Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
The creator of Philip Marlowe has been called an imitator and a hack, but he deserves his lonely, disillusioned corner in the American literary canon.
Jul 31, 2002 | A few years ago, passing through Santa Monica on the way to L.A. International, I found myself gazing at the pseudo-Mexican, stucco-ed architecture and wondering why an area I had never been anywhere near before seemed so familiar. Then I saw, for the first time, the Pacific pier where Philip Marlowe caught the water taxi to the Montecito gambling boat in "Farewell, My Lovely" and realized the source of my dij` vu: I had seen it all before through the eyes of Raymond Chandler. To paraphrase Burt Lancaster in "Atlantic City," the Pacific Ocean was really something back then.
Probably no writer has evoked urban Southern California for more readers than Raymond Chandler, which is ironic, because Chandler hated L.A. at the same time he was providing us with an enduring object of nostalgia. As the cover art of the new Vintage reissues of Chandler's nine published books proves, nostalgia is a large part of Chandler's appeal. In the city that constantly renews itself without ever changing, Chandler created an astonishingly adaptable genre that continues to evolve.
Thinly disguised variants of Chandler's Philip Marlowe, almost all of them denizens of Los Angeles, are resurrected every few years to revise the past (Jack Nicholson's seedy post-Depression hustler in "Chinatown"), mirror the present (James Garner's sly, laid-back, me-decade private dick in TV's "The Rockford Files") and even anticipate the future (Harrison Ford's burnt-out replicant hunter in "Blade Runner"). Steve Martin parodied Chandler in "Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid" and Dennis Potter paid homage to him in "The Singing Detective." He has even influenced the stage musical; without Raymond Chandler, there would have been no "City of Angels." (And how in the world did Chandler ever miss using that title?)
Has any writer with such a small oeuvre influenced American culture more than Raymond Chandler? His first-rate work consists of a few novels -- "The Big Sleep," "Farewell, My Lovely," "The Long Goodbye" -- film scripts for Billy Wilder's "Double Indemnity" and Hitchcock's "Strangers on A Train," and perhaps a few stories and an essay. And yet, for millions of people around the world, many of whom don't read other mystery stories, he defined a genre (the American "hardboiled" detective story), a city (pre- and post-war Los Angeles), and a style (film noir).
Various titles
By Raymond Chandler
Vintage/Black Lizard
Click below for a full list of books
Billy Wilder once said that the Hollywood personalities he was asked about most frequently were Marilyn Monroe and Raymond Chandler. Of the two, Chandler -- a publicity-shy former accountant who went to school in England, lived with his mother 'til he was 25 and began writing in middle age -- is certainly the more unlikely candidate for enduring interest. Nonetheless, his influence pervades American culture to an extent that may puzzle a younger generation unfamiliar with his work. As Wilfred Sheed noted, Chandler has suffered the opposite fate of fellow Dulwich school alumnus P.G. Wodehouse: "Where Wodehouse outlived the competition, the competition only came to life after Chandler, so that he seems more of a hack in retrospect than he was at the time."
Sheed's point is valid except for the "hack" part; the man who wrote seven novels (all reprinted in the Vintage edition) over a quarter-century may not have been Flaubert, but he wasn't Erle Stanley Gardner, either. In fact, it would have cheered Chandler to find that in death he has escaped the mystery and crime sections altogether and has been moved over to "literature" between Camus (who sought, in "The Stranger," to emulate the spare, pungent American prose style made popular by Chandler) and Chekhov.
If Chandler, then, fits uneasily into the genre category, then what is his place in American literature? Or does he have one? The answer to that question is no simpler now than it was half a century ago, when W.H. Auden and Graham Greene were praising him for rising above his contemporaries while Edmund Wilson was dissing him for failing to do just that. The question has been asked about whether or not Chandler rose above his own predecessors. If rereading Chandler and Dashiell Hammett (the man whose style Chandler is often said to have appropriated) proves nothing else, it proves Chandler was original.
For instance, while rereading the two most celebrated American private eye novels, Chandler's "The Big Sleep" and Hammett's "The Maltese Falcon" back-to-back, I was surprised to find Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, who had melded in my memory (probably because Bogart played them in film adaptations of both books), really had very little in common. Spade was much closer to the type of bullying, sadistic mercenary Marlowe generally comes up against. (Hammett used Spade in just one novel and four stories; I don't think he liked him very much.)
