In this, as in so much else, he understates the facts. He must certainly have packed a fair amount of reading into those two years, since we never find him reading during his cases. At various times he quotes Alice, Proust, Hemingway, Wuthering Heights, Anatole France, T. S. Eliot, Jane Austen, Flaubert, Pepys’s diaries; he paraphrases Othello (when he says that Mr. Grayle in Farewell, My Lovely was “an old man who had loved wisely, but not too well”) and—in the same book—can wax decidedly lyrical under the influence of drugs:
“Speak out, Dr. Fell. Pluck the antique viol, let the soft music float … But me no buts. I’ll make a sop of you, I’ll drown you in a butt of Malmsey wine.”
On occasion the lyrical phrases are all his own:
“You have been drinking,” she said slowly.
“Only Chanel No. 5, and kisses, and the pale glow of lovely legs, and the mocking invitation in deep blue eyes. Innocent things like that.”
—The Little Sister
“Never the time and the place and the loved one all together,” I said … “Browning. The poet, not the automatic.”
—The Little Sister
Though when he was playing scrupulously by his sardonic rules, it didn’t do to admit to too much literacy. When Marlowe arrives at his office in The Big Sleep, he finds Vivian Regan waiting for him.
“I was beginning to think perhaps you worked in bed, like Marcel Proust.”
“Who’s he?” I put a cigarette in my mouth and stared at her.
Art, on the other hand—particularly modern art—smacks of pretension all too often for Marlowe’s taste …
“I picked it up just the other day, Asta Dial’s Spirit of Dawn.”
“I thought it was Klopstein’s Two Warts on a Fanny,” I said …
“You have a somewhat peculiar sense of humor,” he said.
“Not peculiar,” I said. “Just uninhibited.”
—Farewell, My Lovely
A couple of vigorously colored daubs on the walls that looked lousy enough to have cost money.
—The Little Sister
…and music didn’t fare much better:
I was … listening to Khachaturyan working in a tractor factory. He called it a violin concerto. I called it a loose fan belt and the hell with it.
—The Long Goodbye
Kropp’s Piano Concerto for Two Lame Thumbs.
On the other hand, he does like Mozart!
He worked as a field investigator for an insurance company before joining the office of the Los Angeles D.A., Taggart Wilde. (“I was fired for insubordination. I test very high on insubordination”—The Big Sleep.) Chandler speculated that Marlowe was “too efficient at a time and in a place where efficiency was the last thing desired by the persons in charge.” He was never a regular cop, although he knew the breed well and a career-long friend was Bernie Ohls, one of the D.A.’s key investigators.
He runs afoul of the law on numerous occasions and occasionally pays the inevitable price for protecting his client. (“I’ve been in jail more than once.”)
Why did Marlowe come to Los Angeles? Chandler said he was never sure himself, except that “eventually most people do, although not all of them remain.”
He stands six feet and a half-inch tall and at the time of The Big Sleep (1939) weighs 190 pounds. He may have added three or four pounds over the years. His hair is dark brown, although by The Lady in the Lake (1943) “I brushed my hair and looked at the gray in it. There was getting to be plenty of gray in it.” He has “warm brown eyes with flecks of gold in them”—but then that is a lady noticing them.
“Well, you got a build on you for the work,” he said, satisfied. “And your face don’t tell a lot of stories.”
—The Lady in the Lake
In the early short stories he pays little attention to his appearance and habitually wears a “shiny blue serge suit” (“Goldfish”—1936), but for his debut in a full-length novel, The Big Sleep, three years later, he takes more pains:
Audrey Totter and Robert Montgomery star in La Dame du Lac/The Lady in the Lake (1946). Belgian poster (illustrations credit 3.6)
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 shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it.
In the mid-1930s he has an office in the Condor Building but soon moves to the mythical Cahuenga Building—first to the seventh floor, then settling on the sixth (Suite 615): “two small rooms at the back,” the smaller of them “the half-office I use for a Reception Room” with “a buzzer on the door which I could switch on and off from my private thinking parlor” (“my down-at-the-heels brain emporium”).
The pebbled glass door panel is lettered in flaked black paint: “Philip Marlowe … Investigations.” It is a reasonably shabby door at the end of a reasonably shabby corridor in the sort of building that was new about the year the all-tile bathroom became the basis of civilization.
As I walked into the musty silence of the little waiting-room there was the usual feeling of having been dropped down a well dried up twenty years ago to which no one would come back ever. The smell of old dust hung in the air as flat and stale as a football interview.
I opened the inner door and inside there it was the same dead air, the same dust along the veneer, the same broken promise of a life of ease.
In The Big Sleep the reception area has a “faded red settee, two odd semi-easy chairs, the net curtains that needed laundering [“I’ll send them only come St. Swithin’s Day”—Farewell, My Lovely] and the boy’s size library table with the venerable magazines on it to give the place a professional touch.” By The High Window the magazines are “dead” and the room, with its “rusty floor covering and the general air of not much money being made,” is “empty of everything but dust.” The door was invariably left unlocked “for a client to go in and wait, in case I had a client, and the client cared to sit down and wait.”
In the office itself, with its “mustard yellow plaster wall,” were:
A rust-red carpet, not very young, five green filing cases, three of them full of California climate, an advertising calendar showing the Quints rolling around on a sky-blue floor, in pink dresses, with seal-brown hair and sharp black eyes as large as mammoth prunes. There were three near-walnut chairs, the usual desk with the usual blotter, pen set, ashtray and telephone, and the usual squeaky swivel chair behind it.
—The Big Sleep—1939
Three hard chairs and a swivel chair, a flat desk with a glass top, five green filing cabinets, three of them full of nothing, a calendar, and a framed license bond on the wall, a washbowl in a stained wooden cupboard, a hatrack, a carpet that was just something on the floor, and two open windows with net curtains that puckered in and out like the lips of a toothless old man sleeping. The same stuff I had last year, and the year before that. Not beautiful, not gay, but better than a tent on the beach.
—The High Window—1942
Detection starts at home. Robert Montgomery as Marlowe clearly hasn’t noticed that whoever inscribed his office window called him “Phillip” instead of “Philip”—and that his favorite newspaper prefers “clews” to “clues.” Photofest (illustrations credit 3.7)
The Dionne Quintuplets, born in Ontario, Canada, in May 1934. Photofest (illustrations credit 3.8)
By the time of The Little Sister (1948) the five green filing cases have been reduced to three and we are introduced to:
the light fixture in the ceiling with three dead moths in it that had been there for at least six months … grimy woodwork and the pen set on the desk and tired, tired telephone (on which he liked to hang his hat instead of bothering with the hat-rack) … the Boston sharpener screwed to the edge of the window frame.
Little changes over the years.
The desk acquires
a “stained brown blotter” and a desk lighter, together with a holder for a range of pipes including a bulldog. One drawer of the desk holds a fresh pack of cigarettes (usually Camels at fifteen cents a pack!—although “almost any cigarette will satisfy him”) and a duster; and in the deep bottom drawer is a bottle of scotch (usually Old Forester) and “two pony glasses”—in case he should happen to have a visitor and the visitor should also happen to be thirsty.
…although “almost any cigarette will satisfy him.” (And in The Long Goodbye he’s even caught smoking a “bulldog pipe.”) (illustrations credit 3.9)
In The High Window it’s Old Taylor. At home he’s been known to keep Four Roses.
Marlowe’s drinking habits, incidentally—rather like his own—were a subject that could make Chandler testy. While Marlowe rarely turned down a scotch or rye when it was offered—and had been known to help himself on occasion when it was not—it wasn’t his only tipple (“I was never fussy about drinks”). His preferred cocktail seems to have been a double Gibson, or the gimlets he drinks with Terry Lennox in The Long Goodbye. Chandler once claimed to a correspondent that the P.I. “didn’t prefer rye to bourbon and would drink practically anything that is not sweet … Certain drinks such as Pink Ladies, Honolulu cocktails and crème de menthe highballs he would regard as an insult.” However, “I am a little tired of the numerous suggestions that … he’s always full of whiskey … When he wants a drink he takes it openly and doesn’t hesitate to remark on it. I don’t know how it is in your part of the country, but compared with the country-club set in my part of the country he is as sober as a deacon” (Letter to a fan—October 1951).
Although in 1945 Chandler had referred to him as “a simple alcoholic vulgarian who never sleeps with his clients while on duty.”
“Alcohol is like love,” [Terry] said. “The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl’s clothes off.”
“Is that bad?” I asked him.
—The Long Goodbye
“I think a man ought to get drunk at least twice a year just on principle, so he won’t let himself get snotty about it.”
—Raymond Chandler
“His guns have been rather various. He started out with a German Luger automatic pistol. He seems to have had Colt automatics of various calibers, but not larger than .38 and when last I heard he has a Smith & Wesson .38 Special, probably with a four inch barrel. This is a very powerful gun … and has the advantage over an automatic of using a lead cartridge. It will not jam or discharge accidentally … and is probably just as effective a weapon at short range as a .45 caliber automatic” (Raymond Chandler).
The top left-hand drawer was reserved for his gun—initially a Luger, then later a Colt .38 or a Smith & Wesson .38 with a 4-inch barrel. To make life easier he would also have a .38 in the glove compartment of whatever car he was driving and a pint of Old Forester to keep it company. On the job he invariably “carried” in a shoulder holster.
The rest of his professional equipment consisted of a photostat of his P.I. license, an honorary deputy sheriff’s badge with a set of phony business cards (ditto), a penknife and a fountain-pen flashlight.
“I’m not too fussy about cars,” he would claim and he tended to hang onto them. Back in 1934 (Finger Man) the car was “still” a 1925 Marmon Touring Car. Ten years later, in The Lady in the Lake, he’s traded it in for a Chrysler, and by 1953 (The Long Goodbye) he’s driving an Oldsmobile. He’s also become socially mobile—the latest office block gives him a parking space!
Marlowe’s “assistants”: “I knew one thing: as soon as anyone said you didn’t need a gun, you’d better take one along that worked. Luger P08 (Parabellum) (top).
“The muzzle of the Luger looked like the mouth of the Second Street tunnel” (The Big Sleep). Colt .38 Super Match (middle), Smith & Wesson .38 (with 4” barrel) (bottom). (illustrations credit 3.10)
“I’m not too fussy about cars.” —Marlowe
Top to bottom: Marmon 34 Touring Car, Oldsmobile Series 60, 1937 Chrysler Airflow. (illustrations credit 3.11)
“I read somewhere that a dick should always have a plain, dark, inconspicuous car that nobody would notice. The guy had never been to L.A. In L.A. to be conspicuous you would have to drive a flesh-pink Mercedes-Benz with a sun-porch on the roof and three pretty girls sun-bathing.”
—Playback
The office—which opens onto an “imitation marble corridor”—would eventually acquire “a small radio in the corner beyond the edge of the desk” and a leather cigar humidor for his Pearce’s mixture “from an admirer” (“by an odd coincidence having the same name as me,” he admits), while the stained wooden cupboard with the open door now boasts “a flawed mirror.”
By The Long Goodbye it also has a fan (“It didn’t make the air any cooler, just a little more lively”) and a Boston fern that needs watering. (“I think it needs re-potting too,” Linda Loring tells him. “Too many air roots.”) At no time does it boast the luxury of a secretary or an answering service.
Naturally, a change of year dictated a change of calendar. Out go the Dionne Quintuplets, and in Farewell, My Lovely (1940):
Rembrandt was on the calendar that year, a rather smeary self-portrait due to imperfectly registered color plates. It showed him holding a smeared palette with a dirty thumb and wearing a tam-o’-shanter which wasn’t any too clean either. His other hand held a brush poised in the air, as if he might be going to do a little work after a while, if somebody made a down payment. His face was aging, saggy, full of the disgust of life and the thickening effects of liquor. But it had a hard cheerfulness that I liked, as the eyes were as bright as drops of dew.
Marlowe’s apartment building on Hightower Drive. (illustrations credit 3.12)
As for that visitor’s chair—“A lot of people had tried to get comfortable in that chair. I ought to try it myself some time. Maybe it was losing business for me.”
Marlowe had plenty of time on his hands to study the current calendar, the mustard yellow plaster wall and the rust-red carpet, but occasionally his contemplation was enlivened by a little nature study:
I had been stalking the bluebottle fly for five minutes, waiting for him to sit down. He didn’t want to sit down. He just wanted to do wing-overs and sing the prologue to Pagliacci.
—The Little Sister
Leaving the windows open made the neighbors a definite factor. Across the alley on the opposite side of the air shaft was the Mansion House Hotel, a paradigm of the air pollution that was changing the City of Angels beyond recognition. Soot from its oil burners was “rolling across the glass top of the desk in tiny particles, like pollen drifting over a vacant lot” (“Goldfish”). In The Big Sleep—three years later—the analogy had changed: “Soot … was down-drafted into the room and rolling across the top of the desk like tumbleweed drifting across a vacant lot.”
But it wasn’t just the dust …
The fish smell from the Mansion House coffee shop was strong enough to build a garage on.
—Farewell, My Lovely
Despite that, he eats there regularly. Haute cuisine is not among Marlowe’s affectations. “I gobbled what they called the regular dinner, drank a brandy to sit on its chest” (The Lady in the Lake).
“Bad but quick. Feed ’em and throw ’em out. Lots of business. We can’t bother with you sitting over your second cup of coffee, mister, you’re using money space.”
—The Long Goodbye
I went down to the drugstore and ate a chicken salad sandwich and drank some coffee. The coffee was over-strained and the sandwich was as full of rich flavor as a piece of old shirt. Americans will eat anything if it is toasted and held together with a couple of toothpicks and has lettuce sticking out of the sides, preferably a little wilted.
—The Long Goodbye
The eighty-five cent dinner tasted like a discarded mail-bag and was served to me by a waiter who looked as if he would slug me for a quarter,
cut my throat for six bits and bury me at sea in a barrel of concrete for a dollar and a half plus sales tax.
—Farewell, My Lovely
Down at the drug-store lunch counter I had time to inhale two cups of coffee and a melted cheese sandwich with two slivers of ersatz bacon embedded in it, like dead fish in the silt at the bottom of a drained pool.
—The Little Sister
By 1959 (“The Pencil”) he is patronizing Joe’s Eats next door. The cuisine maintains the Marlowe standards:
“All I want is two eggs three minutes—no more—a slice of your famous concrete toast, a tall glass of tomato juice with a dash of Lea and Perrins, a big happy smile and don’t give anybody else my coffee. I might need it all.”
… I got the eggs the way I liked them. The toast had been painted with melted butter past its bloom.
“No Lea and Perrins,” she said, putting down the tomato juice. “How about a little Tabasco? We’re fresh out of arsenic, too.”
I used two drops of Tabasco, swallowed the eggs, drank two cups of coffee and was about to leave the toast for a tip, but I went soft and left a quarter instead.
In whatever apartment he was currently calling home, Marlowe prided himself on keeping a neat kitchen, even though he used it mainly to make breakfast and frequent strong coffee, something on which he rather prided himself. He refers to the drinking of it as taking a conference with “Mr. Huggins and Mr. Young”—a play on the name of a brand popular at the time.