Dear Jack,
Yesterday was Raymond Chandler’s birthday. I did some math and he would’ve been 137; somehow I don’t think he’s in a place to much care how old he’s getting, but you never know. The man was no saint, that’s for sure—but brother, could he ever write.
“I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again.”
― Raymond Chandler, The High Window
I first got acquainted with Chandler through the film Murder, My Sweet, a 1944 adaptation of his novel Farewell, My Lovely, starring Dick Powell as L.A. private eye Philip Marlowe. Up until that time Powell had been a successful star in splashy and cerebral musicals such as 42nd Street and Goldiggers of 1933, 1935, and 1937. Apparently the film studio was afraid that a title like “Farewell, My Lovely” would make audiences think this was another of Powell’s musicals, so they opted for a more obviously gritty name for the U.S. release. It worked. And Powell was transformed from a sugar-throated romantic lead to the sort of wise-cracking, understatedly cynical, tough but loveable guy he’d go on to play on radio’s Richard Diamond, Private Detective, and as the host of Dick Powell’s Zane Grey Theatre on television.
I think I was about 18 when I first saw the film, but, whatever I was reading at the time, it wasn’t hard-boiled noir—I had a rude awakening when I first read Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man as a younger teenager and discovered a world infinitely more seedy than that of the charming William Powell and Myrna Loy’s Nick and Nora. Whatever Farewell, My Lovely held would have to wait. My next encounter with Chandler was through radio, in the form of The Adventures of Philip Marlowe.
As you know, I grew up listening to old-time radio shows (and consequently probably know more about the pop culture of my grandparents’ formative years than that of the ’80s and ’90s). My favorites as a kid were Sherlock Holmes, Hopalong Cassidy, and the comedy programs, but somewhere along the line I branched out to the darker shows like The Saint, Broadway Is My Beat, and Dragnet. When I took a film class in college on popular culture of the 1940s, I discovered that brilliant folks had been archiving all these shows—and many hundreds more—on the internet. (I subsequently had a Burns & Allen comedy listen-a-thon.)
I don’t think it was until about 2019, though (when I was trying to escape the misery of overhearing the department in the next aisle over at work cold-call people all day and try to bully them into buying our product), that I discovered old-time radio programs were now available to stream in the form of podcast episodes. I was hooked. I quickly realized that shows with audience laugh tracks were a little too distracting for work, so I opted for detective shows instead. I blitzed through Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce’s Sherlock Holmes series, and then The New Adventures of Nero Wolfe with Sidney Greenstreet, plus Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar; Dick Powell’s Richard Diamond; Boston Blackie; Casey, Crime Photographer; Candy Matson (finally, a girl detective!); Box Thirteen, The Adventures of Sam Spade … and The Adventures of Philip Marlowe. Some of these shows were better than others, both in audio quality, writing quality, and the voices of the actors. But Marlowe, as played by Gerald Mohr, pretty much had it all—sure, the writing was cheesy sometimes (and Phil kissed far, far too many girls who were far, far too ready to be kissed), but my goodness was Mohr’s deep baritone ever a welcome antidote to the haranguings I’d otherwise have heard. Then the pandemic struck and I found myself working from home, in the silence of my bedroom; I often played through my favorite radio shows in those months just to give myself a little company (and, let’s be honest, escape) during the long workdays.
Somewhere along the line, I picked up Chandler’s short stories and then gradually began reading my way through his novels. I started with Farewell, My Lovely. As with Hammett’s The Thin Man, it’s considerably darker and grimier than its silver-screen little sister (although I can’t speak to the 1975 film version of Farewell, My Lovely, starring Robert Mitchum as Marlowe. I haven’t seen it; first of all, it’s in color, and that takes away some of the intrigue and classiness of the ’44 film. Plus, Robert Mitchum always looks like he was born trying to look like a detective). There are also plenty of racial (and racist) elements to the book that reflected the kind of world in which Chandler was living and writing but which would never have made it past the film code censors of the day.
On the whole, Chandler’s books are essentially depressing: broken people do bad things to other broken people, who get broken far worse than they were before, and often lots of both of them end up dead. If the books were narrated in the third person, I probably wouldn’t have read as many as I have (three or four of his seven completed novels). But Philip Marlowe is telling you the story, and he sure has a way with words:
“Time passed again. I don’t know how long. I had no watch. They don’t make that kind of time in watches anyway.”
“After a little while I felt a little better, but very little. I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.”
“You can crab over the morning paper and kick the shins of the guy in the next seat at the movies and feel mean and discouraged and sneer at the politicians but there are a lot of nice people in the world just the same.”
“Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.”
As Jean Arthur’s character Clarissa Saunders drawls in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, “But it was the way [he] said it, you nearly fell through the floor.” Chandler, through the eyes of Marlowe, has a gift for turning a phrase in a way that you wouldn’t expect (see the tarantula example above), but he also has a brilliant command of rhythm and pacing using very simple language. He’s more wordy than Hemingway, of course (who isn’t?), but his prose has a similar stripped-down feel to it.
“The faster I write the better my output. If I’m going slow, I’m in trouble. It means I’m pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.”
― Raymond Chandler
If you’re looking for something cozy, read Agatha Christie (who is hardly “clean,” but seldom gritty). If you’re looking for something classy (and classic), read Arthur Conan Doyle. But if you want unforgetable phrases, turn to Chandler: “I’m not a young man. I’m old, tired and full of no coffee.”
His 1944 essay “The Simple Art of Murder” is well worth a read, too, if you have time. And, speaking as we were of radio: In 1945, Lux Radio Theater did an adaptation of Murder, My Sweet, with Dick Powell reprising his role as Philip Marlowe. I’m adding it to my queue.
How’s the view from where you are?
Yrs,
Meli
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