July 23, 1888—Raymond Chandler, perhaps the most influential of American crime novelists (The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely, etc.), was born in Chicago. Beginning in pulp
magazines of the 1930s, he took the prototype of the hard-boiled detective
genre created by Dashiell Hammett and, through his wisecracking, unlikely
knight errant, Philip Marlowe, elevated the genre to the form we know today.
The hard-boiled genre represented a hard, American
variation on the more genteel British detective story created by the likes of
Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. The Anglophilic Chandler gave his great American archetype--one who went forth
against gangsters, pornographers, crooked cops, you name it--with the same surname as the great Elizabethan playwright-poet, Christopher Marlowe. (Someone whose literary and personal world, come to think of it, might have been every bit as dark as the private eye's.)
Film was another form in which Chandler left an
indelible imprint on American culture. It wasn’t just that his own novels were
adapted onto the big screen, but that, as a screenwriter himself, he helped
shape the emerging film noir genre, in his Oscar-nominated scripts for Double Indemnity (1944) and The Blue Dahlia (1947), as well as
Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train
(1951). Think of Chinatown and L.A. Confidential--all descendants of his art.
Chandler’s sense of place—the Los Angeles of the
1930s and 1940s—remains crucial to his art, as well as the one-liners that
spring effortlessly from Marlowe—including one I like particularly from his
1953 novel, The Long Goodbye: “I never saw any of them again—except the
cops. No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them."
Intrinsic to Chandler’s development of his iconic
private eye was suspicion of authority. I wonder, then, what he would have made
of today’s police.
I have a feeling that, were he alive today, Chandler
would identify traffic cops as a particularly thorny problem. The freeway
culture of Southern California was more in its gestation period than its infancy
at the start of his career, but the policemen who would become an ubiquitous
element of this environment he could glimpse in the L.A. of his time.
Traffic violations are like taxes: arbitrarily
enforced, offering the well-off far more areas to escape scot-free than the
poor, abetted by a self-interested network of police, lawyers, government and private business.
(Auto-insurance companies have learned to turn summonses to their advantage by
hiking premiums.)
By making Marlowe a private eye rather than a member
of the L.A. force, Chandler implicitly responded to the question posed by the
ancient Roman satirist Juvenal; “Who will guard the guardians?” It has to be someone outside the system—a lone
wolf, like Marlowe.
Chandler saw that murder was hard and dramatic, but
I think would have recognized, had he lived a bit longer, how ripe the ordinary
cop—either in the big city or on the highway—is for the inevitable temptations
of corruption and abuse of power by the strong of the weak. Most of us can
point to the small-time, petty targeting of a summons. If police can be unfair or
calculating in a small thing such as this, how can they be trusted to enforce,
with only minimal constitutional safeguards, a broad-based policy such as stop-and-frisk
that targets an entire racial or ethnic group?
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