In honor of Raymond Chandler’s 125th birthday and Private Eye Day, a little Chandler word magic—phrases that mark the detective-noir hero and his world.
“It seemed a little too pat,” muses detective-hero Philip Marlowe, in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. “It had the austere simplicity of fiction rather than the tangled woof of fact.” In a phrase, Chandler’s iconic hero defined hard-boiled—a style of no-nonsense storytelling that painted the world in unsentimental greys and decorated it with colorful, over-the top similes.
In Chandler’s milieu, stark lines between good and not-so-good blurred and shifted. Facts were tough to pin down, dames spun tales, and the “truth” rarely, if ever, dropped by for a cocktail. In his classic, The Big Sleep, Chandler wove such a tangled woof that a film director working on adapting the novel called to ask who murdered one of the characters. Chandler replied that he had no idea.
If Carroll John Daly and Dashiell Hammett fathered hard-boiled detective fiction, Chandler—who was born 125 years ago today—took it on to raise. He pinballed from home to home and job to job until his late 40s, when he started writing detective fiction for pulp magazines.
In his Marlowe novels, written mostly in the 1940s, Chandler finds himself…and his hero. He molds his Marlowe into that icon of noir: the misanthropic wordsmith whose cynical quips brighten a dark universe just enough so that looking at it becomes bearable.
More than bearable, in fact. His worldview may be bleak, but his wordsmithery is pure pleasure. After all, what aspiring writer (or detective) doesn’t wish he’d thought of this line first?
“Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake.”
In honor of Chandler’s 125th birthday and Private Eye Day, we at PursuitMag have chosen a few of our favorite Chandlerisms—phrases that define the jaded private eye, his two-dimensional damsels, and his noir world. And even though Chandler may have molded a stereotype that shadows us present-day PIs, he told our story in a new way…with the tangled-ruff complexity of the cases we work and the real lives we live.
The Shamus
Broke: “I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun.” (Farewell, My Lovely)
Boozy: “I’m an occational drinker, the kind of guy who goes out for a beer and wakes up in Singapore with a full beard.” (The King in Yellow)
Blunt: “I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings. But don’t waste your time trying to cross-examine me.” (The Big Sleep)
Invisible: “I was a blank man. I had no face, no meaning, no personality, hardly a name. I didn’t want to eat. I didn’t even want a drink. I was the page from yesterday’s calendar crumpled at the bottom of the waste basket.” (The Little Sister)
Occasionally Civilized: “I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark little clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.” (The Big Sleep)
Reluctantly Heroic: “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.” (The Simple Art of Murder)
No Bulls**t: “What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you.” (The Big Sleep)
The Shamus’ World
Bleak: “The corridor…had a smell of old carpet and furniture oil and the drab anonymity of a thousand shabby lives.” (The Little Sister)
Ominous: “There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.” (Red Wind)
Seedy: “It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.” (The Big Sleep)
The Dame
Dishy: “It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.” (Farewell, My Lovely)
Brassy: “From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.” (The High Window)
Manipulative: “She lowered her lashes until they almost cuddled her cheeks and slowly raised them again, like a theatre curtain. I was to get to know that trick. That was supposed to make me roll over on my back with all four paws in the air.” (The Big Sleep)