Three things I didn't remember about Raymond Chandler.
- I didn't remember that he, alone of all authors of my experience (or increasingly dodgy memory, it seems...), spelled "okay" as "okey." Why did he prefer this variant spelling? *Shrug*
- I didn't remember the amount of racial epithets and ethnic slurs slung around not just by the riff-raff but by Chandler's white knight (and, arguably, Mary Sue ideal) Philip Marlowe, particularly in Farewell, My Lovely (1940; and how odd is it that I've read The Big Sleep some five or six times now, but FML only two or three times?). Yeah, yeah, different times, different protocols -- but Marlowe's free-and-easy usage of such words, even in the first person narration, takes the shine off his character a fair bit for a modern reader, and should've for a contemporary one too. (OTOH, I did remember Marlowe's distaste for "fairies"; it's not at the level of Sam Spade's queer-bashing in The Maltese Falcon, but it's definitely noticeable.)
- I didn't remember the "psychic" grifter in Farewell, My Lovely (or his Amerindian stooge, Second Planting, for that matter); upon my latest reading, I was struck by this fellow's name: Amthor. Could Chandler have possibly meant this as a sly dig at "Himmler's Rasputin," Karl Maria Weisthor, née Karl Maria Wiligut (1866 - 1946)? Weisthor is one of the more fascinating background figures from Nazi Germany, and was used as a pivotal character by Philip Kerr in the second book of his Bernie Gunther series of mysteries, The Pale Criminal (1990; arguably my favorite of the original Berlin Noir trilogy, but I've yet to read the recently published fourth book, The One From the Other [2006]).
It might be germane to cite a passage from Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology (1985; 1992), specifically from Chapter 14: "Karl Maria Wiligut -- The Private Magus of Heinrich Himmler":
"By virtue of his alleged possession of ancestral memory and an inspired representation of archaic Germanic traditions, he [Weisthor / Wiligut] became the favoured mentor of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler on mythological subjects and was given an official assignment for prehistorical research in the SS between 1933 and 1939. During the period of his service he was promoted from SS-Hauptsturmführer (captain) to SS-Brigadeführer (brigadier) upon the personal recommendation of Himmler. Consulted by his patron on a wide range of issues, Wiligut's influence extended to the design of the Totenkopfring (death's head ring) worn by members of the SS, the conception of the Wewelsburg as the order-castle of the SS, and the adoption of other ceremonial designed to bestow a traditional aura upon the SS ideology of elitism, racial purity, and territorial conquest."
-- p. 177
Here's another brief excerpt:
"Wiligut's...importance to völkisch groups and the SS rested on his reputation as the last descendant of a long line of Germanic sages, the Uiligotis of the Asa-Uana-Sippe, which dated back to a remote prehistoric era. Wiligut claimed to possess ancestral clairvoyant memory, which enabled him to recall the history and experiences of his tribe over thousands of years. It is difficult to establish when Wiligut first identified with this tradition as pre-war documents are scarce. He claimed that he received instruction from his grandfather Karl Wiligut (1794 - 1883), and dated his formal initiation into the family secrets by his father from 1890; a series of nine pagan commandments was supposedly written by him as early as July 1908."
-- pps. 179-80
Of course, it doesn't really matter if Amthor is a downgraded stand-in for Weisthor ("White Thor"); there were plenty of self-professed "occultists" and not-so secret societies tub-thumping in the first few decades of the twentieth century (particularly in the years immediately after WWI, when many people turned to "spiritualism" in the hope of contacting a deceased loved one). But those of a certain geeky/nerdish bent are likely to get a certain faint glow of satisfaction from imagining that it is so.