Out in the 1950s Crime Noir Night –Raymond Chandler’s Playback

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Book Review

Playback, Raymond Chandler, Vintage Crime Books, New York, 1958

Yes, no question, Philip Marlowe was getting long in the tooth, too long in the tooth, too long in the private snooper racket, too long searching for some reasons to stop tilting at every passing windmill after twenty years out in, what did Ross MacDonald call it, oh yah, the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles, L.A. L.A. before it became La La Land. He had lost his compass a little, lost the feel for the gritty streets now that the town was getting all grown up after the war and those endless highways from one spot to another were becoming endless super highways from one spot to another. Yah, the town had changed since he first blew the force, the D.A.'s office off his back in the late 1930s and went private. Went private to make his own deals, tilt or not tilt at his own windmills and try, try mind you, to make some sense of this wicked old world. With a little bit of honor and self-regard left in tack. Those wild waves coming from back East made it hard though, mad e it real hard.

See, even if the town had changed, the hordes had come and eaten up the best there was to offer, the swells had made the place nothing but another of their stinking watering holes. The crimes though, the crimes still needed solving, the off- hand murder or robbery or kidnapping or art theft or all of them together still needed to be solved. And the coppers, well, the coppers had too many fish to fry, too many things to handle without enough resources and so there you were. Yah, every small town grafter it seemed, every com man who knew from three- card Monte, every mobster looking ‘retire “in the sun had his hands in the till. And the women too, the grasping women who had as much murder, as much larceny, as much lechery in their grasping little hearts as in the old days and to be held at bay if anything was to be figured out. Marlowe knew, knew as well as he knew anything, that when that perfume got in the way he was done for. And lately he had lost a certain amount of judgment brooding over, well, let’s call her, “her”and move on. Yah, our boy had lost a step or two and this last caper kind of put paid to that notion.

Of course it was about a dame, a good-looking dame, a red-head or what passed for a red-head those days, that he was supposed to tail and keep an eye on. Well, he did, did it pretty good too except a guy, a guy looking for the main chance got in the way, got himself killed and that dame was implicated in it right up to her pretty little eyebrows. But here is the clincher she tied herself up with one of the new hard boys then seen around town lately. The reason for that was simple she needed a strong guy to protect her from her past. No questions asked. And so it took Marlowe an excoriatingly long time to figure out why he was tailing this red-head, what she was hiding and why she was, well, uncooperative when he tried to tilt a little windmill her way. Hell, here is a surefire way to know our boy was slipping he didn’t even get her under the satin sheets until he had things all figured out. What do you think of that. Still L.A. had gone to hell in a hand-basket since our slumming avenging angel kept a lid on crime in the city of angles.

Oh yah, about Raymond Chandler, about the guy who wrote the book. Like I said in another review he, along with Brother Dashiell Hammett (the author of TheThin Man, and creator of The Maltese Falcon’s Sam Spade maybe the most famous tough guy detective of them all. Who, come to think of it, also had a judgment problem when it came to women, although not Hollywood women but up North in Frisco town) turned the dreary gentile drawing-room sleuth by-the-numbers crime novels that dominated the reading market back in the day on its head and gave us tough guy blood and guts detectives we could admire, could get behind, warts and all. Thanks, guys.

In Chandler’s case he drew strength from his startling use of language to describe Marlowe’s environment much in the way a detective would use his heightened powers of observation during an investigation, missing nothing. Marlowe was able to size up, let’s say, a sizzling blonde, as a statuesque, full-bodied and ravishing dame and then pick her apart as nothing but a low-rent gold-digger. Of course that never stopped him from taking a run at one or two of them himself and then sending them off into the night, or to the clink, to fend for themselves. He also knew how to blow off a small time chiseler, a grifter, as so much flamboyance and hot air not neglecting to notice that said grifter had moisture above his upper lip indicating that he stood in fear of something if only his shadow as he attempted to pull some caper, or tried to pull the wool over Marlowe’s eyes.

The list of descriptions goes on and on -sullen bartenders wiping a random whisky glass, flighty chorus girls arm in arm with wrong gee gangsters, Hollywood starlet wannabes displaying their wares a little too openly, old time geezers, toothless, melting away in some thankless no account job, guys working out of small-time airless no front cheap jack offices in rundown building s on the wrong side of town doing, well, doing the best they can. And cops, good cops, bad cops, all with that cop air about them of seen it all, done it all blasé, and by the way spill your guts before the billy- club comes down (that spill your guts thing a trait that our Marlowe seems organically incapable of having). He had come from them, from the D.A.s office in the old days, had worked with them on plenty of cases but generally he tried to treat them like one might a snake not quite sure whether it is poisonous or not.

At the same time Chandler was a master of setting the details of the space Marlowe had to work in- the high hill mansions and the back alley rooming houses (although usually not the burgeoning ranchero middle class locales since apparently that segment of society has not need of his services and therefore no need of a description of their endless sameness and faux gentility). He has a fix on the museum-like quality of the big houses, the places like General Sternwood’s in The Big Sleep or Mrs. Murdock’s in The High Window reflecting old wealth California. And he has a razor sharp sense of the arrivisite, the new blood all splash and glitter, all high-ceiling bungalow, swimming pools, and landscaped gardens.

But where Chandler made his mark was in his descriptions of the gentile seedy places, the mansions of old time Bunker Hill turned to rooming houses with that faint smell of urine, that strong smell of liquor, that loud noise that comes with people living too close together, too close to breath their simple dreams. Or the descriptions of the back alley offices in the rundown buildings that had seen better days populated by the failed dentists, the sly repo men, the penny ante insurance brokers, the con artists, the flotsam and jetsam of the losers in the great American West night just trying to hang on from rent payment to rent payment. Those denizens of these quarters usually had a walk on role, or wound up with two slugs to the head, but Chandler knew the type, had the type down solid.

Nor was Chandler above putting a little social commentary in Marlowe’s mouth. Reflections on such topics as that very real change after World War II in the kind of swarms that were heading west to populate the American Western shore night. The rise of the corner boys hanging, just hanging, around blasted storefronts, a few breaking off into the cranked up hot rod hell’s highway night. The restless mobsters for broken back East looking to bake out in the southern California sun while taking over the vast crime markets. The wannabe starlets ready to settle for less than stardom for the right price. The old California money (the gold rush, gold coast, golden era money) befuddled by the all new waves coming in. And above all a strong sense of the rootlessness, the living in the moment, the grabbing while the grabbing was good mentality that offended old Marlowe’s honor code.

And of course over a series of books Chandler expanded the Marlowe character, expanded his range of emotions, detailed his growing world-weariness, his growing wariness, his small compromises with that code of honor that he honed back in the 1930s. Yes, Marlowe the loner, the avenging angel , the righter of wrongs, maybe little wrongs but wrongs in this wicked old world. The guy who sometimes had to dig deep in his office desk drawer to grab a shot or six of whiskey to help him think things through. Marlowe the guy of a thousand punches, the guy of a hundred knocks on the head, the guy who had taken a more than one slug for the cause, the guy who was every insurance company’s nightmare and a guy who could have used some Obamacare health insurance no questions asked . Yah, Marlowe.