Re-reading Chandler

Some years after reading Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep and Farewell My Lovely, I thought it was about time I read his other most famous novel, The Long Goodbye. I had fond memories of the ‘reworking’ of the story in Robert Altman's 1973 film starring Elliott Gould and wondered how Chandler’s style would stack up against some of the modern crime writers I’d been reading in the last few years.

The Long Goodbye shows Philip Marlowe becoming involved in what appears to be two separate cases but which wind up being connected. The first is his growing friendship with Terry Lennox, who turns out, it seems, to be the murderer of his rich socialite wife. After the friendship ends with Marlowe driving Lennox to Mexico to escape a possible charge of murder, the second storyline picks up: Marlowe is hired by Eileen Wade, the wife of famous novelist Roger Wade, to find her husband, who is a drunk and has either gone off on a bender or is drying out somewhere in a sanatorium. These two plot-lines converge in more violence in which Marlowe is implicated but doesn’t participate.

Marlowe rises from the grave ... then sinks into it again.

It's been called literary ventriloquism - the ability to write in the 'voice' of another writer. That idea, once a jeu d'esprit, has now become big business. I guess it began with Kingsley Amis writing a James Bond novel - Colonel Sun - after Fleming's death, following his own critical examination of the Bond phenomenon, The James Bond Dossier. Subsequently, Wikipedia provides a frighteningly long list of Bond books written by other writers, culminating most recently with William Boyd's poor effort, Solo.

Recently, the Booker-Prize winning author John Banville, writing in his guise as Benjamin Black, has produced a Raymond Chandler 'continuation', The Black-Eyed Blonde, apparently a title that Chandler had earmarked in his notes for future use. This follows a couple of attempts at Chandler follow-ons from the prolific and often excellent Robert B. Parker - Poodle Springs and Perchance to Dream, neither of which met with much approval from hard-boiled fans. But then, expectations are high when it comes to Raymond Chandler.

Chandler and Hammett

On the left of the blog there's a new link to a longish article on Chandler and Hammett, two of the giants of American crime writing. This is largely the text of a talk I gave to a literary group here in France, in Montmorillon, the Cite de l'Ecrit. The article looks at what Chandler and Hammett did to create the private eye genre and suggests some reasons for why detective and crime fiction has become so popular since they were writing.

Reading their books now is a strange experience because they're both very lively and their plots - especially Hammett's - are amazingly complex. There's no doubting, however, that the social context has changed dramatically and that some of the attitudes and prejudices of the writers - and their detectives - are uncomfortable for modern readers. Because we identify so strongly with Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade, when we see them demonstrating prejudices that we don't like, it's hard to stomach. We have to put it down to 'changes in society' ... but that seems somehow to diminish them.