Oh Marlowe, how could I not love you?
Jan. 9th, 2009 11:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elaby*loves detectives*
I finished reading Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye the other day, and it was fantastic. So fantastic, in fact, that it's inspired another long-winded post about how awesome it is, in the spirit of that one I wrote about "The Six Napoleons" (fear not: this one is considerably shorter). Marlowe is very different from Holmes, from the setting to the characters and everything in between (except for a distrust of the official police force, and a sense of private justice, and... hm, okay, maybe they're only superficially dissimilar) but they both give me the same kind of squeeful joy. Onward!
The Long Goodbye might be my favorite Marlowe story. It's neck and neck with Farewell, My Lovely, anyway, if only for the latter's drug hallucination scene and the "putting on my pants" scene and the whole Red incident with the hand-holding. Okay, so maybe they're a true tie. They're both generally seen as two of Raymond Chandler's best, and it's obvious that The Long Goodbye was written later. It's tied together thematically in much more developed ways, and Marlowe's even more cynical and lonely than usual. God above, is he lonely. But I'll get to that. It's also just a little bit freer with letting you know how Marlowe feels about things, which usually you have to extrapolate like you do with Watson (except, of course, on certain rare occasions, like when Marlowe tells all his fears to Red because Red's got pretty girl eyes). But since Marlowe's the focus of the stories, whereas Watson's not, it takes on a different significance. A couple of times he actually says how he feels, in narration or to another person (and it's almost always "like crap") whereas before, you'd have to glean what you can from his detached description of his own actions.
To make a long (long, long, long) story short, the plot runs as follows. Marlowe meets an extremely polite, extremely drunk "nice young guy" outside a fancy club or restaurant. The fellow, Terry Lennox, sounds English, and although he looks young, his hair is bone white and he's got tiny plastic surgery scars along one side of his face. His girl (ex-wife, we find out later) ditches him and Marlowe takes him home and sobers him up. Some weeks later, he sees him drunk on the street and does the same thing. This time Terry tells him he's moving to Vegas where he can get a job, and Marlowe packs him a suitcase and gives him a bunch of things (razor, toothbrush, pajamas) and some money. Because he's a big, mean, heartless sonofabitch, y'know?
Terry ends up re-marrying his ex-wife in Vegas, and when they come back to Hollywood he looks Marlowe up and they strike up a strange friendship, going out for drinks just about every day. This continues for several months until they have a bit of a fight. Then a few weeks later, Terry shows up at Marlowe's door at five in the morning looking like death warmed over, with a gun and a request to be driven to the Tijuana airport. Marlowe asks no questions (in fact tells Terry not to tell him anything) and drives him down without hesitation. Terry tries to pay him, but he refuses any money. After dropping him off, Marlowe returns to find cops at his house, who report that Terry's wife has been brutally murdered. Marlowe refuses to tell them anything, gets thrown into jail and subsequently released from jail. He's told that Terry has confessed and shot himself in Mexico. The media furor over the wife's death is immediately quieted – open and shut case. Marlowe receives a letter from Terry, written just before he killed himself, describing the circumstances and containing a $5,000 bill which Marlowe never spends.
Now time for one of Chandler's classic "you think it's a side plot until ZOMG everybody actually knows everybody else and it's all connected!" bits. In a very reduced fashion, it goes like this: Marlowe is asked to babysit an alcoholic writer so he'll finish his current manuscript. Marlowe refuses but ends up tracking down the writer, Wade, at a detox center after he goes missing, and then frequently comes to the aid of him and his wife whenever they call. The couple knew Terry and his wife since they're all high society. Mrs. Wade tries to seduce Marlowe during a psychotic break, thinking he's her previous lover who died in WWII. Wade kills himself, but Marlowe deduces that Mrs. Wade actually shot him and made it look like a suicide. He confronts her; she overdoses on sleeping pills the next day, leaving a written confession of the murders of both her husband and Terry Lennox's wife, the latter crime Marlowe already suspected. Marlowe finds out that Wade was having an affair with Terry's wife and that Terry's scars came from his time in action in WWII – he and Mrs. Wade were married in England during the war and she thought he was dead. They met up again in Hollywood society. Sent off her rocker by the fact that Terry's wife now had both of her husbands, Mrs. Wade shot Terry's wife and beat her face in to hide the gunshot wound. Wade, subject to blackouts, knew something had happened, as he had been on his way out when his wife showed up at his lover's house. She shot him later because she thought he remembered or would eventually.
In the aftermath of all this, Marlowe sleeps with Terry's wife's sister, the only woman he ever sleeps with aside from somebody in Chandler's last novel, which apparently readers like to forget exists. It was very strange, because they barely knew each other and they didn't exactly get along.
Anyway, the part of this I'm interested in (big surprise!) is Marlowe's friendship with Terry. Marlowe doesn't have friends; he's a hard-boiled detective. Relationships, sexual or otherwise, just do not work out for him. It's his lot in life. But Marlowe always gets attached to people and always feels it deeply when they die or betray him or show themselves to be morally corrupt, as they almost always do, even if he's only known them for two days – so it's doubly so with Terry. His other relationships have been side plots, add-ons to the story that make him a realistic, believable, sympathetic character. His relationship with Terry is what drives the entire plot and dictates almost all of his actions throughout this massive beast of a story.
What's interesting about this book is that nobody succeeds in retaining Marlowe to do anything for them, so he's not getting paid for all of the trouble he goes to. This trouble amounts to things like being beat up by the cops and by mobsters, thrown in jail, traveling long distances, investigating dangerous people, and a facing whole shitload of emotional trauma. And why does he do it? He asks himself that repeatedly. My theory is that Marlowe's got an overdeveloped sense of justice that has nothing to do with the legal system, which he distrusts exceedingly. He takes justice into his own hands. Behind these morals is one driving goal: clear Terry's name. Marlowe is convinced he didn't kill his wife. Terry was too gentle. Even if Terry wasn't his friend, I think he would have still tried to clear his name in the interest of revealing the truth, but I don't think he would have risked as much as he did. When he was in jail, people constantly said to him that Terry must've been some friend to make it worth getting thrown in the slammer over. Marlowe always countered that he was protecting his business - nobody would hire a private eye who sold out a pal, right? But at the end, he risks high-powered businessmen and kneecap-breaking gangsters both threatening to not only smash him into itty pieces but also to destroy his career if he meddles, and he gives the proof of Terry's innocence to the press anyway.
And what does he get for all this? Nothing. It's downright tragic. In the last chapter, after suspecting something was off in the story he got about Terry's death from his letter and from the reports of those involved, Marlowe shows up at his office to find a well-dressed Mexican waiting for him. He recognizes Terry under the new plastic surgery long before he lets on to the readers, but their reunion is not a happy one. Let me reproduce it for you, because telling you about it wouldn't do it justice. Oh, things you'll need to know for this to make sense: Maioranos is the name Terry's going by now. They used to drink gimlets together. The gimlet thing was a thing. Gimlets = Terry and Marlowe's pre-faked death friendship.
"Well, thaw out a little. Let's go have a drink somewhere where it's cool and quiet."
"No time right now, Señor Maioranos."
"We were pretty good friends once," he said unhappily.
"Were we? I forget. That was two other fellows, it seems to me."
[...]
"It wouldn't be much risk going to Victor's for that gimlet."
"Pick up your money, Señor Maioranos. It has too much blood on it."
"You're a poor man."
"How would you know?"
He picked the bill up and stretched it between his thin fingers and slipped it casually into an inside pocket. He bit his lip with the very white teeth you can have when you have a brown skin.
"I couldn't tell you any more than I did that morning you drove me to Tijuana. I gave you a chance to call the law and turn me in."
"I'm not sore at you. You're just that kind of guy. For a long time I couldn't figure you at all. You had nice ways and nice qualities, but there was something wrong. You had standards and you lived up to them, but they were personal. They had no relation to any kind of ethics or scruples. You were a nice guy because you had a nice nature. But you were just as happy with mugs or hoodlums as with honest men. Provided the hoodlums spoke fairly good English and had fairly acceptable table manners. You're a moral defeatist. I think maybe the war did it and again I think maybe you were born that way."
"I don't get it," he said. "I really don't. I'm trying to pay you back and you won't let me. I couldn't have told you any more than I did. You wouldn't have stood for it."
"That's as nice a thing as was ever said to me."
Okay, pay attention, because the good part's coming up.
"I'm glad you like something about me. I got in a bad jam. I happened to know the sort of people who know how to deal with bad jams. They owed me for an incident that happened long ago in the war. Probably the only time in my life I ever did the right thing quick like a mouse. And when I needed them, they delivered. And for free. You're not the only guy in the world that has no price tag, Marlowe."
He leaned across the desk and snapped at one of my cigarettes. There was an uneven flush on his face under the deep tan. The scars showed up against it. I watched him spring a fancy gas cartridge lighter loose from a pocket and light the cigarette. I got a whiff of perfume from him.
"You bought a lot of me, Terry. For a smile and a nod and a wave of the hand and a few quiet drinks in a quiet bar here and there. It was nice while it lasted. So long, amigo. I won't say goodbye. I said it to you when it meant something. I said it when it was sad and lonely and final."
"I came back too late," he said. "These plastic jobs take time."
"You wouldn't have come at all if I hadn't smoked you out."
There was suddenly a glint of tears in his eyes. He put his dark glasses back on quickly.
"I wasn't sure about it," he said. "I hadn't made up my mind. They didn't want me to tell you anything. I just hadn't made up my mind."
"Don't worry about it, Terry. There's always somebody around to do it for you."
"I was in the Commandos, bud. They don't take you if you're just a piece of fluff. I got badly hurt and it wasn't any fun with those Nazi doctors. It did something to me."
"I know all that, Terry. You're a very sweet guy in a lot of ways. I'm not judging you. I never did. It's just that you're not here any more. You're long gone. You've got nice clothes and perfume and you're as elegant as a fifty-dollar whore."
"That's just an act," he said almost desperately.
"You get a kick out of it, don't you?"
His mouth dropped in a sour smile. He shrugged an expressive energetic Latin shrug.
"Of course. An act is all there is. There isn't anything else. In here—" he tapped his chest with the lighter— "there isn't anything. I've had it, Marlowe. I had it long ago. Well—I guess that winds things up."
He stood up. I stood up. He put out a lean hand. I shook it.
"So long, Señor Maioranos. Nice to have known you—however briefly."
"Goodbye."
He turned and walked across the floor and out. I watched the door close. I listened to his steps going away down the imitation marble corridor. After a while they got faint, then they got silent. I kept on listening anyway. What for? Did I want him to stop suddenly and turn and come back and talk me out of the way I felt? Well, he didn't. That was the last I saw of him.
And that's the last scene in the book. Marlowe had serious investment in this guy, which is more than you can say for anybody else in the other stories I've read. He's got that old-fashioned mentality towards women, like they did in the Victorian era, that men can't be friends with women in the same way they can be with men. He said something in this book about how once in a very great while, a man can be friends with a women without the prospect of sex getting in the way, and I think that's a good indication of why he was so affected by the trouble in his relationship with Terry. He wouldn't have to worry about that with guys (not consciously, anyway) so someone like Marlowe would be a lot more apt to let his guard down. It's horrifically lonely, which I know is all a part of the hardboiled detective idiom, but it doesn't make it any easier to watch. I really love this character, and man, all he does is suffer. Getting beat the crap out of is one thing, but The Long Goodbye had Marlowe hurting a lot worse than that.
I finished reading Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye the other day, and it was fantastic. So fantastic, in fact, that it's inspired another long-winded post about how awesome it is, in the spirit of that one I wrote about "The Six Napoleons" (fear not: this one is considerably shorter). Marlowe is very different from Holmes, from the setting to the characters and everything in between (except for a distrust of the official police force, and a sense of private justice, and... hm, okay, maybe they're only superficially dissimilar) but they both give me the same kind of squeeful joy. Onward!
The Long Goodbye might be my favorite Marlowe story. It's neck and neck with Farewell, My Lovely, anyway, if only for the latter's drug hallucination scene and the "putting on my pants" scene and the whole Red incident with the hand-holding. Okay, so maybe they're a true tie. They're both generally seen as two of Raymond Chandler's best, and it's obvious that The Long Goodbye was written later. It's tied together thematically in much more developed ways, and Marlowe's even more cynical and lonely than usual. God above, is he lonely. But I'll get to that. It's also just a little bit freer with letting you know how Marlowe feels about things, which usually you have to extrapolate like you do with Watson (except, of course, on certain rare occasions, like when Marlowe tells all his fears to Red because Red's got pretty girl eyes). But since Marlowe's the focus of the stories, whereas Watson's not, it takes on a different significance. A couple of times he actually says how he feels, in narration or to another person (and it's almost always "like crap") whereas before, you'd have to glean what you can from his detached description of his own actions.
To make a long (long, long, long) story short, the plot runs as follows. Marlowe meets an extremely polite, extremely drunk "nice young guy" outside a fancy club or restaurant. The fellow, Terry Lennox, sounds English, and although he looks young, his hair is bone white and he's got tiny plastic surgery scars along one side of his face. His girl (ex-wife, we find out later) ditches him and Marlowe takes him home and sobers him up. Some weeks later, he sees him drunk on the street and does the same thing. This time Terry tells him he's moving to Vegas where he can get a job, and Marlowe packs him a suitcase and gives him a bunch of things (razor, toothbrush, pajamas) and some money. Because he's a big, mean, heartless sonofabitch, y'know?
Terry ends up re-marrying his ex-wife in Vegas, and when they come back to Hollywood he looks Marlowe up and they strike up a strange friendship, going out for drinks just about every day. This continues for several months until they have a bit of a fight. Then a few weeks later, Terry shows up at Marlowe's door at five in the morning looking like death warmed over, with a gun and a request to be driven to the Tijuana airport. Marlowe asks no questions (in fact tells Terry not to tell him anything) and drives him down without hesitation. Terry tries to pay him, but he refuses any money. After dropping him off, Marlowe returns to find cops at his house, who report that Terry's wife has been brutally murdered. Marlowe refuses to tell them anything, gets thrown into jail and subsequently released from jail. He's told that Terry has confessed and shot himself in Mexico. The media furor over the wife's death is immediately quieted – open and shut case. Marlowe receives a letter from Terry, written just before he killed himself, describing the circumstances and containing a $5,000 bill which Marlowe never spends.
Now time for one of Chandler's classic "you think it's a side plot until ZOMG everybody actually knows everybody else and it's all connected!" bits. In a very reduced fashion, it goes like this: Marlowe is asked to babysit an alcoholic writer so he'll finish his current manuscript. Marlowe refuses but ends up tracking down the writer, Wade, at a detox center after he goes missing, and then frequently comes to the aid of him and his wife whenever they call. The couple knew Terry and his wife since they're all high society. Mrs. Wade tries to seduce Marlowe during a psychotic break, thinking he's her previous lover who died in WWII. Wade kills himself, but Marlowe deduces that Mrs. Wade actually shot him and made it look like a suicide. He confronts her; she overdoses on sleeping pills the next day, leaving a written confession of the murders of both her husband and Terry Lennox's wife, the latter crime Marlowe already suspected. Marlowe finds out that Wade was having an affair with Terry's wife and that Terry's scars came from his time in action in WWII – he and Mrs. Wade were married in England during the war and she thought he was dead. They met up again in Hollywood society. Sent off her rocker by the fact that Terry's wife now had both of her husbands, Mrs. Wade shot Terry's wife and beat her face in to hide the gunshot wound. Wade, subject to blackouts, knew something had happened, as he had been on his way out when his wife showed up at his lover's house. She shot him later because she thought he remembered or would eventually.
In the aftermath of all this, Marlowe sleeps with Terry's wife's sister, the only woman he ever sleeps with aside from somebody in Chandler's last novel, which apparently readers like to forget exists. It was very strange, because they barely knew each other and they didn't exactly get along.
Anyway, the part of this I'm interested in (big surprise!) is Marlowe's friendship with Terry. Marlowe doesn't have friends; he's a hard-boiled detective. Relationships, sexual or otherwise, just do not work out for him. It's his lot in life. But Marlowe always gets attached to people and always feels it deeply when they die or betray him or show themselves to be morally corrupt, as they almost always do, even if he's only known them for two days – so it's doubly so with Terry. His other relationships have been side plots, add-ons to the story that make him a realistic, believable, sympathetic character. His relationship with Terry is what drives the entire plot and dictates almost all of his actions throughout this massive beast of a story.
What's interesting about this book is that nobody succeeds in retaining Marlowe to do anything for them, so he's not getting paid for all of the trouble he goes to. This trouble amounts to things like being beat up by the cops and by mobsters, thrown in jail, traveling long distances, investigating dangerous people, and a facing whole shitload of emotional trauma. And why does he do it? He asks himself that repeatedly. My theory is that Marlowe's got an overdeveloped sense of justice that has nothing to do with the legal system, which he distrusts exceedingly. He takes justice into his own hands. Behind these morals is one driving goal: clear Terry's name. Marlowe is convinced he didn't kill his wife. Terry was too gentle. Even if Terry wasn't his friend, I think he would have still tried to clear his name in the interest of revealing the truth, but I don't think he would have risked as much as he did. When he was in jail, people constantly said to him that Terry must've been some friend to make it worth getting thrown in the slammer over. Marlowe always countered that he was protecting his business - nobody would hire a private eye who sold out a pal, right? But at the end, he risks high-powered businessmen and kneecap-breaking gangsters both threatening to not only smash him into itty pieces but also to destroy his career if he meddles, and he gives the proof of Terry's innocence to the press anyway.
And what does he get for all this? Nothing. It's downright tragic. In the last chapter, after suspecting something was off in the story he got about Terry's death from his letter and from the reports of those involved, Marlowe shows up at his office to find a well-dressed Mexican waiting for him. He recognizes Terry under the new plastic surgery long before he lets on to the readers, but their reunion is not a happy one. Let me reproduce it for you, because telling you about it wouldn't do it justice. Oh, things you'll need to know for this to make sense: Maioranos is the name Terry's going by now. They used to drink gimlets together. The gimlet thing was a thing. Gimlets = Terry and Marlowe's pre-faked death friendship.
"Well, thaw out a little. Let's go have a drink somewhere where it's cool and quiet."
"No time right now, Señor Maioranos."
"We were pretty good friends once," he said unhappily.
"Were we? I forget. That was two other fellows, it seems to me."
[...]
"It wouldn't be much risk going to Victor's for that gimlet."
"Pick up your money, Señor Maioranos. It has too much blood on it."
"You're a poor man."
"How would you know?"
He picked the bill up and stretched it between his thin fingers and slipped it casually into an inside pocket. He bit his lip with the very white teeth you can have when you have a brown skin.
"I couldn't tell you any more than I did that morning you drove me to Tijuana. I gave you a chance to call the law and turn me in."
"I'm not sore at you. You're just that kind of guy. For a long time I couldn't figure you at all. You had nice ways and nice qualities, but there was something wrong. You had standards and you lived up to them, but they were personal. They had no relation to any kind of ethics or scruples. You were a nice guy because you had a nice nature. But you were just as happy with mugs or hoodlums as with honest men. Provided the hoodlums spoke fairly good English and had fairly acceptable table manners. You're a moral defeatist. I think maybe the war did it and again I think maybe you were born that way."
"I don't get it," he said. "I really don't. I'm trying to pay you back and you won't let me. I couldn't have told you any more than I did. You wouldn't have stood for it."
"That's as nice a thing as was ever said to me."
Okay, pay attention, because the good part's coming up.
"I'm glad you like something about me. I got in a bad jam. I happened to know the sort of people who know how to deal with bad jams. They owed me for an incident that happened long ago in the war. Probably the only time in my life I ever did the right thing quick like a mouse. And when I needed them, they delivered. And for free. You're not the only guy in the world that has no price tag, Marlowe."
He leaned across the desk and snapped at one of my cigarettes. There was an uneven flush on his face under the deep tan. The scars showed up against it. I watched him spring a fancy gas cartridge lighter loose from a pocket and light the cigarette. I got a whiff of perfume from him.
"You bought a lot of me, Terry. For a smile and a nod and a wave of the hand and a few quiet drinks in a quiet bar here and there. It was nice while it lasted. So long, amigo. I won't say goodbye. I said it to you when it meant something. I said it when it was sad and lonely and final."
"I came back too late," he said. "These plastic jobs take time."
"You wouldn't have come at all if I hadn't smoked you out."
There was suddenly a glint of tears in his eyes. He put his dark glasses back on quickly.
"I wasn't sure about it," he said. "I hadn't made up my mind. They didn't want me to tell you anything. I just hadn't made up my mind."
"Don't worry about it, Terry. There's always somebody around to do it for you."
"I was in the Commandos, bud. They don't take you if you're just a piece of fluff. I got badly hurt and it wasn't any fun with those Nazi doctors. It did something to me."
"I know all that, Terry. You're a very sweet guy in a lot of ways. I'm not judging you. I never did. It's just that you're not here any more. You're long gone. You've got nice clothes and perfume and you're as elegant as a fifty-dollar whore."
"That's just an act," he said almost desperately.
"You get a kick out of it, don't you?"
His mouth dropped in a sour smile. He shrugged an expressive energetic Latin shrug.
"Of course. An act is all there is. There isn't anything else. In here—" he tapped his chest with the lighter— "there isn't anything. I've had it, Marlowe. I had it long ago. Well—I guess that winds things up."
He stood up. I stood up. He put out a lean hand. I shook it.
"So long, Señor Maioranos. Nice to have known you—however briefly."
"Goodbye."
He turned and walked across the floor and out. I watched the door close. I listened to his steps going away down the imitation marble corridor. After a while they got faint, then they got silent. I kept on listening anyway. What for? Did I want him to stop suddenly and turn and come back and talk me out of the way I felt? Well, he didn't. That was the last I saw of him.
And that's the last scene in the book. Marlowe had serious investment in this guy, which is more than you can say for anybody else in the other stories I've read. He's got that old-fashioned mentality towards women, like they did in the Victorian era, that men can't be friends with women in the same way they can be with men. He said something in this book about how once in a very great while, a man can be friends with a women without the prospect of sex getting in the way, and I think that's a good indication of why he was so affected by the trouble in his relationship with Terry. He wouldn't have to worry about that with guys (not consciously, anyway) so someone like Marlowe would be a lot more apt to let his guard down. It's horrifically lonely, which I know is all a part of the hardboiled detective idiom, but it doesn't make it any easier to watch. I really love this character, and man, all he does is suffer. Getting beat the crap out of is one thing, but The Long Goodbye had Marlowe hurting a lot worse than that.
