Philip Marlowe


Philip Marlowe is a fictional character created by Raymond Chandler who was characteristic of the hardboiled crime fiction genre. The genre originated in the 1920s, notably in Black Mask magazine, in which Dashiell Hammett's The Continental Op and Sam Spade first appeared. Marlowe first appeared under that name in The Big Sleep, published in 1939. Chandler's early short stories, published in pulp magazines such as Black Mask and Dime Detective, featured similar characters with names like "Carmady" and "John Dalmas", starting in 1933.
Some of those short stories were later combined and expanded into novels featuring Marlowe, a process Chandler called "cannibalizing", which is more commonly known in publishing as a fix-up. When the original stories were republished years later in the short-story collection The Simple Art of Murder, Chandler did not change the names of the protagonists to Philip Marlowe. His first two stories, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot" and "Smart-Aleck Kill", were never altered in print but did join the others as Marlowe cases for the television series Philip Marlowe, Private Eye.
Underneath the wisecracking, hard-drinking, tough private eye, Marlowe is quietly contemplative, philosophical and enjoys chess and poetry. While he is not afraid to risk physical harm, he does not dish out violence merely to settle scores. Morally upright, he is not fooled by the genre's usual femmes fatales, such as Carmen Sternwood in The Big Sleep. Chandler's treatment of the detective novel exhibits an effort to develop the form. His first full-length book, The Big Sleep, was published when Chandler was 51; his last, Playback, when he was 70. He wrote seven novels in the last two decades of his life. An eighth, Poodle Springs, was completed posthumously by Robert B. Parker and published years later.

Inspiration

Explaining the origin of Marlowe's character, Chandler commented, "Marlowe just grew out of the pulps. He was no one person". When creating the character, Chandler had originally intended to call him Mallory; his stories for the Black Mask featured characters that are considered precursors to Marlowe. The emergence of Marlowe coincided with Chandler's transition from writing short stories to novels.
The Cahuenga Building, where Phillip Marlowe's office is located, is widely believed to be inspired by the Security Savings and Trust located on Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California.

Biographical notes

Philip Marlowe is a fictional character created by Raymond Chandler in a series of novels including The Big Sleep; ''Farewell, My Lovely; and The Long Goodbye. Chandler is not consistent as to Marlowe's age. In The Big Sleep, set in 1936, Marlowe's age is given as 33, while in The Long Goodbye, Marlowe is 42. In a letter to D. J. Ibberson of April 19, 1951, Chandler noted among other things that Marlowe is 38 years old and was born in Santa Rosa, California. He had a couple of years at college and some experience as an investigator for an insurance company and the district attorney's office of Los Angeles County. He was fired from the DA's office for insubordination. The DA's chief investigator, Bernie Ohls, is a friend and former colleague and a source of information for Marlowe within law enforcement.
As with his age, Chandler is not consistent as to Marlowe's height: in The Long Goodbye he is described as being "six feet, one half inch", while in Farewell My Lovely Marlowe describes one of his clients, Lindsay Marriott, as having "an inch more of height than I had, which made him six feet one" – meaning Marlowe is six feet tall himself. He weighs about. He is described as having dark hair and a medium heavy build ; dark brown hair with some grey and brown eyes. Marlowe first lived at the Hobart Arms, on Franklin Avenue near North Kenmore Avenue but then moved to the Bristol Hotel, where he stayed for about 10 years. By 1950 he has rented a house on Yucca Avenue in Laurel Canyon and continued at the same place in early 1952 in Playback, Chandler's last full-length Marlowe novel.
His office, originally on the seventh floor of an unnamed building in 1936, is at #615 on the sixth floor of the Cahuenga Building by March–April 1939, which is on Hollywood Boulevard near Ivar. North Ivar Avenue is between North Cahuenga Boulevard to the west and Vine Street to the east. The office telephone number is GLenview 7537. Marlowe's office is modest and he does not have a secretary. He generally refuses to take divorce cases.
He drinks whiskey or brandy frequently and in relatively large quantities. For example, in The High Window, he gets out a bottle of Four Roses and pours glasses for him, Det. Lt. Breeze and Spangler. At other times, he is drinking Old Forester, a Kentucky bourbon, "I hung up and fed myself a slug of Old Forester to brace my nerves for the interview. As I was inhaling it I heard her steps tripping along the corridor". However, in Playback he orders a double Gibson at a bar while tailing Betty Mayfield. Also, in The Long Good-bye, Terry Lennox and he drink Gimlets; in the same novel he also orders a whiskey sour and drinks Cordon Rouge champagne with Linda Loring.
Marlowe is adept at using liquor to loosen peoples' tongues. An example is in The High Window, when Marlowe finally persuades the detective-lieutenant, whose "solid old face was lined and grey with fatigue", to take a drink: "Breeze looked at me very steadily. Then he sighed. Then he picked the glass up and tasted it and sighed again and shook his head sideways with a half smile; the way a man does when you give him a drink and he needs it very badly and it is just right and the first swallow is like a peek into a cleaner, sunnier, brighter world".
He frequently drinks coffee. Eschewing the use of filters, he uses a vacuum coffee maker. He smokes and prefers Camel cigarettes. At home and at his office he sometimes smokes a pipe. A chess adept, he is often described as playing games against himself or setting out and duplicating historical tournament games from books as a means of relaxation or clearing his head.
As is typical of pulp fiction private eyes from Sherlock Holmes onward, Marlowe is a bachelor throughout most of the novels. That he has sex with female characters is explicit or implied in each of the novels, but he is also shown resisting various sexual invitations and refusing to take advantage of other sexual opportunities on moral grounds. In The Long Goodbye the divorced daughter of the press tycoon Harlan Potter, Linda Loring, asks Marlowe to go with her to Paris, but he declines. Then, at the end of the next novel, Playback, Loring phones him from Paris and asks him again to join her. Marlowe challenges her to come to him in L.A. instead, implicitly testing her sincerity. In the opening paragraphs of Poodle Springs'' he has just married her.

Marlowe bibliography

Original short stories by Raymond Chandler

  • "Blackmailers Don't Shoot"
  • "Smart-Aleck Kill"
  • "Finger Man"
  • "Killer in the Rain"
  • "Nevada Gas"
  • "Spanish Blood"
  • "Guns at Cyrano's"
  • "The Man Who Liked Dogs"
  • "Noon Street Nemesis"
  • "Goldfish"
  • "The Curtain"
  • "Try the Girl"
  • "Mandarin's Jade"
  • "Red Wind"
  • "The King in Yellow"
  • "Bay City Blues"
  • "The Lady in the Lake"
  • "Pearls Are a Nuisance"
  • "Trouble Is My Business"
  • "I'll Be Waiting"
  • "The Bronze Door"
  • "No Crime in the Mountains"

Original Philip Marlowe works by Raymond Chandler

Authorized works by other writers

Authorized novels by other writers

  • Poodle Springs, by Robert B. Parker. An authorized completion of Chandler's unfinished last work; the original text 'The Poodle Springs Story' had been published alongside excerpts from Chandler's letters, notes and essays in Raymond Chandler Speaking, by Dorothy Gardener and Katherine Sorley Walker. New York: Books for Library Press.
  • Perchance to Dream, by Robert B. Parker. An authorized sequel to Chandler's The Big Sleep.
  • The Black-Eyed Blonde, by John Banville writing as "Benjamin Black," is an authorized sequel to The Long Goodbye, and reuses the title of Benjamin M. Schutz's otherwise-unrelated Marlowe story.
  • Only to Sleep, by Lawrence Osborne, finds the elderly Marlowe in Mexico in 1988, investigating the “accidental” swimming death of a debt-ridden con man/developer.
  • The Goodbye Coast, by Joe Ide, a reimagining of the character, set in present day Los Angeles.
  • The Second Murderer, by Denise Mina

Film adaptations

Radio and television adaptations

Radio

Television

Theater adaptations

Marlowe has appeared on stage at least twice. An adaptation of The Little Sister in 1978 in Chicago starred Mike Genovese as Marlowe. In 1982, Richard Maher and Roger Michell wrote Private Dick, in which Chandler has lost the manuscript for a novel, and calls in Marlowe to help find it. The production played in London, with Robert Powell as Marlowe.

Video game adaptations

Audio


Category:Fictional American detectives
Category:Fictional characters from Los Angeles
Category:Fictional private investigators
Category:Book series
Category:Characters in pulp fiction
Category:Characters in American novels of the 20th century
Category:Characters of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction
Category:Literary characters introduced in 1939
Category:Thriller film characters
Category:Crime film characters
Category:Characters in short stories
Category:Detective fiction short stories
Category:Male characters in literature
Category:Male characters in film
Category:Fictional characters from the 20th century