Stephen McGinty: The hard-boiled hero of my youth takes on a new dimension

Published on Friday 1 May 2009 21:07

IN THE spring of 1939, Hamish Hamilton announced the publication of – as the publicity blurb declared – "the greatest find amongst detective stories in the past decade". It was "a mystery sensation novel with a difference. It has wit, punch, toughness and ingenuity." But 70 years on, who has heard of A A Fair's Lam (sic] To The Slaughter?

I thought so. Yet if the same question was asked about another book on that spring list, the answer would be universal recognition. For seven shillings and sixpence, British readers could distract themselves from the gathering storm clouds, harbingers of the Second World War, and settle down instead with The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, which – as the blurb said – was "a novel of crime and character written with uncommon skill and in a tense style which is irresistible".

How true. Into a plot as knotted as a loose spindle of thread in a plate of spaghetti walks Philip Marlowe. As the famous first paragraph explains: "I was wearing my powder-blue suit, black brogues, black wool socks with dark-blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars."

To mark the 70th anniversary of the first publication of Mr Marlowe and the 50th anniversary of the death of his creator, Raymond Chandler, Hamish Hamilton has re-issued the first five novels in attractive hardback editions complete with the original cover designs (Farewell, My Lovely is a voyeuristic delight: an open door, broken palm leaves and, partially glimpsed, a naked and dead woman sprawled on a bed). The back of each book also carries old adverts for books long forgotten. I'm particularly intrigued by The Hands of Kornelius Voyt, by Oliver Onions.

Today, the detective novel is one of the most popular genres in Britain and I sometimes wonder why. It has, in so many ways, become the vehicle through which we explore our lives and our society. So is life a mystery waiting to be solved or – like Russian dolls – merely one mystery stacked inside another, with the question marks trailing into infinity? The latter, I think. The detective gives us the comforting illusion of control, that there is a tarnished white knight prepared to shine a light into the dark alleys and record what he finds. But the man charged with this role is not a happy man, he does not have an enviable life: it is solitary, lonely and he is frequently perplexed. He passes through a troubled landscape with dark clouds always on the horizon, but with an unquenchable desire and courage to go on, when we would surely turn back.

I've been re-reading Chandler's novels for the first time since devouring them as a teenager, when all I could see were the witty lines, the bright sunlight and dark shadows of Los Angeles, where I so longed to be. Now, one year shy of Philip Marlowe's age in The Big Sleep (he's 38), I can't help but see them in a different light. The lines still sparkle: "He was as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food." And surprisingly, they haven't dated – The Big Sleep revolves around the dark secret of a rich family, and offers a enticing stew of pornography, homosexuality and a murderous, nymphomaniac 18-year-old. But now the broken lives seep off the page and linger around my feet like a beaten dachshund.

Then I was ignorant of the author's life; now, knowing of Chandler's depression and alcoholism, lines such as "the first swallow is like a peek into a cleaner, sunnier, brighter world" come with added poignancy. And yet to me, Marlowe is all the more heroic, an Everyman doggedly on the trail of those infinite question marks. Chandler deserves the last word: "I see him always in a lonely street, in lonely rooms, puzzled but never quite defeated."