Source of book: I own this.
Let me start this post with a story about my childhood. Back when I was in early double digits, a family friend who worked at JPL at the time gave my brother and I some supplies and training in how to properly solder electronics. The project was these Radio Shack (remember them?) AM radios that needed to be built.
This was a fun project, and the skills we learned have translated well to similar things in real life. Including knowing what trichloroethylene is, how to use it, why it is bad to have it contaminate your water supply. (Don’t worry: there isn’t a site in Los Angeles caused by my brother and I…)
So, we now had a pair of AM radios, and our shared bedroom was on the other side of the house from where my parents slept. So, what kind of trouble did we get into?
You guessed it! We stayed up past our bedtime listening to the Drama Hour on KNX 1070.
Wait, you didn’t guess that? Well, maybe you didn’t grow up in Los Angeles. For those unfamiliar with that, back in the day, KNX would run replays of old fashioned radio shows from 9 to 10 every evening. It was different each night, and rotated through a whole host of different shows over the course of time.
My brother and I had our favorites, usually mystery or detective shows. (Dragnet, set in LA and based on real cases, was so popular it eventually became a TV show.) We also freaked ourselves out one night when Lights Out came on - I mean, giant spiders and all.
Later, my parents bought a couple sets of cassette tapes of old shows, and we would listen to those on road trips.
These days, the Drama Hour is long gone, alas, as are readily available cassettes and CDs. You can stream some of them online here and there.
So, what does this story have to do with this book?
Well, one of the shows was The Adventures of Philip Marlowe, based on Raymond Chandler’s detective character. It was generally a bit more “hard-boiled” than the other detective shows, and…well, I’ll talk about him when I get to the book.
Another formative bit of culture in my childhood was Calvin and Hobbes. One of Calvin’s many imaginary alter-egos was “Tracer Bullet,” a (you guessed it) hard-boiled detective in a noir story. One that sure seems to be a lot like the stuff Chandler wrote, between its femme fatales, hard drinking, and memorable one-liners.
Chandler didn’t originate the genre - that would be Dashiell Hammett with Sam Spade. (Trivia fact: Hammett was married to playwright Lillian Hellman.) But much of what we think of in terms of style is Chandler’s particular riff on the genre.
Marlowe first appeared in a series of pulp short stories for magazines. Later, Chandler reworked elements of the plots from those stories into full length novels, of which The Big Sleep was the first.
As is my usual practice when writing about mysteries, I am not going to spoil the plot of the book. Rather, I will be quoting a bunch of the best lines, because I can.
And also, I want to talk a bit about the different mystery genres, because I am a nerd that way.
I grew up reading Agatha Christie, which is perhaps the most characteristic of the British tradition. Also in this tradition are G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, and Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Whimsy novels. And, of course, the godfather of them all, Sherlock Holmes.
The British tradition involves an amateur detective, who solves carefully plotted mysteries using powers of observation and deduction. The reader is encouraged to carefully read the story, looking for clues, and then try to beat the detective to the solution.
In contrast, the American tradition has a professional sleuth, and the solution involves more legwork and investigation rather than deduction. These tend to also subdivide into two subgenres: the police procedural, and the noir private detective.
The borders are blurred a bit, of course. Murder She Wrote is set in the US, and has a private detective, but leans more toward the British genre in other ways.
Ironically, the first mystery story was written by an American: Edgar Alan Poe, and is rather in what would become the British tradition.
So, with all that background, let’s talk about the book.
To quote Tracer Bullet, “In walked trouble. Brunette, of course.”
Well, this one doesn’t quite start with that, but our detective does end up running into the wayward daughters of his client on the way to see him.
He’s an old guy, the wealthy General Sternwood. And he wants Marlowe to take a look at blackmail demands he is receiving.
Marlowe recognizes the name of the blackmailer: he is a small-time bookstore owner. And black market distributor of pornography, in an era when that was illegal. (The book was written in 1939.) But before he can make contact, the pornographer turns up dead, in a house with a drugged and naked Carmen Sternwood.
And that is only the first of many bodies in this book. In some cases, Marlowe witnesses the murder. In others, not so much. In one case, we never find out for sure who killed the person or exactly why - there is only speculation.
Further than that, I won’t go. There are a lot of twists and surprises. The ending is both unexpected and yet predictable, as a good detective story should be.
One of the very enjoyable things about the book for me was its Los Angeles setting. This is my hometown, and, while many of the buildings have been torn down 85 years later, a lot is still there, and the neighborhoods felt very familiar. I could follow a good bit of Marlowe’s route throughout the book.
As a noir tends to be, this one is set during the rainy season. Although it must have been an El Nino year for this book, because that’s a LOT of rain.
I will also note that the book is of its time. The main way this comes out is in a certain amount of casual racism and misogyny. It’s not particularly bad - it’s not even overt except for a bit by a corrupt police officer. And in that case, it’s realistic for our time as much as then, sadly.
The misogyny is both an issue and key to the plot and genre. After all, the femme fatale is the driver of the plot - and indeed many noir plots. It wouldn’t work quite as well, for example, if the women weren’t trying to get Marlowe to sleep with them.
What I would say is that you have to know what you are dealing with, and just go with it as part of the work of art the book is. Yes, Chandler and his hero look down on women. But yes, that’s part of the story too.
Probably the best part of the book, though, is the writing. The deliciously cheesy and overwritten metaphors, the breezy yet snarky quips by Marlowe, the patter and rhythm that come through so well in the radio versions. It’s a fun, immersive experience.
Let’s jump to some quotes. The opening, for example.
It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, black wool socks and dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, aid I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.
Or this bit about Carmen Sternwood.
Her eyes rounded. She was puzzled. She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her.
Or the bedridden General Sternwood.
The General spoke again, slowly, using his strength as carefully as an out-of-work showgirl uses her last good pair of stockings.
Come on, that’s so bad it’s good.
And also this exchange between the butler, who clearly knows more than he is telling, and Marlowe.
His blue eyes frosted. “Are you attempting to tell me my duties, sir?”
“No. But I’m having a lot of fun trying to guess what they are.”
Marlowe, for his part, is puzzled at his task. It doesn’t seem to be the sort of thing one needs a detective for, after all.
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.
The description of the bookstore, complete with snarky asides, is fun.
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. I didn’t know whether it was any good, not being a collector of antiques, except unpaid bills.
The older sister, Vivian, may not be quite as openly wild, but she has a thing for gambling. And her own snarky way of talking.
“Yes. I like roulette. All the Sternwoods like losing games, like roulette and marrying men that walk out on them and riding steeplechases at fifty-eight years old and being rolled on by a jumper and crippled for life. The Sternwoods have money. All it has bought them is a rain check.”
That could be said about a lot of rich people, honestly. Vivian later gets a cutting remark in at Marlowe.
“That makes you just a killer at heart, like all cops.”
In another scene, Marlowe ends up with a young man who has just killed another character, in revenge for the killing of his lover. (It’s…a long story, and I’m not spoiling it.) This quip is pretty good.
“Go ------ yourself.”
“That’s how people get false teeth.”
Here’s another great description, of a police bureaucrat.
He swung around slowly and heavily in his swivel chair and put his large flat feet on the bare linoleum that covered his floor. His office had the musty smell of years of routine.
And this exchange between the two of them.
“It’s goddamned funny in this police racket how an old woman can look out of a window and see a guy running and pick him out of a line-up six months later, but we can show hotel help a clear photo and they just can’t be sure.”
“That’s one of the qualifications for good hotel help,” I said.
In a later scene comes this line from the cop.
“I’m a copper,” he said. “Just a plain ordinary copper. Reasonably honest. As honest as you could expect a man to be in a world where it’s out of style. That’s mainly why I asked you to come in this morning. I’d like you to believe that. Being a copper I like to see the law win. I’d like to see the flashy well-dressed mugs like Eddie Mars spoiling their manicures in the rock quarry at Folsom, alongside of the poor little slum-bred hard guys that got knocked over on their first caper and never had a break since. That’s what I’d like. You and me both lived too long to think I’m likely to see it happen. Not in this town, not in any town half this size, in any part of this wide, green and beautiful U.S.A. We just don’t run our country that way.”
Yikes, that’s a bit too true and definitely subversive.
As is mandatory in the genre, there is the scene where Carmen gets into Marlowe’s apartment and waits for him. Naked of course. He turns her down.
“Neat,” I said. “Managers are like that. Now I know how you got in tell me how you’re going to go out.”
Another great over-the-top description, to finish things off.
He wore a blue uniform coat that fitted him the way a stall fits a horse.
So, it’s a classic noir, a good bit of fun even when dated, and a good escape from reality for a bit. In these troubled times, even as we fight for what is good and decent in the world, we are going to need our refuges where we can get them. And literature is a good place to look.
No comments:
Post a Comment