Essay: Private Eye, Public Conscience

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I lit another cigarette and looked at the dental-supply company's bill again. The minutes went by with their fingers to their lips. Then there was a small knocking on wood. It was a blond. A blond to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window. She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looked by moonlight. She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket. "Cops are just people," she said irrelevantly. "They start out that way, I've heard."

The lines above come from four different novels by Raymond Chandler. Yet all of them seem to issue from our memories or dreams, or at least the ones in which we picture ourselves, alone in the office, dreaming of cool blonds and stiff whiskeys (or cool whiskey and stiff blonds). Raymond Chandler was ghostwriter to the sound track our lives so often imitate. The figure of the tough-but-tender hero cracking wise to cover up his soft spots; the lethal blond and the flick-knife dialogue on which the movies (and so the rest of us) still feed -- all of them seem to have been copyrighted by the onetime oil executive who only began writing at the age of 45. In seven novels and in the screenplays he wrote for Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock, Chandler scripted much of the unshaven poetry and arsenic idealism that form us now, and haunt us still, in Mickey Spillane beer ads and smoky urban videos, from Jack Nicholson's Chinatown to Joan Didion's Malibu.

Chandler is not, of course, the only American writer with a centenary this year who worked in a British bank, steeped his writing in the classics and explored the breakdowns of the age in cadences so memorable that he seems to have taken up a time-share ownership of Bartlett's. But T.S. Eliot was an American who found his voice in England, and in books. Chandler, by contrast, was an honorary Brit who smuggled two foreign substances into Hollywood -- irony and morality -- and so gave us an unflinchingly American voice, the kind we hear in the rainy voice-overs of our mind. Few would suggest that Chandler is a more significant literary figure than Eliot. But quality and influence are mysteriously related, and Chandler has inspired more poses and more parodies, perhaps, than any other American writer of the century save Hemingway. Eliot merely articulated the deepest spiritual and emotional issues of the times; Chandler put them on the sidewalk.

Chandler's most immortal creation -- co-produced by Humphrey Bogart -- was the quixotic figure of the gumshoe, Philip Marlowe, private eye and public conscience, sitting behind his pebbled-glass door with an office bottle and a solitary game of chess. What made Marlowe special was simply the fact that he was nothing special, no genius like Sherlock Holmes, no Connoisseur model like James Bond. Just an underpaid drudge with, as one mobster says, "no dough, no family, no prospects, no nothing" -- except a habit of making other people's worries his own, and a gift for walking in on corpses he knows just well enough to mourn.