[Note: This bounced to me because of its size and an HTML
attachment. I reformatted it for easier reading and cleaned
out the Windows control characters, but may have introduced a
few incorrect periods or dashes. -- The Listowner]
Interesting, Marc, your end comments about Chandler's
modernist search for a "new authority." Something I had never
considered before, not in connection with Chandler at least.
I did once write a paper, though, attacking Sara Paretsky's
supposed feminism as a knee-jerk Leftist rebellion against
figures of power, all power, and not really having anything
to do with the empowerment or emancipation of women. I will,
however, have to go sit in a corner and meditate on Chandler
and authority for a while and see what rolls off the conveyor
belt of my brain. I always consider the genre somewhat
left-leaning in that respect, but I often forget the extent
to which the genre was molded and shaped by Chandler.
Although I am largely a lurker here, only apparently leaping
into existence to disagree with Marc about Chandler, and
don't have the time to post as often as I'd like to this
excellent list, I figured that since the door has been opened
letting in quasi-academic work, that I might post some
Chandler meditations of my own, specifically on "The Simple
Art of Murder," which, I admit and apologize, really has
little to do with the topic at hand, i.e. "Blackmailers Don't
Shoot," but since Marc mentioned SAOM and Chandler's
complimenting of Hammett, which, to my ears, always sounds
more sour than celebratory, I thought I'd weigh in on C. once
more.
You will, I hope, forgive me for not taking the time to trim
this post down to a more acceptable reading length. I wrote
this so long ago I can scarcely look at it, much less edit
it.
D.M.
--------------
There's
a scene in Billy Wilder's film of James M. Cain's Double
Indemnity, in which the protagonist, an insurance salesman,
is asked by a potential customer (and future murder
co-conspirator) about the rates and benefits of his
competitor's insurance plan. The salesman answers the
question with cocky truthfulness, admitting that his
competitor has some fine insurance plans as well. To explain
this bit of counterintuitive salesmanship he says, "I never
knock the other guy's product."
Double
Indemnity was just seeing theatrical release as Chandler was
writing "The Simple Art of Murder." He might have remembered
that line in the movie, because he wrote the
screenplay.
"The Simple Art of Murder" reads like eighteen pages of
"knocking the other guy," and it gives his comments an air of
condescension and contempt that almost overwhelms several
excellent points that he makes.
It's
difficult to be even-handed while writing literary polemics.
By their very nature they tend to be negative, particularly
when written by novelists of some repute. Like most
statements of purpose by fiction writers, this one is
shamelessly self-aggrandizing and almost uniformly negative.
Derision always sells better than praise, but it is hard not
to be suspicious of critics who have a vested commercial
interest in the abandonment of certain literary forms in
favor of their own. Don't buy those writers' novels, the
critic seems to silently cajole. Buy mine.
It is a
cynical sentiment worthy of Chandler himself, but to a degree
that was his literary trademark. Still, it's hard to know how
seriously to take Chandler's arguments and bald, blanket
statements about mystery literature. After publishing the
essay, Chandler wrote to a friend: "You must not take a
polemic piece of writing like my own article from the
Atlantic too literally. I could have written a piece of
propaganda in favor of the English detective story just as
easily"
(Gardiner 52).
Or, if he
meant his comments, whether he considered them significant or
just a random burst of bile. To a different friend, he wrote:
"['The Simple Art of Murder'] was simply a general expression
of contempt for what is known as significant writing" (49),
and he had been known to call his own readers "intellectually
adolescent at best" (51).
Sincerely or
not, Chandler's apologia contends that mystery fiction as a
whole appears artistically handicapped because of a
publishing industry that insures an average "straight" novel
will not see publication, while an average detective story
will. Speaking from personal experience (I have worked with
books for ten years), I can testify that average novels, and
even those well below average, are published often. They
appear every season with the relentlessness of a force of
nature. I seriously doubt it was any different in Chandler's
day.
Chandler is
on to something here, but this sentiment of his is more
accurately rendered in what is now known as Sturgeon's Law,
coined in 1958 by sci-fi writer Theodore Sturgeon, an
engaging novelist in his own right. Although he is defending
the genre of science fiction, not detective fiction, the
principle is the same:
"Sure, ninety percent of science fiction is crud. That's
because ninety percent of everything is crud."
In any form
or genre, everywhere you look, mediocrity is the norm.
However, that does not take one whit away from the triumphs
of a genre. As Chandler says, when Hammett wrote The Maltese
Falcon, he demonstrated that the form was capable of
anything. Hammett showed that any barriers between genre
fiction and capital "L" Literature were purely
imaginary.
Chandler is,
however, right on the money about the pervasive, unabashed
snobbery of the mainstream critical establishment. It is as
true now as it was then. The tacitly endorsed idea was, and
is, that genre fiction of any sort has an inherent artistic
inferiority to what Chandler called "significant writing."
Book reviewers, when they deign to approach genre fiction at
all, feel comfortable mocking it in a tone that would mark
them as ignorant fools if they applied it to the industry's
newest high-literary superstars, say, for example, a David
Foster Wallace or a Jonathan Safran Foer or a T.C. Boyle.
Reviewers take it as self-evident that some kinds of writing
are worthy of being taken seriously and some are not. As J.A.
Cuddon points out, "P.D. James is thought fit to chair the
panel of judges for the Booker Prize, but it remains
inconceivable that one of her own crime novels could win it"
(194).
Most modern
literary "classics" are lauded by the critics precisely
because they lack the suspense, tight plotting, clear writing
and popular appeal that would suggest even a superficial
resemblance to genre fiction. Critics hold up writers' very
unreadability as proof of their literary merit. Readers of
today's book pages are made to feel like uncultured halfwits
for not enjoying the latest literary sensation, no matter how
fatuous the content or how impenetrable the style.
There is
nothing in the puerile "philosophical" detective novels of
Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, to take one example, that
isn't appallingly inferior to even the weakest novel James
Ellroy has written in the last twenty-five years (which, for
my money, would be Brown's Requiem), yet mainstream critics
have praised Auster to the rafters--he's "our preeminent
novelist of ideas" according to Kirkus Reviews (Myers
67)--while virtually ignoring James Ellroy until the release
of the movie L.A. Confidential. And it's still tough to
imagine Ellroy winning a Pulitzer or a National Book Award,
or even a National Book Critics Circle Award for that
matter.
Mainstream
critics begin with the assumption that genre fiction cannot
be great literature, unless it is ironic, and therefore
anything that is clearly NOT genre fiction must of course be
great literature. For better or worse, critics will always
look down upon home-grown American art forms while they are
still contemporary, whether it's hip hop music or John Wayne
westerns or comic books or American popular song a la Frank
Sinatra or Bing Crosby.
Chandler is
not without his own snobbishness, however, just the same as
the mainstream critics. This spoiled English schoolboy, this
product of private tutors in France and Germany, sneers at
the concept of "significant writing," at the idea that
certain popular styles and conventions subtract artistic
weight from a work of literature, but his real problem is
just that he disagrees with the accepted notions of what
significant writing is.
Specifically,
it seems, he finds snobbish any idea of
"significant writing" that does not include Raymond Chandler.
Other than that, his problems with the tone of literary
criticism in America seem slight. As eager as mainstream book
reviewers were to dismiss his own kind of writing, he was all
too happy to join them in dismissing the arguably more
popular form of the English detective novel.
He attacks
the genre for recycling the same old tricks, deploying the
same "careful grouping of suspects" and, in short, for having
become an ossified art form. He does not have the foresight
or humility to predict the same thing happening to his own
style. What was great literature when Chandler first wrote it
has throughout the years steadily acquired the aroma of
mothballs from writers who shamelessly copied him (Ross
MacDonald), and from writers whose chief contribution to the
literature is to replace Philip Marlowe with their own
particular marginalized subset of the human race, be it
women
(e.g. Sara Paretsky), blacks (e.g. Walter Mosley) or lesbian
kung-fu experts (e.g. Niccola Griffith). While entertaining
on the surface, such continuous re- and re-re-envisioning of
older classics and their tropes can only come to diminishing
returns, as it continues to recycle the same old tricks,
deploy the same profusion of scuzzy suspects, &c.
Chandler was
already on the verge of his own ossification by the time "The
Simple Art of Murder" appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in
1944. After that, he wrote the screenplay for The Blue Dahlia
(not nearly as bad as the critics claimed); he got fired from
the adaptation of his own novel The Lady in the Lake (an
interesting but ultimately failed experiment); he began a
screenplay for Elisabeth Saxnay Holding's The Innocent Mrs
Duff (never produced); he wrote a screenplay for Playback
(also never produced); in 1949 he wrote the mediocre novel
The Little Sister; in 1950 he published two short-story
collections (aside from "The Simple Art of Murder" essay,
nothing in the two books had been written later than 1939);
he got sacked by Alfred Hitchcock from scribe duties on
Strangers on a Train; in 1953 he wrote the quite good but
arguably recycled novel The Long Goodbye; and in 1958 he
wrote the inarguably awful Playback.
In between,
he did some anonymous script doctoring on the forgotten And
Now Tomorrow and The Unseen, and he wrote several stray
essays for The Atlantic Monthly, mostly dealing with his
experiences of Hollywood, mostly written in the tone, as J.G.
Ballard splendidly put it, "that arises from feeling sorry
for oneself while making large amounts of money" (Ballard
3).
Taken on its
own, this latter period of his artistic career--which lasts
quite a bit longer than his fertile, pre-1944 career--does
not seem to indicate literary greatness in any respect.
Luckily for Chandler, his reputation is not derived from
novels like Playback. One common criticism of Cervantes is
that his literary fame rests solely on Don Quixote. But if
you've written that, what else do you need to write? If
Chandler fulfills his manifesto only retroactively, before
1944, before calcifying into self-parody, it can at least be
said that for a time in his career he wrote as no one else in
America was writing, and he wrote well.
While he
largely refrains from naming names in "The Simple Art of
Murder," Chandler does take aim at a few specific novels. He
displays a niggling attitude towards improbability and
factual error in a genre fraught with both. "Conan Doyle made
mistakes which completely invalidated some of his stories."
Do mistakes really invalidate a story? Chandler's plodding
diagram of the flaws that presumably invalidate A.A. Milne's
The Red House Mystery proceeds with all the petty literalness
of a high school term paper. This is the sort of
forest-for-the-trees criticism that believes Ben Hur to be
artistically compromised because Charlton Heston's wristwatch
is visible in a few scenes.
Chandler also
ridicules E.C. Bentley's charming novel, Trent's Last Case,
in which "you have to accept the premise that a giant of
international finance will plot his own death so as to hang
his secretary."
This is, I
admit, a little hard to swallow, and Bentley did attempt to
dispel the aura of absurdity such a set-up necessarily has.
Towards the end of the novel, one character cites the
"Campden Case," in which John Perry accused his mother and
brother of murdering a man. There was no body and no real
evidence, but the fact that Perry was claiming to have
assisted in the murder lent weight to his accusation. Who
would put his own neck in the noose just to hang someone
else? His mother and brother denied the accusations. The
judge believed John, and on the strength of his confession,
all three were hanged. Two years later, the "victim" returned
from abroad to Campden, unharmed and unaware that he had been
murdered (Bentley 158-159).
Even to my
credulous ears, it sounds almost too fantastical to be true.
Yet, I have looked it up in the Newgate Calendar, that
classic compendium of the most celebrated and grotesque
criminal cases of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, referred
to by Dickens, Defoe, Thackeray and numerous others (Cuddon
545). It's there. It happened.
Apparently,
even this bit of classic true-crime reportage wasn't enough
to satisfy Chandler. In his personal letters, he later said
that if this central conceit of Trent's Last Case was logical
or realistic, "then logic and realism have no meaning"
(Gardiner 67).
Yet, again,
it's hard to tell if Chandler is being thoughtful or merely
contentious. In his own novel, The Lady in the Lake,
published one year before "The Simple Art of Murder,"
Chandler wrote a scene in which Marlowe defends the
plausibility of just such a situation:
Patton shook
his head. He didn't like it. Neither did I. He said slowly:
"As to your other notion, it's just plain crazy. Killing
yourself and fixing things so as somebody else would get
accused of murdering you don't fit in with my simple ideas of
human nature at all."
"Then your
ideas of human nature are too simple," I said. "Because it
has been done" (81).
Chandler
misses the point of Trent's Last Case, that Bentley, while in
some sense writing a traditional English detective story, is
also himself mocking the clich鳬 the farcically contrived
situations and mandarin deductive logic of these same
stories. Chandler was hardly the first writer to jump on this
bandwagon, or bandwagons like it. There was nothing new about
this anti-criticism criticism, particularly in America where
an allergy to pretentiousness is both the treasure of our
national sensibility and the bane of our cultural existence.
Even before Trent--which was written three decades
before
"The Simple Art of Murder"--the more implausible conventions
of the English detective novel were an open joke among
writers. Forty-one years before Chandler felt it necessary to
point out the nudity of the emperor, Bram Stoker was writing:
"Such things are all very well in books where your amateur
detectives, who know everything before it's done, can fit
them into theories; but in Scotland Yard…the men aren't all
idiots either" (72).
As with
Chandler, E.C. Bentley's opinion of the English detective
novel manifests itself in his fiction. In Trent, his sleuth
arrives at a dazzling conclusion that is as brilliant as it
is incorrect. Bentley's amateur detective puts forth a
theory, and it fits all the facts, but it is just plain
wrong. This is a very real occurrence in the world of
investigation, but something Chandler never had the modernist
courage to do with his own hero, who, in the end, is as
blandly infallible as any concoction of Agatha Christie's or
Dorothy Sayers's.
Trent's Last
Case contains ideas and devices that were picked up by
modernist writers, mostly on the rainier side of the
Atlantic, e.g. Virginia Woolf and Ford Madox Ford. After
reading Bentley's novel, you are left with a sense of the
true strangeness and illogic of real life, of the intricate
fabric of misunderstandings that forms our narrative reality,
that is not entirely fathomable by deductive reasoning alone.
The antepenultimate sentence of Trent--"I could have borne
everything but that last revelation of the impotence of human
reason"--sounds as if it could have come straight from The
Good Soldier, Ford's masterpiece of emotional
mystification.
This is an
idea courted by much detective fiction, including that of
Chandler, but seldom pursued. It is certainly a plot twist
that has just as much or more claim to "logic and realism"
than most of Chandler's own twists.
Still, the
realism--or supposed lack thereof--of the English detective
novel bothered Chandler a great deal. He condemned the entire
genre as being "artificial to the point of burlesque," an
interesting choice of words because he himself had been known
to say that about his own fiction, which was itself quite
stylized and often quite over the top. "Why is it that
Americans…do not see the strong element of burlesque in my
kind of writing?" (Gardiner 53)
He criticizes
old-fashioned detective writing as being contrived, and
removed from reality. He also derides the genre's more
ludicrous trappings ("hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare
and tropical fish"). What he does not do, in between his
hectoring jibes, is stop to think that these things might be
the genre's principal charm. Tastewise, when you get down to
brass tacks, I do prefer Chandler's work to that of the other
mystery writers he cites in his essay. Yet the fiction of
these other writers is not without its pleasures, and not
without its own artistry. Conversely, Chandler's fiction is
not without its own unreality, its own implausibility.
I think most
emergency-room physicians would concur that if anyone took
the number of knock-out blows to the head that Philip Marlowe
takes in Chandler's stories, he'd be punchier than Muhammad
Ali on a Tilt-a-Whirl. In a letter to his agent, Chandler
once outlined what he felt was the basic unreality of all
mystery fiction, including his own:
"The mystery writer's material is melodrama, which is an
exaggeration of violence and fear beyond what one normally
experiences in life. The means he uses are realistic in the
sense that such things happen to people like these and in
places like these; but this realism is superficial; the
potential of emotion is overcharged, the compression of time
and event is a violation of probability, and although such
things happen, they do not happen so fast and in such a tight
frame of logic to so closely knit a group of people"
(Gardiner 53-54).
There are
plenty of detective story writers to whom this does not apply
(James Lee Burke and, again, the iconoclastic James Ellroy
leap to mind). And to say, essentially, that "all mystery
fiction is melodrama" is a more contemptuous dismissal--even
of his own work!--than even the most snobbish New York Times
book reviewer could come up with.
In truth, the
most glaring unreality inherent in private-eye fiction stems
from the presence of the private eye in the first place.
Hammett's Continental Op had at least a background in the
social realities of the day and in Hammett's own history with
the Pinkerton Detective Agency. Chandler's Marlowe, on the
other hand, exists in a vacuum of realism, which Chandler
himself acknowledged: "The private eye is admittedly an
exaggeration--a fantasy" (Gardiner 60).
Robert
Aldrich's nihilistic, genre-busting movie adaptation of
Mickey Spillane's Kiss Me Deadly turns on this difference
between the popular fantasy of the private eye and the less
glamorous reality: in the translation from novel to screen,
the character of Mike Hammer becomes cruder, sleazier, more
ignoble, more sadistic. He is no symbol of anarchic justice,
but a self-absorbed, bottom-feeding brute who chases and
manipulates divorce cases for a living. He is, in the words
of one character, a "bedroom dick." In many of Chandler's
novels and stories, Philip Marlowe makes it a point to tell
people that he doesn't do divorce cases, since that is what
everyone's first thought when they hear the word "detective,"
because that is indeed what real detectives do.
As with all
great writers, Chandler's realism is of his own making.
Although Chandler was perceived to be the avatar of a
particular vision of a chaotic and unstable urban landscape,
his fiction speaks of nothing but a highly ordered and
mannered universe in which crime and violence always happen
for reasons (which is usually true) and, moreover, always
happen for good reasons (which is usually not). Rare is the
crime that occurs outside a greater scheme or conspiracy.
Morally, Chandler's universe is cynical and fatalistic. It's
a universe in which cops are not always good, and in fact
very seldom are; crooks, conversely, are always bad. The
world is populated by mean, venal, greedy, callous, stupid,
weak people, and that, Chandler wants us to know, is how it
is. Absent from his work is any real sense of modernist moral
ambiguity, that people can be both good and bad at the same
time. Or neither.
The
occurrences in Chandler's universe operate along very strict
lines of narrative balance. His ideas about writerly craft
and form--which are quite old-fashioned and not modernist at
all--come before his ideas about realism.
And even
Chandler's vision of a jaundiced Los Angeles is fairly tame
when viewed side-by-side with the actual Los Angeles of the
day, which in retrospect seems to more truthfully resemble
one of James Ellroy's phantasmagorical nightmares. Published
in 1949, the year of the publication of Chandler's
next-to-last novel The Little Sister, was J. Paul de River's
The Sexual Criminal, a compendium of case studies gathered
from the 1930s and 1940s during de River's tenure as director
of the LAPD's Sex Offense Bureau.
The cases
that make up the book were not obscure secrets of law
enforcement, they were, by the author's own admission, front
page news all over the city (de River 399). With chapter
headings such as
"The Sadist Pedophile," "Lust Murder" and "Necrophilia," one
imagines that even the basest grotesqueries Chandler could
invent simply paled in comparison to the front pages of the
Daily Mirror and Evening Herald and Express being hawked at
busy Los Angeles intersections.
So really,
there isn't a single one-size-fits-all realism for
literature. It's hard to say if Raymond Chandler thought his
was the only true realism, the one true narrative logic, or
if he was just being Raymond Chandler: a cranky, unfair,
tetchy sentimentalist. If Chandler really did believe it, he
had a pretty narrow perspective on the vastness, the immense
scope of English literature.
Good fiction
builds its own internal logic, or abides by the logic of a
set of common conventions or genre rules. There can be no one
yardstick for "realistic" for all literature. It's all
relative. One could quite easily point to Woolf's The Waves
or Faulkner's As I Lay Dying--even Joyce's Finnegan's
Wake--as being more palpably real than even the most
plain-spoken, clue-studded, plot-driven pulp mystery story.
Or vice versa. If a piece of fiction accurately and
truthfully communicates a situation or an emotion, if it
reaches the reader on its own terms--whatever tactics it
adopts to do this--then it is real.
Chandler
himself acknowledged as much in some personal notes written
five years after "The Simple Art of Murder":
"Plausibility is largely a matter of style--a matter of
effect, not of fact, and one writer will succeed with a
pattern which in the hands of a lesser artist would just seem
foolish--The mystery story must take into account the
cultural stage of its readers; things that were acceptable in
Sherlock Holmes are not acceptable in Sayers or Christie"
(Gardiner 63).
But in "The
Simple Art of Murder," one gets the idea that somewhere in
his slender readings and his provincial musings on
literature, Raymond Chandler had not yet grasped this point.
For if detective fiction's value as literature rests chiefly
on the airtightness of its plots, then it is indeed as
unliterary as some critics contend. Logic as a means can fall
within the terrain of literature. Logic as an end is the
domain of philosophical proofs.
For a
supposedly major American writer, Chandler doesn't seem to
have been much of a reader. Before writing "The Simple Art of
Murder," he wrote to his editor at the Atlantic Monthly to
voice his misgivings about writing such a polemic: "I tried
to do a rough draft of such an article, only to discover I
hadn't read enough detective stories to be able to indulge in
the usual casual display of erudition" (Gardiner 49).
His personal
letters create the impression of a man who isn't so much in
love with literature as stuck in an unhappy marriage with it.
Almost all of the authors and books he mentions to friends as
having merit--a rare occurrence--seem, in retrospect, quite
pedestrian, and his guesses for their posterity are wrong on
almost every occasion.
Most if not
all of the books mentioned admiringly in "The Simple Art of
Murder" have long ago vanished from the publishing landscape:
Percival Wilde's Inquest, Kenneth Fearing's The Dagger of the
Mind, Donald Henderson's Mr. Bowling Buys a Newspaper, and
Richard Sale's Lazarus No. 7 are all long out of print, and
Raymond Postgate's Verdict of Twelve is recently so. Not that
that's necessarily damning--almost none of Fredric Brown's
work is currently in print, and he wrote some incredible
books--but the fact that I couldn't track down even one of
those books struck me as inauspicious.
These books,
presumably, all contain plots not invalidated by
"mistakes."
It's not as
if Chandler's plots were always so iron clad. Confirming a
popular Hollywood anecdote I had always thought apocryphal,
Chandler once wrote to a friend: "I remember several years
ago when Howard Hawks was making The Big Sleep, the movie, he
and Bogart got into an argument as to whether one of the
characters was murdered or committed suicide. They sent me a
wire asking me, and dammit I didn't know either" (Gardiner
221).
Chandler also
calls foul on old-fashioned detective stories because of
their "puppets and cardboard lovers and papier-mache villains
and detectives of exquisite and impossible gentility." Very
often his own fictional characters could be described in the
same way. True to the form of most serial literature, which
virtually all of Chandler's writing was, the main character
is by far the most memorable, recurring in a continuously
recycled cast of ringers as forgettable as they are
temporarily well-drawn.
As for
cardboard lovers? The femmes fatale in his own books have a
drearily interchangeable existence. You remember the girl's
bolero jacket in the story "Red Wind" far longer and far more
clearly than you remember the girl. Her individual identity,
in the larger scheme of things, is unimportant.
Mid-essay,
Chandler moves on to criticize several writers of loftier
reputation, leaving the reading to wonder who, exactly,
Chandler considers a great writer other than himself. And you
really have to marvel at the breathtaking gall it took for
the creator and purveyor of the Marlowe mystique to write:
"Sherlock Holmes…is mostly an attitude and a few dozen lines
of unforgettable dialogue."
He also goes
after Dashiell Hammett (of all people), who, in balance, must
be reckoned Chandler's superior in everything except
alcoholic temperance. Chandler says Hammett had "no
deliberate artistic aims" and reductively calls him an
"individual picked out to represent a whole movement." In
light of these comments, all the praise he heaps on Hammett
afterwards seems somewhat back-handed.
Chandler is
certainly right that authors were becoming more conscious of
their artifice, but this was hardly limited to detective
fiction, or even literature. The hard-boiled literary
"movement," if it can be called such, was indicative of a
sea-change coming over literature and art as a whole, and
with the modernists in particular. It came largely from a
tectonic shift in urban social realities, racial and sexual
politics, from new popular interest in the disciplines of
psychology, sociology and criminology, and from the wedding
of mass media to mass killing in the wars of the early 20th
century.
Chandler, on
the other hand, seems to rather myopically frame this change
as being motivated by writers looking for an opportunity to
put Dorothy Sayers in her place.
The famous
show-stopper in "The Simple Art of Murder," the final part
describing the ideal traits of the fictional private eye, is
uncharacteristically romantic, even maudlin, for a modernist
writer, and a modernist crime writer at that. Chandler writes
with the stridency of a frustrated sentimentalist:
"Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself
mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid…He is the hero; he
is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and
yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weary phrase,
a man of honor."
This saintly,
almost mystical image of the private eye is as formulaic and
psychologically simple as anything found in the traditional
English novel of detection, or even in the modern Harlequin
romance novel for that matter.
Ultimately,
it is probably true that Chandler does live up to the
manifesto implicit in "The Simple Art of Murder," but the
manifesto itself is somewhat confused and amorphous. While
Chandler was a man of his modernist times in terms of prose
style--particularly in the area of dialogue and in the
mistaking of cynicism for psychological depth--he was
thoroughly reactionary in attitude to form and character. His
description of the idealized man who is not himself mean
lends itself more to comparisons with medieval romances than
modernist concerns.
Had Chandler
more of a sense of humor (after all, "flipness is not wit"),
Philip Marlowe might have become the Don Quixote of the
moderns. Instead he became Dick Powell.
[I've always considered this last sentence a serious misstep
on my part; I actually think Powell was a pretty good
Marlowe, although I prefer him far more as a straight man, as
in Andre de Toth's Pitfall--D.M.]
--------------------
Works Cited:
Aldrich, Robert, dir. Kiss Me Deadly. By Mickey Spillane.
Perf. Ralph Meeker, Maxine Cooper, Gaby Rodgers, Cloris
Leechman. 1955.
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