2004-09-27 - 8:26 p.m.
'"Okey, Marlowe," I said between my teeth, "You're a tough guy. Six feet of iron man. One hundred and ninety pounds stripped and with your face washed. Hard muscles and no glass jaw. You can take it. You've been sapped down twice, had your throat choked and been beaten half silly on the jaw with a gun barrel. You've been shot full of hop and kept under it until you're as crazy as two waltzing mice. And what does all that amount to? Routine. Now let's see you do something really tough, like putting your pants on."'
-Raymond Chandler, "Farewell, My Lovely"
Seriously, my dream one day is to play Philip Marlowe in film adaptations of Raymond Chandler's novels. "The Big Sleep" was made into a film starring Humphrey Bogart, so obviously that one is out of the question, but there's five more Marlowe novels just waiting for someone to do them justice.
They're not really detective or crime stories, though that of course is the plot, but that serves as the backdrop to what the books are really about-
A rumpled, wisecracking, unkempt, alcoholic private detective playing the disapproving angel, observing the corruption of the human spirit in Los Angeles in the 1950s. A keen mind wrapped up in a rough sensibility. People come to him, tangled up in all kinds of hideously complicated webs of badness, and he does his best to do what he believes is right, namely protecting his clients and doing the jobs he's hired to do. Once or twice during each story he comes periously close to being in deep trouble with the law, and the Marlowe trademark is that, unlike other detectives of the era who roughed up informants and bad guys for information, Marlowe gets the living hell beaten out of him at least once or twice a novel. People who don't know him smack him around just cause he asked the wrong question, and he's been on the wrong end of a gun barrel so many times it doesn't even phase him anymore.
Men and women do terrible, depraved, horrible things all around him. He always has just enough information to get himself into trouble, but not enough to get him back out of it without some ballsy and clever bluffing. Women throw themselves at him for all the wrong reasons, and come up empty. He leads a lonely life full of introspection and wry observation of a world going straight to hell all around him, and yet he stays along for the ride for reasons even he doesn't comprehend.
How can you not want to be a guy like that?
�
