A while back I was sketching out an essay I wanted to write
about this subject. So I compiled the following. For whatever
reason I could not complete the essay. I had, simply, no
ending I liked, that I felt comfortable with, that I felt was
honest and truthful. I posted it once before here and asked
the list what you all thought. I seem to recall most felt too
uncomfortable to speak definitively. Maybe I was wrong.
"It's not just a shine killing any more" by Frederick
Zackel
The mystery novelist Raymond Chandler wrote great stories
about Los Angeles. Walter Mosley writes about it now in Devil
in a Blue Dress and a half-dozen other Easy Rawlins novels.
James Ellroy writes about it now in Black Dahlia and Suicide
Hill. John Gregory Dunne wrote about it in True Confessions.
Each has discovered the Dark Side of the Dream.
Some critics say Chandler's best book about the city was his
first, Farewell, My Lovely, which was made into a classic
noir movie Murder My Sweet. The novel is based upon a short
story, "Try the Girl," that can be found in Chandler's
collection Killer in the Rain.
The novel begins in South Central Los Angeles, and the very
first sentence tells us we are at "one of those mixed blocks
over on Central Avenue, the blocks that are not yet all
Negro."
Although Philip Marlowe is the narrator, Moose Malloy is the
main character. For Malloy, just released from prison, blacks
are "smokes" and "dinges" and
"nigger," the saloon he and Marlowe enter is a "shine box,"
"a dinge joint." Moments after the dirty deed, he hardly
remembers murdering a black man here.
The LAPD cops are little different. Detective-lieutenant
Nulty attached to the 77th Street Division is glum. "'Another
shine killing,'" he calls it. He asks Marlowe, "'What was you
doing all the time . . . this Malloy was twisting the neck of
this smoke.'" Nulty is not seeking justice, of course. In
fact, he couldn't care less.
One time there was five smokes carved Harlem sunsets on
each other down on East Eighty-four. One of them was cold
already. There was blood on the furniture, blood on the
walls, blood even on the ceiling. I go down and outside the
house a guy that works on the Chronicle, a newshawk, is
coming off the porch and says,
'Aw, hell, shines,' and gets in his heap and goes away. Don't
even go in the house.
When Marlowe does buy an evening edition, he realizes Nulty
"was right in one thing at least. The Montgomery killing
hadn't even made the want-ad section so far."
Throughout the novel Marlowe and Nulty will crack wise. When
Marlowe asks when "the inquest on the nigger" is coming up,
Nulty sneers, "Why bother?"
On another occasion Marlowe will say, "Well, all (Malloy) did
was kill a Negro . .
. I guess that's only a misdemeanor."
It's only after an old drunken white woman gets beaten and
strangled by Malloy does Marlowe say, "It's not just a shine
killing any more."
Blacks of course aren't the only victims of prejudice and
racial epithets. Marlowe himself speaks not just of
"coloreds," but also "pansies" and "Chinamen." Marlowe
states, "I saw a Jap gardener at work weeding a huge lawn" on
a rich white man's lawn. "He was pulling a piece of weed out
of the vast velvet expanse and sneering at it the way Jap
gardeners do."
When Marlowe hides out in a waterfront hotel, "I didn't have
any bags, so being a Mexican, (the bellhop) opened the door
from me and smiled politely just the same." Later, when he
sneaks aboard a gambling ship, "I smelled engine oil and saw
a wop in a purple shirt reading under a naked light bulb with
his grandfather's spectacles."
Marlowe even gets confused between Japanese and Chinese when
he talks about a cigarette case, "a trade article that might
have cost thirty-five to seventy-five cents in any Oriental
store, Hooey Phooey Sing--Long Sing Tung, that kind of place,
where a mild mannered Jap hisses at you, laughing heartily
when you say that the Moon of Arabia incense smells like the
girls in Frisco Sadie's back parlor."
Marlowe goes up against a self-proclaimed "Hollywood Indian"
villain who goes by the name Second Planting. This villain
speaks in guttural pig Latin, smells
"the earthy smell of primitive man, and not the slimy dirt of
cities," looks like a bum, wears clothes two sizes too small
for him, has "the short and apparent awkward legs of a
chimpanzee."
Marlowe is not alone in his racist speeches. An elderly white
woman has "a little colored boy that goes errands for me." A
beautiful young blonde sees a beer joint as "a very dingy
place."
Chandler's Los Angeles has changed, though, since then. Back
in 1940 Philip Marlowe says that, "Law is where you buy it in
this town."
Marlowe gets sapped by a pair of Bay City police. (Bay City
was Chandler's Santa Monica.) The larger cop -- who turns out
to be the Chief of Detectives -- is described as "a windblown
blossom of some two hundred pounds with freckled teeth and
the mellow voice of a circus barker. He was tough, fast and
he ate red meat. Nobody could push him around. He was the
kind of cop who spits on his blackjack every night instead of
saying his prayers. But he had humorous eyes."
Marlowe on Santa Monica: "Sure, it's a nice town. It's
probably no crookeder than Los Angeles. But you can only buy
a piece of a big city. You can buy a town this size all
complete, with the original box and tissue paper. That's the
difference."
The Chief of Police in Chandler's Bay City is big city all
the way, one of those
"fat prosperous cops with Chamber of Commerce voices."
Marlowe says, "No straw was sticking to his hair."
The Chief tells him that "Trouble . . . is something our
little city don't know much about, Mr. Marlowe. Our city is
small but very, very clean. I look out of my western windows
and I see the Pacific Ocean. Nothing cleaner than that, is
there?' He didn't mention the two gambling ships that were
hull down on the brass waves just beyond the three mile
limit."
Neither does Marlowe.
Marlowe deals with the crooked cops, one of who tells him,
"'Them old cops get sap-hungry once in a while,' he said.
'They just got to crack a head. Jesus, was I scared. You
dropped like a sack of cement.'"
The big cop blames the system. "Cops don't go crooked for
money. Not always, not even often. They get caught in the
system. They get you where they have you do what is told them
or else.'"
The big cop claims that a cop can't stay honest even if he
wanted to. "'He gets chiseled out of his pants if he does.
You gotta play the game dirty or you don't eat.'"
Marlowe has the cop perspective explained to him by a
waterfront wheeler named Red. "'The trouble with cops is not
that they're dumb or crooked or tough, but that they think
just being a cop give them a little something they didn't
have before.'"
As for the predictable villains, according to Marlowe, like
the gangster who owns the gambling ships, "'they didn't get
there by murdering people. They got there by guts and
brains--and they don't have the group courage the cops have
either. But above all they're business men. What they do is
for money. Just like other business men. Sometimes a guy gets
badly in the way. Okey. Out. But they think plenty before
they do it.'"
***
Reading Farewell, My Lovely brings memories of Huckleberry
Finn swimming to the surface. In Chapter 32, Huck comes to
the Phelps' cotton plantation and pretends to be their cousin
Tom. To explain to his "relation" why his
"cousin Tom" hadn't arrived days earlier, Huck fabricates a
story that his boat had gone aground.
"We blowed out a cylinder-head."
"Good gracious! anybody hurt?"
"No'm. Killed a nigger."
"Well, it's lucky; because sometimes people do get
hurt."
Is Huck a racist?
Is Marlowe a racist?
By contemporary standards, of course they are.
But for their times, both are paragons of progressive
thinking. And what is politically incorrect today may be
historically correct.
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