#6: from The High Window (Penguin, 2005 pp230)
“He’s the fellow for whom they coined the phrase, ‘as ignorant as an actor’.”
#7: Ibid, p235
“I want to tell you about it,” she said breathlessly. “I—”
I reached over and put a paw over her two locked hands. “Skip it. I know it. Marlowe knows everything—except how to make a decent living. It doesn’t amount to beans.”
#8, Ibid, pp247-8
“All right,” he said wearily. “Get on with it. I have a feeling you are going to be very brilliant. Remorseless flow of logic and intuition and all that rot. Just like a detective in a book.”
“Sure. Taking the evidence piece by piece, putting it all together in a neat pattern, sneaking in an odd bit I had on my hip here and there, analysing the motives and characters and making them out to be quite different from what anybody—or I myself for that matter—thought them to be up to this golden moment—and finally making a sort of world-weary pounce on the least promising suspect.
He lifted his eyes and almost smiled. “Who thereupon turns as pale as paper, froths at the mouth, and pulls a gun right out of his ear.”
“That’s right. We ought to play it together sometime. You got a gun?”
Thoughts: The first time Chandler seems to be playing—and having fun—with the more ridiculous elements of the genre he’d begun to define, as well as with the filmic quality which imbued all of his writing. For example, he uses the adjective ‘hard-boiled’ far more than in any of the previous novels, and he also refers to Marlowe in the third person more often.
Many times he (e.g. pp247-8) pokes fun at the stock ‘noir’ scenes only to use them nonetheless, with Marlowe as a kind of author-figure who realises that they’re ridiculous but also realises that, as the tough-guy hero, he has to play the role designated him.
At the same time, Chandler’s screenwriting work allows him to comment on the movie industry (‘Hollywood’s full of them’; ‘I’ve been in pictures’; ‘as ignorant as an actor’), going nearly so far as to have Marlowe/Bogart repeat Rick’s line in Casablanca (‘it don’t amount to beans’).
Chandler’s still playing. But by The Long Goodbye, this sense of fun has almost disappeared with Terry Lennox, a drunk, down-on-his-luck author whom only Marlowe can take under his wing and attempt to save. By this point, Chandler’s wife was dead, he’d attempted suicide, and he’d become disillusioned with working in Hollywood.
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