Chandler and Marlowe
Posted on | April 23, 2007 | 25 Comments
Have just finished reading a collection of the Philip Marlowe books. I’d read them years ago but I think I was too young to appreciate them properly.
Marlowe was a cool bastard, even though he smoked a pipe from time to time. The first cool thing about him was the fact that his first name didn’t have two Ls in it. There’s never any need for somebody to be called ‘Phillip’ or ‘Matthew’ or ‘Allan’ – why waste letters like that? You don’t hear of people called ‘Gorddon’ or ‘Derrek’, do you?
Another cool thing about him was the fact that he never chose the easy way to do anything. When inevtiably questioned by the cops over his involvement in some case he never just said “Well, what happened was X, Y and Z” at which point the fuzz would just say “Oh right, that all makes sense. See you later.”
No, Marlowe would remain aloof, rude and would tell them nothing but let them know he knew everything. He also drinks bourbon for breakfast, kisses other people’s wives while they’re looking and has no problem drinking gin based cocktails.
Of course the coolest thing about Marlowe were his ‘sayings’. It was he who perfected the style of the hard-boiled PI (post Sam Spade) which has been so pastiched by film and TV, notably Frank Drebben in Police Squad (“It’s true what they say. Cops and women don’t mix. It’s like eating a spoonful of Drano: Sure, it’ll clean you out, but it’ll leave you hollow inside.”)
My most favourite line of all is the one where he’s talking about a beautiful blonde client and he says something along the lines of “She was a blonde. The kind of blonde that would make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.”
Awesome. I don’t really know what exactly it means but it just sounds brilliant, doesn’t it?
Can you imagine if we’d had an Irish Marlowe?
“She had a face like a freshly dug Kerr’s pink. Filthy, red like a baboon’s arse and lumpy as hell.”
In honour of Marlowe I’m going to drink a pint of bourbon for my breakfast.
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25 Responses to “Chandler and Marlowe”
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April 23rd, 2007 @ 9:31 am
Wow – thought I was in the wrong house there for a minute.
Was the lumpy and red faced woman any relation to the Wexford Queen?
April 23rd, 2007 @ 9:55 am
“She was a blonde,The kind of blonde that would that would give the horn to a snowman.”
April 23rd, 2007 @ 10:03 am
You people disgust me.
April 23rd, 2007 @ 10:09 am
I remember laughing out loud at Marlowe saying of a woman that “her face looked like the basket the cat had kittens in”
April 23rd, 2007 @ 10:17 am
How about: “He snorted and hit me in the solar plexus. I bent over and took hold of the room with both hands and spun it. When I had it nicely spinning I gave it a full swing and hit myself on the back of the head with the floor.”
April 23rd, 2007 @ 10:18 am
Or this one: “I’m an occasional drinker, the kind of guy who goes out for a beer and wakes up in Singapore with a full beard.” — Sound familiar, Twenty?
April 23rd, 2007 @ 10:20 am
Erm, not the Singapore part but the rest surely does.
April 23rd, 2007 @ 12:32 pm
So you’d recommend Chandler then?
April 23rd, 2007 @ 12:49 pm
Big time.
April 23rd, 2007 @ 1:58 pm
“Big Time”
Was that the sequel to “Big Sleep”?
April 23rd, 2007 @ 1:59 pm
No, that was Big Sleep II, starring Tom Hanks as a man trapped in the body of an insomniac child.
April 23rd, 2007 @ 2:12 pm
Isn’t it funny that PI books are so entertaining, when in real life, PI’s are so not.
April 23rd, 2007 @ 2:19 pm
You read?
April 23rd, 2007 @ 2:22 pm
Who, me?
April 23rd, 2007 @ 2:52 pm
Who the fuck’s this Marlowe anyway? I always thought it was Chandler and JOEY.
April 23rd, 2007 @ 3:34 pm
Have you tried reading Damon Runyon? Not as tough as Marlowe but funnier. And all written in the present tense, so you can read the stories while drunk without taxing the brain too much.
April 23rd, 2007 @ 4:27 pm
“She was as ugly as they get – a kind of cross between WeeWee. Porridgeface, Peader (well-named after his eponymous pig-father) with a touch of Belmullet man thrown in for good measure. In short, she couldn’t have got laid if she were in Mountjoy with a handful of Pardons….”
April 24th, 2007 @ 1:31 am
Gluaistean was like a piggy bank,plenty of money but take it away and he’s hollow and empty inside
April 24th, 2007 @ 10:31 am
“She was a blonde. The kind of blonde that would make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.”
It means the Bishop got so randy he needed a hole for his mickey.
April 24th, 2007 @ 3:31 pm
‘scorchio was one of those typical Oirish – her only ambition to live untill she died. Filling in time between solving the problems of the world at the Pub was a matter of fulfilling all the expectations that she would go far – down the drain”
Anyone that tells you that having a large unencumbered Bank Balance is not FUN – is just as pitiful as the rest of you losers on the public tit down the Dole office : )
April 24th, 2007 @ 3:51 pm
[...] “Twenty? Well, time was, you was right. Now’days, though, he don’t take so well to folk. Went and got hisself a book deal and shipped his whole damn operation outta Blogville. Works out west now, in a big city called Published. Charges a damn appearance fee for every story he’s referenced in, including this one. So, unless you got the green to command an appearance from the man hisself, I suggest you take his cheap non-union Mexican equivalent, Veinte Major, and make do with him.” [...]
April 24th, 2007 @ 5:21 pm
think I hit a nerve there gluaistean,you billy no mates cunt.no one wants to listen to your boasting and bullshit, so you do it on here,all the money in the world couldn’t buy you a personality,thats why your doing so well in the states.knobjockey
April 24th, 2007 @ 6:02 pm
and I’m sure there is nothing wrong with a large bank balance,but boasting about it cos your hung like a mouse is sad.cunt
April 25th, 2007 @ 1:32 pm
Hammett’s better
April 30th, 2007 @ 11:59 am
Declan Hughes. A Galwayman gone bad, now living in the faraway fairyland called Dublin.
From his latest, “The Wrong Kind Of Blood”. The night of my mother’s funeral, Linda Dawson cried on my shoulder, put her tounge in my mouth, and asked me to find her husband. Now she was lying dead on her living room floor,and the howl of a police siren echoed through the surrounding hills. Linda had been strangled: a froth of blood brimmed from her mouth, and her bloodshot eyes bulged. The marks around her neck were barely perceptible, suggesting the murder weapon had been a scarf or a silk tie. Cyanosis had given her already livid skin a blueish tone, deepest at the lips and ears, and on the fingernails of her hands, which were clenched in small fists. They lay stiff in her lap, and her eyes gaped unseeingly through the glass wall toward the sky; her corpse looked like some grotesque parody of the undertakers art.
The siren’s howl reached a defening crescendo and then stopped. As the car doors slammed, as the Guards stomped up the drive and began to pound on the front door, my eyes looked out past Linda’s, out at the gray morning sky, then down along the cliffside, down between the stands of spruce and pine, down among the great Georgian houses, the Victorian castles and modern villas of Castlehill, down to where this all began, barely a week ago.