I'm not saying Chandler wasn't influential, he obviously was.
He's certainly my favourite, by a long, long shot. But I
don't think we should attribute things to him which were
already and are still pretty much standard items in P.I.
literature, archetypes if you will. All Chandler did was
popularize them, and he did it by writing very very
well.
And attributing "the American setting" to Chandler,
particularly by American writers, is absolutely ridiculous.
Just because a few Commonwealth copycats tried to jump on the
bandwagon by aping the US setting doesn't mean much. Are you
suggesting that without Chandler, Ross Macdonald might have
written about Buenos Aires, Leigh Brackett about Alaska or
Howard Browne about Tickle Creek, Tasmania? No, they wrote
about towns they lived in and knew.
The American setting is really just surface stuff, when you
get down to it, just like wisecracks and fedoras and office
bottles and trenchcoats, the sort of exterior stuff hacks
pick up on. The real deal, and Chandler's real legacy, is
much deeper (and deeper-rooted in the genre) than that -- the
zip and poetry of Marlowe's "rude wit;" his tattered code of
chivalry -- frequently corrupted -- that he clings to because
it's all that keeps him going; his bruised romanticism; his
unerring sense of what's right; why he made those wisecracks;
his disgust for corruption and pettiness and sham and all
that. His age, his genre (gee, you forgot race and sexual
preference), his nationality, his former employment history,
his marital status -- none of these matter in the end --
because they're mere window dressing on the real essence of
Chandler's genius.
Hacks see the clothes and mistake it for the man. Good
writers see the surface stuff for what it is, and pick and
choose from it.
--
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