508 Making It New: 1900–1945the setting in an urban labyrinth (it was Chandler, after all, who coined the phrase
“mean streets”), the sense of a conspiratorial network of evil, the terse dialogue,
rapid narrative tempo, and flashes of violence. What is relatively new with Chandler,
however, is a more highly wrought style and more open concern with a code of
honor. Chandler was born in Chicago, educated in England, and only began writing
fiction at the age of 45. When he began writing, he mixed the hardboiled with other
idioms, which he saw at least as the product of his European education. “All the best
American writing,” Chandler argued, “has been done by cosmopolitans. They found
freedom of expression, richness of vocabulary” in the United States. “But they had to
have European taste to use the material.” That taste, in his case, led to a vivid use of
metaphor and allusion, sharp street language and a trenchant use of wisecracks. It
also led to evocative scene-setting, creating the sense of a neon-lit jungle. Chandler
helped create what later became known as a noir world: rainswept streets, dark,
empty buildings, shadows and fog punctuated by the occasional streetlamp, light
from the window of a lonely room or an all-night café. This is the world in which
Chandler’s solitary detective makes his way. Usually, as in The Big Sleep (1939),
Farewell My Lovely (1940), and The Long Goodbye (1953), that hero is Philip Marlowe.
Marlowe, more than most detectives of his kind, is a man of honor, committed to
justice and principle, a righter of wrongs as well as an agent of the law. As Chandler
was well aware, he bears little resemblance to any real private detectives; “the real-life
private eye,” Chandler observed, “is a sleazy little drudge” with “about as much moral
stature as a stop and go sign.” In the mean streets, but morally not of them, Marlowe
is more like the familiar figure of the American Adam, redrawn and resituated in
California. Surrounding him are vicious villains, corrupt cops, avaricious businessmen
and politicians, and usually decadent women. Somehow, he manages to keep his
integrity in the midst of all this. He is as much alone as the mythic cowboy in the
vastness of the West is: that is the source of his pride, as well as his strange pathos.
Not all writers associated with the hardboiled school concentrated on stories with
detectives at their center, however. Particularly as the Depression set in, many turned
their attention to the lives of apparently average people caught up in a cycle of
deprivation – turning to sex or violence or both in a desperate attempt to break that
cycle. Or, perhaps mindful of the way the boom times of the 1920s had suddenly
been turned upside down, they showed ordinary men and women spiraling down
into nightmare worlds, victims of chance and coincidence – a malign fate, a
malevolent system, or an unknown, malicious individual. Among such writers was
Cornell Woolrich (1903–1968). Author of many novels and short stories, including
The Bride Wore Black (1944) and “Rear Window” (1941), his bleak view of life is
summed up in just one phrase he coined, “First You Dream, Then You Die.” There
was also David Goodis (1917–1956) and Horace McCoy (1897–1955). Goodis wrote
a series of fictions, beginning in 1939 and including the novel Dark Passage (1946),
that have as their guiding impulse a sense of dislocation. “That’s fine piano,” a
character in one of his novels, Down There (1956), thinks, hearing music. “Who’s
playing that? He opened his eyes. He saw his fingers caressing the keyboard.” McCoy,
in turn, described a world of seedy hotels, cheap dance halls, rundown movieGGray_c04.indd 508ray_c 04 .indd 508 8 8/1/2011 7:54:06 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 06 AM