A Cultural Serial Killer, Qu'est-ce que c'est?

When I discovered my love of reading, I discovered I craved trilogies. I wanted to know that after I finished one, there were two more novels waiting. Then I discovered genres and knew that when I went into the public library, I could reliably go upstairs to the Sci-Fi/Fantasy section and find coordinated sets to my heart’s content.

But now I’m being my old-lady self, and what do old ladies love? Detective series with Earl Grey tea and a bitter outlook! All I need is my scented hanky and peppermints, and I’d be happily imitating friends I made decades ago working at a local library. I had no idea how fun it all could be.

And I’m loving these particular detective stories from the 1940s and 1950s.

Those decades have a hold on me. I grew up surrounded by their artifacts, raised by older parents and classic movies.

And accompanying my love of books, those decades, and noir, I’ve discovered that many of these books are also movies. So I’ll be picking them off one by one. I’m a cultural serial killer.

A cultural serial killer, qu’est-ce que c’est?

When I find something—books, movies, jewelry, music, food, anything—it isn’t enough to have a single experience. No.

I want to consume it.

So I’ve reconciled with my shadow self. I’m not just materialistic. I’m a serial book killer. A serial movie killer.

And if we’re completely honest, I’m the cereal box killer in the family. At breakfast and at midnight. No one knows where I will strike, but the hollowed-out shells will be on the counter.

Anyway. I took The Long Goodbye slowly. Ever so slowly.

Something in the series and in Marlowe—the archetypal hard-boiled detective, or soft-boiled, depending on which book we’re discussing—has been bothering me, which is usually how I know I’m enjoying a book.

Something about the setup wasn’t quite right. Chandler was toying with his audience like a cat toys with fat, lazy mice.

I know there’s a particular pleasure in following an honorable detective through a corrupt world. Someone who notices things others—cops, politicians, and daddies—want to ignore. Someone who asks the inconvenient question we wouldn’t dare ask because then we’d be ostracized, fired, or disliked. Someone who refuses to accept the polished, published explanation offered by a person with excellent manners, lots of cash and power, and something terrible to hide.

And we get to ride along. Safely, of course.

We get to enjoy coffee while Marlowe gets beaten over the head. We can put a bookmark in the corruption and take the dog for a walk.

There’s catharsis in that arrangement. And that was how I knew Chandler was the fat, observant cat and we were his complacent mice.

We get to ride along beside the person calling out the wrongdoing and feel a little removed from both the wrongdoing and our feelings of culpability. We’ve seen the machinery. We’ve recognized the performances of goodness. Surely that places us somewhere on the respectable side of things with Marlowe, without being hammered by the cops, the politicians, the newsies, the landowners, and anyone else with a stake in things.

And when the detective gets ugly, when he calls out the traumatized women surviving in a world they have very little power over, we can step away from him, too.

Well, I wouldn’t have gone that far, Marlowe. No need to rub her face in it. She was surviving the corrupt world along with the rest of us. Don’t be such an ass.

Or maybe we would just read on, enjoying him laying into a woman for her part in murder and exploitation. Enjoying her fall from the pedestal.

Fucking dames. They’re all alike. All different hair colors. But when you’re down and out, they don’t have your back. Sheesh. What a racket. Good ol’ boy Marlowe called her out. Good for him. Bitch had it coming.

It’s a remarkably comfortable seat, being the reader. We can move in and out whenever the view becomes unflattering. We might not even reflect at all, just ride the thrill-seeking chase and its turns. Hide our conscience behind a roadside billboard advertising Coca-Cola and wait for the next speeder to come racing by so we can play judgmental cop.

I sat really close with Marlowe these last couple of months. I took it slow and easy with him. I really wanted to get to know the hard-boiled or soft-boiled detective and understand how he was ticking without blowing up.

It’s not a comfortable seat, but I don’t go in for long-term comfort. Not in my heels and, apparently, by four o’clock, not in my bra either. Apparently, not in my men either. Damn. Aren’t we all supposed to settle down with the safe choices when we grow up?

See, what interests me is his attachment to characters. In The Long Goodbye, it’s the man we know as Terry Lennox. My reading is that he sees something honorable in this wounded man that he cannot bear to have dismissed or mistreated. Some surviving decency that made it through WWII and all that had battered the old world before. Something worth caring about had survived, and he saw it. And once this man cares, he wants a proper accounting.

A true account for an honorable man, or what was left of him once the world and the dames had their way with him. The war had trashed his face. A woman had trashed his heart. And the rest of us couldn’t just see that he was a decent guy underneath the alcoholic binges and scars.

At least, that was the account I felt invited to believe.

There were bad guys and there were good guys, and we were still on the side of the good guys, regardless of everything else going wrong.

I deeply understand that desire. I’m not comfortable with how far it can take people. But I get it. The need to feel self-righteous.

Loyalty can make us attentive to one person’s suffering and strangely impatient with another’s. We want answers. We press. We expose. Then we leave, and the person we confronted is still there, living with everything we’ve brought into the room.

And we’re self-righteously armored.

And we’re the bastard at that point.

That was the flip and body slam I wasn’t expecting from the author. Marlowe got ugly and cruel in his pursuit of truth. And he did it before someone slipped the truth under his ribs. I won’t say more.

But finding out the truth of what happened doesn’t necessarily leave anyone feeling better.

It shouldn’t.

That is the grit of the matter.

There shouldn’t be joy and elation in meting out justice and truth.

And what a dark, smoky room this book has brought me into. Drinks, money, beautiful houses, damaged marriages. People carrying the wreckage of war into lives that look, from a distance, furnished and fortunate. Old dreams remain present enough to torment them. The past has been buried badly. The corpses are rotting and smell foul all over the valley.

In what I’ve read of this series, I’ve noticed Chandler has very little room for children, pets, young families—no babies that I remember yet. The ordinary demands that pull a person into tomorrow. Someone needs breakfast. The dog needs to go out. A child has outgrown her shoes.

The world we work to keep on an even keel. The world we try to keep stable for them. Not because it isn’t corrupt and greedy and unjust, but because we can’t afford the aftermath.

These books are a tally of the aftermath.

The noir world I’m reading feels sealed around its adults and their injuries. Dark, dank, theatrical. Everyone has an account of themselves. Everyone has something they would rather leave undisturbed.

Then someone dies, and all those private arrangements become available for inspection.

I came to this morning’s thoughts by way of counterfeit collectibles, oddly enough. The pretty object, the reassuring label, the story that helps us buy it. Technology can make the deception easier to circulate, but the appetite is familiar.

We want something. We want to believe something. We want our own part in the transaction to remain innocent.

But it’s all counterfeit.

A detective story gives us someone to investigate the scams we’re playing on our own behalf, as well as everyone else’s.

But I’m beginning to suspect that part of the pleasure—and part of the discomfort—is watching someone else carry our desire to know further than we would carry it ourselves.

There is also the romance of it. The possibility that someone could care enough about another person to refuse the convenient ending.

It took a long time to finish this book, intentionally. I wanted to carry around the possibility that Marlowe had it right. I wanted to believe he wasn’t a bastard. The lady had deserved to be confronted and destroyed. Good versus bad. I had chosen to ride along with one of the good guys. He’d just been fed up is all, see? Terry had deserved better. Didn’t everyone understand? Marlowe and Terry were mirrors.

All it took was one more chapter to kill me.

Chandler, you bastard.

Then, apparently, I have a few more books and some movies to kill.

As well as the last of the Cocoa Puffs and another season of Reacher.

Does anyone grieve the women in Marlowe’s wake?

Or maybe that is just me.