The Annotated Big Sleep Page 7

  The product of an English public school himself, Chandler once wrote that “I had to learn American just like a foreign language.” He became a serious student of what William Carlos Williams famously called “the American idiom,” the distinctively American way of speaking (and writing), and late in life he expressed the hope that he “may have written the most beautiful American vernacular that has ever been written (some people think I have).” He bristled at comparisons with certain other hard-boiled writers like James M. Cain, whose Double Indemnity he turned into a screenplay in 1944. Chandler called Cain’s style “faux naif,” or artificially simple, “which I particularly dislike.” Chandler had higher aspirations: to “play with a fascinating new language” and “make it into literature.”

  20. The General declines with Regan’s vital spark gone. Marlowe will be as concerned about this as about almost anything in the novel.

  21. The Irish War of Independence, 1919–21. Chandler’s mother was Irish, and he spent a part of his youth in Waterford, about thirty miles from Rusty’s Clonmel. Chandler would occasionally identify himself as Irish in his correspondence. In 1942 he wrote to Charles Morton, an editor at The Atlantic Monthly, “I have a great many Irish relatives, some poor, some not poor, and all Protestants, and some of them Sinn Feiners [separatists] and some entirely pro-British….An amazing people, the Anglo Irish….I could write a book about these people but I am too much [an Irishman] myself ever to tell the truth about them.”

  22. The Irish Republican Army, a revolutionary military organization formed in 1917 with the goal of establishing home rule and independence from the British.

  23. The 1930 census listed almost forty thousand Irish residents in Los Angeles County, but there were undoubtedly far more. Although the Census Bureau attempts to count undocumented residents, many such residents have always preferred to remain anonymous.

  24. The figure of the detective parallels that of the blackmailer in crime fiction, as critic David Fine has noted. Both are either in possession of the family secrets or searching for them, and both ensure that what is buried in the past will not stay there. No one is better positioned to become a blackmailer than a detective, as Sternwood is no doubt aware.

  Chandler used blackmail as a plot device in no fewer than fourteen of his short stories and in five of his novels. As Fine argues, it’s a device peculiarly suited to probing the dark side of “historyless” Los Angeles, with its mythology of fresh starts and new beginnings. In these stories, set in “the land dedicated to the proposition of the fresh start,” the past can never be buried, and the twin figures of detective and blackmailer ensure that “history is inescapable.”

  Metaphors aside, the land of new beginnings really was a golden opportunity for the blackmailer, as headlines from the time demonstrate: “Girl Tries Blackmail; Caught in Police Trap”; “Fugitive Is Seized in Extortion Case”; “Fantastic Blackmail Plot Against Pola Negri Bared”; “Extortion Plot Suspect Taken: Standard Oil Millionaires Ex-Chauffeur Accused.” W. Sherman Burns, head of the Burns Detective Agency, said in 1922, “Blackmail is the big crime in America today….The facts of these cases are not published: the police hear of scarcely 10% of them. A list of the recent victims would contain names of national prominence: its publication would create the greatest sensation this country has ever known. More blackmailing is going on today than any time in my knowledge, and it is not safe for a man or woman of wealth to make a chance acquaintance in any of our large cities.” In Farewell, My Lovely, when Lindsay Marriott objects that “I’m not in the habit of giving people grounds for blackmail,” Marlowe retorts, “It happens to the nicest people. I might say particularly to the nicest people.”

  San Francisco Call, August 31, 1913

  25. The street is a fiction but is symbolically named: “Alta,” Spanish for “high” or “upper,” and “Brea,” for the tar pits below the residence (see note 21 on this page).

  26. De Luxe: “Deluxe,” French de luxe, literally “of luxury.” Places of business that use the word “deluxe” usually don’t offer deluxe fare.

  27. Traditional dish consisting of boiled corned beef with cabbage and other vegetables, especially popular with people of Irish descent.

  28. The metaphor of the predatory, toying cat will be apt, as will the question of moral sensibility. The description echoes Dickens, one of Chandler’s favorites: the mercenary young Bella Wilfer in Our Mutual Friend has “no more character than a canary bird.”

  29. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, private schools gained in popularity with the local gentry. California historian Kevin Starr cites the Marlborough School, located in the Hancock Park neighborhood, where, in 1926, girls were made to wear English-style uniforms. Probably not a good fit for Carmen.

  30. Chandler was born during the Victorian period, which spanned the years of Victoria’s reign, 1837–1901. Sexual purity and a spotless morality were among the Victorian virtues, more often preached than practiced: the charge of hypocrisy was first leveled by Victorians themselves and became synonymous with the period in ensuing decades. The Victorians also held an ideal of a father/patriarch who was the moral authority of the home—a role Sternwood has relinquished, if he ever held it.

  31. Assuming that Vivian is in her mid-twenties, that would make the General in the neighborhood of eighty years old.

  32. chiseler: A cheat; a swindler.

  33. That is, someone is banking on the assumption that, being a proud man, he will honor these debts even if they are legally unredeemable.

  Vintage map of Laurel Canyon (courtesy of the Prelinger Library)

  34. Sam Spade also charged twenty-five dollars a day and expenses in The Maltese Falcon. This would have been the equivalent of more than four hundred U.S. dollars today. On first look this seems like very high pay for 1939, as indeed some of Marlowe’s employers in later novels insist. (“Absurd,” counters the imperial Derace Kingsley in The Lady in the Lake. “Far too much. Fifteen a day flat.”) Marlowe points out, on the other hand, that he takes considerable risks, and doesn’t work a traditional five-day week. There were periods of layoff, and he often did what was essentially volunteer work after the client had stopped paying. Modern-day freelancers will understand his situation.

  35. Marlowe has gone from advising the General to forget his pride and pay up—and even plan to keep paying up indefinitely, as the most practical solution—to promising to “take him [the blackmailer] out.” It’s rather a strange offer, ramped up from a much more equivocal commitment in “Killer in the Rain.”

  36. Chandler favored the understated style famously perfected by Ernest Hemingway: brief, pointed descriptions to indicate significant emotions or moods, letting the reader fill in the rest. “Strange thing the eyes,” Chandler wrote in a letter. “Consider the question of the cat. The cat has nothing to express emotion with but a pair of eyes and some slight assistance from the ears. Yet consider the wide range of expression a cat is capable of with such small means. And then consider the enormous number of human faces you must have looked at that had no more expression than a peeled potato.” Hemingway’s famous style is rooted in what has been called the Iceberg Theory, because, as he said in Death in the Afternoon (1932), so much more is there than is visible. Perhaps we might say that Chandler’s understated style is based on his Cat’s Eye Theory of emotional depiction. In both cases, the reader is encouraged to understand intuitively, based on images, metaphors, and even gaps in explanation.

  37. The butler became a stock character in the detective genre with the Sherlock Holmes stories, but it was Mary Roberts Rinehart’s wildly popular 1930 novel The Door that gave birth to the cliché “the butler did it.” In fact, the butler hardly ever turns out to be guilty in classic mysteries, though suspicion is often cast on the discreet figure who floats silently down hallways, appears unexpectedly in doorways, and is in full po
ssession of the family secrets. In the Holmes short story “The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual” (1893) and novel The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902; both by Arthur Conan Doyle, of course), the butler is suspected but innocent. Herbert Jenkins’s 1921 novel Malcolm Sage, Detective features a murderous butler, but S. S. Van Dine’s “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories,” published in 1928, warns against this: “A servant must not be chosen by the author as the culprit. This is begging a noble question. It is a too easy solution. The culprit must be a decidedly worthwhile person—one that wouldn’t ordinarily come under suspicion.” Outside the genre, Norris’s great literary antecedent is P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves (technically a valet), who first appeared in print in 1917 and, like Norris, is charged with the difficult job of taking care of a barely functional household. Perhaps the most famous of today’s literary butlers was just being invented around the time of TBS: Batman and Bruce Wayne’s right-hand man, Alfred Pennyworth of Wayne Manor (first appearance 1943), originally an amateur detective himself.

  THREE

  This room was too big, the ceiling was too high, the doors were too tall, and the white carpet that went from wall to wall looked like a fresh fall of snow at Lake Arrowhead. There were full-length mirrors and crystal doodads all over the place. The ivory furniture had chromium on it, and the enormous ivory drapes lay tumbled on the white carpet a yard from the windows.1 The white made the ivory look dirty and the ivory made the white look bled out.2 The windows stared towards the darkening foothills. It was going to rain soon.3 There was pressure in the air already.

  I sat down on the edge of a deep soft chair and looked at Mrs. Regan. She was worth a stare. She was trouble.4 She was stretched out on a modernistic chaise-longue5 with her slippers off, so I stared at her legs in the sheerest silk stockings. They seemed to be arranged to stare at. They were visible to the knee and one of them well beyond. The knees were dimpled, not bony and sharp. The calves were beautiful, the ankles long and slim and with enough melodic line for a tone poem.6 She was tall and rangy and strong-looking. Her head was against an ivory satin cushion. Her hair was black and wiry and parted in the middle and she had the hot black eyes of the portrait in the hall. She had a good mouth and a good chin. There was a sulky droop to her lips and the lower lip was full.7

  She had a drink. She took a swallow from it and gave me a cool level stare over the rim of the glass.

  “So you’re a private detective,” she said. “I didn’t know they really existed, except in books.8 Or else they were greasy little men snooping around hotels.”9

  There was nothing in that for me, so I let it drift with the current.10 She put her glass down on the flat arm of the chaise-longue and flashed an emerald and touched her hair. She said slowly: “How did you like Dad?”

  “I liked him,” I said.

  “He liked Rusty. I suppose you know who Rusty is?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Rusty was earthy11 and vulgar at times, but he was very real. And he was a lot of fun for Dad. Rusty shouldn’t have gone off like that. Dad feels very badly about it, although he won’t say so. Or did he?”

  “He said something about it.”

  “You’re not much of a gusher,12 are you, Mr. Marlowe? But he wants to find him, doesn’t he?”

  I stared at her politely through a pause. “Yes and no,” I said.

  “That’s hardly an answer. Do you think you can find him?”

  “I didn’t say I was going to try. Why not try the Missing Persons Bureau? They have the organization. It’s not a one-man job.”

  “Oh, Dad wouldn’t hear of the police being brought into it.” She looked at me smoothly across her glass again, emptied it, and rang a bell. A maid came into the room by a side door. She was a middle-aged woman with a long yellow gentle face, a long nose, no chin, large wet eyes. She looked like a nice old horse that had been turned out to pasture after long service. Mrs. Regan waved the empty glass at her and she mixed another drink and handed it to her and left the room, without a word, without a glance in my direction.13

  When the door shut Mrs. Regan said: “Well, how will you go about it then?”

  “How and when did he skip out?”

  “Didn’t Dad tell you?”

  I grinned at her with my head on one side. She flushed. Her hot black eyes looked mad. “I don’t see what there is to be cagey about,” she snapped. “And I don’t like your manners.”

  “I’m not crazy about yours,” I said. “I didn’t ask to see you. You sent for me. I don’t mind your ritzing me14 or drinking your lunch out of a Scotch bottle. I don’t mind your showing me your legs. They’re very swell legs15 and it’s a pleasure to make their acquaintance. I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings. But don’t waste your time trying to cross-examine me.”

  She slammed her glass down so hard that it slopped over on an ivory cushion. She swung her legs to the floor and stood up with her eyes sparking fire and her nostrils wide. Her mouth was open and her bright teeth glared at me. Her knuckles were white.

  “People don’t talk like that to me,” she said thickly.

  I sat there and grinned at her. Very slowly she closed her mouth and looked down at the spilled liquor. She sat down on the edge of the chaise-longue and cupped her chin in one hand.

  “My God, you big dark handsome brute! I ought to throw a Buick at you.”16

  I snicked a match on my thumbnail and for once it lit.17 I puffed smoke into the air and waited.

  “I loathe masterful men,” she said. “I simply loathe them.”18

  “Just what is it you’re afraid of, Mrs. Regan?”

  Her eyes whitened. Then they darkened until they seemed to be all pupil. Her nostrils looked pinched.

  “That wasn’t what he wanted with you at all,” she said in a strained voice that still had shreds of anger clinging to me. “About Rusty. Was it?”

  “Better ask him.”

  She flared up again. “Get out! Damn you, get out!”

  I stood up. “Sit down!” she snapped. I sat down. I flicked a finger at my palm and waited.

  “Please,” she said. “Please. You could find Rusty—if Dad wanted you to.”

  That didn’t work either. I nodded and asked: “When did he go?”

  “One afternoon a month back. He just drove away in his car without saying a word. They found the car in a private garage somewhere.”

  “They?”

  She got cunning. Her whole body seemed to go lax. Then she smiled at me winningly. “He didn’t tell you then.” Her voice was almost gleeful, as if she had outsmarted me. Maybe she had.19

  “He told me about Mr. Regan, yes. That’s not what he wanted to see me about. Is that what you’ve been trying to get me to say?”

  “I’m sure I don’t care what you say.”

  I stood up again. “Then I’ll be running along.” She didn’t speak. I went over to the tall white door I had come in at. When I looked back she had her lip between her teeth and was worrying it like a puppy at the fringe of a rug.

  I went out, down the tile staircase to the hall, and the butler drifted out of somewhere with my hat in his hand. I put it on while he opened the door for me.

  “You made a mistake,” I said. “Mrs. Regan didn’t want to see me.”

  He inclined his silver head and said politely: “I’m sorry, sir. I make many mistakes.” He closed the door against my back.20

  I stood on the step breathing my cigarette smoke and looking down a succession of terraces with flowerbeds and trimmed trees to the high iron fence with gilt spears that hemmed in the estate. A winding driveway dropped down between retaining walls to the open iron gates. Beyond the fence the hill sloped for several miles. On this lower level faint and far off I could just barely see some of the old wooden derricks of the oilfield from
which the Sternwoods had made their money.21 Most of the field was public park now,22 cleaned up and donated to the city by General Sternwood. But a little of it was still producing in groups of wells pumping five or six barrels a day. The Sternwoods, having moved up the hill, could no longer smell the stale sump water or the oil, but they could still look out of their front windows and see what had made them rich.23 If they wanted to. I didn’t suppose they would want to.

  I walked down a brick path from terrace to terrace, followed along inside the fence and so out of the gates to where I had left my car24 under a pepper tree on the street. Thunder was crackling in the foothills now and the sky above them was purple-black. It was going to rain hard. The air had the damp foretaste of rain. I put the top up on my convertible25 before I started downtown.

  She had lovely legs. I would say that for her. They were a couple of pretty smooth citizens, she and her father. He was probably just trying me out; the job he had given me was a lawyer’s job. Even if Mr. Arthur Gwynn Geiger, Rare Books and De Luxe Editions, turned out to be a blackmailer, it was still a lawyer’s job. Unless there was a lot more to it than met the eye. At a casual glance I thought I might have a lot of fun finding out.26

  I drove down to the Hollywood public library27 and did a little superficial research in a stuffy volume called Famous First Editions.28 Half an hour of it made me need my lunch.

  1. Completing the Sternwood mansion triptych: three scenes of conspicuous opulence, with a Sternwood in each one. The family members will never share a scene. Indeed, most scenes in the novel will take place between Marlowe and one other character. In 1951, Chandler mused on his early years writing fiction: “I couldn’t get characters in and out of rooms. They lost their hats and so did I. If more than two people were on scene I couldn’t keep one of them alive. This feeling is still with me, of course, to some extent. Give me two people snotting each other across the desk and I am happy. A crowded canvas just bewilders me.”