Raymond Chandler may not have invented noir, but he gave the form a Southern California edge. For him, literature emerged from voice more than from content or genre. “There are no vital and significant forms of art,” he wrote in 1950. “There is only art, and precious little of that.” Chandler’s first novel, The Big Sleep, published (like Ask the Dust) in 1939, represents a case in point. The book is narrated by Philip Marlowe, who evolved from the private eye Chandler, in his early stories, called Mallory, a nod, perhaps, to Sir Thomas Malory, who wrote Le Morte d’Arthur. Certainly, the detective moves through the novel, and the six that followed, like a tarnished knight. As with all of the author’s fiction, the plot is often spotty, but when it comes to Chandler, plot has never been the point. Rather, it is the character’s hard-earned knowledge that draws us, especially as the extortion case he’s been hired to handle explodes like a brush fire in a Santa Ana wind. “What did it matter where you lay once you were dead?” Chandler writes. “In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on the top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now.”•
This article appears in Issue 31 of Alta Journal.
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