Karnataka   

Tackling sin in style

An incorrigible addict to escapist literature, I nowadays only read books I have already read and enjoyed, like those by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, both writers of crime or detective fiction to which one does not normally return.

A friend recently wondered how I could return again and again to such narratives which, after the unmasking of the villains in the denouement, would have held no surprises. While most of crime fiction does not wear well, Chandler and Hammet have worn well for me. Their narratives are marked by a moral ambiguity; the good are not always good and the evil not always evil. The complexities of these finely tuned plots dealing with love and death, betrayal and murder, are unravelled in an easy narrative flow of diamond-hard prose, especially of Hammett’s, marked by style and wit and humour and high spirits. Comedy and romance are juxtaposed with rank villainy and evil that is, and sometimes is not, finally defeated.

Chandler and his slightly younger contemporary Hammet honed their narrative skills in the hard school of writing for pulp magazines. Their narratives, peopled by utterly amoral men and women motivated by greed and lust, are situated against the social milieu of America of the 1920s and the 1930s, the heyday of Hollywood and Wall Street before and during the Great Depression. Sleek women in sheer dresses smoking cigarettes in long holders and snorting cocaine, and even smoother men in tuxedos pack guns and knives and knuckledusters, as they prepare to dine and dance and kill. The narratives are packed with smooth-talking conmen, grifters and blackmailers; pillars of society and captains of industry, living in luxurious mansions hiring assassins of both sexes.

The detective, in many cases also the narrator, is almost always male and a loner, in it but not of it. Love, loyalty, courage and similar virtues are entirely private, cherished by the unsuccessful of this harsh and brittle world. The Long Good-Bye by Chandler presents a slice of a rich world into which has drifted Terry Lennox, a loner bearing a striking scar of a war wound. He has married money, or to be more precise money has married him, for as a war hero, he is somewhat of a trophy husband. The novel opens with the narrator, Philip Marlowe, the iconic private eye created by Chandler, running into a dead drunk Terry who is being dumped outside a restaurant by his rich wife Sylvia.

Marlowe takes Terry to his lonely home; and thus begins a friendship that takes the most unexpected twists and turns. Sylvia is brutally murdered. Terry, apparently a suspect, is helped to flee the country by Marlowe who has faith in his friend. For his troubles, Marlowe is beaten up by the police and threatened by menacing gangsters. Terry then shoots himself in a remote small town in Mexico, leaving a note that could be read as a confession of murder, and a $ 5,000 note that Marlowe receives by mail.

This is not the end, but the beginning of another story whose central character, Roger Wade, is an alcoholic writer of best-selling sexy romances, who has run into a writer’s block. He is married to an ethereally beautiful wife, Eileen. Marlowe is hired by his agent to help him complete the book. Roger too dies, apparently a suicide like Terry, who was once married to Eileen. The beautiful Eileen turns out to be the real killer of both Roger and Sylvia, Roger for his money and Sylvia out of jealous rage for having stolen both Terry and Roger from her.

However, it turns out that Terry is not really dead but has only faked his suicide and has made a new life for himself in Mexico. He tries to befriend Marlowe again. Marlowe turns him down and returns the $ 5,000 note, saying he would rather live his lonely life in his lonely house, a piece of virtue-mongering that is characteristic of Chandler’s heroes, and such a contrast to the unsentimental realism of Hammett’s equally authentic heroes.

M. S. PRABHAKARA

kamaroopi@gmail.com

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