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jonah raskin The Master of Nasty

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Raymond Chandler relished finding names for his quirky characters, including , the pipe-smoking, chess-playing private eye—a literary kinsman to , ’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, (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 in 1888, near the end of the Victorian era, raised in among elite Edwardians, and transplanted to Los Angeles in 1913, Chandler saw 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.

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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 , 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 , 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, “,” 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 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 , and lovers “” 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 has pushed Chandler always the dogged detective who empathizes with the to the sidelines. The newcomers include , little man and the little woman who haven’t basked in Jazz , and , 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

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PHOTOGRAPH By FRASER MUMMERy.

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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 , the high window, , 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. class I called “The Mysteries of College Composition,” my All creative writers, even Shakespeare, rely at times on students read Chandler, Hammett, and James M. Cain. literary formulae, Chandler pointed out. Writers of detective They also wrote their own murder mysteries, making up fiction were no exception. Moreover, they could also write truly original works that might change the world of fiction. Nasty sex, nasty money, Now and then, as Chandler recognized, a novel such as Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1930), created its own nasty murder, and nasty space, exploding nice, neat literary categories. “Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase,” Chandler wrote, cops are the volatile “and dropped it into the alley.” The Big Sleep, too, exploded ingredients Chandler literary categories. As the contemporary novelist Paul Auster observed, “Raymond Chandler invented a new way mixed.

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Boom0204_10.indd 90 12/21/12 7:36 PM crimes and criminals. Then, in the 1990s, as a professor of men, like General Sternwood in The Big Sleep, hire communication studies, I taught a class in which gunmen to do the dirty work while they live vicariously students viewed the cinematic versions of Chandler’s, and die quietly. Women commit the crimes themselves, Hammett’s, and Cain’s novels, as well as neo-noir classics and they don’t get away with murder. Marlowe is often, such as Chinatown, Blade Runner, and Body Heat, which though not always, a misogynist and a racist. Sometimes rekindled my love of the noir form. In fact, I read so much misogyny and racism are essential parts of his character noir fiction and saw so many noir films that the world came and integral to the story, and sometimes he learns not to to look like a noir movie with femme fatales, fall guys, be a racist and a misogynist; he knows better. corrupt cops, and big-time crime bosses. Noir helped save me from becoming a hopeless romantic and a starry-eyed Nasty people idealist. Raised in a liberal-left East Coast family, I imbibed progressive ideas and values about the perfectibility of Part of the pleasure of reading Chandler is watching him 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 society and human beings. I needed a healthy dose of peel away the layers that surround seemingly virtuous Chandler’s cynicism to balance my optimism, and I was characters. The plot is usually far too tangled for its own delighted to learn that Dashiell Hammett, the author of good, and at times it doesn’t matter who has killed whom. The Maltese Falcon, with its cast of back-stabbing characters, The bodies just pile up. Hawks and had been a member of the American Communist Party. once telegrammed Chandler to ask him if a character was Knowing the venal nature of the world and wanting to murdered or if he committed suicide. Chandler wired back change it were compatible. saying he didn’t know. Occasionally, Marlowe will explain I’ve been collecting Chandler’s books for nearly fifty who pulled the trigger and disposed of the corpse, but years, but I only have one first edition. I prefer the cheap his explanations are the least entertaining aspects of his paperbacks with the lurid colors and the cartoon-like stories. The quirky characters—gangsters, movie stars, rich sketches of Philip Marlowe wearing a fedora and carrying playboys, and playgirls—keep the reader turning pages. a gun, or, as he calls it, “a gat.” In the 1990s Vintage Chandler maintains the by moving his private republished the novels in their “Crime/Black Lizard” series, eye or “peeper” as quickly and effortlessly as he can from but those covers are too arty and elegant for my taste. More luxurious mansions and swank swimming pools to smoky recently, the Library of America issued an essential two- gambling dens, and by connecting the nasty rich to the volume set of Chandler’s complete works. Volume One nasty down-and-outers. Sexual tension mounts, sexual includes early stories that were dress rehearsals for the sparks fly, and Marlowe uses his wits more than his fists novels, with catchy titles: “Red Wind,” “King in yellow,” to fend off adversaries, whether they’re male or female. and “Trouble Is My Business.” In one novel after another, There are as many fictional Southern California doctors, Chandler went out of his way to look for trouble, leading and especially insidious psychiatrists, as there are crafty his narrator and existentialist antihero into labyrinths of lawyers and brutal cops. That’s fitting, because Chandler nastiness from which there appears to be no escape— was fascinated by the workings of the human mind—the especially when he’s drugged and unconscious—or not deceptions, the lies, and the psychological warfare that until the proverbial last minute. takes place in poisonous marriages and in toxic families My two favorite Chandler novels, The Big Sleep and The such as the Wades in The Long Goodbye, the Sternwoods in Long Goodbye, were both made into Hollywood movies, The Big Sleep, and the Murdocks in The High Window, who the first directed by Howard Hawks, the second by Robert are covering up for an old, cold case of murder. Altman. Both were changed substantially, the venality toned down. Those who have only seen the movies don’t realize that the novels paint indelible portraits of nasty “Kissing is nice, but your California mobsters and nasty California monsters, most father didn’t hire me to of them wealthy and white; the women, more often than men, play staring roles as consummate killers. Wealthy sleep with you.”

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Boom0204_10.indd 91 12/21/12 7:36 PM beautiful daughter of a wealthy client, “kissing is nice, but your father didn’t hire me to sleep with you,” a line that Sherlock Holmes or Doctor Watson never would have uttered. ’s Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple wouldn’t utter it, either. In 1961, when I first read Chandler, the sexual revolution of the 1960s was yet to come. Pillow Talk, with Doris Day and Rock Hudson, was the movie of the year the year I graduated from high school, and, though it offered pillows and talk, the dialogue and the plot weren’t explicitly sexual. Chandler connected perverted sex to big money, organized crime, and patriarchal power, and when the sexual and 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 political revolutions of the 1960s arrived, his novels reached rebels such as myself and my contemporaries who were eager for sordid details about old money and old men who, Chandler explains in The Long Goodbye, were “[a]ll Victorian dignity on the outside” and “inside…as ruthless as a Gestapo thug.” The High Window exudes sexuality from beginning to end. The characters also offer a steady stream of cruel comments about one another, as when Leslie Murdock tells Marlowe, “My mother hates to spend money. She thinks PHOTOGRAPH By EMDOT. money is part of her skin.” In another scene, Lois Magic, the novel’s blonde beauty, advises one of her admirers, “Sit down and rest your sex appeal.” There’s something of Mae Nasty thrills West’s cheeky sexuality in Chandler’s novels, and, while The High Window, Chandler’s third novel, holds a special some of the quips about sex are humorous, in the spirit place on my shelf because it was published in 1942, the of West, the sexual overtones and undertones can be plain year I was born. I didn’t discover it until I was nineteen, and hurtful. Marlowe, the protagonist, is as hurtful as anyone when I did I realized that the world that I saw all around me else. Of Merle, the silly, sweet, innocent girl in The High was the world according to Chandler. He invented it before Window, who has been brainwashed into thinking she’s I was old enough to recognize it. a killer, he says, “She will probably turn out to be one of At nineteen I was also reading Marcel Proust, Thomas these acid-faced virgins that sit behind little desks in public Mann, and James Joyce, intoxicated by Swan’s Way, The libraries and stamp dates in books.” Magic Mountain, and Ulysses, but reading those books, Marlowe can’t resist making snide comments about which were assigned in literature classes at college, felt like women, much as Chandler can’t help but make his entering distant cultures unlike my own. women characters into far more seductive, dangerous, With Chandler, I experienced something very different. and often more lethal figures than his male characters Reading The High Window was like wandering in a world (with the notable exception of Marlowe, the loner who simultaneously familiar and strange. All of his novels were never marries, who doesn’t have a wife, a family, or more than a tad shocking. The main characters belonged even a long-lasting friend in the wilderness of LA). to nuclear families, but they didn’t behave like the well- Mrs. Eileen Wade, one of the last major women characters behaved members of the families I knew. In The High that Chandler created, is as vicious as any other in his Window, the innocent young girl is sexually molested by oeuvre, and in many ways she’s similar to Carmen an older married man. In The Big Sleep, Marlowe tells the Sternwood, one of the first female characters he created.

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PHOTOGRAPH By COLLECT MOMENTS.

They’re both man-killers, insanely jealous, possessive, overlap. The Big Sleep and Farewell My Lovely both include and neurotic. Not the butler, but the wife, daughter, or big time mobsters.) Monga also observed that the first wave sister is often the killer, though it’s the chauffer in an early of noir films from the 1930s and 1940s were often filmed story Chandler published in Black Mask. at night, with dark scenes, ominous shadows, and odd I stumbled on The High Window on my own and read camera angles that made the characters look literally bent it without the help or hindrance of literary critics and and twisted. book reviewers. The cover of my copy of the novel sported I became so enthralled with Marlowe on the screen a blurb by someone I had never heard of before, named and in print that I came to think of him as a real person. , who said, “Raymond Chandler is a I was disappointed when I read one of Chandler’s letters star of the first magnitude.” The High Window introduced (collected by biographer Frank MacShane) in which he me to noir, that elastic term coined by French critics to insisted that Marlowe was a fictional character. “He is a describe Hollywood’s “B” movies that has been defined and creature of fantasy,” he wrote. In the 1990s, when I met redefined ever since the 1940s. Anita Monga, a well-versed real detectives in San Francisco, I was delighted to hear that film buff who regularly put on noir festivals at the Castro they learned about detective work by reading Chandler and Theater in San Francisco while I was teaching noir, noted by investigating crimes as doggedly and as fearlessly as his that noir films are often bleaker than gangster pictures, with character Marlowe does. Of course, none of the real detectives no redemption at the end and with, as she put it, “an inner I met talked about cases as candidly as Marlowe; he breaches feeling of fatalism.” (Noir and gangster novels and films confidentiality at every opportunity, while they didn’t.

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Boom0204_10.indd 93 12/21/12 7:36 PM The High Window persuaded me that Chandler’s dark Chandler clearly enjoyed hearing his own ideas emerge view of the world was as fascinating as any intellectual’s, from the mouth of a millionaire. He also enjoyed the scene including Karl Marx’s, and it turned me for a time into a in which his district attorney, Bernie Ohls, tells Marlowe, kind of noirish Marxist. In the pages of film magazines, “There ain’t no clean way to make a hundred million I discovered that I wasn’t the only one to appreciate noir bucks . . . Big money is big power, and big power gets as social criticism. Some of the grandest theorists and the used wrong. It’s the system.” When Marlowe replies, “you most astute writers about noir, such as the director Paul sound like a Red,” Ohls quips, “I wouldn’t know. I ain’t been Schrader and the American film critic Robert Warshow, investigated yet.” Published in 1953, in the aftermath of the pointed out that noir movies and books were eminently Hollywood Ten, and before Senator Joseph McCarthy was suited to present a subversive view of the bourgeois world tarnished on TV, The Long Goodbye captures the tenor of the and its dangerously seductive illusions. anti-Communist crusade that infected the film industry and The author himself seemed to think along Marxist lines, Washington, D.C. Though Chandler was never questioned 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 though he could also “crack wise”—to borrow one of his about his political affiliations, he called the hearings own expressions—in the manner of Groucho Marx. In The on Reds in the film industry “the Hollywood show in Big Sleep, a beautiful, sexy, rich, young white woman cracks Washington,” and argued that “the Founding Fathers” did wise with Marlowe. “I was beginning to think perhaps you not intend that it be “conducted with microphones, flash worked in bed, like Marcel Proust,” she says. “Who’s he?” bulbs, and moving picture cameras.” He understood the Marlowe asks. Proust, she tells him, is “a French writer, a power of the media to shape public opinion and to make or connoisseur in degenerates.” Of course, Chandler knew to break politicians. Working in the film industry provided about Proust and his work. He assumed that readers would him with an intimate glimpse into the links between public get his inside joke about the highbrow author of In Search relations and mass marketing. In Hollywood, Chandler of Lost Time. He had a bookish chip on his shoulder and saw the future of an America in which images would have enjoyed taking shots at the big authors of his day who were the magical power to manufacture conformity. acclaimed as the masters of something called literature. Chandler could be mean about fellow writers and about Hollywood nasty reviewers and critics. There’s more overt social criticism in The Long Goodbye Working as a screenwriter in Hollywood turned Raymond than in any other Chandler novel. A millionaire named Chandler into a cynic about the movie studios. “They do not Mr. Potter sounds like the Marx of Das Kapital when he like to deal with honest men,” he told his publisher, Alfred says, “There’s a peculiar thing about money. In large Knopf. Not surprisingly, he never cared for the cinematic quantities it tends to have a life of its own, even a conscience versions of his novels. Hollywood cannibalized his plots, of its own. The power of money becomes very difficult glamorized and sanitized his sinister women, and turned to control.” Potter also echoes the American sociologist Marlowe, a lonely drunk and misogynist, into Marlowe Thorstein Veblen when he explains, “you can’t have quality the sentimental lover. Bogart filled the idealized Marlowe with mass production. you don’t want it because it lasts role admirably in Hawks’s version of The Big Sleep. Lauren too long. So you substitute styling, which is a commercial Bacall was smart and sexy as the older, wiser, and more swindle intended to produce artificial obsolescence. Mass virtuous of the two rambunctious Sternwood sisters, and production couldn’t sell its goods next year unless it made Hawks’s happy ending made for happy audiences and big what it sold this year look unfashionable a year from now.” box office revenues.

Chandler’s brand of California noir is so down and so dark that it’s positively inspiring and elevating.

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Boom0204_10.indd 94 12/21/12 7:36 PM Chandler made significant contributions to two makes me feel more depressed than the noirest of noir major motion pictures, (1944) and novels and films. I’ll take Marlowe over the current wave Strangers on a Train (1951), but directors, of detectives who have wives, girlfriends, husbands, and and , rejected much of what he children, and who have a nice day even when it’s cold and wrote, leaving him feeling bitter and resentful about gray outside. Chandler’s brand of California noir is so down making movies. His novels—The Big Sleep, Farewell and so dark that it’s positively inspiring and elevating, and My Lovely, The High Window, Lady in the Lake, The Little as timeless, too, as Nathaniel West’s novel The Day of the Sister, The Long Goodbye, and —were too harsh, too Locust, published in 1939, the same year as The Big Sleep. real, and too noir even for the studios that made noir films. At the conclusion of The High Window, Marlowe enjoys Over the last few years, I’ve returned to those seven novels playing chess with himself—“beautiful cold remorseless again and again as welcome and necessary antidotes to chess, almost creepy in its silent implacability.” At the end the kind of cheap, facile optimism that’s mass-produced in of the day, he is always alone, always eager for a new case, 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 Hollywood—and elsewhere in America—and that usually and always sharpening his razor-sharp mind. b

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