The World of Raymond Chandler: In His Own Words

by Raymond Chandler

  By the time she reappears as Mrs. Grayle (a.k.a. Velma) in Farewell, My Lovely she has gained several touches of class, although she still has the ability to drive a bishop to sacrilege:

  Her hair was the gold of gold paintings and had been fussed with just enough but not too much. She had a full set of curves which nobody had been able to improve on … She put her head back and went off into a peal of laughter. I have only known four women in my life who could do that and still look beautiful. She was one of them.

  When they are alone, she invites Marlowe to sit beside her on the sofa …

  “Aren’t you a pretty fast worker?” she asked quietly.

  I didn’t answer her.

  “Do you do much of this sort of thing?” she asked with a sidelong look.

  “Practically none. I’m a Tibetan monk in my spare time.”

  “Only you don’t have any spare time.”

  But once again, the passing of time and the plot are not kind to her. When her previous identity as Moose Malloy’s girlfriend, Velma, is revealed …

  her smile became just a little glassy. Suddenly, without any real change in her, she ceased to be beautiful. She looked merely like a woman who would have been dangerous a hundred years ago, and twenty years ago daring, but who today was just Grade B Hollywood.

  By the same transformation process Carol Pride in “Mandarin’s Jade” becomes Anne Riordan, one of Chandler’s few genuine heroines—one of the few women he seems to like.

  “She was about twenty-eight years old. She had a rather narrow forehead of more height than is considered elegant. Her nose was small and inquisitive, her upper lip a shade too long and her mouth more than a shade too wide. Her eyes were grey-blue with flecks of gold in them [just like Marlowe’s]. She had a nice smile. She looked as if she had slept well.

  It was a nice face, a face you could get to like. Pretty, but not so pretty that you would have to wear brass knuckles every time you took it out.

  A face with bone under the skin, fine drawn like a Cremona violin. A very nice face.

  Later Marlowe teases her about her “red hair and her beautiful figure” and is clearly as attracted to her as she is to him. After his drugged encounter with Jules Amthor and his friends, he drags himself to her house for safety. She opens the door …

  “My God,” she wailed. “You look like Hamlet’s father!”

  As he recovers, Marlowe finds himself softening still more toward her:

  “A fellow could settle down here,” I said. “Move right in. Everything set for him.”

  “If he was that kind of fellow. And if anybody wanted him to,” she said.

  “No butler,” I said. “That makes it tough.”

  Lieutenant Randall—like a good cop—can see the way things are, but Marlowe is ready with a riposte …

  “Not my type … I like smooth shiny girls, hardboiled and loaded with sin.”

  “They take you to the cleaners,” Randall said indifferently.

  “Sure, where else have I ever been?”

  Once again the wisecrack preserves him for more of the mean streets.

  In The High Window we have Linda Conquest, the cabaret singer, another lady with a symbolic name …

  Her lips seemed to have forgotten to smile. They would smile when she was singing, in that staged artificial smile. But in repose they were thin and tight and angry.

  But, more interestingly, we have one of Chandler’s damaged ladies—Merle Davis, secretary to Mrs. Murdock …

  A thin fragile-looking blondish girl in shell glasses … She was pale with a sort of natural paleness and she looked healthy enough … the whole face had a sort of off-key neurotic charm that only needed some make‑up to be striking.

  A psychiatrist concludes:

  “She’ll always be high on nerves and low on animal emotion. She’ll always breathe thin air and smell snow. She’d have made a perfect nun … As it is she will probably turn out to be one of these acid-faced virgins who sit behind little desks in public libraries and stamp dates in books.”

  “She’s not that bad,” Marlowe replies. “And besides, how do you know they are virgins?”

  The Little Sister gives us the little sister, Miss Orfamay Quest, ostensibly a simple little girl from Manhattan, Kansas—but with “something in her eyes that was much older than Manhattan, Kansas.”

  Her steps along the corridor outside made tiny, sharp pecky little sounds, kind of like a mother drumming on the edge of the dinner table when father tried to promote himself a second piece of pie.

  From a strap over her shoulder hung one of those awkward-looking square bags that make you think of a Sister of Mercy taking first aid to the wounded. On the smooth brown hair was a hat that had been taken from its mother too young … The rimless glasses gave her that librarian’s look.

  To begin with, Marlowe doesn’t know what to make of her …

  [She] suddenly began to cry. I reacted to that just the way a stuffed fish reacts to cut bait.

  Nancy Guild as Merle Davis in The Brashear Doubloon/The High Window. “A thin, fragile-looking blondish girl … the whole face had a sort of off-key neurotic charm that only needed some make‑up to be striking.” Photofest (illustrations credit 7.6)

  Later Marlowe is intrigued by this strange little creature enough to want to kiss her:

  I reached up and twitched her glasses off … “Without the cheaters those eyes are really something,” I said in an awed voice … Her upper lids drooped, fluttered a bit and her lips came open a little farther. On them appeared the faint provocative smile that nobody ever has to teach them … “Even at the church socials they play kissing games,” she said. “Or there wouldn’t be any church socials,” I said.

  Although the other heroine, Mavis Weld, is meant to be the film star (she turns out to be the “little sister’s” big sister), easily the most interesting woman is her friend and fellow actor, Dolores Gonzales—“the nicest whore I ever didn’t meet,” as Chandler describes her.

  Marlowe’s first encounter is on the phone, and it is not promising …

  She laughed. I guess it was a silvery tinkle where she was. It sounded like somebody putting away saucepans where I was.

  But when he actually meets her: “Sexy was very faint praise for her … She looked almost as hard to get as a haircut … And exclusive as a mailbox.”

  “Your name?” Her voice froze on the second word, like a feather taking off in a sudden draft. Then it cooed and hovered and soared and eddied and the silent invitation of a smile picked delicately at the corners of her lips, very slowly, like a child trying to pick up a snowflake … She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight … She made a couple of drinks in a couple of glasses you could almost have stood umbrellas in.

  It rapidly becomes apparent to Marlowe that the lady is “reeking with sex. Utterly beyond the moral laws of this or any other world I could imagine.”

  She goes into her act …

  Her shoulders did a fan dance

  … and before he knows what hit him—

  I got out a handkerchief and scrubbed the lipstick off my face. It looked exactly the color of blood, fresh blood.

  Every time he is thrown into her company, she throws herself at him. Luckily, Marlowe is used to being slugged and sapped.

  I let go of her wrists, closed the door with my elbow and slid past her … “You ought to carry insurance on those,” I said.

  “Just for half an hour,” I said, “let’s leave the sex to one side. It’s great stuff, like chocolate sundaes. But there comes a time when you would rather cut your throat. I guess maybe I’d better cut mine.”

  Despite the odds, Marlowe survives with his honor intact. “She was one for the book all right.”

  Exotic and overt as she was, Dolores Gonzalez was never the threat that certain blondes posed.

  There are blondes and blondes and it is almost a joke word nowadays. All blondes have their points, except perhaps the metallic ones who are as blo
nde as a Zulu under the bleach and as to disposition as soft as a sidewalk …

  “There is the small cute blonde who cheeps and twitters and the big statuesque blonde who straight-arms you with an ice-blue glare. There is the blonde who gives you the up-from-under look and smells lovely and shimmers and hangs on your arm and is always very, very tired when you take her home. She makes that helpless gesture and has that goddamned headache and you would like to slug her except that you are glad you found out about the headache before you invested too much time and money and hope in her. Because the headache will always be there—a weapon that never wears out and is as deadly as the bravo’s rapier or Lucrezia’s poison vial.

  There is the soft and willing and alcoholic blonde who doesn’t care what she wears as long as it is mink and doesn’t care where she goes as long as it is the Starlight Roof and there is plenty of dry champagne. There is the small perky blonde who is a little pal and wants to pay her own way and is full of sunshine and common sense and knows judo from the ground up and can toss a truck driver over her shoulder without missing more than one sentence out of the editorial in the Saturday Review. There is the pale, pale blonde with anemia of some non-fatal but incurable type. She is very languid and very shadowy and she speaks very softly out of nowhere and you can’t lay a finger on her because in the first place you don’t want to and in the second place she is reading The Waste Land or Dante in the original or Kafka or Kierkegaard or studying Provençal. She adores music and when the New York Philharmonic is playing Hindemith she can tell you which one of the six bass viols came in a quarter of a beat too late. I hear Toscanini can also. That makes two of them.

  “And lastly there is the gorgeous showpiece who will outlast three kingpin racketeers and then marry a couple of millionaires at a million a head and end up with a pale rose villa at Cap d’Antibes, an Alfa-Romeo town car complete with pilot and co-pilot, and a stable of shopworn aristocrats, all of whom she will treat with the affectionate absentmindedness of an elderly duke saying goodnight to his butler.”

  —The Long Goodbye

  And then there was Eileen Wade, the blonde of blondes …

  Her hair was the pale gold of a fairy princess. There was a small hat on it into which the pale gold hair nestled like a bird in its nest. Her eyes were cornflower blue, a rare color, and the lashes were long and almost too pale.

  And when Marlowe hears her speak, she had

  a voice like the stuff they used to line summer clouds with.

  This is the language of a knight to his lady fair. There is only one small problem. The lady will turn out to be a double murderer.

  Marlowe is tempted—as he so often is. Like so many other women he encounters, she is ready to buy him with her body …

  Underneath it she was as naked as September Morn but a darned sight less coy.

  But, as always, he is not for sale. The lady dies and Marlowe lives to fight and, once again, be bloodied but unbowed. Until he meets Linda Loring …

  She had that fine-drawn intense look that is sometimes neurotic, sometimes sex-hungry, and sometimes just the result of drastic dieting … She had very dark eyes. She had the reddest fingernails I had ever seen … I put her in the second half of the thirties, early in the second half.

  Marlowe meets her in a bar in The Long Goodbye, where she is drinking the same rather obscure cocktail, and the exchange is the by now predictable verbal tennis match, at which she more than holds her own …

  “Perhaps you don’t ever make passes at women in bars.”

  “Not often. The light’s too dim.”

  Why Linda Loring turns out to be the woman for Marlowe ends up being one of Chandler’s least believable touches. She turns up from time to time but is not really integral to the complex plot, and she is no “smooth shiny girl, hardboiled and loaded with sin.” What she is loaded with is money—the daughter of multimillionaire newspaper proprietor Harlan Potter and everything Marlowe despises. She is the one who—not too convincingly—takes his literary virginity and, for once, Marlowe’s reaction sounds overemphatic. When she has gone, he goes over to the bed …

  There was a long dark hair on one of the pillows. There was a lump of lead at the pit of my stomach.

  Nina Van Pallandt as Eileen Wade in The Long Goodbye. Photofest (illustrations credit 7.7)

  If there were genuine sparks, Chandler didn’t manage to convey enough of them to justify Marlowe’s sense of loss:

  The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right. To say goodbye is to die a little.

  One thing Linda does do for Marlowe is loosen him up a little. After having fought the good but pointless fight, he gives in without a murmur to Miss Vermilyea in Playback.

  Miss Vermilyea is another platinum blonde, a “very expensive secretary” and, in the words of her boss—who should know—“besides being a lovely piece of female humanity, she’s as smart as a whip.” After the usual Marlowe exchange she begins to see behind the shabby suit …

  “With a little practice I might get to like you. You’re kind of cute in a low down sort of way.”

  … and after a brief encounter …

  “I hate you … Not for this, but because perfection never comes twice and with us it came too soon and I’ll never see you again and I don’t want to. It would have to be forever or not at all.”

  By the end of the story he has also succumbed to Betty Mayfield, the woman he has been hired to track …

  “Is there some other woman?” she asked softly …

  “There have been.”

  “But someone very special?”

  “There was once, for a brief moment. But that’s a long time ago now.”

  Later she wonders …

  “How can such a hard man be so gentle?”

  “If I wasn’t hard, I wouldn’t be alive. If I couldn’t sometimes be gentle, I wouldn’t deserve to be alive.”

  In the early stories women are attracted to Marlowe but have trouble dealing with his essential aloofness. Some of them, like Mavis Weld in The Little Sister, attempt to deal with it by putting him down …

  “What a way you have with the girls … It can’t be your clothes or your money or your personality. You don’t have any. You’re not too young, nor too beautiful. You’ve seen your best days …”

  A moment later she is kissing him.

  The faux naïf Orfamay Quest teases an answer from him—but it’s more from a desire to shock her than a heartfelt revelation. Why had he never married?

  “I suppose I know the answer … The ones I’d maybe like to marry—well, I haven’t what they need. The others you don’t have to marry. You just seduce them—if they don’t beat you to it.”

  Good or bad—and anything in between—women are a problem to Marlowe …

  You can have a hangover from other things than alcohol. I had one from women.

  —The Big Sleep

  Another aspect of the Battle of the Sexes that seemed to give Chandler a headache was the question of the “third sex.”

  We are now never likely to know whether he was a genuine homophobe or whether his frequent slighting references to homosexuals reflect a prevailing current attitude at a time when alternative sexual preferences were covert and for most people “gay” meant “cheerful.” Considering the times, it is surprising how often they appear in the stories, even if most of them are queenly caricatures or dangerous psychopaths.

  In Farewell, My Lovely Marlowe visits Lindsay Marriott about a possible job …

  The door opened silently and I was looking at a tall, blond man in a white flannel suit with a violet satin scarf around his neck.

  Having examined him carefully, Marlowe concludes …

  He has the general appearance of a lad who would wear a white flannel suit with a violet scarf around his neck and a cornflower in his lapel.

  Later in the book Marlowe visits a bar:

  A male cutie with henna’d hair drooped at a bungalo
w grand piano and tickled the keys lasciviously and sang “Stairway to the Stars” in a voice that had half the steps missing.

  On its own it might easily be a cheap crack of no particular significance and with no risk of a Gay Liberation cry of outrage—any more than his aside in The Big Sleep, where he referred to “a stealthy nastiness, like a fag party.” But this was back in 1940, and by the time of The Long Goodbye (1953) the tone is harsher.

  Roger Wade complains to Marlowe about the bias of book reviewers. If they thought he was homosexual, he says, they would regard him more favorably:

  “Have to take care of their own, you know. They’re all queers, you know, every damn one of them. The queer is the artistic arbiter of our age, chum. The pervert is the top guy, now.”

  Four years later Chandler (as Chandler) agrees with him …

  Perhaps these darling pansies are the symbols of a civilization of the future. If so, let them have it.

  —Letter to Michael Gilbert—July 5, 1957

  It may be cheap psychiatry to identify Chandler and Marlowe too closely, but it is surely too close to be coincidental that the softening of Marlowe in the later novels so closely parallels Chandler’s own mental attitude after the death of Cissy. In the words of the song, they were both “looking for love in all the wrong places.”