Chandler ramblings
I've been inhaling Raymond Chandler of late, probably for the first time. So far The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely, The High Window & The Lady in the Lake plus various radio versions with Toby Stephens/Ed Bishop, also covering The Little Sister & Playback.
I've not read hard-boiled since I was a child and encountered one in which the hero was so sexually violent that it put me off the entire genre, and there are two things that surprise. First, the quality of the prose. It's a bit variable, but I actually prefer it to much male-authored American lit fic. I get the feeling that Chandler had a great novel in him if only he'd managed to rid himself of the desire to plot.
Then there's this weird Austen-like feel to Marlowe's relations with women. They divide neatly into good girls & bad girls, and Marlowe treats the good ones' virtue like he's one of the more stuffy Heyer heroes. (Chandler writes in his altogether odd essay on detective fiction that the hero would not spoil a virgin.) I know one might gloss this as latent homosexuality, and there's plenty of textual evidence for that, but it still seems weird in the context of this hyperviolent, alcohol-guzzling consumer society. It alone makes it immediately apparent that it's not contemporary, in a way that stuff written ten or twenty years later doesn't.
I've not read hard-boiled since I was a child and encountered one in which the hero was so sexually violent that it put me off the entire genre, and there are two things that surprise. First, the quality of the prose. It's a bit variable, but I actually prefer it to much male-authored American lit fic. I get the feeling that Chandler had a great novel in him if only he'd managed to rid himself of the desire to plot.
Then there's this weird Austen-like feel to Marlowe's relations with women. They divide neatly into good girls & bad girls, and Marlowe treats the good ones' virtue like he's one of the more stuffy Heyer heroes. (Chandler writes in his altogether odd essay on detective fiction that the hero would not spoil a virgin.) I know one might gloss this as latent homosexuality, and there's plenty of textual evidence for that, but it still seems weird in the context of this hyperviolent, alcohol-guzzling consumer society. It alone makes it immediately apparent that it's not contemporary, in a way that stuff written ten or twenty years later doesn't.