or dinosaurs
Twenty-five a day plus expenses
Philip Marlowe’s office, over the years:
The Big Sleep (1939):
A rust-red carpet, not very young, five green filing cases, three of them full of California climate, an advertising calendar showing the Quints rolling around on a sky-blue floor, in pink dresses, with seal-brown hair and sharp black eyes as large as mammoth prunes. There were three near-walnut chairs, the usual desk with the usual blotter, pen set, ashtray and telephone, and the usual squeaky swivel chair behind it.
The High Window (1942):
Three hard chairs and a swivel chair, a flat desk with a glass top, five green filing cabinets, three of them full of nothing, a calendar, and a framed license bond on the wall, a washbowl in a stained wooden cupboard, a hatrack, a carpet that was just something on the floor, and two open windows with net curtains that puckered in and out like the lips of a toothless old man sleeping. The same stuff I had last year, and the year before that. Not beautiful, not gay, but better than a tent on the beach.
The Little Sister (1948):
I went up to the office and unlocked the door and sniffed in the twice-breathed air and the smell of dust. I opened a window and inhaled the fry cook smell from the coffee shop next door. I sat down at my desk and felt the grit on it with my fingertips. I filled a pipe and lit it and leaned back and looked around.
‘Hello,’ I said.
I was just talking to the office equipment, the three green filing cases, the threadbare piece of carpet, the customers’ chair across from me, and the light fixture in the ceiling with three dead moths in it that had been there for at least six months. I was talking to the pebbled glass panel and the grimy woodwork and the pen set on the desk and the tired, tired telephone.
…
The pebbled glass door panel is lettered in flaked black paint: ‘Philip Marlowe … Investigations’. It is a reasonably shabby door at the end of a reasonably shabby corridor in the sort of building that was new about the year the all-tile bathroom became the basis of civilization. The door is locked, but next to it is another door with the same legend which is not locked. Come on in — there’s nobody in here but me and a big bluebottle fly.
Philip Marlowe, the greatest detective of the pulp (or any) era of crime fiction, because he is both the saddest and the funniest. Because we know the most about his life, though there is very little to know. Because he is the most gallant and uncompromising of his principles, and yet rude, disillusioned, alcoholic and down-at-heel. Because he is well aware that his life is empty, pitiful and without any hope of happiness, and yet his black humour makes it all seem so much fun.
Does Marlowe actually get paid in any of his books?
Aside: Chandler would be upset to hear me call his novels “pulp.” He had genuine literary ambitions and was bitter that the establishment disregarded his work as mere crime fiction. (Bernard V. Higgins comes to mind). But isn’t it so often wonderful when a talented author allows themselves to write genre fiction. Pynchon’s Chums of Chance in Against the Day come to mind. Kurt Vonnegut’s Kilgore Trout. It’s sad that so few quote-unquote serious authors will embrace the highlowbrow. What would a choose-your-own-adventure by Don DeLillo be like? What about a space opera by David Foster Wallace? If Nicholson Baker ever published a Mills & Boon I would pre-order the hardcover.
(Can we blame the false idols of Modernism for this? If we’re being fair then probably not. But let’s do it anyway: Modernism has a lot of tedious, pretentious fiction that it should be made to answer for. I’d like to see it dragged from its Arcadian picnic rug and gang-beaten beneath a willow tree by gangsters and aliens).