So, I’m in Paris right now. I am infamously terrible at travel writing, so I won’t attempt a blow by blow account of my last week. In fact, for this post there will be no attempts at Paris writing. Right at the moment I’m in the tiny apartment I am sharing with my amour in the 2nd arrondissement (fortunately spell check knows how to spell that). My feet are tired from walking around today. So I’m going to do my first overseas post on the book I read in transit. Part two will be Madame Bovary in Paris, and may involve some actual travel tales.
On my way from Canberra to Paris I read a Raymond Chandler novel – The Long Goodbye. Many years ago I saw an excellent film version of this book with Elliot Gould as Phillip Marlowe, Chandler’s classic noir detective anti-hero, most famously played by Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep. Usually I try to read the book first, but in this case it didn’t seem to matter.
Chandler is one of the greatest of the American hardboiled crime writers. In hardboiled crime, the detective typically has a cynical attitude towards crime, criminals and the system. Often the protagonists are private detectives, often dealing with corruption and incompetence in the police force. Usually there are one or two women of doubtful moral fibre.
Reading Chandler in the strange cavernous departure hall of Shanghai Pudong airport, I am transported to the strange, sprawling streets of LA – doctor’s dispensing illicit drugs, drunken authors, trips to border towns. In the end, though, what makes Chandler great are three things: his stripped back, occasionally poetic style; his frequent witticisms; and his random references to works of ‘high’ literature. The latter are always obvious, not subtle, and often seem to say more about Chandler than operating as character development.
As for great lines, how about:
He was a man who always talked with commas.
The stores were already beginning to fill up with overpriced Christmas junk, and the daily papers were beginning to scream about how terrible it would be if you didn’t get your Christmas shopping done early. It would be terrible anyway; it always is.
I really hate flying, but I feel that the desperate, stretched out state it puts you in is perfect for reading hardboiled crime, where most of the characters are desperate and stretched out. Usually in these novels no one comes out a winner, America is never beautiful (though the women sometimes are), but the detective continues on his quest for the truth and some sort of justice.
I read somewhere once that it’s about maintaining faith that one good man will always stand up against a corrupt system and an immoral world. But I’m not sure that’s totally true in Chandler. Marlowe is almost fatalistic. He has a code which requires him to act in a certain way, and he just does. He reflects on the people around him, their characters, but the reasons why he holds out when a cop beats him, pursues a case no one wants solved, remain under-explained. Particularly given that he rarely gets paid, and turns a fair bit of money down.
To bring it back to travels, sometimes he seems to inhabit that strange state you do after long haul flights, moving through the world without it quite touching you. Unreal. I think this style suits crime novels. A lot of contemporary crime novels are just too horribly graphic; full of disgusting serial killer crimes, psychological analyses. I’ll leave Chandler with the last word.
A murderer is always unreal once you know he is a murderer.
Ghosts and ashes 
A bit different from Mum’s approach! I might try reading Raymond Chandler.
Dad (masqerading as Mum)
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Interesting post. I’m a big Chandler fan, but haven’t got around to ‘The Long Goodbye’ yet – one day… I think you’re right in that Marlowe’s motives largely remain mysterious, and that’s perhaps why he’s such an engaging character. There’s something almost mythic about him (Chandler talked about him in terms of a knight, and there’s an explicit reference at the beginning of ‘The Big Sleep’; Marlowe sees a stained glass window featuring a man in armour, trying to rescue a damsel tied to a tree, and makes some remark about wanting to get up there and give him a hand) – he’s smart, and knows his way around LA, but also stands apart from it, almost as if he’s watching it from the outside. He’s a good man, but since you never know quite where this goodness springs from there’s also an element of doubt and uncertainty about him, which you find in all the best heroes.
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I really like your observation that you never know where the goodness springs from. Marlowe is a great narrator, but he always remains somewhat mysterious. He does unexpected things, but it’s never unbelievable.
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