Portrait of Marlowe by Chandler

I have started reading this book again and in it I found a description of iconic private eye Philip Marlowe by his author Raymond Chandler which I found fascinating, for reasons which I will state below. Here it is:

"The date of his birth is uncertain. I think he said somewhere that he was 38 years old, but that was quite a while ago and he is no older today. He was born in a small California town called Santa Rosa about 50 miles from San Francisco. Marlowe has never spoken of his parents, and apparently he has no living relatives. I don't know why he came to Southern California, except that eventually most people do, although not all of them remain. He is slightly over six feet tall and weights above 13st 8lbs. he has dark brown hair, brown eyes, and the expression "passably good looking" would not satisfy him in the least. I don't think he looks tough, but he can be tough. If you ask me why he is a detective, I can't answer you..."

Chandler wrote this in a letter to an enquiring fan. So this descrption his fascinating for many reasons. Even in this letter, Chandler remains literary and evocative, it reads like a part of one of his novels. What is also just as interesting is the level of uncertainty: Chandler describes Marlowe physically in minimalist terms and is vague about his character's background. We get a better idea about his mindset, but even then it is more by evocation and the use of a few words than deep analysis. In sum, Chandler is writing here about someone he knows but not completely and not perfectly, rather than a character he created. So that is why I am obsessed about this quote. Now I want to find and read the whole letter.

"To swap punches with a power shovel"

"I need a man good looking enough to pick up a dame who has a sense of class, but he's got to be tough enough to swap punches with a power shovel."

I am reading Trouble Is My Business by Ramond Chandler and this is how someone describes his legendary private eye Philip Marlowe. It fits him, but it fits so many that were inspired by him and it is such a great and vivid description that I wanted to share it here. I love reading Chandler just for such lines.

Marlowe and Mozart

I am finishing The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler, which features private eye and cynical hero Philip Marlowe. In one chapter, he is held in police custody and discusses with the police officer about... Mozart. The policeman plays piano in his spare time and is actually a Mozart aficionado. Here is what he says about the composer: "You'd be surprised how difficult some of that Mozart is. (...) It sounds so simple when you hear it played well." And then: "Mozart is just music. No comment needed from the performer." And Marlowe observes in his narration: "You could see he was a man who loved to move his hands, to make little neat inconspicuous motions with them, motions without any special meaning, but smooth and flowing and light as swansdown. They gave him a feel of delicate things delicately done, but not weak. Mozart, all right. I could see that." Marlowe got Mozart in a nutshell.

#Noirvember: time for crime (fiction)

When November comes, I change my reading genre and go from horror to crime fiction (which is actually the main genre I read all year round). This is nothing new for the month, or at least nothing unique: I learned on Twitter that there is a hashtag for it: #Noirvember. I am currently reading The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler, which features legendary private eye Philip Marlowe. I was in the mood for a good old fashioned hard-boiled thriller and I want to be up to date with the crime classics (as I am not, to my great shame). What I love about Chandler, it is how he slowly builds the settings and characters to create atmosphere and suspense. I might blog more about it, until then if you have any crime read suggestions for #Noirvember, please let me know in the comments.

The Long Goodbye

Sometimes I wonder if Vraie Fiction should not be renamed Crime Fiction. Anyway, I recently finished a novel which I wanted to recommend to my readers: The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler. His longest novel, his most autobiographical, maybe the most literary, maybe also the most existentialist.It was also the one Chandler considered to be his best. In it, private eye Philip Marlowe befriends Terry Lennox, alcoholic married to the daughter of a media mogul and reluctantly helps failed writer Roger Wade, also alcoholic. Both plots intertwine and merges seamlessly, death and violence abound, in the end the dead have little to envy the living, who manage to survive but at a heavy price. They are wounded, scarred, both emotionally and physically. It's more than four hundred pages, but it never feels like it, in fact you would wish the story to last a little longer, so as not to say goodbye too early.

Dorothy Malone and The Big Sleep

I learned something quite sad yesterday: Dorothy Malone passed away. I only knew her from a single scene in The Big Sleep, where she played the geeky yet sexy bookshop clerk who flirts with private eye Philip Marlowe. It is an extended scene from the novel, yet it remains quite short, but very memorable. I don't want to sound nostalgic, but you don't make seduction scenes like this anymore, where no innuendo is lost, nothing is gratuitous, every word, look, movement is so effective. So I decided to share it on this blog as an homage to the actress.

Reading The Big Sleep again

"It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display a handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue socks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed detective ought to be. I was calling on four millions dollars."

Philip Marlowe, describing himself and his environment in The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler.

The books we re-read are more important than the ones we read. This is the case for me right now, as I had been wanting to revisit this crime fiction classic for ages, since I had read it the first time in college/cégep in our class of American literature. Now I am reading it solely out of pleasure, and in the original language. The start of the novel is still pure hardboiled crime fiction bliss and maybe the best the genre ever gave. There were private eyes before, but none truly defined the genre like Marlowe did. I might blog about the novel more in the weeks to come, right now I just wanted to share its first few lines, because they are that good. I also wanted to encourage my readers to discover or rediscover The Big Sleep.

The death of a femme fatale

You might think Vraie Fiction is turning into an obituary blog since the 12th of August. But I learned yesterday that the legendary Lauren Bacall died. She was 89. I know at this age, it is not a tragedy, but all the same, I have to confess it saddened me more than the suicide of Robin Williams. She was the kind of sophisticated beauty that we don't see very often. Strangely enough, I watched The Big Sleep again this weekend, in which she played femme fatale Vivien Rutledge so brilliantly. Ironic, that a femme fatale should live to 89. This is the first thing that came to my mind.

The Big Sleep (just because)

I was just thinking about it: I am in the mood to watch some old black and white crime movies, some good old fashioned stuff full of atmosphere. I thought about watching The Big Sleep and I am very tempted to buy it. I read The Big Sleep in cégep, in its French translation (by Boris Vian), for a course in American literature. I never read it again, even though I read now most of the novels of Raymond Chandler (well, the majority of them). The movie, however, I watched a few times, the first time in cégep for the same course of American literature. It's one I never get bored of. The plot is a bit muddled up at times, it has differences from the novel that don't quite work, but there is such atmosphere! Oh and there is Humphrey Bogart. He does not quite look like Philip Marlowe, he is a bit too old for one, but he's got this attitude. And he's Bogart. I recently discovered the trailer on YouTube. I watched it over and over again today. I uploaded it here, because it has plenty of atmosphere too.

An orchid in the snow

"Sternwood: I seem to exist largely on heat, like a newborn spider. The orchids are an excuse for the heat. Do you like orchids? 
Marlowe: Not particularly. 
Sternwood: Nasty things! Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men, and their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption."

I know I already quoted the above here, but I had to use it again for this post. I was looking for a new picture for this month and the new year, something that would look like winter yet not too much like Christmas. So I found this one dad sent me, an orchid in the conservatory, where you cans ee the snow in the background. I thought it was an interesting contrast. And at the moment I am reading Farewell, My Lovely. Not the same novel, but it still from the same author and it features Philip Marlowe. So to kick start my year as a reader I am reading a crime fiction classic and to kick start this year as a blogger (yesterday's post was barely more than an announcement, but I will come back to it), I have this interesting picture. Please feel free to give me your impressions about it.

A crime fiction archetype

Since this is a blog of fiction, and sometimes a blog of literature, I thought I would put a quote about an archetype character in crime fiction, maybe the archetype. I got this quote from The Thrilling Detective website. This is of course from the great and immortal Raymond Chandler, in The Simple Art of Murder. Private eyes have changed and developed since then, but the chore of each and every one of them is in these words. When you get this core, you have the foundations for a great character.

"In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor -- by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things.
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He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man's money dishonestly and no man's insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks -- that is, with a rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.
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The story is this man's adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in."

Why I read crime fiction

Leigh Russell recently blogged about why she writes crime fiction. I don't write any (yet), but I thought that the appeal of crime fiction would be an interesting topic for a post. So why do I read crime fiction?

While I read "serious" literature and even studied it as an academic, I am a genre reader. Crime fiction especially. The first novels I managed to get through as a child was Agatha Christie's. After a few years, I grew out of whodunits and Christie is now a far away memory. But a few years after, when I was a young adult, I started reading Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and then a string of American crime novelists, I started reading hardboiled novels, romans noirs, etc. And I got hooked again. I am still.

I read crime fiction because it is the genre of modernity, it is the fiction that espouses better our time and because it is also one that often shows a reality that may be far from pretty but that is necessary to see. I say reality, as I think it reveals it, albeit sometimes in the exagerated tones of caricature and escapism, life and civilisation as it is. Crime fiction belongs to realism.

It is also a hell of an entertaining genre. It deals with sex, violence, greed, jealousy, anger, the primitive pulsions of mankind. That is always nice to witness it. Those emotions create such brilliant, beautiful, larger than life characters.There is a cathartic notion, central to crime fiction. There is also a certain notion of solace in it: when in reality (always way to real in comparison to even a realistic genre) urban violence and criminality is helped by endemic corruption, the impotence of the justice system, sometimes a flawed police force, it is nice to see that the good guys can win, at least in fiction.

So that's why I read crime fiction.

What to read where

This is a follow up of this post. I thought about it quite a lot, and a recent post by Leigh Russell got me thinking about it again (and by the way Leigh enjoy your time in the Midi). As I said pretty often here I am a seasonal reader, I read according to the time of the year (horror stories before Halloween, novels set in a heatwave if I am in the middle of one, etc). Maybe I should be, sometimes, a "setting" reader. I thought about it a lot: one understands a country better through its literature. So here is a list of authors or titles I would read, or recommend to read, when I/one visits a place, or travels to a place (disclaimer: I did not visit all these places):

 -Chicoutimi: The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi. Well, duh!
-Japan: something by Yukio Mishima. Read one novel of him, in cégep. If I ever go to Japan, I will pick up one of Mishima's work.
-Florence: Machiavel, in the text if I can, or with a translation on the side.
-Los Angeles: Raymond Chandler, definitely.
-Oxfordshire: Something by Tolkien. You visit the English countryside and you see the Shire, like my dad remarked recently.
-Rome: I would probably reread Bear's Roman Women. I know, I know. I am shamelessly plugging Burgess again. But it is such a great read. I would probably try to read some Italian poets, in the text. I would ask an Italian friend to give me a few tips. Not Dante, I got fed up with him.
-South Africa: something by Deon Meyer. I only read Dead at Daybreak, basically a crime novel about the ghosts of Apartheid, but I want to read more of this author. My mum made me discover this one. It has been too long.
-Train journeys (especially long ones): No, not this one! If you read French, try this one. Tonino Benacquista is sadly not very well known outside the French speaking world. A shame.
-Sea journeys, or beach holidays: Moby Dick or Treasure Island. Just because.

Orchids, corruption and literature

My father grows orchids and I took this picture last time we visited my parents. I have been wanting to put it here for a while to accompany this quote I have been wanting to put on this blog. It is from The Big Sleep. I read the original classic of Raymond Chandler fifteen years ago in cégep in its French translation. I want to read it again in its original language. I do not remember exactly what was written in the novel, but in the movie the quote goes like this:

"Sternwood: I seem to exist largely on heat, like a newborn spider. The orchids are an excuse for the heat. Do you like orchids? 
Marlowe: Not particularly. 
Sternwood: Nasty things! Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men, and their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption."

Evidence that crime fiction can also be genuine literature. Orchids can be quite creepy plants if you think about it: their flowers have something ophidian or arachnoid. I never thought they smelt much of anything, but their beauty has indeed something nasty.  

Une certaine nausée

Raymond Chandler a déjà dit de Montréal (je l'ai appris de Kevin Burton Smith dans cet article) qu'elle était "almost as crooked as we are". Le scandale Bernier-Couillard lui a donné raison. En lisant cet article sur les anciennes amours maffieuses de Julie Couillard, je ne peux m'empêcher d'avoir une certaine nausée, parce que la corruption doit quand même avoir des limites. Promis, juré, je ne penserai plus jamais que la relation entre Pierre Gauthier et Gabrielle Scarfo dans Omertà était tirée par les cheveux. Cela dit, Gabrielle avait beaucoup plus de classe, Julie Couillard est une arriviste vulgaire et méprisable. Qu'un ministre ait pu aimer une pareille femme, franchement, ça me met en colère.

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Yes, I am talking about the Bernier-Couillard scandal again. There is always something new to dig, it seems, and it defies imagination. I swear I will never consider Omertà far-fetched anymore. And talking about crime fiction, and since this blog is about fiction, somebody has to use that story as a base for a novel. We might need this as a catharsis.