The story starts off simple, like a string in its spool, but within a few pages when the string is pulled away, it does get tangled up in your fingers a little. Phillip Marlowe stories follow this same pattern, and whether you like the ending or not, make sense of it or not, the plot become secondary to the character of Marlowe himself. Phillip Marlowe is one of my favourite characters in literature. And yep, I dare accuse Chandler of literature.
A deadly scavenger hunt
Marlowe is hired by Mrs Murdock, a fat rather sedentary lady to find a missing dubloon from her collection, convinced that it had been taken by her wild-at-heart daughter in law. But her son is even shadier than her stories shapes up to be, and the the fat lady’s secretary is this little mouse of a woman who’s jumpy as a Vietnam war vet and as eager to please as an overly eager simp to a streamer for Mrs Murdock. On the way out of the house, he was tailed by a peer, another PI who’s got a similar task as he has.
The trail to the dubloon becomes confusing very quickly. Like the typical Marlowe or Detective Conan fashion, he runs into dead bodies, try to waltz the song and dance with the local police force that may not be necessarily sympathetic to his cause and being invited to some of the glitziest houses in LA for some romp-a-bomp Playboy level parties. And more bodies.
Phillip Marlowe is not the hero we deserve, but the one we need
Is it the best Phillip Marlowe book I’ve read so far? I don’t know. I think The Lady in the Lake is more brutal and intense. The High Window can be annoyingly confusing, which makes me question Marlowe’s actions as well in some parts of the book. But of course he can tie everything up in the end, he always does even though I don’t feel too satisfied with the explanation. Crime writers are often guilty of being too complex, but I had a huh? sorta feeling after I finished the book because there is a lack of surprise at the revelation at the end. Reminds me of when I watched Glass Onion on Netflix the other day.
But why the four stars you might ask? Seems pretty high for a book that feels pretty flat at the end. I had to justify it because I fell for Marlowe’s character in this book. There is not much rest between one chain link to the next: Marlowe has to go to the next person who might know something, and off to the next guy, talk to the cops and it just keeps going. We catch his true self at the moments of reprieve, waiting for the door to open after he presses a bell, driving to the hills of LA and describing the stunning view of the valley, or just describing a hot afternoon (“There was a drowsy smell of flowers and sun…”). We catch him strategising and playing from a chessbook Capablanca’s game, as he strategises his ways to find the solutions to his brief.
But it’s not until the end of chapter 26 that it really hit me. Just as Marlowe had a slight reprieve alone in the office, away from all the shady characters and screwballs he collected like dust throughout the day. In mid-sentence Marlowe revealed himself like an open book:
I filled and lit my pipe and sat there smoking. Nobody came in, nobody called, nothing happened, nobody cared whether I died or went to El Paso.
And I love this jaded and flawed character so much more for that.
Maybe in another life Marlowe could have made police commissioner, maybe even mayor. But he stays and does his shitty job out of a sense of obligation — A sense of obligation to the underdog, a skewed loyalty to his client based on flawed but staunch self-guided principles, perhaps some pride of what he does. In a world where ethical dirt and grime stains everybody throughout, Marlowe is Atlas holding up whatever possible good the quagmire that is Los Angeles had to offer.
