Tag Archives: Philip Marlowe

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Big Sleep,’ by Raymond Chandler

Leave a comment

Her smile was tentative, but could be persuaded to be nice.

Recently I watched an old interview with Andrew Klavan in which he cited The Big Sleep, the first Philip Marlowe novel (1939), which he admires very much. He mentioned how he adopted Marlowe as a literary hero when he read the first scene of this book, where the detective enters the palatial Sternwood mansion. Above the door he sees a stained glass window depicting a knight attempting to free a maiden tied to a tree. Marlowe doesn’t think the knight is trying as hard as he could, and thinks that if he lived there he’d have to climb up himself and help out.

That, Klavan says (and I agree), is the key to Philip Marlowe’s character. He’s a knight out of romance, plunked down in the 20th Century where he has no place. His adventures involve him in many compromises, but he strives to keep some honor.

Even when the fair maidens don’t really deserve rescuing, as is the case in The Big Sleep. Old General Sternwood, confined to a wheelchair, has summoned Marlowe because he has received blackmail demands related to his daughter Carmen. Carmen is flighty, promiscuous, and not very bright. He also mentions a man named Rusty Regan, ex-husband to his other daughter Vivian. The general liked Rusty, but the man has disappeared. He hopes he’s all right. Marlowe intuits (correctly) that the general isn’t really much concerned over the blackmail; he’s trying to work up to asking Marlowe to locate Rusty.

Soon Marlowe will be a near-witness to a murder, with Carmen Sternwood present (high on drugs). Then the body will disappear. And Marlowe will find himself looking for Rusty Regan after all – not because he cares about the Sternwood daughters, but for the old man’s sake.

The Big Sleep is an intriguing book. Plot-wise it’s confusing and not neatly tied up. The author himself, famously, wasn’t sure who killed the Sternwood chauffeur. And there’s one scene where Marlowe is captured by a notorious murderer, who then conveniently goes away, leaving him to be watched by a suggestible woman whom Marlowe persuades to free him. (A very weak plot device, you can’t deny.)

And yet this book is treasured by readers and critics alike. I treasure it myself. The prose is masterful, the characters are fascinating, the atmosphere draws you in, and the conclusion has been a model for all but the most cynical of hard-boiled writers ever since.

On this reading I was particularly struck by a minor character, the purest hero of this story. His name is Harry Jones. He’s a short, unprepossessing man, a two-bit gambler. Yet he makes the ultimate sacrifice for a woman who doesn’t deserve him. Marlowe pays him the greatest respect – he’s the man Marlowe would like to be, but pure knights of that sort do not survive in our world.

Taken all in all, The Big Sleep is a great novel. If you haven’t read it and like hard-boileds, you should. Cautions for drugs and sexual situations – pretty racy stuff for 1939.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Long Goodbye,’ by Raymond Chandler

Leave a comment

She had an iron smile and eyes that could count the money in your hip wallet.

Recently I was poking around Amazon Prime for a movie to watch, and I hit on the old 1973 film adaptation of The Long Goodbye. I hadn’t seen it in many years, and watched it again just to see if I liked it any better than I did in my youth. I found I did not. It’s a Robert Altman vehicle, meaning Raymond Chandler’s story is mostly subsumed in Altman’s improvisations, and Elliott Gould is not Philip Marlowe by any stretch of the imagination. (I must confess the movie did the story no harm by simplifying the plot, though.)

Anyway, I figured I might as well re-read the book (first published 1953) and see how it compared. As I expected, I liked it a whole lot better than the movie, though it’s not without flaws.

Terry Lennox is sporadically one of Philip Marlowe’s few friends. He’s a wounded war veteran with interesting facial scars, and Marlowe encounters him sometimes in evening clothes with rich women on his arm, and sometimes drunk in the gutter. Terry has been married to an heiress named Sylvia, been divorced by her, and then remarried again. Now and then he and Marlowe get together for a drink.

One night Terry shows up asking Marlowe to drive him across the border to Mexico. Marlowe does this, with some misgivings. Once back, he learns the news – Terry’s wife has been murdered, and the police are looking for him. Marlowe gets arrested and subjected to some third degree… and then the whole business is dropped. Word is that Terry has killed himself in Mexico. Shortly afterward, Marlowe gets a letter from Terry, apparently posted just before his death. Tucked in the envelope is a $5,000 bill, which Marlowe puts away in his office safe because he’s uncomfortable about how he earned it.

Through his connection with Terry, Marlowe gets an inquiry from the publisher of Roger Wade, a bestselling author of historical thrillers. Roger has a serious drinking problem and writer’s block. The publisher has the idea that Marlowe might be the man to nursemaid Wade, dry him out and keep him working. Marlowe is not interested, even after a personal appeal from Wade’s stunningly beautiful wife, Eileen. But that doesn’t stop her appealing to him to find Wade after he disappears on a bender. Marlowe tracks him down at a seedy health spa and drags him home. He forms a prickly friendship with the man, while still refusing the babysitting job.

That’s enough to explain how things start out. The plot progresses in what seems to me a somewhat uneven, lurching fashion, as if Chandler was describing his own difficulties writing it through the creative travails of Roger Wade. The final conclusion is (to my mind) a little unsatisfying – but not as weird as the climax they gave us in the movie.

Critics, I understand, are divided concerning The Long Goodbye. Some consider it Chandler’s best work. Others judge it one of the weakest in the series. I myself enjoyed reading it, but found it a little claustrophobic. The story was, after all, somewhat crowded with author’s surrogates. Both Terry Lennox, the shell-shocked, psychologically broken war veteran, and Roger Wade, the bibulous, self-loathing author, are expressions of Chandler’s own self-image. And almost all narrator characters – including Philip Marlowe – are alter egos of their creators.

Also, the book features a series of “solutions,” each replacing the other as if the author couldn’t make up his mind.

But it’s worth reading. I enjoyed it all in all. Also, there’s references to the war in Norway.

The Kindle link I’m using here is for the edition I read, which is the only ebook edition I can find that’s not part of an omnibus. If you can find a different edition, I advise you to buy that, because this one (published in Ukraine) is laden with OCR errors. The “illustrations” advertised are just old paperback cover art, unrelated to the story.

I find, on searching our archives, that I’ve already reviewed this book here once. I need to review more Philip Marlowe novels, and have set about reading another.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Trouble Is My Business,’ by Raymond Chandler

Leave a comment

“Her eyes were wide-set and there was thinking room between them.”

“I felt terrible. I felt like an amputated leg.”

“He had his right hand in the side pocket of the coat, and under the derby a pair of scarred eyebrows and under the eyebrows a pair of eyes that had as much expression as the cap on a gas tank.”

Apparently I have already read all the stories in Trouble Is My Business, a collection of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe short stories, since they are taken from the collection, The Simple Art of Murder which I know I read a while back. But I didn’t remember them, and so had the pleasure of discovery all over again.

The stories included in this particular collection are “Trouble Is My Business,” “Finger Man,” “Goldfish,” and “Red Wind.” These stories were not, in fact, originally Marlowe stories at all (according to Wikipedia), but pulp stories Chandler wrote about a couple other detective characters, adapted to cash in on Marlowe’s popularity. Which relieves me a little, because the hero of “Trouble Is My Business” has a serious drinking problem. I mean, Philip Marlowe certainly liked his booze, but this guy (John Dalmas, according to the listing in Wikipedia) is putting it away at a rate that indicates serious maintenance alcoholism, and I wouldn’t give his liver many more years.

One doesn’t go to Raymond Chandler for great plotting. We read him mostly for his characters and his prose and his evocation of a time and place. I didn’t think the writing here was up to Chandler’s very best standards, but there are plenty of good lines: “She wasn’t beautiful, she wasn’t even pretty, but she looked as if things would happen where she was.”

Objectionable material was mostly limited to racial slurs. The cursing was mainly the sort of thing you hear in old movies, like “Nerts!” There’s no sex as such, though there’s plenty of sexual tension – at one point Marlowe kisses a married woman, and the author skips describing the actual kiss in the same way later writers would skip a sex scene.

I had a blast reading Trouble Is My Business. Recommended for hard-boiled fans.

Reviews

Amazon Prime film review: ‘Marlowe’

Leave a comment

I caught the 2022 film, “Marlowe” on Amazon Prime. Anything related to Philip Marlowe always intrigues me, so I watched it in spite of the poor reviews it’s gotten. I liked it in many ways, but somehow it fell apart at the end.

There seem to be two varieties of Philip Marlowe in the cinematic world. Usually he’s portrayed as a strong, tall man, young or no older than middle age. But 1975 brought us “Farewell, My Lovely,” featuring an aging Robert Mitchum, who was so perfect for the role that he made it work (there was even a sequel, “The Big Sleep,” where the whole scenario got bizarrely transplanted to London. But once again, Mitchum pulled it off).

“Old Marlowe” is back, after a fashion, in Marlowe, based not on a Chandler novel, but on a 2014 pastiche called The Black-Eyed Blonde, which I understand to have been based on an outline (or a note or something) from Chandler himself. Liam Neeson dons the trench coat and fedora, playing the role with a world-weary slump. Traces of his Irish accent edge through, and we’re told that he fought in an Irish regiment during World War I. (Which is, I think, new information.) The film is set in 1930, and the costumes and sets are pretty good.

Marlowe, as one expects, gets a visit in his office from a beautiful, wealthy blonde, Clare Cavendish (Diane Kruger). She is married, but her concern is with her lover, Nico Peterson (Francois Arnault), who has disappeared. Marlowe learns with little trouble that Nico is officially dead, run over by a car outside the swanky Corbata Club. But Clare insists that she recently saw Nico alive in Tijuana. Complications arise in the form of Clare’s mother, the aging actress Dorothy Quincannon (Jessica Lange. Her character is blatantly based on Gloria Swanson). Drug smuggling and Hollywood studio politics also show up, and civic corruption is revealed.

Liam Neeson is always fun to watch, even when he looks tired. The script was erudite – too erudite, it seemed to me. Raymond Chandler could rock a classical allusion with the best of them, but he knew better than to put quotations in everybody’s mouths.

But my main problem with the film was that the plot kind of went to pieces at the end. A new Maguffin appears out of the blue, and then we get swept up in a lot of references to Nazism that haven’t been set up in the story.

Nevertheless, I can’t deny I enjoyed watching “Marlowe,” most of the way through. Cautions for language, adult themes, and (of course) violence.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Only to sleep,’ by Lawrence Osborne

Leave a comment

The Raymond Chandler estate has asked three authors (Robert B. Parker, Benjamin Black, and now Lawrence Osborne) in recent years to write continuation novels about classic private eye Philip Marlowe. Only to Sleep is the third and most recent, written by Osborne.

The book is set in 1988, and the investigator is now 72 years old, rusticating in a hotel in Baha, California. When two insurance company representatives show up and ask him to go to Mexico and make some inquiries for them, he finds himself interested. He’s bored, and doesn’t really care much if the job gets dangerous (which they assure him it will not).

He sets out on the trail of Donald Zinn, an American businessman who was found murdered on a beach – and very quickly cremated. The company paid out his wife’s insurance claim, but they’re suspicious. The hunt leads to that wife, a young and beautiful woman who fascinates Marlowe. He soon becomes certain that the man she’s traveling with is in fact Zinn, who faked his death. But Marlowe’s actions after finding them are… ambivalent.

I wasn’t greatly impressed by Only to Die. There’s some good writing here, but the story – like its hero – has weak legs. Raymond Chandler’s famous advice on plotting was, “When in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns.” That policy doesn’t work very well when your hero is in his seventies, though. If tough guys with guns show up too often, the show will pretty much be over. So other ways have to be found to pass the time. And although Marlowe’s meditations on life are one of the pleasures of a Chandler novel, they can’t carry a whole book – especially in the hard-boiled genre.

On top of that, a major plot point involves Marlowe doing something that strongly violates his private eye code (as I understand it). He mitigates that choice through later actions, but the whole business diminished him for me.

So I don’t highly recommend Only to Sleep. I finished it, so it didn’t insult my intelligence, but it wasn’t what I hoped for. Cautions for language and adult themes.