The Annotated Big Sleep Page 9

  Marmon touring car from the 1930s

  26. Marlowe doesn’t know why he was hired but knows there’s something under the surface. In his essay “The Simple Art of Murder,” Chandler testifies: “The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure.”

  27. The Hollywood branch of the LA Public Library was established in 1907 at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard (then Prospect Avenue) and Ivar Avenue. Hollywood was laid out as a real estate subdivision in 1896, and beginning in 1904 was serviced by an interurban line. The movie industry arrived from the East Coast in the early 1910s, changing the sleepy town dramatically. The WPA Guide to California likened 1930s Hollywood and Vine to Times Square. Perched above the city is the iconic Hollywood sign (originally “Hollywoodland”), erected as a stunt to publicize a real estate development in 1923.

  Hollywood Branch Library, 1920s

  28. The title is fictional, but the equivalent resource existed. Such guides, popular references in the days before the Internet, would tell a book collector how to identify valuable first editions.

  FOUR

  A. G. Geiger’s place was a store frontage on the north side of the boulevard near Las Palmas.1 The entrance door was set far back in the middle and there was a copper trim on the windows, which were backed with Chinese screens, so I couldn’t see into the store. There was a lot of oriental junk in the windows.2 I didn’t know whether it was any good, not being a collector of antiques, except unpaid bills. The entrance door was plate glass, but I couldn’t see much through that either, because the store was very dim. A building entrance adjoined it on one side and on the other was a glittering credit jewelry establishment.3 The jeweler stood in his entrance, teetering on his heels and looking bored, a tall handsome white-haired Jew4 in lean dark clothes, with about nine carats of diamond on his right hand. A faint knowing smile curved his lips when I turned into Geiger’s store. I let the door close softly behind me and walked on a thick blue rug that paved the floor from wall to wall. There were blue leather easy chairs with smoke stands beside them. A few sets of tooled leather bindings were set out on narrow polished tables, between book ends. There were more tooled bindings in glass cases on the walls. Nice-looking merchandise, the kind a rich promoter would buy by the yard5 and have somebody paste his bookplate6 in. At the back there was a grained wood partition with a door in the middle of it, shut. In the corner made by the partition and one wall a woman sat behind a small desk with a carved wooden lantern on it.

  She got up slowly and swayed towards me in a tight black dress that didn’t reflect any light. She had long thighs and she walked with a certain something I hadn’t often seen in bookstores. She was an ash blonde with greenish eyes, beaded lashes, hair waved smoothly back from ears in which large jet buttons7 glittered. Her fingernails were silvered. In spite of her get-up she looked as if she would have a hall bedroom accent.8

  She approached me with enough sex appeal to stampede a businessmen’s lunch and tilted her head to finger a stray, but not very stray, tendril of softly glowing hair. Her smile was tentative, but could be persuaded to be nice.

  “Was it something?” she enquired.

  I had my horn-rimmed sunglasses on. I put my voice high and let a bird twitter in it.9 “Would you happen to have a Ben Hur 1860?”10

  She didn’t say: “Huh?” but she wanted to. She smiled bleakly. “A first edition?”

  “Third,” I said. “The one with the erratum11 on page 116.”

  “I’m afraid not—at the moment.”

  “How about a Chevalier Audubon 184012—the full set, of course?”

  “Er—not at the moment,” she purred harshly. Her smile was now hanging by its teeth and eyebrows and wondering what it would hit when it dropped.

  “You do sell books?” I said in my polite falsetto.

  She looked me over. No smile now. Eyes medium to hard. Pose very straight and stiff. She waved silver fingernails at the glassed-in shelves. “What do they look like—grapefruit?” she enquired tartly.

  “Oh, that sort of thing hardly interests me, you know. Probably has duplicate sets of steel engravings, tuppence colored and a penny plain.13 The usual vulgarity. No. I’m sorry. No.”

  “I see.” She tried to jack the smile back up on her face. She was as sore as an alderman with the mumps.14 “Perhaps Mr. Geiger—but he’s not in at the moment.” Her eyes studied me carefully. She knew as much about rare books as I knew about handling a flea circus.

  “He might be in later?”

  “I’m afraid not until late.”

  “Too bad,” I said. “Ah, too bad. I’ll sit down and smoke a cigarette in one of these charming chairs. I have rather a blank afternoon. Nothing to think about but my trigonometry lesson.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Ye-es, of course.”

  I stretched out in one and lit a cigarette with the round nickel lighter on the smoking stand. She still stood, holding her lower lip with her teeth, her eyes vaguely troubled. She nodded at last, turned slowly and walked back to her little desk in the corner. From behind the lamp she stared at me. I crossed my ankles and yawned. Her silver nails went out to the cradle phone on the desk, didn’t touch it, dropped and began to tap on the desk.

  Silence for about five minutes. The door opened and a tall hungry-looking bird with a cane and a big nose came in neatly, shut the door behind him against the pressure of the door closer, marched over to the corner and placed a wrapped parcel on the desk. He took a pinseal wallet15 with gold corners from his pocket and showed the blonde something. She pressed a button on the desk. The tall bird went to the door in the paneled partition and opened it barely enough to slip through.

  I finished my cigarette and lit another. The minutes dragged by. Horns tooted and grunted on the boulevard. A big red interurban car grumbled past.16 A traffic light gonged.17 The blonde leaned on her elbow and cupped a hand over her eyes and stared at me behind it. The partition door opened and the tall bird with the cane slid out. He had another wrapped parcel, the shape of a large book. He went over to the desk and paid money. He left as he had come, walking on the balls of his feet, breathing with his mouth open, giving me a sharp side glance as he passed.

  I got to my feet, tipped my hat to the blonde and went out after him. He walked west, swinging his cane in a small tight arc just above his right shoe. He was easy to follow. His coat was cut from a rather loud piece of horse robe with shoulders so wide that his neck stuck up out of it like a celery stalk and his head wobbled on it as he walked. We went a block and a half. At the Highland Avenue traffic signal I pulled up beside him and let him see me.18 He gave me a casual, then a suddenly sharpened side glance, and quickly turned away. We crossed Highland with the green light and made another block. He stretched his long legs and had twenty yards on me at the corner. He turned right.19 A hundred feet up the hill he stopped and hooked his cane over his arm and fumbled a leather cigarette case out of an inner pocket. He put a cigarette in his mouth, dropped his match, looked back when he picked it up, saw me watching him from the corner, and straightened up as if somebody had booted him from behind. He almost raised dust going up the block, walking with long gawky strides and jabbing his cane into the sidewalk. He turned left again. He had at least half a block on me when I reached the place where he had turned. He had me wheezing. This was a narrow tree-lined street with a retaining wall on one side and three bungalow courts20 on the other.

  He was gone. I loafed along the block peering this way and that. At the second bungalow court I saw something. It was called “The La Baba,”21 a quiet dim place with a double row of tree-shaded bungalows. The central walk was lined with Italian cypresses trimmed short and chunky, something the shape of the oil jars in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.22 Behind the third jar a loud-patterned sleeve edge moved.

  I
leaned against a pepper tree23 in the parkway and waited. The thunder in the foothills was rumbling again. The glare of lightning was reflected on piled-up black clouds off to the south. A few tentative raindrops splashed down on the sidewalk and made spots as large as nickels. The air was as still as the air in General Sternwood’s orchid house.

  The sleeve behind the tree showed again, then a big nose and one eye and some sandy hair without a hat on it. The eye stared at me. It disappeared. Its mate reappeared like a woodpecker on the other side of the tree. Five minutes went by. It got him. His type are half nerves. I heard a match strike and then whistling started. Then a dim shadow slipped along the grass to the next tree. Then he was out on the walk coming straight towards me, swinging the cane and whistling. A sour whistle with jitters in it. I stared vaguely up at the dark sky. He passed within ten feet of me and didn’t give me a glance. He was safe now. He had ditched it.

  I watched him out of sight and went up the central walk of the La Baba and parted the branches of the third cypress. I drew out a wrapped book and put it under my arm and went away from there. Nobody yelled at me.

  1. The location matches that of the legendary Stanley Rose Bookshop at 6661½ Hollywood Boulevard, often cited as a possible inspiration for Geiger’s shop. Rose’s shop (quite unlike Geiger’s) was a true literary gathering place, counting among its regulars Nathanael West, Budd Schulberg, John Fante, and William Faulkner, as well as Hollywood celebrities including Jean Harlow, Marlene Dietrich, and Charlie Chaplin. Next door was Musso and Frank’s Grill, another famous Hollywood haunt and a favorite watering hole for Chandler in his Hollywood screenwriting days. Stanley Rose himself was a larger-than-life character around whom colorful stories still circulate: that he came out west to peddle pornographic books to the studios, counted bootleggers and underworld characters among his friends, and was once jailed for distributing pornography at Satyr Book Shop, his first business. The last story, at least, turns out to be inflated: trial records confirm that Satyr was merely charged with copyright violation regarding its reprint of a popular humor book about outhouses called The Specialist. Rose took the fall for his business partners, and the incident led to his opening his own bookshop, initially directly across the street from Satyr on Vine.

  2. This is the fourth consecutive chapter placing our resolutely common-man narrator in scenes of conspicuous opulence, allowing for some delightfully irreverent, albeit subtle, populist cynicism. Chandler later clarified: “P. Marlowe and I do not despise the upper classes because they take baths and have money; we despise them because they are phoney.”

  3. That is, a place to buy jewelry on credit; hence, sketchy in substance, though glittery on the surface.

  4. Hollywood was one of the centers of Jewish Los Angeles. Most credit jewelry stores were on South Broadway downtown, but one, Strasbourg’s of Hollywood, was at 6750 Hollywood Boulevard between Highland and Las Palmas, half a block from Stanley Rose’s bookshop. The figure of a Jewish credit jeweler is stereotypical but demographically accurate. Chandler fielded accusations of anti-Semitism after portraying a Shylockian Jewish coin dealer in The High Window. There is no question that anti-Semitism was on the rise throughout the country in the 1930s and ’40s. By that point Los Angeles was a predominantly Anglo and Protestant city, and a measure of anti-Semitism went unquestioned in polite society. Chandler pointedly did not consider himself anti-Semitic, however, and biographers note that he refused membership in a private club in La Jolla because it did not allow Jews. Regarding the seeming impropriety of calling a character by the proper noun “Jew,” Mencken wrote that in heavily censored (and, one might add, heavily Jewish) Hollywood, such usage was acceptable in complimentary contexts, as it is here and on this page. In 1946, Chandler wrote: “I have many Jewish friends. I even have Jewish relatives. My publisher is a Jew….What [word] would you like me to substitute? I am not being sarcastic.” World War II having just ended, the naturally sardonic Chandler recognized the seriousness of the matter. He reassured his Jewish correspondent that “you are safe and more than safe with outspoken people like me,” as opposed to the “brutes,” and “the snobs who do not speak of Jews at all.”

  5. That is, to give his home the appearance of culture and taste: a dig at LA’s nouveau riche as well as at Geiger’s phony bookshop. Easy targets for satirists and critics of Los Angeles, promoters epitomized the hucksterism and fast-buck mentality that built the city. Carey McWilliams wrote in 1973 that LA was less built than “conjured into existence,” largely by the efforts of railroad, real estate, and oil promoters who hawked and sold the city through the successive booms of the 1890s, 1910s, and 1920s, during which LA grew explosively from a small town to a city of well over a million people. Louis Adamic wrote in 1925, “The people on the top in Los Angeles, the big men, are the businessmen…the promoters, who are blowing down the city’s windpipe with all their might, hoping to inflate the place to a size that will be reckoned the largest city in the country.”

  Geiger’s business may be a sham, but book collecting was serious business in Los Angeles. As Kevin Starr has written, books were especially important signifiers of culture in a new city where cultural institutions lagged far behind wealth. The elite of Los Angeles were dedicated book collectors, and some left their mark with major institutional collections: railroad magnate and real estate baron Henry Huntington founded the Huntington Library; William Andrews Clark, whose fortune came from mining, founded UCLA’s William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. Estelle Doheny’s book collection was as notable as her orchids and was donated after her death to St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo, California. None of these collectors, we can safely assume, would have been caught dead in Geiger’s “De Luxe” shop.

  6. bookplate: A decorative label pasted in the front board of a book bearing the name of the book’s owner.

  Stanley Rose bookplate

  7. jet buttons: Earrings made of jet.

  8. A hall bedroom is a small room formed by partitioning off one end of a hall. An accent associated with it would be lower-class; in a sexual context it would be associated with cheap romance. “Let’s understand each other,” the sultry Mrs. Grayle tells an underdressed Marlowe in Farewell, My Lovely. “I’m not this much of a pushover. I don’t go for hall bedroom romance.” An Americanism.

  9. Marlowe is striking a pose as a stereotypical book collector: fussy, snobbish, and, for good measure, gay (made explicit on this page).

  Black Mask editor Joseph Shaw did not admit references to homosexuality into the pages of his magazine, famously striking them from Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, which first appeared as a Black Mask serial in 1929. According to Erle Stanley Gardner, Hammett tricked his editor into allowing the word “gunsel”—hobo slang for a young male kept by an older tramp—because Shaw thought it meant gunman. Since then, “gunsel” as slang for “gunman” has entered the lexicon.

  Bogey acts effete while Sonia Darrin acts bookish. (Photofest)

  10. Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, a novel by Lew Wallace, Civil War hero and the eleventh governor of the territory of New Mexico. The best-selling American novel of its time, it was first published in 1880, twenty years after Marlowe’s “third edition.”

  11. erratum: An error in the printing that would be one possible identifying point of a rare edition. Evidently the clerk, who is herself impersonating a bookish type, is not accustomed to such questions. The scene is lifted from “Killer in the Rain,” but there Marlowe plays it straight.

  12. John James Audubon’s Birds of America, from Drawings Made in the United States and Their Territories, a collector’s prize then as now. A seven-volume set recently sold for $62,500.

  13. A phrase made known by Robert Louis Stevenson regarding the toy theater sheets for sale to children in the nineteenth century. They cost two pence already colored or a penny for poorer children to color themselves. Note that Mar
lowe’s fussy persona dips into Britishism for effect.

  14. An alderman is a local political official, a member of the city government.

  15. pinseal wallet: A posh leather wallet made from the skin of a very young seal.

  16. The legendary Pacific Electric Railway streetcars once ran on more than a thousand miles of track connecting downtown Los Angeles to surrounding communities as widely dispersed as Santa Monica, San Bernardino, and Newport Beach. Several lines provided local service to Hollywood, and the big red cars are featured in a number of Hollywood films of the day, most famously the Harold Lloyd comedy Girl Shy (1924). The peak years of the interurbans were the 1920s, when the Pacific Electric streetcars formed part of what was (believe it or not) the world’s largest electric public transportation system. By the time TBS appeared at the end of the following decade, the interurban was in steep decline, forced to compete with the increasingly popular automobile on crowded city streets and plagued by internal corruption and inefficiency. Marlowe himself never boards an interurban, and the big red cars disappear from later Chandler novels after Farewell, My Lovely (1940), in which Marlowe points out to a police investigator that Moose Malloy, thought to have been spotted on the Seventh Street line, would never ride a streetcar: “He had money.” Passenger service on the last of the Hollywood lines ended in 1954.

  Santa Ana line interurban streetcar (courtesy of Orange County Archives)

  Pacific Electric Railway map