“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.”
Philip Marlowe -- the sardonic, morally ambiguous, and
occasionally chivalrous fictional private detective created by American novelist
Raymond Chandler -- came into existence with the 1939 hard-boiled mystery The
Big Sleep. It is easy to understand Marlowe’s enduring, universal appeal: a world-weary
loner and outsider who withhold certain moral codes while fighting against deep
corruption and cirme. At the same time, this archetypal detective character of Depression
and post-Prohibition era dabbles with a kind of unique Americanisms that has
turned him into an iconic figure of American imagination (like the ‘noble Cowboys’
of Western genre, ‘Superman’, etc). Before Philip Marlowe, of course there were
Dashiell Hammett’s archetypal gumshoes like the unnamed Continental Op (‘Red
Harvest’) and Sam Spade (‘The Maltese Falcon’) who also scored high in terms of
sarcastic repartee and ‘quote-worthy’ street-slang. However, Chandler’s
universe emphasizes more on the atmosphere (the elaborate, unwinding prose
beautifully sets up the mood) while it’s a bit light on mystery.
The Big Sleep’s insanely convoluted plot opens with a
crippled, dying oil baron General Sternwood hiring the L.A. PI Philip Marlowe
to handle a black-mailing scheme directed against the younger of his two
troublesome daughters, Carmen Sternwood. Marlowe follows the ‘polite’ black-mailing note to a
bookstore run by Arthur Gwynne Geiger. What starts off as a
simple case of blackmailing, however, turns complex as two murders happen in
quick succession (one of them is Geiger) and Marlowe get deeply pulled into
intricate schemes of kidnapping, pornography, corruption, and extortion. Guns
are often waved at Marlowe but the guy mostly bluffs his way around without
getting fired at. The seedy city and its inhabitants keep throwing curve-balls
at him. Even so he keeps himself composed, makes peace, and remains content
with making $25 a day.
The Depression-era classic pulp fictions of Dashiell
Hammett, James M. Cain, and Raymond Chandler later influenced the visual mood
and narrative schemes of the misanthropic war-time and post-war Hollywood crime features, which was
addressed as ‘Film-Noir’ by the French critics. Chandler’s second Philip
Marlowe novel ('Farewell, My Lovely') was the first to be adapted into a movie
titled ‘Murder, My Sweet’ (1944). Dick Powell played the central character. But
it was Humphrey Bogart’s wry, cool persona that worked perfectly for the
on-screen avatar of Marlowe in Howard Hawks’ 1946 adaptation of The Big Sleep
(Elliott Gould was equally great in his turn as Marlowe in Robert Altman’s
1973 adaptation of ‘The Long Goodbye’; Robert Montgomery, James Garner, and Robert
Mitchum are some other actors who have portrayed Marlowe in films).
The Big Sleep could be relished for Chandler’s linguistic
flourishes, his suave non sequiturs, and distinctly poetic evocation of the
atmosphere. The first-half of the novel is lot troubling to follow as we
constantly try to piece together each character’s angle, how they are connected
to each other, and what their part is in the larger mystery. Geiger, Joe Brody,
Owen Taylor, Lundgren, Eddie Mars, Harry Jones, Canino --- these names are
repeated throughout the narrative and it took me sometime to understand who’s
who and their tangled personal histories. The same problem afflicts Hawks’
movie adaptation too. It was said that Howard Hawks sent Chandler a telegram
questioning ‘whether Owen Taylor, the General’s chauffeur, was murdered or he
committed suicide?’, to which Chandler replied, “Dammit I didn't know either”.
Yes, some of the mysteries aren’t answered, and if these loose ends are
resolved it wouldn’t matter much since the answer to central mystery happens to
be quite simple. The movie version of The Big Sleep, nevertheless, gained
classic status due to Hawks’ meticulous direction and the presence of seductive
central pair (Bogart and Bacall).
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Humphrey Bogart and Lauran Bacall in Howard Hawks' 1946 movie adaptation |
Likewise, Chandler’s novel despite all the convolutions is
immensely enjoyable due to the terse dialogues and the manner with which the
cagey and calculative Marlowe smoothly handles array of crazy situations. At
some point in the novel, Marlowe emphatically declares, “I'm not Sherlock
Holmes or Philo Vance. I don't expect to go over ground the police have covered
and pick up a broken pen point and build a case from it….” This pretty much
suggests how the heroes of the era's hard-boiled fiction are wildly different from the
idealized fictional sleuths (like Holmes or Hercule Poirot) since the social
context of Chandler or Hammett repeatedly state how crime and corruption are
very much in the fabric of society or governing bodies. Hence Marlowe, like his
other hard-boiled detective counterparts stay morally ambiguous and understand
that the world is possibly irredeemable. Overall, The Big Sleep is a riveting,
preeminent novel of hard-boiled detective fiction that still holds up today.
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