Janet Roger's Blog - Posts Tagged "thriller"
The Noir Zone
The Noir Zone? I’ve borrowed the title from UK-based writer and script consultant, Phil Clarke who recently wrapped a charming compliment around an interesting question. And all in a few lines on Twitter! Here’s the question, and some of the thoughts it stirred:-
Now the fact is, the whole apparatus of a Chandleresque mystery felt so natural to write that I wasn’t aware of doing any preparing at all. Yet still the question nagged. It left me wondering not only why Chandleresque should feel so natural, but also how to label that Chandler tone. After all, Hardboiled just doesn’t get close, does it?
Here’s some help on that from Robert Towne, talking about his screenplay for Chinatown in a Jack Nicholson biography, Jack’s Life:
So for now let’s call Chandler’s tone his lazy lyricism, and consider where does anybody - where did I - absorb it from?
Well, like Robert Towne, I read all the Marlowe novels. First as teenage reading while I ground through Eng. Lit., and then lots more times since. Only recently, Hill, Jackson and Rizzuto’s The Annotated Big Sleep, set me off on the entire series again.
By now there’s lazy lyricism in the bloodstream, I suppose. Not forgetting that it’s a European bloodstream. You see, Robert Towne read his Chandler as an Angeleno himself. And he wrote Chinatown as a detective story based in the history of his own city. Whereas, I’m not even a native speaker of American English. Luckily, there were always the movies.
Since we started on labels, Chinatown finds itself tagged as neo-noir. It deals in those themes found in classic films noirs of the 1940s and 50s; which is to say, unhinged wealth and civic corruption in the big city; murder and complicit policing; a femme fatale and a private-eye narrator who’s left to work through the maze, and to speak some truth to power along the way.
If I’m a longtime enthusiast for those noir originals, it’s hardly a surprise. For that European teenager, reading Chandler’s lyricism off the page was one thing. Hearing it echo through those movies, in the contexts and settings and American cadences of the day, was quite another. Film noir decided that the shamus in Shamus Dust would have to be an American, even though the setting is London, 1947. The truth is, I simply couldn’t hear my private eye in any other voice.
So what am I saying? Start young on the Marlowe novels? Get to all the film noir festivals you can? Never miss Eddie Muller’s Noir Alley on TCM, and you’ll end up thinking and dreaming Chandleresque prose? Well, you might. As long as you remember, when you’re watching Robert Towne nail that lazy lyricism in Chinatown, there’s another facet of tone in the mix.
I mean the conventions Chandler writes in. The sensibilities of his time. Because on one hand, there are places that hardboiled mysteries of the 1940s and 50s just don’t go. And on the other, in the places they do go, they’re a reliable cheerleader for the routine prejudices of the day. Chandler is no exception; when the Marlowe novels turn to women, or to race or sexualities, they can make for some queasy twenty-first century reading. Which may well be regrettable, but the fact remains: if you plan to write a 1940s Chandleresque mystery, those sensibilities are as much a part of Chandler’s world as the hats and the highballs. Fail to observe the casual prejudices, or those places that are off-limits, and you won’t be writing the 1940s. Fail to confront them, and you’ll be left writing dead pastiche.
To see what I mean, think how Robert Towne deals with the off-limits in Chinatown - where his LA is contemporary with the LA of The Big Sleep. Yes, he’s steeped in Chandler’s prose style. But also in the sensibilities of the age. So when he explodes the timebomb of incest that weaves through his story, he not only makes the revelation oblique, it very graphically has to get beaten out of the victim.
Put it this way; no amount of facility with Chandler’s lyricism would be convincing, if Towne didn’t also know there were things he could and couldn’t use it to say. Set your detective story circa 1940 and - if you want to stay in period - you won’t be flat-out naming and confronting incest. Get that wrong in the writing and not only will the tone not work, the costumes and art direction will be empty decoration.
Similes? Yes, they’re a Chandler and a noir thing. No, I don’t work on them. On the contrary, I think they inevitably fail when they don’t grow out of their immediate surroundings. Some of Chandler’s similes are splendid. Others are labored, flat and forgettable. He was known to make lists of them for future use, and I suspect those are likely to be the dogs, while the splendid ones are an inspiration of the moment. Metaphor likewise.
One extended metaphor in Shamus Dust is its setting in a spell of icy-hard London winter. Now admittedly, bone cold and blizzards don’t obviously chime with Chandleresque prose. Marlowe always seems so perfectly fitted to a California climate. But the best metaphors, like the best similes, spring from exigence. When you know your story well enough to trust it, you write what it demands.
This article by Janet Roger was originally published in Killer Nashville, 2020
"I did want to ask you how you manage to so exquisitely nail that Chandler tone. Was it just a case of having read the books when you were young or did you do anything specific before writing Shamus Dust to get into the noir gumshoe zone? Did you work on your metaphors and similes? (always of note in a noir) I’d love to know."
Now the fact is, the whole apparatus of a Chandleresque mystery felt so natural to write that I wasn’t aware of doing any preparing at all. Yet still the question nagged. It left me wondering not only why Chandleresque should feel so natural, but also how to label that Chandler tone. After all, Hardboiled just doesn’t get close, does it?
Here’s some help on that from Robert Towne, talking about his screenplay for Chinatown in a Jack Nicholson biography, Jack’s Life:
"Raymond Chandler’s descriptions of LA really knocked me out, left me with a sense of loss. His prose is so incredible. He made that time so real. There is that lyrical, lazy feel of a city with horrible things going on."
So for now let’s call Chandler’s tone his lazy lyricism, and consider where does anybody - where did I - absorb it from?
Well, like Robert Towne, I read all the Marlowe novels. First as teenage reading while I ground through Eng. Lit., and then lots more times since. Only recently, Hill, Jackson and Rizzuto’s The Annotated Big Sleep, set me off on the entire series again.
By now there’s lazy lyricism in the bloodstream, I suppose. Not forgetting that it’s a European bloodstream. You see, Robert Towne read his Chandler as an Angeleno himself. And he wrote Chinatown as a detective story based in the history of his own city. Whereas, I’m not even a native speaker of American English. Luckily, there were always the movies.
Since we started on labels, Chinatown finds itself tagged as neo-noir. It deals in those themes found in classic films noirs of the 1940s and 50s; which is to say, unhinged wealth and civic corruption in the big city; murder and complicit policing; a femme fatale and a private-eye narrator who’s left to work through the maze, and to speak some truth to power along the way.
If I’m a longtime enthusiast for those noir originals, it’s hardly a surprise. For that European teenager, reading Chandler’s lyricism off the page was one thing. Hearing it echo through those movies, in the contexts and settings and American cadences of the day, was quite another. Film noir decided that the shamus in Shamus Dust would have to be an American, even though the setting is London, 1947. The truth is, I simply couldn’t hear my private eye in any other voice.
So what am I saying? Start young on the Marlowe novels? Get to all the film noir festivals you can? Never miss Eddie Muller’s Noir Alley on TCM, and you’ll end up thinking and dreaming Chandleresque prose? Well, you might. As long as you remember, when you’re watching Robert Towne nail that lazy lyricism in Chinatown, there’s another facet of tone in the mix.
I mean the conventions Chandler writes in. The sensibilities of his time. Because on one hand, there are places that hardboiled mysteries of the 1940s and 50s just don’t go. And on the other, in the places they do go, they’re a reliable cheerleader for the routine prejudices of the day. Chandler is no exception; when the Marlowe novels turn to women, or to race or sexualities, they can make for some queasy twenty-first century reading. Which may well be regrettable, but the fact remains: if you plan to write a 1940s Chandleresque mystery, those sensibilities are as much a part of Chandler’s world as the hats and the highballs. Fail to observe the casual prejudices, or those places that are off-limits, and you won’t be writing the 1940s. Fail to confront them, and you’ll be left writing dead pastiche.
To see what I mean, think how Robert Towne deals with the off-limits in Chinatown - where his LA is contemporary with the LA of The Big Sleep. Yes, he’s steeped in Chandler’s prose style. But also in the sensibilities of the age. So when he explodes the timebomb of incest that weaves through his story, he not only makes the revelation oblique, it very graphically has to get beaten out of the victim.
Put it this way; no amount of facility with Chandler’s lyricism would be convincing, if Towne didn’t also know there were things he could and couldn’t use it to say. Set your detective story circa 1940 and - if you want to stay in period - you won’t be flat-out naming and confronting incest. Get that wrong in the writing and not only will the tone not work, the costumes and art direction will be empty decoration.
Similes? Yes, they’re a Chandler and a noir thing. No, I don’t work on them. On the contrary, I think they inevitably fail when they don’t grow out of their immediate surroundings. Some of Chandler’s similes are splendid. Others are labored, flat and forgettable. He was known to make lists of them for future use, and I suspect those are likely to be the dogs, while the splendid ones are an inspiration of the moment. Metaphor likewise.
One extended metaphor in Shamus Dust is its setting in a spell of icy-hard London winter. Now admittedly, bone cold and blizzards don’t obviously chime with Chandleresque prose. Marlowe always seems so perfectly fitted to a California climate. But the best metaphors, like the best similes, spring from exigence. When you know your story well enough to trust it, you write what it demands.
This article by Janet Roger was originally published in Killer Nashville, 2020
Chandler’s Atmospherics
Detective fiction? Let’s start with Bertrand Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, logician, historian, philanderer-philosopher (epistemology can send a girl limp) and improbable Nobel laureate for his thoughts on marriage.
In October 1939 he was in his late sixties, travelling long distance the way any Earl did - first class, and by train. Though not before looking in at the station bookstore, to buy the hatful of detective yarns he took with him on any rail journey. They were his logic problems for relaxation on the move. His chin-ups for the brain. When he got out he’d leave them behind on the seat, flashed through, digested, solved.
So imagine the Earl at Los Angeles Union Station that year, climbing into the Super Chief ahead of a Hollywood star or three, trailing the car attendant to his sleeper. Imagine also that one of those detective yarns clamped under his arm is Raymond Chandler’s new, first, book-length mystery. Then wait to watch him cozying up with the Chandler over a pipe in the club car, and not having a clue what’s coming. You see, The Big Sleep doesn’t test high on logic.
The Super Chief scene isn’t so unlikely. The Union Station had opened in May 1939. Russell had been a visiting professor at UCLA since March, and before that at Chicago, a forty-hour ride and the train’s destination. Then as now, he could change there for New York, where he went to teach after UCLA. As for The Big Sleep, it was published by Knopf that October, only weeks after Russell’s country had gone to war with Nazi Germany. Which makes the book eighty years old.
It’s even possible, assuming the 3rd Earl had been picking up his Black Mask or Dime Detective at the newsstands, that the name Chandler might have struck a chord. But it still wouldn’t have prepared him.
By 1939 Chandler had worked a seven-year apprenticeship writing for the pulp magazines, absorbing the craft and getting the passages that most interested him - we’ll call them the atmospherics - routinely cut. In The Big Sleep, with a full novel at his disposal, they stayed in for the first time. And changed the face of mystery writing.
If an octogenarian Big Sleep is a shocking thought consider that Chandler was already fifty-one when it saw light of day. Chicago-born, but raised in Victorian London, he’d packed his interest in poetics along with a public school education and re-crossed the Atlantic before the First World War. He was in his mid-twenties by then, in need of a future, and taking the long view, his move back worked out. Chandler learned book-keeping. Went to war. Made and then unmade himself as a California oil executive (one consequence of testing seriously high on alcohol for most of a lifetime). Finally, down and out of a job in Depression-era LA, he turned to pulp writing. Not as a slumming poet, but as a man eyeing a craft he needed to learn. Once get the hang of it and the pulp magazines were paying a penny a word.
And get the hang of it he did, though it’s no surprise the pulp detective form grated on Chandler. His Belle Epoque schooling had taught him that a writer’s style was everything. Flaubert was the rage. But this was Dime Detective, 1932, and when Chandler tried writing in the atmospherics they were nixed. Not only because words cost pennies. They were costing publishers their action too.
Chandler didn’t see that as any loss. What’s more he didn’t think pulp readers would either, if ever they were shown an alternative. Unlike the 3rd Earl, most critics, and the (generally) English mystery writers of the time, he thought their refined plot lines were fripperies too. Which didn’t sit too well. The Murder in the Samovar crowd had its rules and unities for sleuthing by the book, and guarded them. Eighty years ago, when Chandler turned out the novel that shattered their commandments, they naturally gave it the chill.
From the outset, Chandler’s novels don’t major on writing action or detailing a plot. Nor does he aim to burden a story with significance, social or otherwise. After all, if you want to change the world, you don’t set out writing gumshoe mysteries. Chandler’s atmospherics are meant to be taken on their own terms. Stand in a floodlit parking lot. Breathe the scent of a diner. Hear the aimless tramp of the Pacific or drowse at a poolside with the fast and the monied, corrupting in a California glare. The Big Sleep and the novels that follow are soaked in such atmospherics, indelible and sometimes magical.
Just don’t ask what they mean. For Chandler they’re a burlesque of the hardboiled genre, shifted up a gear by the art and originality of the prose alone. He thinks it’s the only way a writer makes the grade.
That’s Chandler being the Belle Epoque stylist, resistant to attaching any significance to art. But there’s no doubt either that his art holds up a mirror to his Los Angeles; fast industrializing and overgrowing even as he hit his writing stride. From The Big Sleep onward his burlesques parade a new-minted metropolis before the mystery reader: gaudy and brittle, decadent and nervous, nickel-plated, always grifting, skin-deep. In fact, a metropolis tailor-made for Chandler’s priorities as a writer; so fragmented and transitory that any idea of meaning would seem quaint. Its atmospheres are its sum, lurid as the paint on the passing scenery.
The irony being, of course, that since The Big Sleep first nailed them, those very atmospheres became the signifier for LA the world over. The atmospheres, it turns out, are the meaning; as much for generations who never heard of Chandler as for his enduring fans.
Dammit, Raymond, was there more to you than style after all?
In October 1939 he was in his late sixties, travelling long distance the way any Earl did - first class, and by train. Though not before looking in at the station bookstore, to buy the hatful of detective yarns he took with him on any rail journey. They were his logic problems for relaxation on the move. His chin-ups for the brain. When he got out he’d leave them behind on the seat, flashed through, digested, solved.
So imagine the Earl at Los Angeles Union Station that year, climbing into the Super Chief ahead of a Hollywood star or three, trailing the car attendant to his sleeper. Imagine also that one of those detective yarns clamped under his arm is Raymond Chandler’s new, first, book-length mystery. Then wait to watch him cozying up with the Chandler over a pipe in the club car, and not having a clue what’s coming. You see, The Big Sleep doesn’t test high on logic.
The Super Chief scene isn’t so unlikely. The Union Station had opened in May 1939. Russell had been a visiting professor at UCLA since March, and before that at Chicago, a forty-hour ride and the train’s destination. Then as now, he could change there for New York, where he went to teach after UCLA. As for The Big Sleep, it was published by Knopf that October, only weeks after Russell’s country had gone to war with Nazi Germany. Which makes the book eighty years old.
It’s even possible, assuming the 3rd Earl had been picking up his Black Mask or Dime Detective at the newsstands, that the name Chandler might have struck a chord. But it still wouldn’t have prepared him.
By 1939 Chandler had worked a seven-year apprenticeship writing for the pulp magazines, absorbing the craft and getting the passages that most interested him - we’ll call them the atmospherics - routinely cut. In The Big Sleep, with a full novel at his disposal, they stayed in for the first time. And changed the face of mystery writing.
If an octogenarian Big Sleep is a shocking thought consider that Chandler was already fifty-one when it saw light of day. Chicago-born, but raised in Victorian London, he’d packed his interest in poetics along with a public school education and re-crossed the Atlantic before the First World War. He was in his mid-twenties by then, in need of a future, and taking the long view, his move back worked out. Chandler learned book-keeping. Went to war. Made and then unmade himself as a California oil executive (one consequence of testing seriously high on alcohol for most of a lifetime). Finally, down and out of a job in Depression-era LA, he turned to pulp writing. Not as a slumming poet, but as a man eyeing a craft he needed to learn. Once get the hang of it and the pulp magazines were paying a penny a word.
And get the hang of it he did, though it’s no surprise the pulp detective form grated on Chandler. His Belle Epoque schooling had taught him that a writer’s style was everything. Flaubert was the rage. But this was Dime Detective, 1932, and when Chandler tried writing in the atmospherics they were nixed. Not only because words cost pennies. They were costing publishers their action too.
Chandler didn’t see that as any loss. What’s more he didn’t think pulp readers would either, if ever they were shown an alternative. Unlike the 3rd Earl, most critics, and the (generally) English mystery writers of the time, he thought their refined plot lines were fripperies too. Which didn’t sit too well. The Murder in the Samovar crowd had its rules and unities for sleuthing by the book, and guarded them. Eighty years ago, when Chandler turned out the novel that shattered their commandments, they naturally gave it the chill.
From the outset, Chandler’s novels don’t major on writing action or detailing a plot. Nor does he aim to burden a story with significance, social or otherwise. After all, if you want to change the world, you don’t set out writing gumshoe mysteries. Chandler’s atmospherics are meant to be taken on their own terms. Stand in a floodlit parking lot. Breathe the scent of a diner. Hear the aimless tramp of the Pacific or drowse at a poolside with the fast and the monied, corrupting in a California glare. The Big Sleep and the novels that follow are soaked in such atmospherics, indelible and sometimes magical.
Just don’t ask what they mean. For Chandler they’re a burlesque of the hardboiled genre, shifted up a gear by the art and originality of the prose alone. He thinks it’s the only way a writer makes the grade.
That’s Chandler being the Belle Epoque stylist, resistant to attaching any significance to art. But there’s no doubt either that his art holds up a mirror to his Los Angeles; fast industrializing and overgrowing even as he hit his writing stride. From The Big Sleep onward his burlesques parade a new-minted metropolis before the mystery reader: gaudy and brittle, decadent and nervous, nickel-plated, always grifting, skin-deep. In fact, a metropolis tailor-made for Chandler’s priorities as a writer; so fragmented and transitory that any idea of meaning would seem quaint. Its atmospheres are its sum, lurid as the paint on the passing scenery.
The irony being, of course, that since The Big Sleep first nailed them, those very atmospheres became the signifier for LA the world over. The atmospheres, it turns out, are the meaning; as much for generations who never heard of Chandler as for his enduring fans.
Dammit, Raymond, was there more to you than style after all?
