January 2012: Raymond Chandler: The Big Sleep

[Landslide]

Discussion starts January 1st.

 

[brk_3]

I guess I'll start. Yea, start is a good word for this book since I started three different times with it. I bought this book along with another Ray Chandler book (I think it's called The Long Goodbye) before Christmas with every intention on reading it over the holiday weekend. I figured a 250 page paperback, no problem.
I just couldn't get in to this. The story line was hard to follow for some reason. As I was reading, I kept trying to remind myself this was a novel from 1939. That didn't really help change my focus much. There were too many characters to follow all of which seem to double-cross one another. I kept having to page back to try and remember who a particular character was and what role they have in the story.
I did like Philip Marlowe. He was a bit of smart-ass and that made it a little more bearable.

 

[beer good]

I just started this. I've read it before, years ago, and I've seen the movie several times, but I'd forgotten how funny the opening is:

The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn't have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn't seem to be really trying.

Not to mention, well, foreshadowing - a dark knight only nominally trying to help a woman...?

 

[Landslide]

Finished it this morning. It was ok, but I think it lacked mystery. It has crime alright, but not mystery...

Will elaborate on it later.

 

[eclair]

In spite of her get-up she looked as if she would have a hall bedroom accent

What is a hall bedroom accent?

 

[beer good]

I (mostly) love the way Chandler plays with language in his descriptions; yes, there are some rather tedious adjective-adjective-adjective descriptions, but then you get a jazz phrase like this:

What is a hall bedroom accent?

I don't think it is something, it sounds like something Marlowe improvised on the spot; but what I get is, well, what is he saying about the woman? She's dressed to impress, but she speaks like (or carries herself like) someone who grew up in a house where she had to sleep in the hall. Ie she's lower-class, putting on airs, and not doing a very convincing job of it. That's a characterisation in one short phrase.

Incidentally, I'm loving that there's no one big mystery to solve. That sort of stuff is dull. Instead we have a rather low-rent crime, but every time you pull a string it seems to be connected to something else...

 

[eclair]

That's about what I figured with regards to the gist of it. Was wandering if it was one of those phrases that has now dropped from usage, but am actually finding it thrilling (mein gott I needs a life) that it's an original coinage.

So far I'm finding lots of it overly descriptive, but then you get these cute little pow dazzlers -

She'd make a jazzy week-end, but she'd be wearing for a steady diet.

Marlowe's snappy sassiness is beyond cool and I'm liking the slowburn mix of guns, gangsters and dames - it's very involving.

 

[beer good]

Just finished it. Liked it this time around too, but perhaps for other reasons. Will post more after I gather my thoughts, but for now:

Poor Harry Jones.

 

[eclair]

I've finished, and have mostly positive thoughts.
One question, however...

Who killed

Spoiler

Owen Taylor

?

I can't work out whether I've missed it or whether it wasn't actually disclosed.

 

[beer good]

Who killed

Spoiler

Owen Taylor

?

I don't think it's ever stated outright.

Spoiler

The way I read it, either he passed out from the injuries from his fight with Brody and had an accident, Brody killed him and lied about it, or he killed himself. The official police line is suicide, and Marlowe seems happy to let that stand.

 

[eclair]

^ Google throws up an interesting anecdote.

Lauren Bacall recalls in her autobiography, "One day Bogie came on the set and said to Howard, 'Who pushed Taylor off the pier?' Everything stopped."
"Hawks sent Chandler a telegram asking whether the Sternwood's chauffeur, Owen Taylor, was murdered or a suicide.
'Dammit I didn't know either,' " Chandler recalled.

The Knight motif, first in the opening paragraph and then again later:

I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn't a game for knights.

That about sums up Marlowe for me. He has this personal code of honour which renders him alone and separate from his fellow man, as well as from the times he dwells in - that age of gangsters and molls, everyone out for themselves, the leftover hazy ethics from the prohibition era. The It wasn't a game for knights line indicates his awareness of the matter.

 

[beer good]

^ Heh. And good observation about the knights.

And yup, a few days later, I still like it; sure Chandler goes over the top with the adjectives, and Marlowe captures both the best (unending sarcasm, often brilliant little asides) and the worst (complete unfailing unflappableness, never making a mistake) of the first-person narration, but I really wish more modern mystery writers would get this about what Chandler did: there is no one big case in this book. Or rather, if it's there it's not the case he's supposedly working. It's just a connected series of little ones that you can't disturb without bringing them all down, a whole bunch of characters who happen to intersect each other's lives with their own ideas of what the plot is, all with their own plan. Marlowe isn't a knight, isn't a policeman, isn't a gunman; he's a detective, so he detects. That's what he does, pieces together a world that makes sense from little seemingly unconnected details (and being a very entertaining smartass in the process). Every time I read a good detective story like this one, I become even more frustrated with most of the crap detective novels out there where the author seems to think the world is a mystery to which there can be an answer. Catch the bad guy and the story is over. Don't think so.

Someone should write something on the relation of early existential strolling observing narrators (Notes From Underground, Doctor Glas, Hunger, Adventures In The Immediate Unreality, that lot) and Chandler; not saying Chandler is as good a writer as any of those, but Philip Marlowe drunkenly weaving through LA, using his eyes and ears, putting pieces together and being completely jaded about it all is still a good yarn.

 

[eclair]

^ : )

early existential strolling observing narrators

Very apt, and also sounds like a good theme for future book of the month choices.

Does anyone know if the subsequent books throw any further light into Marlowe's past?

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. Such as they were they had all my memorie

 

[753C]

I'm late to the discussion and only about half way through the story. I am definitely enjoying it so far. The biggest impression I get is that reading Chandler is sort of like discovering the fossilized beginnings of the hard boiled genre (in a good way). You can see Chandler's influence in most of the current tough guy protagonists.
Very cool so far.