When I got home I mixed a stiff one and stood by the open window in the living room and sipped it and listened to the groundswell of the traffic on Laurel Canyon Boulevard and looked at the glare of the big angry city hanging over the shoulder of the hills through which the boulevard had been cut. Far off the banshee wail of police or fire sirens rose and fell, never for a moment completely silent. Twenty four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him. Out there in the night of a thousand crimes people are dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels or under heavy tires. People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped and murdered. People were hungry, sick; bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness.
It all depends on where you sit and what your own private score is. I didn't have one. I didn't care.
--"The Long Goodbye", Chapter 38
I recently reread this last major novel by Raymond Chandler. It reminded me that one of the great things about reading Chandler is that no matter what novel or collections of short stories you return to with him you get the same quality almost all the way throughout his literary output. I can't say that his last novel, "Playback", (1959) is very good, however, so i wouldn't suggest anyone start off the bat reading that one.
This is one of Raymond Chandler's best Marlowe runarounds--a melange of crooked and violent cops, cheap and not-so cheap hoods and rich and often desperate or bored people in nice mansions, trying to cover up their sordid and sometimes deadly mistakes and character flaws by hiring Our Hero to help cover their traces (or in one case, keep a best-selling author from falling off the wagon and not finishing his sure cestseller of a pop novel.)
It's not set on the "mean streets" of Los Angeles or Chandler's own fictional "Bay City" that figures so well in his early Forties books, "The Lady in the Lake" and Farewell, My Lovely". Thesetting here is more posh; private clubs and boat launches and manicured lawns that are above the creeping smog that is beginning to smoke out the ordinary citizens of the lower bastions of LA. The main arena of fun is the fictional Idle Valley, for instance, a town possibly like Pasadena, where a prominent publisher's daughter is found bludgeoned to death one evening.
The main suspect is a guy named Terry Lennox, a former British Army war hero turned dissapated playboy who Marlowe gives a lift in his car to the Tijuana/San Diego so he can catch a plane for parts unknown. Marlowe doesn't know what Lennox is supposed to have done, but he finds out from the law soon enough. That little car trip indiscretion earns him a few days in the local jail and some tough times from the sergeants in the interrogaton room.
When Marlowe is sprung, after his friend reportedly kills himself in a squallid Mexican "resort" hotel, he gets an offer to track down over Roger Wade, the unstable but profitable author. He refuses at first to take the "babysitting" job, but Wade's beautiful wife convinces him. The best scenes follow as Marlowe gets to interact and reflect on the habits of the high society types who inhabit Idle Valley.
As the above quote should illustrate, however, Chandler is no social commentator with a political agenda. He seems to be reporting on a place (Los Angeles and its inhabitants) as he finds them. Roger Wade is not such a bad guy when sober, for instance, and takes a liking to Marlowe. (Many critics have pointed out that Chandler based a good deal of Wade on himself.) But Marlowe's moral compass is too sharp for him to forget he is only doing a job and he takes no guff from anyone, not even the wealthy publisher who wants him to stop checking into the validity of Terry Lennox's guilt.
The only character Marlowe sets a bit sentimental about is the late Mr. Lennox, a fellow who became a drinking buddy of his from time to time before he blew town in an unusual manner. It is Marlowe's sense of friendship to Lennox and his memory that is the source of his problems; the detective thinks Terry Lennox is at heart a gentleman who wouldn't have murdered his wife no matter how much self-loathing might have come into play. The novel's twist and turns lead to a surprise ending that should have put to rest those critics who say Chandler was past his prime by the early Fifties.
I looked up "The Long Goodbye" on YouTube and came up with the first ten minutes of the 1973 Robert Altman/Elliott Gould film. It's been a long, long time since I've seen this, and I have to say I'm more of a fan of Mr. Chandler than Mr. Altman and his treatment as I recall it, but this opening has its own charms and it was, to be fair, made a good time after the book came out in a post-puritanical, Vietnam/Watergate America. (The opening has almost nothing to do with Chandler's work. A cat features prominently in the scenes, however, and Chandler did like cats.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_u0uo0TxS-I
photo of Hollywood Blvd. by P.S. Zollo
No comments:
Post a Comment