IVIV: Inherent Vice WIKI/Raymond Chandler

[Robin Landseadel]

	Page 97

	Philip Marlowe

	Raymond Chandler's famous detective, featured in Chandler's
	many novels set in LA, including The Big Sleep(1939; his first
	appearance), Farewell My Lovely, and The Long Goodbye. [2]
	There are many important parallels between Pynchon's Doc
	and Chandler's Marlowe, especially his world-weariness, his
	fondness for certain drugs of choice, and a penchant for
	cracking wise and getting beaten up and worse. (John D.
	MacDonald's fictional detective Travis McGee is also an
	important predecessor; see below). Of all Chandler's fiction,
	Farewell My Lovely (1940), which many think is Chandler's
	best, may be most relevant for the plot and themes of Inherent
	Vice. For instance, in that novel Marlowe stays in a hotel in
	Venice Beach before going out to Laird Brunette's offshore
	gambling boat, the Montecino. Farewell My Lovely also has
	"rehab" centers that serve as a front for torture and murder;
	characters with hidden identities; an impossibly convoluted plot;
	and a literary style that features striking metaphors, similes, and
	literary allusions. Marlowe is, like Doc, a dark mixture of
	cynicism, doggedness, and indifference--yet his goodness and
	inherent virtues can't be killed. To trace the parallels with
	Chandler's Marlowe, though, is to see how fully Pynchon has
	transformed and deepened the generic conventions of 1930s
	and '40s detective fiction (and film noir inspired by it) even as
	he pays homage to these.

http://inherent-vice.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Chapter_7

	". . .  Cause PIs are doomed, man," Doc continuing his earlier
	thought, "you could've seen it coming for years, in the movies,
	on the tube. Once there was all these great old PIs-Philip
	Marlowe, Sam Spade, the shamus of shamuses Johnny
	Staccato, always smarter and more professional than the cops,
	always end up solvin the crime while the cops are followin
	wrong leads and gettin in the way."

	"Coming in at the end to put the cuffs on."

	"Yeah, but nowadays it's all you see anymore is cops, the tube
	is saturated with fuckin cop shows, just being regular guys, only
	tryin to do their job, folks, no more threat to nobody's freedom
	than some dad in a sitcom. Right. Get the viewer population so
	cop-happy they're beggin to be run in. Good-bye Johnny
	Staccato, welcome and while you're at it please kick my door
	down, Steve McGarrett. Meantime out here in the real world
	most of us private flatfoots can't even make the rent."

	"So why do you stay in the business? Why not get a houseboat
	up in the Sacramento Delta-smoke, drink, fish, fuck, you know,
	what old guys do. "

	"Don't forget piss and moan."
	IV: 97