And he's right there in Chandler's Philip Marlowe. Forget your Poirots and your Marples. Forget even Sherlock Holmes. Marlowe is the greatest literary detective. What makes him great is his apartness; Chandler's novels are not really about solving mysteries - often the plots don't make a lot of sense - but about the tragedy within the man he created.

Marlowe is tragic. A noble, Arthurian figure (Chandler almost called him Malory, after the author of Morte d'Arthur, but rejected the name as too obvious) he is isolated in the decadent civilisation that surrounds him. He is, as Robert Graves might put it, the one good man in a wholly evil time.

His dilemma - whether to give in to the temptations of the world around him, or to pursue his lonely crusade - is at the centre of each of these novels, and in each novel is explored in a different way. They are all absorbing even though, as I've said, Chandler didn't really care a hoot about plot. (He once said that whenever he ran out of ideas he had a man walk into the room with a gun. So not much pre-planning and storylining going on there, then).

In an essay about detective fiction, Chandler wrote of Marlowe and his Los Angeles:

'Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid... He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.'

Such is Chandler's Marlowe. Read him, and be amazed.


Crime comes of age   February 26, 2001
 11 out of 14 found this review helpful

With the arrival of Raymond Chandler on the scene,the noir novel began in earnest.Dashiell Hammett had started the movement,with contributions to Black Mask magazine The Continental -Op stories-- and his ensuing full length output,but the qualities that Chandler brought to the genre,and whose echoes are still felt today(Dennis Lehane,James Ellroy,Robert Parker,etc.etc.)were hugely influential.The world weary Marlowe,a white knight who walks the mean streets in slightly tarnished armour,the exemplar of the lonely P.I.The plots,although not(by Chandler's own admission)always logical,gripped and maintained interest,and,certainly not least,he captured a time and an essence of America and American writing that have so obviously stood the test of time...a Raymond Chandler novel is as valid a piece of literature as anything by Thomas Wolfe,Sherwood Anderson,William Faulkner,Sinclair Lewis,or any of the more contemporary writers of today.Although by the time of "Playback" the powers were waning,all Chandler is well worh reading,and there's a very good chance that once you've experienced "crime taken out of the drawing room",you'll never regard Agatha Christie in quite the same light again.