ASSAULTING THE CITADEL

     

     In 1940 a writer of classic crime and detection stories wrote: "There are no classics of crime and detection. Not one. Within its frame of reference...a classic is a piece of writing which exhausts the possibilities of its form and can hardly be surpassed. No story or novel of mystery has done that yet. Few have come close."
     Raymond Chandler included that assertion in the introduction to his collection of short stories, Trouble is My Business. The easy demystifier is to attribute the stunning falsity of those words to the fact that artists often prove themselves to be the worst judges of their own works. Or perhaps earning his name onto the screenplay for The Big Sleep along with those of Dashiell Hammitt and William Faulkner lured Chandler into an uncharacteristic state of false modesty. He may have even believed what he wrote. Whatever the motivation behind his lapse of reason, he confirmed in the minds of many critics a prejudice they loved to nurture: anyone who wrote for such magazines as Black Mask, Dime Detective, and Detective Fiction Weekly needn't risk humiliation by calling his tales "literature." And when that same writer placed pieces in The Saturday Evening Post, Atlantic Monthly, and The Saturday Review of Literature, well, that provided yet more evidence that the realm of fine writing was being dragged into the gutter by so much tripe. 

     Nowadays we wouldn't stand for such a snotty attitude towards literature, but only because of the risk. After all, less than three in every one hundred Americans bother to read books at all. Ironically, that statistic illuminates why we need Raymond Chandler now more than ever. Writing for a mass market is automatic for any scribe today who wishes to earn a genuine living from the craft. But that does not mean that the masses can't be elevated in the process of being entertained. 

     No classics of crime and detection? This from a writer who yearned for legitimate praise from literary critics and earned it in spite of himself. This from a talent as big as that of his character, Philip Marlowe, whose worst trait was racism and whose least worst trait was an eye color that switched from brown to blue depending on which book one read. Chandler himself probably suffered from the same existential race hate as his creation, and yet his minor minority characters float with as much life as anyone.
     No classics? Then how to explain Chandler's genius in his third book and first classic, Farewell, My Lovely, when he paints a background in Sociology, then zaps us with psychoanalytical humor right up front-despite his loathing for the social sciences? 

     So powerful was Chandler's prose, even when compared to his mentor Hammett, or to his greatest protégé, Ross MacDonald, that his lack of prolificacy becomes irrelevant. From The Big Sleep through Playback (or the unfinished Poodle Springs), Chandler wrote nothing but detective stories (and not many of those). In fact, a reader could begin at the beginning, wade through the lesser pools (The High Window, The Little Sister, Trouble), soak up the classics (Farewell, The Lady in the Lake, and especially The Long Goodbye), take a week off, and be anxious to start all over again, a state of affairs untrue of the works of most other mystery writers. The reason? The joy of reading Marlowe's adventures comes less from the unraveling of clues and the making of mental wagers on suspects than from immersing oneself in the rejuvenating waters of Chandler's style, one which is disserviced by the term "hard-boiled." The term is especially deceiving when applied to Marlowe's character in the best of the canon, The Long Goodbye. Here, the presumably isolationist detective spends the better part of 300 pages befriending and absolving a young man who is every bit the deliberate outcast, hardly the behavior of a bare-knuckled womanizing pragmatist. In a sense, then, plot-the essence of most detective fiction-is the least compelling aspect of Marlowe's adventures. One hardly cares whodunit, or even why. What we do care about-because Chandler won't let us escape from it-is Marlowe's conscience. We want him to be happy, or at least not miserable. We want him to enjoy that cigarette, that cup of coffee or shot of whiskey. We want the women flirting with him to treat him well and to have no ulterior motives.
     And so, when Chandler concluded his essay with the threat, "[That] is one of the principal reasons why otherwise reasonable people continue to assault the citadel," he had already given us the classic fictionalized model for doing precisely that.