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Insubordination: Marlowe is 33 and went to college once. He’s a bit of a cynic, and his manners are bad. He was fired for insubordination. “I test very high on insubordination.” (The Big Sleep)
American hero: “Chandler seems to have created the culminating American hero: wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical and rebellious” (NYT Book Review).
A detective always has a code: “Marlowe is Prometheus [of American myth]: the noble outsider, sacrificing and enduring for a code he alone upholds.” [The Annotated Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler (eds. Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Rizzuto)]
Tough guy: He’s tough, clever, and a good judge of character. He’s brash and witty.
At his tiny apartment, he goes to a chessboard on a card table. “There was a problem laid out on the board, a six-mover. I couldn’t solve it, like a lot of my problems” (The Big Sleep ch. 24).
In the Philip Marlowe books, Marlowe doesn’t have a backstory, a love interest, or family drama.
“Look,” I said. “This room is eighteen floors above ground. And this little bug climbs all the way up here just to make a friend. Me. My luck piece.” I folded the bug carefully into the soft part of the handkerchief and tucked the handkerchief into my pocket. Randall was pie-eyed. His mouth moved, but nothing came out of it.
“I wonder whose lucky piece Marriott was,” I said.
“Not yours, pal.” [Randall’s] voice was acid—cold acid.
“Perhaps not yours either.” My voice was just a voice. I went out of the room and shut the door.
I rode the express elevator down to the Spring Street entrance and walked out on the front porch of City Hall and down some steps and over to the flower beds. I put the pink bug down carefully behind a bush.
I wondered, in the taxi going home, how long it would take him to make the Homicide Bureau again” (31).
Anne: “You’re so marvelous. So brave, so determined and you work for so little money. Everybody bats you over the head and chokes you and smacks your jaw and fills you with morphine, but you just keep right on hitting between tackle and end until they’re all worn out. What makes you so wonderful?” (40)
“There are the aficionados of deduction and the aficionados of sex who can’t get it into their hot little heads that the fictional detective is a catalyst, not a Casanova.” (Trouble Is My Business, Raymond Chandler)
“Silence. Traffic resumed. I walked along to the double doors and stood in front of them. They were motionless now. It wasn’t any of my business. So I pushed them open and looked in” (1).
“Nothing made it my business except curiosity. But strictly speaking, I hadn’t had any business in a month. Even a no-charge job was a change” (3).
Anne: “You take some awful chances, mister” (10).
“I had concealed a murder and suppressed evidence for twenty-four hours, but I was still at large and had a five-hundred-dollar check coming. The smart thing for me to do was to take another drink and forget the whole mess. That being the obviously smart thing to do, I called Eddie Mars and told him I was coming … That was how smart I was” (The Big Sleep ch. 21).
Marlowe sees Malloy in the house he’s escaping. Downstairs, he stops outside an office. “This was the time to leave, to go far away. So I pushed the door open and stepped quietly in” (26).
I “looked at a piece of black shiny metal on a stand. It showed a full, smooth curve with a shallow fold in it and two protuberances on the curve. I stared at it. Marriott saw me staring at it.
“An interesting bit,” he said. “I picked it up just the other day. Asta Dial’s Spirit of Dawn.”
“I thought it was Klopstein’s Two Warts on a Fanny,” I said.
Mr. Lindsay Marriott’s face looked as if he had swallowed a bee. He smoothed it out with an effort.
“You have a somewhat peculiar sense of humor,” he said.
“Not peculiar,” I said. “Just uninhibited” (8).
The Golden Age of detective fiction “starts after the First World War and lasts up to about 1930. … Two thirds or three quarters of all the detective stories 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.” (The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler)
Anne: “You ought to have given a dinner party. … Gleaming silver and crystal, bright crisp linen … candlelight, the women in their best jewels and the men in white ties, the servants hovering discreetly with the wrapped bottles of wine, the cops looking a little uncomfortable in their hired evening clothes, as who the hell wouldn’t, the suspects with their brittle smiles and restless hands, and you at the head of the long table telling all about it, little by little, with your charming light smile and a phony English accent like Philo Vance” (40).
How is the book an exemplar of the hard-boiled American school of detective/crime fiction?
As to the emotional basis of the hard-boiled story, obviously it does not believe that justice will be done—unless some very determined individual makes it his business to see that justice is done. The stories were about the men who made that happen. (Trouble Is My Business, Raymond Chandler)
The phrase is an Americanism. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable: to be “hard-boiled” is to be “toughened by experience; a person with no illusions or sentimentalities.” [The Annotated Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler (eds. Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Rizzuto)]
Hardboiled as a subgenre is infamously “American.” [The Annotated Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler (eds. Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Rizzuto)]
The popular mystery story shed its refined good manners and went native. (Trouble Is My Business, Raymond Chandler)
Walter Mosley: hardboiled style is “elegant and concise language used to describe an ugly and possibly irredeemable world.” The world according to hardboiled is not only tough but vibrant: a gritty, profoundly urban setting teeming with underworld life—booze, sex, drugs, violence—and the decadence of the wealthy and powerful. [The Annotated Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler (eds. Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Rizzuto)]
For Chandler and Hammett, Hemingway was the greatest living American novelist. The Sun Also Rises (1926) became the hardboiled touchstone, with its interior monologue, stark prose, and colloquial turns of phrase. [The Annotated Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler (eds. Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Rizzuto)]
“Who is this Hemingway person at all?” Marlowe: “A guy that keeps saying the same thing over and over until you begin to believe it must be good” (24).
“In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. … down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things.
He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks—that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.
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. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.” (The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler)
“They were hard men, and what they did, whether they were called police officers, private detectives or newspaper men, was hard, dangerous work. It was work they could get.” (Trouble Is My Business, Raymond Chandler)
What is Marlowe’s relationship with the police in LA and Bay City? Why is Marlowe a private investigator instead of a police officer?
Marlowe gets off the phone with Nulty. I held the dead phone and snarled into it: “Seventeen hundred and fifty cops in this town and they want me to do their leg work for them” (7).
Randall’s “eyes were going over my face line by line, corpuscle by corpuscle, like Sherlock Holmes with his magnifying glass or Thorndyke with his pocket lens” (29).
“To hell with the rich. They made me sick.” (The Big Sleep)
“Just so we understand each other,” [Randall] said after a pause. “If you crab this case, you’ll be in a jam. It may be a jam you can wriggle out of this time. I don’t know. But little by little you will build up a body of hostility in this department that will make it damn hard for you to do any work.”
“Every private dick faces that every day of his life—unless he’s just a divorce man” (31).
Hemingway: “Okey, how many cops do you find living on a street even as good as this, with nice lawns and flowers? I’d know four or five, all vice squad boys. They get all the gravy. Cops like me live in itty-bitty frame houses on the wrong side of town. Want to see where I live?”
“What would it prove?”
“Listen, pally,” the big man said seriously. “You got me on a string, but it could break. Cops don’t go crooked for money. Not always, not even often. They get caught in the system. They get you where they have you do what is told them or else. And the guy that sits back there in the nice big corner office, with the nice suit and the nice liquor breath he thinks chewing on them seeds makes him smell like violets, only it don’t—he ain’t giving the orders either. You get me?”
“What kind of a man is the mayor?”
“What kind of guy is a mayor anywhere? A politician. You think he gives the orders? Nuts. You know what’s the matter with this country, baby?”
“Too much frozen capital, I heard.”
“A guy can’t stay honest if he wants to,” Hemingway said. “That’s what’s the matter with this country. He gets chiseled out of his pants if he does. You gotta play the game dirty or you don’t eat. A lot of bastards think all we need is ninety thousand FBI men in clean collars and brief cases. Nuts. The percentage would get them just the way it does the rest of us. You know what I think? I think we gotta make this little world all over again. Now take Moral Rearmament. There you’ve got something. M.R.A. There you’ve got something, baby.”
“If Bay City is a sample of how it works, I’ll take aspirin,” I said.
“You could get too smart,” Hemingway said softly. “You might not think it, but it could be. You could get so smart you couldn’t think about anything but bein’ smart. Me, I’m just a dumb cop. I take orders. I got a wife and two kids and I do what the big shots say. Blane could tell you things. Me, I’m ignorant” (33).
L.A. served as setting and in some ways as the other major character in the Philip Marlowe books. It was a city of excess, escapism (Hollywood!), tawdriness, exhibitionism, and corruption. [The Annotated Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler (eds. Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Rizzuto)]
In the nineteen-teens it was the fastest-growing city on earth, hyped and hustled like no other city ever had been. From 1910-1930, the population ballooned from 310,000 to 1,250,000. [The Annotated Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler (eds. Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Rizzuto)]
The streets were paved, automobiles replaced horse-drawn carriages and the electric railway, and the L.A. Aqueduct was built to heist water from the Owens Valley 250 miles away. [The Annotated Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler (eds. Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Rizzuto)]
Moral ambiguity or moral decay? Corruption was rife, and politicians and law enforcement often worked with the “System,” the L.A. syndicate of organized crime. L.A. was also a proto-Las Vegas with prostitution and gambling. [The Annotated Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler (eds. Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Rizzuto)]
Captain Gregory: “Being a copper I like to see the law win. I’d like to see the flashy well-dressed mugs like Eddie Mars spoiling their manicures in the rock quarry at Folsom, alongside of the poor little slum-bred hard guys that got knocked over on their first caper and never had a break since. That’s what I’d like. You and me both lived too long to think I’m likely to see it happen. Not in this town, not in any town half this size, in any part of this wide, green and beautiful U.S.A. we just don’t run our country that way” (The Big Sleep ch. 30).
Marlowe on Bay City: “Okey, it’s a nice town. So is Chicago. You could live there a long time and not see a Tommygun. Sure, it’s a nice town. It’s probably no crookeder than Los Angeles. But you can only buy a piece of a big city. You can buy a town this size all complete, with the original box and tissue paper. That’s the difference. And that makes me want out.”
What are your thoughts on the portrayal of women in this book?
Do women have power in this story? If so, what kind?
Is the bad guy always a gal?
“You can have a hangover from other things than alcohol. I had one from women. Women made me sick” (The Big Sleep, ch. 25).
Marlowe looks over Jessie Florian’s photos: “The women had good legs and displayed their inside curves more than Will Hays would have liked. But their faces were as threadbare as a bookkeeper’s office coat. Blondes, brunettes, large cowlike eyes with a peasant dullness in them. Small sharp eyes with urchin greed in them. One or two of the faces obviously vicious” (5).
Velma Valento “leaned forward a little and her smile became just a little glassy. Suddenly, without any real change in her, she ceased to be beautiful. She looked merely like a woman who would have been dangerous a hundred years ago, and twenty years ago daring, but who today was just Grade B Hollywood” (39).
“I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. … Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn’t a game for knights” (The Big Sleep ch. 24).
Chandler grew up in Nebraska, England, and Ireland and attended a good English public school, where he studied languages and the classics. Retellings of the stories of the Knights of the Round Table were common in Edwardian England. [The Annotated Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler (eds. Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Rizzuto)]
About Jessie Florian: “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” (5).
“I filled a pipe and reached for the packet of paper matches. I lit the pipe carefully. She watched that with approval. Pipe smokers were solid men. She was going to be disappointed in me” (13).
Mr. Grayle walks in on his wife and Marlowe. He departs. “I was still cold. I felt nasty, as if I had picked a poor man’s pocket” (18).
“I liked the cool quiet of her voice. I liked her nerve” (11).
“Oh I know I’m just a damned inquisitive wench. But there’s a strain of bloodhound in me. My father was a cop. His name was Cliff Riordan and he was police chief of Bay City for seven years. I suppose that’s what’s the matter” (13).
“I lit my pipe for the eighth or ninth time and looked carefully across the half-dusted glass to Miss Riordan’s grave and honest little face. You could get to like that face a lot. Glamoured up blondes were a dime a dozen, but that was a face that would wear. I smiled at it” (13).
“Probably you’d like me to mind my own business, is that it? And not have ideas you don’t have first. I thought I was helping a little” (19).
“The wet air was as cold as the ashes of love” (37).
Mona “brought the glass over. Bubbles rose in it like false hopes. … Blood began to move around in me, like a prospective tenant looking over a house” (The Big Sleep ch. 28).
Anne Riordan “came back with the glass and her fingers cold from holding the cold glass touched mine and I held them for a moment and then let them go slowly as you let go of a dream when you wake with the sun in your face and have been in an enchanted valley.” He repeatedly asks to be dropped at a taxi stand. “I looked back a moment before I closed the door. It was a nice room. It would be a nice room to wear slippers in” (28).
“[Anne Riordan] likes you,” Randall said, like a polite FBI man in a movie, a little sad, but very manly. “Her old man was as straight a cop as ever lost a job.”
“She’s a nice girl. Not my type.”
“You don’t like them nice?” He had another cigarette going. The smoke was being fanned away from his face by his hand.
“I like smooth shiny girls, hardboiled and loaded with sin.”
“They take you to the cleaners,” Randall said indifferently.
“Sure. Where else have I ever been? What do you call this session?” (29)
To what degree does Chandler’s second book reinforce or, conversely, call into question some of what we learned or thought we knew from reading The Big Sleep? Examples: relationships with women, code of honor, self-destructive streak, ultimate faith (or lack thereof) in humanity?
Why do you think Chandler titled the book Farewell, My Lovely?
The book contains racist language and themes, ethnic slurs, and descriptions of African-Americans, Mexicans, Asians, Native Americans, and Italian-Americans that are likely to be found offensive. How far does this overshadow the merits of the rest of the book?
The intense racism in the book is woven into scene after scene. Philip Marlowe arguably could have been disgusted by racism. Alternatively, he could have removed Marlowe’s references to and thoughts about characters’ race from the stories altogether. These aren’t the choices Chandler made. Chandler was trying to write Marlowe as living by his own personal code of honor in a corrupt world. Is the book evidence of a failure of empathy and imagination on Chandler’s part? Complete obliviousness?
“[T]he detective story, even in its most conventional form, is difficult to write well. Good specimens of the art are much rarer than good serious novels. Second-rate items outlast most of the high-velocity fiction, and a great many that should never have been born simply refuse to die at all. They are as durable as the statues in public parks and just about as dull.
“This fact is annoying to people of what is called discernment.” (The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler)
There’s authentic power in a kind of writing that, even at its most mannered and artificial, made most of the fiction of the time taste like a cup of luke-warm consommé at a spinsterish tearoom. (Trouble Is My Business, Raymond Chandler)
Most of the plots were rather ordinary and most of the characters rather primitive types of people. … Their characters lived in a world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civilization had created the machinery for its own destruction, and was learning to use it with all the moronic delight of a gangster trying out his first machine gun. (Trouble Is My Business, Raymond Chandler)
The law was something to be manipulated for profit and power. The streets were dark with something more than night. The mystery story grew hard and cynical about motive and character, but it was not cynical about the effects it tried to produce nor about its technique of producing them. (Trouble Is My Business, Raymond Chandler)
“In this country the mystery writer is looked down on as sub-literary … When people ask … why I don’t try my hand at a serious novel, I don’t argue with them; I don’t even ask them what they mean by a serious novel. It would be useless. They wouldn’t know.” [The Annotated Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler (eds. Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Rizzuto)]
There are those who think violence and sadism interchangeable terms, and those who regard detective fiction as subliterary on no better grounds than that it does not habitually get itself jammed up with subordinate clauses, tricky punctuation and hypothetical subjunctives. (Trouble Is My Business, Raymond Chandler)
Murder, My Sweet (1944)
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Teasers & Tidbits
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