I’ve recently completed a read of all of Raymond Chandler’s works included in the Library of America two volume edition of his works. The following essay is a result of that and no other scholarship.
Having closed another case, Philip Marlowe heads back to Los Angeles:
“I didn’t do more than ninety back to Los Angeles. Well, perhaps I hit a hundred for a few seconds now and then. Back on Yucca Avenue I stuck the Olds in the garage and poked at the mailbox. Nothing, as usual. I climbed the long flight of redwood steps and unlocked my door. Everything was the same.
The room was stuffy and dull and impersonal as it always was.
I opened a couple of windows and mixed a drink in the kitchen. I sat down on the couch and stared at the wall. Wherever I went, whatever I did, this was what I would come back to. A blank wall in a meaningless room in a meaningless house.”
This is almost the last we’ll ever see of Philip Marlowe, Raymmond Chandler’s Private Eye and alterego and one of the most astonishing characters in Twentieth Century American fiction. Marlowe is a persona who had been developed and honed through a series of short stories sold to pulp magazines where he appeared under different names such as Mallory and Carmady. He debuted in the novel “The Big Sleep” in 1939 when Chandler was 51. Six novels were to follow along with a further short story and the first four chapters to a novel “Poodle Springs,” left unfinished at Chandler’s death at the age of 70.
During the Marlowiad, we get to know a lot about our man. He loves booze, coffee and cigarettes, and occasionally a pipe. He loves chess but only plays problems from books. He doesn’t like non-white races and homosexuals and much about women. All of this makes his life in multicultural Los Angeles during the war years when gender roles were shifting significantly challenging for him. He despises a lot about society and seems to look at America, and California, at one remove. He once worked for the DA but left under a cloud, and now has a very temperamental attitude towards the police, admiring and hating by turns. He’s a private investigator but spends most of the novels turning down money or returning his fee. He is punctillious to the point of irritating about his accounting. He has the ability to describe (all the novels are first person narratives) place and appearance which fits with his role as an observor. He is intricate in his detail when it comes to women’s fashion. His go to literary technique is simile which he use with all the frequency of a tommy gun spitting bullets.
Marlowe is good at what he does. He is courageous and clever. He stands up to bullies on both sides of the law and he takes little in reward even when he is continually offered it both in the form of money and sex. Marlowe is the great sayer of no. And yet at the same time he is promiscuous when it comes to whisky and coffee. Due to his profession, he spends a lot of time wandering the city and environs. In “The Big Sleep,” he’s mostly in ther suburbs of Los Angeles. Occasionally, he’ll make it to a place called Bay City, a fictional town, which stands for unrestrained corruption where Marlowe will find himself several times in the hands of a feral police department. In “The Lady in the Lake,” he’ll head into the mountains and a surprisingly rural setting. In “Playback,” he’ll go south to Esmerelda, a sleepy wealthy enclave on the coast near San Diego. That’s where he’s heading back from in the quote I topped this essay with.
But despite these wanderings, there are some anchors to Marlowe’s life. There’s his office which is described throughout the books with remarkable consistency. There’s the corridor and its cleaning lady, the waiting room and its dusty lampshade collecting dead moths, and his inner sanctum, his “thinking parlor,” as he describes it. It’s situated in the Cahuenga Building in Hollywood. Through the window the smells of cooking from a local eatery waft. There are bars within walking distance, such as Victor’s where Marlowe drinks gimlets with Terry Lenox in “The Long Goodbye.”
In “The Big Sleep,” Marlowe lives in the Hobart Arms. He has a room with a kitchenette and bathroom. And a pull-down bed. This pull-down bed really struck me on re-reading the book for what must be the third or fourth time recently. It’s the kind of thing that you expect in a Laurel and Hardy film but not a Humphrey Bogart one. It speaks of space-saving poverty to contrast with the mansion of General Sternwood and his daughters. The Sternwood mansion was itself based on the Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills. This mansion has a history that is worthy of a book to itself. It was here that a tycoon Ned Doheny and his personal secretary Theodore Plunkett died in an apparent murder-suicide, or suicide pact, depending on who you believe. It was a scandal at the time and there was widely believed to be a coverup. Chandler was obsessed with the crime and it would go on to inspire the conclusion of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood.” The estate went on to become the headquarters of the AFI conservatory. David Lynch shot “Eraserhead” in its stables and many a film used its sweeping staircase as a ready made set.
The Sternwood Mansion is massive and full of too much space compared to Marlowe’s too little space. And yet Marlowe feels an affinity with the old general. He is part of the old order which Marlowe and Chandler both wistfully aspired. Chandler had been fired from his job in the oil business and was disaffected. He saw the changes around him through the baleful gaze of someone who feels his generation is losing the privilege that he feels ought to automatically belong. As Tony Soprano bemoans: “I came in at the end. The best is over.”
The young, the women, those who are just getting their jollies, the pornographers and gays, seem insultingly unaware of how things should be. For Marlowe, this behaviour is close to insanity. And so it proves that his main foe, the final boss in gamer parlance, is a homicidal nymphomaniac, Sternwood’s youngest daughter. He finds her at one point in the story in his room, in his pull down bed to be precise. He is not happy. His inner sanctum has been corrupted and when he rejects her she swears at him. His reaction uis telling: “I didn’t mind what she called me, what anybody called me. But this was the room I had to live in. It was all I had in the way of a home. In it was everything that was mine, that had any association for me, any past, anything that took the place of a family. Not much; a few books, pictures, radio, chessmen, old letters, stuff like that. Nothing much as they were, they had all my memories. I couldn’t stand her in that room any longer. What she called me only reminded me of that.” He kicks her out and then “savagely” tears his bed to shreds.
In a literary theory there’s this useful idea called the “objective correlative.” It’s essentially an object, a thing which stands for an abstract notion. Charles Foster Kane’s sled for instance might stand for innocence lost. Marlowe’s full of objective correlatives. In the above extract, his chessmen can stand for much. In one book he notes that one of his knight moves is wrong: this isn’t a game for knights. But the pull-down bed is a part of his early iteration. And it disappears once he earns some money. Marlowe moves to the Bristol Hotel for ten years and then spends the rest of the books in a house in Yucca Avenue where he stays until the end of the Marlowiad.
The house had redwood steps and a garden at the back which is overgrown and the backdoor is easy to pop open. It is a space which will be invaded by mobsters and cops during “The Long Goodbye.” In fact, during that novel, the house is much more central than the office. People seem to be popping by all the time, leaving suitcases there, money in the coffee pot. He is nifty in the kitchenette, brewing up coffee mixing drinks, bringing them into the living room on trays. He also has a television which, being Marlowe, he only ever hate-watches when too tired to play chess.
Now he no longer has a pull-down bed he feels more confident about having sex there, although in “Playback” there’s a point made that he goes to Miss Vermilyea’s house for some consequence-free sex, even though she comes to his house first. The reason he does this is because he had sex with Linda Loring in the house, a novel – “The Long Goodbye” – and a year earlier, and he can’t betray her by having sex in the same place. This comes as a strange realization for the reader and Marlowe. The books have a continuity and some incidents leak from one to the other but this is the first time that Marlowe has shown anything like an emotional continuity and it leads to a remarkable conclusion. Back at his house, filled with post-case ennui, Marlowe gets a phone call from Linda who tells him she wants to marry him. He plays hard to get, wanting her to come back to Paris and then telling her that he’ll buy the ticket – she’s rich but he has his pride. When she agrees we get the happiest ending Marlowe has ever been allowed.
“I reached for my drink. I looked around the empty room – which was no longer empty. There was a voice in it, and a tall slim lovely woman. There was a dark hair on the pillow in the bedroom. There was that soft gentle perfume of a woman who presses herself tight against you, whose lips are soft and yielding, whose eyes are half blind.”
John Bleasdale’s latest book, Darkness Visible: the Cinema of Jonathan Glazer, is published July, 2025
