The Long Goodbye

 

Jackie Winspear’s new book, The Comfort of Ghosts, is her eighteenth Maisie Dobbs mystery, and the last.  You wonder why, and the author says she imagined a narrative arc to the series, as well as the storyline in each novel, and she felt that she’d closed the circle.

I say, God bless.  I’ll miss Maisie, as will huge numbers of other readers, but there comes a time.  I’d rather make the choice myself.  All too often, you don’t get to.  I’m still sorry Philip Kerr died, when there were many more Bernie Gunther stories to come; and Bruce Alexander stood us up, before his blind 18^th-century magistrate, Sir John Fielding, was ready to step down from the bench – what will happen to young Jeremy, ever on the prowl for that sinful Turkish brew, haunting Lloyd’s for both the coffee buzz and the maritime gossip?

The other side of the ledger, we have Conan Doyle famously trying to kill off Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls, and Agatha Christie wanting to rid herself of the “insufferable” Hercule Poirot, but market demand kept them going.  Speaking of, Tom Clancy shuffled off this mortal coil eleven years ago, but he keeps manufacturing product. 

I’m not a huge fan of publishers profiting off dead guys, although Ace Atkins has done a good job with Robert B. Parker’s legacy (plus the blessing of Parker’s widow Joan). Ace gets Spenser’s rhythm right.  You can’t say the same about Parker himself, and Raymond Chandler.  Poodle Springs isn’t a bad book, on its own; it is, however, dreadful as Chandler.  Parker clearly admires the master – Spenser, Marlowe, get it? – but he doesn’t have Chandler’s lapidary and Byzantine habit of mind, or Chandler’s precise and mischievous ear for language (to wit, “a couple of streamlined demi-virgins went by caroling and waving,” from The Long Goodbye).  I happen to be a big fan of Islands in the Stream, too, if only the first fifty pages or so, which I’m actually confident Hemingway himself wrote. 

I know this sounds mean-spirited, but the most specific thing about any writer is voice.  This is usually different from story to story, sometimes inviting and intimate, sometimes chilly, or arm’s length.  Homely and domestic can open out into the epic.  Larry McMurtry and Jim Harrison are very unalike, but Lonesome Dove and Legends of the Fall share an almost Arthurian scale of delivery.  On the other hand, A Narrow Grave, McMurtry’s essays, would seem to have nothing in common with Letters to Yesenin, Harrison’s poetry.  Two writers who are utter strangers to each other. 

Probably not, though, if they meet in heaven.

There’s an originality to any writer.  We have the dictum, write the book only you can write, which can be taken in more than one way, but for the moment, let’s say it means, this book, at this moment, couldn’t be written this way, by anybody else.  Somebody else could write a story about a nurse, in a combat surgery, behind the trenches, in the Great War.  But only Jacqueline Winspear is going to use her character, Maisie, to speak to the trauma of Jackie’s own grandfather, still picking shrapnel fragments out of his scarred legs in his seventies.  The specificity is everything.  War is never over, a character in one of the Maisie books says, it lives on in the living, in the guilt of the survivors.  The arc of Maisie’s story, in eighteen books, is a map of grief, and the consequences of loss.  It has a shape, like something stuck in your throat.  Maisie can’t be imitated, because she’s invented herself out of a certain, particular piece of the past – I mean Maisie, as a character in her own story, is self-invented, and Maisie, the character that Jackie the writer has invented, can only have become this Maisie. 

Jackie Winspear says Maisie will always be taking up space in her head, even if she’s longer writing about her.  I’d suggest that’s because Maisie is partly a vehicle, like any character – your characters are a way into the story – but also because she’s taken on, over time, the burden of responsibility.  You might say it’s a necessary plot device, which it is; Maisie, though, has become necessary to the author.  Not an avatar, or a second self, but a physical metaphor, for the gravity of hope.  Maisie carries the weight.  Jackie has lightened her own heart, and ours.

Los Angeles - The Novels

LOS ANGELES: THE NOVEL(S)

by Michael Mallory

Los Angeles has long emitted a siren song for writers of all stripes, particularly mystery authors and anyone concerned with the disparities of haves and have-nots, stars and nobodies, and the powerful and downtrodden. Given such a vast, contradictory, multi-tentacled megalopolis as L.A., and taking into account all of the writers who have attempted to plumb her depths, one has to ask: Is there such a thing as the Great Los Angeles Novel?

In short, no, there isn’t.

There are instead three Great Los Angeles Novels, all of them published within months of each other in 1939, and all written by transplanted Angelenos: Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep; Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, and John Fante’s Ask the Dust. At the age of 85, none of them has lost their power over readers as great stories or as depictions of a city like no other. And so many decades worth of evolution, the City of Angels is still eminently recognizable in all three. (Whether that’s a good or bad thing is open for debate.)

Of the three, The Big Sleep has ascended to the status of L.A.’s unofficial pre-war biography. Raymond Chandler’s version of Los Angeles is the real Los Angeles of that time, the one built up and out from oil fields. Any references to Hollywood in the book refer to the actual, physical place, not the metonymic movie capital. Through his narrator, private eye Philip Marlowe, Chandler provides a Google Earth image of the city without seeming to do so. Rather than writing paragraphs of descriptive prose, Chandler offers snippets of the city’s characteristics such through off-handed remarks as one character’s “[having] a smile as wide as Wilshire Boulevard.” 

The notoriously convoluted plot (which inspired an even more convoluted film in 1946) was the combination of two of Chandler’s previously published short stories, “Killer in the Rain” (source of the A.G. Geiger blackmail subplot) and “Curtain” (the disappearance of Rusty Reagan). Both had appeared in Black Mask and featured powerful fathers struggling to control rebellious daughters. The L.A. of The Big Sleep is inhabited by the one percent: the wealthy, the powerful, the string-pullers, and the too-rich-to-jail class, who in turn are preyed upon by the city’s infrastructure of corruption, ranging from big-time racketeers to small-time blackmailers. At its core, The Big Sleep isn’t about power or ever murder, it’s about money. 

Standing in stark contrast to that is Ask the Dusk, which is about the lack of money. The book’s narrator is Arturo Bandini, an alter ego for author John Fante himself, who comes to Los Angeles with nothing but his dreams of being a great writer. He can only afford to live in a run-down apartment on Bunker Hill while he pursues both his dreams of fame and a beautiful, but emotionally unstable Latina waitress.

Something of a biography of Depression-era Los Angeles (while also laying the tracks for the darkly-populated noir novels that would follow), Ask the Dust is a jumble-tumble of thoughts, fantasies, fears and worries, all delivered by a protagonist with a desperate desire to fit in, but an even greater desire to rise above everybody else. Fante half-celebrates, half-condemns the dreamers of Los Angeles, those who possess a much sounder grip of the perceived future than the actual present. Along the way he fills the reader with the sights, sounds, smells, and ethnic tensions of the city as it then existed.  

Both The Big Sleep and Ask the Dust present the real Los Angeles; taken together, they span the city’s socio-economic range. The Day of the Locust, however, compensates for that by presenting a Los Angeles that is as genuinely real as a painted backdrop behind a Busby Berkeley musical number. 

Nathanael West’s short novel is almost exclusively concerned with Tinseltown in its Golden Age, and tells a story that could not possibly be set anywhere else. The picture of Hollywood it offers is not that of a puffed-up article in a movie magazine. Instead it’s a snapshot of fake imagery taken through a smudged and broken lens by a novelist who had already slogged through the trenches of Hollywood screenwriting.

The book’s protagonist Tod Hackett represents the kind of artist who lemming-rushed to Hollywood on the promise of fame and fortune, while striving to convince themselves that they will be the one who survives the seduction of the industry without selling out. (Todd’s very surname cynically indicates how that particular struggle will end.) 

Much of the story takes place within the confines of the studio, which allows the real L.A. to be seen only through windows, and even the scenes depicting Hackett’s life outside of work are influenced by the shadow of the Hollywood Sign. Virtually every character in the book is a Hollywood hanger-on, struggling to find the dream before it turns into a nightmare. A quarter-century later, a shot in the classic film Chinatown perfectly recaptured the host/parasite nature of Los Angeles/Hollywood, or Hollywood/Los Angeles that Nathanael West presented so well. It’s the scene where detective Jake Gittes is searching the court apartment of the murdered Ida Sessions, and while looking through her wallet, the tiniest glimpse of a Screen Actors Guild card can be seen. Poor Ida was one of the many hopefuls who straddled the fake and the real halves of the city, and lost in both. 

The Day of the Locust entwines reality, cinematic artifice, and surreal fantasizing into one troubling rope, and while not a mystery per se, the brutal murder of a child (by a character named Homer Simpson!) causes a mob to rise and incite a riot at a movie premiere, though it is hard to tell what version of reality is actually being described.

Taken independent of one another, each book delineates a different societal, economic, and industrial facet of the City of Angels, with its own rules, prejudices, and beliefs. But when read as a triptych, The Big Sleep, Ask the Dust and The Day of the Locust reveal the picture of L.A. in all its sprawling and contradictory glory, laying bare the beating heart and corruptible soul of a unique conurbation.

The Big Sleep

 

I was sitting at a light, and the guy in front of me had a “Dude Abides” bumper sticker, and having just watched The Big Lebowski not long before, I couldn’t help thinking that the Dude doesn’t, really.  All due respect to Jeff Bridges – who’s terrific in pretty much everything he does, Hell and High Water only the most recent example – Lebowski dates really badly.  On the other hand, Miller’s Crossing seems timeless.  This is to take two examples from the Coen oeuvre.  Robert Towne.  Tequila Sunrise, from 1988, is stuck there; Chinatown, released in ‘74, has no such issue.  Why is Altman’s The Long Goodbye, Chandler updated to the contemporary L.A. of 1973, left behind, but the Chandler of The Big Sleep (1945) as present and real as a dime?

You could say that Miller’s Crossing and Chinatown are intentional period pieces, yes, and that Tequila Sunrise and 1973’s Long Goodbye are trying intentionally to be timely, but we should remember that The Big Sleep, in 1945, was in fact contemporary.  Take a look at the Woody Van Dyke much-celebrated adaption of Hammett’s The Thin Man, in 1934, Powell and Myrna Loy.  The leads are terrific, the dialogue snappy, the runtime comes in at an hour and a half, but you’re still completely aware that you’re watching a picture from 1934.  Not nearly as true of John Huston’s adaption, in 1941, of Hammett’s Maltese Falcon, which still reads as immediate.  But so does Casablanca, in my opinion.  Maybe the difference is Bogart.

Bogart went from second leads to movie star with High Sierra, in 1940 (even if he’s actually billed second, after Ida Lupino).  He did Falcon in ‘41, and Casablanca in ‘42. He worked with Hawks for the first time – and famously, met Bacall – in To Have and Have Not, in 1944.  Bogart and Bacall fell in love while they were making the picture, you can see it happening.  The Big Sleep was the second movie they made together; it wrapped in early ‘45, but released a year later.  Thereby lies a tale.

The first cut of the picture has more Martha Vickers (the little sister), and less Bacall.  Hawks went back and shot extra scenes, and recut the movie.  Vickers got less screen time, Bacall got more, by about twenty minutes.  It made Bacall’s career, and Martha Vickers never got another part as good, to make it up to her.  The plot actually makes less sense, in the re-edited version; Carmen, the baby sister, turns out in the book to have murdered Sean Regan (spoiler alert), but they had to change the ending for the movie, so the whole thing doesn’t hang together.  None of this matters.  The picture is dreamlike: Hawks later remarked that the audience reaction made him realize that if you kept things moving fast enough, nobody cared whether any of it made sense.  This isn’t quite true.  The plot almost comes together.  You paper over the holes because of your giddy pleasure in its exhilarating surface tension.

My point about The Big Sleep being contemporary to its own era is that an audience back then would recognize both specific detail and things left unspoken.  They’d notice, for example, the gas ration stickers on Marlowe’s windshield – the war was only just over.  They’d realize that when Dorothy Malone pulls the shades and pours Marlowe a drink, there’s more on offer than just what’s in the glass.  They’d know what the cop, Bernie Ohls, was on about when he says about Sean Regan, “Oh, you mean the ex-legger Gen. Sternwood hired to do his drinking for him?”  (They weren’t that far removed from Prohibition, and Repeal.)  They could figure out what kind of books Geiger was selling, in brown paper wrappers, and why Carmen was vulnerable to blackmail, and what the relationship was between Geiger and Carol Lundgren, the kid who cleans up after the murder, and dresses the dead man in his Chinese pyjamas, and lays him out on the bed.  None of it had to be spelled out.

There’s also the still-shocking violence.  The death of Elisha Cook.  The moment in the garage, Canino flipping the roll of coins in his hand, Marlowe taken by surprise, his arms pinned to his sides with the spare tire, and Canino with the sucker punch, straight to the jaw – Canino opens his balled fist, and the loose coins spill out.  And the killing of Canino himself, as cold-blooded as anybody could get away with, at the time. 

The test, I think, is whether we recognize their attitudes as like ours, their choices, their motives, their reactions, not so much the fashions in clothes, as their manner.  Do they feel genuine to us?  I think Marlowe does.  I’m not a big fan of Chandler’s down-these-mean-streets prescription, but if anybody can live up to it, Bogart certainly can.  And he does it without being performative, or self-conscious – it’s natural and lived-in, someone he’s familiar with.

Bacall, too, is a very assured presence.  You get the feeling that the characters, as thin as the script is, have a sense of their own back story, and don’t need to fill it in for us.  Hawks, knowing he’s onto a good thing, gives her the last word.  Bogart is finishing up the story, what’s happened and what has to happen next, and Bacall tells him he’s forgotten one thing: her.  What’s wrong with you? he asks her.  “Nothing you can’t fix,” she says.

Gunsmoked

     The television western, Gunsmoke, was a staple at my childhood home. Weekly, we watched Marshal Matt Dillon face down an outlaw during the opening scene. To a heavy and threatening drumbeat, the marshal stepped out onto the main street of Dodge City, Kansas. The camera focused on the revolver hanging low on his hip, the sheriff's right hand held steadily above the pistol grip. The music built as the camera panned to show the sheriff striding determinedly and wordlessly forward. His opponent, the outlaw dressed in black, entered the street from the opposite side. The two men squared to face one another. The music built to a crescendo. When they drew pistols, the camera angle shifted. Through the cloud of white smoke, we watched the grim-faced sheriff. We never saw the outlaw fall, but we knew the marshal had outdrawn his opponent. As the camera held the sheriff's world-weary expression, the announcer solemnly intoned, "Gunsmoke, starring James Arness as Matt Dillon." 

Marshal Matt Dillon, Gunsmoke
© CBS Television, public domain

    CBS Chairman William Paley, reportedly was a great fan of Raymond Chandler. Beginning with the radio show, ;Gunsmoke, and later with the television adaptation, he wanted to create a series centered on the "Philip Marlowe of the old West." The opening scene, with the stylized code duelo showdown, set a tone. It cemented the single combat gunfight in the middle of the town's dusty street as a trope of the American West.

    Such gunfights, however, rarely occurred. 

    The West had its share of violence, typical for a frontier. But the formality of the single combat duel was primarily the product of dime novelists and film directors. 

    There were, of course, exceptions. 

    In 1865, Wild Bill Hickok squared off with Davis Tutt in Springfield, Missouri. The two quarreled over gambling. To secure a debt, Tutt took a prized watch belonging to Hickok. Tutt prominently wore the watch, embarrassing Hickok. Later, the two men advanced on one another. Tutt reportedly drew first, fired wildly, and missed. Hickok shot more steadily and hit Tutt in the chest. History does not record whether the watch was injured. Tutt, however, died. 

    In his subsequent trial, a jury acquitted Hickok of manslaughter. In 1867, a story describing the event appeared in Harper's New Monthly Magazine. The exaggerated tale helped form the myth about Wild Bill Hickok and the single combat duel. Today, readers can get the details on the official Springfield, Missouri website.

    On March 9th, 1877, Jim Levy (sometimes Leavy) and Charlie Harrison argued over a game of cards in Cheyenne, Wyoming's Shingle and Locke's saloon. Levy challenged Harrison to "take it outside." There, as Bat Masterson, the western lawman, gunfighter, and writer, described the event, Harrison drew quickly. He fired five shots. Levy took his time and needed only one. (Although he only required one, reportedly Levy stood over the downed Harrison and shot him a second time in the stomach. This fact tampers with the honorable gunfighter trope but, perhaps, more accurately portrays the times.) Masterson used the Levy/Harrison battle to illustrate the importance of a gunfighter's need to remain calm and take one's time. In 1907, Masterson wrote in Human Life magazine:

    That Harrison was as game a man as Levy could not be doubted; that he could shoot much faster, he had given ample proof, but under extraordinary conditions he had shown that he lacked deliberation and lost his life in consequence.

    My adopted town, Fort Worth, also helped create the myth of the Western gunfight. Although the facts bear little resemblance to the stylized book or movie version.

    Longhair Jim Courtright had been the first marshal of Fort Worth. He was tasked with keeping the peace in Hell's Half Acre. The murder rate plummeted on his watch. He also, however, likely used his badge and gun to extort money from saloon owners as part of a protection racket. Following an election defeat in 1879, he moved to New Mexico. There, a dispute over land and cattle led to an accusation of murder against Courtright. There were, it seems, lingering questions about whether Courtright's involvement in the shooting had been as law enforcement or criminal participant. He returned to Fort Worth, a place far enough removed from New Mexico to avoid extradition. In 1884, he established a private detective office here. Besides investigative services, the office resumed operations as a protection racket. 

    Luke Short, another man experienced with guns, worked as the manager of the White Elephant Saloon in Fort Worth. Short refused Courtright's offers of protection. Allowing business owners to decline, however, would be bad for the detective's business. On February 8th, 1887, a drunk Courtright called out Luke Short. Together, they walked down the street on Fort Worth's north side as they attempted to settle their disagreement. Outside a local brothel, the negotiation apparently reached an impasse. The two men stood three to four feet apart. Courtright drew his gun. Short, however, fired first, and his bullet tore off Courtright's thumb. While Longhair Jim Courtright attempted to switch his weapon to his other hand, Short fired again. His subsequent shots killed Courtright, the former lawman, detective, and extortionist.

    Luke Short was investigated for the shooting. The charges were subsequently dismissed. The Courtright/Short gunfight is one of the legends of Fort Worth. This town's stories are part of why I like living here. When the local chapter of Sisters in Crime began compiling an anthology, Notorious in North Texas, I used this tale as my jumping-off point. This week, we celebrate the release of that anthology. Many of the fine authors who contributed tales set their stories in Dallas. But I wanted to put my story here in Fort Worth, where the West begins.

---

(Thanks to Legends of America for the details about the gunfights.)

    Until next time.

Vernacular

Anthony Burgess once remarked that the Elizabethan Age was word-drunk – Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson, Thomas Nashe (“an upstart crow”) – and as it spilled into the next century, the Book of Common Prayer published in 1604, the King James Bible in 1611, and the First Folio in 1623, we recognize the shaping of the English language into a modern tongue, a vernacular for the commons, in its meaning of the community at large.

What we see, in literature, politics, and religion, is a leveling effect. Not that the language becomes gross, or inexact; the reverse. It becomes more specific, and at the same time, includes more variety. The vocabulary expands beyond the cloisters, or the manners of court. In part, this is a function of class breakdown, the permeability of social and economic barriers: the collapse of feudalism. Also, the essential message of the Reformation is that you can have a personal relationship with God, independent of the interpretation of Scripture by the Church. There’s an obvious political message here, too. Your loyalty to any earthly power isn’t ordained, it isn’t written in stone, it derives from your consent.

I’d suggest that language – or more specifically, let’s say ‘usage’ – is an instrument of democratization. The term vernacular can be defined as indigenous, or local, such as a dialect; natural, or vulgar, or ordinary. In other words, a common manner of speech, in both senses: something everybody shares, or something you turn up your nose at.

Or perhaps there’s no real contradiction. My grandmother actually wrote a letter to R.J. Reynolds, back in the Bronze Age, complaining about their slogan, “Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should.” Amazingly, somebody in PR actually wrote her back, saying basically that their target audience wasn’t grammar-adjacent, so suck it up.

This is the Bad Money Drives Out Good argument, and I’m not sure I’m on board with it. Chandler, in The Simple Art of Murder, remarks that Hammett took murder out of the drawing room and dropped it in the street.  

He goes on to say a number of other things, some of which I disagree with, but his point is that the supposed gentlefolk of the English country house were given the bum’s rush, and the effete Philo Vances were shouldered out of the queue by the more muscular and less fastidious Sam Spade, or the Continental Op. It’s an exaggeration, and the hard-boiled and the cozy still keep company, but Chandler’s put his finger on it.

It’s no secret, either, that Chandler wasn’t a big fan of Mickey Spillane, and he clearly feels Spillane is pandering to the market, the brutality, the contempt for women, the furious, feverish psychological dream landscape, but at the same time, Chandler recognizes the inevitability.

This is an old conversation. The more accessible literature becomes, or citizenship, or Holy Communion, is the mystery cheapened, or diluted? For the previous initiates, yes. The literate, the propertied, the baptized – the chosen ones. Who wants to give up the secrets of a fellowship that sets you apart? By definition, it excludes the other, the unwashed, the unread, the unholy. We make it too easy for them. They should have to jump insuperable hurdles, rehearse impenetrable, Talmudic catechisms. Once you open books to these people, libraries of knowledge, you no longer hold the keys. You lose the power of voice.

Mickey Spillane, in any case, is fish in a barrel. I happen to like Spillane (“How could you?” “It was easy”), but you can understand how Chandler would think he debased the culture.  Chandler’s a snob. For our purposes, let’s pick somebody else. Chester Himes. Himes is definitely genre, and Coffin Ed and the Grave Digger don’t fit all that comfortably into Chandler’s “down these mean streets a man must walk who’s not himself mean,” but Himes is giving us Harlem from the native perspective – although Himes seems like an outsider looking in, dispossessed, and always an exile, the books are still unapologetically black.

We see something similar in science fiction and fantasy over the last, say, thirty to forty years. There was very much a time when it was boy’s club, and pretty much white boys, too.

Alice Sheldon published as James Tiptree, under the probably accurate assumption that SF readers wouldn’t buy stories by a girl. The community is notoriously cranky and hidebound, for all that they’re supposed to be looking to the future.

Ursula Le Guin made waves with The Left Hand of Darkness (ambiguous genders), and then along comes Chip Delany, not only colored, but queer. Sakes alive, the pearls that got clutched.

The lesson would appear to be, that opening the door to opportunity doesn’t water the whiskey. Our literature, our world, is reinvigorated, even reinvented. This is the purpose of a living language. It undermines orthodoxy, and in an Age of Lies, we could use a few choice words.

The Definitive Marlowe?

 So as of Valentine's Day there is a new Phillip Marlowe film in theaters. It's called Marlowe, with the great Liam Neeson in the titular role as Raymond Chandler's iconic Southern California gumshoe, in an era when "gumshoes" were highly likely to actually wear "gum shoes."

An Irish actor playing a quintessentially American character, the 20th century's greatest example in fiction of the private eye. It does seem fitting in this instance. After all, the source material for this newest Marlowe movie also comes to us courtesy of the Emerald Isle. 

Specifically, from the pen of John Banville. An Irish novelist acclaimed for many works of literary fiction, Banville had been tapped by the estate of the late Raymond Chandler to write a new Marlowe novel. The Black-Eyed Blonde, the novel on which the new Marlowe movie is based, was the result, published under Banville's crime fiction nom de plume, Benjamin Black. 

A sequel to the first Marlowe novel–The Big Sleep–the novel takes its title from a Marlowe short story written by another author (Benjamin M. Schutz), which aside from the title, bears no resemblance to Banville's work. Banville is hardly the first author to take on Chandler's greatest creation. He isn't even the first one authorized to do so by the Chandler estate. That honor falls to the prolific Robert B. Parker, the author of many novels, but most famously of a series featuring one of Marlowe's spiritual descendants, Boston private investigator Spenser ("Spelled with two 's''s like the poet." Get it? "Marlowe"? "Spenser"?). Parker both finished Chandler's Poodle Springs, a Marlowe novel Chandler left unfinished at the time of his death in 1959, and wrote his own sequel to The Big Sleep: the poorly received Perchance to Dream.

Talk about working a theme.

The Chandler estate has authorized two further Marlowe novels since The Black-Eyed Blonde was published in 2014. The first, 2018's Only to Sleep by British author Lawrence Osborne imagines an elderly Marlowe still in the P.I. game in 1988 Mexico. The most recent, American author Joe Ide's The Goodbye Coast (2022), billed at the time as "not so much a reimagining as a reinvigoration," places a modern day Phillip Marlowe, updated to fit into his new setting: 21st century Los Angeles.

I have not read Ide's update on Marlowe, but it has received good reviews (as has Osborne's book), and in one aspect carries on an interesting post-Chandler tradition with the character of Phillip Marlowe: the modern overhaul. In fact Ide's crack at updating Marlowe is the fourth such crack at an update. The previous three were all films.

The first one, 1969's Marlowe (Yep, the Neeson vehicle is the second such imaginatively titled film) starred a post-Maverick/pre-Rockford James Garner wisecracking his way through a surprisingly faithful screen adaptation of Chandler's The Little Sister. There's a stellar supporting cast, too, headlined by a never-better Rita Moreno, Gayle Hunnicutt, Carol O'Connor, and a pre-stardom Bruce Lee.

Yep, THAT Bruce Lee.

Watching this film it's easy to see the roots of Garner's epic turn as Jim Rockford throughout the '70s. Marlowe is "tougher," and not quite as fast-talking. But there are many similarities between his Marlowe and his Rockford.

The next such "update" of Marlowe came in 1973 at the hands of legendary auteur film-maker Robert Altman. He chose the Chandler novel The Long Goodbye for his take on a modern update of the character, with a mumbling, shambolic Elliott Gould playing Marlowe bouncing around contemporary Southern California (and Mexico), chain-smoking his way through scene after scene in an ever more rumpled suit. As with so much of Altman's work, the film is uneven, often in spite of its top notch supporting cast, which included Henry Gibson, Sterling Hayden, Nina Van Pallandt and former big league pitcher (and author of Ball Four, one of the greatest sports memoirs of all time) Jim Bouton.

The third "updated" Marlowe film was a late-70s money grab, featuring a far past-his-prime Robert Mitchum playing an expatriate Marlowe working in the UK(!?). I plan to discuss this one (as well as Mitchum’s vastly superior-and era appropriate-first bite at the Marlowe apple- 1975’s FAREWELL MY LOVELY) at length in my next installment.

In the mean-time I'm going to see the new Marlowe. I'll weigh in on it, and every other film Marlowe next time, a couple of Wednesdays from now.

And on that note, I'm off!

See you in two weeks!

I've Watched The Long Goodbye 3 Times Now

It's a middle distance squint, and I get like that during every watch. Here's how it happened this round.

Recently, Killer Nashville asked me to review Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye (1953). The second-to-last Marlowe outing is Chandler's best, for my money. The detective story, truly elevated. No mean feat, given the high standards of his earlier novels. Doing the essay lured me to re-confront Robert Altman's 1973 film version starring Elliott Gould. I'd seen it twice before. I'd been left in that squint both times.

Wikipedia

Full disclosure: I'm no cinema expert. I do, however, understand a few things about the genre and this novel in particular. So, freshly inspired, I ventured again into Altman's film. 

Same squint. 

Advance critics in 1973 seemed to have a similar reaction. They were confused whether they'd just watched a detective movie or not. The hardboiled posters didn't match the semi-noir, semi-satire delivered. The Long Goodbye got pulled ahead of mixed reviews. In came the studio marketing folks, and several months later it was re-packaged more honestly, as a subversive take on Hollywood tropes. These reviews praised a nose-tweaking of the genre. Fifty years later, the film is now well-studied and the critical consensus ever-more favorable. 

Altman's take has much going for it. Casting faded star Sterling Haywood as alcoholic novelist Roger Wade is spot on. In the novel, Wade is Chandler himself stuffed into a part Michener, part Hemingway persona, but the film wisely cranks up the Papa factor. Nina Van Pallandt plays wife Eileen Wade with deftly-concealed femme fatality. The soundtrack is evocative and playful, mostly rearrangements of the same Johnny Mercer song to fit each scene. The cinematography is gorgeous. Altman's L.A. is up all hours but not doing much, a glossy pit of decay and casual violence. Malibu is just higher-end decadence with beach access. It's Chandler's noir SoCal– left twenty years to rot. Altman drops Marlowe smack into the cesspool. Above it, more precisely, observing L.A. from an improbably affordable top-floor apartment at Hollywood Heights' iconic High Tower enclave. 

Your essayist just down the beach, 2016

Which may be the initial squint-maker. 

Altman wants to make a point how L.A. vibe and P.I. stories were outdated. He does this by– beautifully– repainting the '50s Marlowe scene as a neo-noir, only-in-the-'70s moment. The style of it, like Chandler's, helps the work age pretty well (there is a violent moment that either wouldn't happen in a modern film or else would be answered on-screen later). Still, rebinding one tired era with what would surely become another? That message and its disconnect, though, comes off as part of the satire. But a story lost in time doesn't necessarily make for a timeless story.

Or maybe I get stuck on a half-reimagined Marlowe, one foot in both worlds. The task fell to Elliott Gould, attached to the project before Altman and the screenwriters came onboard. Gould is terrific, his characters never quite sure what the hell is going on but muddling through anyway. He does schlubs to perfection and plays Marlowe that way. There is a certain genius to this. Chandler's Marlowe is tough but not the toughest. He's forever outmuscled and often outsmarted. Gould takes this to another level. He's lost in a beyond rumpled state. He loses or avoids every fight. As for women, Gould's Marlowe is oblivious even to Eileen's flirtations. Early in the film, he's trapped in a disassociative mumble about L.A. passing him by. We get it. But Elliott Gould is funny. He can't help it, the schlub. His best Marlowe is when Gould eventually drops the sleepwalk and just does Gould. 

From your
essayist's collection

Next, there's that Edgar-winning masterpiece novel. Altman seizes on aspects of Chandler's world– the backdrop, Marlowe's sense of morality, the outsized characters against the smallness of their crimes– but abandons much of the actual story. Some of this is necessity.

Chandler's The Long Goodbye is intricate, often contemplative, and hefty– almost 400 pages. The inciting murder happens forty pages in, give or take your edition. A hyper-faithful film version is a marathon with too many moving parts. In trimming things, the screenwriters left Chandler's premise– Marlowe wants justice for a friend in a jam--but glossed over the motivations driving that premise. Marlowe doesn't make friends. Allies and lovers, yes. Never true friends.

So when in The Long Goodbye Marlowe and ruined socialite Terry Lennox strike up an odd friendship via drinks and loyalty tests, Marlowe is as surprised as anyone. Resolving this inner confusion is as much what Marlowe is after than justice for Lennox's suspicious death. Lennox never fit right, in any sense.

The film almost immediately finds Marlowe and Lennox chumming it up playing liar's poker. Sure, we've already seen Marlowe living alone but for a finnicky cat. His quick chumminess with Lennox suggests Marlowe has a wider circle of chums. Add in that the film's Lennox is stripped of complications. He's a common crook who married well, and it's pretty clear he committed what inevitably surfaces as the murder. In Chandler's world of rough justice, one murder must lead to a next. Altman doesn't need the same body count. Murders are cut or cleansed as suicides, clues are sparse, the solution a bit easy. The crime elements are, like Marlowe, scaffolding to Altman's larger statement. 

© Wikipedia

Look, no big-name director agrees to get lashed to a novel they can't re-envision. The screenwriter in Chandler would've gotten that better than anyone. Altman made the movie he wanted to make, and he made a sleek one. 

Altman reportedly said that Chandler fans would hate this take. I don't hate-watch a movie three times. There's plenty to admire in this film.

Altman reportedly also never read the novel cover-to-cover. If true, I wish he had. He might've found Chandler's novel had risen above the noir tropes in these crosshairs. With more study of his source material, Altman might've made one hell of a noir update or the best kind of crime comedy. He might've made a great movie, not just a weird one.

And at least I could stop squinting.

Outside the Three-Mile Limit

As many regular readers here know, I’m fascinated with Los Angeles history. I post about various aspects of it from time to time. I use it as background in much of my fiction. And one of the most fascinating aspects of L.A. history are the gambling boats that used to anchor off the shore, just outside the three mile legal limit.

The Rex

Bobby in the just-released (yesterday) The Blues Don’t Care has more than his share of adventure on one of those gambling ships. In the novel, Bobby and the band he’s in get a gig on the Apollo, one of the gambling ships off the Los Angeles coast. They find more than a little trouble there that really sets the plot in motion.

Cops dumping slot machines off the Rex

The Apollo is based on the real gambling ships that used to lay off the SoCal shore, just outside the three-mile limit. I’ve taken a few liberties with the Apollo. It’s much nicer than the real gambling ships, which, while they had their amenities, weren’t always as glamorous as you might think. But when gambling was illegal I guess they were good places to go and get your fix.

                  The interior of the Lux

The most famous of the real gambling ships was the Rex, run by Tony Cornero, A.K.A. The Admiral. Cornero had a checkered career, to say the least. During Prohibition in the 1920s he was a rum-runner (I wonder if he knew Joseph P. Kennedy Sr.?). He moved much of his illegal booze on ships, so had a background on the bounding seas for when he decided to open up the gambling ships later on.

When Prohibition was repealed, Cornero made the easy slide over to gambling. In 1931 when gambling was legalized in Las Vegas, he and his brothers set up there, opening up The Meadows Casino and Hotel, beating out Bugsy Siegel’s Vegas venture by over a decade. Unfortunately, Lucky Luciano got wind of it and, since Cornero wouldn’t pay extortion money, the Meadows was torched. Hmm, no connection to old Lucky there, right?

Tony Cornero aboard the Lux

So back to L.A. Cornero went. And in 1938 he bought two ships, the SS Rex and the SS Tango and converted them into gambling boats. By running them outside the legal limit he could skirt US law. The ships included gourmet chefs, gunmen to keep the peace, waiters, waitresses and—wait for it—orchestras. And that’s where Bobby and the Booker ‘Boom-Boom’ Taylor Orchestra come in.

Cornero was a constant thorn in the side of authorities, but things went along swimmingly until The Battle of Santa Monica Bay—yeah, that’s a real thing. The authorities tried raiding the ships. The Rex held them off for nine days, but eventually lost and Cornero, to make a long story short, hightailed it back to Vegas, where he built the Stardust Casino and Hotel, which I stayed at many times. At the time, way back when, I knew it was mob-connected, but I didn’t know then about the Cornero connection, which I find intriguing.

The Battle of Santa Monica Bay

And, of course, some pivotal scenes in The Blues Don’t Care are set on the Apollo, just a water taxi ride from the Santa Monica Pier:

“A fine briny mist bit Bobby’s skin as he waited in the throng of people on the Santa Monica Pier for the water taxi that would take him to the gambling ship Apollo. The little cartoon-like ‘Kilroy Was Here’ drawing glared at him from the water taxi shack. Kilroy was everywhere these days. He had to shield his eyes from the fiery late afternoon sun, wished he had a pair of sunglasses. Only movie stars and musicians wore sunglasses. Maybe he’d get a pair of shades.”

Below, Bobby describes seeing the Apollo’s ballroom for the first time:

“Bobby peered over the sea of faces in the ballroom—white faces in expensive suits and chic dresses. The Apollo wasn’t the biggest or fanciest or the most seaworthy ship in the world. But if she went down, half of Hollywood, the Los Angeles political establishment, and business movers and shakers in the Southland would disappear into Davy Jones’ Locker. That didn’t stop the people who ran her—gangsters everyone knew—from decking out the main ballroom as if it were Versailles. The ceiling was tall and sparkled with lights under a false ceiling with a gauzy, azure-painted sky. Below it, the dance floor in the center of the room, surrounded by gambling tables—craps, roulette, blackjack, and the like. And in rows behind the gambling tables, dining tables.”

The La La Land gambling ships also make appearances in one of my favorite books and a movie from one of my favorite series.

Raymond Chandler talks about them in Farewell, My Lovely. In the novel, Philip Marlowe is told that Moose Malloy might be hiding out on one of the gambling ships outside the three mile limit. Marlowe sneaks aboard and persuades Brunette, the gangster who runs the ship, to get a message to Malloy. Farewell, My Lovely was made into the movie Murder, My Sweet (1944). The 1942 B movie The Falcon Takes Over is also based on the plot. And in 1975 Robert Mitchum starred in a remake.

And much of Song of the Thin Man, the last Thin Man movie (co-written by my friend Nat Perrin) is partially set on one of the ships. A benefit is happening on the gambling ship Fortune. The bandleader is murdered. Guess who has to figure it out. Song of the Thin Man should be called Farewell, My Thin Man as it’s the last in the series and unfortunately not the best by far, but it has its moments.

Mr. Lucky

Another movie that takes place on a gambling ship is the Cary Grant-Larraine Day flick Mr. Lucky. Not his best, but I like it. And you can check out my close encounter of the first kind with Cary Grant at my website.

The book was released yesterday. Hope you’ll want to check it out. Here’s what some people are saying about it:

"This is a beautifully noirish book, set firmly in the dark days of wartime and offering a sharp insight into the life and times of Los Angeles, 1940s style. Yes, it’s a mystery thriller, but The Blues Don’t Care is so much more than that, with historic detail, chutzpah, a cast of hugely entertaining characters, a really unusual protagonist and, best of all, a cracking soundtrack too."
    —DeathBecomesHer, CrimeFictionLover.com

“Award-winning author Paul D. Marks hits it out of the park with this finely-written novel bringing WWII-era L.A. alive with memorable characters, scents, descriptions, and most of all, jazz. Highly recommended.”

     —Brendan DuBois, New York Times bestselling author

“Paul D. Marks finds new gold in 40's L.A. noir while exploring prejudices in race, culture, and sexual identity. There's sex, drugs, and jazz and an always surprising hero who navigates the worlds of gambling, music, war profiteers, Jewish mobsters, and a lonely few trying to do the right thing. Marks has an eye for the telling detail, and an ear that captures the music in the dialogue of the times. He is one helluva writer.”

      —Michael Sears, award-winning author of Tower of Babel, and the Jason Stafford series

"While The Blues Don't Care is a complex, sometimes brutal, story, it also has its glimmers of beauty and joy. Those glimpses come from Bobby's passion for music, and his awe when he sees celebrities such as Clark Gable and Billie Holiday. Wander into Bobby Saxon's world in Paul D. Marks' latest book. It's a world you won't easily forget."

      —Lesa's Book Critiques, lesasbookcritiques.blogspot.com

~.~.~

And now for the usual BSP:

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Favorite Places

I have written before about atmosphere and setting. No surprise: there are not all that many topics in writing. That mystery writers have favorite venues is one of the obvious and most enjoyable facets of the genre. Many fans have had their views of California shaped by Golden State mystery mavens from Margaret Millar to Raymond Chandler and our own Paul Marks, while Carl Hiaasen has put his stamp on South Florida, as Anne Cleeves’ has put hers on Shetland and the multitude of northern noir writers on Scandinavia and Scotland. Frenchwoman Fred Vargas, currently making Paris dangerous, also includes the Pyrenees, which take up a good deal of psychic space within the capacious mind of her Commissaire Adamsberg.

I have my favorite places, too, but thinking about the topic, I realized that I have only rarely set mystery novels in them. My first detective, Anna Peters, hung out in Washington, D.C., a consequence of her remote inspiration in the Watergate hearings. At the time of the scandal, I was convinced on that some underpaid secretary knew a whole lot she wasn’t saying. I devised such a secretary and moved her to an oil company.

Anna Peters' early environment

When Anna proved modestly popular, her speciality, white collar crime, kept her in big cities with only the occasional side trip to the sort of rural setting I really prefer. She had a visit to St. Andrews, Scotland, one of the world’s great good places, and got to Patagonia, Arizona, a favorite birding location, as well as to Trier, a shabby and historic burg whose Roman ruins caught my eye. But, basically, Anna was stuck in urban life – or well-heeled suburbs.

My second series character, Francis Bacon, the Anglo-Irish painter and bon vivant, was the urban man par excellence, and his city was London, whose light and ambiance encouraged good work. A serious asthmatic, he loathed the country and all its works. Animals made him sick and he thoroughly disliked them – despite the fact that two of his finest paintings depict a screaming baboon and a mastiff. He also did a fine African landscape, complete with elephant, but that did not reconcile him to any place without sidewalks.

Soho, Francis' favorite venue

This inexplicable distaste for the natural world and its more attractive inhabitants was, along with his tin ear for music, the hardest thing  about turning the real Bacon into my character. His rather gaudy sex life, his alcoholism, his genius were the merest bumps in the road compared to constructing a man who hated and feared dogs and found the rural landscape boring.

Perhaps in retaliation, my version of Bacon was frequently in difficulty in rural areas – no doubt confirming all his prejudices. He wound up on camel back in the wilds of Morocco, drove in terror down vertiginous French roads, and effected a rescue on horseback in Germany. His trials and tribulations culminated at a real English country house, his absolute least favorite venue, in his last (and final) outing, Mornings in London.

My own favorite landscape – the rolling woods and farmland of New York state and New England – have been reserved for stand alone, mostly contemporary, novels. Night Bus was set in a fictional town that drew from our village and the one next to it, while Voices went right back to my hometown in Dutchess County, where I am happy to say, the landscape of roughly fifty years earlier was waiting for me.

nearby rail to trail conversion

And that brings me to one of the great pleasures of favorite and familiar landscapes and, indeed, of memory, which I can best illustrate with reference to the climax of Night Bus, which required a lonely cabin in the Adirondacks. I was in such a cabin only once, when I was 18, but unbeknownst to me, the neurons, which had forgotten so much else, remembered exactly what I needed, right down to how the water supply turned on. It was one of the weirdly satisfying moments in my writing life.

It is not often that the pulp fiction writer channels Proust, but the French master of memory was absolutely right about recapturing the past. He wrote that memory, in awakening the past, frees it and the remembering mind for a moment from time. Proust mentions sounds and, that most evocative and primitive of senses, smell, as triggering memory. It is the sound and smell and sight of our favorite places that so often bring us what we need as writers, not only the momentary setting but the weight and flavor of the past.

Do you have favorite literary places as either writer or reader?

Not all favorite places wind up in print