The Knight in the Window

Start in the hallway

It is a rainy October morning in 1939 and a private detective is standing in the entrance hall of a Beverly Hills mansion, waiting to be called in to see four million dollars. He has taken trouble over himself. Shaved, sober, powder-blue suit, and he says so with a straight face, which is the first joke in the book and a warning about the man telling it.

Above the doors there is a stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armour untying a naked woman from a tree. The knight has pushed his visor back to be sociable. He is picking at the knots and getting nowhere at all. Marlowe looks up at him and thinks that if he lived in this house he would have to climb up there sooner or later and lend a hand, because the knight does not appear to be really trying.

That is the whole enterprise, stated on the first page of the first novel and never explained again. Seven books, twenty years, and a man who keeps climbing up to help someone who cannot be helped, for wages that would embarrass a plumber. Chandler was fifty-one when the book came out. He had been an oilman until the drink and the Depression finished that, a poet before it, and an infantry officer in the first war, which had left him with damage he did not discuss. He came to the detective story late, and knowing exactly what he wanted from it.

Philip Marlowe: a life priced at twenty-five dollars a day

Marlowe describes himself briefly and without self-pity. Licensed private investigator. Lone wolf, unmarried, getting middle-aged, not rich. He has been in jail more than once. He does not do divorce work, which is where the money is, and he says so. He likes liquor and women and chess. The cops mostly dislike him, though he gets along with one or two. If he is killed in an alley some night, nobody’s life will fall in.

The office is on the sixth floor of the Cahuenga Building on Hollywood Boulevard near Ivar. Glenview 7537. A reception room he never bothers to staff, a desk, a bottle in the deep drawer, a reproduction of a Rembrandt on the wall that he nods to on his way out, a fresh dead moth and a fresh layer of dust every time he comes back. He charges twenty-five dollars a day and expenses, eight cents a mile for the car, and he holds that rate for four novels while everything else in California doubles in price.

At home there is an apartment, and later a rented house up a canyon, and in both of them a chessboard with a problem laid out on it. He plays through championship games alone in the evening, one man taking both sides, and he calls it a war without blood and about as good a use of human intelligence as an advertising agency. He fills a pipe. He makes his own coffee and is exact about it. He drinks more than is wise and knows it. Almost nobody comes.

The refusals are the real biography. In the first book a rich young woman offers him fifteen thousand dollars, which is a house and a car and four suits, and he turns it into a speech about what twenty-five a day actually buys and hands it back. In the last of the great ones he keeps a five-thousand-dollar bill in his safe that he will never spend a nickel of, because something was wrong with the way it came to him. He takes it out sometimes and looks at it. A colleague pins the label on him in a hospital corridor and it sticks for good: the shop-soiled Galahad.

The code, and what it costs

Marlowe never sets out a philosophy. It has to be caught in passing, usually when he is tired and talking to a cop.

The clearest statement comes late, to an old friend on the DA’s staff. He says he is a romantic, that he hears voices crying in the night and goes to see what is the matter, and that there is no money in it whatsoever. The sensible man shuts the window and turns up the television. Marlowe goes out. He gets his face pushed in for it, or thrown in a cell, and comes home with nothing.

A woman in the last novel asks him how a man so hard can also be gentle, and he gives her the shortest version of the code that exists: “If I couldn’t ever be gentle, I wouldn’t deserve to be alive.”

The rest is warnings, mostly to himself. That there is no trap so deadly as the one you set for yourself. That loyalty given to the wrong man is still loyalty and still has to be paid for. That the truth, once you have it, frequently helps nobody and cannot be handed to the police. Marlowe solves his cases and changes nothing. The rich stay rich, the crooked chief keeps his job, the guilty go on breathing, and he goes home to the chessboard. In the middle of the first book he looks down at a problem he cannot crack, moves a knight, then puts it back where it was.

“It wasn’t a game for knights.”

He is one anyway. That is the joke and the point of him, and it is why the books outlived every imitator.

A city between two wars

The seven novels sit across the war like a bridge. Three before it, one in the middle of it, three after, and Los Angeles is a visibly different animal at each end.

The early city is still an oil town wearing good clothes. Standing on the steps of the Sternwood house Marlowe can see, far down the hill, the old wooden derricks the family fortune came out of, some of them still pumping five or six barrels a day. The Sternwoods have moved high enough that they can no longer smell the sump water. They can still see what made them rich, if they care to look out of the window. Chandler puts the whole moral of Southern California into that view and then goes back to the plot.

Then the war arrives, and it arrives the way war arrives for civilians, at the edges. Chandler never writes a battle or a speech. He writes the black and white rubber sidewalk on Olive Street being torn up to be given to the government, and the pale building superintendent watching it go as though it were breaking his heart. He writes armed sentries at each end of the Puma Lake dam and one more in the middle, and windows that must be wound shut before you may drive across. A man at a hotel cash desk fighting to get the war news out of a radio full of static. A deputy with half his bonus money in war bonds. National Geographic war maps tacked to the wall of a mountain cabin by a man who will shortly be arrested for murder. A patrol car pulling up outside, and the dry note that the Bay City police are conserving rubber. The war is never the subject. It is the weather.

And Bay City is the invention that matters most. It is Santa Monica with the name changed, and it is Chandler’s working model of how an American town is actually owned. A syndicate of gamblers elects a mayor. The honest police chief is moved sideways into the records bureau, which in that town is roughly the size of a tea bag, and he quits, and it kills him. His daughter tells Marlowe the story in a parked car in about ninety words. Nothing in the plot depends on it. It is there because it is true.

After 1945 the money changes character and Marlowe turns elegiac. He remembers trees along Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills as a country town, Westwood as bare hills with lots going at eleven hundred dollars and no takers, Hollywood as frame houses strung along the interurban line. What replaced it, driving west past the blaze of the Strip, is the fast-dollar boys and the hoodlums in from Cleveland and Detroit, and he lands on the phrase everyone remembers, a big hard-boiled city with no more personality than a paper cup. By the last great book the villain is a man with a hundred million dollars and a public relations department, and a cop tells Marlowe flatly that there is no clean way to make that kind of money. The gunmen have become executives.

What saves all this from sourness is that Chandler cannot help loving the place. Standing at his window above Laurel Canyon Boulevard, listening to sirens rise and fall somewhere out in the dark, Marlowe calls it rich and vigorous and full of pride, and lost and beaten and full of emptiness, in the same breath and without deciding between them.

Where to begin

Anywhere, really. There is no continuing story and barely a continuing cast, so nothing is spoiled. Still, The Big Sleep (1939) is the natural door. Its plot has a famous hole in it, and when a film crew wired to ask who killed the chauffeur, Chandler is supposed to have replied that he had no idea. Read it anyway and you will see why nobody minds.

If you want the best-made of them, take Farewell, My Lovely (1940), where an enormous released convict called Moose Malloy walks into the wrong bar looking for a girl he last saw eight years ago and pulls the whole city down behind him. If you want the wartime city specifically, The Lady in the Lake (1943) is the one with the sentries on the dam and the rubber going to the government. And if you only ever read one, make it The Long Good-bye (1953). It is the longest, the slowest and the saddest, written while Chandler’s wife was dying, and it is the book where he stopped pretending he was writing detective stories. Marlowe finally has a friend in it. That goes about as well as you would expect.

People will tell you to read Chandler for the wisecracks. The wisecracks are wonderful and they are the least of it. Read him for the sentences, which are still, after eighty-odd years, doing things no one else has managed. Read him for a city caught at the exact moment it stopped being a big dry sunny town and became the thing we now mean by Los Angeles. And read him for the man in the powder-blue suit, standing in a rich man’s hallway in the rain, looking up at a knight in coloured glass who is still working at the knots and still not getting anywhere.
Somebody has to climb up there. That is the job. Every time.