“But you can only buy a piece of a big city. You can buy a town this size all complete, with the original box and tissue paper. That’s the difference.”
—Farewell, My Lovely
Money—Chandler felt—really was the root of most of the evil. The American psyche was obsessed with the almighty dollar. In The Long Goodbye Marlowe tells Bernie Ohls …
“We’re a big, rough, rich wild people and crime is the price we pay for it, and organized crime is the price we pay for organization. We’ll have it with us a long time. Organized crime is just the dirty side of the sharp dollar.”
“As for the top men … they didn’t get there by murdering people. They got there by guts and brains … But above all they’re businessmen. What they do is for money. Just like other businessmen. Sometimes a guy gets in the way. Okay. Out. But they think plenty before they do it.”
—The Long Goodbye
In Farewell, My Lovely the cop “Hemingway” had expressed the same thought rather more colloquially:
“Listen, pally … Cops don’t go crooked for money. Not always, not even often. They get caught in the system. They get you where they have you do what is told them or else … A guy can’t stay honest if he wants to. That’s what’s the matter with this country. He gets chiseled out of his pants if he does. You gotta play the game dirty or you don’t eat.”
Later Marlowe mulls it all over …
I thought of cops, tough cops that could be greased and yet were not by any means all bad … Fat prosperous cops with the Chamber of Commerce voices … Slim, smart and deadly cops … who for all their smartness and deadlines were not free to do a clean job in a clean way.
And D.A. Sewell Endicott puts his finger on another problem:
“The citizen is the law. In this country we haven’t got around to understanding that. We think of the law as an enemy. We’re a nation of cop-haters.”
—The Little Sister
A district attorney may be the top honcho in the police hierarchy, but Marlowe is in no doubt about his inevitable angle: he wants to be famous.
“He eats publicity like I eat tender young garden peas,” the cop Beifus tells Marlowe in The Little Sister, while in The Long Goodbye the current incumbent is running true to form—“The D.A. smells a lot of headlines on this one.”
By this time Endicott is no longer D.A. but back in private practice. His view of the law remains cynical …
“The law isn’t justice. It’s a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.”
Years of exposure to L.A.’s finest had also given Marlowe a somewhat questioning attitude. By and large he (and Chandler) felt they were “a pretty dumb bunch who operate on the mental level of plumbers.”
“There’s no law against lying to the cops. They expect it. They feel much happier when you lie to them than when you refuse to talk to them. That’s a direct challenge to their authority.”
—The Long Goodbye
All the simple old-fashioned charm of a cop beating up a drunk.
You don’t shake hands with big city cops. That close is too close.
—The Long Goodbye
“What makes you Bay City cops so tough? … You pickle your nuts in salt water or something?”
—The Little Sister
I smelled his sweat and the gas of corruption.
—The Long Goodbye
He leaned back and hooked his thumbs in his vest, which made him look a little more like a cop.
—Farewell, My Lovely
His blue uniform coat fitted him the way a stall fits a horse.
—“Bay City Blues”
“Or maybe we walk ourselves into some hot lead.”
“Just like the coppers do on the radio,” I said.
—“Bay City Blues”
“I’m just one of those sadistic cops that has to smack a head with a piece of lead pipe every so often to keep from getting nervous indigestion.”
—“Bay City Blues”
“Oh, Christ, a sensitive cop!”
—Farewell, My Lovely
But when all is said and done …
I replaced the phone thinking that an honest cop with a bad conscience always acts tough. So does a dishonest one. So does almost anyone, including me.
—The Long Goodbye
So, were there no good cops?
Well, there was Lieutenant Carl Randall from Central Homicide in Farewell, My Lovely—“a thin, quiet man of fifty with smooth creamy gray hair, cold eyes, a distant manner”—who had, in Marlowe’s opinion, “a lot behind his vest besides his shirt.”
Randall warns Marlowe:
“Little by little you will build up a body of hostility in this department that will make it damned hard for you to do any work.”
“Every private dick faces that every day of his life.”
There was Lieutenant Breeze in The High Window:
The only thing about him which very much suggested cop was the calm, unwinking, unwavering stare of his prominent pale blue eyes, a stare that had no thought of being rude but that anybody but a cop would feel to be rude.
And then there was the deceptively rustic Sheriff Patton in The Lady in the Lake, running for reelection on the slogan “Keep Jim Patton Constable. He is too old to go to work.”
He had a sweat-stained Stetson on the back of his head and his large hairless hands were clasped comfortably over his stomach … His hair was mousy brown except at the temples, where it was the color of old snow … He had large ears and friendly eyes and his jaws munched slowly and he looked as dangerous as a squirrel and much less nervous.
And then, of course, there was Bernie Ohls, “white eyebrows and an out-thrust, very deeply cleft chin” (“Finger Man”); “a medium-sized blondish man with stiff white eyebrows, calm eyes and well-kept teeth. He looked like anybody you would pass on the streets. I happened to know that he had killed nine men” (The Big Sleep).
In several of the novels Ohls is Marlowe’s alter ego—a cop who is tough but basically honest and realistic about this flawed paradise they share. Ohls speaks for both of them when he says, “There ain’t no clean way to make a million bucks. The difference between him and most of the other cops is that he is prepared to clean up the dirt, instead of regarding it as inevitable and wallowing in it.”
“I don’t like hoodlums.”
“That’s just a word, Marlowe. We have that kind of world. Two wars gave it to us and we are going to keep it.”
—The Long Goodbye
“That’s the difference between crime and business. For business you gotta have capital. Sometimes I think it’s the only difference.”
“A properly cynical remark,” I said, “but big time crime takes capital, too!”
“And where does it come from, chum? Not from guys that hold up liquor stores.”
—The Long Goodbye
In “The Pencil” Ohls tells Marlowe:
“This town is getting to be almost as lousy as New York, Brooklyn or Chicago. We could end up real corrupt.”
“We’ve made a hell of a good start.”
He was frequently struck by—
“The strange psychological and spiritual kinship between the operations of big money business and the rackets. Same faces, same expressions, same manners … These boys all have good business fronts and very clever, although crooked, lawyers. Stop the lawyers and you stop the Syndicate, but the Bar Associations are simply not interested.
—Letter to Helga Greene—October 1, 1958
In “The Pencil” Marlowe tells Anne Riordan about the Mafia—
“… the Outfit, the Syndicate, the big mob, or whatever name you want to use for it. You know damn well it exists and is as rich as Rockefeller. You can’t beat it because not enough people want to, especially the million-a-year lawyers that work for it, and the bar associations that seem more anxious to protect other l
awyers than their own country.”
“My God, are you running for office somewhere? I never knew you sound so pure.”
The image of the dollar is ever present in the world according to Chandler, and one of the things that unites Marlowe with Ohls and the occasional good cop who crosses his path is the clear-eyed realization that—in one way or another—everyone is out there looking for it.
On his way home from a case in The Little Sister Marlowe stops at a bar for a brandy. As he leaves:
I stepped out into the night air that nobody had yet found out how to option. But a lot of people were probably trying. They’d get around to it.
Five
The City of the Angels
(illustrations credit 5.1)
Scattered diamond points at first, the lights drew together and became a jeweled wristlet laid out in the show window of the night.
—“The Man Who Liked Dogs”
“Everything’s for sale in California.”
—The Lady in the Lake
“We make the finest packages in the world, Mr. Marlowe. The stuff inside it is mostly junk.”
—Harlan Potter in The Long Goodbye
“A big hard-boiled city with no more personality than a paper cup.”
“It is the same in all big cities, amigo.”
—The Little Sister
I smelled Los Angeles before I got to it. It smelled stale and old like a living room that had been closed too long. But the colored light fooled you.
—The Little Sister
Crime writer Ross Macdonald—considered by many to be the leading neo-Chandler—wrote that Chandler “invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence.” But the romance was strictly of the film noir variety.
It was a time when the city was trying to carve out an identity for itself. There are those who will tell you it still is. Hollywood was not the whole of Los Angeles; but in a very unreal sense, all of Los Angeles was Hollywood.
Ross Macdonald (a.k.a. Kenneth Millar) (1915–1983). Now generally considered one of “the holy trinity of the American hard-boiled detective novel” with Hammett and Chandler. He named his detective, Lew Archer, as an homage to Hammett’s Miles Archer, Sam Spade’s murdered partner.
He said that Chandler wrote “like a slumming angel … and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence.” Alfred A. Knopf (illustrations credit 5.2)
(illustrations credit 5.3)
Architectural imagination ran riot. French châteaux sat cheek by jowl with Tudor castles and Italian villas. You might go to a restaurant like the Brown Derby, built to resemble a hat, or a bank that resembled an animal. A bottling plant a block long might have the exterior of an ocean liner with portholes for windows; a cinema posed as a Chinese pagoda—and still does. Everything was made to look like something else, and nothing seemed built to last—just like the film sets over in Hollywood.
There was money aplenty …
There were great silent estates, with twelve-foot walls and wrought-iron gates and ornamental hedges; and inside, if you could get inside, a special brand of sunshine, very quiet, put up in noise-proof containers just for the upper classes.
—Farewell, My Lovely
The bright gardens had a haunted look, as though wild eyes were watching … from behind the bushes, as though the sunshine itself had a mysterious something in the light.
—The Big Sleep
The house itself was not so much. It was smaller than Buckingham Palace, rather gray for California, and probably had fewer windows than the Chrysler Building … A man in a striped vest and gilt buttons opened the door, bowed, took my hat and was through for the day.
—Farewell, My Lovely
Inside the houses—were you privileged enough to get a peep—you were likely to find
the kind of room where people sit on floor cushions with their feet in their laps and sip absinthe through lumps of sugar and talk from the back of their throats in high, affected voices, and some of them just squeak. It was a room where anything could happen except work.
—Farewell, My Lovely
On the floor might be “a rug as thin as silk and as old as Aesop’s aunt” (“Mandarin’s Jade”) or, alternatively, “You could just manage to walk on the carpet without waders” (The High Window). “A peach-colored Chinese rug a gopher could have spent a week in without showing his nose above the nap” (“Mandarin’s Jade”).
Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, 6931 Hollywood Boulevard. A movie theater posed as a Chinese pagoda—and still does. Everything was made to look like something else. Photofest (illustrations credit 5.4)
The house in which Chandler had Joe Brody (“the two-bit chiseler”) murdered in The Big Sleep. (illustrations credit 5.5)
Wilshire Boulevard, 1935. Photofest (illustrations credit 5.6)
When the old-money moment was past, the glow faded fast. The color scheme of the old Chateau Berry was
bile green, linseed-poultice brown, sidewalk gray and monkey-bottom blue. It was as restful as a split lip.
—The Little Sister
Raymond Chandler, one gathers, did not approve of the filthy rich, if only because of what they did with their money.
Chandler remembered the city as being “hot and dry when I first went there, with tropical rains in winter and sunshine at least nine-tenths of the year.”
Hollywood Boulevard, 1937. Marlowe had his office at the mythical Cahuenga Building near Ivar—first on the seventh floor, then Suite 615. Photofest (illustrations credit 5.7)
The original Brown Derby restaurant was on Wilshire opposite the Ambassador Hotel. A second Brown Derby opened on North Vine Street in 1928 in the heart of Hollywood and attracted the top movie stars. Photofest (illustrations credit 5.8)
Marlowe also has his memories …
“I used to like this town,” I said … “A long time ago. There were trees along Wilshire Boulevard. Beverly Hills was a country town. Westwood was bare hills and lots offering at eleven hundred dollars and no takers. Hollywood was a bunch of frame houses on the interurban line. Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but goodhearted and peaceful. It had the climate they just yap about now. People used to sleep out on porches. Little groups who thought they were intellectual used to call it the Athens of America. It wasn’t that, but it wasn’t a neon-lighted slum either.”
—The Little Sister
It was a very different Los Angeles in those days. The 1911 Census had estimated 350,000 people but the trickle of immigrants was becoming a flood. By 1930 it would be 1.5 million and a lot of things would have changed.
An oil boom of massive proportions was under way, creating money and jobs—and it didn’t much care for whom. Money poured into the state with the encouragement of the federal government. Before long the economy was that of a fair-sized country, and since it was easy money, it easily attracted organized crime.
World War II aggravated the situation. The setting‑up of factories for arms manufacturing made California the epicenter of the defense industry, and Washington—anxious to help rebuild the region after the Depression of the 1930s—gave preference in the granting of contracts.
Vine Street, 1953. Known for its famous restaurants such as the Brown Derby, nightclubs, high-end stores and theaters that broadcast live radio shows. Photofest (illustrations credit 5.9)
City Hall (which appears in The Little Sister and other stories) and its neighbor, Union Station. Photofest (illustrations credit 5.10)
And still people poured in. By the 1950s the city boasted an electronic sign that showed the population increase minute-by-minute. What it did not show was the range of problems that unplanned influx brought with it.
It was all too much too soon for a town that had no evolved culture of its own. What had emerged, Chandler saw as being just as much the product of bland mass production and advertising. He called it the “culture of the filter-tipped cigarette … leading to a steakl
ess steak to be broiled on a heatless broiler in a non-existent oven and eaten by a toothless ghost.”
In the books Marlowe is constantly crisscrossing the terrain, noting the morphing of one aspect into another—rarely for the better—and always making us aware of the geographical context in which this amorphous new “Athens” exists. Behind it, the timeless range of mountains. Before it, “the great fat solid Pacific trudging into shore like a scrubwoman going home … a California ocean. California, the department store state. The most of everything and the best of nothing” (The Little Sister). “There is a touch of the desert about everything in California and about the minds of the people who live here” (Letter to Blanche Knopf). We are constantly being made aware of natural beauty corrupted by unnatural man.
In a more mellow mood, the sea takes on more romantic imagery …
Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form itself on the edge of consciousness.
The World of Raymond Chandler Page 9