Then there’s that static on the radio and the announcer telling how Rusty was nabbed down in Talbot. Dotty stands there and listens, resting back on the bar.
“Not a single shot was fired,” the announcer says. “The gangster was completely surprised by the raid. Alone in the hide-out with Nelson was a pretty dark-haired, unidentified girl.”
Then there’s that static and the music again.
Nobody looks at Dotty for a while. Then the man with the shotgun bolts for the door. No sooner he’s opened it, he shuts it again. “There’s a guy comin’ up the road,” he says. “He’s got on a badge.”
For what seems a long time, Dotty don’t move. Then she reaches out and snaps off the radio. “Let him come,” she says. “You guys get out in the car.”
The men don’t argue. They go out the back.
Dotty walks slowly to the door. When she speaks, her voice isn’t flat any more.
“You know,” she tells me, “it was funny about those flowers. They just wouldn’t stay put. Every minute I’d fix them and the next minute they’d slip. One of the girls said the pin was too big.”
She steps out on the porch, and I drop flat in back of the bar.
“Hello, copper,” I hear her say. The rest is all noise...
One of these days I’m going to show the sheriff. One of these days he’s going to tell once too often how he got Dotty and I’m going to take him out on the porch and show him...
Sure, she might have missed him, even Dotty might have missed him twice in a row. But she would never have put those two slugs in the ceiling. Not Dotty. Not unless she had reason to. Not unless she wanted to die.
Raymond Chandler
(1888–1959)
Raymond Chandler brought to the hard-boiled genre the unique perspective of an American whose formative years had been spent in England. He was educated at Dulwich College, a liberal, classics-oriented school only a few notches down from Eton and other top-echelon institutions. In his five years there, Chandler gained a code of behavior, a moral tone, a sense of honor and public service, a broad knowledge of literary allusion, and an immense understanding of the precise workings of the English language. The last was a skill that stayed with him all his life. Even when he deliberately adopted colloquial American English (southern California variety), it became the most powerful weapon in his writing armory.
In his unpublished essay “Notes... on English and American Style,” Chandler justifies his own Anglophilic influences by arguing that “all the best American writing has been done by... cosmopolitans. They found [in the United States]... freedom of expression.... richness of vocabulary.... wideness of interest. But they had to have European taste to use the material.” Whether this assertion is true or not, Chandler’s sharp colloquialisms, vivid use of metaphor and allusion, trenchant wisecracks, and extraordinarily evocative scene-setting combine into a style that is distinct, memorable, and, on occasion, richly comic.
While Dashiell Hammett (whom Chandler admired up to a point) wrote from close experience about life at the tough end as a former Pinkerton operative, Chandler created his own world, in which villains are vicious, cops are corrupt, and women are (mostly) decadent. Chandler’s most famous character, Philip Marlowe, more than most detectives of his kind, is a righter of wrongs as well as a defender of values and moral precepts. He believes in justice, honesty, and faithfulness; he loathes injustice, dishonesty, and faithlessness. He is a “verray parfit gentil” gumshoe in a savage, threatening, neon-lit concrete jungle.
Marlowe is rather fond of taking his licks from thugs and sadistic cops, but this may be explained as a hangover from Chandler’s own school days. What cannot so easily be excused is the sentimentality that at times seeps into the stories like a northern California fog. It is Chandler’s worst and at the same time most curious fault. He knew perfectly well that his is a created and frequently melodramatized world, while his hero, for all his wisecracking toughness, is an impossible eternal Galahad. “The real-life private eye,” Chandler once wrote, “is a sleazy little drudge... [who] has about as much moral stature as a stop and go sign.” But Marlowe is different, and for this reason, Chandler seems to have been almost in love with him, in much the same way that Dorothy L. Sayers famously exhibited a distinct tendresse for her creation, Lord Peter Wimsey. Perhaps it is this very love for his hero that has made his books so good and enduring.
Chandler wrote seven complete novels, three of which — Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Little Sister (1949), and The Long Goodbye (1953) — are considered masterpieces by some. The Long Goodbye was arguably the first book since Hammett’s The Glass Key, published more than twenty years earlier, to qualify as a serious and significant mainstream novel that just happened to possess elements of mystery.
Chandler was a perceptive critic of others’ work, although less so of his own. He did not care for “I’ll Be Waiting,” which he wrote in 1939 for the Saturday Evening Post. Perhaps the large sum of money he received for the story engendered a fit of guilt. To his friend the novelist William Campbell Gault he wrote in 1957: “It was too studied, too careful... I could have written it much better, without trying to be smooth and polished.” As though to demonstrate his less than acute judgment concerning his own talents, he went on: “I’m an improviser.” But, of course, this is precisely what Chandler was not. What he was a painstaking rewriter and polisher, whose diligence made “I’ll Be Waiting” a superbly atmospheric night-piece.
J. A.
I’ll Be Waiting
(1939)
At one o’clock in the morning, Carl, the night porter, turned down the last of three table lamps in the main lobby of the Windermere Hotel. The blue carpet darkened a shade or two and the walls drew back into remoteness. The chairs filled with shadowy loungers. In the corners were memories like cobwebs.
Tony Reseck yawned. He put his head on one side and listened to the frail, twittery music from the radio room beyond a dim arch at the far side of the lobby. He frowned. That should be his radio room after one A.M. Nobody should be in it. That red-haired girl was spoiling his nights.
The frown passed and a miniature of a smile quirked at the corners of his lips. He sat relaxed, a short, pale, paunchy, middle-aged man with long, delicate fingers clasped on the elk’s tooth on his watch chain; the long delicate fingers of a sleight-of-hand artist, fingers with shiny, moulded nails and tapering first joints, fingers a little spatulate at the ends. Handsome fingers. Tony Reseck rubbed them gently together and there was peace in his quiet sea-grey eyes.
The frown came back on his face. The music annoyed him. He got up with a curious litheness, all in one piece, without moving his clasped hands from the watch chain. At one moment he was leaning back relaxed, and the next he was standing balanced on his feet, perfectly still, so that the movement of rising seemed to be a thing imperfectly perceived, an error of vision.
He walked with small, polished shoes delicately across the blue carpet and under the arch. The music was louder. It contained the hot, acid blare, the frenetic, jittering runs of a jam session. It was too loud. The red-haired girl sat there and stared silently at the fretted part of the big radio cabinet as though she could see the band with its fixed professional grin and the sweat running down its back. She was curled up with her feet under her on a davenport which seemed to contain most of the cushions in the room. She was tucked among them carefully, like a corsage in the florist’s tissue paper.