Bonus Quote of the Day (Raymond Chandler, on a Hotel Lobby)

“[The lobby of the Indian Head Hotel]… was full to overflowing with males in leisure jackets and liquor breaths and females in high-pitched laughs, oxblood fingernails and dirty knuckles. The manager of the joint, a low budget tough guy in shirt sleeves and a mangled cigar, was prowling the room with watchful eyes. 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. In the deep back corner of the room, a hillbilly orchestra of five pieces, dressed in ill-fitting white jackets and purple shirts, was trying to make itself heard above the brawl at the bar and smiling glassily into the fog of cigarette smoke and the blur of alcoholic voices. At Puma Point, summer, that lovely season, was in full swing.”—American mystery novelist-screenwriter Raymond Chandler (1888-1959), The Lady in the Lake (1943)

I could not let this day pass without noting that it’s the 60^th anniversary of the death, at age 70, of Raymond Chandler, who evoked, as few if any others have ever done, the physical and moral landscape of crime—in this case, Los Angeles. Many have imitated--and almost as many have parodied--Chandler, but I can't think of anyone who's surpassed him.

James Joyce once observed that reading Proust was not for him, because the French novelist never surprised him. That failing could never be ascribed to Chandler. 

From start to finish, especially in his early novels, his style never stops surprising in its mix of poetry, moral judgment, and wise-aleck sense of humor.

Again, Joyce comes to mind here. The Irishman continues to be read not so much for his plots but for his wizardry with language. Similarly, Chandler did not bother himself unduly with action. (Indeed, when director Howard Hawks wired him to ask who had killed the butler in The Big Sleep, Chandler answered simply: “I don’t know.”) But he buffed his style to a high sheen—never overloading a sentence, but always leaving you crave more.

For all intents and purposes, Dashiell Hammett invented the hard-boiled detective story. But Chandler took it to an entirely different level through the character who served as the first-person narrator of seven of his novels, Philip Marlowe. He is as tough as a man has to be to survive as a private eye, but there’s more to it than that—or, in the author’s words: 

“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, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.”

(The image accompanying this post is of Dick Powell in Murder My Sweet, Hollywood's first adaptation of Chandler's Farewell My Lovely. I haven't seen Robert Mitchum, reputedly the best onscreen Philip Marlowe, and Humphrey Bogart is not bad. But I don't think that Powell can be surpassed in his ability to take a roundhouse punch and keep going "down these mean streets." On the morning after such encounters, Powell's Marlowe can use an icepack and a razor, but for all his seeming tarnish he remains the indispensable knight to save his dark city. In this photo, he looks the way Chandler intended: like he gives a damn.)