“It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.”

 “She’s a charming middle-aged lady with a face like a bucket of mud and if she has washed her hair since Coolidge’s second term, I’ll eat my spare tyre, rim and all.”

When trying to recommend Chandler it feels like your own words will never do him justice, you have no choice but to quote some of the slick, sublime descriptions. Evidently as a female character in the world of private detective Philip Marlowe you can go one of two ways, but women often end up being the key to the story – not in the typical damsel in distress way, more the conniving vixen out to destroy everyone around her.

I was drawn to this as the second Marlowe novel, and I had read the supremely cool The Big Sleep at A-Level, where I have to say, my teacher read it brilliantly. I was engrossed by the seedy, dark, corrupt, mysterious worlds Marlowe operated in, and the ending was captivating to the point that despite being regarded as a classic, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall could not do it justice in the film adaptation.

I’d argue Marlowe is the greatest literary detective, and yes, I’m including Sherlock Holmes in that one. Marlowe operates as a lone wolf, is a womaniser and in Farewell, My Lovely he takes on jobs for the sheer thrill of the ride.

The story of Farewell, My Lovely is thrown at the reader from the start; Marlowe observes Moose Malloy, a physically intriguing character, he has – oh what’s the point? I’ll quote Chandler again:

“He was a big man but not more than six feet five inches tall and not wider than a beer truck…Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a piece of angel food.”

Malloy is out of prison after a stitch-up and is on the lookout for Velma, his former fiancée. Marlowe tries to find Velma, and uncover the framing of Malloy, but to say he gets more than he bargained for doesn’t really cut it. Marlowe witnesses robberies, murders and is on the receiving end of some tough treatment himself.

Marlowe as a detective is completely relentless, and there is a perpetual sense of peril that his intrigue will be his downfall, and that’s what makes this so exciting. There are so many threads of the plot, and you know that they will come together at the end, but the endless contemplation of how that will happen is a real treat.

If you’re a fan of The Great Gatsby read Farewell, My Lovely or The Big Sleep. In my opinion you will soon realise that when it comes down to it, the supposed literary king of American cool does not hold up to the descriptive delights of Raymond Chandler.

Oh, go on then, have another quote:

 “You can crab over the morning paper and kick the shins of the guy in the next seat at the movies and feel mean and discouraged and sneer at politicians, but there are a lot of nice people just the same. Take the guy that left that half bottle of whisky there. He had a heart as big as one of Mae West’s hips.”

Farewell, My Lovely, Raymond Chandler, Penguin (1940/2005)

At the age of 84 and with over forty novels to his name, Elmore Leonard is one of the most popular crime fiction writers alive today. His characters are typically quirky, edgy people operating on the fringes of society and trying to make a fast buck in some doomed get- rich- quick scheme. His writing style is deceptively simple: Leonard begins with an idea of a character or a situation and starts writing without any formal outline or conception of the ending. As a reader you begin to see the narrative emerge, and the characters from seemingly unrelated worlds begin to connect and you understand, to an extent, how it must have come together for Leonard in the process of writing. Leonard’s style is one of the best reading experiences for examining how a writer thinks. This approach can be hit and miss, sometimes the books can meander indefinitely and have a rushed tagged- on ending, as with say Freaky Deaky (1988). But when it works, it’s dynamite! Cat Chaser (1982) is Leonard at his best. It has all the hallmarks of a classic Leonard tale— sex, violence, quirky characters  and several unexpected plot twists.

With Cat Chaser Leonard shifts the setting from his fiction’s first home of Detroit and introduces us to George Moran, an ex-US marine turned Miami hotel owner whose struggling business caters mostly to lovers looking for a quick afternoon tryst. Moran makes a return trip to the Dominican Republic where he served as part of Operation Power Pack in 65. Moran is looking for Luci Palma, a revolutionary who shot and wounded him during the hostilities, but instead he meets his one- time lover Mary, wife of Andres De Boya, the former head of the Dominican Secret Police, who is now an exile in Miami.  Moran plans to whisk Mary away from her millionaire, torture-expert husband but only if he can escape the hustle of a Dominican conman who claims Moran shot him during the war, a workshy alcoholic private eye, and a cold blooded professional killer all with their eyes on De Boya’s millions.

It may seem improbable, but Leonard is able to bring these disparate plot elements together perfectly. The novel gives a great sketch of its tropical settings. The characters are compellingly bizarre. The jokes are funny and the last half of the novel is written at a breakneck pace. As Leonard says in his influential Ten Rules of Writing, ‘Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.’ Not a word seems wasted in this rollicking yarn. This is not something every crime writer could claim today. Leonard’s successors in the field, authors such as James Sallis and James Ellroy may have been more experimental with the crime fiction genre, but none have written books as compulsively entertaining as Cat Chaser, although some readers may find the denouement to contain one twist too many.

 
ASK THE READER

Brian Nellist

Q 

I go to Stratford regularly and read George Eliot and Anne Michaels for CE classes but for my own pleasure I used to read John le Carré and nowadays it’s John Grisham; in those complicated plots I forget everything else. Yet this is condemned as escapism. What’s wrong with that?

A 

Calm down; don’t be so defensive. From what you have just said I rather suspect that you yourself could hazard a guess at two things that are slightly askew. It is not that you refer to Shakespeare as though he is a medicine to be taken for one’s mental health (‘regularly’) which is true in a way but rather that you are limiting the meaning not of Shakespeare but of pleasure. I am reminded of the use of the term by Wordsworth who is the great apostle of its gospel. In the ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads he credits poetry with only a single limitation, ‘the necessity of giving immediate pleasure’. The harm comes from trivialising the word, he believes, because in essence man is a creature who seeks pleasure; ‘the grand elementary principle of pleasure by which he knows, and feels, and lives, and moves.’ Pleasure always involves the satisfaction of desires, so the argument goes, and the deepest pleasure must be given by what meets our profoundest, not our most immediate, needs. Hence for Wordsworth, surprisingly, all acts of sympathy, even with those in intense pain, whether in literature or in life, are grounded in pleasure because they embody our need for kinship, fellow feeling, pride in human endurance. Of course, we should not pervert this into pleasure in suffering itself but grant that in its acts of understanding literature encourages a tenderness and fineness of feeling that fulfils a need in us; ‘wherever we sympathise with pain it will be found that the sympathy is produced and carried on by subtle combinations with pleasure’. So, feel free to acknowledge that Stratford and Middlemarch, without any juvenile sense of schadenfreude, are also sources of pleasure.At the moment you are turning literature into hard slog for which you compensate by guilty weekends of holiday reading. As you know, the greatest pleasures demand effort as much as the greatest anything else. It is natural if you enjoy playing bowls that the pleasure will be increased if you work seriously at your game.

But the second thing, from what you say, that you are not taking seriously enough is that word ‘escapism’. To get out of gaol is generally classed as beneficial to the prisoner. All literature in its attempt to make sense of things, even in expressing the fear they make no sense at all, is to that extent a liberation from the cell of non-meaning. We use this accusation too easily. I note from the dictionary that Punch (!) in December, 1939, significant date of course, thought the reading of the big Victorian realist novel an ‘escape’; ‘Many a publisher has had the good idea of advising you to escape thoroughly by way of an eighthundred-and-fifty page novel about family life in the Victorian era.’ Yet I remember after World War II being told by someone from GCHQ (or whatever it was called then) that the World’s Classic Trollope had preserved for him a sense of moral normality that very directly helped to sustain a belief in what he was doing.

But I am evading the issue now, I agree, because your point concerns not the use to which we put books that are ambitious in their aims but what used to be called light literature, a branch of the entertainment industry, to be dismissive of it. Those complicated plots by which you ‘escape’ are often the means by which the sense of friends and foes are identified with good and evil but by complicated routes to make the belief tenable to our sceptical minds, so that their identities become fluid and there are crossovers between the categories. The modern thriller has to complicate the sense that judgement was once a lot easier yet the resolution of the plot, however tentatively, gives you the reassurance that in the end the balance works out on the right side. Popular literature is often close to myth in the clarity with which it will work out its resolutions and a part of your guilty delight in it, I suspect, is the desire for an easier life than more complicated literature allows. Fairy stories do that, of course, and John Grisham may be closer to ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’ than to Middlemarch but that does not make it necessarily suspect. Behind the excitements of the Lord of the Rings, for example, we notice that Sauron is destroyed less by action than by suffering, including Frodo’s own corruption, that indeed fighting is part of that corruption and that unless it is registered as suffering there is no value in the fight. When we read quickly for plot and event we do not necessarily register these things but that does not mean they are not being noted somewhere inside us or that we do not feel refreshed in consequence.

Yet if it is a pleasure sometimes to read quickly, be conscious that you may have to do that because otherwise not enough is going on to hold the attention and also to avoid being irritated by how much better you could have expressed it yourself. Inattention in the reader can begin as an excuse and end as a habit; take care that you do not blunt your capacity for still greater pleasure, Paradise Lost or Women in Love.

(Remember: you can purchase all of these books, plus many others, through The Reader Organisation’s Online Bookshop.)

The Big Sweep

Loitering in Lime Street train station,
With newspaper and white carnation,
I was suddenly aware
Of a lady with pink hair
Approaching in great expectation.

At twenty-past five I duly set off for Lime Street with a newspaper tucked under my arm and a white carnation skewered ludicrously through my coat. Jen and Lee came along to help (and to laugh) and went in ahead of me to reconnoitre the ground and make sure I wasn’t about to be mobbed. I wasn’t. In fact, after loitering without intent for a couple of minutes, I was starting to think the whole thing might be a complete waste of time. But then – to my surprise and relief – a lady with bright pink hair looked very pleased to see me (first time I’ve been able to say that) and dashed over to recite the magic words and claim her prize. Tempting as it was to act dumb at this point, I congratulated her and handed over the books, which we’d tied in a nice gold ribbon, along with a few copies of The Reader magazine. Her name was (and still is) Wendi Surtees-Smith and she was (and probably still is) very, very excited. She’d been waiting since five o’clock, with a friend and small child, and couldn’t believe her luck. Neither could we.

Still, I felt we’d done our bit to celebrate and commemorate, in some small way, America’s greatest writer of detective fiction. And had a good time into the bargain. How many other hopefuls had been waiting and had left disappointed will almost certainly never be known…

But this Chandleresque assignation
Was not such an odd situation.
Quite the opposite, I’d say -
Just an ordinary day
At The Reader Organisation.

In Chandler’s books the tough, modern world of twentieth century Los Angeles is channeled through the much older worldview of Philip Marlowe, a detective who laments the upending of a romantic code of honour and courtly love.

Click here to read Chris Routledge’s article ‘Chandler’s Reverse Romances’ in full.

To claim this wonderful prize you must follow these instructions:

Listen very carefully. We will say this only once. Go to Liverpool Lime Street railway station on Thursday 26th March at 17:30 precisely. One of our undercover agents will be waiting. The agent will be wearing a white carnation and carrying a copy of the Liverpool Daily Post. The merchandise will be given to the first person to make contact with these words: “Excuse me. Do you know who killed the chauffeur?”

Keep your eyes peeled on this blog and our website for more clues over the next twenty-four hours.

Perhaps you’re soon to meet a fair stranger?

Good luck on your mission. This message will not self-destruct.

Ross Macdonald was one of the many pseudonyms of Kenneth Millar, creator of the fictional private detective Lew Archer, and one of the most important twentieth century American detective fiction writers. Lew Archer follows in the tradition of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe as one of the great literary detectives: he made his first appearance in The Drowning Pool (1950), and continued through many novels until The Blue Hammer (1976). In the late 1950s Macdonald adopted a radically different form of crime writing. His earlier work merely imitated the successful formula created by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. But Macdonald went on to write detective fiction focusing on social realism and serious psychological analysis of family secrets and their impact over generations, inspired in large part by Macdonald’s personal experiences. The Wycherly Woman (1961) stands as one of the best novels produced during this period. Despite his huge contribution to the crime genre, Macdonald has received very little publication in the UK–but with the power of the internet, and the weak dollar, now might be the perfect time to start your Lew Archer collection.

The Wycherly Woman begins with Archer visiting the mansion of the Californian millionaire, Homer Wycherly. Wycherly wants Archer to locate his missing daughter Phoebe, although he is reluctant to accept that Phoebe’s mother, his ex-wife Catherine, could help with the case. Character names are traditionally important in American literature, and crime fiction is no exception. Mike Hammer is blunt and violent; Sam Spade revels in digging up dirt and sleaze; and Lew Archer is analytical and precise. Interestingly, in two film adaptations of Macdonald’s novels both starring Paul Newman, Archer was renamed Lew Harper. The wealthy Wycherly family evoke images of a pack of witches–at times alluring and powerful, but always dangerous. Phoebe and Catherine Wycherly parallel each other as the good and bad witch of the family. Phoebe is a good looking, promising student with many friends. Catherine is an alcoholic gold digger, with a habit of humiliating herself in public. But when a crooked real estate agent who links the two Wycherlys ends up dead, one has to ask: is Phoebe really so good and Catherine really so bad? Only Lew Archer can find out.

Doubling is an important feature of the crime novel, and within the family context Macdonald exploits it to the full. Behind their wealth and privilege the Wycherlys’ fall from grace is viewed with a mixture of sympathy and defeatism by Archer. Here is a private eye who has witnessed every form of corruption imaginable, has lost any sense of idealism from the experience, and seems doomed to endure it. The only hope is that others will not have to. Archer philosophises on whether Phoebe can be saved with a mixture of cynicism and humour and sometimes in an hilariously overwritten PI style:
She looked like one of those sensitive girls who could grow up into beauty or hard-faced spinsterhood. If she grew up at all.

As the crime fiction novel has evolved into the gritty violent tales of James Ellroy or Eddie Bunker, Macdonald’s work has fallen out of fashion. But an historical re-evaluation is long overdue. Lew Archer is a private eye who wears his cynicism on his sleeve. Long after the central mystery of the story is solved, Archer remains lost as to the other mysteries of life: the distance that grows between people who love each other, the soul-destroying power of money, and whether a person ever stops paying for past crimes. The Wycherly Woman is a moving novel that will haunt you long after reading.

____

Steven Powell is writing a PhD at Liverpool University on James Ellroy.

The Dahlia mythology has spawned numerous conspiracy theories as to the identity of her killer. Yet, while Ellroy’s gripping take on the case did not bring anyone closer to uncovering the murderer, it did help forge Ellroy’s greatest strengths as a writer. His depiction of post-war L.A. is unmatched amongst American crime writers, a utopian spectacle masking a cauldron of corruption, organised crime, and ethnic tension: ‘It’s a boomtown populated by psychically maimed misfits running from World War II. It’s a fiend habitat.’ This is the Los Angeles setting Ellroy grew up in, but the plot also parallels his life. The unsolved murder of his mother Geneva Hilliker Ellroy has striking similarities to the Dahlia case.

The story of The Black Dahlia is told through the first person narrative of Dwight ‘Bucky’ Bleichert, a warrant squad cop with the L.A.P.D. who strikes up an unlikely friendship with fellow officer Lee Blanchard, and his beautiful girlfriend Kay Lake. Bleichert and Blanchard find themselves on the Dahlia case seventy-five pages into the novel. Before then, Ellroy weaves a complex back-story involving the zoot suit riots of 1943, a politically staged boxing bout, and Blanchard’s impressive list of ‘collars’. As is typical of Ellroy, the violence is graphic and to the point: ‘the breasts were dotted with cigarette burns, the right one hanging loose, attached to the torso only by shreds of skin’. His portrayal of Elizabeth Short’s fate is explicit but never exploitative, her cadaver is described scientifically, ‘dotted’, ‘hanging’, and ‘attached’.

Violence alone cannot make a great crime novel, and whilst this dark tale may not be for those of sensitive tastes, Ellroy’s writing style and interweaving of storylines is subtle and assured. The zoot suit riots are an explosion of underlying urban tension, the boxing bout is motivated by political corruption and self-interest and Blanchard’s past collars become his undoing when Bleichert uncovers his dark nature. Ellroy is less interested in the buddy-buddy relationship of Bleichert and Blanchard, than he is in the unusual trinity of Bleichert, Blanchard, and Kay. For a character who grapples so much with the nature of evil, Bleichert finds himself acting as a kind of alternative husband in an unholy marriage. The three friends do everything together: work, play, and fight. Ellroy complicates matters even further when Bleichert becomes romantically involved with Madeleine Cathcart Sprague, a Black Dahlia look-alike whose family may be involved in the murder. The Dahlia becomes the epicentre for these characters soul, forging unlikely alliances, uncovering evil and offering redemption in equal measure.

James Ellroy was ten years old at the time of his mother’s murder. He first came across the Black Dahlia case a year later in Jack Webb’s sensationalist true crime book The Badge. The Black Dahlia is not autobiography and it is not history, though Ellroy leaves many of the factual details of the case unchanged. It is not even entirely original as fiction: John Gregory Dunne’s, True Confessions (1977) is a fine fictional rendering of the case, and an influence on Ellroy. Whatever category The Black Dahlia falls into, autobiography, history, fiction, the final and most unusual alliance to appear is that of Elizabeth Ann Short, Geneva Hilliker, and James Ellroy. From it Ellroy has produced one of the finest American crime novels of the last fifty years.

By Steven Powell

The Secrets of Harry Bright

Joseph Wambaugh was a Los Angeles policeman and detective for fifteen years before turning full-time to writing about crime (real and fictional) in the early 70’s. Now he’s regarded as one of the finest crime writers of the age. There are few contemporary American writers in the mystery genre who do not revere his mixture of cold realism, mordant black humour and sharp dialogue. To be fair, these are characteristics that he abandoned in his later novels. The characters became more caricatured, the humour more smutty, and the plotting so thin it is as though Wambaugh was so desperate not to repeat himself that he forgot to make the story interesting.

So for many, his stellar reputation rests on his brutal but funny depiction of L.A. Cops, The Choirboys (1975), his non-fiction classic, The Onion Field (1973), and a few others, including this 80’s gem, The Secrets of Harry Bright. The plot seems Chandleresque at first: struggling alcoholic homicide detective Sidney Blackpool is hired by a Palm Springs millionaire to investigate the murder of his son in nearby Mineral Springs. The case is over a year old and considered by the local P.D. to be unsolvable. But, as his employer is offering an all- expense- paid holiday with just a little bit of police work in between, Blackpool cannot resist. Yet, he soon finds himself lulled away from the luxury golf clubs to being obsessed about the case. He has lost a son himself, and regards it as a personal crusade to find the killer amidst the strangeness of Palm Springs life—a bizarre triangle of desert cops, biker gangs, and bored housewives. All of which Wambaugh gives quirky character introductions to in the opening pages before the first chapter: Blackpool’s reads:

SGT. SIDNEY “BLACK SID” BLACKPOOL – an L.A.P.D. homicide detective with a staggering Johnny Walker habit. Involved in a dead-end murder investigation that strikes closer to home than he can bear.

The title character, Harry Bright, is a once-revered cop, not unlike Blackpool, now in a coma and holding the key to the mystery. However, Wambaugh is interested less in the plot than he is paralleling the two policemen. The novel is rich with details of cop life, from the funny— guys impersonating Magnum P.I. on the beat— to the sad— the high divorce rate, and the almost equally high suicide rate. Wambaugh has been writing about these men for more than thirty years, but what makes Harry Bright’s secrets so fascinating is that as they are unravelled, they become less about crime, until finally not about crime at all. The more Blackpool discovers about Bright, the more it serves to deepen the mystery of himself. Why is being a cop as alien to mainstream American society as being a criminal? Wambaugh’s depiction of this despairing life is both thrilling and moving. The flashbacks of Harry Bright before his coma-induced stroke are pitiable. He cannot sing, but he records songs for his love when they are obviously not wanted. He is the most respected cop in the department, but he patrols an area where crime is almost non-existent. Yet, in a strange way, Blackpool envies him: ‘He stared into Harry Bright’s beautiful blue eyes. Looking for what.’ Blackpool is the hedonistic homicide detective to Harry’s Bright’s shadow of a policeman. But Bright finds a kind of emotional rest in his hospital bed which eludes Blackpool. Ultimately, Sidney Blackpool is serving a life sentence. Harry Bright is set free. Wambaugh has never been better than he is here, and he could do a lot worse than returning to this territory.

Steven Powell

Although it was remodeled in 1899 by Edinburgh architect James M. Henry, and its interior was modernized in the mid-20th century, Rutherford’s elegant historic façade remains, as do “the terrazzo floor and marble walls of the lavatory and boxed-in sawdust spittoon channel,” according to Edinburgh’s Evening News. However, that newspaper adds, the pub’s original purpose may now be in peril …

Here’s the link.

Posted by Chris Routledge