Just read my first Raymond Chandler,
The Long Good-bye (1953), which was his last-but-one novel. (Though many commentators on Amazon etc seem to view the last one,
Playback, as a poor thing, and it's rarely mentioned in blurbs etc.) Anyway.
The Long Good-bye. Ooooh. I thought it was one of the most relentlessly terrific books I've read all year: perhaps number one. Forget all the stuff about Marlowe being a 'wisecracking' private eye (and what does 'hardboiled'
mean anyway, when it's not referring to eggs?); he's handy with a one-liner all right, but the overwhelming sensation I got when reading his narrative was of permanently reeling under beautifully delivered blows of bitter truth. That, of course, is the kind of thing that cheers me up immensely, and I can't remember the last book I read that had me sitting there grinning like an idiot for so long from the sheer pleasure of the prose.
There was a sad fellow over on a bar stool talking to the bartender, who was polishing a glass and listening with that plastic smile people wear when they are trying not to scream. The customer was middle-aged, handsomely dressed, and drunk. He wanted to talk and he couldn’t have stopped even if he hadn’t really wanted to talk. He was polite and friendly and when I heard him he didn’t seem to slur his words much, but you knew that he got up on the bottle and only let go of it when he fell asleep at night. He would be like that for the rest of his life and that was what his life was. You would never know how he got that way because even if he told you it would not be the truth. At the very best a distorted memory of the truth as he knew it. There is a sad man like that in every quiet bar in the world.
The brevity of Marlowe's observations (is
that the 'hardboiled' bit?) means that Chandler drives an extraordinary density into each paragraph and page: as a result the book (448 pages in my edition, about 50% longer than the other Marlowe novels) feels long and slow but never drawn-out or boring. The milieu is wonderful too: the idle rich of California, whose habits and behaviour prove that money and social standing just make you more miserable in the end. At one point, in three successive chapters, Marlowe meets three different doctors: each one is perfectly portrayed, a fully-rounded character, idiosyncratic but not pitifully eccentric as some lazier, looser writers would have them, so that you really don't know which one is going to feature more prominently, and which two are never going to be mentioned again. This even-handedness and equal attention to detail is present throughout and illuminates the whole thing from within. It's a common overstatement to say of a book one has admired that 'Not a sentence is wasted,' but I really felt this was (almost) literally true with Chandler. Everything that's there needs to be there.
So I picked up a couple more Chandlers,
The Lady in the Lake and
Farewell, My Lovely, with a combination of jittery excitement and dread at the thought of there being a limited number of these little packages of joy still to read. Mere hardboiled detective stories?
Just crime fiction? This is literature - art - pure and simple (though rarely pure, and never simple).
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