Why I Love Philip Marlowe

In Which it Becomes Clear that the Knight of Mean Streets Can Make Don Draper, John Wayne, and Dirty Harry all say "Uncle!"

Photo¹ by Megan Earl

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Raymond Chandler’s hardboiled protagonist first crossed my path when I watched The Big Sleep in film school, sometime in 2014 or 2015. It wasn’t very memorable. But when I listened to the book on Audible in November of 2020 while mowing the 8 acres of lawn at my church, I was hooked. Enthralled actually. Ray Porter reads it, and he does a good job, but Marlowe’s voice as a narrator is more powerful when I see the words on the page. I picked up the second book, Farewell, My Lovely, in print and proceeded to plow through the next five after it over the following few months. 

I loved the writing. I loved the humor, the pithy and thoughtful descriptions, the pacing, the colorful characters. I loved the mood that was created. Most of all, I was strongly struck by the protagonist. He’s a man. He’s strong. He doesn't get fazed by a lot. He doesn't have time for wannabe tough guys, and yet we can sense he’s tougher than just about everyone he comes across. He’s the sort of person that just is who he is, and we get to watch as others break over him in all sorts of ways, like wave after wave on the same pitted, stalwart rock. He doesn't share many feelings; mostly impressions. He isn’t insecure. He doesn't suffer from self doubt. He just pays attention. Always looking outward, not inward. He doesn't give backstory on himself, and doesn't overexplain or apologize. 

There’s a sort of almost magical, uncanny quality about a character that isn’t affected by temptations or fears the way most people are, and Marlowe has that in spades. I first remember encountering that quality in Marx Brothers movies. Groucho is often in a position of being flirted with or seduced by some woman, and, while he’s into it, he usually lets his chance pass by and goes for the joke. And of course, he had to because he was in a comedy. But as a teenager, I could set that aside and be intrigued by the idea of someone turning down some easy enjoyment and living out what they know is ultimately more interesting and entertaining and worthwhile, even if nobody else is watching. Like the scene in Monkey Business where Groucho is in the cabin of some gangster’s girlfriend on board a ship, going in and out of her closet as he hides from the people who are after him, making light of her advances, and of everything else. He and Harpo both had that uncanniness to them in their own ways. 

This ability to turn away temptation is evident in The Big Sleep in a few places, mostly involving the young Carmen Sternwood, a loose and unstable young woman who throws herself at and is exposed in front of Marlowe a few times, once on purpose. Marlowe is not, as far as he lets on, a religious man. But he is extremely dedicated to the client. The client’s needs take utter precedence for him. This is what provides him his professional lodestar and ethical compass, guiding almost every action he takes in the stories, aside from little things like pouring himself a drink or lighting a cigarette. He won’t touch a woman if it means being distracted from or disturbing a case before it’s finished. 

On the other hand, he seems willing to seduce a woman to get information that might help him on a case, as he begins to do with Mrs. Grayle in Farewell, until her elderly husband walks in, making Marlowe feel “as cold as Finnegan’s feet, the day they buried him.” He stops immediately and gets up and leaves, feeling like he just robbed a grave. It could also be that he was just weak in that moment and not motivated by the case at all. But that seems less likely the more you get to know him. 

The humor is fantastic. This paragraph from The High Window does a good job encapsulating it, along with some of Chandler’s other good qualities as a writer: 

A long-limbed languorous type of showgirl blond lay at her ease in one of the chairs, with her feet raised on a padded rest and a tall misted glass at her elbow, near a silver ice bucket and a Scotch bottle. She looked at us lazily as we came over the grass. From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away. Her mouth was too wide, her eyes were too blue, her makeup was too vivid, the thin arch of her eyebrows was almost fantastic in its curve and spread, and the mascara was so thick on her eyelashes that they looked like miniature iron railings.

Carl Trueman has said that he thinks Raymond Chandler could be in the running for best American writer of the 20th century. I think he might be right. 

A smattering of other great lines: 

The air in the apartment was dead and Breeze’s cigar butt had made it a little worse than dead. (The High Window)

I lit a cigarette and dragged the smoking stand beside the chair. The minutes went by on tiptoe, with their fingers to their lips. I looked the place over. You can’t tell anything about an outfit like that. They might be making millions, and they might have the sheriff in the back room, with his chair tilted against the safe. (The Lady in the Lake)

“You the caretaker?”
"Sort of. Don’t ask any more questions, sweetie. My temper’s not reliable.”
"What do you do when you get mad—dance a tango with a ground squirrel?” (The Long Goodbye)

If it’s true that Chandler almost named his hero ‘Mallory’, this would come as no surprise. The Arthurian parallels abound, especially in the first book, from the first page where Marlowe sees a stained glass panel over the entrance to the Sternwood residence depicting a knight trying to free a damsel. The whole book reeks to me of a very clever controlling question: what happens to a knight when the damsel he aims to rescue creates all the distress—hers and a lot of other people’s? The novels read like modern, grimy tales of the Round Table, with less but still some magic.

Chandler’s world is pretty dark. He attempted suicide in his later years and turned more and more to drink. His view of human nature, I’d say, is no lower than that of a good Calvinist, but is shot through with a kind of cynical contempt. He was said to be a far cry from his hero in temperament, as apparently many writers of brutal crime fiction are.² To finish, it’s worth seeing in his own words what he aimed for with his detective:

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But 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. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things.

He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks—that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.

The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.³

1. Yeah, I know it’s Chicago and not L.A.

2. https://www.nytimes.com/1973/12/23/archives/the-case-of-raymond-chandler-chandler-crime-isnt-a-disease-its-a.html

3. “The Simple Art of Murder”. https://www.fadedpage.com/books/20140930/html.php#Page_1