Kangaroo in a Dinner Jacket: Why Raymond Chandler still stands out

When Howard Hawks was filming The Big Sleep in the mid-1940s, his writers found a problem. The film, based on Raymond Chandler’s wildly successful novel, featured a car found submerged in water with a murder victim inside. The problem: the reader never learns who committed this murder. Hawks called up Chandler and asked him who this murderer was, and Chandler said he had no idea. It really didn’t matter to him that he’d left this loose thread untied in his novel, and he didn’t think it needed to be tied up for the movie.

This anecdote embodies the enigma of Chandler’s works. We Twenty-First Century readers are fiends for plots, and tend to rate our potboilers based on clever twists and dramatic arc. Dan Brown, author of The DaVinci Code, speaks of fulfilling a “contract” with his readers in each book, suggesting that if writers leave the reader with a question, they have a contractual obligation to answer it before the book ends. It’s a notion Chandler would have no doubt dismissed with a cleverly worded jibe.

Plot was secondary to Chandler, whose priorities were atmosphere, description, punchy dialogue, and character (not characters, plural, but a singular, astonishing hero). And it hasn’t hurt his reputation at all. He achieved a rare feat among crime writers: respect from critics. In Thegreatestbooks.org website (an aggregation of lists of the greatest books of all time), The Long Goodbye ranks No. 99 while The Big Sleep comes in at No. 113. I don’t believe any detective novels rate higher.

What is it about Chandler that still resonates with readers and critics almost seven decades after his death?

First, there’s his hero Philip Marlowe, brought to life so brilliantly by Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep. Like Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade (another Bogie home run), he is a tough, sarcastic, witty, candid private eye, able to take and deliver a beating as part of a day’s work. The best description of Marlowe can be found in Chandler’s classic essay, “The Simple Art of Murder”. Describing his own ideal of a fictional detective, Chandler wrote, “Down these mean streets a man must go. A man who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. . . He is the hero; he is everything.”

Marlowe is indeed everything in Chandler’s writing, and the author brings his hero to life effortlessly through his dialogue, which reveals his wit. Consider this exchange in The Big Sleep with tough guy Eddie Mars.

“How come you had a key?” [asked Marlowe.]
“Is that any of your business, soldier?”
“I could make it my business.”
He smiled tightly and pushed his hat back on his gray hair. “And I could make your business my business.”
“You wouldn’t like it. The pay’s too small.”

The sharp wisecracking – brought to the screen so wonderfully by Bogart – is a hallmark of Chandler’s style, but his real gift was description – of people, of setting and of action. Given that all the Marlowe novels are written in the first person, these descriptions deepen our appreciation of Marlowe’s humor, candor and magnificent cynicism. The details aren’t important, not always.

What is important about the description is that we see people and places through the eyes of Philip Marlowe. And this transcendent exposition can be found in all seven Chandler novels. Some are lengthy, but here are a few economical gems:

From The High Window: “A check girl in peach-bloom Chinese pajamas came over to take my hat and disapprove of my clothes. She had eyes like strange sins.”

From Farewell, My Lovely: “She’s a charming middle-aged lady with a face like a bucket of mud and if she has washed her hair since Coolidge’s second term, I’ll eat my spare tire, rim and all.”

From The Little Sister: “I wet my lips and made some kind of a vague noise to which nobody paid any attention. I got up on my feet. I was as dizzy as a dervish, as weak as a worn-out washer, as low as a badger’s belly, as timid as a titmouse, and as unlikely to succeed as a ballet dancer with a wooden leg.”

And my favorite, from Playback: “The subject was as easy to spot as a kangaroo in a dinner jacket.”

If there’s a writer today who can match this, even approach it, I’d love to read their work. I can’t think of any writer in any era who used simile (and to a lesser degree metaphor) so effectively to enliven their prose, entertain their readers, and breathe life into their characters.  (In 1984, Brigham Young University Professor Stephen L. Tanney even published a paper titled “The Function of Simile in Raymond Chandler’s Novels”.)

A final strength of Chandler was his intelligence. He revealed his smarts most strongly when he put pen to paper for reasons other than fiction. “The Simple Art of Murder” still stands as one of the best essays ever on crime fiction. And his letters, collected in The Raymond Chandler Papers by Tom Hiney and Frank MacShane, display a mental rigor few writers possess. Whether he’s bawling out Alfred Hitchcock about the script of Strangers on a Train or recounting his suicide attempt, his letters at their best are fascinating, erudite documents.

And yet, there’s the persistent problem of Chandler’s plots. When recalling the books, we always find the story a bit misty, doubly so because we’re blinded by the radiant character of Philip Marlowe. You remember the books usually open with Marlowe being called in to meet a rich person who needs someone found. But after that, they get confusing, with too many characters and subplots. A quick test: without looking it up, outline the plot of The Big Sleep.  I wouldn’t have been able to do it if I hadn’t read or reread all seven Marlowe books in the last year.

That number of books (which excludes the posthumously published Poodle Springs, finished by Robert B. Parker) is another thing I like about the Marlowe series. Had he had more productive writing years, there may have been more Marlowe books. But a seven-book series is a perfect size. Not only does it mean we don’t have a diminished Marlowe trying to do the job in his dotage, it means we can digest the whole series in months. In fact, the ebooks are 99 cents each. The whole series costs $6.93. What a bargain. You can download the entire Philip Marlowe library on your phone and take him with you as you walk down these mean streets.

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Hi, I’m Peter Moreira, author of The Haight Mystery Series, and I hope you’ve enjoyed this article. If you want to receive my blogs regularly, please sign up for the mailing list at my website by clicking here. As well as regular blogs about Michael Connelly and other crime fiction writers, you’ll receive The Ashbury Hideaway, a free novella in ebook format. In this prequel to The Haight Mystery Series, Jimmy Spracklin’s teenage daughter runs away to Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love. Spracklin knows about the drugs, sexual predators and bikers in Haight-Ashbury, and he has to find her before she comes to harm.  

The Haight Mystery Series is set in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in the late 1960s. Each book is a whodunnit with hippies. Described as ‘Gritty and Groovy” (Tampa Bay author George L. Fleming) and “Fabulous” (Pamela Callow, author of the Kate Lange series), the Haight books chronicle the investigations of SFPD Lieutenant Jimmy Spracklin into homicides in the hippie enclave. If you’re interested in the 1960s, fond of San Francisco or just love great page-turners with strong characters, check out the series with The Ashbury Hideaway. I hope you enjoy the novella enough to move on to the five novels (so far) in the series.

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