The Annotated Big Sleep Page 6

  Humphrey Bogart in 1940

  In another version that Chandler gave, Marlowe doesn’t have literary antecedents at all but had “dozens” in real life, in the form of honorable men struggling to “make a decent living in a corrupt society.” According to Richard Rayner, one of these real-life models was Leslie White. Rayner’s magnificent A Bright and Guilty Place (2010) can be read as a sort of skeleton key to some of the possible real-life sources of TBS’s characters and serves as a spirited guide to the background of politics, corruption, and crime in Chandler’s Los Angeles. Like Marlowe, White was a detective in the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office who quit, disillusioned by its corruption. And like Chandler, he turned pulp writer. White’s 1936 autobiography, Me, Detective, was called “about the most depressing account of the politico-criminal combination on record” by The Saturday Review. Coincidentally, White took the only known photo of Hammett and Chandler together, at a Black Mask writers’ get-together in 1936 (see this page).

  Another real-life source might be Chandler himself. Although Chandler insisted that “he is not me, of course,” their similarities included a striking mix of idealism and cynicism, a biting wit, and an avowed commitment to the ideals of truth and integrity over material gain. James Bond creator Ian Fleming thought he noticed a “distinct relationship” between Marlowe and Chandler himself. “He’s like me,” Chandler said with a laugh. “He’s always confused.”

  Of course, the most immediate source of the Marlowe in TBS would be Chandler’s own “cannibalized” stories and the variously named detectives (Dalmas, Carmady, Mallory) that test-ran the course. Chandler worked tirelessly to mold his earlier, pulpier detectives into the form of Philip Marlowe.

  Finally, there is Marlowe’s namesake, Shakespeare’s contemporary Christopher Marlowe. That Marlowe was a playwright, a poet—and a spy. He wrote in a variety of registers resonant within TBS: the romantic (“Come live with me and be my love”), the blood-spattered (Tamburlaine the Great), and the Man Who Knew Too Much (Doctor Faustus). In the sixth and perhaps greatest of Chandler’s Marlowe novels, The Long Goodbye, the detective will have Faustus quoted to him in a particularly romantic scene.

  In homage, mystery writer Robert B. Parker named his immensely popular serial detective “Spenser” after another Renaissance poet (Edmund, that is). Parker would later be tapped to complete Chandler’s unfinished last novel (Poodle Springs, 1989), and would pen the authorized prequel of TBS, Perchance to Dream (1991).

  4. This is the first appearance of alcohol, a substance imbued, in Chandler’s writing and in the hard-boiled genre, as in American culture at large, with heavy ritualistic and symbolic significance. In the Marlowe novels, what one drinks and how one drinks it often indicate one’s character, status, and style. It can even indicate one’s politics and ethics. In a telling exchange in The Little Sister, a “big agent” decides to share some of his ultra-rare Armagnac with Marlowe. “If you knew me, you’d appreciate the compliment,” boasts the smarmy rich guy, before sniffing and taking a sip. Marlowe’s narration: “I put mine down in a lump. It tasted like good French brandy. Ballou looked shocked. ‘My God, you sip that stuff, you don’t swallow it whole.’ ‘I swallow it whole,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’ ”

  Marlowe usually prefers the distinctly American whiskies bourbon or rye. However, in a letter, Chandler wrote that Marlowe “will drink practically anything that is not sweet. Certain drinks, such as Pink Ladies, Honolulu cocktails and creme de menthe highballs, he would regard as an insult.”

  Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man, published the year after the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, is perhaps the greatest American paean to drinking before the arrival of Charles Bukowski (1920–94). Prohibition, enacted by the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920, romanticized alcohol like nothing else could have. It illegalized the selling, distributing, and importing of alcohol in the United States, but not its consumption. Since drinking alcohol was not itself illegal, the question was where to get it. Answers proliferated: bootleggers, rumrunners, speakeasies, and gambling clubs like the one we will visit later in the novel. It might be said that Prohibition’s greatest achievement was the creation of a vast underground economy around the importation, manufacture, and distribution of alcohol: hence, “organized” crime.

  Prohibition spawned not only criminal networks to distribute alcohol but also a vibrant society (both underworld and respectable) to drink it and celebrate it. As Mark Twain wrote of Tom Sawyer’s flirtation with the Temperance movement, “to promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.”

  5. The hyperbolic simile, like the fedora and trench coat, is now seen as an indispensable element in detective fiction, but this scene still stands out for the abundance and sheer gratuitous fun of its similes, nearly all of them added in the rewriting. Chandler, who said, “I think I rather invented this trick,” tried it out for his first story, “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot”: “It was a beautiful hand, without a ring. Beautiful hands are as rare as jacaranda trees in bloom, in a city where pretty faces are as common as runs in dollar stockings.” It’s not in his next story, but it returned when he began to hone the first-person voice in his stories of the mid- and late 1930s. The simile arrives in force in “Mandarin’s Jade” and “Try the Girl” (1937), where even a tough-talking gangster has the gift: “Act nice and you are as safe as the bearded woman at a Legion convention.”

  Where did the outrageous simile come from? It’s not entirely a Chandler invention. We’ve found it in at least one other LA private eye in the 1930s, Robert Bellem’s Dan Turner: “It was hotter than the hind hinges of hell, and my puss felt like a fried egg,” reads the opening line of Bellem’s “Death on Location” (1935).

  Beyond that, its roots go back to American folk humor and a homegrown vernacular style that stretched from the frontier literature of the Old Southwest through Mark Twain and beyond. The inimitable H. L. Mencken—journalist, cultural critic, language scholar, and, incidentally, cofounder of Black Mask—called this style, characterized by “wild hyperbole” and “fantastic simile and metaphor,” “tall talk.” Mencken was known to indulge in it himself with similes like this: “About as sincere as the look upon the face of an undertaker conducting a nine-hundred dollar funeral”—not as graceful as Chandler’s, but cut from the same cloth. A student of vernacular himself, Chandler no doubt was familiar with Mencken’s The American Language (1919; much enlarged Fourth Edition, 1936), in which Mencken praised the “extravagant and grotesque humor” and “extraordinary capacity for metaphor” of the American mind.

  HE WAS AS SQUARE AS A TEXT BOX IN AN ANNOTATED EDITION

  The simile-spouting private eye caught on and is now part of popular culture; indeed, it’s what people who don’t know much about Raymond Chandler know about his writing style. Chandler complained as early as 1948 about his trick being copied and “run into the ground…to the point where I am myself inhibited from writing the way I used to.” This didn’t stop him from generating a whole list of similes for inclusion in The Little Sister, ticking them off as he used them. The Long Goodbye’s self-hating novelist rants at himself after using one: “Goddamn silly simile. Writers. Everything has to be like something else.”

  The device became fodder for good writers, bad writers, satirists, and comedians. “Some days hang over Manhattan like a huge pair of unseen pincers, slowly squeezing the city until you can hardly breathe,” is from the incomparable Mickey Spillane’s novel The Killing Man (1989). Jim Nisbet, in The Price of the Ticket (1983), adds a touch of the surreal: “The guttering sound from his father’s throat modulated strangely, as if broadcast from some small, hapless machine attempting to recite a final bit of enigmatic code as it sank into a dark sea.”

  Here are some Chandler comparisons from outside TBS:

  The hard-boiled
literature of the 1920s and ’30s “made most of the fiction of the time taste like a cup of luke-warm consommé at a spinsterish tea-room.”

  “My voice sounded like somebody tearing slats off a chicken coop.”

  “It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.”

  “She smelled the way the Taj Majal looked by moonlight.”

  “I left her laughing. The sound was like a hen having hiccups.”

  She had “makeup that looked as if it had been put on in the dark by somebody with a sprained wrist.”

  “On the other side of the road was a raw clay bank at the edge of which a few unbeatable wild flowers hung on like naughty children that won’t go to bed.”

  “I thought he was as crazy as a pair of waltzing mice, but I liked him.”

  “You’re cold as a night watchman’s feet on that one, guy.”

  The Internet is as full of Chandler similes as a digital commons might be, if it were a digital commons full of Chandler similes. Too self-aware? How about this lovely simile, from The Little Sister: “She jerked away from me like a startled fawn might, if I had startled a fawn and it jerked away from me.”

  6. Valley Forge is the legendary location in Pennsylvania of the Continental Army’s encampment during the American Revolution. It’s a fitting reference for the steely General: the scene passed into national mythology for the steadfast leadership of General George Washington through the fatally freezing conditions in the winter of 1777–78.

  7. This scene sets the stage for one of the central themes of the novel: vitality—strength and life—versus mortality, the moribund, and death. The category of the moribund—the dying but not yet dead—will expand from the General to include other characters, including ultimately Marlowe himself. There are also the predators who inflict death upon the living. Needless to say, hard-boiled fiction and “murder mysteries” generally have no shortage of killers and corpses, but this might be the first time that the subject of human mortality itself, generally considered the province of poets and philosophers, has been thematized in the genre.

  Crucially, Chandler considered it the duty of literature to participate in this dynamic, to affirm life and liveliness against the deadly and dull. “There are no dull subjects, only dull minds,” Chandler wrote in his literary manifesto, “The Simple Art of Murder”: “everything written with vitality expresses that vitality.” The Big Sleep, it might be said, refuses to accept the big sleep.

  8. The average temperature of St. Louis in August is 87 degrees Fahrenheit. It was an early stop for Chandler on his way to California in 1912.

  9. In a 1951 letter to D. J. Ibberson, a British correspondent, Chandler wrote that Marlowe preferred Camels but would smoke any brand offered. He also smokes a pipe, as did Chandler.

  10. In the novels, Chandler will usually reserve the creative similes for Marlowe. Putting this one in the General’s mouth marks him as Marlowe’s verbal equal.

  11. In The Long Goodbye, Marlowe will be a bit more forthcoming:

  I’m a lone wolf, unmarried…and not rich….I like liquor and women and chess and a few other things. The cops don’t like me too well, but I know a couple I get along with. I’m a native son, born in Santa Rosa, both parents dead, no brothers and sisters, and when I get knocked off in a dark alley sometime, if it happens…nobody will feel that the bottom has dropped out of his or her life.

  12. In the 1951 Ibberson letter, Chandler wrote that Marlowe “had a couple of years of college, either at the University of Oregon at Eugene, or Oregon State University at Corvallis, Oregon.” Although this seems unremarkable now, higher education between the wars was far from the norm and the college-educated private eye would have been an anomaly. It’s one of the ways we know that Marlowe must be in the profession by choice.

  Chandler himself was distinguished from his fellow writers by his education. Classically educated at Dulwich College in London, he prided himself on being “raised on Latin and Greek.” He developed an acute and lifelong interest in languages, at one point taking steps toward becoming a comparative philologist. He wrote in 1950, “It would seem that a classical education might be rather a poor basis for writing novels in a hard-boiled vernacular. I happen to think otherwise.”

  13. In the following Marlowe novel (Farewell, My Lovely) it’s for “talking back.” Chandler elaborated in the Ibberson letter: “He got a little too efficient at a time and in a place where efficiency was the last thing desired by the persons in charge.” The point made throughout the novels is that Marlowe’s inviolable integrity has landed him outside the legal profession but kept him inside his own ethical code.

  Chandler himself had been fired as vice president of the Dabney Oil Syndicate in 1931, the precipitating event that made him a pulp writer. He later blamed the sacking on the Depression and various conspiracies against him, but in fact he was fired for drunkenness, absenteeism, in-office liaisons, and general erratic behavior. Such stuff as dreams are made on.

  14. A romantic aura of swashbuckling has always attached itself to the image of the bootlegger, the smuggler of illegal spirits who suddenly rose to prominence in the United States during Prohibition. The word itself is a nineteenth-century Americanism, deriving from the high boots that concealed illicit merchandise. The term “rum-running” is usually applied to smuggling over water; “bootlegging” is applied to smuggling over land. Both flourished in Los Angeles during Prohibition with the full knowledge of many in high places. Bootlegging remained in the news after repeal, as liquor taxes continued to make it profitable to use illegal distribution channels.

  15. Given name Terence. Presumably “Rusty” because red-haired, or perhaps because of his ruddy Irish complexion.

  16. Clonmel is a town in County Tipperary, Ireland.

  17. Wilshire Boulevard is one of the major east–west arterial roads in LA, running nearly sixteen miles from Grand Avenue downtown to Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica (“Bay City” in the Chandler novels). A historic and even prehistoric route, once traveled by the Pleistocene animals that ended up in the tar pits at La Brea, Wilshire was widened in 1924 as part of developer A. W. Ross’s scheme to move shopping away from the traffic-choked downtown. The expanded Wilshire was emblematic of the newly auto-centric city: it could accommodate six lanes of traffic, had synchronized traffic lights, and funneled automobiles to a brand-new shopping district (named Miracle Mile in 1928) where each building had its own parking lot.

  18. get himself wrapped up in some velvet: Come into a sum of money. After the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, Regan, like a lot of former bootleggers, would be looking for new ways to make a buck. Sternwood’s use of underworld slang allows Marlowe some insight into his friendship with Regan.

  Chandler loved the “reckless extravagance” of English-language slang, which proliferated with the advent of Prohibition and the attendant rise of criminal cultures in the United States. Prohibition-era slang was so fecund that one scholarly study dubbed it “Volstead English,” after the act passed to reinforce the Eighteenth Amendment. Chandler methodically kept long lists of slang terms in his notebooks, under various categories such as “blackmail,” “gambling,” and “pickpocket.” He corresponded and sometimes disagreed with famous lexicographer Eric Partridge, author of the prodigious Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. In a letter to publisher and friend Hamish Hamilton, he wrote, “Partridge is interesting but he makes me uneasy….What always gets me about the scholarly excursions into the language of the underworld, so to speak, is how they smell of the dictionary. The so-called experts in this line have their ear to the library, very seldom to the ground.” Chandler pointed out that many colorful slang terms were of literary rather than social origin, adopted by real-life gangsters only after they read about them or saw them in movies. �
�I have no doubt,” Chandler wrote to Partridge in 1952, “that many a Western sheriff has ornamented his language and perhaps even his costume from a study of six-gun literature.” According to Chandler, “Chicago overcoat,” which his heavy Lash Canino uses later in TBS, is one of the terms invented by writers. Another is “the big sleep,” invented—or perhaps “re-invented,” as he allows—by Chandler himself.

  19. Marlowe and the General are addressing something that would go unremarked in virtually all the other pulp fiction of the period: their use of the hard-boiled lingo. Marlowe’s consciousness of language is one of the qualities that distinguishes him from his peers. Like Chandler himself, he’s a highly self-aware stylist, on occasion critiquing his own verbal fancies.

  The 1930s was a robust decade for the study of the English language and its American iteration and for debate over whether American English constituted a language of its own. (Virginia Woolf and H. L. Mencken said yes; Edmund Wilson said no.) Knopf put out Mencken’s great Fourth Edition of The American Language in 1936; Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English appeared in 1937 (revised in 1938). The monumental dictionary known as Webster’s Second was issued in 1934 and added new words in 1939—“There isn’t a dull page in it,” Chandler declared—while newspapers and journals like Variety, The New Yorker, American Speech (est. 1925), and others gleefully recorded the explosion of colorful expressions and neologisms throughout the early decades of the twentieth century. Chandler himself produced a mini-essay entitled “Notes (very brief please) on English and American Style” in his notebook. He insisted that “the best writing in English today is done by Americans, but not in any purist tradition. They have roughed the language around as Shakespeare did….They have knocked over tombs and sneered at the dead. Which is as it should be. There are too many dead men and there is too much talk about them.”