Davis on Chandler

[John Carvill]

> I've been reading Raymond Chandler over the last two/three weeks, in the
> wake of a couple of whacks at Inherent Vice. When I say that Philip Marlowe
> is a time traveller, I'm exaggerating, but only a little:
>
>        The main hallway of the Sternwood place .....
>        showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to
>        a tree .....
>        Raymond Chandler: "The Big Sleep"
>

Yes yes, we recognise the 'detective as knight' thing, and that
Pynchon likes quests. I quoted that very passage in my review of
Inherent Vice, and it's very well known.

What I'm disagreeing with is any attempt to claim Marlowe as an actual
olden days knight. If Marlowe does yearn for an older time - and he
sometimes does, I agree - it's not that old a time he yearns for, it's
a more recent past, which in itself is more apt when considering Doc
in IV.


> My reading of Chandler can't be that out of
> joint—Leigh Brackett saw fit to open up that aspect of the Long Goodbye when
> she wrote the screenplay for Altman's film. While the theme of mysteries
> being solved more by kismet than real work is found many times in Noir, The
> Long Goodbye, The Big Lebowski and Inherent Vice are all examples where that
> theme takes up greater space in those stories.
>

Leigh Brackett would know: she co-wrote the screenplay for The Big
Sleep. But she - and Altman - imagined a 'Rip Van Marlowe', someone
transported from the 40s to the 70s and thus out of synch. That;s a
hell of a lot less out of synch than taking King Arthur and setting
him down in 1940s L.A.!