Western Story, Love Story, Sea Story, and Sport
Story. "When this last title showed up, in 1923, the
dime novel was long gone and the pulpwood magazine was
the dominant format for adventure and romantic fiction"
(Goulart 13). By the close of World War I there were
barely two dozen pulp magazines, but by the middle of
the Depression years there were over two hundred
separate pulp magazines for sale.
By the early 1920's, a standard pulp magazine
format had been established.
The average pulp consisted of 128 rough-edged
pulpwood paper pages and had a cover of more
expensive, coated stock. The cover served as
a package and an advertisement and so it was
both bright and provocative. Basic colors and
intense action prevailed....The interiors of the
pulps were, usually, a let down, and you had to
actually read the stories to get anywhere near
the thrills promised by the cover.
(Goulart 14-15)
Incidentally, it is interesting how the format of
the pulps gradually changed in the 1920's because of
the restlessness of the times. Ron Goulart, in his
definitive study of the pulps, Cheap Thrills, explains
this well:
96
The older Munsey pulps had run as many as
four serials per issue, but by the anxious
20's the continued story was diminishing in
popularity and the most an editor would dare
offer the impatient public of the jazz age
was one serial... As a rule, a pulp magazine
ran about a half dozen short stories and one
or two longer pieces of fiction.
(Goulart 15)
Heroes have been a staple of mass entertainment
and popular literature in America since the early 19th
century. The Wild West was the focus for countless
half-real, half-fictionalized, heroes like Kit Carson,
Buffalo Bill, Davy Crockett, and Deadwood Dick, and as
the country industrialized, and printing technology
developed, by the thirties new heroes appeared in every
setting imaginable: cowboys, detectives, lumberjacks,
royal Canadian mounties, sandhogs, explorers, ape men,
aviators, phantoms, robots, talking gorillas, boers, G-
men, doughboys, spacemen, foreign legionnaires,
knights, crusaders, reporters, masked marvels,
ballplayers, doctors, playboys, pirates, kings,
stuntmen, cops, commandos, magicians, and spies.
The one constant throughout these decades of pulp
fiction was the hero. Although he changed dramatically
over the years, he was always there, and he was always
what the public wanted and needed, in whatever form.
He had to be there, righting wrongs, restoring peace,
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bringing justice however violent or poetic that
justice might be.
While the 1920's liberated the repressed
sensibilities of the writer, it also awakened the
masses from years of inhibitions, and they began to
crave a form of popular literature they had never
before needed but which was integral to the spirit of
the times and their personal lives. This need found
its satisfaction in the pulp magazines of the 1920's
and 1930's, springing to life in their garish and
sensational full maturity and quickly finding a
readership to surpass anything ever published in
American literary history.
The people, consistently, throughout these twenty
years and more, sought the pulp magazine and its heroes
as their reading material. This clearly reflects the
need of the popular culture for a standard of morality
and justice that people were not able to find, it
seems, in their lives and in the society around them.
There was a need for security and some sense that
somewhere, if even in escapist fiction, there remained
someone who could fight his way through the barrage of
confusion, violence, evil, immorality, and flying
bullets, and restore the community to sanity and a
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moral standard based on some clear code of right and
wrong and justice. These magazines of superheroes and
later realistic hardboiled and tough detectives, do
provide simplistic moral standards to combat, or,
perhaps more accurately, to provide solace from, the
complicated and nihilistic world with which the people
had to struggle every day.
This is not to place some absolute and idealistic
value judgement on the effects of the pulp industry on
its readers. I don't know whether the pulp code made
things worse by allowing its readers to escape from the
realities they needed to confront, and created a
misguided hope for some miraculous recovery from the
frantic and depressed society about them, or whether it
made things better by providing some badly-needed
moments when each reader could unwind, dream, and
fantasize a world of justice and morality, and while so
doing keep alive a recognition of what is right and
what is wrong. Obviously, this extreme depiction of
good and evil drawn in the stories of the pulps cannot
provide a moral guide for getting through the real
world, where things are rarely black and white.
But these stories, particularly the hard-boiled
detective genre, do offer enjoyment and escape, not to
be underestimated in hard times, and a certain amount
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of realism and consciousness of contemporary life,
however melodramatic. The people began to demand this
realism in their literature. But, as well, the pulps
offer a code of justice and a standard of morality,
however idealized, which was very difficult to find in
the street and in the real world, and in highbrow
fiction, but is perhaps necessary in literature to
satisfy some essential moral aspect that resides in the
human community.
When Raymond Chandler found himself out of work in
1932, broke and without prospects, and with a wife to
support, he began to travel up and down the California
coast with Cissy, his wife, reading the pulps, trying
to figure what to do. In a letter to Hamish Hamilton,
Chandler's English publisher, in 1950, he wrote about
this period:
Wandering up and down the Pacific coast in an
automobile, I began to read pulp magazines,
because they were cheap enough to throw away
and because I never had at any time any taste
for the kind of thing which is known as women's
magazines. This was in the great days of the
Black Mask (if I may call them great days) and
it struck me that some of the writing was
pretty forceful and honest, even though it had
its crude aspect. I decided that this might be
a good way to learn to write fiction and get
paid a small amount of money at the same time.
(Gardiner and Walker 26)
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Even earlier, in 1945, Chandler remarked about why
he chose melodrama and the pulps as his medium. He
reveals in these remarks that he was very conscious of
appealing to a wide audience that is, the American
mind, the half-literate common citizen who would be
able to appreciate his art but perhaps not ever
consciously realize what it was that left such a
magical "afterglow." In a letter to Dale Warner, his
editor at Houghton Mifflin, in 1945, Chandler explains:
All I wanted to do when I began writing was
to play with a fascinating new language, to
see what it would do as a means of expression
which might remain on the level of
unintellectual thinking and yet acquire the
power to say things which are usually said
only with a literary air. I didn't really
care what kind of story I wrote: I wrote
melodrama because when I looked around me it
was the only kind of writing I saw that was
relatively honest and yet was not trying to
put over somebody's party line.
(Gardiner and Walker 214)
Chandler, in his letters, repeatedly talks about
the need to appeal in literature to a democratic
sentiment in the people of America. He doesn't say it
exactly in these words, but he is adamant about the
uselessness of snob appeal in literature. In an almost
offhand attempt to explain why the pulps, and
particularly the stories about murder or crime, have
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acquired such great popularity, Chandler perhaps has
put his finger on the deep-seated need the people of
America had developed for a moral yet realistic and
tough popular literature:
The psychological foundation for the immense
popularity with all sorts of people of the
novel about murder or crime or mystery hasn't
been scratched...And 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.
(Gardiner and Walker 53)
Chandler felt the tensions of his generation; he
understood the violent realities of American life, and
he wanted to create literature out of a melodramatic
popular formula. He philosophizes, sardonically, on
this desire and upon his earliest recognitions about
the pulp genre and the audience for whom he wrote:
... I know the audience I have to deal with
and what they will not read is written in
sand. From the beginning, from the first
pulp story, it was always with me a question
(first of course of how to write a story at
all) of putting into the stuff something they
would not shy off from, perhaps even not know
was there as a conscious realization, but
which would somehow distill through their
minds and leave an after-glow. A man with a
realistic habit of thought can no longer
write for intellectuals. There are too few
of them and they are too specious. Neither
can he deliberately write for people he
despises, or for the slick magazines
(Hollywood is less degrading than that) or
for money alone. There must be idealism but
there must also be contempt. This kind of
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talk may seem a little ridiculous coming from
me. It is possible that like Max Beerbohm I
was born half a century too late, and that I
too belong to an age of grace. I could so
easily have become everything our world has
no use for. So I wrote for Black Mask, what
a wry joke.
(Selected Letters. McShane 64)
Chandler's discovery of the pulps and his
subsequent fame in this genre is as much a paradox as
is his tough and moral hero. Chandler, an overly-
sensitive, English-educated, American businessman,
whose first attempts at literature were overblown,
moralistic, yet even then, as he remarks, "nasty in
tone" essays written for stuffy English journals when
he was only eighteen, had found a forum for his talent
and an honest one at that. The American people read
the pulps and Chandler wanted to write to an American
audience, not literary highbrows who were much too far
from the realism of the contemporary scene. Allow me
to quote at some length, from a letter to Hardwick
Moseley of Houghton Mifflin, in April of 1949,
Chandler's thoughts about the hypocritical nature of
so-called "serious literature" and its constant
attempts to sound profound, and why he feels that he
can make art out of a popular genre:
There is something about the literary life
that repels me; all this desperate building
of castles on cobwebs, the long drawn
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acrimonious struggle to make something
important which we all know will be gone
forever in a few years, the miasma of failure
which is to me almost as offensive as the
cheap gaudiness of popular success. I believe
that really good people would be reasonably
successful in any circumstances, that to be
very poor and very beautiful is most probably
a moral failure much more than an artistic
success.
(McShane 171)
And then Chandler, in this same letter, evokes
Shakespeare and his ability to adapt a formula so that
literature could meet the needs of the people and yet
still remain art:
Shakespeare would have done well in any
generation, because he would have refused to
die in a corner; he would have taken the
false gods and made them over, he would have
taken the current formulae and forced them
into something lesser men thought them
incapable of. Alive today he undoubtedly
would have written and directed motion
pictures, plays, and God knows what. Instead
of saying 'This medium is not good,'he would
have used it and made it good. If some people
had called some of his work cheap (which some
of it is), he wouldn't have cared a rap,
because he would know that without some
vulgarity there is no complete man. He would
have hated refinement, as such, because it is
always a withdrawal, a shrinking, he was much
too tough to shrink from anything.
(McShane 172)
The pulps indeed were the perfect place for an
educated man like Chandler, with definite thoughts
about the role of literature in a democracy, to begin
his career. Chandler wrote in this letter to Moseley:
104
..we have to make an art of a language they can
understand." Chandler is here referring to the average
American reader, and this is the password into his art.
He spent a long time mastering the American language
and its slang; some he even coined himself: the phrase
"the big sleep," for examnple. Chandler insisted on the
integrity of the artist and not on the compromised
nature of the medium itself. The hardboiled pulp genre
recognized a chord that ran true and deep within the
great masses of people in America, and Chandler's
intent from the very beginning was to tap that chord
and build symphonies upon it in his art. He continues
in this same letter:
I am engaged and have always from the very
beginning been engaged in the effort to do
something with the mystery story which has
never quite been done. In one way Hammett
came close: in another way [Dorothy] Sayers
came close. Neither was capable of imparting
emotion to the right nerves. They didn't
feel it. What I have tried to do (and if I
fail, someone will succeed) is not at all to
get to be a good enough writer to do a
"straight novel"; I could have done that long
ago, just as I could have trained myself to
write slick serials, if I had really worked
at it. The thing is to squeeze the last drop
out of the medium you have learned to use.
The aim is not essentially different from the
aim of Greek tragedy, but we are dealing with
a public that is only semi-literate and we
have to make an art of a language they can
understand.
(McShane 173)
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A look at the heroes of the pulps during these two
decades will be helpful to document the genre itself,
its themes, its heroes, its great appeal, and to see
how one segment of the pulps, the detective story,
changed in the late 1920's and into the 1930's to
become a realistic, hardboiled, big-city story that
spoke directly to the people of America and to Raymond
Chandler, who was to become its acknowledged master.
Ron Goulart's Cheap Thrills: An Informal History
of the Pulp Magazines, and Frank Gruber's The Pulp
Jungle, present, a far more detailed and in-depth study
of this subject than can be given here, and must be
read for a full appreciation of this phenomenon. Most
of the following is based on these works.
The hero in American fiction has been studied
intensively. He is an American Adam, striving
futilely, but nobly, to regain Eden; he is Deerslayer,
a pathfinder, and a Huckleberry Finn, an innocent
"lightin' out for the territory" to escape the corrupt
ways of civilization; he is the terrible Old Testament
prophet, an Ahab, righteous in his wrath and unwavering
in his honor; he is a doomed soul like Billy Budd or
Bartleby, or Maggie, or Sister Carrie, or Martin Eden
or Joe Christmas; he is tough and brave and lost like
Jake Barnes, and Jay Gatsby; and he is all of these
106
things or some of these things; and he is a restorer of
justice, a seeker of truth, a "man of honor" as
Chandler called him.
The hero of the pulps is not quite so esoteric,
not quite so complicated, not driven to the brink by
psychological conundrums and aesthetic paradoxes, and
not so difficult to understand. This is one reason why
the pulps were read by so many and Melville, Crane,
Hemingway, et. al, were not.
Yet despite the simplistic nature of the pulp
hero, he nevertheless was asserting and affirming
qualities of justice and compassion and honor in the
midst of a world of violence, intrigue, and corruption
that was at once easy to understand and easy to enjoy.
Granted, the hard questions that the great writers
wanted us to ask and to answer were nowhere to be
found. The enlightened quality one feels after
experiencing great literature was conspicuously absent,
and the gray, ambiguous, and corrupt real world which
serious fiction does not attempt to simplify, but
instead wonderfully intensifies, is turned into a world
of good and evil, right and wrong, alive and dead: not
nearly as satisfying or morally uplifting. Chandler's
hope was to be able to capture the ambiguity and
intensity of serious fiction and address its cultural
107
concerns within the formula of the hard-boiled
detective genre.
The superheroes of the pulps carried forth upon
one outrageous escapade after another, and they
generally won great approval from their readers and
reviewers. These heroes were sometimes masked
avengers, sometimes simply omniscient, and without need
of disguise. In any case, the reading public loved
them. However, one of the few detractors, in the early
twenties, of these super-heroes, interestingly enough,
was the then quite obscure Dashiell Hammett. Hammett,
referring specifically to one of the more famous
heroes, R.T.M. Scott's, Secret Service Smith, said the
stories were "mechanical and preposterously
motivated... Smith is one of the always popular
deducers, though not a very subtle specimen" (Goulart,
47) .
It wouldn't be long before Hammett was leading the
way in the pages of Black Mask in the rebellion against
this type of preposterous and unrealistic story,
forging a new genre based on hardboiled realism that
the people of America had come to demand, and which
corresponded to the literary rebellion taking place in
serious American fiction. But, in the meantime, and
throughout the 1930's, a great need for this type of
108
popular and super hero existed, as the American people
led an increasingly dire existence. Only in the pages
of the pulps could their fantasies and standards of
justice find expression and an avenue of release?
The pattern seems clear. Good and evil are pitted
against each other for control of the society, whether
on a small scale, the city, or a larger scale, the
entire nation. Deep into the restless and anarchic
1920''s, and then into the Depression of the 1930's,
when organized crime had consolidated its power and
grown richer by exploiting the burgeoning population of
the big American cities, and government and corporate
corruption spread endemically, the pulps simplistic
standard of right and wrong seems inevitable and
appealing. And the remarkable expansion of the pulp
market during these decades seems just as inevitable
given the economic and social realities which daily
confronted the readers of the pulps.
Ron Goulart's history of the pulps devotes a
chapter to each pulp genre, and then concludes his
study explaining the demise of this fantastically
popular industry:
Nobody noticed at the time, but the pulp
magazine was one of the casualties of the 2nd
World War. The mystery men chuckling in their
capes and the bronze genius leaping out of
penthouses didn't fit very well in the world
109
as it was after Hitler and Hiroshima. By
1946, though there was still a large public
for cheap thrills, they were beginning to
want them in new shapes and new formats. The
paper back book had offered itself as an
alternative, explains a history of popular
magazines. The comic book, and later
television, provided the same sort of
romantic and adventurous escape. Then, too,
during and after World War II, publishers of
pulp were hit especially hard by swiftly
rising production costs...So a combination of
economic factors, a restless and, to some
extent, more sophisticated public and a new
competition combined to do in the pulps.
(Goulart 183-84)
But well before this demise, and in their heyday,
perhaps the most popular pulp hero was the one who
changed the most dramatically from the 1920's to the
1930's the private detective. This is where Chandler
comes in, for it was in the midst of this change, or
rebellion, more accurately, against the classical and
tremendously absurd detective of the 1920's and the
1930's, that the hardboiled American school of
detective fiction comes into its own, and where Raymond
Chandler begins his career as a writer of such stories.
Detective fiction takes two lines of development,
the first and more popular, the classical, begins the
genre in the 19th century; the second, the hardboiled,
is the latecomer and springs to life in the 1920's.
Goulart comments on the beginning of the classical
genre:
110
Detectives seem not to have become abundant
as fictional heroes until relatively late in
the 19th century. Poe's stories of Dupin had
appeared in 1841 and did not start much of a
trend (but were to establish the formula for
the classical detective carried forward even
to the present day) (26) .
These first crime stories became distilled into a
formula of classical detection around the turn of the
century in England and became the standard for
detective stories until the Second World War despite
the rebellion of the 1920's and 1930's.
These early stories, written by A.E.W. Mason, Mary
Roberts Rinehart, Carolyn Welles, and later Agatha
Christie and Dorothy Sayers, have the air of being
written specifically for maiden aunts. The formula of
needless confusion and mock terror did not change over
the years, and, while the settings varied, they became
increasingly more enclosed the county manor, the
locked room. Julian Symons, in his book on the
detective story, Mortal Consequences, quotes what one
commentator has said:
"it does not really matter much to the world view
which emerges whether the backdrop is New York
City or Connecticut, a town or a country house,
the stability and balance most usually associated,
sentimentally at least, with an agrarian order are
assumed" (Symons 98).
Ill
The action in these stories rarely ever moves outside
the confines of the scene of the crime; there is no
relationship to the real world in either setting or
character; nobody is ever doing any work, and the
slights of hand by which the reader is deceived into
making what prove to be unjustifiable accusations are
many and maddening. This is the Golden Age of detective
fiction, an era in which "the detective story came to
be regarded as a puzzle pure and complex, and in which
interest in the fates of the characters was
increasingly felt to be not only unnecessary but also
undesirable" (Symons 99) .
One clear criteria used in perceiving the
difference between the two schools is in what the
classical school does not make reference to in its
stories. For the Golden Age writers, the detective
story was a speculation, a game to be played according
to strict rules, like cricket. Clues were to be
provided, and the detective was to reach inevitable
conclusions based on rational deductions. The
detective was the central figure, and he was to be an
intellectual or scientific detective, for "the chief
interest of the story should be mental analysis"
(Symons 101). Willard Huntington Wright, who wrote
under the name of S.S. van Dine and created perhaps the
112
most absurdly ridiculous detective of the lot, Philo
Vance, said that the detective must be "a character of
high and fascinating attainments a man at once human
and unusual, colourful and gifted" (Symons 101).
Julian Symons, in this excellent study of the
golden age of detective fiction, Mortal Consequences,
is perceptive in summing up the nature of what these
stories did not contain:
Sexual feeling was not the only aspect of
life ignored in these stories. The period in
which they were written was one in which the
number of unemployed in Britain rose to three
million and remained near that mark for a
decade; in which boom in America was
succeeded by slump, and slump by depression;
in which dictatorships rose to power. It was
a period that ended in a long expected war.
These things were ignored in almost all the
detective stories of the golden age. In the
British stories, the General Strike of 1926
never took place, trade unions did not exist,
and when sympathy was expressed for the poor
it was not for the unemployed but for those
struggling along on a fixed inherited income.
In the American stories, there were no bread
lines and no radicals, no southern demagogues
or home-grown Fascists. The fairy-tale land
- of the golden age was one in which murder was
committed over and over again without anybody
getting hurt.... It is safe to say that
almost all of the British writers in the
twenties and thirties, and most of the
Americans, were un-questionably right wing.
This is not to say that they were openly
anti-semitic or anti-radical, but that they
were overwhelmingly conservative in
feeling... The social order in these stories
was as fixed and mechanical as that of the
Incas.
(Symons 104-105)
Instead, these stories concerned themselves with
constructing and then solving the puzzle; plot was
everything, character barely recognizable, with the
exception of the eccentric and absurd traits of the
detective. In the great flood of British and American
detective stories that began after World War I, as
H.R.F. Keating has recently said, "dullness in
everything except the riddle was the rule" (Symons
108). The leaders in this field were Agatha Christie,
Dorothy Sayers, and Anthony Berkely in Britain, and
S.S. van Dine, Ellery Queen, and John Dickson Carr in
America. Their heroes were, with rare exception,
monsters of snobbish affectations, young social
aristocrats with encyclopedic knowledge about
absolutely everything, outrageously clever, handsome
and self-consciously humorous to the point of
embarrassment on the part of the reader (Symons 110-
112) .
By the end of the 1920's, however, even the
creators of these riddles began to realize that the
mechanical ingenuity of these stories was becoming
wearisome, and, in 1930, Anthony Berkeley said:
I am personally convinced that the days of
the old crime-puzzle, pure and simple,
relying entirely upon the plot and without
any added attractions of character, style, or
even humour, are in the hands of the auditor;
114
and that the detective story is in the
process of developing into the novel with a
detective or crime interest, holding its
readers less by mathematical than by
psychological ties.
(Symons 110-112)
Berkeley's words proved to be prophetic, and he
could have been talking about Raymond Chandler and the
hardboiled school. Time and again, Chandler stressed
that his concerns were with character, style, and
humor, Berkeley's very words, and the things that
motivate real people in a real world: the psychological
impetus which drives one to commit murder, and which
becomes, in the hands of the artist, the stuff of
literature, not an ingenious puzzle pandering to
upperclass sensibilities, secure from the real world of
our cities and streets.
The detective story grew enormously during the
1930's. Howard Haycraft cites figures about the number
of crime stories reviewed in the American Book Review
Digest. Less than a dozen were considered in 1914, 97
in 1925, and 217 in 1939 (Symons 118). During this
period, the style of the classical detective changed.
His habit of disguise, especially prevalent in the
American pulps, ended, and although the tradition of
omniscience remained, the detective began to become
more normally human, capable of making mistakes. The
115
golden age was "not the main highway of crime fiction
that it looked at the time, but a minor road full of
interesting twists and views which petered out in a
dead end" (Symons 131). In sacrificing everything for
the sake of a mechanical perfection, an artificial art
was created which finally had nothing to say about life
or the human condition and therefore ceased to be
anything else but the puzzle it strived so to become.
When Dorothy Sayers, the writer Chandler takes most
ardently to task in his essay, The Simple Art of
Murder, says that, "After a time...the writer gets
tired of a literature without bowels," she was
absolutely correct (Symons 132). The old order had to
change, and it did, in America in the hardboiled pulps,
where a reading public demanded a realism in its
fiction, and where the artist, serious or popular,
began to understand the needs of a society in the midst
of psychological, social, political, and economic
upheaval.
The tough detective, the private eye, was
born in the American pulp magazine in the mid-1920's,
and flourished in the decade between the two world
wars. His rise reflected the increasing violence and
corruption of American society, the collapse of any
accepted moral code, and the misery of the Depression
116
years. These years in southern California have been
previously documented in this study, and it is clear
that the private eye could only have happened first in
those years after World War I, the years of
Prohibition, organized crime, and shattered dreams.
Goulart, in his history of the pulps, again best
summarizes this period and the rise of the hardboiled
school:
There had always been aggressive, straight-
shooting fiction heroes. But it took the
mood of the '20's to add cynicism,
detachment, a kind of guarded romanticism and
a compulsion toward action. The
disillusionment that followed the war, the
frustration over the mushrooming gangster
control of the cities affected the detective
story as much as it did main-stream fiction.
The same things began to unsettle the private
detectives that bothered the heroes of
Hemingway, Dos Passos and Fitzgerald. And
the 1920's preoccupation with the American
language, the dis-satisfaction with Victorian
rhetoric and polite expression was nowhere
more strongly felt than among the writers of
private eye stories.
(Goulart 114)
These private eyes shared many common traits with
the classical detective. They stayed away from small
towns, and usually worked on their own in large cities-
— New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles Chandler's
locale, which Black Mask called the New Wild West.
They shared a distrust of the police and politicians,
for good reason, as history attests. They could collect
117
evidence the hard way and could cut corners in ways the
law could not. But unlike the classical detective
"they were linked to reality, with the real crimes of
the urban world and the real smell and feel of the
streets..." (Goulart 115).
It doesn't take a genius to realize that by the
time Chandler arrived on the pulp scene in 1933,
America was floundering and in trouble and the people
were desperate. As early as the summer of 1931, Gerald
Johnson,in William Leuchtenburg's F.D.R. and the New
Deal, had noted the "fathomless pessimism the
depression had induced. The energy of the country had
suffered a strange paralysis," he observed. "We are in
the doldrums, waiting not even hopefully for the wind
which never comes" (Leuchtenburg 27).
Society seemed to be disintegrating, a
disjointedness caught in the fragmented "Newsreel" of
Dos Passos, in the theatre scene in West's A Cool
Million, in the final anguished writing of Hart Crane,
who took his life in 1932.
Although the superheroes who emerged in the 1920's
and 1930's certainly spoke to this deep despair of the
American people and gave them a few moments of
vicarious hope and courage, it seems this was not
enough. For a people entering a new decade of
118
liberated sensibilities and economic pessimism, these
eccentric and bizarre heroes were endearing and
entertaining. But how could their appeal last?
William Ruehlmann, in his study of the private
detective in American fiction, Saint with a Gun said
that the super detectives of the 1920's were a product
of the "faith of their time in the ultimate
resourcefulness of the human mind...[But] nationwide
depression, high level failures both diplomatic and
economic, called to question the faith in brainpower as
a fool proof solution to any problem" (Ruehlmann 50).
An anti-intellectualism began to sweep America; the
best brains had only led us to disaster and were
insufficient in the pursuit of the evil that was
overtaking a country searching desperately for
salvation. What was needed was less intellect and more
hardboiled street savvy the common man become hero.
As Russel Nye so astutely points out in his book
on the popular arts, The Unembarrassed Muse, "...in a
world of paid-off cops, corrupt politicians, rich
crooks, expensive call girls, and contract murder,
logic did not necessarily work. The question of who
put the weed killer in Aunt Hetty's bouillon was of
little interest compared to that of who would (or
could) break the power of the gangster era" (Nye 257).
119
The society of the 1920''s and 1930's was no longer
the orderly, self-confident, secure society of the pre
war years; savagery lay too close to the surface of
life. The death of 10 million men, wrote Robert Duffus
in 1918, revealed to his generation that "there is no
escape from the hideous chaos of struggle" (Nye 256).
Survival meant playing a "counter game" against
society, and the new hero was able to do exactly that.
The private eye novel, from its inception, had offered
us a vision of rampant and inescapable corruption
moving beyond the margins of control. It has always
sustained the suspicion that institutions set to save
society are destroying it.
The private eye becomes the most modern of
American heroes. He moves through the ruins of the
American metropolis with a real awareness of what an
unclean region it is, and in the hero is invested the
moral sanction of the future world. William Ruehlmann
makes a good point about the appeal of the detective
story in his study , and it is very similar to what
Chandler said about the tensions in a story of murder
being as close to the tensions of our time as we can
get: "For popular culture is history in caricature, an
exaggerated portrait of a nation's psychic nature, and
the urban murder story is and has been the American
120
waking nightmare of its own civic reality" (Ruehlmann
52) .
The hardboiled detective novel emerges into the
popular culture of America as naturally as the
speakeasy: the pulps became its medium and violence in
the name of justice became its message. The world in
which these detectives operated was a nightmare
projection of the real world. The extreme violence
which characterized these stories serves as a cathartic
agent the culture needed to purge itself from the
increasingly severe frustration and hostility they felt
as the years went by and their lives became only more
miserable, and justice was nowhere to be found.
When FDR was re-elected and the Depression
continued, the sense of failure, or at least deep
dissatisfaction with him and his brain trust, began to
permeate the nation. It is not difficult to understand
why a new form of detective fiction and a new type of
hero, established in the late 1920's, would become even
more popular in America. As Ross MacDonald wrote in
his essay ,"The Writer as Detective Hero", "the Black
Mask revolution was a real one. From it emerged a new
kind of detective hero, the classless, restless men of
American democracy who spoke the language of the
street" (MacDonald 35) .
121
There were a great many pulp magazines, but much
the most notable was Black Mask during the reign of
Captain Joseph T. Shaw, 1926-1936. Black Mask did not
get any real competition in the tough detective field
until the 1930's. In the 1920's, Clues, Detective
Fiction Weekly, and Detective Story gave little space
to the kind of story Shaw was promoting. "It was often
said, in that period," Shaw later wrote of his authors,
"that their product, in its best examples, was several
years ahead of its time. These writers were blazing
new paths" (Nye 256). The strongest competitor was
Dime Detective, inaugurated in 1932, and the place
where Chandler published after Shaw left Black Mask in
1936. Eventually almost all the detective pulps were
featuring private eye stories.
Shaw wanted stories with a direct, straight plot
line. "Simplicity for the sake of stressing clarity,
plausibility, and belief," he wrote. They should
emphasize action, "fast tempo," and should be written
with economy, objectivity, and restraint. Most
important, they should "set character before
situation," with "recognizable characters in three-
dimensional form. Black Mask," wrote Shaw, "gave the
stories over to the characters...." (Nye 256-258).
122
Shaw wanted to create an authentic reflection of
the society in which the characters moved. Shaw and
his Black Mask were made to order for Chandler.
Chandler had himself come to realize that these
realistic hardboiled stories were speaking to the
American people as no other form of literature was
doing. They appealed precisely to his anti
intellectual and democratic spirit, as they did to the
country in general. Shaw realized this even earlier
than Chandler, yet when Chandler appeared with his
first story in 1933, Black Mask seemed to have always
been waiting for him. Shaw was clearly an editor of
genius. During his years as editor a new phenomenon in
American literature was born and raised in the pages of
Black Mask, and the private eye first became an
American hero.
In the course of these years Dashiell Hammett
(recognized by all, including Chandler, as the father
of the hardboiled detective story as literature),
wrote Red Harvest (1929), The Maltese Falcon (1930),
and The Glass Kev (1931), all of which appeared as
serials in Black Mask. Chandler's first stories,
""Blackmailers Don't Shoot (1933), "Smart-Aleck Kill
(1934), "Finger-Man (1934), "Nevada Gas" (1935),
"Spanish Blood" (1935), "Guns at Cyrano's" (1936), and
123
"The Man Who Liked Dogs" (1936), were published; and
"Killer in the Rain" (1935), "The Curtain", published
the following year, and "Try the Girl", in 1937, from
which he derives the basis of the novels The Big Sleep,
Farewell, My Lovely, and The Ladv in the Lake, were all
published in Black Mask, as was the work of Earle
Stanley Gardner, George Harmon Cox, Frederick Nebel,
Chester Dent, and Horace McCoy.
Numerous histories of The Black Mask are to be
found; Goulart's history of the pulps includes one, as
does Frank McShane's biography of Chandler, and William
Nolan's recent biography of Hammett, so a full-scale
repetition of these facts are not necessary here.
Suffice it to say that the magazine was started because
H.L. Mencken needed money to support his financially
shaky The Smart Set, and early in 192 0 began The Black
Mask, a thriller magazine of detective stories. One of
Mencken's favorite topics was the American language,
but the early tone of Black Mask did little to reflect
this concern; most of the stories in these early issues
were as stilted and as pretentious as their English
cousins. Mencken and his partner George Nathan sold
the magazine after six months to Eugene Crowe and his
partner; the new managing editor, Eltinge Warner,
stayed with the magazine until 1940, and, like Mencken,
124
hated detective stories, especially the ones written by
the newcomer, Dashiell Hammett. By late 1926, a new
editor, Joseph T. Shaw, was appointed; he gave the
magazine a clear editorial position. By 1923 an ex-
silent movie projectionist with a tin ear began writing
the first hardboiled stories in the American
vernacular. Carrol John Daly introduced the tough
detective Race Williams: "I'm what you might call a
middle man just a half-way house between the cops and
the crooks... I do a little honest shooting once in a
while just in the way of business but I never
bumped off a guy what didn't need it" (Goulart 118).
Not a great talent but nevertheless a pioneer,
Daly created one of the pulps' most popular heroes.
Philip Durham, author of Down These Mean Streets, the
first book-length study of Chandler's work, summarizes
Daly this way:
Carrol John Daly was a careless writer and a
muddy thinker who created the hard-boiled
detective, the prototype for numberless
writers to follow, a tough, straight-
shooting, wise-talking, pragmatic urban
cowboy. He was cynical, didn't trust
anybody. Yet he could be sentimental about a
girl in trouble. [His world] was a night
world, filled with speakeasies, gambling
joints, penthouses, rundown hotels. Hoods
kept their hat brims pulled low, packed a .45
in their armpit, drove long black cars.
There was no safety.
(Goulart 121)
125
It is fortunate Dashiell Hammett began writing at
the same time as Daly or the genre may not have
survived. While the world for Daly and countless other
pulp writers was a simple one, and all problems were
solved by simply taking violent action, Hammett's world
was complex, confusing, and subtle. His early
detective hero was a nameless, objective, first person
narrator called the Continental Op, anything but a
cliche: a short, pudgy, middle-aged detective "more
interested in solving the crime than in feminine
beauty!" (Goulart 126). In "The Simple Art of Murder",
Chandler's praise of Hammett explains how Hammett
brought the pulp private eye into the American literary
mainstream. This kind of honest and forceful writing
inspired Chandler to create his own hardboiled fiction.
Chandler's essay criticizes the classical school
of detective fiction and its foremost proponent,
Dorothy Sayers, and then discusses Hammett and the
hardboiled school. Hammett, in Chandler's opinion, was
the only "first class writer" of the entire period,
1920-1933.
His first complaint concerns the often-heard
criticism of the detective genre that it can never be
a vital or high form of art. Chandler's immediate
126
response is not to argue but to flatly note that "there
are no vital and significant forms of art; there is
only art, and precious little of that" (178). This
biting repartee is typical of Chandler and this kind of
wit becomes his fictional hero's greatest weapon. This
statement also indicates that Chandler saw art as
something coming from the artist and not intrinsic to
an established form. In itself this is a non-elitist,
democratic vision of literature and bears remembering.
The essay bemoans the lack of talent it takes to write
so many of these preposterous novels, and the fact
that, unlike the average novel, to which he compares
it, that preposterous novel gets published and is
bought and read.
Frank McShane notes in his excellent biography of
Chandler, The Life of Raymond Chandler, that Chandler
always stood apart from his fellow detective-story
writers. This was not done out of any public school
classicism or snobbery, but for literary reasons. "The
main trouble with most detective stories, as I see it,"
Chandler wrote, "is that the people who write them are
bad writers" (McShane 61)). The problem, for the most
part, as Chandler saw it, was an inherent flaw in the
classical school formula. In a letter to Charles
Morton, associate editor of The Atlantic Monthly
127
Chandler insightfully observes: "the mind which can
produce a cooly thought-out puzzle can't, as a rule,
develop the fire and dash necessary for vivid writing"
(Gardiner and Walker 49).
Chandler moves into the crux of the argument when
he begins to focus on the classical school's lack of
realism: the absence of the "poetry of modern life," as
G.K. Chesterton put it. Chandler, the English-educated
gentleman, becomes the harshest critic of the English
golden age of. detective fiction. He realized that the
American stories appearing in most of the detective
pulps were little more than localized imitations of
their English progenitors, and not very good ones at
that. In fact, he quips at this point: "The English
may not always be the best writers in the world, but
they are incomparably the best dull writers." He says
clearly at this point:
it is the ladies and gentlemen of what Mr.
Howard Haycraft (in his book Murder for
Pleasure) calls the golden age of detective
fiction that really get me down. This age is
not remote. For Mr. Haycraft's purpose it
starts after the First World War and lasts up
to about 1930. Two thirds or three quarters
of all the detective fiction published still
adhere to the formula the giants of this era
created, perfected, polished, and sold to the
world as problems in logic and deduction.
(Chandler 181)
128
A number of detailed examples follow in Chandler's
essay, illustrating the abysmal ignorance these
classics exhibit toward modern police procedures and
modern psychology.
Chandler is now almost ready to talk about himself
and his poetic ideas about this genre and its hero, but
not quite. He summarizes the Golden Age succinctly:
There is a very simple statement to be made
about all these stories. They do not really
come off intellectually as problems, and they
do not come off artistically as fiction....
If the writers of this fiction wrote about
the kind of murders that happen, they would
have to write about the authentic flavor of
life as it is lived. And since they cannot
do that, they pretend that what they do is
what should be done. Which is begging the
question and the best of them know it.
(Chandler 186-187)
These remarks reveal Chandler's intuitive moral
sense about truth in fiction and his artistic sense of
realism. He is both aesthetically and morally offended
by these stories, and this indicates that his personal
morality about fiction may be integrated in his art and
may characterize his hero in the realistic world
Chandler creates. Chandler's detective, it can be
argued (and I will do so at greater length in the next
two chapters), follows his particular case with the
same intuitive sense of right and wrong that Chandler
129
himself employs in his comments about the golden age
detective story.
Chandler objects strenuously to the contention
made by Dorothy Sayers, probably the best of the
classical English school, that the detective story can
never attain "the loftiest level of literary
achievement," and is merely a "literature of escape"
and not a "literature of expression." Again he gets
right to the issue: "It is always a matter of who
writes the stuff, and what he has in him to write it
with" (187) .
Chandler is eloquent in rejecting the critics
narrow attempts to define and categorize art.
"Everything written with vitality expresses that
vitality," he insists.
There are no dull subjects, only dull minds. All
men who read escape from something else into what
lies behind the printed page; the quality of the
dream may be argued, but its release has become a
functional necessity. All men must escape at
times from the deadly rhythm of their private
thoughts. (Chandler 187)
Chandler felt that Sayers, groping for an
explanation about her own genre's insufficiencies, had
come to realize that "her kind of detective story was
an arid formula which could not satisfy its own
implications.... It was a second grade literature
130
because it was not about the things that could make
first-grade literature" (Chandler 188).That is, it was
not about reality: not about life itself.
There was only one first-class writer of detective
stories of this whole period, in Chandler's opinion:
Dashiell Hammett. For Chandler, Hammett was the
culmination of a movement in mystery fiction. But, as
well, he was an intrinsic part of the larger literary
movement of American realism, hardboiled fiction, and
the creation of the American common language in
fiction. Chandler says, that "there is nothing in his
(Hammett's) work that is not implicit in the early
novels and short stories of Hemingway...
Hemingway may have learned something from
Hammett as well as from writers like Dreiser,
Ring Lardner, Carl Sandburg, Sherwood
Anderson, and himself. A rather
revolutionary debunking of both the language
and the material of fiction had been going on
for some time. It probably started in
poetry; almost everything does. You can take
it clear back to Walt Whitman, if you like.
But Hammett applied it to the detective
story, and this, because of its heavy crust
of English gentility and American
pseudogentility, was pretty hard to get
moving.
(Chandler 189)
And, in Chandler's often-quoted statement about
the realism or in fact the lack of it of English
and American detective fiction and what Hammett created
131
instead, he finally lays to rest the old and raises the
banner of the new and becomes able to set forth his own
intentions.
If they wrote about Dukes and Venetian vases,
they knew no more about them out of their own
experience than the well-heeled Hollywood
character knows about the French Modernists
that hang in his Bel-Air chateau... Hammett
took murder out of the Venetian vase and
dropped it into the alley... Hammett wrote...
for people with a sharp, aggressive attitude
to life. They were not afraid of the seamy
side of things; they lived there. Violence
did not dismay them; it was right down their
street. Hammett gave murder back to the kind
of people that commit it for reasons, not
just to provide a corpse; and with the means
at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols,
curae and tropical fish....
(Chandler 190)
Hammett had style, writes Chandler, "but his
audience didn't know it, because it was in a language
not supposed to be capable of such refinement,"
Chandler, the consummate stylist, who learned the
American language of the street like it was a foreign
tongue, which it was in a sense, insightfully points
outs the change taking place in American literature.
"All language begins with speech," he observes, "and
the speech of the common man at that, but when it
develops to the point of becoming a literary medium it
only looks like speech. Hammett's style...at its best
it could say almost anything... He was spare, frugal,
132
hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only
the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes
that seemed never to have been written before (Chandler
190-191).
Yet for all this well-deserved praise, here
Chandler parts company with Hammett, and, by extension,
certainly, with the rest of the American hardboiled
Black Mask writers who made the pulp market Chandler
entered. Extolling this style, not as Hammett's or
anyone else's, but as "the American language," he
writes, nevertheless, that this style "can say things
he (Hammett) did not know how to say, or feel the need
of saying. In his hands it had no overtones, left no
echo, evoked no image beyond a distant hill" (190).
"The American language," as practiced by Hammett,
for example, denies the literary effects cultivated by
stylists like Hemingway, with a pervasively flat, hard-
edged, and laconic vernacular style which even in the
most fantastic episodes retain the solid, cold,
slightly tired tone and cynicism of a private-eye who
has seen it all before and knows it is phony. In the
famous climax of The Maltese Falcon. Sam Spade unmasks
Brigid O'Shaughnessy as the killer, accusing her of
having used him to save her neck. Brigid, however,
133
still hopes to capitalize on the romance that has grown
up between the two:
"Yes, but— oh, sweetheart!— it wasn't
only that. I would have come back to you
sooner or later. From the instant I saw you I
knew-"
Spade said tenderly: "You angel! Well,
if you get a good break you'll be out of San
Quentin in twenty years and you can come back
to me then."
She took her cheek away from his,
drawing her head far back to stare up without
comprehension at him. He was pale. He said
tenderly: "I hope to God they don't hang you,
precious, by that sweet neck." He slid his
hands up to caress her throat. (173)
Another example , this one from The Pain Curse,
exemplifies Hammett's sylistic interweaving of flat
realism, a nearly emotionless, lucidly descriptive
vernacular prose, and wild fantasy which pervades his
work from beginning to end. Cawelti, in Adventure,
Mystery, and Romance feels Hammett's style "grows out
of Hammett's basic sense of life: the vision of an
irrational cosmos, in which all the rules, all the
seeming solidity of matter, routine, and custom can be
overturned in a moment..." (166).
He came in, looking and acting as if I
were St. Peter letting him into Heaven. I
closed the door and led him thorugh the
lobby, down the main corridor. So far as we
could see we had the joint to ourselves. And
then we didn't. Gabrielle Leggett came around
a corner just ahead of us. She was
barefooted. Her only clothing was a yellow
silk nightgown that was splashed with dark
134
stains. In both hands, held out in front of
her as she walked, she carried a large
dagger, almost a sword. It was red and wet.
Her hands and bare arms were red and wet.
There was a dab of blood on one of her
cheeks. Her eyes were clear, bright, and
calm. Her small forehead was smooth, her
mouth and chin firmly set. She walked up to
me, her untroubled gaze holding my probably
troubled one, and said evenly, just as if she
had expected to find me there, had come there
to find me: "Take it. It is evidence. I
killed him."
I said: "Huh?"
(The Pain Curse, 72)
But, for Chandler, (and his followers), as much as
he recognizes and appreciates the revolutionary
contribution Hammett made to realistic American
detective fiction, to American fiction in general, for
that matter, "all this (and Hammett too) is for me not
quite enough" (Chandler 192). The realism of the
corrupt infrastructure of American society, written in
the language of an America finally come of age, is
simply not enough. Chandler demands "a quality of
redemption" in his art; that is, an indication of a
positive position toward which a society can move, a
moral force to counter the corruption, a glimmer of
uncompromised integrity, a sense of honor, and he says
it must be there in anything that is going to call
itself art.
135
It is this quality of redemption with which the
rest of this dissertation will concern itself. For it
is in struggling with this idea in his art that
Chandler leaves the world of the pulp thriller and
enters the world of literature. He leaves behind the
faked realism that so many of the writers of the
American hardboiled school substituted for art. "It is
easy to fake," Chandler said of the realistic style:
brutality is not strength, flipness is not
wit, edge-of-the-chair writing can be as
boring as flat writing; dalliance with
promiscuous blondes can be very dull stuff
when described by goaty young men with no
other purpose in mind than to describe
dalliance with promiscuous blondes....
(Chandler 191)
Chandler leaves behind him an entire genre, in one
sense; yet he remains true to its formula. Chandler's
concerns are the same serious concerns of mainstream
American literature, yet he strives to integrate these
into a popular genre and make them accessible to
popular culture. Chandler's intention is to create a
hero who can go "down these mean streets" of America's
perverse city and carry with him a sense of honor and
personal morality that will enable him to temporarily
restore the shattered community he is asked to enter.
Of course, Chandler is sensible and realistic
enough to understand that there is little one honest
136
man can do, but on the very small scale of the
community of the novel itself, and the characters in
need of his help therein, he insists on a hero who is a
representation of this quality of redemption: in John
Gardner's language, an affirmative moral force which
serves as a weapon against the forces of chaos. And it
is this hero and his instinctual moral integrity which
becomes for Chandler the very quality of American
democracy which has been forsaken in the 20th century's
lust for power and wealth. It is through Chandler's
hero then, and through the moral nature of his
discovery process, that any possible hope for
redemption lies.
137
Chapter 4 MORAL TRANSFORMATION OF THE HARDBOILED GENRE
"... To accept a mediocre form and make something like
literature out of it is in itself rather an
accomplishment.
"Any man who can write a page of living prose adds
something to our life."
"An artist cannot deny art/ nor would he want to."
Chandler
One of the qualities of art Gardner discusses is
the absence of didacticism. When fiction begins to
become a platform for the author's morality, it becomes
a sermon and ceases to be moral fiction. What Gardner
stresses is that in true art the writer discovers that
which is moral, that redemptive quality Chandler writes
about, and that which is true by the process of the
creation of the work itself. The moral standards which
are affirmed by the author are an integral part of the
development of the characters and their responses to
the real situations in which they are placed.
Characters must not become spokesmen for one point of
view or another, a symbolic representation of a
particular position. Of course this happens in the
very highest forms of fiction, but only on one level.
138
If the characters do not become individual characters
with personalities who develop according to the organic
movement of the novel, and to whom we as readers are
able to relate and sympathize or despise or whatever,
then the novel becomes pedagogic and is not literature,
although it may certainly be moralistic.
Ross MacDonald, the author of many private
detective novels, and the heir-apparent to Chandler in
many respects, takes issue with this redemptive quality
to which Chandler is so committed. In an essay titled
"The Writer as Detective Hero", MacDonald, while paying
tribute to Chandler's beautifully written disenchanted
vision of our lives, thinks that the prescription
Chandler offers for his hero, in terms of the quality
of redemption in art, "suggests a central weakness in
his vision" MacDonald argues:
that this quality of redemption belongs to
the whole work and is not the private
property of one of the characters. No hero
of serious fiction could act within a moral
straight jacket requiring him to be
consistently virtuous and unafraid... Such a
strong and overt moralistic bias actually
interferes with the broader moral effects a
novelist aims at. (MacDonald 17)
MacDonald is speaking about the early novels of
Chandler, and he feels that in the later work Chandler
toned down "his Watsonian enthusiasm for his
139
detective's moral superiority." But despite this
almost-grudging attempt to restore to Chandler some
aspect of seriousness, after his initial critique,
MacDonald's basic complaint remains: Chandler is too
emotionally involved with his hero-narrator and this
involvement gets in the way of the story and blurs its
meanings, and Chandler's moral thrust becomes heavy-
handed and too narrowly focused in the hero "such a
strong and overt moralistic bias actually interferes
with the broader moral effects a novelist aims at"
(MacDonald 17). This argument is the primary critique
made about Chandler's fiction, and is essentially
defining a form of didacticism.
MacDonald does not seem to recognize the
significance of Marlowe as the major character.
Instead, MacDonald mistakenly feels Chandler fails in
his stated purpose because he does not create the kind
of hero he, MacDonald, does: the detective as "a
consciousness in which the meanings of other lives
emerge" (MacDonald 24). Chandler has taken great
pains, however, to create a hero who is a common man,
an everyman imbued with the best the American
democratic tradition has to offer, but a man of his
time bitter, cynical, humorous, tired, emotional,
fallible, and alone. In the process of his work, which
140
is the detection of the truth, he discovers what he
must do and how he must respond to the world which
imposes itself upon him.
Like Gardner's writer of moral fiction, Chandler's
detective is a discoverer, not of a pre-established
moral doctrine, but of what is right and true in any
given situation. Chandler's hero moves within an
amorphous world and is guided by a personal code of
morality and a democratic standard of justice. His
relationships with the many minor and major characters
of the novels are testament to his ability to allow
others' lives to be revealed and his own character to
evolve. Philip Marlowe, as a literary character, and as
Chandler's "American mind", does sustain Chandler's
fiction and prevent it from falling under the category
of didacticism that Gardner warns about and that
MacDonald fears is the case.
The dilemma that was faced by Chandler, and
mainstream American fiction of the mid-twentieth
century, was that somehow the American dream had become
a nightmare, in actuality and in literature, yet
Chandler still had the need to find a place for
humanity in his fiction. Allen Greenberg, in his essay
"Choice: Ironic Alternatives in the World of the
Contemporary American Novel," writes: "The nightmare as
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a good bit of modern fiction has shown it The Sound
and the Fury. The Sun Also Rises, The Dav of the
Locust. The Man with the Golden Arm, to name only a
few is that of a world run amok, or a world running
down, in the midst of which stands the often solitary
individual, immersed in a process of frightening
disintegration..." {Madden, 176). The challenge for
the novelist, in the context of such a concept of the
human dilemma, "has been to explore the question of
whether, and how, in the midst of an apparently
meaningless process which threatens to render
meaningless all in its grip, man can yet find, or give,
meaning to his existence" (176). This is precisely
where Raymond Chandler (and by extension, his hero,
Philip Marlowe) finds himself.
Greenberg continues, and although his comments are
focused upon the American writers mentioned above, he
could very well have included Chandler in this list:
However much the faces of that world are
revealed as antihumanistic, meaningless,
amoral nonetheless that world, being the
world in which man lives, still possesses the
capacity for being humanistic, at least while
he is there, and is as far as he can make it
his. The extent' to which he can accomplish
these things remain afloat in the
destructive stream of experience and swim, if
not in his own direction, at least in his own
fashion defines both his limits and his
possibilities. And it is, above all else,
choice, however limited the alternatives may
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be, that gives man, in such a context, the
possibility of determining the nature, if not
the end, of his experience. (17 6)
The existential concept of choice, in a world
without standards, is central to twentieth-century
literature and its heroes, and occupies the pivotal
position from which Marlowe acts, and which allows
Chandler's work to become moral fiction. As Sartre has
put it, "literature is preoccupied with the relation
between what man is and what he is choosing to make
himself within the historical perspective" (quoted in
Greenberg,177). Greenberg, like Gardner, agrees, and
takes it one step further than Sartre:
"Choice...becomes, thus, a harmonizing assertion of the
self in the world" (177). It is by placing himself
and his hero within this complex of existential and
humanistic concepts that essentially separates Chandler
from his genre and sets him squarely with the serious
American literature of his era.
This existential understanding of the world, a
world as absurd and irrational as a nightmare into
which we have awakened, was reflected in our literature
as early as Hawthorne and Melville, the nay-sayers
whose "thunderous no's charge that there has been one
dream in the rhetoric, another in the action,"
according to David Madden, in his introduction to
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American Dreams, American Nightmares. He goes on to say
that while serious fiction has previously been an
indictment of the failure of American society to
transform the dream into reality, or for its futile
pursuit of the wrong dreams, "popular culture has been
the multi-faceted medium of American sunlit
daydreams... an affirmation of the Dream, though not
necessarily of the realities of materialism" (xxvi).
The western novel, the cowboy movie, the popular escape
novel, all become indirect affirmations that all is
well, that our dream images of some heroic past and
present are still alive. But, on another level, these
escapist forms of popular culture are "simultaneously,
an unconscious declaration that conditions exist from
which we must escape" (xxvi).
In some cases, popular fiction does more than
simply make unconscious declarations. While most
detective fiction, as opposed to tough guy or crime
fiction, does present this daydream of a society where
justice triumphs and all is well, the tough guy or
hardboiled school best offers "a negative picture of
the present, balancing the Westerner's dream vision of
the past" (xxvii). Crime, real and fictive, writes
Madden, "testifies to the volcanic vitality of
submerged nightmare" (xxvii).
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For Chandler (looking at America during the
Depression and its aftermath), Los Angeles represented
the American scene as "the Great Wrong Place" (xxx-
xxxi), as Auden called it, a place of nightmare that
persists despite his hero's best efforts. Yet, in
another sense, Chandler's Los Angeles was the only
place left for the American dream. It was the last
American city, the last hope, yet it is hopelessly
fallen. And within this understanding Chandler insists
a hero must emerge who serves to redeem the corrupt and
amoral reality we have created. But not as a saint,
merely as an ordinary citizen, albeit a private eye, as
John G. Cawelti argues in his book, Saint with a Gun.
This is also what Gardner implies when he insists upon
moral affirmation as intrinsic to moral fiction.
For Cawelti, in Adventure, Mystery, and Romance,
the hard-boiled formula "constitutes an escape from the
full implications of the modern naturalistic moral
universe" (161). There is no question that this is
true, for the genre as a whole. But Chandler's work
transcends the formula by the very nature of Marlowe's
character. Cawelti's analysis is astute, and through
it we can pinpoint what determines the greatest
difference between Marlowe and his fellow detectives,
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and between Chandler's serious fiction and the escapist
fiction of his genre.
Cawelti admits there are similarities between the
hard-boiled detective and the heroes of mainstream 20th
century realistic fiction. But where they part company
is in how they are affected by what they have
encountered. What price do they pay? asks Cawelti.
The detective is able to walk away from it all,
basically untouched by the reality of death and
corruption. The modern, mainstream hero is not. He is
left irreparably impaired, psychologically, and can not
escape the horror of the naturalistic universe.
Let Cawelti explain this more clearly:
Like the heroes of Ernest Hemingway, who must
be considered a major influence on the genre,
the hard-boiled detective finds himself up
against a corrupt and violent society that
threatens to destroy him. He, too, is
tempted, betrayed, and wounded by that
society to the point where he realizes that
to preserve his integrity he must reject the
public ideals and values of the society and
seek to create his own personal code of
ethics and his own set of values. It is
precisely at this point that the Hemingway
hero and the private eye part company. When
Jake Barnes and Frederick Henry reject the
corrupt and hypocritical ideals of their
world and set out to make a separate peace,
they find the price they have to pay is
tragically high. For Jake Barnes, integrity
and a relative degree of serenity also mean
impotence and despair. Frederick Henry must
pay for his brief period of happiness by
facing the tragic death of his love. To
these heroes come an inescapable realization
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of the tragic limitations of human life. The
hard-boiled story represents an escape from
the naturalistic consciousness of determinism
and meaningless death.... And it achieves
this escape with minimal cost and maximal
pleasure.... The hard-boiled detective has a
few scratches, but no deep wounds spoil his
function as fantasy hero....
(161)
This long quote succinctly describes what for
Cawelti was the difference between the hard-boiled
detective and the hero of mainstream American fiction
in the mid-twentieth century. I spend as much time
with it because of its power as an accurate and vital
analysis of the genre. But it does not work for
Chandler's fiction and his hero.
Marlowe is badly wounded as a consequence of the
moral standards upon which he insists, and by the
corruption he witnesses. And he is not able to shake
it off and be rewarded by the money, nor the women, nor
the professional success that satisfy the other hard-
boiled detectives of the formula (161). Marlowe is
left after each case alone and friendless, filled with
bitter disgust and revulsion at his involvements with
the corrupt society. Like the mainstream heroes,
Marlowe refuses to buy the American illusion about
romance and success, and he therefore is left with his
own sense of himself, and his own sense of honor and
integrity. All he has to protect himself is his bitter
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cynicism and world-weariness and his wit. In the
following passage from Farewell, My Lovely, one hears
in the self referential irony this disgust clearly.
Marlowe has just gotten an old woman drunk in order to
get information about his case:
A lovely old woman. I liked being with her.
I liked getting her drunk for my own sordid
purposes. I was a swell guy. I enjoyed
being me. You find almost anything under
your hand in my business, but I was beginning
to be a little sick at my stomach.
(26)
It is the complexity and almost neurotic
sensitivity of Marlowe that enables Chandler's work to
become serious fiction. The moral dilemmas posed by
the characters he encounters have a serious
significance and human complexity that is most
definitely missing from most of the genre. Chandler
uses the hard-boiled detective formula to treat such
contemporary moral and critical themes as romantic
illusion, destructive innocence, and the conflict
between individual moral feeling and societies
amorality and corruptability. And he uses Marlowe not
as one more tough guy, but as an anti-hero as decimated
by the events of his life as any other anti-hero in
American fiction. The difference is that Marlowe must
go on to the next adventure; Jake Barnes and all the
rest do not. Yet Marlowe takes with him all of the
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despair and existential alienation he has accumulated—
-as well as his humor. (Chandler has repeatedly
remarked about the overlooked quality of his
character's humor and how important it is). And, as
the years go by, although Marlowe remains thirty-eight,
his character becomes more psychologically complex,
more sensitive, and more vulnerable. Still he follows
his moral code, more developed and complex in each
succeeding novel, yet hopelessly out of place, even in
the first novel.
Yes, this is fantasy. Chandler said himself that
Marlowe was a fantasy creation; that a real-life
detective could not be anything like him. This is not
Frank Norris, nor Dreiser, writing. That is not really
the point. Marlowe is still a popular culture hero,
and as such must contain certain basic elements of
fantasy. But the struggle he undergoes in each novel,
the magic of Chandler's language, the moral choices
Marlowe must make, and the process of discovery he
employs to lead him through the maze of corruption he
encounters is significant and central to the high
quality of each novel, and are not found in the hard-
boiled genre anywhere else. And , in fact, are the
qualities which Gardner includes in his definition of
moral fiction.
149
Chandler realizedd his first novel, The Big Sleep,
was flawed, filled with too many similes and
overstretched metaphors, yet he was still proud of it
and the ambiance it establishes. In a 1939 letter to
Alfred A. Knopf, his publisher, Chandler comments,
The Big Sleep is very unequally written.
There are scenes that are all right, but
there are other scenes still much too pulpy.
Insofar as I am able I want to develop the
objective method— but slowly— to the point
where I can carry an audience over into a
genuine dramatic, even melodramatic, novel,
written in a very vivid and pungent style,
but not slangy or overly vernacular. I
realize that this must be done cautiously and
little by little, but I think it can be done.
To acquire delicacy without losing power,
that's the problem.
(Gardiner and Walker 209-210)
A few years later, in 1943, he reread The Big
Sleep, and in a letter to Knopf he reflected about how
it had held up:
I looked into it and found it both much
better and much worse than I had expected— or
than I had remembered. I have been so
belabored with tags like tough, hardboiled,
etc., that it was almost a shock to discover
occasional signs of almost normal sensitivity
in the writing. On the other hand, I sure
did run the similes into the ground.
(Gardiner and Walker 212)
With Farewell, Mv Lovely and The High Window, his
second and third novels, he creates mature work which
remains true to the formula but transcends it into an
area of urban realism almost unique at this time in
150
serious American fiction. With the later work, The
Little Sister, and especially The Long Goodbye,
Chandler has fully transcended the limitations of his
genre and written fiction accessible to popular
culture, yet socially relevant, morally redemptive, and
stylistically brilliant: Gardner's moral fiction. The
road Chandler has chosen for Marlowe and for his work
is the road taken by Hemingway, Faulkner and
Fitzgerald, Dreiser, Norris, Hammett, and Norman
Mailer. That is, its themes emerge from the hidden
underbelly of America: the alienated individual
confronted by the onslaught of despair and moral
dilemmas; the greed and power and ruthless and lawless
behavior of the rich; the criminality of a subclass
endemic to our twentieth-century big cities; the
powerful sexual motivation and the violence it spawns;
and the almost bizarre labyrinth-like interconnections
between radically different types and classes.
Pulp fiction pays lip service to those themes, but
only in as much as they are props to move the plot from
point A to point B. For Chandler and mainstream
American fiction, these elements are essentially
integrated into the work as organic components and the
very stuff of the novel itself.
151
In the tradition of hard-boiled detective fiction,
Chandler's private detective begins each case
attempting to solve a relatively easy problem. These
problems eventually lead to more complex and serious
issues and ultimately involve at least one murder, the
most serious violation to confront the community.
Since all of Chandler's novels are written in the first
person, the reader must follow the thoughts and
dialogue and action of Philip Marlowe. The reader is
not entitled to any privileged information, as he or
she would be if the novel were written from the point
of view of an omniscient observer. Therefore, the
reader does not know anything more than does the
detective, and Chandler is emphatic about this point.
A 1949 article called "Casual Notes on the Mystery
Novel" lists ten points to which the mystery novel must
adhere. The last point concerned the detective and the
reader:
The mystery novel must be reasonably honest
with the reader.... There is always an implied
guarantee to the reader that the detective is
on the level, and this rule should of course
be extended to include any first person
narrator... from whose point of view the story
is told. The suppression of fact by the
narrator as such or by the author when
pretending to show the facts as seen by a
particular character is flagrant dishonesty.
(Gardiner and Walker 67)
152
As Chandler goes on to clarify and expand this
idea, he admits, however, that intrinsic to the mystery
genre is concealment itself. And even on the part of
the detective. "There must come a time," Chandler
writes, "when the detective has made up his mind and
has not given the reader this bit of news, a point, as
it were (and many old hands recognize it without much
difficulty) when the detective stops thinking out loud
and ever so softly closes the door of his mind in the
reader's face" (68). This is just what happens in
Chandler's novels. His detective slowly comes to that
point when he has reached a revelation of what must be
the truth, and, at this point, he retreats and, as
Chandler says, "...closes the door of his mind in the
reader's face."
At this point, or shortly thereafter, the
detective of the hardboiled formula (and Chandler's
Marlowe also,) brings the loose ends together, one way
or another, and the novel heads toward its conclusion.
This is the basic formula, and the one to which
Chandler adheres. But it is in the process of
discovery itself, how Marlowe acts, what he does and
why, which allows Chandler to transcend the formula and
write what must be considered much more than another
example, however highly regarded, of popular fiction.
153
Throughout the entire process, novel after novel,
from first page to last, Marlowe proceeds without any
kind of superhuman power. He makes mistakes, he can't
figure things out, people die whom he has been hired to
protect, and he often finally arrives at the truth
about the whole thing after it is too late to save the
people he wanted to save. He does, unquestionably,
restore a certain sense of peace to the community, as
is a classic part of the formula. The murderer is
removed from the scene, somehow, and the remaining cast
of characters can rest relatively easily. But Marlowe,
at the end of the story, is not self-satisfied, proud,
admired by all for his genius or toughness. Unlike the
heroes of his genre, Marlowe cannot be happy about what
he has just experienced, or about what he has learned
of the real nature of our society. Even if the final
result has restored the so-called harmony of the
community, Chandler's realism and Marlowe's honesty
will not allow this hero to gloss the truth about how
people behave and what they will do to each other.
Marlowe does know he has stayed honest; however deeply
the knowledge of the truth he has discovered may have
tainted him. He has done what he could. But this does
not help him much. He has still absorbed the
corruption of the story, and he is not the same for it.
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These very human qualities and realistic lack of
talents make Marlowe something for which the genre had
very little use a fallible literary character as
hero. And as such, he is the kind of character Gardner
defines as having been created out of a moral discovery
process; the only kind of character able to sustain
moral fiction.
For all his realism, however, Marlowe does not
resemble a "real" private detective. Except perhaps for
Marlowe's shabby material trappings, his office and
home, Marlowe could hardly resemble one of these rather
mundane professionals. His reality lies in his
humanity, in his way of thinking and speaking, and in
the world within which he lives. If he were more
similar to a real private eye, he would be doing little
more than snapping pictures through motel windows and
waiting in parked cars, and would hardly be fit
material for a work of art.
As a literary character rather than as a
manifestation of a literary formula, he is able to be
known by the reader. He becomes a specific character to
whom we listen and from whom we learn and about whom we
care. He is not only a catalyst for the action of the
plot, nor simply a mirror to reflect other characters'
truths, but he is part of the story, intrinsic to its
155
meaning, and the central element in rendering
Chandler's poetic vision.
Exactly as a simple description of a house and its
front porch and yard tells us unmistakably something
about its occupant, a simple description by Marlowe of
a section of Los Angeles, or of a character he meets,
tells us something about him. We are constantly in his
mind, hear his voice, and it is a mind and voice trying
to be real and honest, however much the character does
remain within certain established limits of the
formula.
A true literary character in a world of fiction
develops according to the nature of his personality. If
he acts in a certain way it is action which fits his
character, an organic product of his nature as it has
been developed for us by the author. We may be
shocked, but we are not really surprised if we have
read closely. We don't know where he will end when we
first begin to read about him and his story anymore
than the author knew before he began to create him, and
as he went through the process of that creation. This
process , according to Gardner, is a discovery based
upon moral premises, remaining faithful to the
character and his or her development. And this is the
process which produces moral art.
156
Good art, by most traditional standards, asserts values
either directly or indirectly (as in irony or satire),
that provide positive standards by which to live, as
individuals or as a society. High art, which Gardner
says must be moral art, from Homer to Shakespeare, to
Melville, Tolstoy, Faulkner and Joyce, despite its
recognition of and even obsession with the dark side,
has always asserted positive values. And it is these
life-affirming values, Gardner feels, which carry the
work through history. What has held certain works
of literature to our hearts and to our collective
unconscious on many levels does so with echoing symbols
and images and truths, which represent a standard of
what is highest in the human psyche and human
community.
Gardner, in his excellent study, On Moral Fiction,
spends the first third of his book tracing the premises
of moral art from Homer through Dante, into the
Romantic period, and out of it into the late nineteenth
and twentieth century. One of the more relevant points
Gardner makes, and which may be applied to Chandler's
hero, concerns the Romantic vision. Gardner has
analyzed art's morality in Homer, Dante, and Tolstoy
and feels it is derived from divine goodness. That is,
humans are capable, by their very nature, of innate
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goodness. Like Beatrice, they are good, "an
incarnation of the divine principle" (35). The
Romantic and post-Romantic interpretation changes this
vision radically, but does not abandon morality as a
principle of art "when the sky comes to be 7ungoded7"
(Gardner 35). The Romantics still see the innately
good in men, but believe that humanity7 s misery and
injustice "were not caused by a fall from grace but by
bad human institutions. Thus humanity itself, innately
good, became divinity enough, and the poet became its
spokesman" (37).
And so the Romantic poet looked into himself and
at similar people around him and found there the
implied model for individual and social action (Gardner
37) .
Obviously the optimism of the Romantic vision was
not to last. In the heat of historical events war,
depression, revolution "and in the din of
individualist, anti-rational philosophies like
Nietzsche7s..." (Gardner 38), the Romantic idealism
became a fading dream, and by the mid-twentieth century
the hopes and ideals of the Romantic age had been
abandoned almost completely.
But Gardner insists that, in terms of fiction, the
moral imperative of the Romantics was the correct one:
158
that high art does delight and instruct and should
instruct and has always done so. Not as a sermon, not
as a pedagogical or didactic tract or party line but
as a process of discovery which is moral in its
process; and which sets forth affirmative standards for
the individual and the community to follow, even in the
midst of the horror the twentieth century poses and the
writer must confront in such a creative process.
For Chandler, also, the Romantics were right.
Marlowe is a Romantic knight in a world where there is
no place for such a figure. He is almost an absurd
caricature of an ideal hero that fits neither into real
life nor the literary reality of his time or genre. He
is not a pulp stereotype fighting for justice. He does
not relentlessly and brilliantly deduce solutions which
police overlook. He does not strong-arm his way to
truth, nor does he seduce the beautiful killer only to
kill her or turn her in, at the end, as in the
formula's tried-and-tested way. If he did fit into
this well-oiled process of the hard-boiled model, then
Chandler would not be writing moral fiction. Yet
Chandler realized that at the center of his literature-
— and what would make it both popular fiction and moral
art is the hero, Marlowe. "The American mind,"
Chandler called him; and he is, as well, "the implied
159
model,” as Gardner says about the Romantic vision of
art, ”for individual and social action."
When Marlowe stares at the painting of the maiden
in distress and the knight reaching but unable to
rescue her, at the beginning of The Big Sleep, we see
an obvious but significant analogy which will follow
Marlowe through the next five novels. He is a
twentieth-century knight in a futile quest to save the
helpless. He knows he is an anachronism, that he will
make very little difference, no matter what he succeeds
in doing; but nevertheless he struggles. His struggle
is really a simple one, for him. It is all he is able
to do. In a sense, he is compelled, despite his
awareness of the futile nature of his quest, to
struggle, because the struggle's impetus comes from his
deepest sense of what a society should be, and what
values individuals in a society should follow.
Perhaps it is this intuitive compulsion to remain
faithful to a code which is hopelessly out of date that
makes of Marlowe both a success and a failure. And it
is this very ambiguity which makes him both a hero and
a literary reality as opposed to a caricature riding a
white horse.
If there is one quality in mid twentieth-century
American fiction which earmarks it as distinctive, it
160
is perhaps the quality of its anti-hero: an out-of-
sorts, out-cast, out-lawed, irresponsible, bedraggled
drunkard, lover, poet, thief of a figure who
nevertheless has managed to maintain a certain quality
of grace, a certain standard of honor, however
abstracted by circumstances it may be. Marlowe, a
fairly conservative character by most of these
standards, is still representative of the anti-hero
within his genre, and even within mainstream American
fiction. His shabby life-style, his dirty office and
run-down rented apartment, his relative poverty, his
lack of social standing, his social conscience, his
commonality, all set him apart.
Chandler recognized this aspect of failure in
Marlowe, but wouldn't have it any other way. Chandler
would not create an eccentric, infallible, tough guy
like that created by his fellow mystery writers:
obsessively violent, obsessively sexual, too perfect
for anything but a popular audience reading formula
novels one after another like we watch television soaps
today. Chandler, one of the last Romantics himself,
nevertheless insisted on the corrupt realism of his
time for the milieu of his fiction, and Marlowe, a
knight without meaning, became then a kind of anti-hero
stepping through his paces but restoring only the
161
vaguest semblance of order and harmony when the fiction
ends .
Chandler wrote in 1951 a letter to a Mr. Inglis in
response to a letter Inglis had written him concerning
the immaturity of Marlowe:
...I don't think my friend P.M. is very much
concerned about whether or not he has a
mature mind. I will admit to an equal lack
of concern about myself.... If being in
revolt against a corrupt society constitutes
being immature, then P.M. is extremely
immature. If seeing dirt where there is dirt
constitutes an inadequate social adjustment,
then P.M. has inadequate social adjustment.
Of course Marlowe is a failure and he knows
it. He is a failure because he hasn't any
money. A man who without physical handicaps
cannot make adecent living is always a
failure and usually a moral failure. But a
lot of very good men have been failures
because their particular talents did not suit
their time and place. In the long run I
guess we are all failures or we wouldn't have
the kind of world we have. But you must
remember that Marlowe is not a real person.
He is a creature of fantasy. He is in a
false position because I put him there.
(Gardiner and Walker 232)
Chandler's work is infused with Marlowe's vision.
Marlowe may be a failure, as Chandler admits, but in
our society, to be anything else would mean he had been
corrupted himself. However, it should be obvious that
a man of Marlowe's intelligence could succeed in many
areas, and could easily be considered a great success
in any given field. Yet he remains the lonely, poor,
and despairing private detective, becoming only more
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unhappy as the novels go along. It would seem that
only as a detective, whose very raison d'etre is to
seek truth, can Marlowe continue to exist as we know
him: as both a hero and a failure. Marlowe's integrity
and his need to seek the truth, his life as a quest, a
knight who cannot do anything else, alienates him from
both his society and his genre. Chandler called him, in
"The Simple Art of Murder","a man of honor— by
instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and
certainly without saying it" (193). These are the
qualities which define him as a hero within his genre
and make him a failure.
The hardboiled detective in American fiction was
shallow and egotistical. His toughness was all he was
left in the end. And, therefore, his realizations and
understandings, his vision of the world of which he has
been a part, is a standard one. The reliance on a
cool, tough, bull-dog attitude which brought the killer
to justice was enough for the popular audience and
therefore for the genre. For Chandler this was not
enough, and Marlowe becomes a fantasy hero who, out of
his failure, as our reality defines it, achieves a sort
of grace, but a hard-won grace and the price he has
paid is what leaves him so depressed. The hero of the
genre, on the other hand, in this same corrupt and
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violent reality, remains untouched and psychologically
unaffected by what he has experienced and understood.
Any indications of hard, cold, truth about the
criminality and evil behavior of our species, are token
offerings. The plot and the violent, tougher-than-thou
hero is really the focus of concentration.
Unlike the tough guy in much of the genre, Marlowe
absorbs the pain he witnesses and becomes, in a sense,
the bearer of all the pain and despair for which we are
responsible as a society. Chandler seems to agree: he
continues, in this letter to Mr. Inglis: "In the long
run I guess we are all failures or we wouldn't have the
kind of world we have..." (232) .
The quest itself becomes the means by which
Marlowe transcends his genre and becomes both a
literary figure and a romantic hero, out of place and
out of time. The quest is the process of discovery for
Marlowe as well as his singular and futile effort to
bring forth a moral standard of conduct in his society.
And it is this process which becomes so important in
setting him apart from his contemporaries.
Gardner talks about the process of discovery which
the artist employs as he writes his novel. That
process of discovery about character, about rendition
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of situation, conflict, plot is the creative process
for the artist. In that process, Gardner says, the
moment-to-moment development of the novel entails
morality; that is, there is a decision-making process
going on, which is essentially based on a standard of
morality that seeks affirmation and truth. And, in
Chandler's work seeking truth is accomplished through
the context of the discovery process of the seeker, the
private eye Philip Marlowe.
Marlowe comes alive only when he is on a case. As
the narrator as well as the hero he is both inside and
outside the actual story as it unfolds. Yet he is
unmistakably the main character of these novels.
Despite the significance of Marlowe as a literary
character, his role in the novel is to discover why
things happen, and so the very nature of the story is
woven around this central process of discovery which
Marlowe employs before the story becomes resolved. The
detective leads the reader into our own discovery of
the characters and their interweaving corruption until
the case is solved, so to speak, and Marlowe then says
good-bye. Marlowe's modus operendi is very much like
that of Gardner's artist; his creative role is the
process of discovery through the telling of the story.
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The artist, says Gardner, in On Moral Fiction, in
creating his art is driven to honestly observe to see
and judge what is there with a clear and honest mind:
"...the 'art'...forces the writer to intense yet
dispassionate and unprejudiced watchfulness, drives
him in ways abstract logic cannot match to
unexpected discoveries..." (108). This is a
wonderfully accurate definition of Marlowe's process of
detection. It is through this creative process that
"meanings" are discovered by the artist (and Marlowe)
and communicated to the reader. These "meanings," as
Gardner calls them, seem to be, in terms of the
detective, the same as the "hidden truths" Chandler was
writing about in his essay "The Simple Art of Murder."
Chandler writes that the story itself, "is this man's
adventure in search of a hidden truth"(194). This
search is the process of discovery for Gardner's artist
and for Chandler's detective. And the "hidden truths"
are Gardner's "meanings" which he claims "moral fiction
communicates" through this "process of the fiction's
creation" (Gardner 108).
Arriving at the end of the novel with the hidden
truth discovered is obviously not the only criteria for
moral fiction. But for the hard-boiled genre, this
seemed to be the overriding factor. Gardner is
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clear when he says that if morality is achieved through
pedagogy and without interest in character and the
affirmation of certain community values, then the
result is something less than moral fiction. But
it certainly can be and was still read as popular and
hardboiled detective fiction.
As Chandler develops as a novelist throughout
the years, Marlowe becomes a means of commenting upon
an American society in decay. As a detective, Marlowe
finds exactly what the truth is, and not so
incidentally how little he can do about it. The
formula and the plot become less important, and
characters, especially Marlowe, become central. This
can be seen as we look at the development of Marlowe as
a character. He remains Marlowe from first novel to
last, essentially, but he becomes more involved in each
case. It is not that he becomes more aware of what is
around him, although it might seem that way because of
the greater attention he pays to seemingly
insignificant events or objects which cross his path.
It is rather that he becomes more sensitive to
everything he sees, and therefore becomes more
vulnerable, and consequently more emotionally affected
by the world he finds himself exploring.
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Frank McShane, in his biography of Chandler,
writes about this development. McShane, looking at the
stories of the 1930s, recognizes Chandler's early hero,
never identified as Marlowe by name, as "an ordinary
Black Mask character: tough, strong, attractive to
women, an honest man in a crooked trade" (McShane 69).
McShane even goes on to place this type of hero in
mainstream American fiction: "(the) kind of
hero... common in American literature and seems to
represent a faith in the incorruptibility of at least
part of the population. The early Marlowe's
antecedents are Natty Bumppo, Huckleberry Finn, and
Hemingway's Nick Adams" (69). McShane partly
attributes Chandler's decision to use Marlowe as his
first-person narrator, for "the higher quality of
Chandler's novels..." (McShane 69).
McShane recognized a key difference in Chandler,
as everyone does, but also sees in Marlowe perhaps the
main reason for this difference. While most detective-
story narrators are "colorless," for Chandler, "Marlowe
was something quite different: through his voice comes
what Chandler called the 'controlled half-poetical
emotion' that is at the heart of the work" (69).
Marlowe grows more complex as a literary
character. This is unusual in American hard-boiled
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detective fiction, and is a testament to Chandler's
growth as a novelist. For no matter how many novels a
particular author of this genre will ordinarily write,
his detective remains inextricably fastened to the ties
of the formula. As a literary character his detective
remains stock, unrealistic, without depth, and really
of very little interest except as the tough-guy hero
true to his genre.
The new popular hero had to seek a new kind of
truth and a new kind of solitude one enmeshed within
the concrete and crime of twentieth-century urban
society. The wilderness of Cooper and the river of
Twain were supplanted by America's sprawling cities.
The American hero could no longer choose to live
outside civilization. Popular fiction told the stories
of these cities, newly swelled by emigration and
industrialization and troubled by the social problems
such population explosion inevitably produces. A new
kind of fictional hero was needed to reflect these
times and the concerns of the American people. And
from the shifting societal patterns came the hard-
boiled detective: not modeled anymore on Poe's Dupin,
but emerging eventually from the organic urban reality
of Twenties America, which is probably why the new
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fictional hero took such a strong and lasting hold on
the American psyche.
The figure that Poe invented in 1841 and labeled
the classic detective became firmly established as a
major figure of popular literature with the first
magazine appearance of Nick Carter in the US in 1886,
and Sherlock Holmes in England in 1887. Generally the
classic detective is an amateur, entering into the case
for intellectual stimulation or from a sense of social
order rather than for profit. He is a superior being
and may be arrogant, romantic, aristocratic, moody,
bookish, addicted to drugs, and even sexually
ambiguous. He is also removed from real life.
As British critic Julian Symons has pointed out in
his study of detective fiction, Mortal Consequences,
the classic detective story is essentially a fairy
tale. The crime at its heart is an aberration that
neither influences nor is influenced by the civilized
world around it. Holmes and his British counterparts
were fairy-tales supreme par excellence. But their
American counterparts, even as early as 188 6 and Nick
Carter, began to deviate from the classic archetype.
While still a superior being, Carter is more of a Jack
Armstrong-all-American-boy type an exaggeration and
embodiment of what any turn-of-the-century reader might
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have become if he had been a little smarter, stronger,
and tougher. He was a conscious representation of the
American ideal of his time, and he provided a fitting
model and source of satisfaction for both youth and
adult audiences.
He was America's first popular urban hero. His
predecessors, from Cooper's Leatherstocking through
Deadwood Dick, Annie Oakley, and Buffalo Bill to the
other heroes of the dime novels, all pursued their
adventures outside the emerging American society. But,
by Carter's time, civilization had overrun the
frontier. And by the twenties America was ready for a
new popular hero in its fiction.
When Black Mask, in its June 1, 1923, issue,
published a story called "Knights of the Open Palm," by
Carroll John Daly, America was introduced to the first
of a new type of private eye, the hard-boiled dick.
Like Poe, Daly established a significant number of the
conventions of the formula. The hard-boiled detective
is not a dilettante amateur, but a working man self-
employed in a small business. He is very much a part
of the urban environment in which he lives and works:
his sparsely furnished, small, and shabby office is
downtown, and his home is a nondescript apartment
house. Like his antagonist, he carries a gun. His
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instinct for self-preservation is highly developed. He
doesn't actually seek violence, but it always seems to
find him; and if he has killed a man or woman, his
conscience remains clear as clear as his moral
vision. Unlike the classic detective, he does it
through persistence, legwork, and trial-and-error, not
through a near-mystical power of logical process.
Yet the differences between the classic and the
hard-boiled formulas extend beyond the detective.
Hard-boiled fiction responds to a more complex, more
democratic society that cannot be defined using such
direct concepts as law and order, or social caste.
Under the influence of trade unionism, the rise of
modern capitalism, the establishment of the Protestant
work ethic, and the postwar prosperity of the twenties,
American urban culture became more chaotic, more
competitive, more violent. In reaction to these
changes, as well as in rejection of the fantastic
aspects of the classic story and its heroes, tough
detective fiction consciously strives for a gritty
realism, a representation of violence that demands that
the reader become involved not only with an
intellectual mystery, but with the human and societal
influences behind a realistically presented crime.
When Chandler wrote, in "The Simple Art of Murder,"
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that the hard-boiled school "gave murder back to the
kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to
provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand-
wrought duelling pistols, curare, and tropical fish,"
he also made a tacit acknowledgment that crime had
become a fact of American life. The world had only
recently been rocked by its first fully industrialized
war; the potential of technology for producing death
and violence had been amply demonstrated. Some of the
violence continued, quite naturally, into peace time.
The Eighteenth Amendment turned millions of ordinary
citizens into technical criminals. The failure of
Prohibition was obvious, and this open and apparent
contempt for the law was an unprecedented phenomenon.
The hard-boiled hero is closer to the ordinary man
than the superior being, but he still does have the two
most important qualities necessary to cope with the
new, darker vision of American society: he is a
capable man, and he is a moral man.
With his Continental Op, which first appeared in
Black Mask in 1924, Dashiell Hammett had outlined the
code of behavior that the hard-boiled dick still
follows. In "The Gutting of Couffignal," the Op
explains this code to the Russian emigre princess whom
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he has apprehended for murder and robbery, when she
tries to bribe him into freeing her.
"Let me straighten this out for you,"I
interrupted. "We'll disregard whatever
honesty I happen to have, sense of loyalty to
employers, and so on....Now I'm a detective
because I happen to like the work....And
liking work makes you want to do it as well
as you can. Otherwise there'd be no sense to
it. That's the fix I am in. I don't know
anything else, don't want to know anything
else, don't enjoy anything else, don't want
to know or enjoy anything else. You can't
weigh that against any sum of money....
"You speak only of money," she said."I said
you may have whatever you ask." That was
out. I don't know where these women get
their ideas. "You're st ill all twisted
up," I said brusquely.... "You think I'm a
man and you're a woman. That's wrong. I'm a
man-hunter and you're something that has been
running in front of me. There's nothing
human about it. You might just as well
expect a hound to play tidily-winks with the
fox he's caught...." ( Cawelti, 154)
This is the essence of the code: the detective's
moral vision must be unswerving. When he begins a
case, he must finish it, and he can't allow money, sex,
friendship, or personal bias to deflect him from the
correct path.
These early Hammett stories also establish the
formula hard-boiled attitude toward violence. Violence
for the Op, and for the hard-boiled detective to come,
is neither pleasant nor vicious. Violence is simply a
commonplace, as rational a result of private-eye work
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as a cynical view of one's fellow man and woman. This
attitude does change in the 1940s and 1950s, when
Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer arrives on the scene;
here, under the rationale of revenge, we witness some
of the most sadistic and vicious violence, on the part
of the detective, ever to be seen in popular fiction.
Spillane's detective becomes psychotic, premeditated,
and bloodthirsty, and outsells almost anyone else
writing in America to that time, or any other time, for
that matter.
"Hard-boiled" is not only a description of the
detective's attitude toward violence; it also reflects
his reaction to society at large. At least, the hard-
boiled dick is a romantic: the simplest proof of this
can be found in his optimistic delusion that he is
restoring order in the society, when in fact this
optimism is consistently and blatantly being shattered.
As Ross MacDonald points outs in his essay "The Writer
as Detective Hero," hard-boiled novels "could almost be
described as novels of sensibility. Their constant
theme is big-city loneliness, and the wry pain of a
sensitive man coping with the roughest elements of a
corrupt society" (301).
Because of his vulnerability, the detective
assumes his bitter and cynical attitude as a defense
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against the inevitable failure of his idealism. The
formula of the hard-boiled detective story, with the
modern city as its background, shifted away from the
classical pattern of mystery to that of heroic
adventure. The vision of the city was no longer the
fantasy city of G. K. Chesterton, with its exotic and
romantic adventure, but almost its reverse: instead of
the new Arabian nights, we find empty modernity,
corruption, and death. A gleaming and deceptive facade
hides a world of exploitation and criminality. Compare
the following passages in which Chandler's hero Philip
Marlowe, in Farewell. My Lovely, describes a trip
across the city, with Chesterton's evocation of the
investigator's journey across the city in which "the
casual omnibus assumes the primal colours of a fairy
ship." Here is Marlowe driving on Sunset strip through
the heart of Hollywood:
We arrived through the bright mile or two
of the strip, past the antique shops with
famous screen names on them, past the windows
full of point lace and ancient pewter, past
the gleaming new nightclubs with famous chefs
and equally famous gambling rooms, run by
polished graduates of the Purple Gang, past
the Georgian-Colonial vogue, now old hat,
past the handsome modernistic buildings
in which the Hollywood flesh-peddlers
never stop talking money, past a drive-in
lunch which somehow didn't belong,
even though the girls wore white silk
blouses and drum majorette shakos and
nothing below the hips but glorified kid
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Hessian boots. Past all this and down a
wide smooth curve to the bridle path of
Beverly Hills and lights to the south,
all colors of the spectrum and crystal
clear in an evening without fog, past
the shadowed mansions up on the hills
to the north, past Beverly Hills altogether
and up into the twisting foothill boulevard
and the sudden cool dusk and the drift
of wind from the sea.
(112-13)
For Chandler, following the hard-boiled formula,
it was only outside the city, in what was left of the
natural world still unspoiled by the pervasive city,
that enchantment or beauty could be found. Not so for
Chesterton, and his poetic vision of the detective and
the city at the turn of the century:
The first essential value of the
detective story lies in this, that it
is the earliest and only form of popular
literature in which is expressed some
sense of the poetry of modern life....
No one can have failed to
notice that in these stories the hero or
the investigator crosses London with
something of the loneliness and liberty
of a prince in a tale of elfland, that in
the course of that incalculable journey,
the casual omnibus assumes the primal
colours of a fairy ship.... (Chesterton
112-113)
Chesterton has a good point when he realizes that
the detective story is "the only form of popular
literature in which is expressed some sense of the
poetry of modern life...", but his idea of the nature
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of the city is a far cry from Chandler's hard and
cynical vision .
In many ways the hard-boiled formula resembles
the classic detective story. In its pattern of action,
for example, they both move "from the introduction of
the detective and the presentation of the crime,
through the investigation, to a solution and
apprehension of the criminal" (142). In his book,
Adventure. Mystery, and Romance, quoted immediately
above, an excellent study of the serious literature of
popular culture, Cawelti analyzes in great detail the
literary formula of the hard-boiled detective story.
He finds two important differences between the classic
and the hard-boiled pattern of action:
"the subordination of the dramas of solution
(in the hard-boiled story) to the detective's
quest for the discovery and accomplishment of
justice; and the substitution of a pattern of
intimidation and temptation of the hero for
the elaborate development in the classical
story of what Northrup Frye calls 'the
wavering finger of suspicion' passing across
a series of potential suspects." (142)
Because of this emphasis on discovery and on the
hero as a moral figure, Cawelti points out that the
detective must have much more personal involvement than
in the classic pattern, and therefore is
forced to define his own concept of morality
and justice, frequently in conflict with
social authority or the police. Where the
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classic detective's role was to use his
superior intellect and psychological insight
to reveal the hidden guilt that the police
seemed unable to discover, the hard-boiled
detective metes out the just punishment that
the law is too mechanical, unwieldy, or
corrupt to achieve. (143)
What Cawelti calls "the rhythm of exposure"
becomes almost inviolable in the hard-boiled formula.
That is, the detective, through his emotional
involvement, slowly reveals the hidden levels of guilt
and where they lead. "In many ways this rhythm is the
antithesis of the classical story where the detective
always shows that the corruption is isolated and
specific rather than general and endemic to the social
world of the story" (147). Not only is the social
world rift with corruption, the detective of the hard-
boiled genre fully understands that this corruption and
evil is thoroughly woven into the fabric of society. He
knows that evil is not isolated to certain specific
criminal elements, with the essential social order
benevolent and merely temporarily disrupted. "In
short, the hard-boiled detective," writes Cawelti, "is
a traditional man of virtue in an amoral and corrupt
world.
His toughness and cynicism form a protective
coloration protecting the essence of his
character, which is honorable and noble. In
a world where the law is inefficient and
susceptible to corruption, where the
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recognized social elite is too decadent and
selfish to accomplish justice and protect the
innocent, the private detective is forced to
take over the basic moral functions of
exposure, protection, judgment, and
execution. (152)
For Chandler, a good detective novel his, for
instance can be read and enjoyed and understood even
if the last chapter was missing. For the genre as a
whole this was blasphemy. And worse, the novel would
be ruined. The work simply cannot hold itself together
if the ending, a long-winded explanation and
denouement, is removed. The necessary foundation of a
novel that is more than popular fiction is character
and style, and motivation which comes from a
character's particular nature, which has been slowly
revealed to us as the work proceeds. The development
of plot is secondary and becomes a vehicle to carry the
more important aspect of character. The detection
involved is one of discovery of psychological motives,
not one of solving a particular crime. This is a
simplification of the novelistic process, but,
nevertheless, what serious literature is not is the
careful putting together of the pieces of a puzzle,
with decoration, eccentricity, violence, sex, and
affectation the primary elements of the fiction.
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Gardner seems to be saying that it is the creative
process of the artist that determines if the art itself
is moral. It is this process which seeks to verify in
some fashion the heroic aspect of ourselves in our
struggle with life; and by its nature, throws its light
on a value system which a society takes to heart; a
value system which affirms certain basic aspects of
community and democracy that a society can embrace as
that which is best in itself.
Marlowe's process of discovery is a moral process
as well. He is like Gardner's artist in that sense,
discovering his own story: his own truth and the truth
of the case. This makes Chandler's novels moral
fiction.
The detective seeks truth. It is unthinkable that
the guilt which festers throughout the story is not to
be finally purged, and that the guilty will not atone
for their crimes. The detective, in many respects, is
the primary catalyst for this process.
The process of discovery, for Marlowe, however,
becomes synonymous with his moral standard in terms of
his personal conduct. This conduct becomes for us as
readers a model of democratic moral behavior that
Chandler seems to insist upon for his hero and
indirectly perhaps for us as well. That is not to say
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that Chandler wants us to become down-at-the-heels
private eyes lonely, alienated and poor in order to
qualify as moral human beings. This would be an absurd
premise. But it does become increasingly clear that in
the very corrupt world in which we live, and in which
Marlowe lives, this fantasy hero does provide a
standard of moral and democratic behavior that Chandler
endorses, and encourages. And, if he is too realistc
to automatically reward this integrity, then at best he
grants Marlowe a certain grace that is perhaps the only
reward a man of his kind can receive in such a world.
Perhaps Gardner7 s main purpose in writing On Moral
Fiction was to remind us, as a culture, how important
art is to a healthy society. Gardner's task in the
work is to criticize the state of modern American
fiction: Not because artists are lacking in talent,
but because they have abandoned what he considers to be
the true meaning of art, which is "essentially and
primarily moral that is, life-giving moral in its
creation and moral in what it says" (Gardner 15). In
defining art and in explaining why only art, and not
formula, didacticism, and technical virtuosity for its
own sake, can influence and "instruct" as well as
"delight" a society, Gardner emphasizes the process of
creation itself.
182
Marlowe, in this regard, is again like the artist,
who creates the story, and the critic, who reads and
interprets it; in the process of discovering
understanding and truth, Marlowe creates the
opportunity for life-affirming values to be brought
into the open and shared by all of us. Obviously,
after one reads Chandler's novels, one realizes that
these ideal standards as lived by Marlowe and endorsed
by Chandler are not the ends we generally achieve. But
the important aspect is that Marlowe has remained
faithful to a moral process of discovery, exactly as
the artist must in order to create moral fiction.
If Marlowe does not know how things will work out,
it is simply because he proceeds along lines which have
not been predetermined, despite the fact that Chandler
does adhere to the basic tenets of the hard-boiled
formula. If characters don't turn out the way they
should, if they are not redeemed, if they are killed
instead of saved at the last moment, then it is because
they are developed as unique and realistic studies, not
stock pawns to be moved by a master chessman. In fact,
Chandler has Marlowe remark in The Big Sleep, the first
novel, in the midst of one of the detective's solitary
chess games (he plays against a book of published
tournament games), after he has moved his knight and
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realized the move was a mistake: "I looked down at the
chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put
it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no
meaning in this game. It wasn't a game for knights”
(146).
So then, like Gardner's idea about art and the
creative process, Marlowe not a knight with
prescribed moves in a well-defined game proceeds out
of his imagination, "seizing whatever swims close to
his net" (Gardner 13). Gardner writes:
Art is as original and important as it is
precisely because it does not start out with
clear knowledge of what it means to say. Out
of the artist's imagination, as out of
nature's inexhaustible well, pours one thing
after another. The artist composes, writes,
or paints exactly as he dreams, seizing
whatever swims close to his net. This, not
the world seen directly, is his raw
material.... Or, as Schiller once put it in a
letter to a friend, what happens in the case
of the creative mind is that 'the intellect
has withdrawn its watches from the gates, and
the ideas rush in pell-mell, and only then
does (the creative mind) review and inspect
the multitude' . (Gardner 13)
Marlowe as detective is doing exactly this. His
process, is composed of "endless blind
experiments... and then ruthless selectivity" (Gardner
14). Chandler's fiction is comprised of the
detective's search for meaning and truth in an amoral
and absurdly corrupt world. His art, in Gardner's
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words, is "in sworn opposition to chaos, (and)
discovers by its process what it can say. This is
art's morality" (Gardner 14). And this is Marlowe's
morality. If Marlowe moves falsely, if he exploits
weakness, if he allows himself to take money he does
not deserve, if he is disloyal, if he sees the truth
and hides it for wrong reasons, if in the process of
detection he moves as if the ends justify the means and
therefore allows any action to prevail, however
immoral, then Marlowe ceases to be a moral agent (moral
detective or discoverer might be more accurate) in
Gardner's terms. He becomes one more typecast detective
in one more predictable mystery novel, compromised by
this capitulation to the corruption and violence of the
world in which he is placed.
The artist is. a hunter, a detective of sorts,
even. And the process of creating art is the sensitive
one of listening and observing. "Art gropes," says
Gardner; and Marlowe is a groper. "It stalks like a
hunter lost in the woods, listening to itself and to
everything around it, unsure of itself, waiting to
pounce" (Gardner 19). And Marlowe is surely lost in
the dense and dismal "woods” of Los Angeles, America's
last frontier, searching for prey of which he has
little knowledge or description. He absorbs and
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listens. He even dreams about his cases in strange
distorted versions of reality, attempting
subconsciously to find meaning within the mystery.
In The Big Sleep. Marlowe, early in the novel, has
seen Geiger, the blackmailer and pornographer, lying
dead in his (Geiger's) living room, and Carmen
Sternwood, the daughter of his client, sitting at the
scene, naked and drugged into a stupor. A concealed
camera has no film inside it, obviously taken by the
murderer, who has hastily fled before Marlowe arrived.
In his dream that night Marlowe incorporates these
events into a garish nightmare which subconsciously
indicates his involvement in the case, but as well his
deeper sense of frustration and helplessness. "I went
to bed full of whisky and frustration and dreamed about
a man in a bloody Chinese coat who chased a naked girl
with long jade earrings while I ran after them and
tried to take a photograph with an empty camera" (38).
Surely this is the groping detective caught in a
nightmare web of decadence and corruption, futilely
seeking to discover what he cannot hope to capture with
his empty camera. Marlowe is certainly unsure of
himself and moves only out of instinct and experience;
his only landmarks his own sense of right or wrong, and
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jumbled half-truths he cannot piece together; yet he
still thinks about his futility as a detective and
seems to recognize the absurdity of trying to make his
work meaningful. It is as if the hunt the process---
is the essence of his meaning, for often the prey---
even when Marlowe does manage to pounce upon it has
already been brought to bay, or is but an almost
meaningless part of a world order which he can do
nothing to alter. Yet that doesn't really matter.
Like the artist, Marlowe has carved a clear and moral
niche in a very dirty and immoral piece of clay which
is the world we inhabit. That is enough and all we
want of art and of Marlowe.
In The Big Sleep, the central mystery of the novel
concerns finding a man who has been dead before the
story begins. Marlowe obviously does not know this,
and in fact he is not directly asked to find this man,
Rusty Regan, until very late in the book. But Regan and
his whereabouts become the axis around which the entire
story revolves. With everything else that occurs, from
Marlowe's initial task of getting a blackmailer off the
back of a wealthy family, to the subsequent multiple
murders that take place, ostensibly because of this
blackmail, to the final resolution again involving
the same family, the Sternwoods the missing Regan
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lurks behind the scenes. His fate and the discovery of
what happened to him is the hidden center of the novel.
Marlowe's process of discovery in The Big Sleep
and the other novels is a complicated one which leads
him through a labyrinth of indirection and danger.
Throughout he is confronted with numerous sexual
temptations which he feels would compromise his sense
of integrity. He resists these, in one case violently.
Chandler has been criticized for this so-called
"puritanical" behavior in Marlowe. And, in fact,
Marlowe's insistence upon a standard of conduct which
does seem either absurd or extremely old-fashioned and
conservative, given the corrupt sexuality and
permissiveness of the hard-boiled detective of the
genre, sets him apart from his contemporaries. This
sexual chastity (at least on camera) and Marlowe's
ever-present and increasingly bitter critical voice
concerning so many aspects of modern American society,
combine to portray what appears to be a view cut from
the cloth of small-town America, with its phobia of
modern technology, sexual freedom, the big, fast,
corrupt city, and generally speaking a fear of the
entire post-Freudian, post-World War I amorality of Jay
Gatsby, Jake Barnes, and Sam Spade.
188
It is this staunch adherence to a so-called
anachronistic code of ethics that isolates Marlowe
within his genre, and which links him up with Gardner's
neo moral stance, It is also Marlowe's uncompromising
ethics which becomes the basis for a general criticism
of Raymond Chandler, who, the critics bemoan, is
futilely seeking to return America to a long-gone past
of simplisitc, conservative, family-oriented values,
completely out of touch with the existential godless
reality of mid-twentieth-century America.
When Marlowe refuses to be seduced by first the
older Sternwood daughter, and then the younger one, one
writer sees this as proof that Marlowe is sexually a
prude, obsessed with a ridiculous moral code, and
possibly even homosexual. Another critic, Michael
Mason, has written an essay entitled, "Marlowe, Men and
Women," (discussed earlier) in which he develops the
idea of Marlowe's latent homosexuality, and Chandler's
as well, citing mother-complexes, Marlowe's attraction
to strong men, and the fact that Chandler makes women
the killers in many of his novels. Of course, the
fact that Hammett, in The Maltese Falcon, both John D.
and Ross MacDonald in numerous novels, and the hard-
boiled genre, as well as the complementary film noir
genre in general were discovering that women could be
189
as criminal and violent as men, is ignored completely
by these critics. In fact, in Cawelti's study of the
hard-boiled formula, he recognizes that one of the most
striking differences between the classical and hard-
boiled genre was in the role of women:
The function of the women in the hard-boiled
formula then is not simply that of opposite
sexual consort to the dashing hero; she also
poses certain basic challenges to the
detective's physical and psychological
security. These challenges frequently serve
as the climax to the pattern of temptation,
threat, and bribery...and thereby lead to the
most brutal violence of the story. (Cawelti
154)
What is seemingly being said in arguments such as
Mason's, however, as with arguments which label Marlowe
obsessively puritanical and conservative, is that a
consistent moral standard in popular versus serious
American fiction, even fiction as relatively early as
Chandler's, cannot be accepted by an already very
corrupt and decadent American society, and a way must
be found to derogate any fiction that insists upon such
a standard.
Gardner is right when he says that we are
downright embarrassed when we are presented with moral
characters and standards in our fiction, when we are
given unadulterated truth and a pure vision of our
community. We have become so inured to corruption, so
190
blase and cynical about morality, we cannot accept a
moral code with anything else but embarrasment. As
readers and as writers we seem to demand fiction and
fictional characters which reflect and even celebrate
the absurd, the nihilistic, and the corrupt, every bit
as much as our real society seems to do.
Chandler, through Marlowe, refuses to capitulate
to this demand. His hero, however conservative and
puritanical he may appear in the decadent Los Angeles
through which he travels, and in the blase eyes of the
contemporary critic, is simply an honest man, however
cynical and dispossessed, and a man who does his best
to stay that way. His honesty allows him to recognize
morality in others and to respond positively, even
though his response may not be sufficient to save a
worthy character in need of his help.
What motivates Marlowe to act as he does? Is he a
neurotic prude, or a man with a moral code? A
particularly intense scene in The Big Sleep may point
to the answer. Carmen Sternwood is the younger,
somewhat psychotic daughter who is causing all the
trouble in the novel. Marlowe is hired by her father
to get a blackmailer "off his back." It seems as
though Carmen doesn't mind becoming drugged into an
191
oblivious state and having her picture taken in the
nude by a sleazy pornography dealer.
Marlowe saves her from further trouble in this
regard, but not before the pornographer is murdered by
the Sternwood's chauffeur (secretly in love with
Carmen), who kills himself or is murdered Chandler
never makes clear which and the man who covertly
attempts to take over the pornography business is
killed as well, by the original porn dealer's lover,
who mistakenly thinks he is killing his lover's killer.
Carmen seems to be the catalyst for all of this, and
Marlowe is able to extricate her from the scene of two
murders. She is grateful. Too grateful, for Marlowe's
tastes.
Marlowe returns to his apartment late one night.
He has rescued Vivian, the older daughter, from a
robbery attempt in the parking lot of the Cypress Club,
a posh gambling club run by Eddie Mars, who later
figures prominently in the mystery. She had with her a
large amount of money; Marlowe happened to be in the
club questioning Mars. Waiting in the lot to drive
Vivian home, Marlowe gets the drop on the robber. On
the way home, Marlowe and Vivian stop at the beach. A
couple of passionate kisses ensue but Marlowe still
insists on information from Vivian, even at this
192
inopportune time, and will not allow her attempted
seduction to sway him. She becomes angry. He takes
her home in silence. When he enters his apartment, he
finds Carmen in his bed, naked, and grinning like the
demented young girl she is.
Carmen wants to repay Marlowe for his kindness---
with her young and lovely body but Marlowe can only
see her as a "dope" and orders her out of his bed.
Carmen, not used to being sexually rejected, pouts and
frets and this turns quickly into one of her patented
fits, during which she hisses, and calls Marlowe a
filthy name. Marlowe has, by this point, had enough.
He says to himself:
I didn't mind what she called me, what
anybody called me. But this was the room I
had to live in. It was all I had in the way
of a home. In it was everything that was
mine, that had any association for me, any
past, anything that took the place of a
family. Not much; a few books, pictures,
radio, chessmen, old letters, stuff like
that. Nothing. Such as they were they had
all my memories. (147)
He tells her to get up and be dressed in three
minutes or he will toss her out into the hall as she is
and toss her clothes after her. His description of
Carmen is stark and frightening: "Her teeth chattered
and the hissing noise was sharp and animal.... She stood
there for a moment and hissed at me, her face still
193
like scraped bone, her eyes still empty and yet full of
some jungle emotion" (148) .
When she leaves and he is sure she is gone, he
opens his windows wide to let in the night air of the
city, and takes a drink. And then:
I went back to the bed and looked down at it.
The imprint of her head was still in the
pillow, of her small corrupt body still on
the sheets. I put my empty glass down and
tore the bed to pieces savagely. (148)
In one long night Marlowe has been sexually
tempted by both Sternwood daughters and has turned both
down. Although he certainly was attracted to Vivian
Sternwood and didn't mind kissing her in the slightest,
and even though Carmen presented a beautiful picture
naked in his bed, Marlowe is not seriously tempted. It
would be very hard to find other such examples of
heroic abstinence in the hard-boiled detective genre.
However, this does not imply that Marlowe is some kind
of eunuch, or perhaps even homosexual. It seems clear
from Marlowe's repeated remarks to himself and to
various women throughout all the novels that he is
strongly attracted to the opposite sex. And, in fact,
in the only on-camera love affair he does have, in the
last novel, The Long Good-bve (1953), there seems no
doubt at all that Marlowe is, in that strictest sense,
another in a long line of detectives making love to a
194
beautiful woman who crosses his path in the course of
the adventure.
Surely the difference is obvious. Marlowe
repeatedly repels attempts by women clients and
otherwise to seduce him. The fact of the single
sexual relationship in the last novel indicates the
seriousness with which Marlowe takes sexual intimacy,
and as well how seriously he takes the work he is
doing. As much as Marlowe is attracted to women, which
seems normal enough for a heterosexual male in good
health and in his thirties, he is not ever able to be
tempted to lose track of what he is trying to do----that
is, solve a mystery. Solving a mystery, for Marlowe,
is being done in the first place for someone else, a
client, to help that person obtain justice, or to help
avoid injustice. The fringe benefits of sexuality
(and violence, often gratuitous) within which so many
hardboiled detectives of the genre find themselves
entangled seem to take up the burden of these novels.
Marlowe is set apart, yet does not lose his human
quality because of it. Nor his sexuality. His
attraction to Vivian, and Eddie Mars' wife Mona, whom
he meets at the end of the novel, and his sensitivity
to the character traits of those he encounters,
reinforces the emotional nature of his personality.
195
His sexual abstinence on stage, despite the
temptations, seems to identify not a prude nor a
homosexual operating, but a man whose professional and
moral intent transcends his sexual desires and whose
moral standard of conduct and relationship is more than
immediate gratification of physical lust. It doesn't ,
take an entire novel for Marlowe to read a character as
obviously deranged as Carmen Sternwood, for instance,
and Chandler is not interested in proving his hero's
virility at every opportunity.
Although Marlowe is distinguished from the heroes
of his genre by his sexual abstinence on camera, he
also transcends the nature of the genre's hero in
another, more important way. He is not, in the
formulaic sense of the word, a very successful hero.
He understands, even by the end of the first novel,
that his quest is a hopeless one.
His attitude is perhaps a bitter and cynical one,
but certainly understandable, after this nightmarish
battle, in The Big Sleep, with a rich and corrupt
family. He seems to recognize that some of the
corruption has rubbed off on him and that he will never
be the same. He is, at the end of this first novel,
not anything like the idealistic, almost innocent
private eye we see on the first page of the novel---
196
with a new suit, new socks, and a bubbling optimism
about himself as he sees himself scaling the heights
to rescue the damsel in distress he encounters in the
painting on his first visit to the mansion.
Although he does not exactly think about it, the
message seems clear that Marlowe's self-image has been
irreversibly altered by the end of this novel. He has
been corrupted by the stench of the Sternwoods and
those trying to extort them, and it is that smell that
turns him so cynical at the novel's close. He doesn't
like himself nearly as much anymore, and he doesn't
like the world as much either. But he has come into
the world as it is, and Chandler will not have it any
other way. Marlowe must pass this initiation rite if
he is to continue in his profession. Part of that
passage includes this intimate contact with the dark
side of our society and of ourselves. He could not be
professionally effective in such a world if he remained
innocent, nor could he be feasible as a literary
character if this innocence and optimism remained
unchanged and unsullied.
The basic elements of Marlowe's character are
revealed in the first novel. And his idealism about
justice, however depressed and cynical he later
becomes, never really leaves him throughout the next
197
six adventures, over fifteen years. Yet, justice, for
Marlowe, even by the end of The Big Sleep, has ceased
to be a concept in a vacuum, fit for a romantic knight.
Justice has become a distant dream which still
motivates him; but the reality of the American city has
forced him out of the vacuum. Marlowe struggles to
achieve his own idea of justice, but he is without
illusion. He finds himself too close to the maw of
evil which has enveloped the Sternwood family and it
frightens him as nothing else or no one else could. It
awakens his repressed sense of mortality about which,
earlier in the novel, he could joke.
He is confronted by Eddie Mars and his two gunmen
at one point: "The muzzle of the luger looked like the
mouth of the Second Street tunnel, but I didn't move.
Not being bullet proof is an idea I had had to get used
to" (67). This is typical Marlowe wit, and it serves
him as a weapon and very well in these sorts of
situations.
Marlowe leaves the Sternwood mansion for the last
time on the last page of the novel, and as he drives
down the hill of the estate, the case completed, he
reflects about "the big sleep" which we all must share
at some point. He leaves the book with a cynicism and
despair that is disturbing:
198
Outside, the bright gardens had a
haunted look, as though small wild eyes were
watching me behind the bushes, as though the
sunshine itself had a mysterious something in
its light....What did it matter where you lay
once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a
marble tower on top of a high hill? You were
dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you
were not bothered by things like that. Oil
and water were the same as wind and air to
you. You just slept the big sleep, not
caring about the nastiness of how you died or
where you fell. Me, I was part of the
nastiness now. (215)
Certainly the passage is far different in tone
than Marlowe's first, witty thought about not being
bullet-proof. He has, in facing so much death, in
having to kill, been changed. In a sense, death has
been a democratizing force. It has brought its victims
to one democratic level, despite their station in life.
It is a fitting closing comment for Marlowe to make---
Marlowe, the common, democratic American.
Chandler, in his first novel, is setting the tone
for the rest of his work, whether he is conscious of
this or not. To say Marlowe has become corrupted by
the stench of the Sternwoods and the underworld of Los
Angeles, does not mean he has abandoned his moral
standards, nor capitulated to the temptations offered
him. His corruption takes the form of bitterness,
disillusionment, and cynicism. It is a corruption in
the sense that he recognizes how closely he has been
199
touched by the events of the adventure. And this
recognition remains with Marlowe, and colors his
emotional reality.
He resigns himself to the fact that he must
suppress the truth from the law in order to salvage all
that remains of a dying old man's indomitable spirit
and of a young girl's pathologically twisted mind.
When he takes Carmen Sternwood to her family's
inoperative oil wells, ostensibly to teach her to shoot
with the pistol he has returned to her, the rotten
stench coming from the abandoned sump nauseates him.
As readers we do not at this point know that this sump
contains the corpse of Rusty Regan, the missing husband
of Vivian Sternwood and the crucial missing link in the
novel. There is no way Marlowe could know this either,
but he suspects something like what has actually
happened has occurred, and he is setting up Carmen in
the scene to see if his suspicions are correct; that
she, in one of her jealous, insane fits, has lured
Rusty somewhere and killed him, with the very pistol
she is now about to point at Marlowe, and fire at him,
from point-blank range. He is right, of course. This
time the bullets are blanks, and Marlowe returns Carmen
to Vivian and orders Vivian to send her away somewhere
to find her help or he will reveal all to both the
200
police and the old man which is the last thing either
Carmen or Vivian want to happen.
It is this stench of the rotten sump and all it
contains which, on a symbolic level, penetrates the
psyche of Marlowe and must remain with him forever. It
is this reality that corrupts him that is, forces him
out of Eden (of a sort the idealistic detective in a
sunny world that we see in the first chapter of this
novel) and into the American nightmare, the place we
now find him for the remainder of the Chandler canon.
Yet Chandler's genius is based upon this very
ground. Exiled from Paradise, yet still true to its
basic spirit, Marlowe can then become a seriously-
considered twentieth-century American hero. He is
wandering through the scenes of what once was Paradise-
— Hollywood, Los Angeles, southern California and is
still advertised and believed to be such in so many
ways attempting to maintain that original spirit of
justice and compassion which marks his moral standard
and which has motivated him from his very inception.
In the second novel, Farewell. Mv Lovely, Chandler
again opens on a fairly light note, as Marlowe is seen
cracking wise from the very first page. The humor is
not particularly bitter or cynical, but has a sharp
meticulous quality about it that makes this novel
201
perhaps his finest, until The Long Goodbye♦ There is,
however, a major difference between the beginning of
Farewell, Mv Lovely and the opening of The Big Sleep,
which saw Marlowe as still an innocent, striving in his
mind against all odds to rescue some mythical damsel in
distress. Despite the brilliant humor, Farewell, Mv
Lovely opens with Marlowe's failure to be able to do
anything to help anyone.
By the time the book is over, he has accomplished
what he has set out to achieve that is, he has found
"little Velma" for Moose, his client, an ex-bank
robber, recently released from prison, who is searching
for his long-lost lover. But, Marlowe's discovery of
Velma forces her to murder Moose, in front of Marlowe,
who has set up the meeting. "Little Velma", who is now
the wealthy Mrs. Lewis Lockridge Grayle, has too much
to lose if she is found and her past as a dancer and
prostitute revealed. Grayle is an interesting last name
for this woman who has not only murdered her ex-lover,
but her unwitting accomplice and friend, Lindsay
Marriott, and who tried to murder and did badly injure
Marlowe as well. In this case, her name symbolizes a
very unholy grail, indeed, for her quest is to remain
wealthy and powerful, and even multiple murders are a
small price for her to pay for this prize. The irony is
202
great here. Mrs. Grayle, the object of Marlowe's
quest, a romantic quest to reunite two lovers, turns
out to be a triple murderer. Her name becomes a black
irony and powerful metaphor for Chandler's vision of
the American romantic dream become nightmare. She
escapes after murdering Moose, but is eventually
recognized by a cop in another city; she kills him, and
then herself, therefore making it impossible for her to
stand trial, and bring humiliation to her wealthy
husband, which Marlowe feels is why she killed herself,
and which he feels redeems her.
Marlowe does not justify nor condone the
murders; he is able to move beyond them and understand
that in the end she was thinking of someone besides
herself, and he respects that reality. The police
laugh at this notion and ridicule Marlowe for his
sentimentality, but Chandler's notion of redemption "in
everything that can be called art", permeates this
novel and extends even to this cold-blooded killer, and
perhaps ameliorates the romantic dream turned nightmare
with an oddly human note. Marlowe tries to explain his
thinking to Detective Randall:
I'm not saying she was a saint or even a
halfway nice girl. Not ever. She wouldn't
kill herself until she was cornered. But what
she did and the way she did it, kept her from
coming back here for trial. Think that over.
203
And who would that trial hurt most? Who would
be least able to bear it? And win, lose or
draw, who would pay the biggest price for the
show? An old man who had loved not wisely,
but too well. (249)
When Marlowe leaves the police station, his final
comments, which close the novel, and again, as with the
close of The Big Sleep, refer to the finality of death,
are an elegiac and poetic response to the sad reality
of the human condition: "I rode down to the street
floor and went out on the steps of the City Hall. It
was a cool day and very clear. You could see a long
way— but not as far as Velma had gone"(249).
In fact, the events and the characters in this
novel are almost completely out of Marlowe's control,
and these closing remarks are about all he can say.
They seem a self-conscious testament to the futility of
his work. Marlowe is never again so ineffectual as he
is in this novel His wit is acerbic because it is all
he has available to get him through the tangled,
violent, love story. Yet it is not the good-natured
wit of the early part of The Bio Sleep. That
experience with the quintessential rich and corrupted
American family has left its indelible mark, and in
this second novel, written immediately after the first
204
(1940), Marlowe is still reeling, it seems, from the
effects.
The early failure to find the Greek barber is a
foreshadowing of Marlowe'' s failures to come in
Farewell, My Lovely. Everywhere he goes in the novel he
meets failure: Nulty the police detective, too lazy to
do his own legwork; Jessie Florian the widowed ex-co-
owner of the bar in which Moose and Velma first started
their romance now an alcoholic wreck living for her
monthly checks in the mail; and Lindsay Marriott, the
pompous gigolo who hires Marlowe, unaware he is setting
himself up to be murdered. And Marlowe's own attempts
to solve this mystery of betrayal, hidden identity, and
murder only ends in more murder and leaves Marlowe
grasping for flimsy straws to justify all that has
happened.
But inside all this failure Chandler fashions a
more mature, tighter, wittier gem of a book than his
first novel, and Marlowe emerges, having been baptized
in fire in The Big Sleep, as the character he will
remain, for the most part, throughout the rest of the
canon. It will not be until The Long Goodbye, the last
novel, that Marlowe's character goes through a truly
significant development and reaches its final and most
complex stage.
205
It is important that we consider the significance
of all this failure. How can Marlowe hold up his head
as a self-respecting fictional private eye in the light
of so much unmitigated failure and ineffectiveness?
How does this abysmal track record afford him the title
"hard-boiled hero"? Hard-boiled, perhaps, but hero,
certainly not. Not in the face of a genre which is
top-heavy with successful detectives able to turn even
the bleakest picture into a Hollywood happy ending.
Nowhere but in Chandler and especially in Farewell, Mv
Lovely and the later novels, do we find a detective so
unable to use his powers of wit or muscle to bring
about even a relatively upbeat ending. At the end of
this second novel, no one, absolutely no one, is happy,
least of all Marlowe. Yes, the murderer has been
brought to justice, and in that sense the novel remains
true to the formula and harmony is restored within the
immediate community of the work. But, unlike the
mainstream of even the hardboiled novelists and
certainly of American detective fiction in general,
there is only the merest token sense, at the end of the
work, of a better society in which to live. The new
chief of police of Bay City is Marlowe's friend, the
ex-cop, fired previously for being honest. The city
government is reformed, but Laird Burnette, the gambler
206
and the power behind the throne is still operating
outside the city limits, untouchable and certainly
beyond Marlowe's reach. Instead Chandler seems to
present a vision of a society very little better off
for being rid of a murderer or two, and of a detective
well wrung-out for all his efforts. Exhausted and
perhaps even sentimental, Marlowe reaches for feeble
philosophizing to get him through another lonely night
as both of Chandler's first two novels close.
There is a scene in Farewell. Mv Lovely, toward
the end of the novel, where, under cover of night,
Marlowe is about to ride out to a private gambling ship
in a small motor boat, piloted by this same honest ex-
Bay City cop to whom Marlowe is drawn. He wants to get
on board to talk to the ship's owner, Laird Brunette,
about the whereabouts of Moose Malloy. Marlowe,
floating in darkness and on the alien and dangerous
ocean, unaware of what lies ahead, is on the deepest
level, depressed, scared, and filled with a type of
existential despair concerning his place in the
universe. Yet, on another level, he is able to rise
above this despair and use the only weapon available to
him to survive that is, his wit and imagination,
which we as readers realize through the brilliance of
Chandler's language:
207
The boat slid out over the water.... Once
more the lights of Bay City became something
distantly luminous beyond the rise and fall
of alien waves....
"I'm scared," I said suddenly. "I'm
scared stiff."
Red throttled down the boat and let it
slide up and down the swell though the water
moved underneath and the boat stayed in the
same place.
"I'm afraid of death and despair," I
said. "Of dark water and drowned mens' faces
and skulls with empty eye sockets. I'm afraid
of dying, of being nothing, of not finding a
man named Brunette."
He chuckled. "You had me going for a
minute. You sure give yourself a pep
talk." (213)
In the face of death and despair, in a dark and
foreboding world, Marlowe hangs frozen and suspended,
as the boat's rhythm seems to signify. All of time and
space become for him this one moment, magnified and
encompassing all the past and all the future, and it is
within this moment that he becomes something more than
another scared and drowning man; here he becomes a
hero. He is afraid of being nothing, like us all, yet
from this isolation the very essence of human fear---
he discovers meaning through his humor. It is this
quality and this wit which enable Marlowe to rise out
of the void of futility and nothingness and 'empty eye
sockets' which is the final nightmare reality of
humanity.
208
Chandler has managed to transform a tight
formulaic popular literature of plot into a realistic
literature of substance and character. He has managed
to transform a formulaic detective into a twentieth-
century American existential hero filled with the angst
and solitude of mainstream American literature. And,
most significantly, in spite of the continual despair
of the hero, certainly a reflection of twentieth-
century reality and literature, Chandler has created
for his detective a process of discovery which is a
moral one, and which points toward affirmation,
honesty, and democratic standards missing in the genre
out of which Chandler works.
It is easy enough to fashion a formulaic moral
standard in fiction when one is not concerned with
aesthetic quality. The hard-boiled genre has
established a larger-than-life hero couched in the
trappings of big-city reality: dark streets, cheap
bars, gamblers, prostitutes, rainy nights, fast cars,
faster sex, violence, more violence. The hero always
manages to sort things out, save the innocent, shoot
the bad guys, and sexually conquer beautiful women
before the story ends. Justice is done, the truth is
revealed, and the tough-guy detective walks into the
sunset ready to be called again when needed. Right
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triumphs over wrong, good overcomes evil, and American
idealism, although slightly tarnished by big-city
reality, reigns supreme.
Two problems exist in this often-repeated
scenario. This is not the stuff of serious literature
and this is not how moral fiction is created. Gardner
is emphatic about defining moral fiction in terms of
the discovery process. The writer discovers the truth
about the work as it is being created.
In Farewell, Mv Lovely, as in all his novels,
Chandler remains faithful to the formula in one
respect. He insists that justice be done. But
Chandler's idea of justice is complex and often
unsatisfying. Marlowe, unlike the heroes of the genre,
has a dream of justice and of what is right, but they
seem to be forever beyond his grasp.
In The High Window (1943), the third novel,
Chandler for the first time writes about the lost but
ideal dream of American democracy as an intrinsic facet
of the futile quest Marlowe pursues. For the first
time Chandler allows Marlowe to explicitly channel the
cynicism and isolation he feels in the first two novels
into a more complex expression of social commentary.
Marlowe has always been anti-establishment; he has
always recognized the corrupt legal system and the
210
privileged status the rich enjoy within the system.
And he has always despised it; even been disgusted by
it. But, in The High Window, he sees not only the
individual example of corruption; he is able to make a
conscious connection between the individual case and
the abandoned dream for American democracy he still
cherishes. The tone in this novel is intensely
personal. Marlowe has not acquired a social
conscience. But he has gone a step further in this
interesting work toward a more conscious
consideration of the exploitation of the weak, the
victims in our society, and of the concept of justice:
"...the justice we dream about, but don't find" (200).
In 1945 (two years after the publication of The
High Window), Chandler wrote in a letter to Dale
Warren, his editor at Houghton-Mifflin, a response to
criticism that he dwelled on the ugly side of life, and
that perhaps he should shift his focus and write a
proletarian novel:
So now there are guys talking about prose and
other guys telling me I have a social
conscience. P. Marlowe has as much social
conscience as a horse. He has personal
conscience, which is an entirely different
matter.... P. Marlowe doesn't give a damn who
is President; either do I, because I know he
will be a politician... P. Marlowe and I do
not despise the upper classes because they
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take baths and have money; we despise them
because they are phony.
(Gardiner and Walker 214-
215)
Marlowe, in this third novel, understands that the
concepts of morality and democracy are inextricably
integrated in terms of the American dream. Yet he also
clearly understands that both have been perverted and
corrupted, forsaken for greed, class status, power and
wealth.
He continues to pursue the dream, and this is the
point. As Chandler makes clear, this quest is based on
a very personal conscience, a very personal standard of
morality and democracy. Marlowe, on this personal
level, has internalized the democratic-moral framework
of the American experiment. Despite his knowledge that
this dream has turned into nightmare, that democracy
has become a rich man's joke and a poor man's tragedy,
his struggle seems to assert the only possibility that
remains against complete moral capitulation to American
avaricious reality.
In The High Window, a Mrs. Elizabeth Bright
Murdock wealthy, old Pasadena money hires Marlowe
to find a stolen rare coin, and the one who stole it,
whom she suspects is her runaway daughter-in-law. The
search for this coin, and the truth, leads Marlowe to
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four murders. In the end, Marlowe rearranges the
evidence at the scene of the last murder, and withholds
from the police the evidence from the first murder,
which took place eight years in the past. He does all
this in order to protect certain people he feels have
been wronged or who, in his eyes, have acted
justifiably.
Justice in Chandler's world is not the pure white
of the driven snow, not "cold and clean like the
justice we dream of but don't find" (200). In southern
California no snow falls and nearly everyone is
permanently tinted to some degree with a poisonous hue;
it is as if an infectious disease has contaminated all
of Chandler's Los Angeles, from the shabby poverty-
stricken apartment houses of Bunker Hill, to the
grandiose old mansions of Pasadena; from the Hollywood
hills and its bizarre inhabitants to the Santa Monica
coast, run by the mob.
In The High Window, as with all of Chandler's
novels, Marlowe moves across the city making
connections and revealing an interwoven fabric of
corruption and deception which envelops the entire
society. Marlowe trusts himself and makes judgments
about what he sees, and therefore doesn't question his
perception of what is right and wrong. He is thus able
213
to manipulate and suppress evidence without a guilty
conscience. He understands that without his efforts
justice and its human face will have been completely
erased from the modern landscape.
Marlowe's client, Mrs. Murdock, pushed her husband
out of a second -story window and has spent the next
eight years paying off a blackmailer who happened to be
on the scene, and photographed the actual crime. During
these years, through psychological intimidation, Mrs.
Murdock has also been brainwashing her late husband's
secretary into believing that she (the secretary) has
committed the murder.
The secretary, now Mrs. Murdock's secretary, is a
timid and vulnerable young woman. Although she is
treated terribly by the dictatorial and fierce Mrs.
Murdock, and never really understands what is going on,
she nevertheless feels great love and gratitude for
this menacing woman. Even after the truth is revealed
to her, she says, "Mrs. Murdock has been wonderful to
me always" (217) .
Merle Davis, the young and helpless victim of Mrs.
Murdock's scheming, represents for Chandler, and
Marlowe, the promise of the American dream never
realized. She is all the little people of America who
are manipulated and victimized, and who cannot get the
214
help they need because they have no power or money or
proper connections: The ones who dreamed but never had
a chance. At the book's close, after settling the
situation and demanding that Merle return to her
parents in Wichita, Kansas, Marlowe actually drives her
there:
I was gone ten days. Merle's parents were
vague, kind, patient people, living in an old
frame house in a quiet shady street. They
cried when I told them as much of the story
as I thought they should know. They said they
were glad to have her back and they would
take good care of her and they blamed
themselves a lot, and I let them do it. (219)
Here is a forgotten slice of middle America as
plain as life itself. From the frame house on a shady
street in Wichita to Hollywood, blackmail and murder is
a very long way, and must be measured not in miles but
in lost time and empty lives. Marlowe, when he leaves
Merle, feels this great distance and comments upon it
with the typically poetic vision Chandler infuses into
his hero:
When I left, Merle was wearing a bungalow
apron and rolling pie crust. She came to the
door wiping her hands on her apron and kissed
me on the mouth and began to cry and ran back
into the house, leaving the doorway empty
until her mother came into the space with a
broad homely smile on her face to watch me
drive away.
I had a funny feeling as I saw the house
disappear as though I had written a poem and it
was very good and I had lost it and would never
remember it again. (219)
215
Certainly this brief but illuminating portrait of
the middle American mother and daughter, down to the
bungalow apron and pie crust, with tears and smiles,
signify a return to a simpler time: a time of innocence
and family values still intact: A time Marlowe can only
absorb as if it were a poetic vision lost before it was
ever really remembered. It is almost as if this
returning Merle to her home and family is about as far
as Marlowe himself can go down this almost dream-like
path.
Chandler here seems to eulogize both Marlowe's
lost innocence and the lost innocence of America. All
that we have left is a disturbed young girl who doesn't
really know what hit her, back in Wichita baking pies
in her parents' home, protected only by these almost
mythical confines from the terrible reality of our
society. ,
The America of Merle's parents is hopelessly
anachronistic, and Chandler seems to understand this.
The next novel, The Lady in the Lake, published in
1943, a year after The High Window, brings Marlowe back
to the world of crooked police, violent and jealous
lovers, betrayal, blackmail, and of course, murder. It
isn't until 1949, however, after six years of writing
216
for Hollywood, that Chandler's work begins to
exponentially develop.
In '49 The Little Sister is published, and this is
Chandler's most modern novel and the furthest from the
formula of the genre yet. It is a book with an
unstructured plot, unresolved murders, and dislocated,
deconstructed ramblings about the demise of the
American family— symbol for our entire society. It is
Chandler's most cynical and hardboiled to date; a long
book, difficult to piece together, but brilliantly
written. Most significantly, this is a novel of an
American middle class family, lured by the promise of
Hollywood wealth and fame, which has become
compromised, corrupted, and vicious, willing to
sacrifice even its own members for a few dollars of
blood money.
Chandler began this novel in late 1946, but could
not finish it and put it aside for nearly a year. By
July of 1948 he had nearly completed the first draft,
and was growing increasingly impatient with the form of
the mystery. He felt the book was not up to his
standards and that Marlowe was becoming too self-
conscious. He wrote that "there is nothing in it but
style and dialogue and characters. The plot creaks like
217
a broken shutter in an October wind" (McShane, The Life
of Raymond Chandler, _149).
Me Shane feels it is "an overripe book.... with no
organic development beyond what he had written
before"(149). He also feels that it "is in no sense a
real Hollywood novel" (150) . In fact, Me Shane quotes
Chandler's remarks to James Sandoe, in a letter written
in October, 1949, after the book was published,
indicating his thought that the book just didn't work:
"It's the only book of mine I have actively disliked.
It was written in a bad mood and I think that comes
through"(154).
While Chandler may have disliked this novel, and
Me Shane felt it showed the result of "Chandler's
dispiriting years in Hollywood"(150), the novel
nevertheless concerns itself with the theme of loyalty
which consumes his next novel, The Long Goodbye. In The
Little Sister, which Chandler was writing during the
first rounds of the HUAC hearings in Hollywood, and
shortly after he had left the Hollywood studio scene,
the focus of the book is on a single family, two
sisters and a brother, and their pathological
determination to betray each other for money. The
exception, of course, is Marlowe's client, the older
218
sister, and an up and coining Hollywood starlet, who is
being blackmailed by both her brother and sister.
Chandler, however difficult this novel may be, is
showing signs of an almost unconscious need to go
beyond the formula of the genre. The book has an
authentic feeling for the city and police work and the
inner workings of the Hollywood industry, but it does
more than this. It begins a process of discovery
concerning the values we as a democratic community need
to embrace. It does this in an intensely personal way,
through the use of this one family, but Chandler is
probing and groping, as Gardner says an artist will do,
in order to discover just what he wants to say about
loyalty and betrayal.
The older sister, Mavis Weld, remains loyal to her
family, and is even willing to sacrifice herself and
take the blame for a murder she did not commit in order
to save her sister, who she thinks did commit the
murder. Marlowe will not let this happen, and admires
and even falls in love with Mavis a little bit for her
beauty and her courage and her loyalty.
In the end, Marlowe must rearrange evidence at the
scene of a murder in order to protect Mavis, who he
knows is innocent. As he waits for the police to
arrive, he understands that Mavis will fade into his
219
past, and that he never had a chance with her; he was
in love with her image on the silver screen as much as
anything, that and her toughness and honor, and he
thinks to himself as he waits: "No siren. But the sound
of a car coming up the hill at last. I went out to meet
it, me and my beautiful dream" (206).
Chandler is preparing himself for the challenge of
confronting his community and its wholesale betrayal of
the values he felt were the essence of our democratic
society. In The Little Sister, Mavis is hopelessly
embittered and untouchable. But her bedrock qualities
of courage and loyalty are unscathed by her exposure to
Hollywood and the gangster she loves. In the final
novel, Chandler's longest and most personal, these
qualities and this theme is fully developed and
explored. The remainder of this study will concern
itself then with Chandler's last novel, The Long
Goodbye. In this work, the most stunning example of
his success in transcending his genre and writing
serious moral fiction, Chandler has brought Marlowe and
the detective novel into mainstream American
literature.
220
Chapter 5 THE LONG GOODBYE: CHANDLER'S FICTIONAL
RESPONSE TO THE HUAC HEARINGS IN HOLLYWOOD:
CHANDLER'S MORAL FICTION
If I had to choose between betraying my
country and betraying my friend, I hope I
should have the guts to betray my country.
E.M. Forster
In The Long Goodbve, Chandler has engaged his
hero, Philip Marlowe, emotionally and politically, to a
greater degree than ever before. Because of the unique
combination in this book of Marlowe's personal
involvement with a number of characters, and the
political climate in Los Angeles at the time Chandler
was writing this work, namely, the HUAC hearings taking
place in Hollywood, and the wholesale betrayal of
scores of writers and directors and actors by their
long time collegues, The Long Goodbye becomes the
quintissential example of Chandler's moral and
political philosophy.
The main focus of this novel is Marlowe's
friendship with Terry Lennox and Roger Wade. The
critics agree; this is a novel about friendship and
loyalty. Yet something else is going on in this work
that has yet to be noticed, although the novel has been
221
studied fairly extensively. This criticism is all the
more important for what it has failed to recognize.
What is absent from the scholarship in
this novel is an analysis of the work within its
political and historical context. Chandler is making a
clear statement in The Long Goodbye, which directly
responds to this abhorrent behavior he is witnessing in
the Hollywood film community at this time. That is, the
betrayal 7of friendship, the cowardly capitulation to
pressure, and the informing on long time collegues, all
taking place in the House Un-American Activities
Committee hearings being held in Hollywood to
investigate communist influence in the film industry.
The nature of the HUAC hearings, suspicion,
subpeonas, threats, ruined reputations, and relentless
cross examination by congressmen with unlimited power,
created a climate of fear in Hollywood and America that
Chandler has infused into this novel on a very complex
yet personal level. The political reality of his time
has allowed Chandler, a very apolitical man, to write
one of the most powerful statements of affirmation and
loyalty to emerge from this most disturbing period of
American history.
Before examining Chandler's attempt to integrate
the political history of this period into his novel of
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loyalty and friendship, a survey of criticism of The
Long Goodbye, interesting and insightful in and of
itself, will also make it more clear just how absent
from the scholarship of this novel is the political
perspective.
Terry-Speir's analysis of The Long Goodbye, in his
book Raymond Chandler, provides insight into Chandler
himself, for essentially Speer reads the novel as a
three-level autobiographical portrait: Chandler's
character in three aspects Terry Lennox, Roger Wade,
and, of course, Philip Marlowe. Natasha Spender, with
whom Chandler spent considerable time after his wife
Cissy died in 1955, also writes about this novel,
(collected in The World of Raymond Chandler, and titled
"His Own Long Goodbye"), in an essay which recognizes
the three obvious "self-portraits."
Speir cites Spender a number of times in
attempting to support his contention that Chandler has
gone farther than ever before in stretching the limit
of the mystery genre, in creating characters full of
the moral ambiguities and complexities inherent in
Chandler's own personal and professional life, far
removed from the patently stock representation of good
and bad usually found in the genre.
223
Speir recognizes that "on its most straightforward
level, The Long Goodbve is a story of friendship
established and friendship betrayed" (Speir 66). Yet,
beyond the essential theme, Speir is concerned with
what Chandler is doing with Marlowe in this novel that
essentially transcends even Chandler's past attempts to
write more than merely a mystery. He says that "...on
a grander scale that story is only the microcosm of a
more general social deterioration" (66), and he notes
as evidence of this the humorous anecdotes and brief
essays Chandler indulges in inside this novel, on
subjects ranging from big business to democracy to
money, writers, Freud, lawyers, and television
commercials. Speir then cites a letter Chandler wrote
to his agent, which accompanied the final draft of the
novel "which enlightens these larger concerns." It is
the idea expressed in this letter which becomes the
basis upon which Speir constructs his reading of The
Long Goodbve. In that letter to Bernice Baumgarten,
Chandler complains about the genre's need for "constant
action" instead of character development and says that
he has become too "complicated and unsure" to meet the
need. He is now interested instead in "moral dilemmas,
rather than in who cracked who on the head," and he
continues:
224
Anyhow I wrote this as I wanted to
because I can do that now. I didn't care
whether the mystery was fairly obvious, but I
cared about the people, about this strange
corrupt world we live in, and how any man who
tried to be honest looks in the end either
sentimental or plain foolish. (66)
What Speir is getting at is that this novel, about
which Chandler felt so strongly, finally allows him and
us to focus on "the trauma of a reasonably conscious
and sensitive man attempting to cope with this corrupt
and alienating world" (Speir 67). It is this aspect of
moral character in the midst of a decaying society, and
not the mystery, not the plot, and not who-dun-it,
which has always been the most.important element for
Chandler in his fiction. And Chandler has created a
voice, through Marlowe, which can speak to his larger,
social concerns, the "moral dilemmas," as he called
them, which America must face.
Speir of course understands, as have many critics,
that Chandler's hero is a knight out of time. Marlowe
enters into other peoples' lives because of his code;
he describes himself as "a romantic...I hear voices
crying in the night, and I go see what's the matter."
But he is only rewarded, observes Speir, by betrayal.
As Marlowe says when he first helps Terry Lennox in The
Long Goodbve: "I guess it's always a mistake to
interfere with a drunk. Even if he knows and likes you
225
he is always liable to haul off and poke you in the
teeth" (15). This, symbolically, is Marlowe's dilemma,
but he makes the effort anyway (Speir 67). Even
Marlowe's failure in his self-appointed role as a
romantic is tinged with a kind of bitter irony. By the
end of the novel, as Speir points out, both the reader
and Marlowe "have sufficient reason to question the
practicality of such an approach to a fallen world.
The world, in fact, shows ample signs of having changed
in such a way as to make romantic heroes obsolete"
(76) .
Speir summarizes Spender's insights into the
various personal portraits of Chandler found in this
novel. The first is found in Lennox, the British ex
commando, tortured by the Gestapo and returned to the
world shattered by his war experience: a moral
defeatist, Marlowe called him, with no ethic beyond the
personal. The second is found in Roger Wade, the
disillusioned, alcoholic, and perhaps suicidal but
successful novelist of historical romances, tired of
his own writing, fighting to hide his guilt, who
"finally verges on madness and is destroyed." And, of
course, the third portrait of Chandler is to be found
in Marlowe, the last vestige of the romantic American
dream. Marlowe is drawn to the grand, heroic act but
226
the modern world has rendered such acts "plain
foolish," notes Speir (77).
Each of these three are victims of our modern
society, and Speir sees The Long Goodbve as Chandler's
"last great effort to push the mystery novel out of its
stereotypical niche," by taking on this modern fallen
world thorough the examination of the effects of that
society on these three individuals:
Terry Lennox is a casualty of the mass
insanity of modern war; Roger Wade is a
product of the great entertainment (read:
escape) industry and the modern perversion of
art; Marlowe is the spirit of another age
striving desperately to maintain a sense of
decency. And all three, of course, are
projections of different aspects of the
character of Raymond Chandler. (Speir,
77)
The biographical information certainly supports
this reading of both Natasha Spender and Terry Speir.
Chandler's heroic yet horrifying and fierce war
experience, his alcoholism, his repeated suicide
attempts, and his disillusioned, cynical, lone-wolf
professionalism are well-documented, as is his often-
repeated need to transcend the mystery genre. His
letters during this period made this clear. The end of
The Long Goodbve finds Marlowe ambiguous in his
feelings about almost everything friendship, loyalty,
his profession, what he wants, and what he expects of
227
other people. As Speir observes, "he is unsure,
finally, and his uncertainty underscores the book's
ambiguity.
Either the world is dominated by forces
truly beyond the individual's control or
individuals have merely acquiesced to those
unprincipled elements of a society whose only
measures of value are power or money. (77)
The plight of the individual in the modern world
is Marlowe's real dilemma, and, by extension, our own
and Raymond Chandler's. The last lines of the novel
leave Marlowe bleakly listening to the fading footsteps
of a man he considered a friend, unable to comprehend
how the world could have sunk to such depths of
dishonesty and moral defeatism.
Taking up Chandler's attempt to write serious
fiction within the limits of the mystery formula, Leon
Howard takes issue with Chandler's craftsmanship in The
Long Goodbve. In an essay called "Raymond Chandler's
Not-So-Great Gatsby," written in 1973 for The Mystery
and Detective Annual. Howard essentially argues that
Chandler was serious about something
other than his craftsmanship. He was
genuinely serious about moral values and
apparently so offended by those he found
implicit in Fitzgerald's novel that he
sacrificed his own craftsmanship to an attack
on respect for wealth and tolerance for
crooks. (14)
228
If there could be considered a consensus of
opinion among Chandler's critics on any particular
issue, it would certainly involve his concern for these
so-called moral values, about which Gardner talks so
much. Both Speir and Howard recognize the concern, as
does Frank McShane, Chandler's biographer, who will be
considered below.
However, Leon Howard feels that Chandler has,
for the first time, betrayed the moral standards and
personal sensibility of his hero, Marlowe, in order to
emphasize and focus his attack upon the wealthy and
corrupt.
Howard compares The Long Goodbve with The
Great Gatsbv and the similarities are remarkable, at
least in terms of certain elements of plot and
character and general milieu. At no time does Howard
even hint that Chandler was taking his plot from
Fitzgerald; he states that there is no internal
evidence to indicate any influence from The Great
Gatsbv. In fact, he gives Chandler the respect he
deserves when he says:
It is difficult...to imagine Chandler
comparing his finished book with
Fitzgerald's, just as it is difficult to
imagine that, while writing it, he could have
been aware of the many parallels that can be
abstracted from the two such different
novels. Chandler was too proud of his own
229
individuality and independence to have
consciously bound himself to the work of
another writer as closely as he seems to have
done in The Long Goodbve.
(14)
But he does point to the literary reference within the
novel which alludes to the relationship between Roger
Wade, the alcoholic writer, and Fitzgerald, another
alcoholic writer whom Chandler did admire, to indicate
Fitzgerald was certainly on Chandler's mind when he
wrote the novel.
Howard divides Chandler's novel into two parts.
The first part consists of the first forty-three
chapters of this fifty-three chapter novel. Here
Howard feels Chandler recreates Marlowe in the image of
the first five novels. His vision in these forty-three
chapters is the classic one of the hardboiled
detective, and "conformed closely to the elements of
the genre" (15). Here Marlowe does not believe Terry
Lennox, his client and friend, killed his wife and
therefore there is a killer still to be found. He
keeps the question of Lennox's innocence alive. He
stirs interest and brings trouble for himself from a
number of places: Terry's gangster friends, Terry's
dead wife's millionaire father Harlan Potter, and the
police. As well, the seemingly unconnected case of
Roger Wade begins to dovetail into the Sylvia Lennox
230
murder, and when Wade ends up dead, Marlowe,
uncommitted to the established verdict of his suicide,
eventually ties the two deaths together in a showdown
scene and points the finger at Roger's wife, Eileen
Wade, who was married to Terry Lennox during the war,
and lost both her men to Sylvia Lennox: Terry through
marriage and Roger through an affair. The classic line
which ends Chapter 42, as Marlowe confronts Eileen Wade
in the presence of Wade's publisher, "Of course not.
She killed both of them," becomes for Howard the
natural expected climax of the novel.
But the book still has ten more chapters, and
these are "anti-climactic" for Howard and proof that
Chandler abandoned his craftsmanship in order to make a
point. Howard says, in this regard, in reference to
Chandler's lines in his essay about his hero, "The
Simple Art of Murder": "...down these mean streets a
man must go who is not himself mean...," that "for the
first and only time in Chandler's fiction Marlowe
appears, in the last two chapters, as a man who is
himself mean" (11).
Howard eventually does point out the many similar
motifs in the two novels and says that because Chandler
was always so concerned about moral issues he refuses
to let Marlowe become as forgiving and accepting as was
231
Fitzgerald's narrator Nick Carraway about the wealthy
and the corrupt in Gatsbv. In fact, writes Howard, it
is this refusal on Chandler's part which forces him to
turn Marlowe into the "mean" character Howard feels he
has become at the end of this novel when confronting
Terry Lennox, whom Marlowe has finally smoked out of
hiding. When Marlowe calls Lennox a "moral defeatist"
in these last two chapters, Howard sees this as
Chandler's out-of-character response to Fitzgerald's
acquiescence to wealth and power in The Great Gatsbv.
It is true that Marlowe is particularly hard on
Lennox. Lennox was his friend, as close to friendship
as Chandler ever allows Marlowe to get. Yet in the end
Marlowe understands that Lennox betrayed and exploited
that friendship in order to get out from under the
charge of murder against him, even though he did not
kill his wife. Marlowe instinctively knows from the
beginning that Lennox could not have killed his wife,
especially in the brutal way in which it was done, and
subsequently proves that; and he also figures that
Lennox did not commit suicide, despite the letter he
receives from Lennox's Mexican hideaway stating he was
going to do exactly that, and despite the Potter
lawyer's verification of his body. It is all too pat
for Marlowe, and he understands the power of both
232
Lennox's rich gangster friends and his dead wife's
father's influence to be able to keep the entire case
quiet.
Roger Wade's death could probably have been
prevented if Terry Lennox had not allowed the Potter
family to squelch the investigation, and therefore
Marlowe blames, to a certain extent, Terry Lennox for
that death. So Marlowe will not let the matter rest,
and, he says to Lennox that he wouldn't have come back
at all, "if I hadn't smoked you out." Howard says this
"brutal comment" to his former friend is not the Philip
Marlowe we are used to, "hiding heartache in conflict
with justice," but "a man who is himself mean" (11).
Howard details the values in Gatsbv which imply
for Fitzgerald a "tacit respect for wealth," and says
that The Long Goodbve "provides a strong contrast to
this respect." Chandler makes it very clear in this
novel that the rich are people not different than the
rest, as Fitzgerald thought, but more so of whatever we
all are more corrupt, more venal, more greedy and
Chandler will not forgive it nor excuse it, and neither
will Marlowe, who, as Chandler wrote about very early
in "The Simple Art of Murder," is a hero who:
will take no man's money dishonestly and no
man's insolence without a due and
dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man
233
and his pride is that you will treat him as a
proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him.
(193)
This description of the hero is a good
portrait of Marlowe in these last ten chapters.
Chandler is not abandoning his character, nor is it a
case of Chandler sacrificing his craftsmanship. In
fact, throughout the novel Marlowe is as direct and
tough on Wade, and Eileen Wade, and even Linda Loring,
as he is on Lennox, a result of Chandler's very
explicit attempt to expand the genre through the
character of his hero. Yet Marlowe is still Marlowe;
he has, however, developed and taken on a depth and
sensitivity that has expanded his consciousness.
Howard's case is a good one. The comparison to
Fitzgerald is insightful and well-made; perhaps
Chandler is unconsciously responding to The Great
Gatsbv. Yet Marlowe always hated the rich and corrupt;
this is part of his nature, and certainly not a direct
response to Fitzgerald's work. He is democratic, and
his innate sense of commonality is offended by the rich
and their abuse of power and wealth. Marlowe's
resolve, in terms of his insistence on a moral code,
has been apparent throughout this novel, and not simply
in these last few chapters.
234
My response to Howard's very interesting and valid
reading, that Chandler abandons his character and
allows Marlowe to become mean in order to respond to
Fitzgerald's Gatsbv, is not to argue with it
particularly. Howard recognizes, as does Speir, that
Chandler's concern is with moral values and not the
hardboiled formula, and this is the focus here. Frank
McShane, Chandler's biographer, also spends time with
this novel, and before moving into my own reading of
The Long Goodbve, mention of the biographical criticism
is necessary to complete this partial survey of
critical opinion.
McShane's analysis of The Long Goodbve rests on a
multi-faceted approach. From the biographical
standpoint, McShane says that "it is hard to imagine
worse psychological conditions than those endured by
Chandler as he wrote this book" (192). Chandler's wife
Cissy "was almost critically ill," and his confidence
in his own work was repeatedly undermined by the
frustration of taking care of her, their home, and all
the endless tasks Chandler felt compelled to do
himself, including cooking and cleaning.
Nevertheless, McShane writes, "in this mood
Chandler attempted his most ambitious work and tried to
take the mystery story into a realm where it had never
235
been carried before" (193). McShane also cites
Chandler's letter to Bernice Baumgarten about his
desire to write this book "as I wanted to...." It
does seem clear this was Chandler's intent with The
Long Goodbve.
Chandler, in this same letter to Baumgarten,
written in May, 1952, also recognized that his style
had been "imitated and even plagiarized, to the point
where you begin to look as if you were imitating your
imitators. So you have to go where
they can't follow you" (McShane 194). And this is what
he attempts. Stung by Carl Brandt and Bernice
Baumgarten's (his publishers) criticism of the first
draft of The Long Goodbve, which objected, primarily,
to what they felt was different that Marlowe had
become too Christ-like and a sentimentalist Chandler
asked for the return of the manuscript and began his
revisions, while at the same time terminating his
agency account with Brandt and Brandt. Chandler,
always overly sensitive to any criticism, felt that at
the moment an agent "tries to influence a writer in his
work, the agent just makes a nuisance of himself"
(McShane 194).
The revisions Chandler made, probably in part
because of this letter from Baumgarten, were extensive,
236
entailing "200 yellow half-sheets of typescript
containing passages of the book that were omitted or
re-written" (195).The drafts were all written out
first, without referring to earlier versions (195).
McShane praises the revisions, that they dramatize
and develop a deeper rhythm and texture "like grafts on
a. living organism, and each has its vitality" (196).
McShane stresses that the theme Chandler wished to
more clearly express in this novel is "the need for
love and friendship" (198). And he feels that it was
exactly this need Chandler himself felt most of his
life.
In a sense, McShane's reading is an answer to
Howard's. McShane feels Chandler tried to change the
fundamental nature of the character of Marlowe in order
to be able to explore this theme. Although the novel
does follow the hardboiled genre, and Marlowe does
eventually reveal the murderer of Sylvia Lennox and
Roger Wade, this is not what the novel is about. The
last ten chapters, where Howard felt Chandler abandoned
his craftsmanship in order to take to task Fitzgerald's
acquiescence to corruption and amorality, become for
McShane the proper and organic ending for the book
which is about exactly that moral issues and our
standards of value.
237
McShane, in fact, feels that, finally, the picture
of Marlowe at the end of this novel is not mean nor
vindictive, but a portrait of an American hero who has
only his code of morality when there is nothing else.
This conception of the hero, according to McShane, is
well within the tradition of twentieth-century American
fiction in which the hero does battle with a code of
behavior: "their lives may be tragic, spoiled by the
very codes they live by or fail to live by, but they
have little option to do otherwise"(207). Marlowe,
says McShane, is
not unlike the heroes and heroines of
Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, and Dreiser.
These fictional men and women are divided
individuals who are trying to come to terms
with their surroundings. In order to give
themselves some stability, they evolve
patterns of behavior that permit them to
cope.
(207)
McShane has no problem with Howard's sense of
the disunity of the two parts of the novel. He sees
Chandler trying to move into new territory and the
resolution of the murder mystery becomes a jumping-off
place for the more important themes to be developed and
eventually resolved. The similarities to Chandler's
own life and a number of incidents in the novel are
striking, and McShane points these out. McShane sees
238
Chandler in the novel finally coming to terms with "the
wreckage of a romantic dream" (201) . The bitter and
lonely years of Cissy's illness, his own suicide
attempts and the empty lie of the American dream, all
help Chandler fashion a cynicism for Marlowe toward
which the detective had been moving for some time.
Yet the cynicism does not destroy Marlowe, nor
does it corrupt him and turn him mean. It is the
healthy and inevitable feeling of a twentieth-century
fictional hero whose code for survival and integrity
are all that remain. Yet, even here, as McShane points
out, Chandler wants to do more. And he does this
through involving Marlowe for the first time in a love
affair which softens him and ameliorates his cynicism,
yet still will not let him compromise his moral sense
of justice and his standards for friendship.
So, for McShane, this book is Chandler's major
effort as a novelist. More expansive than the others,
enriched "with comments of all sorts about the society
in which Marlowe lives" (205), yet presenting as bleak
a vision of Southern California as we have seen from
Chandler. But McShane is clear that Marlowe "is still
the hero Chandler defined in "The Simple Art of
Murder" the man who "goes down these mean streets"
239
and who "is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished
nor afraid" (206).
If Marlowe7 s code of behavior which emerges in
this novel is sentimental, then Chandler is willing to
accept that label. He wrote, "I don7t mind Marlowe
being a sentimentalist, because he always has been.
His toughness has always been more or less a surface
bluff" (McShane, The Life of Raymond Chandler,206).
McShane feels that the two-sided character of this
work, sentimental yet cynical, is exactly what Chandler
wanted to achieve, and at the end of the book, when
Marlowe is left alone, without his friendship with
Terry Lennox and without his lover Linda Loring, his
code of behavior is left intact. McShane writes, "At
the end there is just a blank, a void that has to be
filled with something, even a code of behavior that
sounds sentimental; but that is the nature of America
as Chandler saw it" (207).
McShane ends his section on this novel by telling
about Chandler7s writing itself. He makes clear how
important and magical the actual act of creation was to
Chandler, and how through all of the petty and time-
consuming tasks of his daily life errands, tending to
a sick wife, insomnia Chandler was redeemed and his
creative spirit released when he sat down at the
240
typewriter. Chandler himself wrote, in a letter to
Hamish Hamilton in 1951:
The actual writing is what you live
for....How can you hate the magic which makes
a paragraph or a sentence or a line of
dialogue or a description something in the
nature of a new creation?
(Gardiner and Walker 92)
It is hard to imagine anyone with this attitude
toward writing abandoning his craftsmanship for
ulterior motives. McShane probably agrees when he
writes:
But what finally made The Long Goodbve work
was Chandler's attitude toward writing. It
flows through and colors all of his prose.
(209)
While incomplete, this survey of criticism does
represent, more or less, the focus of all of the
criticism on this work, and does reveal the absence of
any attempt to read this novel in terms of the
political climate in Los Angeles during the period
Chandler was writing this work. That is, the climate of
fear and betrayal generated by the HUAC Hearings being
held in Hollywood at this time. Although The Long
Goodbve is generally acknowledged as Chandler's most
ambitious novel, and actually recognized as his most
self-conscious attempt to transcend the hardboiled
genre, the criticism surprisingly overlooks what seems
241
to be an essential element in the novel. That is, that
the text of the times the political environment and
the activities transpiring in Los Angeles during the
years Chandler struggled to write this novel in fact
helps to shape and write this book. Chandler,
certainly conscious of these pervasive influences, is
in some sense having this work written for him, at
least in its major themes and conflicts, by the times
themselves.
Marlowe's personal moral standard serves to guide
him through this work, as it always has; however, in
the late forties and early fifties, when HUAC {the
House Un-American Activities Committee) is
investigating the influence of communism in the movie
industry, it seems that the highly traumatic political
climate in Hollywood during these years is a direct
influence upon the emphasis Chandler places on loyalty
and friendship in this novel. And yet this specific
political influence is never mentioned, much less
analyzed, by the increasingly large body of criticism
on this work.
Chandler, like his hero Marlowe, was a loner his
entire professional life. He worked in Hollywood
during the late 1940s and lived in Los Angeles most of
his writing career, yet he did not make friends easily,
242
and never really felt comfortable with the "boys" at
the studio or with his fellow mystery writers. His
overt politics were practically nonexistent. He joined
none of the numerous Hollywood film community
organizations in the late 1940s and early 1950s, most
of which directed their activities toward fighting HUAC
or toward socialist-oriented discussion and sympathy.
Yet Chandler could hardly have been unaware or his
work uninfluenced by the political events of these
years, and it seems quite reasonable that they
influenced The Long Goodbve, which was being written
during and immediately after the years when Hollywood
was undergoing its most notorious political period:
the HUAC hearings and the trial of the Hollywood Ten.
Chandler knew, as well as anyone who ever worked in
Hollywood, how the system worked, and was particularly
proud of his ability to outmaneuver the producers when
he wrote screenplays in the Forties. He understood
that Hollywood was controlled by large-scale private
interests, and that films must and do reinforce
conventional social values. Those who own and operate
the major studios have an obvious stake in preserving
the status quo. Yet it is not the media moguls
themselves who perform the creative work in Hollywood,
nor is it they who manufacture the cultural products
243
which bring Hollywood its profits. For this kind of
creative labor, Hollywood must rely on writers like
Chandler, but such employees cannot always be trusted
to follow the ideological line of their bosses.
Occasionally films get made which sparkle with social
criticism, but usually they are cluttered with the
phony images of American life which fill theaters, but
have nothing to do with the reality of life in our
country.
In the Thirties and Forties, the years before HUAC
and the blacklist, the Left was a significant force in
the movie industry. During those years, leftists
played an active role in the various entertainment
guilds and unions particularly in the Screen Writers
Guild, of which Chandler was a member, and which was
led during its first year by the noted Hollywood
radical, John Howard Lawson. Leftists were also
integrally involved in the numerous organizations which
arose in Hollywood to fight the worldwide spread of
fascism, to elect progressive candidates, and to
protect civil liberties. These organizations included
the 5,000-member Hollywood Anti-Nazi League; the Motion
Pictures Artists Committee, formed by film industry
figures such as Dashiell Hammett, Gale Sondergaard,
Lillian Heilman, and Dorothy Parker to support Loyalist
244
Spain and China's war of resistance against Japan; the
Motion Picture Democratic Committee, which helped put
New Deal liberal Gilbert Olson in the California
governor's chair in 1938; the Hollywood Writers
Mobilization, a 3,500-member organization formed during
World War II to provide the government with anti-Nazi
propaganda and to encourage the production of socially
enlightened features; and the Hollywood Arts, Sciences,
and Professions Council, which campaigned for
Progressive Party presidential candidate Henry A.
Wallace in 1948 and fought against censorship and
blacklisting in the media industries (Navasky 30 ).
Chandler did not belong to any of these
organizations, with the exception of the Screen Writers
Guild. But Chandler knew Hollywood, and his literary
reputation led him there in 1941, when he signed a
contract with RKO Pictures to film Farewell. Mv Lovely
(McShane 105). From 1943, when he was asked to
collaborate with Billy Wilder on the film-script of
Double Indemnity, through 1946, when Chandler wrote his
best screenplay, The Blue Dahlia. Chandler, really for
the first time in a decade, was involved in an
intellectual dialogue as a normal part of his daily
life. "He belonged to a society of fellow writers, and
their company brought him out" (McShane 110). In his
245
biography of Chandler, McShane makes it clear that the
studio life did Chandler good. He helped younger
writers, and stood up to the studio moguls, who seemed
to be unable to outmaneuver this difficult and insecure
man, who took quiet offense to anyone who put on airs,
which was almost everyone on the lot. Wilder called
Chandler "one of the greatest creative minds" he had
ever met, and Chandler adapted himself quickly if
somewhat uneasily to working in the studio.
One of these young writers, Teet Carle, whom
Chandler befriended, recalled these years. He said
that Chandler told him to write anything he wanted
because the studio heads "wouldn't know a good script
from a bad one" (McShane 109). Chandler seemed to be
clear-eyed and disenchanted about life, remembers
Robert Presnell, Jr., another young writer Chandler
helped.
"He loved to talk and argue about anything,"
Presnell recalls, "and he usually dominated, though
never with arrogance, but with an ironic humor"
(McShane 110). Chandler presided over the group of
writers in the Writers Building, and was the only one
Presnell claims to remember from his Paramount days,
"because he was so vivid, so right-on, so aware of the
Human Comedy" (110).
246
Although not a joiner, and away from the studio
not a socializer, Chandler was highly sensitive to and
aware of what was happening in his community. He
followed the news and read the newspapers avidly, for
it was from current real-life crime stories that he
found inspiration and ideas for his own fiction. His
letters indicate his awareness of the political turmoil
in Hollywood in late 194 7 and early 194 8, and Chandler
was never hesitant about expressing his opinion,
vehemently if Carle and Presnell and others are to be
believed, on every political subject currently under
discussion.
Hollywood was a curious place in those days.
While the studios were owned and operated by profit-
motivated big businessmen, for whom quality film was
secondary to box-office revenue, the community of
writers and directors and other creative talents were
struggling to make socially relevant movies, and having
a very difficult time doing so.
Among the various political groups which emerged
in Hollywood during the Thirties and Forties, a lively
radical subculture developed. Chandler stayed apart
from the subculture, except in the studio itself, where
his colleagues and he argued about everything, but he
was certainly aware of it. There were Marxist study
247
groups, writers' clinics, schools, publications, radio
shows, cabaret revues, parties, benefits, theatrical
performances, and movie premieres. Much of the energy,
initiative, and direction in this political subculture
was supplied by members of the Hollywood section of the
Communist Party. Although small, numbering about 300
people in the pre-blacklist period, the Party exerted a
wider influence in the movie community than its
membership indicated, and its members were respected
for their deep social commitment and their stirring
vision of an egalitarian world (Navaskv 79).
Chandler's vision of a corrupt city where justice
did not prevail, is skewed and disenchanted; one where
things didn't happen because of a logical plan, but
because everybody along the line got his cut, and is
the theme of his fiction and the historical reality of
Los Angeles (McShane 110). Chandler's hero,
nevertheless, struggles for justice and democratic
values in his own ironic and cynical way. Chandler
insists that Marlowe remain faithful to these values,
unlike those of the Hollywood left who were naming
names at the same time Chandler was writing The Long
Goodbye.
These years, 1946-1947, were pivotal ones for
anti-communism in America. As the US-Soviet wartime
248
pact fell apart, the government grew increasingly
intolerant of the domestic left. In September 1946, J.
Edgar Hoover delivered a widely-publicized address on
"the growing menace of communism in the United States."
And, soon afterward, newly-designated HUAC chairman J.
Parnell Thomas announced that his Committee would
"expose and ferret out" all Communists who held
positions of influence in American life.
The hunt for Hollywood reds took on a great
political significance, and the pressure mounted
against the left in the city. In May 1947, a HUAC
subcommittee headed by Thomas arrived in Hollywood to
investigate the film industry. The Hollywood left
battled passionately to save itself, launching letter-
writing campaigns, boycotts of anti-left magazines like
The Hollywood Reporter, and conferences.
But to no avail. In October 1947, HUAC opened its
hearings on Communist infiltration of Hollywood with
great publicity.
Chandler left Hollywood in 1947, and moved to La
Jolla, a suburb of San Diego. Here he lived the rest
of his life, and a reclusive life it was. Except for
the last few years, after Cissy had died and he had
begun to travel to London, Chandler, in the years 1946
through 1954, lived an isolated existence. This
249
tranquility did allow him to complete some of the
projects he had begun in Hollywood. He wrote articles
and book reviews for The Atlantic, and "he enjoyed the
literary and intellectual world the Atlantic articles
had allowed him to re-enter" (McShane 133). He also
began to undertake an enormous correspondence during
these years he lived with Cissy (who was 7 6 and ill in
1946 when they moved to La Jolla; Chandler was 58).
McShane attributes this correspondence to the reclusive
life Chandler led and to the long hours each day he
spent alone, Cissy in bed shortly after dinner, and to
the lack of stimulation in La Jolla.
Many of his letters were to people he never knew
personally, and they allowed him to "converse with
other people, try out his ideas, reminisce, and
ruminate.... Chandler rarely sent out a letter without
some comment on writing, politics, warfare, Hollywood,
or his own life in La Jolla" (McShane 136).
Chandler's letters cover a wide range of topics,
and in a sense serve as a writer's notebook, marking
his range of growth and thinking. "His opinions are
blunt, direct, skeptical, sometimes a trifle naive or
prejudiced. Politics especially puzzled him," writes
McShane, "for he could not understand why people were
250
interested in the nonentities who governed them" (138).
Chandler ridiculed both HUAC and Senator McCarthy,
but he also took to task the "Hollywood Ten" for hiding
behind the First Amendment. One letter he wrote to
James Sandoe is significant because it makes clear just
how aware Chandler was of the HUAC Hearings, and the
positions being taken by his colleagues called to
testify before them. Sandoe, a librarian at the
University of Colorado who later reviewed mystery
fiction for the New York Herald Tribune, was then a new
admirer of Chandler and wrote letters to a number of
leading magazine and newspaper critics praising
Chandler and pointing out his exceptional qualities as
a writer.
This letter by Chandler is dated January 27, 1948,
after the Hollywood Ten had been found guilty of
contempt of Congress, but before they were actually
sentenced to the prison terms they would receive, and
before they knew about the almost fifteen to twenty
years of blacklisting they were to face. Here Chandler
makes it clear he is well aware of what has been going
on in front of J. Parnell Thomas' HUAC, and also that
he knows at least a few of the Ten personally. But,
more significantly, for purposes of The Long Goodbve,
251
which he will begin to write early in 1950, this letter
seems to offer positive evidence that Chandler did---
after all those years of working in the movie studios
and after all those endless political arguments he
presided over with fellow screenwriters, and after an
enormous correspondence which rarely failed to mention
some political issue keenly follow and was surely
influenced by the political climate of Los Angeles
during those years.
Chandler begins this long letter to Sandoe by
making fun of J. Parnell Thomas, the committee
chairman, for thinking Abbe's Irish Rose was a novel.
But he goes on, more seriously, and states that since
the Communist Party is a legal organization, and
"membership in it is a matter of record...then asking a
man if he belongs to the Communist Party or ever has
belonged to it is not an invasion of his privacy"
(McShane, Selected Letters, 107).
Chandler, as McShane postulates, may have been
somewhat naive about the committee's intentions because
of his isolation in La Jolla. But Chandler's ideas
were derived from what he called his "moral
conscience" that is, a code of behavior for both the
individual and the community that adhered to values
based upon moral and democratic principles. This
252
becomes clear when, in this letter, he moves away from
explaining why he doesn't sympathize with the Hollywood
Ten and finally expresses his contempt for "the motion
picture moguls who in conference decided to expel them
from the industry" (108) . Chandler 's deepest sense of
loyalty and friendship and what that should mean in
American society is truly betrayed by these studio
heads who refuse to support their writers and
directors. Chandler's position here reveals the
fundamental sense of moral integrity with which he
imbues his hero Marlowe. He feels that the motion
picture industry "ought to be run by men with a few
guts, men with enough moral and intellectual
integrity...to stand by these men and not treat them as
guilty" (108).
Chandler makes a pointed connection between this
kind of moral cowardice and the poor quality of the
typical movie produced by these moguls. He says:
Sometimes I feel kind of sorry for the poor
bastards. They are so damn scared they won't
make their second or third million. In fact
they are just so damned scared, period. What
a wonderful thing it would have been if the
Motion Pictures Producers Association had
said to Mr. Thomas, "Sure, I guess we have
Communists in Hollywood. We don't know who
they are. How could you expect us to? We're
not the FBI. But even if we did know,
there's an Attorney General in this country.
He hasn't accused these men of any crime.
Congress hasn't legislated anything that
253
would cause their present or future
membership in the Communist Party to be a
crime, and until it does we propose to treat
them just as exactly as we treat anyone
else." You know what would happen if the
producers had the guts to say a thing like
that? They would start making good pictures,
because that takes guts, too. Very much the
same kind of guts.
(108)
Here Chandler makes clear his real concern is in
moral integrity and not a political position. In fact,
it could be argued, as is being done, that this moral
standard becomes his political principle as an artist,
and determines, in his fiction, the behavior and
thinking of the representative of this principle,
Philip Marlowe.
As an artist, Chandler is careful about not
writing any type of political tract into his fiction.
Yet, it is as though in The Long Goodbve, after
absorbing the political climate of Hollywood all those
years, he is finally ready to make his definitive
statement about proper political, or, as he would call
it, moral conduct in the face of political persecution
and pressure.
In the letter to Sandoe, Chandler reveals a kind
of simplified opinion about the Hollywood Ten's refusal
to testify; they were wrong to hide behind the First
Amendment because they did nothing wrong. Perhaps this
254
is a result of his isolation in La Jolla, as McShane
speculates. Perhaps Chandler was confusing Marlowe's
fictional ability to stand up to the government and not
end up ruined and in prison with what he thought the
Ten should have done. Perhaps Chandler's sense of
democratic principle is so absolute that he is able to
ignore the complexities of the legal situation in
Hollywood.
The Ten spent a long time trying to figure out
what to do on the witness stand. They didn't want to
take the Fifth, and they agreed not to do so because
they felt pleading the Fifth on the grounds that what
they might say would tend to incriminate them would be
an indirect admission of guilt. They certainly did not
want to inform on their friends and collegues, so they
were left with little choice. Taking the First meant
that they saw the entire issue as a free speech one.
They saw no legal reason why they should be compelled
to testify about their political beliefs and
activities, which consisited almost entirely in
meetings in each others' Beverly Hills homes, where
only a lot of talkiing was done. Surely this kind of
behavior, the free expression of ideas, was protected
by the First Amendment. Their strategy didn't work, and
they were all convicted of contempt of Congress and
255
sentenced to prison. After the sentences were upheld,
almost four years later, those called to testiify began
to either take the Fifth Amendment or to inform, but
noone was to take the First Amendment again.
Perhaps Chandler was right: the Ten should have
testified as to their political activities, since there
was nothing technically illegal in what they were
doing, or even in belonging to the Communist Party. But
the political reality in the Hollywood Studio boardroom
was clear: do what the government wanted you to do or
find yourself blacklisted from working in the film
industry. And if you do testify, as the government
wished you to do, then while you were patted on the
back and could continue to work, anyone you might have
named in your testimony was not only blacklisted, but
faced a possible subpeona and a possible jail term. It
became a vicious cycle, and very few were able to get
out of it with both their integrity and their freedom
intact.
In the new round of hearings, after the Supreme
Court turned down the Hollywood Ten's last appeal, and
the men were packed off to various federal prisons
around the country, HUAC staged a Hollywood
investigation more massive and malicious than its 1947
probe. Ninety industry figures were called to the
256
witness dock and the names of 324 people were entered
into the record as suspected Communists. More than
half of those subpoenaed stood firm and fended off the
Committee's questions by invoking the Fifth Amendment.
But there were also many defections during the new
round of hearings.
While Chandler was writing The Long Goodbve,
director Edward Dmytryk, one of the Ten, returned to
Washington and told the Committee exactly what it
wanted to hear. He named close friends as Communists;
he denounced fellow members of the Ten for following
the Party line.
Albert Maltz, an immensely popular screenwriter of
the Forties, and perhaps the most outspoken of the Ten,
and who was blacklisted for over twenty years after
coming out of prison, wrote at the time, 1952, an
angry, open letter concerning Dmytryk:
He believed in certain principles, no doubt
very sincerely, until the consequences of
those beliefs became painful. He has not now
made a peace with his conscience, he has made
it with his pocket and his career.
(Talbot and Zheuther 47)
These words ring true, and they reverberate
through the pages of Chandler's last novel, The Long
Goodbve» then in progress when Maltz's letter is
published in the Hollywood Reporter. This novel is
257
about a man who has principles but who will not give
them up, no matter what the consequences or rewards to
his pocketbook.
Before proceeding to The Long Goodbve itself, and
an analysis of it as Chandler's fictional response to
the political capitulation in Hollywood among his
colleagues, it is important to examine one other factor
that became crucial during this, as Lillian Heilman
called it, "scoundrel time." That is the seemingly
epidemic rise of the informer in Hollywood.
It is significant that although the actual HUAC
hearings of the Hollywood Ten began in 1947, shortly
after Chandler left Hollywood, they were resumed by the
spring of 1951, exactly when he was writing The Long
Goodbve. The hearings were originally suspended until
the convicted Ten had exhausted their appeals and were
imprisoned for terms of up to one year. So Chandler
was writing while Hollywood writers and directors were
being called before a Congressional committee, and at
the urging of their studio bosses, informing on their
friends and colleagues, ruining reputations, allowing,
by their testimony, the studios to blacklist these men
and women from working in Hollywood, and indirectly
causing many of those named to be sent to jail.
258
Ironically, as Victor S. Navasky explains in his
excellent book on this period, Naming Names, "playing
informer runs against the American grain" (x). The
idea does not really need to be explained. We all have
certain basic objections to certain activities, and
informing ranks high on this list. "In the abstract,"
Navasky writes, "many Americans would probably
subscribe to E. M. Forster's famous sentiment: 'If I
had to choose between betraying my country and
betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to
betray my country'" (x).
Part of the conditioning for this attitude, by
1950, was created by Hollywood itself. A slew of
films prison films, war films, anti-Nazi propaganda
in particular had already depicted the informer as
the worst type of character, who had to be and was
'taken care of' for the sake of justice and patriotism.
In Navasky's thorough and definitive study of this
period, he goes into great depth on the subject. He
analyzes the religious and cultural roots of our
negative attitudes toward the informer, from Judas in
the New Testament, to the Old Testament definition of
the informer, whose literal translation is "to eat the
flesh of someone else" (Navasky xii). His premise is
"that most of the name-namers believed on some level
259
that what they were doing was wrong," but that what he
calls the "Informer Principle the naming of names as
a test of virtue" was too overwhelming, the pressure
too much, and that this principle "determined and
defined the cold war environment" (xv).
Navasky focuses upon the Hollywood informer and
his role and asks the central and controlling
questions:
How did it come to pass that scores of
otherwise decent individuals were compelled
to betray a moral presumption? What are the
conditions under which good men do things
they know to be wrong? ...Can it be that to
live lives of moral equilibrium our values
must never be tested, for when we adhere to
them we destroy what we cherish (as happened
to some of the uncooperative witnesses who
were blacklisted), yet when we abandon them
we destroy our sense of self (as happened to
some of the informers)? What happens when a
state puts pressure on its citizens to betray
their fellows? (xvi)
The pursuit of answers to these and other
questions is what his book is about. In fact, he calls
his book a "moral detective story" (xv). And the
following reading of The Long Goodbve. Chandler's moral
detective story, proposes that Chandler was attempting
to pursue answers to some of these same questions.
Chandler's novel flies in the face of the context
of the anti-communist crusade of the 1950s: that good
citizenship required the betrayal of friendship. That
260
one had a duty to inform was not ever acceptable to
Chandler, no matter the patriotic labels attached to
the reasons. Everywhere one turned in Hollywood in
those years, and everywhere Marlowe turns in this
novel, the same message is received: cooperate.
Cooperation, another word for informing, became,
amazingly, synonymous with loyalty to one's country,
and the best and courageous thing to do.
Two significant responses to HUAC are worth
quoting, and should serve as an appropriate
introduction to Chandler's attitude about friendship
and those he instills into his hero. The first is
Lillian Heilman's statement to the Committee, in which
she refuses to name names:
But to hurt innocent people whom I knew many
years ago in order to save myself is, to me,
inhuman and indecent and dishonorable. I
cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit
this year's fashions, even though I long ago
came to the conclusion that I was not a
political person and could have no
comfortable place in any political group.
(Navasky 45)
Like Chandler, Heilman recognized her apolitical
nature, but it was a moral imperative which motivates
her courageous stand, and really has nothing to do with
formal politics, as such.
The second statement is really an explanation by
the writer—director Abraham Polonsky, "a former
261
Communist who was an un—apologetic Fifth Amendment-
invoking witness" (xix), as to why John Garfield, the
famous actor, refused to name names. Within this
explanation lies an important concept for understanding
Chandler's novel, and the importance of the informer,
or stool-pigeon, label. Nothing is more important for
Garfield than to be able to live with oneself without
contempt, and to be able to walk through one's own
community knowing one did the right thing. Polonsky
explains:
He said he hated Communists, he hated
Communism, he was an American. He told the
Committee what it wanted to hear. But he
wouldn't say the one thing that would keep
him from walking down his old neighborhood
block. Nobody could say, "Hey there's the
fucking stool-pigeon." You see, that's what
he was fighting against: He should be a stool
pigeon because he can only gain from it, yet
he can't do it because in his mind he lives
in the street where he comes from and in the
street he comes from you're not a stool
pigeon. That's the ultimate horror.
(xix)
This echoes Chandler's early famous statement in
"The Simple Art of Murder," that "down these mean
streets a man must go...a man of honor by instinct,
by inevitability, without thought of it...."
Marlowe, in The Long Goodbve, becomes for Chandler
a character who follows a moral code no matter where it
takes him; to do anything else would be the same as
262
Garfield's "ultimate horror." Written while much of
Hollywood is succumbing to the Informer Principle, and
while under a waving flag of patriotism friends are
betraying each other to save themselves, this novel
seems certain testament to Chandler's political and
moral philosophy.
The The Long Goodbve has only two murders, and
only one murderer: uncomplicated and concise for
Chandler. The plot dovetails its two parts flawlessly,
and the development of character, always Chandler's
primary concern, is never more psychologically
satisfying and complete.
The code of the hardboiled detective is a loose
one at best, and is broken fairly indiscriminately by
writers like Mickey Spillane and others. But one aspect
of the code is rarely, if ever, violated. That is, the
killer pays for his crimes in a way that satisfies the
reader's sense of justice and this means, for the
most part, that the killer must die, by whatever means
necessary, often at the hands of the detective.
This simplistic sense of justice generally
manifests itself in the genre by a trigger-happy
detective who successfully shoots it out with the
villain, and rides off into the sunset. Even Dashiell
Hammett utilizes the method to bring about justice,
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although he generally allows his hero to manipulate the
various factions involved into killing each other (see
Red Harvest for a particularly good example of this
method).
Justice then seems to have taken the place of
morality within this code. Justice, of course, is
clearly a part of a moral code, particularly in a genre
like this one where the balance of the community is so
severely disturbed by violent homicide, and must be
restored. However, justice is not all that a moral
code comprises.
It is in the work of Chandler that the detective's
moral code is epitomized and developed to the extent
that the detective becomes a vibrant and realistic
character within the novel, rather than primarily a
vehicle to implement justice and perform heroics,
untouched by the events and people he wanders through
and among.
In this novel, Chandler allows Marlowe to struggle
with moral and emotional dilemmas that do not even
arise in most of the genre, and in fact forces Marlowe
to come to grips with and understand just who he is, as
a detective and as a human being, and what moral values
he must embrace and call his own. Marlowe's moral code
then becomes not etched in stone as a formula to be
264
followed, but a standard of living which is slowly and
painfully hhdiscovered, as it is in mainstream fiction,
as Marlowe becomes more involved in the lives and
tragedies of the characters in the book.
The novel opens with Marlowe literally picking up
a drunk Terry Lennox from the parking lot of The
Dancers, a Hollywood night club which played a
prominent role in the novel preceding this one, The
Little Sister. Lennox has fallen from the passenger's
side of his ex-wife's Rolls Royce, and she has left him
and driven away. Marlowe steps in, and takes his "new
friend" (3) to his, Marlowe's, house to sober him up.
The parking lot attendant's remark at the time
foreshadows the events to come, and allows Chandler
very early on to indicate exactly where Marlowe is to
stand in relation to helping those and remaining loyal
to those in trouble.
The attendant says, as Marlowe is about to take
Lennox home;
"Okay, sucker. If it was me, I'd just drop
him in the gutter and keep going....1 got a
philosophy about them things. The way the
competition is nowadays, a guy has to save
his strength to protect himself in the
clinches." Marlowe thinks: "He was partly
right of course. Terry Lennox made me plenty
of trouble. But after all that's my line of
work". (3)
265
In this brief exchange, Chandler presents both the
jaded mainstream attitude and its opposite, courage
which persists in the face of certain trouble. Calling
Marlowe a "sucker" is perfect here, because it reflects
exactly how most of Hollywood society felt about anyone
who would put himself at risk for the sake of someone
else. "I'd just drop him in the gutter and keep
going," the attendant says, in another gem of
Chandlerian dialogue which captures the slang of the
street while it indicates a deeply—embedded attitude
about community and democracy, or the lack of both,
which has permeated our society.
Marlowe is impressed by Lennox's manners.
"Whatever he didn't have he had manners" (5), and even
this early in their friendship sees a lot of himself in
this civilized drunk: outcast but proud and human.
This is no doubt how Chandler saw himself as well, and
Natasha Spender does remark a number of times about
Chandler's extraordinary manners and consideration,
even when drunk.
The second meeting with Lennox is similar to the
first. Marlowe is walking the streets of Hollywood,
about three blocks from his office, when he sees
Lennox, unshaven and pale and wearing dirty clothes,
who, it turns out, had been walking the streets for
266
three days, and was now "leaning against a store front"
(6). "It was pretty obvious that the buttons in the
prowl car were about ready to drop the hook on him, so
I went over there fast and took hold of his arm" (6).
Again Marlowe steps in to save his friend, and
again feeds him and takes him home, where Lennox,
bathed and showered, "looked human again" (6).
Lennox begins to tell Marlowe something about
himself, and how he married the extremely wealthy
Sylvia Lennox for her money. Marlowe seems disturbed,
and Lennox remarks:
"Wait a minute, Marlowe. You're
wondering why if I was down and out and
Sylvia had plenty I couldn't ask her for a
few bucks. Did you ever hear of pride?"
"You're killing me, Lennox."
"Am I? My kind of pride is different.
It's the pride of a man who has nothing
else..."
(9)
Marlowe is puzzled about Lennox, but respects and
admires this kind of code of conduct, even if it means,
as it does in this case, that "...a man would starve
and walk the streets rather than pawn his wardrobe.
Whatever his rules were he played by them" (9).
This is a crucial and revealing thought for
Marlowe. Marlowe has rules also, and playing by them
becomes very painful to him as the novel progresses.
For Marlowe, unlike many characters in the novel, and
267
unlike many of those contemporaries of Chandler facing
the pressures of the Hollywood HUAC hearings, the rules
of moral behavior, and of democratic and personal
principle, hardly have any meaning if they cannot be
followed when the pressure is on. It is easy enough to
pay lip service to a code when nothing challenges it,
when nothing is at stake. It is only when the
principles one calls one's own are challenged head-on
that their value becomes important and real.
After the second rescue in November, Marlowe and
Lennox do not see each other until March; Lennox has
since remarried his ex—wife, and has begun to drop in
on Marlowe at his office around 5 pm, when they go to a
bar and have a drink or two. This becomes a fairly
regular occurrence until May, which is the last time
they drink together like this.
One of these evenings they have a brief
conversation about sex, love, the rich, and Hollywood.
The difference in attitude between Lennox and Marlowe
is clear here, and establishes a ground from which
Marlowe proceeds and which carries him through the
novel.
Lennox is talking about how much he likes bars
"just after they open for the evening.... The first
268
quiet drink of the evening in a quiet bar that's
wonderful" (17).
Marlowe agrees, and then Lennox turns bitter and
goes off on a tirade.
"Alcohol is like love," he said. "The
first kiss is magic, the second is intimate,
the third is routine. After that you take
the girl's clothes off."
"Is that bad?" I asked him.
(18)
Marlowe's humor emerges here, in response to
Lennox's cynicism, but his humanity and compassion for
imperfection and human frailty come through as well.
Lennox goes on:
"It's excitement of a high order,but it's an
impure emotion impure in the aesthetic
sense. I'm not sneering at sex. It's
necessary, it doesn't have to be ugly. But
it always has to be managed. Making it
glamorous is a billion—dollar industry and it
costs every cent of it."
He looked around and yawned. "I haven't
been sleeping well. It's nice in here. But
after a while the lushes will fill the place
up and talk loud and laugh and the goddamn
women will start waving their hands and
screwing up their faces and tinkling their
goddamn bracelets and making with the
packaged charm which will later on in the
evening have a slight but unmistakable odor
of sweat."
(18)
Marlowe's response is in clear contrast to
Lennox's bitter and intolerant, however accurate,
attitude.
269
"Take it easy," I said. "So they're
human, they sweat, they get dirty, they have
to go to the bathroom. What did you expect---
golden butterflies hovering in a rosy mist?"
(18)
For all of Marlowe's romantic impulses, he is a
realist and a humanist. He accepts the imperfect human
condition, in himself and others, yet he will not
condone Lennox's ultimate betrayal of his friendship.
He sees even more clearly than Lennox the people around
him and their phoniness and hypocrisy, their soiled
charm and money—laden motivation, but Marlowe absorbs,
like Whitman, and understands. Marlowe is recognized
as a real person by those he encounters: classless, and
without an ulterior motive that threatens. He is
critical, but he is unafraid to make contact.
Marlowe and Lennox next meet a month later when
Lennox rings Marlowe's doorbell at five in the morning.
He needs Marlowe to drive him to Tijuana to catch a
plane and hints that he has murdered his wife. Marlowe'
doesn't believe this and demands that Lennox tell him
nothing about any crime or knowledge of any crime.
In going over their story, Marlowe explains to
Lennox how he justifies what he is doing. And again we
see the development of Chandler's views on friendship:
"We are friends and I did what you asked
me without much thought. Why wouldn't I?
You're not paying me anything." (25)
270
The beginning of the long goodbye in this novel is
when Marlowe sees Lennox board the plane for Tijuana:
"I'm all set," he said. "This is where
we say goodbye." He put his handout. I
shook it.... "Good luck, Terry."
"Climb aboard," I said. "I know you
didn't kill her. That's why I'm here."
(27)
Marlowe believes in his intuitive feelings about
Lennox, and it is these fundamental feelings which
motivate his search for the real killer, "the hidden
truth," through the rest of the book.
When Marlowe gets home the police are waiting for
him. They question him about Lennox and tell him the
details of the grisly murder of Sylvia Lennox, whose
face was "beat to pieces with a bronze statuette of a
monkey" (31).
Marlowe defends his friend, and insists Terry
could never kill her, particularly in such a brutal
way. The police threaten to arrest him if he will not
give them information about the morning's events, but
Marlowe refuses. He is arrested and taken to the
station house, intimidated and slugged, spat upon and
has hot coffee thrown in his face by the captain, and
then thrown in a jail cell where he remains for four
days.
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Chandler, true to the genre, refuses to allow his
hero to be intimidated by the police, but here it is
more than simply a matter of formula. For Marlowe, it
is primarily a matter of friendship. And, on another
level, given the climate of the day, it is a matter of
principled conduct in the face of governmental pressure
to turn on one's friends. It is fundamentally behavior
that preserves the democratic community, and that keeps
the repressive state at bay. In Gardner's words, in
reference to moral fiction, it is conduct which:
holds up models of decent behavior; for
example, characters in fiction,...whose basic
goodness and struggle against confusion,
error and evil in themselves and in others-
— give them intellectual and emotional
support in our own struggle" (Gardner 106).
Gardner further explains that the ideas of an
artist, in his fiction, become standards for the entire
community.
The ideas the artist gets....When he thinks
with the help of the full artistic method,
are abstractly valid, true not only for
himself but for everyone, or at least for all
human beings.
(123)
Thus Marlowe can be and is the detective seeking a
moral standard not only for himself, but for his
community. His determination of the nature of the
structure of reality that is, the truth— is brought
272
about through his discovery process as detective that
is, through Gardner's "artistic method."
Chandler's genius for streetwise dialogue and wit
invests Marlowe with the power to avoid rhetoric, and
cut to the essence of democratic affirmation. He tells
the police, who are urging him to talk and threaten to
blow the whistle on him (that is, arrest him):
"Okay," I said. "Blow it. Terry Lennox
was my friend. I've got a reasonable amount
of sentiment invested in him. Enough not to
spoil it because a cop says come through."
(34)
In one of Chandler's many minor, almost throw-away
paragraphs, he continues to reinforce the idea of
Marlowe's development as human character, not
mechanical and detached detective. Here, immediately
before he is to be escorted to the station, he glances
at one of the two cops who have been questioning him.
Marlowe's astute and sensitive observation makes clear
that Chandler has infused a new-found sense of humanity
in his hero:
Green crossed to the phone and lifted it
slowly, his plain face creased with the long
slow thankless grind. That's the trouble
with cops. You're all set to hate their guts
and then you meet one that goes human on you.
(34)
At the station, and later, in his jail cell when
he is visited by a lawyer working for Sylvia Lennox's
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father, Harlan Potter, and is encouraged to cooperate
with the police, Chandler makes another opportunity for
Marlowe to reiterate his ideas about loyalty, and the
importance of maintaining democratic principles. In
this scene, the indirect reference to the Hollywood Ten
case and the manner in which the witnesses are being
treated by the government seems to be unmistakable.
Marlowe, in an interesting narrative time frame,
which looks back on this entire story, describes the
cop, Captain Gregorius, who was questioning him:
...a type of copper that is getting rarer but
by no means extinct, the kind that solves
crimes with the bright light, the soft rap,
the kick in the kidneys, the knee in the
groin, the fist to the solar plexus, the
night stick to the base of the spine. Six
months later he was indicted for perjury
before a grand jury, booted without trial,
and later stomped to death by a big stallion
on his ranch in Wyoming.
Right now I was his raw meat.
(34)
This wonderful, rhythmic description of police
questioning can certainly be read as symbolic of the
kind of behavior the film industry was being subjected
to by the government committee. Gregorias' fate is
perhaps Chandler's hope for a similar kind of poetic
justice which he feels the committee's violation of
rights deserves.
274
When Samuel Endicott, attorney-at-law and ex—DA,
visits Marlowe and tries to bail him out, Marlowe
refuses the bail, figuring one out on bail is half
guilty in the public's mind. Marlowe again attempts to
make clear his code and where he stands in regard to
his loyalty to his friend.
"I'm in a business where people come to
me with troubles. Big troubles, little
troubles, but always troubles they don't want
to take to the cops. How long would they come
if any bruiser with a police shield could
hold me upside down and drain my guts?
(44)
Marlowe's refusal to capitulate to the police is
further justified by Endicott's remark about the legal
system and his criticism of Marlowe for standing on his
rights.
"You had to play the big scene, " he said
coldly. "Stand on your rights, talk about
the law. How ingenious can a man get,
Marlowe? A man like you who is supposed to
know his way around. The law isn't justice.
It's a very imperfect mechanism. If you
press exactly the right buttons and are also
lucky, justice may show up in the answer."
(45)
The irony here is that both the police and the
lawyer, an ex-DA, recognize the absurdity of remaining
faithful to our legal system, seeing it as one to be
manipulated and abused. Only Marlowe understands that
it is something more than a system of laws and rights
to stand on. It is the structural manifestation of a
275
democracy itself, and to stand on one's rights is to
defend the basic principles of justice and equality
brefore the law upon which the American society stands.
When Marlowe is questioned by Grenz, the assistant
District Attorney, and again refuses to talk, he
finally expresses bluntly what Chandler recognizes has
happened to many of the Hollywood community. The
reference seems obvious. Grenz wants a statement from
him, and asks him, threatens him, really, if he likes
it in jail. Marlowe's reply could be a statement
addressed to HUAC and not Grenz. "Be reasonable,
Grenz. You're trying to make a fink out of me."
There is that ugly, unspeakable word. Fink.
"Suppose you had to hire a private eye—
—yeah, yeah, I know how you would hate the
idea but suppose you were where it was
your only out. Would you want one that
finked on his friends?"
(52)
Chandler will not even allow Marlowe to entertain
the possibility. And if Marlowe is the "American
mind," as Chandler describes him, his conduct in the
face of so much official persecution is our conduct, or
should be our conduct. But it wasn't. Whatever has
taken the American community and transformed it into a
community of informers and finks, Chandler asserts in
276
Marlowe the direction America needs to follow if the
values of democracy are to be restored.
Chandler seems to be telling Los Angeles and
America something very clear about its softness, its
moral cowardice, its sorry idea of justice. Hidden
beneath the words of his private detective, Chandler is
certainly speaking to his colleagues and to his
community.
Marlowe is released from jail after Lennox's
alleged suicide note turns up, in which he confesses to
murdering his wife, and is given a ride back to his
house by Lonnie Morgan, a reporter for the Journal.
After he has showered and shaved and gone to bed,
Marlowe thinks about the case. In one of many of
Chandler's elegiac passages, Marlowe romantically longs
for a simple solution:
"I...lay on my back listening, as if far
off in the dark I might hear a voice, the
kind of calm and patient voice that makes
every thing clear. I didn't hear it. I knew
I wasn't going to..."
(56)
Even in this tranquil and contemplative mood of
longing for clarity, Marlowe understands that the voice
will not be heard that explains the case to him.
Marlowe seems to understand that he himself is that
voice, and that he must be the one to explain the
277
mystery to himself and to everyone else. This seems to
be a metaphor for our obligation in a democratic
society to take responsibility and do what is right---
an obligation only Marlowe remembers we have.
The next day, in his office, Marlowe senses that
Terry Lennox "was already receding into the distance,
white hair and scarred face and weak charm and his
peculiar brand of pride" (57). Marlowe, however, will
not be allowed to forget Lennox, as first Endicott,
working for Harlan Potter, Sylvia's father and a Howard
Hughes—like retired billionaire, and then Detective
Green, call to warn Marlowe to stay out of the case,
which is supposed to be closed. Finally, Mendy
Menendez, a cheap hoodlum and wartime buddy of Lennox,
shows up and also threatens Marlowe to drop the case.
Menendez resents that Lennox came to Marlowe, a
stranger, for help, and not his old friends.
Obviously, with three warnings coming one on top of the
other, from three very different sources, Marlowe is
curious, but has nowhere to go with his curiosity.
At this point in the novel, Chandler introduces us
to the second plot and second set of characters, and
begins the slow and graceful dovetailing of the two
stories into one.
278
The second plot begins when Howard Spencer, a
publisher's representative, calls Marlowe and wants him
to babysit hack novelist Roger Wade {Chandler's quasi-
self-portrait) . The alcoholic writer, allegedly prone
to violence, can't finish his novel and is currently
missing.
Wade and his beautiful wife Eileen are neighbors
of Terry Lennox's, and Wade had been carrying on an
affair with Sylvia, Terry's wife. His terrible
drunkenness has caused him to half—suspect that he may
have killed her, and he is tormented with this guilt.
Before long, Wade is found dead. Marlowe discovers
that his wife, Eileen, was formerly married to Lennox
during the war and that she killed Sylvia out of
jealousy, and then killed Wade because he talked too
much and was unreliable.
Spencer, the publisher, has hired Marlowe because
of his silence under pressure while in jail. Eileen
Wade, of course, appreciates this silence for another
reason, yet it seems to be clear Chandler himself is
putting forth silence as a manifestation of loyalty as
the essential ingredient of Marlowe's moral code. In
the face of the many at the time who could not remain
silent and by talking betrayed and destroyed their
friends, Chandler seems to be pointedly critical of his
279
immediate society, and, by extension, of a 'moral
defeatism' that he felt was sweeping America.
At the end of the book, when Marlowe has smoked
Lennox out of hiding and cleared his name by having
Eileen's full confession published, Marlowe refuses to
have anything to do with him, calling him a "moral
defeatist." This, for Marlowe, is perhaps the worst sin
one can commit in a world where the courage to maintain
and assert one's personal morality is all that remains
of honor. Lennox's complaisance has produced an
unnecessary murder: Wade's. Although Marlowe's sense of
loyalty remains intact throughout, he realizes he must
suspend his involvement with friends who are dishonest,
threaten his independence, or deny the truth.
The novel continues to present evidence of this
reading; as Marlowe becomes more and more involved in
these two cases, he feels he has invested more of
himself than ever before, and he demands and expects an
equal return on his investment. Even the idea of money
as a medium of honor is extended to human relations for
Marlowe. He has always been scrupulously honest about
accepting or not accepting money in all of the novels.
In The Long Goodbve. he spends time remarking on the
$5000 bill (a portrait of Madison, he calls it) Terry
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Lennox has sent him from Mexico, but he never spends
it: It carries too much blood.
Marlowe says: "You bought a lot of me, Terry"
(311) , and "I owned a piece of him. I had invested
time and money in him" (58). So, if monetary value is
the last measure of exchange in corrupt capitalist
consumerism, then Marlowe's refusal to spend any he
believes to be ill-gotten may be the only remaining
virtuous act permitted him in such a society. As
cynical as the connotation of his remarks may be, they
are entirely fitting with his world view, repeatedly
expressed in this work.
Although all of this obsessive concern for
morality seems to make of Marlowe more a stock figure
than a rounded literary character, Chandler invests in
Marlowe, exactly as Marlowe has invested of himself in
Lennox, complexities and sensitivity generally reserved
for characters in more serious fiction. When Marlowe
first receives Lennox's phony suicide letter, well
before he realizes Lennox is not dead, he spends a
lonely night in a ritual of goodbye to Lennox, and thus
the title of the novel. In this scene, Marlowe, alone
in his apartment, with the letter from Lennox and the
$5000 bill that had been enclosed, does what Lennox
asked him to do in the letter, "sentimental or not":
281
I poured two cups and added some bourbon
to his and set it down on the side of the
table where he had sat the morning I took him
to the plane. I lit a cigarette for him and
set it in an ash tray beside the cup.
<69)
Perhaps even here Marlowe suspects something is
not as it seems. The balance is not right. But he
continues to brood. He goes to a late movie: "It meant
nothing." He comes home and sets out a chess problem,
as is his habit, "and that didn't mean anything
either."
He goes to bed and can't sleep, and at three in
the morning finds himself walking the floor, listening
to the radio. This kind of "white night for me is as
rare as a fat postman," he says, and realizes that he
has gotten himself into this morass of mystery and
sentiment. "There is no trap so deadly as the trap you
set for yourself," he thinks. He understands it is his
inability to separate his emotions from his profession
that has him feeling this way. This is very human and
real, and whether Marlowe likes it or not, it is what
makes him the common American and more of a mainstream
hero than a formula one.
He meets Spencer the next day and meets Eileen
Wade as well. She is a beautiful woman, and when he
first spots her walking into the hotel bar where he is
282
waiting for Spencer, he thinks, "...right then a dream
walked in" (71). She is one of many Chandlerian women:
beautiful, eyes of cornflower blue, and hopelessly
corrupt. An American dream, as Marlowe here describes
Eileen Wade: "as remote and clear as mountain water, as
elusive as its color" (73). She represents the
beautiful and sexual facade of American fantasy and
dream, perfectly matched by the erotic historical
romances her husband writes, and which disgust him;
here is Chandler's American vision, personified in this
extraordinarily beautiful woman who underneath is
empty, cold, and a killer.
The Wades live in Idle Valley, an exclusive suburb
for the rich. Marlowe visited Idle Valley in the third
novel, The High Window, when "they had the gatehouse at
the entrance, the private police force, and the
gambling casino on the lake, and the fifty—dollar joy
girls" (80). (There is a brief but significant exchange
with the security guard at the gate in The High Window,
as Marlowe attempts to enter Idle Valley to meet with
the owner of the casino. The gate is locked, the
patrolman is armed, in order to enter Marlowe must be
on a list, and when he gets to the casino, another
officer will be waiting for him. The polite guard says:
"There's a great deal to protect in Idle Valley" (112).
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Marlowe's reply is humorous, but as always,
telling: "I looked at the gun strapped to his hip, the
special badge pinned to his shirt. 'And they call this
a democracy,' I said” (112).)
Idle Valley had since been taken over by "quiet
money," and was now "exclusive in the only remaining
sense of the word that doesn't mean merely expensive"
(80). In one of Chandler's wonderfully apt similes he
has Marlowe remark, "I belonged in Idle Valley like a
pearl onion on a banana split" (80).
Marlowe, in both novels, humorously recognizes his
democratic nature, his common sensibilities, and the
lack of both democracy and commonality in Idle Valley.
This exclusive community reveals the isolated and
elitist character of the American ruling class, and
under the novelist's microscope, Chandler, through the
eye (I) of Marlowe, is able to expose the decadence and
greed which power and money have wrought. He really is
the onion on the banana split, yet his wit and
intuition, born of a grace achieved through his moral
nature, permit him access even here, where he knows he
does not belong.
But for all Marlowe's acerbic contempt for the
rich and powerful, he never loses the very human
quality of sympathy for the victims of our society,
284
even if they do resort to petty schemes and shady deals
to survive. When the pressure is on, these minor
crooks have a moral integrity and honesty that Marlowe
admires, at least when compared to the rich , who are
irredeemably corrupt. This can be seen in The Big
Sleep, the first novel, when Marlowe insults the two-
bit hustler Harry Jones, and then apologizes to him,
realizing that the man had a dignity and self-esteem
and above all a code of moral behavior that would not
be broached.
Marlowe describes the man with a kind of comradery
and respect:
He puffed evenly and stared at me level
eyed, a funny little hard guy. I could have
thrown him from home plate to second base. A
small man in a big man's world. There was
something I liked about him.
(The Big Sleep 157)
Marlowe, because he himself has these
qualities, is able to recognize and respect them in
others, no matter their station in life; in fact,
especially because of their down-and-out lifestyles,
these qualities are all the more hard-earned and
appreciated.
In The Long Goodbve, Marlowe again is able to see
the good in another "small man in a big man's world."
This time it is Dr. Verringer, the quack who is helping
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Roger Wade dry out, secretly keeping him at his
Sepulveda Canyon ranch, which is in bankruptcy and is
about to be taken over by the bank. Marlowe has
tracked Wade to the ranch, and when questioning
Verringer about his ranch, intimates that the place is
not licensed by law:
He drew himself up stiffly. The guy had a
kind of dignity at that. "The suggestion is
insulting, Mr. Marlowe...."
(101)
Marlowe, for one of only a few rare times in all
the novels, is justifiably put in his place.
Marlowe has found Wade, after returning to
Verringer's ranch that night. Verringer has been
knocked out in the scuffle to free Wade by his own
assistant and lover, Earl, the volatile and somewhat
insane young man that Verringer takes care of.
Verringer recovers and is "leaning against the wall,
massaging his jaw." Wade needs to get dressed before
he can leave, and Verringer, who has helped Wade dry
out before, has helped him this time and has not been
paid for it, rises to the occasion:
"I'll help him," he said thickly. "All
I do is help people and all they do is kick
me in the teeth."
"I know how you feel," I said.
(119)
286
Here, in the character of a small-time, two-bit
quack, who we do not see again, Marlowe finds a man
with whom he relates. They are, however different,
comrades. Verringer helps because it is the right thing
to do; he feels for the helpless, as does Marlowe, and
Marlowe shows he understands this in his final
sympathetic remark to Verringer.
Even Wade senses this quality in Verringer. As he
and Marlowe are riding home he asks:
"Why should I give that fat slob four
thousand dollars?"
"No reason at all."
"Then why do I feel like a bastard for
not giving it to him?"
..."Maybe I'll give it to him. He's
broke. The property is foreclosed. He won't
get a dime out of it. All on account of that
psycho. Why does he do it?"
"I wouldn't know."
(121)
In this exchange, Marlowe says he wouldn't know
why Verringer helps Wade, but Marlowe most certainly
knows. Verringer is loyal to his patients and to the
psycho who may one day kill him, and who has already
ruined his profession because of his public displays of
violence. And Harry Jones, in The Big Sleep, is loyal
to the woman he loves, and dies because he loyally
refuses to reveal her whereabouts to the killer.
Marlowe recognizes in these minor and disreputable
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characters the noble and loyal aspects of the human
condition as its asserts itself against all odds and in
spite of dire consequences.
If Chandler grants Marlowe the sensitivity to
recognize the good in people, he also grants him the
ability to appreciate in the non—human world of things
certain metaphors for conveying the appropriate emotion
of the scene or character, including himself. These
personifications become Chandler's famous objective
method of transforming everything touched by the
sensory mechanism that is the eye (the private eye; the
first person I) of Philip Marlowe.
As Marlowe approaches Verringer's ranch, the gate
is locked and he is forced to hike cross-country up the
side of a hill to approach the ranch unseen. As he
walks deeper into the valley, he thinks he hears a
quail:
Far back in the valley I thought I heard a
quail. A mourning dove exclaimed against the
miseries of life....
(113)
While he is stalking his prey, he hears the song
of the dove, symbolically his own song: while it sings
of misery the sound is lyrical. This is Chandler's
ethic for Marlowe and finally it is what keeps Marlowe
going.
288
When he brings Wade home and delivers him to his
wife Eileen, Marlowe for the first time begins to
suspect that Eileen is not what she seems although he
doesn't yet understand the depth of her guilt nor
exactly what the deception he senses in her really
means. He accuses her of sending him on this lost—
husband mission to get him feeling responsible for Wade
so he would then agree to watch over him. He says he
doesn't want to be told, as Mrs. Wade has done, that he
is too nice a guy for having kissed her good—night the
way he did ( "...hard on the lips (123)):
"I'd rather be a heel."
She looked back. "Why?"
"If I hadn't been a nice guy to
Terry Lennox, he would still be alive."
"Yes?" she said quietly. "How can you
be so sure? Good night, Mr. Marlowe. And
thank you for everything."
She walked back along the edge of the
grass. I watched her into the house. The
door closed. The porch light went out. I
waved at nothing and drove away.
(124)
In this exchange the two cases are finally
one, even if Marlowe doesn't realize it at the time.
However, he is now open to the crucial connection
through his ability to detect that is, tune into
untruth or deception no matter how well disguised---
even if he cannot yet penetrate its ultimate ulterior
motive.
289
Marlowe, initially transfixed by Eileen Wade's
breathtaking beauty, cannot be hooked for long. His
sensitivity, in this case to her dishonesty, is the
primary instrument in his discovery process in search
for truth. He is, in Gardner's terms, the artist
discovering his art.
Her beauty, in fact, is the same kind of golden
haired, cornflower, blue-eyed, statuesque imagery of
the beautiful woman that has haunted the romantic
Chandler since his school years in England. In a poem
written in 1932, at the same time Chandler began to
write his first stories, some of these romantic notions
of the lost dream of love become apparent. It is
called, appropriately, "Nocturne from Nowhere," another
elegiac title expressing the existential romantic
vision found in his later book titles. The poem
describes a night-time reverie. Some of the key lines
are these:
There are no women as tender as this woman/
whose cornflower—blue eyes look at me/
With the magic of frustration/
and the promise of an impossible paradise....
So for a little while in the nighthouses/
let me go back/
into that soft and gorgeous future/
Which is not past,/
Never having happened,/
But yet is utterly lost (Chandler in
The Life of Raymond Chandler, McShane, 21)
290
In a not—so—great poem, which McShane repeats
in its entirety, Chandler expresses the feeling of an
impossible romantic dream, with the beautiful woman at
its center, here but not really here. And a vision
remains of a lost paradise that cannot be found because
it never existed, yet which persists in the poet's
consciousness as a vision of the beautiful for which he
longs.
Twenty years later, in The Long Goodbye, and in
the character of Eileen Wade, Chandler again conjures
this beautiful, cornflower blue-eyed woman, and she
becomes the brutally realistic symbol of this lost
imaginary paradise turned into a very real hell.
Beauty has become a killer: cold, ruthless, and
slightly mad, yet untouchable by society and the law.
She becomes, for Chandler, twenty years after America
has taken its hold upon him, the brilliant metaphor for
America itself.
Chandler wages war against this betrayal of his
vision, even though very early he had realized the
hopelessly unrealistic nature of it. Marlowe becomes
his warrior, or knight, and takes upon himself the task
of pursuing into the American night the vision of the
beautiful that has always moved him. The beautiful has
become, in these realistic hardboiled novels, not a
291
beautiful woman, but the democratic, moral, and
truthful standard by which a community needs to live.
And Marlowe rails against any betrayal of this ethic.
This is why Eileen Wade (and the other beautiful women
who have been the killers in Chandler's earlier novels)
becomes the quintessential symbol for Chandler: on a
superficial level, a symbol of the beautiful woman he
imagined but knew was lost. But more importantly, as a
symbol of a beautiful dream, the dream of a democratic
community, which has also been hopelessly lost, and
perhaps has never existed to begin with, except within
the mind of the artist and the mind of the detective.
The Long Goodbve. then, is also a novel of farewell to
America and its lost, great, green promise that
Fitzgerald rhapsodized about.
To further enrich the symbolic structure under
discussion, the political climate of betrayal taking
place in L.A., which has been documented above, allows
Chandler to infuse Marlowe with something near self-
righteousness about betrayed friendship and love which
we have never seen before. And this more complex and
sensitive Marlowe serves to point convincingly to
Chandler's intention to affirm a standard of morality
(one which he has always espoused) in the face of such
blatant real life and fictional corruption. Of course,
292
as has been the pattern in Chandler's novels, Marlowe
does not work miracles, and his quest is a somewhat
futile one even though he does bring the killer to
justice, in his own way.
As the book continues to develop, Marlowe begins
the slow process of discovery which will enable him to
fully understand the connection between the Wades,
particularly Eileen Wade, and the Lennoxs',
particularly Terry Lennox. In the meantime he decides
it is time to return to Victor's, their favorite bar
when Lennox and he where were spending time together,
and pay his last respects.
Here he meets Linda Loring, the older sister of
Terry's murdered wife Sylvia. Like his initial meeting
with Terry, thi first contact seems symbolic of the
intuitive sense of character Marlowe possesses and
which guides him. In Terry's case, his instinct about
his innocence was true, but he did not judge correctly
the self-defeating aspect of Lennox's character which
allows him to use Marlowe and betray their friendship.
In Linda's case, his instinct proves faultless.
/
They have begun a conversation from separate bar
stools, and without introductions, and Lennox is soon
mentioned as a mutual acquaintance. Marlowe asks the
293
bartender for two more of what they are drinking and
says to bring them to a booth. Marlowe's thoughts are
one more indication of his complexity: his moral
intentions and his hair-trigger pride, perhaps with his
wit his only defense:
I got down off the stool and stood waiting.
She might or might not blow me down. I
didn't particularly care. Once in a while in
this much too sex-conscious country a man and
a woman can meet and talk without dragging
bedrooms into it. This could be it, or she
could just think I was on the make. If so,
the hell with her.
(131)
Marlowe attempts to transcend all the sordid and
phony conventions that have become inimical to American
culture. He does this here in attempting to talk to a
woman who is a stranger, and he does this throughout
his adventures. Gardner's comments about the moral
artist's intentions become very relevant here, if we
see Marlowe as the artist, discovering the truth about
his art, his case. Gardner says:
...it is true, I think, that the best sort of
artist is always, has always been, an enemy
of all that is shoddy or false in the world
around him and will not hide the fact. The
reason, I think, is that the tradition of his
art... has set before him and filled his
heart with an idea of the good which is
incomparably more attractive than the filth
and foolishness around him, so that when he's
wakened from his trance, his artist's dream,
he comes up raging like a madman....Out of
the fullness of the tradition of his art, and
out of the deep pleasure in struggling at art
294
himself, he has chosen, irrevocably, art over
life. Art possesses him, establishing his
norms, which are not the world's norms; hence
he is saner than the world, and daemonically
mad.
(Gardner 183—84)
I've quoted at length because I think this can
become a wonderful description of Marlowe as detective
struggling with the discovery process of his work and
struggling with becoming a human being true to this
same standard which infuses his work. As it is for the
artist, this process is a search for truth for the
detective. This tradition of discovery so possesses
him that Marlowe can choose only this path. In fact,
he is considered somewhat crazy because of his
principles and integrity, his self-inflicted poverty
and loneliness, but, like the artist, he would not
really have it any other way. His search for truth
establishes his norms, and the world, in an essential
sense, is left behind.
Linda Loring and Marlowe begin to discuss the
case, and Marlowe angrily defends Lennox and intimates
that her rich and powerful father, Harlan Potter, could
have covered things up. This is his explicit attack on
the corrupting power of the rich and the kind of
organization they must create to maintain that power
and wealth. Marlowe holds it all in contempt;, and
295
expects Potter and his kind fully capable of almost
anything, including influencing the press and the D.A.
For hell's sake, Mrs. Loring, what are you
trying to sell me? That Harlan Potter is
such a sweet and lovely character he wouldn't
dream of using his influence on a political
D.A. to drop the blanket on a murder inves
tigation so that the murder was never really
investigated at all? That he had doubts
about Terry's guilt but didn't let anyone
lift a finger to find out who was really the
killer? (135-36)
Linda Loring is indignant at this, and warns
Marlowe not to broadcast these ideas about her father
if he wants to stay in business. Marlowe, who has been
threatened from all sides of this case, explains:
Perfect, Mrs. Loring. Perfect. I get it
from the law, I get it from the hoodlum
element, I get it from the carriage trade.
The words change, but the meaning is the
same. Lay off. I came in here to drink a
gimlet because a man asked me to. Now look
at me. I'm practically in the boneyard.
(136)
Again Marlowe finds himself isolated from his
society and forced into a corner. As with the
investigations taking place in Hollywood at this time,
loyalty to friends and to democratic rights are being
threatened and punished. The individual who dares to
confront the powerful (the studios and the government
in real life; Potter, the mob, and the police in
Chandler's fiction) finds himself or herself alone, in
296
jeopardy and fighting for his or her life. Marlowe's
search for the truth is essentially all that is
meaningful to him, his raison d'etre, and he is getting
very close. In fact, he is absolutely correct about
what Potter has done to cover up the investigation,
even though he doesn't know this for a fact as yet.
The next eight chapters take place, for the
most part, at the Wade house in Idle Valley. They
consist of two separate scenes: the first a party to
celebrate Wade's new book, which is almost complete,
and the second in response to a desperate call to
Marlowe from Wade. A week separates the two episodes,
and in that time Marlowe finds out that Dr. Verringer
had been bought out on a quit claim for a thousand
bucks.
George Peters, a detective working in a large
agency, who has done some research for Marlowe about
the Verringer ranch and about Lennox's and Eileen
Wade's backgrounds, is cynical, and understands how
little difference there is in our society between big
crime and big business:
and now somebody is going to make a million
bucks clean, out of cutting the place up for
residential property. That's the difference
between crime and business. For business you
gotta have capital. Sometimes I think it's
the only difference.
(153)
297
Marlowe responds to his friend George Peter's
remark, and in this exchange Chandler can permit
Marlowe to serve as a foil to Chandler's ideas about
the American reality of big crime and big business
sharing the same bed:
"A properly cynical remark," I said,
"but big time crime takes capital too."
"And where does it come from, then? Not
from guys that hold up liquor stores...."
(153)
The long scenes in Idle Valley, while they do not
develop the plot to any great extent, nor reveal any
significant clues in the mystery except one, are
significant for a number of reasons. Marlowe frames
the eight chapters with some elegant and lovely writing
describing the Idle Valley landscape first, as he
arrives and sees it with a fresh, untainted eye, and
then as he leaves, seeing it very differently, his tone
filled with a heavy sarcasm and critical acerbity as a
result of what has transpired. His beautiful
description of the valley as he enters is idyllic
indeed, yet as is Chandler's method, portrays through
objective description the style and personality of the
upper-class community. This is writing that the
hardboiled genre rarely saw, and for which it had very
little use. Chandler's style and eye are almost enough
to allow him to transcend the genre. When combined
298
with the character development of Marlowe and the
exploration and critique of the social and political
issues of his day he surely has entered mainstream
American fiction. Here are some of Marlowe's
observations:
...Then I was around the outcrop and the
paving started up in proper shape and
everything was smooth and cared for. Live
oaks clustered towards the road, as if they
were curious to see who went by, and sparrows
with rosy heads hopped about pecking at
things only a sparrow would think worth
pecking at.
Then there were a few cottonwoods but no
eucalyptus. Then a thick growth of Carolina
poplars screening a white house. Then a girl
walking a horse along the shoulder of the
road. She had levi's on and a loud shirt and
she was chewing on a twig. The horse looked
hot but not bothered and the girl was
crooning to him gently. Beyond a fieldstone
wall a gardener was guiding a power lawnmower
over a huge undulating lawn that ended far
back in the portico* of a Williamsburg
colonial mansion, the huge deluxe size.
Somewhere someone was playing left-handed
exercises on a grand piano.
(139)
There is really nothing else we need to know
about Idle Valley, at least superficially. Marlowe
sounds innocent and clean and almost elegiac, as if the
place he has entered is a dream.. His description,
begun with four sentences all beginning with the same
phrase "then I was"; "then there were"; "then a"; and
"then a" lend a poetic, entrancing rhythm to this
dreamlike quality; and the young girl crooning, the
299
undulating lawns and the silent lawnmower, no less, all
become the sound of a lovely yet surreal symphony of
pastoral wealth and opulence.
But, suddenly, the mood abruptly changes and we
are, along with Marlowe, back in the real world, as
Marlowe enters the Wade home and the already-loud,
obnoxious, cocktail party becomes louder and more
telling to this ever—critical and sensitive private
eye:
Then all this wheeled away and the
glisten of the lake showed hot and bright....
It was the same old cocktail party,
everybody talking too loud, nobody listening,
everybody hanging on for dear life to a mug
of the juice, eyes very bright, cheeks
flushed or pale and sweaty according to the
amount of alcohol consumed and the capacity
of the individual to handle it.
(140)
In the ensuing scene Chandler is able to make some
pointed comments about writing, and at the same time
allows Marlowe to assert a kind of mental toughness
(Howard calls it meanness) toward a self—pitying
attitude both Wade and his wife reveal. Both Natasha
Spender and Terry Speir have taken note that Chandler
uses Wade as an autobiographical voice, and here allows
him to perhaps articulate Chandler's own personal
misgivings about his craft, and what writing the
formula detective story has made of him. Marlowe
300
and Wade adjourn to Wade's office and begin to talk
about Wade's work. Quickly the conversation becomes a
vehicle for Wade's cynicism and anger about his own
writing. Wade's self-indulgence is for the historical
romances he writes, but the doubts and fears seem to be
the same as those Chandler expressed about the
detective story.
In a letter Chandler wrote to Juanita Messick in
August 1953, shortly before The Long Goodbye was
published, he humorously bemoans the fact there is no
money in essay writing:
I could have been a very fine essayist, and
should thoroughly have enjoyed that. Much
more so than murder stories, which part of my
mind always looks on with a certain
condescension. (Selected Letters 347)
This part of his mind comes to the surface for the
first time in his fiction in the character of Wade, and
Chandler can vent some of the frustration he, it seems,
has always felt for not being able to write outside of
his chosen genre. Perhaps this is further evidence of
his great need, in The Long Goodbye, to transcend the
formula of the hardboiled story.
Chandler's novelist pulls no punches in this
diatribe of self—rebuke:
You're looking at a small time operator
in a small time business, Marlowe. All
writers are punks and I am one of the
301
punkest. I've written twelve best sellers,
and if I ever finish that stack of magoozlum
on the desk there I may possibly have written
thirteen. And not a damn one of them worth
the powder to blow it to hell.... I'm an
egotistical son of a bitch, a literary
prostitute or pimp choose your own word---
and an all-around heel....
(142)
This serious and almost pathological self—abuse
must, of course, be seen in its proper perspective.
Wade cannot remember the events of the night of the
murder of his mistress Sylvia Lennox. He only knows
that he saw her that night after she had been killed
and then went home and got so drunk that he blacked out
the memory and now feels a deep-seated guilt about his
responsibility, thinking, in a subconscious part of his
mind, that he had killed her and that enough alcohol
would bring out the truth. It doesn't, but Marlowe
does. However, by that time Wade is dead, killed by
his wife Eileen, who cannot afford for Wade to remember
the truth about that night.
Sharing both of her men with the same woman drove
her mad, but coolly and methodically so, and Marlowe
cannot forgive her. He liked Roger Wade, had
befriended him, and remained loyal to him even after
his death by bringing his murderer to justice.
Although all of this is not to be realized for
some time yet in the novel, Marlowe is beginning to
302
understand that Wade is feeling guilty about something,
and that his drinking is not merely because he can't
finish his thirteenth novel. Marlowe rejects Wade's
offer to be a live—in baby sitter for a month, because
he knows he couldn't stop Wade if he wanted to drink.
And Wade, angry by the refusal, says to Marlowe:
"...I'm asking you as a friend. You did more than that
for Lennox."
The reference here is to Marlowe's helping Lennox
escape and then going to jail rather than reveal where
he took Lennox, but Marlowe feels guilty about his role
in Lennox's supposed suicide and says: "I got Lennox
killed, mister. I got him killed" (143).
Both Wade and Marlowe feel guilt for different
deaths (one that didn't even happen) but Wade is unable
to do anything but get drunk, while Marlowe continues
to piece together and probe the mystery until he is
satisfied the truth has been exposed and justice has
been done. His loyalty to both Lennox and Wade, and to
his own standard of ethics and justice, is clearly his
essential motivation throughout the novel.
Significant, in this regard, is Chandler's first
of two overt references to the current red-baiting and
HUAC hearings in Hollywood. Wade's cocktail party, a
gathering of Hollywood's upper crust, becomes the ideal
303
setting for this reference; and while the reference is
incidental by itself and seemingly meaningless, it must
be seen as Chandler's veiled attempt to tie the events
of the novel into the reality of the political events
of his time.
Neither Chandler nor Marlowe is much impressed by
the rich and famous of Idle Valley society as we see
them at the party. These loud and sweaty-faced rich
are the same power elite who have capitulated to the
climate of fear which has swept Hollywood; money and
power had become more important than the reputations
and lives of hundreds accused of nothing more than a
belief in a political philosophy. Essentially, what was
being destroyed, as much as the individuals sent to
prison or blacklisted, was the very fabric of American
democratic principle. Chandler, then, uses this party
as a metaphor for a society blithely indulging itself
while dismissing out of hand the nature of what,
through collaboration and ignorance, it was bringing
about: fear, injustice, and betrayal of the basic
democratic standard.
Marlowe has just witnessed an ugly confrontation
between Wade and Dr. Loring, Linda's husband, an
insipid man, and a jealous and thoroughly despicable
character, who Linda, Marlowe's soon—to—be lover, will
304
shortly divorce. Wade handles the situation very well,
defusing an angry and ridiculous Dr. Loring, giving him
no chance but to leave, alone, after making a public
fool of himself in accusing Wade of seeing his wife
Linda. Marlowe, disgusted by this time with the nice
people of Idle Valley, symbolically "...turned [his]
back on the room and let them sizzle while [he] drank
[his] scotch" (146).
This gesture seems important. Turning his back on
the sordid life of the rich is obviously symbolic of
Marlowe's attitude (and Chandler's, who once refused an
offer to join a prominent social club because it would
not admit Jews). But more important than Marlowe's
rejection of a morally bankrupt society is that his
disinterest and rejection of the mainstream attracts
the one element at the party perhaps more out of sorts
than Marlowe:
A small girl with mud-colored hair and a
band around her forehead popped up beside me
and put a glass on the bar and bleated....
The small girl turned to me. "Are you
interested in Communism?" she asked me. She
was glassy—eyed and she was running a small
red tongue along her lips as if looking for a
crumb of chocolate. "I think everyone ought
to be," she went on. "But when you ask any of
the men here they just want to paw you."
I nodded and looked over my glass at her
snub nose and sun—coarsened skin.
A guy... came up behind her...
"Come on kitten. Time to go home."
305
..."Take your hands off me, you
goddamned rapist," she screamed, and threw
the rest of her drink in his face....
"For Christsakes, baby, I'm your
husband," he yelled back....
She sobbed violently and threw herself
into his arms. I stepped around them and got
out of there. Every cocktail party is the
same, even the dialogue.
(147)
In the person of this drunken young woman,
Chandler not only indirectly brings up the red—baiting
taking place in Hollywood at this time, but he has the
more direct opportunity to reveal an attitude that
seems to be consistent with his central theme of
loyalty and betrayal. The woman, obviously educated and
well-informed about current political events, is as
well concerned that "everyone ought to be" interested
in these political realities. One can infer that her
concern is for what she considers injustice and for the
persecution of so many because of their leftist
philosophies. Otherwise, her interest in the subject
of communism would probably be more strident and
critical. Her drunkenness allows her to be blatantly
honest and open about everything.
But more important than her concern is the fact
that whenever she raises the subject of Communism she
is ignored and propositioned. Chandler has made it
difficult for the reader to relate and sympathize with
306
this drunk and absurd figure; he ostracizes her from
even her husband, yet he obliquely aligns her with
Marlowe, against a blase, hypocritical community who,
when confronted with an issue of conscience, refuses to
be concerned. The cocktail party then becomes a
microcosm of the Hollywood film community, and even of
the American society; and Marlowe is again aligned,
almost against his will, with the little men and women.
In this case Chandler's democratic representative
is a driven and frustrated and very out of place young
woman. Like Marlowe, she has romantic and chivalrous
ideas about life, when life, in the form of the party
guests, wants only to "paw" her.
This young woman, in the middle of her inebriated
monologue, suddenly asks Marlowe his name and then goes
on to quote from Christopher Marlowe's "Helen of Troy":
'was this the face that launched a thousand
ships/ And burnt topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.'
Then she emerges from her poetic mood:
she opened her eyes, grabbed her glass, and
winked at [Marlowe].
"You were pretty good in there chum.
Been writing any poetry lately?"
"Not very much."
(147)
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Then her husband interrupts her and drags her away so
he can get home to water his "tuberous begonias."
Here is Marlowe's natural ally: the
disenfranchised and ridiculously romantic. Yet she is
able to express the need to at least understand
Communism without irrationally striking out against it
in fear and anger. The lines of poetry she quotes,
alluding to the Trojan War fought over the beauty of
Helen, seems to be significant here. In quoting these
romantic lines to Marlowe, this young woman intuitively
recognizes the detective as the romantic he surely is.
As well, these particular lines are appropriate
because they present the reader with historical
circumstances, violent and chaotic by nature, which
become controlled and fashioned into the beautiful and
orderly, through the auspices of the poet. This
artistic creative process is the wellspring of the
moral force of art. This is the same discovery process
that Gardner speaks of in terms of moral fiction; and
it becomes the discovery process of Marlowe as he
fashions truth and justice from the chaos and violence
around him. And , of course, Chandler, the principle
artist in this process, is creating beautiful and moral
fiction. Also interesting to note is Marlowe's
response to the woman's query. He says no, he hasn't
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written much poetry lately. Without stretching the
metaphor too far, it may be acceptable to see this
remark as his realization that his role as a romantic
is in truth a failed and superfluous one, at least at
this point in time on this case. While he is beginning
to fuse the pieces of the these two stories, he is
still floundering and groping for the truth, and
despite the eventual success of his discovery process,
here he seems to realize his impotence. (This
acceptance of one's futility is not an attitude found
in the heroes of the genre.) It is almost as if he
senses that he will be helpless to prevent tragedy, and
he is right, for before long Roger Wade is murdered,
and Marlowe can do nothing to stop it.
This young woman and Marlowe may be seen as two
distinct faces of the same romantic vision. The woman,
young and naive, embraces the romantic ideal of the
Renaissance poet. Her romantic sympathy for the
persecuted communists of Hollywood is singularly met
with deaf ears and abuse. Her drunken and frustrated
anger toward her husband is comically absurd but is
also symbolic of the ineffectualness of this romantic
position in her hands.
Marlowe is perhaps equally romantic in ideal
terms, described in The High Window as a "shop—soiled
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Galahad." But Marlowe is not controlled by frustration
and naivete, drunkenness and reactionary anger. He has
survived the wars by this novel, and has understood the
reality of the anti-romantic world he lives in, as
surely this young woman does not. Although he may in
the long run be unable to prevent murders from
occurring, he is able to arrive at a clear resolution
of the mystery and create at least a poetic justice
which restores some semblance of order to the
community. He can do this only because of his hard-
boiled awareness of what motivates people and their
violence and corruption, yet his impetus towards
discovery is motivated by the same romantic and moral
code which in the hands of the young woman proves so
self—destructive.
In some respects, this scene allows Chandler to
look across time and see himself as a young poet in
England, writing hopelessly romantic verse about lost
love and heroic ideals. In Matthew Bruccoli's book,
Chandler Before Marlowe, there is collected Chandler's
early poems and essays, written before he left England
for America, when he was about eighteen. They are
singularly without merit, but the fascinating aspect of
this early work is the moral and romantic attitudes
that Chandler expresses about the hero. These first
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stirrings of an heroic and moral standard must be seen
as the gestation period for Chandler's mature
conception of his future hero, Philip Marlowe, who will
not appear for almost thirty more years.
A glance at just one of these poems will suffice
to indicate Chandler's early concerns. A poem called
"The Perfect Knight" is a wonderful example; written in
1909, its first two stanzas read:
He hath a sword of altar fire,
He hath a shield of shimmering air,
The one to slay his base desire,
The one to guard him from despair.
He hath a burnished helm of laughter,
He hath a lance of righteous wrath,
To gild the smoke—storm on his rafter,
To dash the foul thing from his path.
It goes on like this for a number of verses,
talking about "emotion", "love", "devotion", "soul",
and "a heart of song and mighty thunder,,/a voice of
endless pure delight."
It is remarkable, when looking back at this poem,
to see within it all of the basic elements which so
uncanningly describe Philip Marlowe. If anything
separates Marlowe from the corruption around him and
its temptations, it is his ability to guard the base
desires. He isn't quite so successful in slaying his
despair, but what is significant in this line is that
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even in 1909 Chandler seemed to intuit the despair that
his hero would one day succumb to. Perhaps to find a
way to ameliorate the despair, Chandler imparts the
weapon of laughter and wit to his perfect knight: "a
burnished helm of laughter", and "a voice of pure
delight". Again, Chandler seems to understand what his
hero will need , and as the poet, and later novelist,
he allows his gift of language to be used as a "shield"
and as a "lance of righteous wrath". And it is exactly
Chandler's use of wit and humor which arm Marlowe and
protect him.
Other poems reflect similar romantic and idyllic
concerns, and certainly seem to indicate that the young
English poet had a highly romantic and moral poetic
vision: consisting of sentiment and melancholy, despair
and courage, laughter and wit. These themes become the
burden of his lonely detective thirty years later.
This odd scene with the drunken woman quoting
romantic poetry has given Chandler the opportunity to
direct his attack, however subtle, at the Hollywood
community's cowardly response to government
intimidation. The HUAC hearings sent a current of fear
and betrayal through the community, and Chandler is
taking up the challenge and making clear his feelings
about such reprehensible behavior. This scene may also
312
be Chandler's attempt to look back at his youth and the
early romantic ideals he wrote about and place these
ideals into the more hardboiled and realistic
perspective of his detective. When he juxtaposes
Marlowe against the young woman, and aligns them as
romantic allies, we are able to appreciate the more
highly evolved and complex Marlowe and his mature
ability to utilize his romanticism and still remain
the realistic literary character he has become.
Marlowe has had enough of this crowd, and he
leaves the party and returns home. Eileen Wade calls
him and questions him about what he and Wade discussed
before he left. Chandler's detached but increasingly
complex first person voice, and his objective style do
not allow the reader to enter too far into Marlowe's
mind at this point. Therefore, at this time we are only
able to take the elements of the story as we are given
them, as does Marlowe, but we do not really know how
Marlowe is adding them up. Both the reader's and
Marlowe's suspicion, however, is beginning to shift to
Eileen Wade, with her curiosity and strangeness. This
is dramatically reinforced the next time Marlowe sees
her, when for the first time he clearly suspects her
behavior and becomes angry at her lack of compassion
and concern for her husband, who he finds himself
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defending more and more, a loyalty he did not think he
felt.
When Marlowe arrives, responding to Wade's call,
he finds him passed out on the lawn and Eileen smoking
a cigarette and leaning against the front door,
assuming an attitude of indifference which immediately
bothers Marlowe. After Marlowe carries Wade inside, Dr.
Loring, Linda's priggish and paranoid husband, arrives
to check on Wade. Loring's brief and superficial
examination and his supercilious and self-righteous
attitude about Wade's alcoholic state further arouse
Marlowe's anger, and he lashes out in contempt at
Loring and his lack of compassion: "as a professional
man you're a handful of flea dirt"(157).
Marlowe's sensitivity to the lack of compassion on
the part of both Eileen and Dr.Loring seems more acute
in this novel than ever before. As does his anger and
toughness in insisting that the truth be faced, no
matter how unpleasant. It is in just such responses as
this one toward Loring's aloofness that Marlowe's more
highly developed sensitivity and toughness is revealed.
These traits have certainly been a part of Marlowe's
character in the earlier works; and Chandler has always
made use of minor characters as foils to expose some
aspect of Marlowe. But in this work, Chandler develops
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his use of minor characters as never before, and in the
process we are able to see Marlowe's development as a
fully rounded literary presence.
Candy, the Wade's Chilean houseboy, is a perfect
example. Candy initially dislikes Marlowe and thinks he
is trying to exploit Wade's personal problems in order
to extort money, or that he is trying to seduce his
wife, Eileen. They engage in some heated and even
physical sparring matches. But what Marlowe comes to
understand is Candy's genuine compassion for Wade, and
his intense and violent loyalty toward the man for whom
he works.
Candy and Marlowe together carry Wade up to his
bedroom. As they are about to lift him from the couch,
Candy "looked sadly at Wade snoring... 'Pobrecito', he
murmured as if he meant it" (158).
When they get him in bed and Candy notices the
blood form the cut on Wade's head he becomes quite
angry and concerned, and Marlowe realizes this fact,
and asks Candy: "...You like this guy, don't you?"
(159).
Candy doesn't answer, but he takes Wade's shoes
off, helps Marlowe get him undressed and into pajamas
and covered up, and then looks at his boss: "...sadly,
shaking his sleek head from side to side, slowly."
315
"Somebody's got to take care of him," he
said. "I go change my clothes."
Get some sleep. I'll take care of him. I
can call you if I need you."
He faced me. "You better take care of
him good," he said in a quiet voice. "Very
good."
(160)
This scene in which Candy's concern and loyalty
for Wade is made so obvious is evidence of Chandler's
continuing need to point out the importance of this
quality between friends and even between employee and
employer. It was exactly the lack of such loyalty that
Chandler was witnessing in Hollywood while writing this
novel. And it seems that he wants to make clear his
respect for loyalty whenever he can. In the earlier
novels, Marlowe was always loyal to his clients. But
with the exception of Mavis Weld in The Little Sister,
and perhaps Harry Jones in The Big Sleep, the issue of
loyalty was never emphasized to anywhere near this
extent, particularly in terms of minor characters. In
the democratic community as Chandler envisions it in
The Long Goodbye, the houseboy becomes ennobled through
his compassion and loyalty to his boss.
In the final confrontation with Eileen Wade, after
she has killed her husband, Marlowe is ready to present
her with the background facts about her first marriage
to Lennox and about the night Sylvia was killed, and
316
see what she will say and do. This takes place at her
home, and Candy is very antagonistic to Marlowe,
nearly slamming the door in his face before he can
enter the house, and telling him to "beat it! Turn
blue. You want a knife in the belly" (243).
First of all, Candy blames Marlowe for Wade's
death. He thought Marlowe killed Wade in order to get
Eileen. He had attempted to tell the police that
Marlowe and Eileen were making love while Wade was
asleep, but Marlowe questioned him in front of the
police and they realized his story couldn't be true.
Candy was humiliated and confused about who killed his
boss, who he truly cared for. He had no reason to
suspect Eileen, and Marlowe's unremitting questioning
of her after Wade's death further antagonizes him and
brings out his good—intentioned loyalty to the wife of
his murdered boss.
But once Marlowe begins to bring out the truth
about Eileen's marriage to Terry Lennox, and he
realizes she has been lying about a number of things,
Candy begins to change his attitude. Candy, who had
been silently overhearing all of the questioning,
appears behind Marlowe: "His dark face was wooden but
there was something in his eyes I hadn't seen before"
(250).
317
Earlier Candy had refused to make Marlowe a drink;
now he realizes Marlowe is truly seeking to discover
the murderer of Wade:
"You are tired amigo," he said softly.
"I fix you a drink, no?"
"Bourbon on the rocks, thanks," I said.
"De pronto, senor."
(250)
Here is a radical change in attitude and a radical
change in the relationship between Candy and Marlowe.
When Marlowe eventually tricks Eileen into trapping
herself in lies, and she flees the room, Marlowe says
to Spencer, Wade's publisher: "She killed them both"
(258), meaning, both Sylvia Lennox and Roger Wade.
Candy, hot-blooded and long ready to seek revenge
for his boss's murder, has his switchblade in hand. The
ensuing dialogue reveals Marlowe's concern for justice,
and Candy's new found trust for Marlowe. It also
reveals how Chandler is able to create a bond of trust
and loyalty between a minor character and Marlowe, and
Marlowe's instinctive power to establish such loyalty
in those as good intentioned as he.
"Million de pardones, senor," he said.
"I was wrong about you. She killed the boss.
I think I— " He stopped and the blade shot
out again.
"No." I stood up and held my hand out.
"Give me the knife, Candy. You're just a nice
Mexican houseboy. They'd hang it onto you and
love it. Just the kind of smoke screen that
would make them grin with delight. You don't
318
know what I'm talking about. But I do. They
fouled it up so bad that they couldn't
straighten it out now if they wanted to. And
they don't want to. They'd blast a confession
out of you so quickly you wouldn't even have
time to tell them your full name. And you'd
be sitting on your fanny up in San Quentin
with a life sentence three weeks from
Tuesday....
"The knife, Candy.... This job here is
dead."
"Lots of jobs," he said quietly. Then he
reached out and dropped the knife into my
hand. "For you I do this."
(258-59)
Spencer wants to call the police when he realizes
Eileen has killed Wade. He says: "There is such a thing
as law" (259). Marlowe refuses, saying they don't have
the evidence to convict her. Spencer is angry and says:
"There's such a thing as justice." And Marlowe says,
"Tomorrow" (2 60).
An interesting exchange because Marlowe
understands how the law and the system work, and that
it would never convict Eileen Wade. Spencer's reaction
is a naive but understandable one, yet it is falsely
romantic and based on the illusion of law and justice.
Marlowe, the true romantic, is hardboiled and
realistic, and knows he must forge justice himself, and
he wants to leave Eileen alone with herself and her
alternatives.
319
She ends up killing herself that night and leaving
a suicide note in which she confesses to both murders.
As Marlowe suspected, even this is going to be covered
up by the D.A., but Marlowe, with the help of a couple
of honest cops in the D.A.'s office, smuggles out a
copy and has it published in an independent newspaper.
The confession brings Terry Lennox out of hiding, now
that his name has been cleared, which is what Marlowe
wanted all along, and enables Marlowe to finally say
goodbye.
As Marlowe leaves the Wade's for the last time,
Candy walks past him and goes quickly to the door and
hold it open. His new found respect and gratitude for
Marlowe is apparent, and Marlowe takes Candy's knife
out of his pocket and gives it back to him. Their final
exchange epitomizes the bond of trust that Chandler
emphatically establishes as the primary principle of
the democratic community:
He smiled.
"Nobody trusts me, but I trust you,
Candy."
"Lo Mismo, senor. Muchas gracias."
(260)
In this relationship between his detective
and the houseboy Candy, Chandler has created an
important metaphor. Their slowly developing trust and
loyalty become a significant indication that Chandler
320
is concerned in this work with the values which are
necessary for a healthy society. And this is
particularly relevant in that the story and the mystery
are about betrayal and disloyalty. And the story
evolving in Hollywood while Chandler is writing this
novel is also about betrayal, and Chandler, like his
hero, perhaps more accurately, through his hero, is
taking a stand.
Before Marlowe can leave Idle Valley, a number of
things happen which indicate the significant shift in
suspicion away from Wade and toward Eileen is taking
place in Marlowe's mind. He has been bothered from the
moment he arrived and saw Eileen standing so non
chalantly in the doorway while her husband was passed
out and possibly severely hurt, and he begins to wonder
if another woman might not be involved. He then goes to
Wade's study, ostensibly to destroy some notes for Wade
which had been left in his typewriter, and which he
didn't want Eileen to read.
Marlowe reads them instead, and discovers a long and
rambling tract, written while Wade was very drunk,
about "writers," and writing as a "lousy racket," his
own pathetic condition which he can't shake, incoherent
passages about a woman "sleeping on her side without
321
sound," and about how "a good man died for me once..."
(165-168).
Before Marlowe can make any sense out of it all, a
shot rings out, and he rushes upstairs to find Eileen
and Wade struggling over a pistol. It seems Wade has
tried to kill himself but fired into the ceiling
instead, and Eileen has pulled the pistol from his
hands just as Marlowe walks into the room. Marlowe
demands that Eileen leave the room ,and he then
confronts Wade about the phony suicide attempt and the
notes in the typewriter.
This scene is important because it reveals a more
complex aspect of Marlowe's character: that is, he is
able to become quite tough with Wade, yet through this
process discover a deeply hidden truth. He refuses to
indulge Wade's self-pity, and forces him to get closer
to the repressed truth he cannot seem to bring out of
his unconscious: the fact that he knows Eileen killed
his lover Sylvia Lennox, and that he did not. He is
confused because he became drunk immediately after
seeing Sylvia dead, beaten horribly, and lying in her
bed, which he had recently left .
This toughness of Marlowe's is consistent with his
behavior throughout this novel; he is tough with Wade,
with Eileen, with Linda Loring, and finally with Terry
322
Lennox. He is still the "shop-soiled Galahad", seeking
to fulfill a futile romantic vision of moral and
democratic justice, but he has become hardened to the
realistic world and insists upon facing it squarely,
refusing to indulge any who shirk this responsibility
and become, as he calls Terry, "moral defeatists." The
stinging and cruel nature of real life is not enough
for Marlowe to condone dishonesty or betrayal, and his
attitude here toward Wade and throughout the book,
seems to confirm that Chandler is most adamant on this
central principle.
As Marlowe is questioning Wade, he asks him, "what
about the sister— the one that died" (172)? Marlowe's
instinct is unerring; his vision of the truth clear and
focused. He thinks, "a wild pitch in a sense, but it
happened to split the plate." Wade's complete emotional
collapse at this juncture, and in response to Marlowe's
question, leads Marlowe to some basic conclusions and
realizations:
He lay back flat and deflated, his face
drained of emotion. His nose had that pinched
look. He could almost have been a dead man.
He wasn't throwing anybody down any stairs
tonight. Most likely not any night (172) .
Marlowe realizes that Wade is not capable of
violence ( The reference above is to the early
accusation that Wade, when drunk, threw Eileen down the
323
stairs, and this was one of the reasons for hiring
Marlowe as a bodyguard; it turns out, as Marlowe
suspects, to have been untrue,), and certainly not the
bloody and brutal head—smashing kind that killed
Sylvia.
Marlowe has zeroed in on the truth about Wade, and
about Eileen, although he cannot prove anything. He
knows the law cannot touch her, and so when he does
finally force her into confession, he realizes that to
turn her in would be a waste of time. Instead, he
leaves her alone with her guilt and her mistaken
projections of being convicted and sent to prison, and
does nothing to prevent her suicide. This is as
hardboiled as Marlowe gets, but it is behavior which
serves his devotion to justice, however that can be
found or created, and serves, as well, his loyalty to
both Terry and Wade, and to the truth. As he leaves
the lovely Idle Valley, which he had described so
pastorally when he first visited the Wades', Marlowe is
a man who has changed. The valley has become a hellish
place of decadence, corruption, confusion, and cold
blooded murder, and he thinks to himself, "all a man
named Marlowe wanted from it was out. And fast" (179).
Again, as always, Marlowe's sharp yet black humor
324
provides him with a measure of defense against all he
has witnessed and been exposed to.
The second and final reference in this novel to
the HUAC hearings in Hollywood occurs shortly after the
Wade murder has been officially declared a suicide.
Chandler's use of a minor character in this regard is
an important development forhim as a novelist.
Bernie Ohls, one of the few honest cops in
Chandler's work, and a friend of Marlowe's since the
early Farewell, Mv Lovely, is tough and cynical, and
has seen just about everything Los Angeles has to
offer, which is plenty. In Farewell. Mv Lovely, Ohls
was working for the D.A., and in this novel he is with
the county Sheriff's office. We first meet him in The
Long Goodbve after Wade has been found dead on his
couch in his study, and Marlowe calls the sheriff's
office, and Ohls is sent to head the investigation.
Marlowe's first thoughts about him are revealing:
"He was a hard tough cop with a grim outlook on life
but a very decent guy underneath" (213). To be decent,
a seemingly simple accomplishment, was important for
Marlowe, and something in very short supply in his
jaded world. It is this basic quality of human decency
in Ohls which allows these two tough men to have a
friendship of sorts, and which allows Chandler to use
325
Ohls as a means of developing his critique of our
society. Ohls is also being developed in this work in
order to lend another voice in Chandler's attack (and
it seems that it must be seen as an attack) against the
HUAC hearings, and against those who are betraying ther
friends and neighbors.
Marlowe reflects on why Ohls, as good and as smart
a cop as can be found, has never been promoted to
Captain: he "ought to have made Captain years ago....
But the Sheriff didn't like him and he didn't like the
Sheriff" (213). Chandler here is musing upon the
inconsequentialness of decency and honesty in our
society. And Ohls and Marlowe, kindred spirits at this
level, have not gotten very far; both would be
considered failures in their chosen fields.
Ohls later visits Marlowe's home to discuss the
so-called Wade suicide, which neither Ohls nor Marlowe
think was a suicide, both rightly suspecting Eileen as
the killer. They are discussing Marlowe's visit to
Harlan Potter, and Potter's pervasive but discreet
influence on this case in the D.A.'s and Sheriff's
offices. Marlowe says he didn't particularly like
Potter, but "I don't figure he's a crook" (227) .
This suprisingly naive response by Marlowe gives
Chandler a chance, through the tough voice of Ohls, to
326
lecture on the nature of the rich in American society,
and to bring up the Red baiting going on, and with
bitter and biting irony, to ridicule it as well. Ohls'
responds to Marlowe's opinion of Potter:
"There ain't no clean way to make a
hundred million bucks," Ohls said. "Maybe the
head man thinks his hands are clean but
somewhere along the line guys got pushed to
the wall, nice little businessmen got the
ground cut from under them and had to sell
out for nickels, decent people lost their
jobs, stocks got rigged on the market,
proxies got bought up like a penny weight of
old gold, and the five per centers and the
big law firms got paid hundred grand fees for
beating some law the people wanted but the
rich guys didn't, on account of it cut into
their profits. Big money is big power and big
power gets used wrong. It's the system. Maybe
it's the best we can get, but it still ain't
any Ivory Soap deal"
"You sound like a Red," I said, just to
needle him.
"I wouldn't know," he said
contemptuously. "I ain't been investigated
yet." (227)
Two things are happening here, and both concern
Chandler's obvious need to criticize the immoral nature
of the rich and powerful, and the workings of our
government, in the form of a congressional committee
such as HUAC. In the voice of Ohls, rather than
Marlowe, removing Chandler one step further from his
apparent spokesperson, Chandler is able to pass sober
and realistic judgment on the ruthlessness of American
capitalism as seen from the eyes of an honest cop,
327
sworn to uphold our society's laws. Chandler's use of
Ohls as an additional critical voice, railing against
greed and our inequitable system, is another indication
of Chandler's growth as a novelist, and his ability to
expand his authorial voice into that of a minor
character. In this angry diatribe, Chandler expresses
his sympathy yet again for the "decent" little people
who are helpless victims of the rich , who exploit and
destroy these decent hardworking folk as a matter of
course.
Potter becomes the symbol of all that Ohls and
Marlowe despise because he and his minions are able to
corrupt a democratic system, get rich and powerful, and
keep their hands clean in the process. But somebody
always gets hurt. And the honest cop and the honest
private detective, decent yet fairly inconsequential
people themselves, as they well realize, feel for the
ones who suffer, and feel even worse for not being able
to do very much about it. Ohls' speech is as blanket an
indictment of what has become of the American dream and
its promise as can be found in Chandler's work. And for
this reason Marlowe tells Ohls that he sounds like a
Red.
Ohls' rejoinder is a very clever one. It implies
that the HUAC hearings are not really investigating
328
communist influence in the film industry, as they
claim, but are instead smearing people's reputations on
the basis of their political beliefs and opinions. Ohls
doesn't know if he is a Red because the committee
hasn't pronounced him one as yet. The sheer absurdity
of these hearings is subtly made apparent in this
statement of Ohls'. In other words, Chandler seems to
be saying , through Ohls, that the hearings are
essentially being used to create a forum for
accusations to be made against people who have broken
no law, but who simply are critical of our system. The
label Red, then, becomes the stigma attached to those
who are so critical, and who then can be effectively
silenced, or who can be given the opportunity to betray
their colleagues and become redeemed in the eyes of our
government and the studio moguls, who will then allow
them to continue to work. This is not the kind of
redemption Chandler had in mind when he wrote about all
art possessing a quality of redemption, and in the
hands of our government even redemption has become
corrupted , another betrayal of what our society once
considered an essential cornerstone: loyalty to the
truth and to our community.
Despite their allegiance to democratic and moral
principles, despite and perhaps because of their
329
decency, Ohls and Marlowe can only be minimally
effective in the midst of this all pervasive betrayal
and corruption of the American ideal. Marlowe is able
to disclose Eileen Wade's guilt, but it is her own
misplaced fear of conviction that dooms her by her own
hand, and not anything Marlowe or Ohls could have done
within the context of the law. Yet in this novel,
through Marlowe, Chandler attempts to resist this
capitulation and betrayal taking place within his
community. The novel and Marlowe's integrity is that
resistance. As a fully complex literary character,
Marlowe is in search for the hidden truth. In this
case, the hidden truth is not simply who done it, but
it is a discovery process about how we can maintain
our honor in a society which has abandoned that
concept.
Chandler's years on the studio backlots during the
early years of the HUAC hearings, his acute awareness
of the political scene as indicated by his letters and
numerous discussions with his screenwriter colleagues,
and his repeated insistence in The Long Goodbye, on the
importance of loyalty and justice, and his abhorrence
of betrayal, support the argument that Chandler was
writing this novel with very particular motivation.
Chandler needed to respond to the travesty taking place
330
within his immediate community against basic democratic
principles, while at the same time stretch the mystery
genre as far as he could. The Long Goodbye is that
response. He had always wanted to transcend the mystery
genre, and he had been doing just that all along; but
in this work, history has allowed Raymond Chandler to
do so on a more significant level than perhaps even he
could have imagined was possible.
331
Conclusion
If we were to assert that humanism was the first
principle of democracy, then it would follow that moral
experience was the basis of a free society. In a
democracy, morality implies the elimination of
hierarchical structures. As Thoreau wrote in his
journal: "I can go to my neighbors and meet on ground
elevated as we could expect to meet upon if we were now
in heaven" (2: 208). This elevated ground places us all
on equal footing, becomes the ideal democratic
understanding, and seems to be the key to American
moral and philosophic thought.
The problem lies in the fact that the democracy of
Thoreau and Emerson and Jefferson and Whitman has been
corrupted beyond recognition. For all intents and
purposes, there is no common ground upon which we can
stand, and if there were, it would probably be for sale
and affordable only to the rich. Of course, Whitman saw
this sea-change quite early and bemoans this fact in
"Democratic Vistas." In fact, much of the American
literary tradition of the late nineteenth and certainly
all of the twentieth century is an attempt to reconcile
the ideal with the harsh reality. And the fiction of
Raymond Chandler is no exception.
332
Chandler, however, is writing in a genre long
scorned by literary critics as second rate. He is seen
as the master of the hardboiled mystery, but his work
is not considered part of the American Literature canon
and its traditions. The hope of this work is that
Chandler can be re-evaluated and properly placed within
the mainstream of American literature where he belongs.
His fiction compellingly confronts the moral
concerns of our culture. And while obliged to the
formula of the mystery story, Chnadler's realistic
understanding of the ambiguities and contradictions of
our corrupt culture allows his work (through the
auspices of his hero) to transcend the formula and
become complex, philosophic, and moral fiction.
Chandler has established a broad and sweeping
critique of American society, and the mystery and its
formula are simply the means by which he has chosen to
express his imaginative vision of America. His hero is
a wandering , solitary detective "in search of a hidden
truth." His discovery process is a moral one, not
didactic or dogmatic, and is based on the abandoned
principles of the democratic community: loyalty,
courage, wit, and a healthy and absolute rejection of
betrayal and "moral defeatism." He is in a long line of
American literary heroes who find themselves isolated
333
and alienated from their communities because of their
insistence on remaining faithful to a moral code: a
code which is diametrically opposed to the accepted
mode of behavior adopted by the greedy and compromised
society. This integrity grants a certain measure of
grace for these heroes, and permits them to survive and
find the truth they seek.
Chandler's hero pushes against the capitulation of
our democratic values, but by so doing, he must pay a
price. He becomes bitter, cynical, and depressed. He
cannot connect with the community, and he cannot find a
friend, yet he moves freely amongst all facets of the
society, and restores a semblance of balance and
justice. He isn't satisfied in the end, and all is not
well, but Chandler is both a romantic and a realist,
and ambiguity and honor are uneasy but committed
partners in the American night of Chandler's and
mainstream America's fiction.
334
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Creator Boas, Kenneth Philip (author)

Core Title The moral fiction of Raymond Chandler

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag literature, American,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor Schulz, Max F. (committee chair), Baker, Robert (committee member), Martin, Jay (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c20-234924

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Legacy Identifier DP23164.pdf

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