Admittedly, Marlowe hits him in the stomach immediately after that speech—but Menendez wasn’t the only one to be hurt.
Toward the end—and in the depths of his own misery after Cissy’s death—Chandler lost control of both himself and his own creation, and appeared to realize it. Marlowe is tired and as near defeated as Chandler must have felt. (“I’m not a young man. I’m old, tired and full of no coffee.”) At the end of Playback (1958)—quite out of the blue—he rather arbitrarily brings back Linda Loring and sets up the scenario for their reconciliation in the intended sequel, Poodle Springs. (“Hold me close in your arms. I don’t want to own you. Nobody ever will. I just want to love you.”)
But on reflection Chandler had his doubts:
I am writing him married to a rich woman and swamped by money, but I don’t think it will last … A fellow of Marlowe’s type shouldn’t get married, because he is a lonely man, a poor man, a dangerous man, and yet a sympathetic man, and somehow none of this goes with marriage.
—Letter to Maurice Guinness—February 21, 1959
In this he was echoing his own earlier edict: “A really good detective never gets married. He would lose his detachment, and this detachment is part of his charm.”
“I think the struggle between them,” he wrote to Jessica Tyndale (December 23, 1957),
as to whether he is going to live her kind of life or his own might make a good sub-plot. Either she will give in or the marriage will bust up. I don’t know. But I do know that nobody, but nobody, is going to keep Marlowe from his shabby office and his unremunerative practice, his endurance, determination and his sarcastic pity. She’ll probably want to redo his office but she won’t get to first base on that either.
Chandler was almost certainly right—but we were never to know.
His last thoughts were expressed in a letter to Maurice Guinness written a few days before he died.
I think I may have picked the wrong girl. But as a matter of fact, a fellow of Marlowe’s type shouldn’t get married … I think he will always have … a number of affairs, but no permanent connection. I think he will always be awakened at some inconvenient hour by some inconvenient person, to do some inconvenient job. It seems to me that is his destiny—possibly not the best destiny in the world, but it belongs to him. No one will ever beat him, because by his nature he is unbeatable. No one will ever make him rich, because he is destined to be poor. But somehow, I think he would not have it otherwise … I see him always in a lonely street, in lonely rooms, puzzled but never quite defeated.
“I was a grain of sand on the desert of oblivion.”
—The Long Goodbye
“It was the job—and that’s all a guy can say.”
—Mallory in “Smart-Aleck Kill”
Let’s not go into that. You’re not human tonight, Marlowe.
Maybe I never was or ever will be.
—The Little Sister
“I’m going the way I always go,” I said. “With an airy smile and a quick flip of the wrist.”
—The High Window
From time to time Marlowe would wonder how else he might have lived …
I would have stayed in the town where I was born and worked in the hardware store and married the boss’s daughter and had five kids and read them the funny papers on Sunday morning and smacked their heads when they got out of line and squabbled with the wife about how much spending money they were to get and what program they could have on the radio or TV set. I might even have got rich—small-town rich, an eight-room house, two cars in the garage, chicken every Sunday and the Reader’s Digest on the living-room table, the wife with a cast-iron permanent and me with a brain like a sack of Portland cement. You take it, friend. I’ll take the big sordid dirty crooked city.
—The Long Goodbye
Four
Cops … and Crime
(illustrations credit 4.1)
“Cops are just people,” she said irrelevantly.
“They start out that way, I’ve heard. ”
—Farewell, My Lovely
I never saw any of them again — except the cops. No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them.
—The Little Sister
The hard stare they think they have to wear on their pans forever and forever and forever. I’m a cop, brother, I’m tough, watch your step, brother … let’s go, and let’s not forget we’re tough guys, we’re cops …
—The Lady in the Lake
“I think you need a good lawyer.”
“That’s a contradiction in terms,” she sneered. “If he was good, he wouldn’t be a lawyer.”
—Playback
The law was something to be manipulated for profit and power. The streets were dark with something more than night.
—Introduction to Trouble Is My Business
“Organized crime is just the dirty side of the sharp dollar.”
—The Long Goodbye
From early on in his voluntary Californian exile, Chandler was in little doubt as to the nature of the society he found there. He would speak of Marlowe’s crusade as “the struggle of all fundamentally honest men to make a decent living in a corrupt society. It is an impossible struggle; he can’t win.” It was his own struggle, too—at least intellectually—to live in “this strange corrupt world” where “any man who tried to be honest looks in the end either sentimental or just plain foolish.”
Toward the end of his life he saw it even more clearly:
I don’t think one can accept or be happy with corrupt people without being a little corrupt oneself. It seems to me a sort of disease which grows almost unnoticed until one doesn’t even know what is happening, and when it has happened, one doesn’t know that either …
—Letter to Michael Gilbert—July 5, 1957
The one thing Raymond Chandler knew he could do was write about it, so that people would be made aware.
The underlying reasons for the decay were not hard to determine.
The introduction of Prohibition in 1920 was the start of open season for organized crime. Overnight ordinary citizens became “criminals” in the technical sense of the word, simply because they wanted a drink. The demand created the illegal supplier who, in turn, had to corrupt the local cops so that he could do business. That business rapidly became highly competitive, which led to gangsterism—and American society was bequeathed a modus operandi that persists to this day. But Chandler was there to see and document its emergence.
In the rotting social scene that he saw all about him, perhaps the most dangerous element was the enemy within. The cops.
In one of his many confrontations with L.A.’s finest, Marlowe expresses his (and Chandler’s) essential philosophy of personal justice:
Prohibition—the Volstead Act (1920–1933). And the start of organized crime … (illustrations credit 4.2)
I said: “Until you guys own your own souls you don’t own mine. Until you guys can be trusted every time and always, in all times and conditions, to seek the truth out and find it and let the chips fall where they may—until that time comes, I have a right to listen to my conscience, and protect my client the best way I can. Until I’m sure you won’t do him more harm than you’ll do the truth good.”
He receives a predictably cynical answer from Lieutenant Breeze, the cop he’s talking to …
“You sound to me just a little like a guy who is trying to hold his conscience down.”
—The High Window
Captain Webber of Bay City is less emotional and more pragmatic about it when he tells Marlowe:
“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.”
“I know,” I said. “I’ve always known that. I’m not bitter about it.”
—The Lady in the Lake
“I just thought of what is
the matter with policeman’s dialogue.”
“What?”
“They think every line is a punch line.”
—The High Window
Policeman’s dialogue. It comes out of an old shoe box. What they say doesn’t mean anything. What they ask doesn’t mean anything. They just keep on boring in until you are so exhausted that you flip on some detail.
—“The Pencil”
In The Little Sister, a cop, Lieutenant Christy-French, reminds Marlowe of what it is to be one …
“It’s like this with us, baby. We’re coppers and everybody hates our guts. And as if we didn’t have enough trouble, we have to have you. As if we didn’t get pushed around enough by the guys in the corner offices, the City Hall gang, the day chief, the night chief, the Chamber of Commerce, His Honor the Mayor in his paneled office four times as big as the three lousy rooms the whole homicide staff has to work out of. As if we didn’t have enough to handle one hundred and fourteen homicides last year out of three rooms that don’t have enough chairs for the whole duty squad to sit down in at once. We spend our lives turning over dirty underwear and sniffing rotten teeth. We go up dark stairways to get a gun punk with a skinful of hop and sometimes we don’t get all the way up and our wives wait dinner that night and all the other nights. We don’t come home any more. And nights we do come home, we come home so goddam tired we can’t eat or sleep or even read the lies the papers print about us. So we lie awake in the dark in a cheap house in a cheap street and listen to the drunk down the block having fun. And just about the time we drop off the phone rings and we get up and start all over again. Nothing we do is right, not ever. Not once. If we get a confession, we beat it out of the guy, they say, and some shyster calls us Gestapo in court and sneers at us when we muddle our grammar. If we make a mistake they put us back in uniform on Skid Row and we spend the nice cool summer evenings picking drunks out of the gutter and being yelled at by whores and taking knives away from greaseballs in zoot suits. But all that ain’t enough to make us entirely happy. We got to have you …
“We got to have you … We got to have sharpers with private licenses hiding information and dodging around corners and stirring up dust for us to breathe in. We got to have you suppressing evidence and framing set-ups that wouldn’t fool a sick baby. You wouldn’t mind me calling you a goddam cheap double-crossing keyhole peeper, would you, baby?”
“… Some of what you say is true,” I said. “Not all. Any private eye wants to play ball with the police. Sometimes it’s a little hard to find out who’s making the rules of the ball game. Sometimes he doesn’t trust the police, and with cause. Sometimes he just gets into a jam without meaning to and has to play his hand the way it’s dealt. He’d usually rather have a new deal. He’d like to keep on earning a living.”
“They had the calm weathered faces of healthy men in hard condition. They had the eyes they always have, cloudy and gray like freezing water. The firm set mouth, the hard little wrinkles at the corners of the eyes, the hard hollow meaningless stare, not quite cruel and a thousand miles from kind. The dull ready-made clothes, worn without style, with a sort of contempt, the look of men who are poor and yet proud of their power, watching always for ways to make it felt, to shove it into you and twist it and grin and watch you squirm, ruthless without malice, cruel and yet not always unkind. What would you expect them to be? Civilization had no meaning for them. All they saw of it was the failures, the dirt, the dregs, the aberrations and the disgust.”
—The Little Sister
By and large, in Chandler’s perception the flawed triers like Christy-French are in the minority. His usual physical depiction of the police is not a flattering one:
Two uniformed cops barged into the room. They were the usual large size and they had the usual weathered faces and suspicious eyes.
—The Lady in the Lake
The usual couple in the usual suits, with the usual stony leisure of movement, as if the world was waiting hushed and silent for them to tell it what to do.
—The Long Goodbye
A police cruiser, c. 1950. (illustrations credit 4.3)
“We’re a couple of swell guys not to get funny with.”
—Trouble Is My Business
“All tough guys are monotonous. Like playing cards with a deck that’s all aces. You’ve got everything and you’ve got nothing.”
—The Long Goodbye
For example …
Chief Tod McKim (“Spanish Blood”) “was a big, loose man who had gone saggy. He had a long, petulantly melancholy face. One of his eyes was not quite straight in his head.”
Captain Gregory (The Big Sleep) is “a burly man with tired eyes and the slow deliberate movement of a night watchman. His voice was toneless, flat and uninterested.”
Lieutenant Degarmo (The Lady in the Lake) is “the big cop with the dusty blond hair and the metallic blue eyes and the savage lined face”—who turns out to be a killer.
Captain Gregorius in The Long Goodbye: “a type of copper that is getting rarer but by no means extinct, the kind that solves crimes with the bright light, the soft sap, the kick to the kidneys, the knee to the groin, the night stick to the base of the spine.”
Bay City’s chief of police, John Wax, in Farewell, My Lovely is a much smoother proposition:
He was a hammered down heavyweight with short pink hair and a pink scalp glistening through it. He has small, hungry, heavy-lidded eyes, as restless as fleas. He wore a suit of fawn-colored flannel, a coffee-colored shirt and tie, a diamond ring, a diamond-studded lodge pin in his lapel … He turned in his chair and crossed his thick legs … that let me see handspun lisle socks and English brogues that looked as if they had been pickled in port wine. Counting what I couldn’t see and not counting his wallet, he had half a grand on him. I figured his wife had money.
More often than not, the eyes have it …
“His eyes were as blank as new plates” (The Lady in the Lake). Lieutenant Greer “sat down on the edge of a chair, the way they do … and looked at me with the quiet stare they have” (The Lady in the Lake). Sergeant Whitestone (Poodle Springs) had “the sort of eyes that every police sergeant gets in time. Eyes that have seen too much nastiness and heard too many liars.” “That dead gray expression that grows on them like scum on a water tank” (The Little Sister).
Lieutenant Nulty (Farewell, My Lovely) is “a lean-jawed sourpuss with long yellow hands which he kept folded over his kneecaps.” But at least Nulty has some redeeming features. “His shirt was frayed and his coat sleeves had been turned in at the cuffs. He looked poor enough to be honest.”
But, like a lot of the cops Marlowe encounters, Nulty is a racist and a bigot—tags that some critics have tried to hang on Marlowe himself. The fact of the matter is that much of Marlowe’s conversation is banter—sometimes lighthearted but more often, where cops are concerned, a defensive fencing. When the other person lowers the level of debate, then Marlowe is involved by association; for, as Chandler said, he wanted his hero to talk “as a man of his age talks … with a rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham and a contempt for pettiness.” And while Marlowe did not agree with the context of the banter, it would have been unrealistic of him not to understand and use the street language of a man like Nulty …
Shines. Another shine killing. That’s what I rate after eighteen years in this man’s police department. No pix, no space, not even four lines in the want-ad section.
The night captain … is tired and cynical and competent. He is the stage manager of a play that has had the longest run in history, but it no longer interests him.
—The Long Goodbye
“He was the kind of cop who spits on his blackjack every night instead of saying his prayers,” Marlowe observes of one in Farewell, My Lovely. “But he had humorous eyes.”
In many cases the coarseness is self-protection. In The Big Sleep Gregory tells Marlowe …
“I’m a copper. Just a plain ordinary cop
per. Reasonably honest. As honest as you could expect a man to be in a world where it’s out of style … Being a copper I like to see the law win … you and me both lived too long to think I’m likely to see it happen. Not in this town, not in any town half this size, in any part of this wide, green and beautiful USA. We just don’t run our country that way.”
“He didn’t know the right people. That’s all a police record means in this rotten crime-ridden country.”
—The Big Sleep
But—as Chandler decreed—“Marlowe wouldn’t be Marlowe if he could really get along with policemen.”
In the years he lived in Southern California, Chandler watched and deplored the twin pollution of the climate and the culture. And the bigger Los Angeles grew, the uglier it got, as organized crime moved in on the locals.
In The Big Sleep Marlowe has a word to the wise for local big shot Eddie Mars …
“This is a big town now, Eddie. Some very rough people have checked in here lately. The penalty of growth.”
Maybe Eddie should move his business down the coast a piece to somewhere like Bay City (Chandler’s wafer-thin alias for Santa Monica) …
“Bay City. The name’s like a song. A song in a dirty bathtub.”
—Farewell, My Lovely
The World of Raymond Chandler Page 8