ATD & Raymond Chandler

[John Carvill]

[very slight spoiler, from late in book, page 1040 onwards]


Was just having a look at Wikipedia's entry on Chandler's 'Farewell, My
Lovely', many aspects of which I see echoed in Lew Basnight,
particularly in a passage I've just re-read beginning on p1040, with Lew
in LA. 

I know most reviews have referred to 'pulp detective fiction' but I
never felt this was appropriate, neither is Dashiell Hammett a very
close fit, though there are more Hammett  resonances towards the start
of the Book, and I think Hammett was a Pinkerton agent at one stage.

But as ATD progresses, and especially at the end, it's Chandler (who,
like Lew, spent some time in England) I hear loud and clear in the tone,
and also some of the specifics. Somewhere there's a mention of 'stolen
necklaces' and then there's Lew pursuing that case where a singer has
gone missing. A lot of this stuff seems to me to have come straight out
of Chandler, specifically 'Farewell, My Lovely'. 

A-and, here's a quote from Chandler's 'The Little Sister', a book which
features a main character with the wonderfully Pynchonian name Orfamay
Quest:

"The rains are over. The hills are still green and in the valley across
the Hollywood hills you can see snow on the high mountains. The fur
stores are advertising their annual sales. The call houses that
specialise in sixteen-year-old virgins are doing a land-office business.
And in Beverley Hills the jacaranda trees are beginning to bloom."

Probably a coincidence, but Lew does go to investigate some goings on at
'Jacaranda Court'.

Anyway, all this stuff has been vaguely swirling in my head for a while,
and when I was having a poke around wikipedia's Chandler pages, I found
this note (from a user named Akb4) on the Discussion page for 'Farewell,
My Lovely' which seems highly relevant, not just to Chandler (alone or
as a flavour in ATD) but Pynchon too, particularly in terms of plotting:


"When I see the term "hard-boiled detective story", I expect something
realistic, perhaps overly-so, like a film shot in real time. This book
is surrealistic; utterly bizarre. The dialog is sometimes like something
out of a dream, vague or without key bits of elucidation, yet everyone
understands everyone else. Everything to do with the characters of
Riordan and Red is deus ex machina; the plot couldn't happen without the
fact that frequently when Marlowe needs something, a person magically
turns up and hands it to him for no reason, with no real reward. Is this
laziness and incompetance by the writer, deliberate surrealism, or some
combination? Marlowe himself is also more a mechanism than a character;
he doesn't ever seem to want anything, or have any motivation, he just
does stuff, following the trail, drinking, and getting knocked
unconcious. Then there's the whole homosexual undercurrent, the loving
details in the descriptions of male characters (even the villians) while
the few female characters consist of a lying funny-talking foreigner, a
cheating floozy who'll murder to keep secrets, an old drunk who tries to
be sexy, a judgemental lying elderly busybody, and Riordan, who is more
a plot mechanism (albeit wrapped with a few female cliches) than a
character. Not that the male characters are great guys, but they are
seen as more human, and more intimate, and have passages devoted to
their eyes, their hands, their hair, their career issues and fears.
Blurbs and plot summaries make this book sound like "Maltese Falcon" or
something by Elmore Leonard; it's a lot more like JG Ballard or
Nathanael West."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Farewell%2C_My_Lovely


Cheers
JC





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