“The Marlowe Paradigm”

by Jim Doherty

NOTE: If what you are about to read seems a bit familiar it may be because you've already seen an abridged version of it at “The Outfit Collective,” a collaborative ‘blog of seven different Chicagoland mystery writers which you can find here: http://theoutfitcollective.blogspot.com/

Recently, the Chicago Public Library sponsored one of those “one book/one community” events, the one book being Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye (Houghton Mifflin, 1954), and I was invited to participate as a guest ‘blogger at the Collective. This article was my contribution. It ran a bit long as a ‘blog entry, though, and had to be abridged. I decided I'd like the full piece to appear somewhere, and so I'm using it as this issue's column.

See if you can identify a particular fictional character from the following description:

•  An unmarried

•  Male

•  American

•  Ex-cop

•  In his 30's (at least when the series begins)

•  Who owns and operates his own one-man detective agency

•  And works out of a large American city

•  Telling his own stories in the first person

Yeah, you're probably thinking, that's a pretty good capsule description of Philip Marlowe. So what's the point?

Well, if you're an aficionado, not merely of Raymond Chandler, but of the hard-boiled private eye story in general, you're probably way ahead of me. The point, of course, is that it's not only a pretty accurate description of Marlowe. It's also a pretty accurate description of 80-90% of all the hard-boiled private eye characters created since Marlowe. And most of the remaining 10-20% fit that description in all but one or two details.

Now why should this be, exactly? Why should the archetype, the template, the paradigm of what a hard-boiled private eye is come to us, not from Dashiell Hammett, who was, after all, the innovator who virtually founded the hard-boiled school, but from Chandler , the self-acknowledged Hammett disciple?

Talent? Perhaps. But a lot of people, myself included, would give you an argument. I think Hammett's at least as talented as Chandler , and, moreover, I think a case could be made that his straightforward, lean and mean style wears better than the more ornate, deliberately poetic style that was Chandler 's forte. Further, it's Hammett, not Chandler , who wrote what is generally regarded as the best and most famous of all hard-boiled private eye novels, The Maltese Falcon (Knopf, 1930).

Yet it's Chandler 's model, not Hammett's, that predominates.

Consider The Maltese Falcon . Sure, it's the most famous private eye novel ever written. But are the familiar elements found in Falcon recycled nearly as often as those found Chandler 's work? Sam Spade was never an official law enforcement officer, but served his apprenticeship as an operative of a large agency before going out on his own. He's not a one-man show, at least at the beginning of the book, but operates his business with a partner. His willingness to do whatever it takes to reach his goal, however morally questionable, from sleeping with a suspect to slapping around a much smaller man, hardly qualifies him as a sterling example of chivalric virtue. And the ruthlessly objective, third person narrative mode sharply contrasts with the hundreds of first-person narrators who've starred in so many private eye novels since then.

No doubt about it. When we think of a private eye, it's not the operative of a large world-wide agency that comes to mind, nor even one half of a two-person partnership; it's the lone wolf in his shabby office barely eking out a living.

It's not the spare, stripped-down third person style that we associate with the PI; rather it's the more personal, more elegiac first person style. Indeed, that first-person style is so pervasive that private eye stories in other mediums, like film and television, routinely try to replicate it by voice-over narration.

It's not the hard-nosed professional who can sleep with a woman one day and turn her over to the cops the next that's our prototype; it's the slightly tarnished modern-day knight errant, forever on the lookout for a damsel in distress to rescue.

Many of the writers who follow what I'm calling “The Marlowe Paradigm” have been quite up-front about it. In an omnibus volume collecting three of his Lew Archer novels, Ross Macdonald (the “Holy Spirit” to Hammett's “Father” and Chandler 's “Son”) flatly stated that Archer was deliberately “patterned on Marlowe.” Robert B. Parker has said that he started writing his series about Boston P.I. Spenser because he was frustrated that Chandler hadn't written more Marlowe novels, and so felt compelled to write them himself. Loren D. Estleman admitted, when he heard someone describe his Amos Walker character as “Philip Marlowe in Detroit ,” that this was a basically accurate description.

Others choose a less direct way of acknowledging their source. Science fiction writer Milton Lesser adopted the Chandlerian pseudonym “Stephen Marlowe” when he began a series about a DC-based shamus named Chester Drum, eventually taking it as his legal name. Howard Browne, whose Chicago private eye, Paul Pine, is one of the most slavish (yet most enjoyable) Marlowe imitations, wrote his first three Pine novels under the pseudonym “John Evans,” which was one of the names Chandler used for his Marlowe prototype during his pulp years. Thomas B. Dewey's The Mean Streets (Simon & Schuster, 1955), generally regarded as the best in his series about the Chicago op known only as “Mac,” takes its title from a phrase in Chandler 's article “The Simple Art of Murder.”

And dozens, indeed hundreds, of others have followed the paradigm just as faithfully without ever acknowledging it, possibly without even being aware of it.

Whether they acknowledged it or not, whether they were aware of it or not, they followed it, and followed it faithfully. Of course, the best of the private eye writers who stuck to the paradigm, only used it as a launch point from which they could go off in directions of their own choosing. For example, Bart Spicer's Philadelphia PI, Carney Wilde, meets every single one of the eight points listed in the capsule description above, at least when the series first begins, but his creator endowed him with two additional traits, ambition and business savvy. Hence, while, in his first appearance, The Dark Light (Dodd, Mead, 1949), Wilde is a 30-ish unmarried ex-cop operating a one-man agency, etc., etc., etc., by his last appearance, Exit Running (Dodd, Mead, 1960), he's happily married and has built his agency into one of the largest and most successful investigative and security firms in Pennsylvania, making the series what Kevin Burton Smith, guru of private eye fiction, has called on his Thrilling Detective website, a chronicle of “a private detective's entire career arc.”

Similarly, the aforementioned Stephen Marlowe also followed the paradigm in every respect for his Drum series, but added the element of world travel. Consequently, Chet Drum might travel to South America in one book, to India in another, make a pilgrimage to Mecca in a third, and wind up in Rome in time for the 1960 Olympics in a fourth, giving the novels a cosmopolitan flavor not usually seen in PI fiction.

And so it goes. Thomas B. Dewey's “Mac” added compassion for children to the mix. Ed Lacy's Toussaint Moore was the first black private eye in fiction, predating Ernest Tidyman's John Shaft by more than a dozen years. Michael Collins's Dan Fortune was physically handicapped. Lawrence Block's Matt Scudder struggled with alcoholism and guilt from a bad shooting back in his cop days.

But, at least when they started out, they all followed the Chandler pattern.

So pervasive was that pattern that, in 1988, when editor Byron Preiss proposed an anthology of new Marlowe short stories by contemporary PI writers, to be called Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe – A Centennial Celebration (Knopf, 1988), William DeAndrea, one of the authors asked to submit, respectfully declined, offering the wry observation that writing Marlowe pastiches seemed to be what most of those invited to contribute were already doing anyway.

One of the most interesting things about that anthology, by the way, is the degree to which the contributors approached Marlowe as a tabula rasa on whom they could impose their own notions of characterization, setting, themes, and story-telling techniques. Hence, Max Allan Collins, who writes historical private eye novels based on famous real-life crimes, fictionalized a real life crime and had Marlowe solve it. Midwestern law professor Francis M. Nevins wrote a story in which Marlowe travels to the Midwest and gets involved in a case that turns on an interpretation of probate law. Native New Yorker Robert J. Randisi brought Marlowe to the Big Apple for an adventure set in Manhattan's Grand Central Station. Mexican mystery writer Pablo Ignacio Taibo II's story took Marlowe south of the border. Edward D. Hoch, best-known for short stories featuring classically skull-crushing puzzles, involved Marlowe with a classic puzzle. And Roger L. Simon, whose Moses Wine novels are marked by an unabashedly left-wing sensibility, wrote Marlowe into a story promoting Simon's political views. Marlowe's iconic status had allowed him to become whatever those writers wanted him to become.

And that iconic status still makes Marlowe the predominant figure in the sub-genre. As much as private eye fiction has evolved since Chandler passed from the scene, the Marlowe Paradigm remains the most frequently used model. Consider the hard-boiled PI story's most obvious innovation over the last quarter century or so, the use of female protagonists in what was previously an all-male preserve.

Writers like Sue Grafton, Sara Paretskey, and Maxine O'Callahan are all, quite rightly, praised as innovators, and yet, aside from their genders, how much do their characters, Kinsey Milhone, V.I. Warshawski,, and Delilah West, veer from the Marlowe paradigm? Milhone and West not at all, and Warshawski only that, in addition to not being a man, she's not an ex-cop.

So we come back to the original question. Why is Chandler's model so pervasive?

In “The Simple Art of Murder,” which I've already referred to, Chandler boldly described his character as, not merely a protagonist, but as a hero. “The best man in his world,” Chandler asserted, “and a good enough man for any world.”

Perhaps Marlowe's status as the PI archetype stems from his striving to live up to the knightly virtues of chivalry and honor. Hammett's protagonists might do heroic things, but they do it less from an over-arching moral sense, than simply because it's their job. They might operate by a code, but it's largely unspoken, and on the rare occasions when attempts are made to explain it, those attempts are as remarkable for what's left unsaid as for what's said. The Continental Op simply states, “I'm a detective because I happen to like the work.” Sam Spade sums it up by shrugging his shoulders and offering the inadequate explanation that, “When a man's partner is killed he's supposed to do something about it.” By contrast, Marlowe, whose very name evokes images of medieval do-gooding, continually agonizes over his chosen profession not being “a game for knights.” The Op and Spade have no such qualms. They are about getting the job done. They're results-oriented. Marlowe's about doing right. He is, for lack of a better description, process-oriented.

Heroism is a more attractive quality than professional competence, and this might explain why Marlowe, rather than the Op or Spade, is the model subsequent writers have tended to follow.

But I think there might be another explanation. And, not surprisingly, Chandler hinted at it himself.

In a 1948 letter to fellow mystery writer Cleve F. Adams, Chandler remarked on the fact that he seemed to have replaced Hammett as the leading proponent of hard-boiled crime fiction.

“Since Hammett has not written for publication since 1932,” he wrote, “I have been picked out by some people as the leading representative of the school. This is very likely due to the fact that The Maltese Falcon did not start the high budget mystery picture trend, although it ought to have. Double Indemnity and Murder, My Sweet did, and I was associated with both of them. The result is that everybody who used to be accused of writing like Hammett may now be accused of trying to write like Chandler.”

An excellent point. The fact of the matter is that movies have a more immediate and farther-reaching impact on popular culture than novels. While millions, for example, have read Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (Macmillan, 1936), tens of millions have seen the film, and few who read the novel now can do so without having the film cast in mind as they conjure images of the characters in their mind's eye.

Moreover, Chandler, as he mentions, was associated with high-budget films, with “A” pictures as they were once called in the movie industry. And because of the way he sold those books, one at a time rather than all in a group, different studios bought the rights to different books, and subsequently made different Marlowe pictures.

This was in sharp contrast to what was then, and to degree still is, the common practice for a series of mystery films featuring the same continuing character. Usually a studio would simply buy the rights to all the books featuring a given character, as well as rights to the character him (or her)self, and go on to release a series of quickly made, comparatively low-budget “B” films featuring the same cast in picture after picture, which had the effect of identifying a particular actor with a particular fictional detective. Thus, Warner Oland would come to be identified with 20 th Century Fox's Charlie Chan, Basil Rathbone with Universal's Sherlock Holmes, Ralph Bellamy with Columbia's Ellery Queen, Peter Lorre with Fox's Mr. Moto, Edna May Oliver with RKO's Hildegard Withers, etc. As many as four entries in a particular series might be released in a single year, and a popular “B” series might go on for a decade or longer. And when the studios ran out of original material to adapt, they'd be free, having bought the rights to the character as well as the stories he appeared in, to simply commission original screenplays featuring that character. Such series would be marked, not only by a single actor in a continuing role, but by a similarity of style from one entry to the next. The closest contemporary equivalent to way a “B” movie series was produced might be a regular weekly drama series on television.

The films made from Chandler's first four Marlowe novels during the middle and late ‘40's, however, followed a different, and unique, path. Not only were they all made with the higher budget and lengthier production time of an “A” picture, but, having been sold to different studios, they each used a different actor in the pivotal role of Marlowe, each actor bringing his own unique interpretation to the role.

Dick Powell, anxious to change his image as a juvenile tenor in Busby Berkeley musicals, was the first to tackle the role in the seminal film noir Murder, My Sweet (RKO, 1945), based on Chandler's, Farewell, My Lovely (Knopf, 1940). In the opinion of many, including me, Powell's performance was the best, most faithful interpretation of Marlowe, and it brought about precisely the image change he hoped it would. For the rest of his career, Powell was associated with tough-guy roles in films like Cornered (RKO, 1946), Rogues' Regiment (Universal, 1948), To the Ends of the Earth (Columbia, 1948), and Cry Danger (RKO, 1951).

Humphrey Bogart, who'd already played Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (Warner's, 1941), was the next to step into the Marlowe role in the Warner Brothers' 1946 adaptation of The Big Sleep (Knopf, 1939). Regarded as Hollywood's top tough guy thanks to films like Falcon , Across the Pacific (Warner's, 1942), Casablanca (Warner's, 1943), and To Have and Have Not (Warner's, 1945), Bogart's performance in Sleep simply grafted his well-honed, familiar screen persona onto Chandler's character. Hence, while in Murder, My Sweet Powell became Marlowe, in The Big Sleep Marlowe became Bogart. Still, if you're a tough shamus, there are few actors it's more appropriate to “become” then Humphrey Bogart. And on the strength of his portrayals of Spade in Falcon and Marlowe in Sleep , Bogart, more than any other actor, has become the visual embodiment of the hard-boiled private eye.

Robert Montgomery was the next to try his hand at the part in MGM's 1946 film version of The Lady in the Lake (Knopf, 1943), remarkable for two reasons. First, it's the only Marlowe film on which Chandler did any work on the screenplay (though he lost interest quickly, and, while a good deal of his work remains in the final script, he is not credited except as the author of the source novel). Second, Montgomery, who also directed, had the original notion of coming up with a visual equivalent for Chandler's vivid first-person narration. He made the camera Marlowe's eyes. The audience saw everything from the hero's point of view, and, except for some framing scenes and a few shots in which Marlowe looked in a mirror, Montgomery's performance consisted almost entirely on off-screen voice work. The gimmick became tiresome at feature-length, though, and the resulting film is now something of a technical curiosity that has never achieved the classic status of MMS or TBS . Nevertheless, it's worth seeing for some fine performances, and sharp, Chandler-written dialog.

A too-youthful George Montgomery (no relation to Robert) was the final film Marlowe of the decade, playing the detective in The Brasher Doubloon (20 th /Fox, 1947), based on Chandler's The High Window (Knopf, 1942). An attempt was made to overcome Montgomery's boyish appearance by having him grow a mustache, and, to date, he is the only big screen Marlowe with facial hair, but the device didn't work. Next to more mature actors like Powell, Bogart, and Robert Montgomery, George Montgomery lacked the gravitas to carry the part off. Still, based on later performances, it's likely he'd have been quite good in the part had he waited a decade or so.

Aside from the four different performances by the lead actors, different filmmakers, like Edward Dmytryk, Howard Hawks, John Brahm, and the aforementioned Robert Montgomery, put their own individual creative stamp on the Chandler properties they adapted. And each of the four studios gave each of the films their own studio's unique look. In consequence, between 1945 and 1947, audiences were not seeing a series of low-budget movies giving one single interpretation of the Marlowe character, but four very different high-budget interpretations of that character.

At the same time, each of the films, and each of the performances, adhered, with a fair amount of faithfulness, to Chandler's vision of the character. Hence audiences were seeing someone who was simultaneously different in each picture, and yet the same in each picture.

Seeing Marlowe being given different, but still valid and faithful, interpretations over a short period of time probably went a long way to creating in audiences the expectation that a hard-boiled private eye was a character who was supposed to be just like Philip Marlowe, and yet different. And since movies wield such a profound impact on popular culture, this, in turn, was likely to have led writers, in a variety of mediums, to conceive PI characters who were created, very often deliberately created, in the image and likeness of Marlowe.

Over the next twenty-odd years, Marlowe was absent from the big screen, though his adventures could be heard on radio or seen on TV. But those four films released between 1945 and 1947 already set the pattern. Not only for the way Marlowe would be depicted, but for the way any hard-boiled private eye character, in any medium, would be depicted.

This is all speculation, of course, and to those of us who live for words on the printed page, the notion that screen adaptations would be more influential than the original works might seem counterintuitive, if not downright sacrilegious.

Ultimately, I suppose, it doesn't really matter. Raymond Chandler remains important not just for what he wrote, but for the effect his writing had on those who came after. Arguably, he was the most influential mystery writer of the 20 th Century. And whether his pervasive influence stems directly from his own work, or from the adaptations made from that work, there's no denying that every crime writer who ever sent a tough private eye on an adventure down a big city's mean streets in the search for hidden truth owes a huge debt to Chandler. So complete is his influence that it's become almost subliminal, part of our collective “pop culture” DNA.