Ten blocks of that, winding down curved rainswept streets, under the steady drip of trees, past lighted windows in big houses in ghostly enormous grounds… windows high on the hillside… I came out at a service station glaring with wasted light, where a bored attendant in a white cap and a dark blue windbreaker sat hunched on a stool, inside the steamed glass, reading a paper. I started in, then kept going. I was as wet as I could get already. And on a night like that you can grow a beard waiting for a taxi. And taxi drivers remember.
Early in The Big Sleep, that passage about Marlowe slipping away from a murder scene is not from my favourite of his books. I’m very fond of the tongue-in-cheek feel of The High Window but The Long Goodbye is too long, The Little Sister is too full of Hollywood and perhaps the most famous one of all, Farewell, My Lovely, is a case of some parts being greater than the whole. For example, Marlowe’s conversation with the black hotel porter is magic conjured from nothing. With its cluttered plot, though, the novel has the feel, at the end, of a rushed tiling job.
Chandler’s California is not just composed of sun-baked streets and smog but also contains unexpected features like dusty pines and coastal fogs and mists. Offering a panorama not seen in his other novels, The Lady in the Lake is so well paced, it’s a real trip, and so very quotable from various angles, from Marlowe feeling typically sore and perplexed one evening in his office:
An elegant handwriting, like the elegant hand that wrote it. I pushed it to one side and had another drink. I began to feel a little less savage. I pushed things around on the desk. My hands felt thick and hot and awkward. I ran a finger across the corner of the desk and looked at the streak made by the wiping off of the dust. I look at the dust on my finger and wiped that off. I looked at my watch. I looked at the wall. I looked at nothing.
I put the liquor bottle away and went over to the washbowl to rinse the glass out. When I had done that I washed my hands and bathed my face in cold water and looked at it. The flush was gone from the left cheek, but it looked a little swollen. Not very much, but enough to make me tighten up again. (…)
I sat very still and listened to the evening grow quiet outside the open windows. And very slowly I grew quiet with it.
… to Mr Grayson’s explanation of the logistics of blackmail;
I have come across traces of them in my work. Unsecured loans, long outstanding. Investments on the face of them worthless, made by men who would not be likely to make worthless investments. Bad debts that should obviously be charged off and have not been, for fear of inviting scrutiny from the income tax people. Oh yes, those things can easily be arranged.
… to the police captain’s comparison of his game to politics;
“Police business,” he said almost gently, “is a hell of a problem. It’s a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of men, and there’s nothing in it to attract the highest type of men. So we have to work with what we get – and we get things like this.”
… to the tableau of the Indian Head hotel;
At the cash desk a pale-haired man was fighting to get the war news on a small radio that was as full of static as the mashed potatoes were full of water.
… to the atmosphere of the final, climactic drive into the country;
This is the ultimate end of the fog belt, and the beginning of that semi-desert region where the sun is as light and dry as old sherry in the morning, as hot as a blast furnace at noon, and drops like an angry brick at nightfall.
Lastly, it should be noted that in The Lady in the Lake, the most attractive female character is not a baddie.
Chandler’s letters, published after his death, are also extraordinary but for some reason the most heartfelt one that I’ve seen was not included in the best-known collection, Raymond Chandler Speaking (1962). I found it instead in a memoir by John Houseman.
It is a struggle of all fundamentally honest men to make a decent living in a corrupt society. It is an impossible struggle; he can’t win. He can be poor and bitter and take it out in wisecracks and casual amours, or he can be corrupt and amiable and rude like a Hollywood producer. Because the bitter fact is that outside of two or three technical professions, there is absolutely no way for a man of this age to acquire a decent affluence in life without to some degree corrupting himself, without accepting the cold, clear fact that success is always and everywhere a racket. (…) I didn’t create him [Marlowe] at all; I’ve seen dozens like him in all essentials except the few colourful qualities he needed to be in a book. (A few even had those.) They were all poor; they will always be poor. How could they be anything else? When you have answered that question you can call him a zombie.
Houseman’s Chandler references have otherwise always struck me as odd, especially but not only because they come from someone who claimed to be his friend. They are also odd because, by their stuffy and superior insolence, they seem so out of tune with the views of most others who knew the subject and his charm, despite Chandler’s honest description of himself as a “contentious fellow” and his even greater thirst for whiskey when he took the studio buck to work on poppycock.
At least Alfred Hitchcock’s biographer Patrick Gilligan’s account of the disastrous last meeting of the two men is plausible in the context of a film project (Strangers on a Train) on which they had strongly opposing views as to its merit and preparation. Their personal chemistry had gone up in smoke by the time of Hitchcock’s last visit to Chandler’s home in La Jolla in 1950.
Chandler, in his cups that day, began a scathing rant about why Hitchcock should stick to the book and forget all his devious plot and camera tricks. The director let him go on and on. (…) At the peak of Chandler’s oration, the director simply stood up, opened the door, and left the house. (…) An amazed Chandler followed, shouting… The director paused to let [his assistant] plunge into the car first… Chandler called the director a fat bastard, and worse, as they drove off. (…) Hitchcock… gazed out the window for a long time… Halfway back to the studio he finally… said simply, “He’s through.”
In 1958, in a happier meeting of minds, Ian Fleming interviewed Chandler in London for the BBC. On Fleming’s request, Chandler explained in great detail the mechanics and logistics of a typical Mob (“Syndicate”) assassination, which, for the sake of illustration, was carried out by a putative pair of hit men flown in from a hardware store in Minneapolis. Chandler in turn asked Fleming why he always included a torture scene in the James Bond books.
“He’s got to suffer something in return for all this success and, I mean, what do you do? Dock him something on his income tax? I’m very tired of the fact that the hero in these, in other people’s thrillers, gets a bang on the head with a revolver butt and he’s perfectly happy afterwards. Just a bump on his head.”
“That’s one of my faults, I recover too quickly. I know what it is to be banged on the head with a revolver butt. The first thing you do is vomit.”
Dr. John Flynn 