Watching the Detectives

     I went to college quite a long time ago now. It certainly is a different animal as we head to 2020. You can take many courses that don’t require you to even attend a class, there are certainly many arguments to be made about the importance and efficacy of a degree, and there are complicated issues that affect campus life.

But there is so much more to a college experience than merely going to class and preparing you for what your eventual career will be. Relationships that often last a lifetime are made, memories that last the same span are created, and if you are as lucky as I was, passions that enrich your life experience for decades are created.

My freshman year at the University of Kansas, I completely randomly took a class called “The Detective in Literature”. I wish I could still remember the name of the professor who taught it because he was excellent, and the course was very interesting. But one particular aspect of it created multiple intense interests that shine brightly for me until this day.

One of the books in the course curriculum was “The Big Sleep” by Raymond Chandler, and a homework requirement was seeing the film of the same name. These two simultaneous assignments resulted in me finding my favorite author, a passion for classic cinema, and a serious fixation on American life in the 1930’s and early 40’s.

Soon I was spending lengthy afternoons cutting class to go into the library stacks and immerse myself in the leading magazines of that period, “Look” and “Life. I have written and spoke about this before, but after 4-5 hours of reading articles and gazing at black and white photography, I would literally be stunned upon going outside to see that the world was in color and life had moved on forty years hence.

Later, I would spend hours starting at 1 AM watching Channel 41 in Kansas City, which had the Warner Brothers catalogue from the 1930’s. Everything from the greatest films of all time, down to the B pictures, serials, and the like such as the Charlie Chan and Mister Moto. Around the same time I had a summer job as the overnight watchman at my Dad’s television station in Boston, and many of the films of the same era would be my vehicle for remaining awake. This spawned a side passion for Big Band jazz, since many of the films would incorporate the top acts of the day in their films.

I consider the period from the start of talking picture until World War II to be the greatest in the history of cinema, although I truly love films from all time frames. But you could do a lot of upper crust bingeing if you only took the Academy Award nominated films of 1939 and 1940. 1940’s list of ten is absurd, every film an unmitigated classic   

So, from the one seed of one class, and really one novel, came an avalanche of things that I zealously dove into, which has continued with me until this day. That is the part of a college experience that is not as pragmatic as people often complain about, the means to an end nature of it.

There was one rather large fly in the ointment of the fact that the triggering mechanism of all this for me was that “The Big Sleep” was one of only seven novels that Raymond Chandler wrote in his lifetime. He didn’t have one published until he was fifty, and he only lived twenty more years, and was far from prolific. The other thing is that he is widely considered along with Dashiell Hammett as the two masters of the modern detective genre. I prefer his work to Hammett’s, so where that left me was that the first author of this genre that I embraced was also arguably the best, so I was spoiled rotten, and didn’t have much to wade through either. I literally own more books about Raymond Chandler than I have written by him.

Chandler’s emphasis was on the written word, not the whodunit aspect of the story. His descriptions are elaborate but not overboard, his dialogue was snappy, but not over the top, and his protagonist Phillip Marlowe was admirable, but flawed. He wrote his books in first person, and that also became a near prerequisite for me when I tried out other writers.

I didn’t care much where the plot was going, it was how we were getting there, and who we were interacting with that was the thing to me. This is embodied by a famous Hollywood tale during the making of the film version of “The Big Sleep” starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. While the plot and a whole lot of the dialogue is very faithful to the book, Chandler himself was not involved in making the picture.

Director Howard Hawks reached a place in the story where the chauffeur of Marlowe’s client has been murdered. Hawks couldn’t get a handle on who did it, so he called and asked Chandler directly. Hawks was stunned to have Chandler tell him that he didn’t know. And I could care less, it was one of several murders along the way, and frankly wasn’t that impactful in the end. The writing, the characters, and the dialogue are the thing.

Every one of the spare catalogue of Chandler’s work has been filmed multiple times. Iconic actors from Bogart to James Garner to Robert Mitchum have played him, but my choice for the best Marlowe ever is Dick Powell. He pressed to play him in a film version of what I believe is the best Chandler novel “Farewell My Lovely” as a way to get away from his image as a famous crooner and dancer. Powell’s image was so entrenched that the name of the film, which predates “The Big Sleep” by two years, was changed to “Murder My Sweet”, so that audiences wouldn’t think it was another musical.

The 1944 movie, directed by Edward Dmytryk, is one of the first American versions of film noir, along with “Double Indemnity”, released the same year, with a screenplay from Chandler that netted him an Academy Award nomination. As the influence tree spreads its branches, film noir is also a great passion of mine.

Finally, about twenty years ago. I discovered someone else whose writing style in the detective genre suited me. It was Robert B. Parker, who’s Spencer series, set in Boston, featured a first-person detective with much the same attitude of flawed valor that Marlowe exhibited. His prose and dialogue are in a similar vein to Chandler’s, but his own.

And lo and behold, Parker, who also wrote other detective series, westerns, and other works, was the opposite of Chandler in one way. He was VERY prolific. I still haven’t quite completed the catalogue of forty Spencer stories, I cherish the six or so I have left. Parker’s work is held in high esteem, and all of his series were popular enough that after his death in 2010 his estate has hired other prominent writers to continue putting them out in his style, and even they are surprisingly good.

The template for this certainly seemed to have been set by Chandler and Parker themselves. Chandler’s estate hired Parker in 1988, on the centenary of Chandler’s birth, to complete ”Poodle Springs”, for which Chandler had written four chapters at the time of his death in 1959. Parker would follow that with a “The Big Sleep” sequel, “Perchance to Dream”.

I only played in the top of the food chain in this genre, and I have that one course, and that one piece of curriculum to thank for it. Classic detective fiction, film noir, vintage cinema, and Big Band jazz all entered my life to stay due to that one little twist of fate.

Right now, I have cued up in my DVR, all ready to force feed to all my holiday visitors, the Benny Goodman Orchestra’s 1937 version of “Sing, Sing, Sing” from the movie “Hollywood Hotel”. The band, overflowing with some of the greatest jazz musicians of their time, many of whom would lead esteemed bands of their own, roars through one of the greatest pieces of hot music ever created. Gene Krupa’s centerpiece drumming, Harry James trumpet, Goodman’s virtuoso clarinet, and a whole lot more explodes off the screen.

I was decades from even being born, but due to “Detectives in Fiction” that is just one example of hundreds of how my life was enriched by happenstance.

Lucky me.