Week 8: Hardboiled Detectives Raymond Chandler The Big Sleep (1939)

1. Week 8: Hardboiled DetectivesRaymond ChandlerThe Big Sleep (1939)

2. Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) • Born in Chicago. After his parents’ separation, he and his mother moved to England when he was 12. • He attended Dulwich College. He didn’t go to university but travelled to Paris and Munich. • In 1907 he was naturalised as a British citizen so he could take the civil service entrance exams, which he passed. He later resigned from the civil service and went into journalism. • He returned to America in 1912, and lived in California, taking a series of jobs, which included stringing tennis rackets and picking fruit. He saw combat during WWI. • He married ‘Cissy’ Pascal, with whom he’d been havingan affair. • He became a well-paid oil company executive but was dismissed for his behaviour (including alcoholism). • He turned to writing fiction during the Depression. His first published story appeared in the pulp magazine Black Mask in 1933. • Six years later he published his first novel, The Big Sleep. This introduced readers to his hard-boiled private detective Philip Marlowe. It drew on material from some of his earlier pulp stories. He published seven novels as well as short stories during his lifetime. • In the year before his death he was elected President of the Mystery Writers of America. • He experienced bouts of depression. He died in 1959.

3. Philip Marlowe • Like Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, he is considered one of the iconic private detectives of the hardboiled tradition. • Tortured, world-weary, tough talking/ physically tough, perceptive. • Follows his own moral code. Has been seen as a modern knight-like figure questing for justice. • Struggles with alcohol. Shaped by Chandler’s own experiences? • We have limited insights into his personal background. • ‘When I get knocked off in a dark alley sometime, if it happens, as it could to anyone in my business, nobody will feel that the bottom has dropped out of his or her life.’ – Marlowe to a prospective client in The Long Goodbye (1953). • Marlowe’s personal involvement in his cases varies. • In 1951, Chandler told his publishers, ‘It begins to look as though I were tied to this fellow for life. I simply can’t function without him’.

4. The Big Sleep • The title refers to the gangster euphemism for death. • Seedy underbelly of LA – pornography, blackmail, gambling, bootlegging, murder. • Multiple strands to the mystery – the problem Marlowe is hired to solve is actually solved halfway through the narrative, with the death of Geiger. But Marlowe seems compelled to investigate the disappearance of Rusty Regan. • Challenging our expectations of the mystery genre – we do not know for certain that Regan is murdered until the end of the novel. • Marlowe’s complicity in covering up the Sternwoods’ guilt. • Chandler described it as a ‘detective yarn that happens to be more interested in people than in plot’. He is often seen as an author better at style/ characterisation than plotting. • The US edition sold barely 13,000 copies. It didn’t attract real attention until it was turned into a film by the director Howard Hawks.

5. Plotting ‘The murder novel has also a depressing way of minding its own business, solving its own problems and answering its own questions. There is nothing left to discuss, except whether it was well enough written to be good fiction, and the people who make up the half-million sales wouldn’t know that anyway.’ -Raymond Chandler, ‘The Simple Art of Murder’ (1950)

6. Golden Age vs Realist Detective Fiction On Golden Age mysteries: ‘they do not really come off intellectually as problems, and they do not come off artistically as fiction. They are too contrived, and too little aware of what goes on in the world.’ ‘Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought duelling pistols, curare, and tropical fish.’ -Raymond Chandler, ‘The Simple Art of Murder’ (1950)

7. The Hardboiled Detective ‘In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption […] down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. 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.’ -Raymond Chandler, ‘The Simple Art of Murder’ (1950)

8. Critical Reception: Plot ‘Raymond Chandler is a great stylist, a poet. Even if his plots are a mess.’ -Truman Capote, A Capote Reader (New York: Random House, 1987), p. 487. Re The Big Sleep and its two halves -‘what satisfies Marlowe professionally does not satisfy his personal concerns’. - Robert Merrill, ‘Raymond Chandler’s Plot and the Concepts of Plot’, Narrative 7.1 (January 1999), 3-21: p. 8.

9. Critical Reception: Gender ‘These criminal fictions are, first and foremost, narratives of besieged masculinity and love corrupted that seek to explain the paradoxical vulnerability of men within patriarchal society.’ - Gill Plain, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), p. 57.

10. The Big Sleep and Film Noir • Adapted for film in 1946 (and again in 1978). • Directed by Howard Hawks and starring Humphrey Bogart (Marlowe) and Lauren Bacall (Vivian). Develops the relationship between their two characters. • The script involved three different writers, including the author William Faulkner. • Hays Code – production code/ guidelines which were hugely influential between 1930-66. Films not supposed to lower moral standards. • Changes were made to the story to ensure it would pass the censors (e.g. cuts to scenes with Carmen naked; no mention of homosexuality). Vivian is no longer married to Regan but is already a (definite) widow. • Ambiguous ending – is Carmen or Mars responsible? • Plotting: allegedly neither the director nor the screenwriters knew whether the chauffeur (Owen) was murdered or had killed himself. They sent a cable to Chandler, who later told a friend: ‘They sent me a wire ... asking me, and dammit I didn't know either’.