Ordered Disorder and Long Goodbyes

Issue 239

San Francisco, 2012

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While rereading Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye for the first time in several years, I was struck by this passage:

“…My man is gone three days now.”

Peters stared at me thoughtfully.

“That’s not too long,” he said. “What’s to worry about?”

This conversation occurs a few times. Whenever the detective, Philip Marlowe, states how long the missing man has been missing, the response is confusion. Three days, four, what’s the fuss? In fact this is Marlowe’s reaction when he first receives the case from the man’s wife: What’s the rush? Surely, he’ll turn up soon enough?

And these conversations always thrust me back into the present moment, reminding me that I’m reading a story that’s so distant from my time. We live in a connected, accelerated culture compared to the world of this novel, and the comparison is more salient when you consider the possibility of someone acting with indifference, today, about a disappearance that lasts two, three, or four days.

Away from these conversations, I can usually escape into Philip Marlowe’s world and inhabit the novel, even the heightened, theatrical reality that’s present in this noir detective story. Although it takes place just after World War II, I’ve discussed those years with people who lived during that time, so I can imagine the streets, I can picture the houses, I have used later versions of the same technologies that you find in this novel, which means that I can feel the sensation of existing in the rooms where Philip Marlowe does his work. But I’m thrust back to our time, again and again, in the passages that reference time, waiting, and personal connections, as those moments feel too distant, the past as a foreign country. Unheard calls, surprise guests, disappearing people, lost letters—a plot of chance encounters, fairly quickly, becomes unfamiliar to contemporary readers.

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Published in 1953, the novel takes place in a period that is, for me, ripe for detective stories: there’s just enough technology to make the atmosphere familiar—phones, cars, televisions—but not so much that solving the mystery depends on technology; the culture is less bureaucratic, looser, there’s more individual autonomy, which provides room for unusual characters and outlandish crimes; the setting is California, back when possibility and eccentricity and open space defined that still young state; the postwar economic expansion adds some propulsion, too, as this isn’t a static, banal period, it is a time when fortunes are made and lost, when cities expand, when people feel the foundation shift underneath them—which sounds just perfect if you’re shaping a detective story.

There’s pleasure in escaping into Philip Marlowe’s sensibility, too, as detective stories impose order on a disordered world. I don’t believe it is an accident that such a tumultuous, dynamic period shaped the structure of noir stories. If you live in an unstable, anarchistic period, it is probably worthwhile to tell stories with characters who follow clear moral codes and step with confidence into the unknown. Conversely, if you happen to live in a stagnant, decadent period, it is probably worthwhile to tell stories that are outlandish, fantastical, much closer to escapes into adventure than escapes into comfort. Regardless of the period, the best detective stories are never really about what happens to need detecting. The murder isn’t important, the blackmail plot is scaffolding, and the missing person is an excuse, when compared to what counts: the story of the detective.

And you can’t read Raymond Chandler without realizing that the crimes are just excuses to see how a cantankerous, dejected, but fundamentally ethical man deals with an unjust world. He muddles forward, cautiously, ponderously, speaking with a bluntness that most readers wish to possess, finding ethical clarity while living in complexity. And this particular detective, it is worth noting, plays chess at night and is probably named after Christopher Marlowe. Are parts of the novel bombastic? Exaggerated? Almost camp? Absolutely, though that’s part of the novel’s charm, and this hardboiled, heightened reality might even be necessary as a contrast. I would argue that the strangeness of the plots—in some cases the incomprehensibility of the plots—serves a purpose: the world accelerates and degrades and there’s uncertainty and unfairness and every corner contains another shadow but at least, for once, there’s somebody who cuts through the confusion.

Because the character of Philip Marlowe has drives that still resonate today—a sense of justice, an ethical code—the story supersedes its period. Every generation feels like it is an entropic, disjointed generation, so an assertive and blunt character who fights against the muck provides an exhale, regardless of when the story is set. Only at the edges is there a distance, such as those times when the reader is reminded that Philip Marlowe lived when a man could disappear for three days and few characters would understand the urgency.

And my assumption is that most people underestimate how different the past must have felt—living fifty, one hundred, two hundred years ago, wouldn’t be akin to living as you do today but without contemporary technologies, it would also shift your perceptions and how you interact with the world. Having a car, for instance, shifts your perception of distance, your perception of time. It isn’t just technology that distorts the past from our understanding, but it is difficult to remove the effects of technology on the sensations of living. Philip Marlowe has his routines, and there’s some enjoyment in watching the mere unfolding of his day—how he prepares coffee, the way he mixes a drink, when he looks through a window—but those straightforward, methodical procedures exist in a particular world, and it is easy to forget that there’s a symbiotic relationship between his behaviors and that culture.

Curiously, contemporary technology can be a problem for mysteries: if all your characters are connected, ceaselessly, it is much harder to have a missing person, missed connections, missing information. One solution is to base contemporary mysteries on the technology. The solution emerges from phone data. The detective solves the case based on what’s uncovered in the digital world. To a point, there’s satisfaction in this approach, but it is restrictive, as the story is limited by the cleverness of the conceit: the story’s quality is equivalent to the quality of the author’s idea about technology. The alternative, the traditional alternative, is to concentrate on the character, their sensibilities, behaviors, thoughts, confusions, emotions, wits, ethics, motivations, which, I would argue, is both timeless and why we turn to stories anyway.