Raymond Chandler Evening

Last night was stormy, with rare rumbles of thunder and flashes of lightning. Appropriately, I was listening to “Raymond Chandler Evening” in a live-stream concert by Robyn Hitchcock:

It’s a Raymond Chandler Evening
And the pavements are all wet
And I’m lurking in the shadows
‘Cause it hasn’t happened yet

That took me to the BBC radio adaptations of Chandler that I’ve been meaning to try, as a break from the Three Pines adaptation of The Cruellest Month. I’m re-reading Penny’s novel while drafting a section of a chapter, and I like the book a lot. The adaptation, conversely, is both loose and awkward despite its good intentions. More about this on April 1, as well as some Eliot and Chaucer. Writers greet spring, and April, in different moods.

The mood in noir begins and ends in cynical disillusion. I can’t think of many Canadian women writers who have created noir novels, with the exception of the versatile, Vancouver-based Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Untamed Shore. It has all the emphasis on weather and place, bored rich people, and simmering intrigue of the genre. The Big Sleep is my favourite of the Chandler film adaptations, unless we count Double Indemnity; Chandler worked on the screenplay, based on James M. Cain’s novel, alongside Billy Wilder.

Toby Stephens is a credible Marlowe, and American, in the BBC radio version. A lot of the narration and dialogue is verbatim, and the quips rain down, but there’s some excision of bluer passages. We get the General’s line about orchids being too akin to the flesh of men, but we don’t hear his cruder follow-up observation that “their perfume has the rotten sweetness of a prostitute.”

This judicious editing is in line with Chandler’s own challenge, of adapting two short stories into a novel. The screenwriters (who included William Faulkner!) had to shape his story as well, into a film that would pass muster with censors during the Hays Code era. According to a BBC piece, “there were various scandals that Marlowe uncovers that had to be fudged to get past the censors: gay relationships and pornography are alluded to in the vaguest possible terms.”

The same article goes on to note that this is a famously confusing plot, with Bogart and Bacall’s chemistry carrying rapturous viewers past the gaps in storytelling. Sticking to Marlowe’s limited perspective, when he’s so frequently in the dark, creates further challenges. There’s also an unexplained death–murder or suicide? Beats moi, said Chandler, when Howard Hawks made inquiries.

As always in Chandler, the women are thinly sketched in, with emphasis on their obvious charms. A bookstore employee “got up slowly and swayed towards me in a tight black dress that didn’t reflect any light. She had long thighs and she walked with a certain something I hadn’t often seen in bookstores.”

Scottish writer Denise Mina penned a terrific piece on her own work, following in Chandler’s problematic noir footsteps. She condemns “his liberal use of racial slurs, his portrayal of people of color and homosexuals as grotesque caricatures and the fact that his work is suffused with misogyny. It takes a strong stomach to read a story in which a woman needs a slap to calm her down.” But she points out that he can’t just be dismissed, either. And there are interesting ways to take his tropes and revise them, from a female and even feminist perspective.

The dated stereotypes, though, can make roles challenging to play. How much parody to inject? While the actor playing the giggly Carmen is more coy than required, the other performers in the BBC adaptation demonstrate some restraint. This is a brisk radio-play take on the novel, and it mostly works.

I’ve been quietly pursuing a scheme to adorn Victoria with more historical plaques, and one of my nominees is Chandler. He spent time here, improbably, when he joined the Canadian Overseas Forces to fight on behalf of Britain. He became a member of the Highlanders, “one of the ‘picturesque kiltie regiments’”, and did his basic training at Willows near the beach and then-fairgrounds. In Europe he saw front line action, was promoted to sergeant, and suffered a concussion from a mortar shell. Then he survived two bouts of Spanish Flu. He was ultimately discharged in early 1919 in Vancouver, and made his way back to San Francisco via Victoria.

“If I called Victoria dull [in a preceding letter], it was in my time dullish as an English town would be on a Sunday, everything shut up, churchy atmosphere and so on. I did not mean to call the people dull. Knew some very nice ones.” Alas, we don’t seem to have inspired any of his fiction. Nice people generally don’t beguile writers.