First Edition
Once a decade I get an irresistible urge to revisit the hardboiled crime noir classics I was introduced to in high school but didn’t appreciate at the time.
My latest binge included Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me, Kenneth Fearing’s The Big Clock, James Ellroy’s LA Confidential, James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, and two books from Raymond Chandler.
Particularly with Ellroy, Hammett, and Chandler, their anti-hero heroes are troubled, rebellious, and cynical – but can’t ever escape from that ember of honor and hope smoldering deep inside. The authors paint a dark, bleak picture of the underbelly of society – usually LA. Why LA? Why not LA? Where the lights shine brightest the shadows cast deep and wide.
Their outlook was shocking when they wrote their novels – especially Thompson when he wrote from the killer’s perspective – but is standard fare today. (Today, you might need to write with a positive buoyancy to shock people!)
I still love to read crime novels, but I’m not sure anyone has really bested the patron saints, Hammett and Chandler. That begs the question, who had the greatest character? Was it Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe?
I like both characters – but Marlowe is my favorite and I believe he was at his best in The Long Goodbye – which just edged The Lady in the Lake in my mind.
Marlowe befriends Terry Lennox – wealthy but haunted by his demons from serving in war and by the escapades of his nymphomaniac wife. No good deed goes unpunished and soon both the cops and the gangsters are after Marlowe when he begins to investigate the death of Lennox’s wife after being told to back off. Telling Marlowe to back off is like pouring gasoline on a fire.
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But don’t blame the cops and gangsters for all of Marlowe’s problems. It is he, after all, who says: “There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.”
And he knows the life he has chosen:
The other part of me wanted to get out and stay out, but this was the part I never listened to. Because if I ever had 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 paper 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 programs they could have on the radio or TV set. I might even get 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.
Rereading Chandler is a graphic reminder that California has always had problems – but I digress. The Long Goodbye stands the test of time and is still a guilty pleasure from an era of tough guys, dames in distress, partnerships between the gangsters and dirty cops, and the discovery that even heroes have flaws.
