I'm finally getting around to reading some Raymond Chandler after years and years of having him on my radar. The Big Sleep so far is great fun, if problematic. It's one of those books that give off the ambience of a whole genre in the middle of being created. Dashiell Hammett arguably had created the hard-boiled crime novel years before Chandler published anything, but Hammett's writing was spare, tight, and largely plot-driven. Chandler is quite a bit more languid and atmospheric in style, more invested in mood than in story. I mean, just check out this reverie-provoking fragment from Chapter 22, describing an L.A. ballroom converted into a night club: “No chromium glitter, no indirect lighting from behind angular cornices, no fused glass pictures, or chairs in violent leather and polished metal tubing, none of the pseudomodernistic circus of the typical Hollywood night trap.” It goes on in that vein for another dozen or so lines, mainly concerned with a description of the parquet floor and the different kinds of wood that must have gone into it. Chandler's eye for detail is so evocative that it doesn't really matter if he spends more time on place than in plot.
And the plot really is pretty inconsequential, at least the extent of it that I've read so far. It starts with an apparently straightforward blackmail/murder mystery with a severe whiff of sordid privilege hovering around it; as is typical for a story like this, private eye Philip Marlowe has solved the case to the satisfaction of his the police but not himself. So, naturally, he hasn't been able to keep his nose out of the loose ends of the supposedly resolved mystery, partly out of a sense of obligation to his aging client, and partly from an unpleasant sense that he may have been played for a sap by other parties peripherally involved in the case. I seem to be right on the edge of the point in the book where the larger, more convoluted plot threads start to wind around themselves.
I'm glad to be moving on from the book's first half, which had Marlowe (and, by extension, probably Chandler as well) indulging in some old-fashioned, distractingly venomous homophobia. Marlowe says some unrepeatable things that identify him as a big ol' bigot, and I can't quite let that go just by identifying him as a man of his time (the late 1930s): his attitudes about gay men are just plain ugly and likely to pull a modern reader out of the story with disbelief and disgust.
But I'm enjoying The Big Sleep as a cultural artifact and a milestone of the genre, even if Chandler's writing has lost some of its value since it was published. I can't really resist a writer with his eye for description or his ability to write, with a straight face, dialogue like this for his protagonist: “I don't mind you showing me your legs. They're very swell legs and it's a pleasure to make their acquaintance. I don't mind if you don't like my manners. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings. But don't waste my time trying to cross-examine me.” The tough talk and the vivid environments are enough to keep me reading; I'll just be ready to move on to more contemporary, non-toxic crime fiction when I've finished.
