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A Homage to Raymond Chandler Downloaded from by Guest on 30 September 2021 L INE BY LINE jonah raskin The Master of Nasty A homage to Raymond Chandler Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/boom/article-pdf/2/4/87/381441/boom_2012_2_4_87.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Raymond Chandler relished finding names for his quirky characters, including Philip Marlowe, the pipe-smoking, chess-playing private eye—a literary kinsman to Sam Spade, Dashiell Hammett’s solitary sleuth—whom I first met in the pages of fiction as a teenager and whom I have known more than fifty years. Sometimes the names are dead giveaways about the morality or immorality of the character, sometimes they’re opaque, but I’ve always found them intriguing and an open invitation to try to solve the mystery myself. In his first novel, The Big Sleep (1939) Chandler calls the bellicose gangster Eddie Mars, the smut peddler Arthur Gwynn Geiger, and the top cop Captain Cronjager. In The High Window (1942), Lois Magic is the femme fatale, Linda Conquest is a torch singer, and Leslie Murdoch is the effete son of a nasty heiress who has murdered her own husband and brainwashed Merle Davis (a wholesome girl from the Midwest and a victim of sexual assault) into thinking she’s guilty of the crime. Nice people, Marlowe observes wryly. Born in Chicago in 1888, near the end of the Victorian era, raised in England among elite Edwardians, and transplanted to Los Angeles in 1913, Chandler saw California through the eyes of an English eccentric. A veteran of World War I who was wounded in action in France, and a child of Prohibition and Depression America, he recognized that crime was an industry in both boom and bust times, and a rich field for a writer. Then, too, as a displaced person and an alien in the Southern California world of cars and freeways, among phony and lonely people, he tapped into a vast reservoir of mass discontent. In his seven novels, all of them set in and around Los Angeles, he depicted the world as a vile place inhabited by loathsome people. A cynic, he envisioned no way to escape nastiness—certainly not by going to the movies, which, in his view, offered much the same trite boy-meets-girl story over and over again and trivialized psychological issues and social problems. “Twenty-four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him,” Chandler wrote of LA. He added that it was “a city no worse than others, Boom: A Journal of California, Vol. 2, Number 4, pps 87–95. ISSN 2153-8018, electronic ISSN 2153-764X. © 2013 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/boom.2012.2.4.87. BOOM | WINTER 2012 87 Boom0204_10.indd 87 1/16/13 5:13 PM In the company of Bosch and Haller, Chandler’s Marlowe is an odd fellow. Granted, once upon a time he worked in the district attorney’s office, and he knows cops he can turn to for information—but Marlowe’s not a company man nor a cog in a law enforcement machine, and he’d never work for the LAPD, just as Sam Spade would never accept a job, however well paid, with the San Francisco Police Department. For Hammett and Chandler, cops belong to the criminal injustice system. They never solve mysteries or apprehend killers, blackmailers, or thieves, although they’re PHOTO COURTESY OF NÉSTOR GALINA persistent and enduring and won’t simply up and disappear. In The Long Goodbye, Marlowe says of cops as a species, “No Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/boom/article-pdf/2/4/87/381441/boom_2012_2_4_87.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them.” a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost Nasty sex, nasty money, nasty murder, and nasty cops and beaten and full of emptiness.” Chandler loved and are the volatile ingredients Chandler mixed together to hated LA in much the same way that Balzac loved and cook up books that could be called noir fiction, detective hated mid-nineteenth-century Paris and F. Scott Fitzgerald stories, murder mysteries, or a combination of all three. loved and hated Jazz Age Manhattan. He learned a great Marlowe the detective is deep in the world of crime, deal about the craft of fiction by reading Fitzgerald, and corruption, and venality, as he recognizes at the end of Hemingway, too; then he created a style of his own that The Big Sleep: “Me. I was part of the nastiness now,” he borrowed from the tabloid newspaper and the modernist exclaims. In the pages of the novels, Marlowe isn’t the poem, fusing The Daily News and The Waste Land. virtuous character that Chandler described in his 1950 To a large extent, Raymond Chandler has gone out of essay, “The Simple Art of Murder,” in which he wrote fashion, his novels and stories unread by the Facebook famously, “down these mean streets a man must go who Generation, and the movies based on the books also is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.” unknown to twenty-somethings. On the cusp of the 125th Throughout the novels Marlowe is a tarnished knight anniversary of his birth, he’s a cult writer once again, and mean, too, though on the whole critics, readers, and as he was at the start of his career in the 1930s writing biographers haven’t noticed this fact. stories for Black Mask, the premier crime magazine of the day, founded by H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. Nasty place In the 1940s, British intellectuals such as J.B. Priestley, Hollywood directors such as Howard Hawks, and lovers “Hardboiled” fiction and “mystery story” were the two of down-and-dirty fiction discovered him and turned his main terms that Chandler himself used to describe his paperbacks into best sellers. Today, a whole new school of work. In his fiction there are always multiple murders, Southern California detective fiction has pushed Chandler always the dogged detective who empathizes with the to the sidelines. The newcomers include Walter Mosley, little man and the little woman who haven’t basked in Jazz James Ellroy, and Michael Connelly, the creator of Los Age glamour, haven’t enjoyed steady employment in the Angeles Police Department Detective Hieronymus “Harry” Depression, and who aren’t part of the California Dream. Bosch and criminal defense attorney Mickey Haller. In the novels there’s always a dark, ominous atmosphere, even though his detective, Marlowe, operates in the sunny “have-a-nice-day” world promoted by the greater Los He tapped into a vast Angeles tourist industry. reservoir of mass It doesn’t really matter how the novels are labeled. They’re works of literature, as critics and reviewers such as discontent. Joyce Carol Oates and Carolyn See have pointed out, and 88 B OOMCAL IFORNIA.COM Boom0204_10.indd 88 12/21/12 7:36 PM Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/boom/article-pdf/2/4/87/381441/boom_2012_2_4_87.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 PHOTOGRAPH BY FRASER MUMMERY. BOOM | WINTER 2012 89 Boom0204_10.indd 89 12/21/12 7:36 PM of talking about America, and America has never looked the same to us since.” But Chandler had something more specific than America in mind. True, the titles of the novels don’t refer to exact geographical locations but rather to places, and to times, and to characters, as well, that could be found almost anywhere: the lady in the lake, the high window, the little sister, and the long goodbye. Much of the dramatic action occurs in a fictional town that Chandler calls “Bay City,” where the police are rough and the residents are rich. We know, however, that Bay City is based on Santa Monica, a place he knew intimately well because he lived Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/boom/article-pdf/2/4/87/381441/boom_2012_2_4_87.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 there for years. In an early story, the femme fatale leaves LA for New York, but neither Marlowe nor Chandler follow her there; she might as well have fallen off the face of the earth. New York isn’t on Chandler’s map of the United States. Los Angeles is nearly his whole universe, and his LA is the epicenter of the dark, soulless civilization he saw sprawling everywhere. In 1950, when he looked back at his own early work and at the pulp fiction published in Black Mask, he observed that it depicted “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 the moronic delight of a gangster trying out his first machine gun.” PHOTOGRAPH BY STEFAN INSAM. Nasty world if anyone tries to force them into a strict genre, they just won’t fit comfortably. Call them pulp fiction, too, if you will. As a long-time aficionado of Chandler’s hardboiled narra- They radiate real genius, especially the author’s uncanny tives who grew up reading his novels on the East Coast, ability to write crisp dialogue that leaps off the page and I refused to allow Californians exclusive bragging rights to conjure up Southern California’s mean streets, derelict to his work. As a lecturer in English in the 1980s, in a office buildings, and transient hotels.
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