It might be added that our detective’s solution to the mystery (that everyone else knew the solution to and which wasn’t being investigated) has been accomplished entirely offstage, with virtually no friendly clues from the author for the reader to play along. “For Christ’s sake let’s not talk about honest mysteries,” Chandler once wrote. “They don’t exist.”
Even the dead body, the traditional beginning point of so many murder mysteries, is only located at the end. The genre has been turned—not so much upside down as inside out.
19. One last shift in modes: rather than end with the über-hard-boiled “big sleep” passage, the novel goes out with a romantic coda. Mona Mars appeared in the book for all of two chapters, but Chandler chooses to end the novel with Marlowe’s wistful reflection on her dreamy alter ego. Why was he so smitten? We might remember Keats’s faery lady in “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” whose ethereality Mona-as-Silver-Wig evokes. In Keats’s poem, the beautiful lady lulls the knight to a sleep from which he awakens bewitched, his life withering away. Of course, Marlowe isn’t the withering kind, but that’s the thought that remains as the book closes. Perhaps there is a hint in the almost-echo of another of Keats’s poems, “Faery Songs”:
Ah! woe is me! poor silver-wing!
That I must chant thy lady’s dirge,
And death to this fair haunt of spring,
Of melody, and streams of flowery verge,—
Poor silver-wing! ah! woe is me!
THE BIG SLEEP’S BIG FINALE
“…and I never saw her again.”
Or: Eddie Mars is killed, tricked by Marlowe and ambushed by his own goons. As the cops move in, Marlowe concocts a plan to send Carmen away where “she might even get herself cured.” With sirens blaring, Vivian notes that Marlowe has forgotten one thing in the packaged scenario he’ll present to the cops: “Me.” Bogart asks, “What’s wrong with you?” Bacall: “Nothing you can’t fix.” Fade to black. This is the finished scene in the 1946 film.
It’s a happy ending, with a love connection, no less. But it inverts the book’s ending in a few crucial ways. It’s not just that Vivian and Marlowe don’t end up together in the book. It’s also that—in some ways, not others—in the book, Vivian’s ambiguous moral viewpoint prevails over Marlowe’s part-idealistic, part-cynical one. Carmen gets away with murder; Vivian gets away with the cover-up, with the police on her side. The elder sister loses the chess game, but she wins the board and all the pieces. Our hero ends up pining over Silver-Wig like some young Romeo or Werther. Death, loss, separation: it’s an unsettlingly unresolved ending. The film restores order: the police are the good guys; there’s no lost love because Mona Mars has been wrapped into Lauren Bacall’s character; and Marlowe carries the masculine toolbox that will “fix” Vivian.
That ideological resolution was a bow to the Hays censors. Hawks’s original ending had Carmen being killed, but that was nixed by the governing board at the Breen Office (Joseph Breen was an assistant to Will H. Hays). Years later, Hawks claimed that “the end of the story was done by the censors. They said, ‘Howard, you can’t get away with this.’ And I said, ‘Okay, you write the scene for me.’ And they did, and it was a lot more violent, it was everything I wanted.” Perhaps Hawks was exaggerating in hindsight, but it does illustrate the power of the censors at the time, and the effect they had on the finished film.
There was an even better ending. According to Chandler, he and Hawks discussed a scene in which Carmen and Marlowe are alone in the house, with Eddie Mars’s “lifetakers” outside. Marlowe knows that if he sends her out first, the gang will shoot her and “take it on the lam.” In keeping with the book’s ambiguous resolution, Marlowe has to choose between two evils: playing God and letting Carmen die, and “playing Sir Philip Sidney” (the gentleman courtier; the knight) and sacrificing himself to save her “worthless life.” In what would have been a riveting scene, Marlowe decides to toss a coin. Heads, the girl lives. It comes up heads. Marlowe heads for the door and his own death—but because the endlessly deceptive Carmen thinks that he’s tricking her, she insists on going out first. He tries to stop her; she pulls a gun. She smirks, and we see that she’s going to shoot him on her way out the door. She opens it; bullets fly in. Fade to black.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the following:
The magnificent Raymond Chandler, the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, UCLA Special Collections, the Los Angeles Public Library, the USC Digital Library, Moe’s Books, Jonathan Lethem, Edward Kastenmeier, Emily Giglierano, Michele Park, Stella Tan, Andrew Weber, Lisa Silverman, Don Bachardy, Mitch Breitwieser, Richard Hutson, Tom Williams, Loren Latker and his Shamus Town blog, Kim Cooper, Howard Prouty, Thomas Gladysz, Daniel Miller, Ed Victor, Benjamin Whitmer, Matthew Moring for the Black Mask images, and our agent, William Clark.
Anthony Dean Rizzuto would also like to thank the following:
Dan Liebowitz for sending me down this path (and so many others); Hassey Gascar Rizzuto, for her undying support, inexhaustible patience, and priceless intellectual contributions; Rebecca Hyman for commiseration and extensive commentary; the Moe’s crew—Doris, Stanley, all the Matts, Kimn, Laura, Francesca, Stas, Bruno, Bradley, Harvey, and Phoebe—for covering our backs; David Brazil and Nick Baranowski for commentary; Matt Wong for the images; Matt Seneca for the drawings; Martha Barnette, Grant Barrett, and their A Way With Words podcast for the lexicological inspiration; John Kunat; and my students in English 315 at Sonoma State University, who make it such an enjoyable romp to teach this book, most notably Paphatsone Sirimoungkhons.
Owen Hill would like to thank:
Liz Leger, H.D., and Zelda, who somehow lived with me in this time of deep obsession, the Moe’s crew (mentioned on the previous page), Heathcote Williams for high tea and a little relaxation in Oxford, Tom Williams and Jules Mann for direction (and directions) in London, Mike Langston, Woody Haut, Patrick Cotter and my students at the Crime Writing workshop in Cork, David Meltzer and Julie Rogers for scouting out a place to live and work.
And my parents and uncle Bob Nugent, for introducing me to the pleasures of pulp fiction.
Pamela Jackson would like to thank:
Steven Black, Toby Jackson Black, Fred Dolan, Maria Brandt, Megan and Rick Prelinger, Antonio Beecroft, Will Amato, Stefan Mattessich, Andreas Zachrau, my parents, and the Berkeley Public Library.
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