Is Marlowe a Racist (or even homophobic)?

[John Carvill]

A sample, from Tom Hiney's well-regarded biography of Raymond Chandler
(p281 et seq):

"The end of the 1980s, however, saw Raymond Chandler's critical
reputation caught in a backlash. The fashion for psychological and
'political' literary criticsm discovered an easy target in Chandler.
Together with Ernest Hemmingway, he was branded a misogynist,
homophobe, and a racist; a writer who had effectively created a
fantastic white male hero in order to compensate for his own
insecurities. The American crime novelist George V. Higgins, appearing
in a profile of Chandler on British television in 1988, speculated
that Marlowe's creator had in fact probably hated his mother and wife,
and that the emotion that marked his correspondence after Cissy's
death was 'hogwash'. At about the same time, a rumour began
circulating Hollywood that Chandler had been a secret cross-dresser.

[...]

In America, the backlash centred on what was seen as Philip Marlowe's
'fascism'. Representative of this type of criticism were the
accusations made against Chandler in ['City of Quartz']:

'Marlowe, the avenging burgher, totters precariously on the precipice
of fascist paranoia. Each successive Chandler novel focuses on a new
target of Marlowe's dislike: Blacks, Asians, gays, 'greasers', and,
always, women'

[...]

The damaging argument that Chandler's books reveal an underlying
racism in their author carries weight only if passages are quoted from
them out of context. Chandler wanted Marlowe to be real, and to talk
'as the man of his age talks, that is with a rude wit, a lively sense
of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness'.
This realsim inevitably included involving the L.A. detective in
banter where words such as 'wetback' and 'nigger' were spoken. Almost
all American hard-boiled crime writers (including such black champions
of the genre as Chester Himes) put racial banter into the mouths of
their characters, and for the same reason as did Chandler: that it
would be unrealistic of them to omit it. 'Racism', by contrast,
suggests hatred, and Philip Marlowe does not hate those who challenge
the old white order, not least because he does so himself. He hates
people who annoy him or threaten him, regardless of their colour.

The opening to 'Farewell My Lovely', sometimes cited as proof of
Marlowe's racism, in fact shows this."

http://www.amazon.com/Raymond-Chandler-Tom-Hiney/dp/0802136370