One of the “dead men” who had been talked about and was—in Chandler’s view—vastly overrated by the intelligentsia was playwright Eugene O’Neill, considered by many to be America’s answer to Shakespeare. Chandler didn’t think so …
O’Neill is the sort of man who could spend a year in a flophouse, researching flophouses, and write a play about flophouses that would be no more real than a play by a man who had never been in a flophouse, but had only read about them.
—Letter to James Sandoe—January 27, 1948
It is likely that one particular incident confirmed his feelings:
Throughout the play The Iceman Cometh O’Neill uses the expression “the big sleep” as a synonym for death. He is apparently under the impression that this is a current underworld or half-world usage, whereas it is a pure invention on my part. If I am remembered long enough, I shall probably be accused of stealing the phrase from O’Neill, since he is a big shot.
—Letter to Cleve Adams—September 4, 1948
Eugene O’Neill (1888–1953). Photofest (illustrations credit 2.13)
But whatever his reservations about his fellow contemporary writers, as a man of letters he had an appropriate respect for one of the immortals:
Shakespeare would have done well in any generation, because he would have refused to die in a corner; he would have taken the false gods and made them over, he would have taken the current formulae and forced them into something lesser men thought them incapable of. Alive today, he would undoubtedly have written and directed motion pictures, plays, and God knows what. Instead of saying “This medium is not good,” he would have used it and made it good. If some people had called some of his work cheap (which some of it is), he wouldn’t have cared a rap, because he would know that without some vulgarity there is no complete man. He would have hated refinement, as such, because it is always a withdrawal, a shrinking, and he was much too tough to shrink from anything.
—Letter to Hamish Hamilton—April 22, 1949
Even though he was now publishing fairly regularly—twenty pulp stories between 1933 and 1939—Chandler was not fully emotionally committed to hard-boiled fiction, as it was popularly called. He had a hankering to alternate it with fantasy.
His notebook contains this entry:
Since all plans are foolish and those written down are never fulfilled, let us make a plan this 16th day of March 1939, at Riverside, California.
For the rest of 1939, all of 1940, spring of 1941, and then if there is no war and if there is any money, to go to England for material.
He then lists several projects in synopsis form and concludes,
The three mystery stories should be finished in the next two years, by the end of 1940. If they make enough for me to move to England and to forget mystery writing and try English Summer (A Gothic Romance) and the Fantastic Stories, without worrying about whether they make money, I’ll tackle them. But I must have two years money ahead, and a sure market with the detective story when I come back to it, if I do. If English Summer is a smash hit, which it should be, properly written, written up to the hilt but not overwritten, I’m set for life. From then on I’ll alternate the fantastic and the dramatic until I think of a new type. Or may do a suave detective just for the fun.
Cissy typed up these notes and added a P.S. of her own …
Dear Raymio, you’ll have fun looking at this maybe, and seeing what useless dreams you had. Or perhaps it will not be fun.
As it happened, events were already shaping otherwise. In 1938 Sydney Sanders, a New York literary agent, had read and been impressed by some of Chandler’s pulp stories. He persuaded publisher Alfred Knopf to commission a full-length novel.
Despite Chandler’s contention that he was always a slow worker—
I work too slowly, throw away too much … and what I write that sells is not at all the sort of thing I really want to write.
—Letter to George Harmon Coxe—October 17, 1939
—he finished The Big Sleep in three months.
But a lot of the material in it was revamped from a couple of novelettes (“Killer in the Rain” and “The Curtain”). This gave it body but it didn’t make it any easier to write … for me it was a terrific production and I have never approached it since.
—Letter to Hamish Hamilton—November 10, 1950
Alfred and Blanche Knopf. Together they formed the Knopf publishing house in 1915. The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin (illustrations credit 2.14, illustrations credit 2.15))
Knopf published the book in the United States in February 1939, and Hamish Hamilton in the U.K. a month later. Chandler was now fifty-one. Reviews were mainly favorable and it sold well—particularly in the U.K., where Chandler’s reputation was to be always in advance of the one he enjoyed in America.
He remained skeptical of the publishing process:
I have never had any great respect for the ability of editors, publishers, play and picture producers to guess what the public will like … I have always tried to put myself in the shoes of the ultimate consumer, the reader, and ignore the middleman.
—Letter to George Harmon Coxe—June 27, 1940
Later he would sound more ironic on the topic …
But you know how ignorant the public is. Compared with an agent the public knows nothing.
—Letter to Hamish Hamilton—May 25, 1952
Chandler himself was more than a little perturbed by the fact that the prestigious New York Times found aspects of the book unpleasant. He reflects to Knopf (February 19, 1939) that
my fiction was learned in a rough school, and I probably didn’t notice them much. I was more intrigued by a situation where the mystery is solved by the exposition and understanding of a single character, always well in evidence, rather than by the slow and sometimes long-winded concatenation of circumstances.
As for the next book that Knopf is encouraging him to produce without delay,
I should like, if you approve, to try to jack it up a few more notches. It must be kept sharp, swift and racy, of course, but I think it could be a little less harsh … The Big Sleep is very unequally written. There are scenes that are all right, but there are other scenes still much too pulpy. Insofar as I am able, I want to develop an objective method—but slowly—to the point where I can carry an audience over into a genuine dramatic, even melodramatic, novel, written in a very vivid and pungent style, but not slangy or overly vernacular. I realize that this must be done cautiously and little by little, but I think it can be done. To acquire delicacy without losing power, that’s the problem.
Chandler’s first novel. Published by Alfred A. Knopf in the United States in February 1939. (illustrations credit 2.16)
In an earlier letter to Blanche Knopf—March 15, 1942—he had tried to analyze the literary dichotomy he was never to solve to his own satisfaction:
The thing that rather gets me down is that when I write something that is tough and fast and full of mayhem and murder, I get panned for being tough and fast and full of mayhem, and then when I try to tone down a bit and develop the mental and emotional side of the situation, I get panned for leaving out what I was panned for putting in the first time. The reader expects thus and thus of Chandler because he did it before, but when he did it before he was informed that it might have been much better if he hadn’t.
Despite his own doubts, the growing band of Chandleristas would grant him both delicacy and power as he became what Time magazine called “the Poet Laureate of the loner.”
Without even realizing it, he had already created something that would ensure his literary legacy …
A man called Marlowe.
Three
Philip Marlowe
Investigations
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 … a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability,
without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in the world, and good enough for any world …
—“The Simple Art of Murder”
Marlowe wouldn’t be Marlowe, if he could really get along with policemen.
—Letter to Roger Machell—October 14, 1958
“The first time we met I told you I was a detective. Get it through your lovely head. I work at it, lady. I don’t play at it.”
—Marlowe to Vivian Regan in The Big Sleep
“Phil Marlowe … the shop-soiled Galahad.”
—Dr. Carl Moss in The High Window
“A dirty little man in a dirty little world.”
—Jules Amthor in Farewell, My Lovely
“You know something, Marlowe? I could get to like you. You’re a bit of a bastard—like me.”
—Roger Wade in The Long Goodbye
“Tell her to jump in the lake … Tell her to jump in two lakes, if one won’t hold her. Not clever, but quick.”
—The High Window
Marlowe on Marlowe:
“Marlowe knows everything—except how to make a decent living.”
—The High Window
I was a blank man. I had no face, no meaning, no personality, hardly a name … I was a page from yesterday’s calendar crumpled at the bottom of the waste basket.
—The Little Sister
Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep (1946). Photofest (illustrations credit 3.1)
If I had ever had an opportunity of selecting the movie actor who would best represent [Marlowe] to my mind, I think it would have been Cary Grant.
—Letter to D. J. Ibberson—April 19, 1951
Marlowe is a more honorable man than you and I. I don’t mean Bogart playing Marlowe and I don’t mean because I created him. I didn’t create him at all. I’ve seen dozens like him in all essentials except the few colorful qualities needed to be in a book. (A few even had those.) They were all poor. How could they be anything else?
—Letter to John Houseman—October 1949
The Private Eye inhabits that limbo land between the private citizen and the public law. Chandler and the rest of the school of “hard-boiled” writers found it necessary and profitable to glamorize the stereotype, but Chandler, at least, always recognized the truth:
Your private detective in real life is usually either an ex-policeman with a lot of hard practical experience or else a shabby little hack who runs around trying to find out where people have moved to.
The cops themselves are in no doubt about his place on the food chain. Lieutenant Reavis in “Mandarin’s Jade” (1937) lays it out for P.I. John Dalmas:
“I’d like to sell you an idea, shamus. Maybe I can. There’s a lot of peace of mind in it. The Police Board gave you a license once and the sheriff gave you a special badge. Any acting captain with a peeve can get both of them taken away from you overnight. Maybe even just lieutenant—like me. Now what did you have when you got that license and that badge? You had the social standing of a cockroach. You were a snooper for hire. All in the world you had to do was to spend your last hundred bucks on a down payment on some rent and office furniture and sit on your tail until somebody brought a lion in—so you could put your head in the lion’s mouth to see if he would bite. If he bit your ear off, you got sued for mayhem. Are you beginning to get it? ”
Greystone Mansion, Beverly Hills—inspiration for the Sternwood Mansion in The Big Sleep. (illustrations credit 3.2)
To which Dalmas predictably replies:
“It’s a good line,” I said. “I used it years ago. So you don’t want to break the case?”
Then John Dalmas begat Philip Marlowe. Marlowe was “no one person.” He “just grew out of the pulps.”
Nonetheless, he became very much “one person.” He was to have been called Mallory—not Marlowe—and for Chandler’s first two Black Mask stories in 1933 (“Blackmailers Don’t Shoot” and “Smart-Aleck Kill”) he did carry that name, along with his .38 Colt. It’s tempting to think the influence on this classically educated author was Sir Thomas Malory of medieval Morte d’Arthur fame, especially when the chivalry connection is carried through to Marlowe’s beloved game of chess.
In reality he was probably, and more prosaically, named after Marlowe House at Dulwich—though several critics have tried to draw a parallel with Conrad’s Marlowe in The Heart of Darkness (1902).
In The Big Sleep Chandler’s White Knight—and alter ego—contemplates a game he is about to lose through making the wrong move: “Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn’t a game for knights.”
He says that because it’s the thing Philip Marlowe expects to hear himself say, but it’s not principle that drives him. More typical is his reaction earlier in the same novel when he visits the invalid General Sternwood for the first time:
Over the entrance doors … there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree … I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him out. He didn’t seem to be really trying.
Marlowe never stopped trying. He may not always have slain all the dragons and rescued all the maidens, but he was never defeated.
Ironically, when he leaves the Sternwood house, having solved the case, “the knight in the stained-glass window still wasn’t getting anywhere untying the naked damsel from the tree.”
The Big Sleep. Hamish Hamilton, London, 1939. (illustrations credit 3.3)
The Lady in the Lake. Hamish Hamilton, 1944. (illustrations credit 3.4)
Chandler in 1939—the year The Big Sleep awoke real interest in him as more than just another writer of “hard-boiled fiction.” Photofest (illustrations credit 3.5)
Chandler never claimed to have invented the private eye. Pulp fiction had spewed them out by the dozen—hard-boiled, laconic, treat-’em-rough-and-tell-’em-nothing. He was happy to admit that Dashiell Hammett had defined the genre and put a memorable face to it—first with his “Continental Op” and, more memorably, in The Maltese Falcon (1930) with Sam Spade, a character created several years before Chandler began to write crime fiction and nine years before Marlowe’s debut in a full-length novel.
In retrospect one can see that from the outset Marlowe had a dimension that Spade and the others lacked. He was a realist instead of a cynic, and he was cursed with a brand of idealism that would draw him irresistibly down the meanest of mean streets.
He emerged from a whole series of Chandler predecessors in the short stories. Apart from Mallory, there was Carmady (“The Man Who Liked Dogs,” “Killer in the Rain” and “The Curtain”); John Dalmas (“Mandarin’s Jade” and “Bay City Blues”) and John Evans (“No Crime in the Mountains”). The last of these was published in 1941, after Marlowe’s debut, and perhaps indicates that the lack of critical response to The Big Sleep (1939) and Farewell, My Lovely (1940) had blinded him to the fact that he had already created one of crime fiction’s immortals. (It was only later that the heroes of several of the earlier stories were retrospectively rechristened Marlowe.)
The difference today is apparent. Even Joseph Shaw, the editor Chandler and Hammett had in common—the editor of Black Mask magazine—could observe that Hammett never really cared for any of his characters, whereas it became increasingly clear that Marlowe was a Chandler alter ego. The “anti-romantic romance hero,” as one critic put it; “the American mind,” as Chandler himself once said.
Critics have argued—as critics will inevitably argue in an attempt to create a sociological context—that the rise of the private eye was an attempt to personalize the individual’s rejection of the social and political corruption of the 1920s and ’30s, but that is to miss the real point of Marlowe and to misunderstand the author. Chandler had no—what we might now call—“political agenda.” He was a man out of time and place, to all intents and purposes an uprooted Edwardian Englishman attempting to make sense of an alien land and cultu
re, “a man who loved England well when his heart was young and has never loved in the same way since, nor ever shall.”
His hero, Marlowe, is—among many other things—a knight errant on a crusade in a strange land, charged to uphold the eternal values or lay down his life and honor in the attempt.
Piecing his biography together from the various clues Chandler leaves lying around, we find that Philip Marlowe would appear to have been born around 1905, although by The Long Goodbye (1953) he admits to being forty-two and “spoiled by independence.” He was an only child, brought up in the Northern California town of Santa Rosa by parents both of whom had died by the time he became a private investigator in 1925.
At high school he played football, broke his nose (“a slight miscalculation in an attempt to block a punt”) and had an operation for a deviated septum. An autobiographical touch here. In describing himself to a correspondent years later, Chandler wrote, “My nose is not sharp but blunt, the result of trying to tackle a man as he was kicking a ball.”
Marlowe had “a couple of years” of college (“I can still speak English if there’s any demand for it. There isn’t much in my trade”—The Big Sleep), before attending the University of Oregon.