Chandler's Misogyny and The Little Sister

 A few weeks ago I noted Michael Connelly’s love of Chapter 13 of Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister. I have no quarrel with Connelly’s admiration for that passage. Reading it made me remember it had been a long time since I read The Little Sister, so I gave it another go.

Times change, but that rarely puts me off a book. What we would call “historical fiction” if it were written today gives an opportunity to see how things used to be without modern points of view re-interpreting the times for better or worse.

We change. Books I loved twenty years ago don’t do it for me anymore. (See Spillane, Mickey.) I can still appreciate the artistry, but the enterprise as a whole no longer moves me.

There are also books I didn’t care for when I first read them; second readings showed how badly I misjudged them. James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss and Adrian McKinty’s Dead I Well May Be fall into this category. (In my defense, I read both for the first time during a month-long bout of mononucleosis I doubt I would have liked the movie L.A. Confidential during that month.)

Tangential to what’s above, I remembered an article in The Atlantic by Katy Waldman that discussed Chandler’s misogynistic tendencies; Megan Abbott followed up. At the time, my initial reaction was similar to Megan’s first impression. Also like Megan, I changed my mind. It just took me longer.

Full disclosure: I am not what anyone would consider woke. I say things that appall The Beloved Spouse™ on an almost daily basis. She knows they’re either for comic effect, because I’m trying out something for a character to say, or are strictly factual but insensitive. From what I’ve seen of the Warriors for Wokeness, these comments eliminate me right there, regardless of what actions I may or may not take.

That said, I was appalled by my recent reading of The Little Sister. Chandler wrote noir. Femme fatales are a staple of noir. I get that. It’s why he gets a pass for Helen Grayle in Farewell My Lovely. The problem with The Little Sister is that, while Dolores Gonzales may play that position, Chandler’s descriptions of the other primary women in the book are no more flattering.

Orfamay Quest, the little sister of the title, is a conniving sociopath who’d sell out her family for a few bucks. Gonzales is beyond slutty and either killed or fingered several people. Mavis Weld comes off best, and she’s a bitch for most of the book until he finds she at least has a bottom.

The lesser characters fare no better. There’s the orange-haired police stenographer and the woman in the city offices. Both are described in disparaging terms even though neither does anything damaging to Marlowe.

That got me to thinking about Chandler’s other novels. In The Big Sleep¸ Carmen Sternwood is a nut job and  Agnes Lozelle is a selfish harpy; Vivian Regan comes off best of the three and she spends most of the book sexually teasing Marloe to get him to do her bidding, though her motives are good. Eileen Wade in The Long Goodbye is a hot mess start to finish; the veneer of worthiness she’s given early on is due almost entirely to Marlowe’s sexual attraction. (It’s been forever since I read either The Lady in the Lake  or The High Window, so I’m leaving them aside for now.)

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve used women as bad guys. I even used one as a femme fatale. By and large, I think my female characters come off at least as well as the men. The only women in a Chandler novel I can think of who resembles a good person more than superficially is Anne Riordan in Farewell My Lovely.

Raymond Chandler’s books were among the primary reasons I got into writing seriously. I have no idea how many times I’ve read The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely, and The Long Goodbye. I can point to two things that have lowered him in my esteem;

1.    I read The World of Raymond Chandler: In His Own Words. Editor Barry Day uses Chandler’s letters to give a picture of the author, who never wrote a memoir. The image that emerges is that of a selfish prig who has serious problems with women. Anyone who knows the story of the relationship he had with his wife is already aware of this.

2.    I got into reading Dashiell Hammett and better appreciated the virtues of telling the goddamn story and getting out.

I’m not finished reading Chandler. I’m sure I’ll read the big three again, though he’s on an extended hiatus right now. It takes a lot to offend me when reading a book, but there were several places in The Little Sister where he had me thinking, “Okay, Ray, I get it. She’s a slut/bitch/cunt. Move on.” I’m sure that’s going to color my reading from now on, even when I’m not actively thinking it.

The short stories don’t have so much of this, nor of the other naval-gazing aspects of what it’s like to be a drugged Philip Marlowe, or his too often misanthropic observations. I have the complete collection. Maybe it’s time to give them another look.

Michael Connelly and The Little Sister

 

I like to watch You Tube videos of author appearances, especially interviews. I recently saw Michael Connelly mention he regularly returns to Chapter 13 of Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister for inspiration when he wants to be sure he’s getting LA right.

The Little Sister was published in 1949 so I wondered how what Chandler wrote serves Connelly today, as it obviously serves him well. I opened my copy to Chapter 13 and saw right away what Connelly is talking about. I suspect you will, too.

One small bit of context: private detective Philip Marlowe has had a rough day.

Now, in Chandler’s words: 

I drove east on Sunset but I didn't go home. At La Brea I turned north and swung over to Highland, out over Cahuenga Pass and down onto Ventura Boulevard, past Studio City and Sherman Oaks and Encino. There was nothing lonely about the trip. There never is on that road. Fast boys in stripped-down Fords shot in and out of the traffic streams, missing fenders by a sixteenth of an inch, but somehow always missing them. Tired men in dusty coupes and sedans winced and tightened their grips on the wheel and ploughed on north and west toward home and dinner, an evening with the sports page, the blatting of the radio, the whining of their spoiled children the gabble of their silly wives. I drove on past the gaudy neon and the false fronts behind them, the sleazy hamburger joints that look like palaces under the colors, the circular drive-ins as gay as circuses with the chipper hard-eyed carhops, the brilliant counters, and the sweaty greasy kitchens that would have poisoned a toad. Great double trucks rumbled down over Sepulveda from Wilmington and San Pedro and crossed toward the Ridge Route, starting up in low-low from the traffic lights with a growl of lions in the zoo.

Behind Encino an occasional light winked from the hills through thick trees. The homes of screen stars. Screen stars, phooey. The veterans of a thousand beds. Hold it, Marlowe. You're not human tonight.

The air got cooler. The highway narrowed. The cars were so few now that the headlights hurt. The grade rose against the chalk walls and at the top a breeze, unbroken from the ocean, danced casually across the night.

 I ate dinner at a place near Thousand Oaks. Bad but quick. Feed ‘em and throw ‘em out. Lots of business. We can't bother with you sitting over your second cup of coffee, mister. You're using money space. See those people over there behind the rope? They want to eat. Anyway they think they have to. God knows why they want to eat here. They could do better home out of a can. They're just restless. Like you. They have to get the car out and go somewhere. Sucker-bait for the racketeers that have taken over the restaurants. Here you go again. You're not human tonight, Marlowe.

I paid off and stopped at a bar to drop a brandy on top of the New York cut. Why New York, I thought. It was Detroit where they made the machine tools. I stepped out into the night air that nobody had yet found out how the option. But a lot of people were probably trying. They'd get around to it.

I drove on to the Oxnard cut off and turned back along the ocean. The big eight-wheelers and sixteen-wheelers were streaming north, all hung over with orange lights. On the right the great fat solid Pacific trudging into shore like a scrub woman going home. No moon, no fuss, hardly a sound of the surf. No smell. None of the harsh wild smell of the sea. A California ocean. California, the department store state. The most of everything and the best of nothing. Here we go again. You're not human tonight, Marlowe.

[He thinks about the case for a couple of paragraphs.]

Malibu. More movie stars. More pink and blue bathtubs. More tufted beds. More Chanel No. 5. More Lincoln Continentals and Cadillacs. More wind-blown hair and sunglasses and attitudes and pseudo-refined voices and waterfront morals. Now, wait a minute. Lots of nice people work in pictures. You've got the wrong attitude, Marlowe. you're not human tonight.

I smelled Los Angeles before I got to it. It smelled stale and old like a living room that had been closed too long. But the colored lights fooled you. The lights were wonderful. There ought to be a monument to the man who invented neon lights. Fifteen stories high, solid marble. There's a boy who really made something out of nothing.

Then he goes to a movie he doesn’t like.

 

I see how this helps Connelly but there is a downside: very little had actually changed over the past 75 years.

Spring's Favorite Reads

 City Primeval, Elmore Leonard. It had been years since I read this. I’ve been meaning to get around to it and the impending release of FX’s Justified extension got me off my ass. A wonderful book, maybe Leonard’s best crime novel. It was also made to order for Raylan Givens to stand in for Ray Cruz. City Primeval shows all the things that made Leonard a legend, and should serve well in Graham Yost’s and Timothy Olyphant’s hands.

 

Because the Night, James D. F. Hannah. Hannah may have to make more room in his house for awards if he insists on writing books like this. He manages to pay homage to the PI tradition at the same time as breaking new ground, never allowing things to seem stale or asking us to suspend too much disbelief. Henry Malone and Woody are a pair worthy of the best PI/sidekick duos, and Crash is a brilliant addition to the series.

 

The Johnson County War, Bill O’Neal. Class warfare in America is nothing new. Rustling was a problem in 1892 Wyoming, but the big cattlemen felt as if all the government land was theirs by divine right and resented homesteaders and small ranchers who staked legal claims. The cattlemen’s methods became so overbearing juries refused to return rustling convictions. The big boys then hired gunmen from Texas to kill anyone they decided had to go, rustler or not. The locals fought back. This is a meticulously research and fascinating look at an episode many thought only happened in movies.

 

Safe and Sound, J.D. Rhoades. I’ve been reading his books for years, off and on, but a while back I noticed they were getting so good I needed to take a more comprehensive look. Turns out they were always that good. Safe and Sound is part of the Jack Keller series and has all the action one could want without ever putting a reader in a position of thinking “Oh, really?” Rhoades is now on the list of people I need to make sure do not fall through the cracks.

 

The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler. It’s The Big Sleep. Damn right I liked it. Again.

 

Sunset and Jericho, Sam Wiebe. The Wakeland series keeps getting better, and it was good to start with. This one deals with politics and money (hard to do a story about politics that doesn’t involve money these days) and, while a fascinating study of the pressures between the haves and have nots, it’s not soon going to show up on the Vancouver Chamber of Commerce’s reading list. Which is even more reason you should check it out.

 

Raymond Chandler, Misogynist?

Megan Abbott started a bit of a sensation recently by writing in Slate about the perils of appreciating Raymond Chandler in the era of #MeToo. Abbott was prompted by an article Katy Waldman penned for The New Yorker back in April that took Whit Reynolds’s challenge to her Twitter followers to “describe yourself like a male author would” and ran with it. There is no longer any controversy that all dead cis white male authors were misogynists. It is only a question of how misogynistic.

I’m a crime guy and Abbott focused on Waldman’s comments about Chandler so that’s where I’m going to focus, the primary position of this article being: Enough, already. Chandler was a lot of things. An alcoholic, absolutely. A dismal failure in everything he tried to do except writing. The more I learn about him the more I am convinced he was a first-rate asshole. Misogynist? I’m not so sure.

There are essentially five women in Chandler’s work: three individuals, the victims, and the harlots. The individuals are worth looking into more for what they say about Philip Marlowe than about Chandler. Vivian Regan in The Big Sleep is a worthy adversary. The sexual tension between them was well utilized in the original film adaptation by bringing Bogart and Bacall together. Vivian is smart, knows what she wants, and is willing to take action to get it. She’d fit into a 21th Century story quite well.

Ann Riordan of Farewell, My Lovely is the best person of all the women Marlowe meets, but she’s also the best person he meets, period. He, of course, wants nothing to do with her. Many have tried to explain this, but I’m an Occam’s Razor guy and look for the simplest reason that makes sense: He likes her, he appreciates her, and he knows he’s no good for her. Much is made of Marlowe’s knight errancy (yes, I made that up; get over it) but rarely is it shown better than here.

And then there’s Eileen Wade of The Long Goodbye. Marlowe might have done his best for her, at least until he found out she was imperfect, after which he did his worst. Chandler’s long “taxonomy” of blondes Waldman decries does less to disparage the demographic than to show Eileen’s perfection. Discovering the clay between her toes is more than Marlowe can bear.

What Chandler really describes in Marlowe is a man with a complicated, unsuccessful, and likely scarred relationship to women. Someone on Facebook—I truly wish I remember who, and I apologize for my failure—mentioned he had the idea Marlowe had been badly hurt by a woman as a young man and never really got over it. That makes as much sense as anything, especially when considered in the context of his treatment of Lola Barsaly in “Red Wind,” for whom he takes to no small amount of trouble and some expense so she won’t find out the dead man she still loves was “just another four-flusher.” Marlowe doesn’t always treat women the way they’d like to be treated, or the way we might like to see them treated, but he’s not a misogynist.

Why are we even talking about this? There are two related points that neither Waldman nor Abbott make that could be all we need to know. First is that Chandler was writing to make a buck. He’d failed at everything and turned to writing for Black Mask because he’d read some stories and figured he could do at least that well and get paid in the bargain. He changed the genre forever, but let’s not forget why he wrote in the first place: for sales. He typed his manuscripts up on half sheets of paper so there would never be more than that much space between engaging similes, not because he was making symbolic references.

Which brings us to the second point: he was writing what readers expected of the genre at the time. Yes, he elevated the language, but he wrote to sell to audiences he shared with writers long forgotten. The conventions of the day included a casual societal misogyny and racism that would be unacceptable today. It’s always risky, and presumptuous, to judge those of the past by the standards of the present, and this is no exception.

And what if one dives deeper than I have here and decides Marlowe was a misogynist? That doesn’t mean Chandler was. He was a drunk and an arrogant asshole, but I’ve seen nothing that shows a pattern of poor behavior toward women. We all write characters who do not share our virtues, and we all do it for our own reasons. Reading too much into the author based on his fiction is risky business I doubt too many would want to have applied to us.

And even then, so what? Are there not enough misogynists (racists, homophobes, whatever) in the word right now, today, for us to take issue with? Whether Chandler or Mailer or Updike had issues with women is water under the bridge. Some seem to enjoy taking down people who can no longer be hurt, maybe because they also can’t defend themselves. Would our time not be more constructively spent taking action about those who are causing damage today?

Chandler's Heroes

(This essay originally appeared in Spinetingler Magazine, October 17, 2013)

In his 1950 essay, “The Simple Art of Murder,” Raymond Chandler deconstructs the classical idea of a mystery, replacing it with the form begun by Dashiell Hammett, who “gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse.” Chandler goes on to describe his idea of the perfect detective with these now famous words:

“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. 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 rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness. The story is his 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, I think the world would be a very safe place to live in, and yet not too dull to be worth living in.”

A lot changes in sixty years; a lot changes in twenty, though conditions maybe not as quickly as attitudes. In his 1973 film based on Chandler’s the Long Goodbye, Robert Altman set out to do to Chandler what Chandler had done to the writers of the classic English-style mystery: to mark Chandler’s hero, Philip Marlowe, as an anachronism. Referring to the character as “Rip van Marlowe,” he built the movie roughly around Chandler’s story while showing what he and screenwriter Leigh Brackett thought would happen had Marlowe existed into the 70s.

Altman and Brackett may have delighted in the sense of irony they sought to create, but the joke was on them. Chandler always knew Marlowe was an anachronism; references to it are all through his books. In the second paragraph of The Big Sleep, while Marlowe waits to meet General Sternwood, Chandler writes:

“…Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn’t seem to be really trying.”

Later, puzzling over a chess problem while trying to ignore Carmen Sternwood lying naked in his bed:

“Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn’t a game for knights.”

The Big Sleep  was Chandler’s first novel. If he knew even then Marlowe was an anachronism, when would Marlowe have fit in?  

Any time. Any time at all.

What setting did Chandler envision for Marlowe? Cherry picking descriptions from the essay, it’s a world:

·         “in which hotels and apartment houses and celebrated restaurants are owned by men who made their money out of brothels.” Maybe not brothels, but there is a lot of now-legitimate money in this country and Canada originally made through illegal means. As Balzac said, “Behind every great fortune there is a crime.” In Chinatown, Noah Cross, as unpleasant a villain as ever filled the screen, says: “Course I'm respectable. I'm old. Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.” The Kennedys and Bronfmans made fortunes during Prohibition. They’re unique only in that they maintained high enough profiles to pop to mind.

·         “[where] the nice man down the hall is a boss of the numbers racket.” Or serial killer. Or has held young women hostage for years with no one any the wiser.

·         “where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket.” Bootleg liquor may be gone, but now the opportunity exists to send a man to a for-profit prison in which the judge owns stock; mere hypocrisy is now passé.

·         “where no man can walk down a dark street in safety because law and order are things we talk about but refrain from practicing; a world where you may witness a hold-up in broad daylight and see who did it, but you will fade quickly back into the crowd rather than tell anyone, because the hold-up men may have friends with long guns, or the police may not like your testimony…” This has been true, and will continue to be true, as long as there are criminals who have criminal friends or associates.

·         “…and in any case the shyster for the defense will be allowed to abuse and vilify you in open court, before a jury of selected morons, without any but the most perfunctory interference from a political judge.” Any rape victim can attest to the first part. Avoiding jury duty may surpass tax fraud as the true national pastime. As for the judges, how much do you know about the names on the ballot? If there is even a ballot.

Who makes things right if the systems—both de jure and de facto—do not? It has to be someone with a knowledge of both, and only tangential involvement with either. Someone whose continued employment does not depend on whose feathers he doesn’t ruffle. An outsider.

Private investigators are outsiders by definition; otherwise he’d be a cop. (We’re talking about fictional detectives. The lives of actual private detectives resemble what we read about not at all, with rare exceptions.) Working as a PI and not as a cop has its plusses and minuses. A PI cannot compel anyone to talk to him, can be beaten up with impunity, and can be arrested for doing things a cop does almost without thought.

The good news—at least in fiction—is the PI gets to look into things a cop never touches. A cop concerns himself with who and what; why is nice, but is primarily important as a way to get to what, or to help to convince a jury as to who. His caseload is too great to do otherwise. Private eyes are paid to find out why, which often compels some worthy introspection. Cops close cases; PIs provide closure.

PI stories are also better suited for ambivalent endings. Cops are paid to catch bad guys. The PI can appreciate the bittersweet nature of all cases, balancing the satisfaction of solving the mystery with the knowledge that things can never be put right; the dead are still gone. The cop catches the killer and exacts a measure of justice; the PI may be brought in to clean up the mess that doesn’t quite meet the standard of illegality.

A writer willing to lay the groundwork can place the private investigator into any manner of criminal situations police may not deal with. Once in, the PI is like a tick on a dog: hell to get out. Ross Macdonald and Declan Hughes explore dirty family secrets. Travis McGee is, in most respects, an insurance investigator who earns a living collecting recovery fees, just not from insurance companies. Sam Spade is motivated by the death of his partner; the demise of Archer as a person interests him little. He solves the murder almost as an afterthought.

PI stories are somewhat out of favor right now. TV and movies ignore them. In written fiction, PIs have become something of a cult thing, with the exception of those writers who were already established. Have the stories outlived their time, much as Altman claimed Chandler’s hero had? More likely this is a low ebb; the tide will come in again. The public’s fear of terrorism has led to the rise of the apocalyptic thriller. Omnipotent government agencies send agents who make the James Bond of Ian Fleming look like Miss Marple out to thwart baddies who want to destroy “our way of life.” (Jack Bauer, anyone?) This is not a time for outsiders; it’s outsiders who caused all this trouble in the first place. No one wants to deal with the troublemaker who turns our protectors on their backs to show how much clay is in their feet.

Public perception of recent events may herald a change. Government interference into people’s lives—real and perceived—has not been well received on either the left or the right. People may become more sympathetic to the outsider who holds abuses up to the light when even a person of good conscience may not be able to do so from the inside, as is shown by the mixed reactions given to the actions of Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and Chelsea Manning.

Who steps into the breach when people have had their fill of super-governmental agencies? Jack Bauer is not going to go private

It must be an outsider—almost by definition—but an outsider with an inviolable code. (Jack Reacher does not apply. Reacher doesn’t just hear a different drummer; he has his own marching band.) This outsider knows going in he won’t get everything he wants, and understands things will never get put right again; the ripples of what he’s investigating spread too far. His victory is in the struggle itself. He’s a man (or woman; the characteristics are not unique to men) who may need to appear to be bent but whose compass can be relied on to point him in the right direction.

In the beginning of The Little Sister, Chandler wrote in Marlowe’s voice:

“It was one of those clear, bright summer mornings we get in the early spring in California before the high fog sets in. The rains are over. The hills are still green and in the valley across the Hollywood hills you can see snow on the high mountains. The fur stores are advertising their annual sales. The call houses that specialize in sixteen-year-old virgins are doing a land office business. And in Beverly Hills the jacaranda trees are beginning to bloom.”

The man we’re discussing sees both the beauty and the corruption, understands they can never be separated, and does not allow his disdain for one detract from his appreciation of the other. The kind of man, who, “If there were enough like him, … the world would be a very safe place to live in, and yet not too dull to be worth living in.”

When this man becomes irrelevant we’ll have bigger problems than deciding which book to read.

Best Reads for May

Tommy Red, Charlie Stella. As good as any of his books. Maybe better. I had more to say a few weeks ago.

What Do You Care What Other People Think? Richard Feynman. I don’t go in much for hero worship, but if I could spend a few hours talking with anyone, alive or dead, I’d pick Richard Feynman. His attitude toward life and learning and how to conduct himself seems to me to be pretty much the way to live. Fascinating in every way imaginable. This is the book where he discusses his work on the Rogers Commission that investigated the Challenger disaster and the insights he unveils through that are, as always, more than expected, no matter how much you expected.

The Digger’s Game, George V. Higgins. I can see why Higgins isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Even more dialog-driven than The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Digger tells the reader nothing and shows damn little. You pick everything up from listening to conversations to piece things together for yourself. This is much like what it must have been like for Higgins as a prosecutor listening to wiretaps. It requires investment on the reader’s part—the dialog is so oblique in places it’s almost obtuse—but the payoff is always there. Writers who want to improve their dialog skills need to read every Higgins book they can find, whether they like his style or not, just to understand what he’s doing.

The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler. It’s been a while since I came back to this one. It’s Chandler’s masterpiece and never fails to remind me why I feel in love with his writing. My appreciation of Chandler as a person diminishes a little every time I learn more about him, but when his writing was good, no one was ever better.

February's Best Reads

A busy month, was February. (Channeling Penguins’ announcer Bob Errey.) The shortest month of the year and one that required taking care of some things that had backed up over the holidays. I didn’t read as much as I like to, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t read.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, Lynne Truss. Read it before and learned and laughed a lot. Didn’t learn as much this time—I should hope not—laughed just as much. While not as detailed as some grammarians and punctuationistas might like, Truss does take the time to explain through example why her nit-pickiness is important. Or should be. (She made her point well enough with me that I copied and pasted the title from the book’s Amazon page lest I bollocks the punctuation, though I do regret her omission of the Oxford comma.)

No More Heroes, Ray Banks. Yes, it was England month at Castle Schadenfreude. No More Heroes was the first of Banks’s books I read, asked to review it by New Mystery Reader way back in 2009. The third of his Cal Innes series, I liked it so much then I not only started working my way through his oeuvre, I jumped all over a Kindle collection of all four of the Innes books when one became available a couple of years ago. I’ve changed in the past seven years—Hillary Clinton would say I’ve evolved—and I’ve learned a lot about writing, storytelling, and reading. This book still kicks ass.

Bay City Blues, Raymond Chandler. Not a novel, maybe not even long enough to be a novella, but way too long to be a short story. I have the Collected Stories Everyman’s Library put out in 2002 and have read them all, but it’s been a while. Peter Rozovsky quoted the opening of Bay City Blues in a blog comment a few weeks ago and I had to look it up. Then, of course I had to read the whole thing. Which led to Red Wind, my favorite of Chandler’s shorter works for how well it describes Marlowe’s chivalrous attitude, but I’ve yet to finish that one in February and there have to be rules. My tastes have moved more toward Hammett than Chandler over the past few years, but it was still a treat to be reminded how good Chandler was when he was good, and in Bay City Blues he’s very, very good at what made him Chandler. What was that opening line, you say? “It must have been Friday because the fish smell from the Mansion House coffee-shop next door was strong enough to build a garage on.” In the same paragraph he mentions he “had my heels in the groove on my desk” and any questions I had about how to spend my evening were gone.

Style

Rick Ollerman turned the tables on me in his interview last week: he asked me a question:

It does bring up an interesting question, though, one you probably have an opinion on yourself. Once you have several books under your belt, don’t you ever wonder if you really can change your voice or your style in any substantive way and still remain original? I wonder about that.

I almost responded with an editor’s note, but Twenty Questions interviews are already plenty long, and his question deserved more than a throwaway comment.

I probably think about style more than any other aspect of writing. I suppose this makes sense. As a reader I can forgive a multitude of sins in story, plot, some of character, and even of cohesiveness, so long as the writing itself grips me. This is why I so rarely enjoy best sellers: they don’t often have any style. (Unless “generically inoffensive” is a style. If it is, I don’t like it.)

I write because of Raymond Chandler. I “discovered” the Philip Marlowe stories a little over twenty years ago and thought trying to tell such a story would be great fun and a challenge to boot. I had no delusions about being that good—or any good, for that matter—but my music career had gone tits up and I needed to fill the hours I used to spend practicing. Writing was a good outlet, and I appeared to have some aptitude for it.

Chandler was, of course, a stylist more than anything. His characters tend to have similarities from book to book and his plots can be incomprehensible. I read him for how the words roll as much into my ears as my eyes. From him I discovered Robert B. Parker and rediscovered Mickey Spillane. Early on I realized I could open an unfamiliar book by an author I knew well to a random spot with characters I didn’t know and tell within a page who wrote it.

Writing about style, Chandler once said:

"The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off."

There are only so many stories. (Seven? Twelve? I forget.) All the rest are variations. What makes them stand apart? The manner of the telling. Style.

It’s not like an author can pick a style and be successful at it. Style chooses the writer as much as the writer chooses a style. I love the way Chandler and James Lee Burke fall on the ear, but I’d come across as a complete boob if I tried to imitate them. The Muse puts a voice in a writer’s head and the writer’s primary job is to identify and capture it, and shape it to suit his needs the best he can.

James M. Cain said:

I make no conscious effort to be tough, or hardboiled, or grim, or any of the things I am usually called. I merely try to write as the character would write, and I never forget that the average man, from the fields, the streets, the bars, the offices and even the gutters of his country, has acquired a vividness of speech that goes beyond anything I could invent, and that if I stick to this heritage, this logos of the American countryside, I shall attain a maximum of effectiveness with very little effort.

I make no conscious effort to write like Cain, either. (Good thing.) His philosophy holds for me. The Penns River books work, if they do, because I carry the patterns and rhythms of Western Pennsylvania speech within me as naturally as a fish breathes water. The Beloved Spouse spots it if we’ve been to visit my parents more than a day or two, my slipping back into the accent and rhythms as I hear them more around me. That’s where the style for the Penns River stories comes from. I might as well bring it back in a jar when I make one of my half dozen trips there each year.

Though I come from a working class background I have also circulated in white collar and upper class communities, largely as a result of my previous life as a classical musician. (Rich people are always happy to show themselves as “patrons of the arts” and can usually be depended on not to wear their condescension too much on their sleeves when mingling.) The working class are a lot more fun to talk with, or to listen to. Their manner of expression is just more interesting. That’s not to say they’re always right—a sizeable number of blue collar types are in the tank for Donald Trump, and that’s just stupid—but they’re a hell of a lot more entertaining, and their use of language doesn’t always make you feel as if you should keep one hand on your wallet. Frankly, I’m delighted my use of language tends to fall on that side of proper. My speech and grammar are much like Calvin Coolidge’s sense of humor: I can talk as good as anyone when I feel like it. I just don’t often feel like it.

How does all this address Rick’s question? “Once you have several books under your belt, don’t you ever wonder if you really can change your voice or your style in any substantive way and still remain original?” Not to get all Bill Clinton about it, but that depends on the definition of “change.” All styles evolve. (At least they should.) It’s a sign of growth, of the author expanding horizons looking for a better way to tell his or her stories. The stories matter, too. Telling a different kind of story often requires a different style in the telling.

My Penns River series has a different style than the Nick Forte books. It’s more than the difference in first-person vs. third-person point of view. Forte’s books allow for more introspection and maintain the same voice throughout because he’s telling you the story. You can’t see anything he doesn’t see, and you learn what’s important to him by what he tells you he sees and how he described it. Penns River books require a broader palette, as the reader gets inside different people’s heads and everyone is the hero of his own story.

 

My style has evolved within each series. I’m working on a Forte novel now, and let it lie fallow while I took a look at a Forte story from several years ago I’m getting ready to self-publish. Switching quickly from one to the other shows that, though I made a conscious effort to keep Forte’s voice the same, the newer book is much tighter. His descriptions are terser. I get in and out of scenes quicker. I’m good with that. If they were too much the same I wouldn’t be getting any better.

Back to Rick’s question, could I arbitrarily turn on a dime and write either Forte or Penns River in a completely different style? I doubt it. I could try, and it would be as original as anything else. It sure would suck, though.