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31 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
American Classics, 25 Oct 2002
Ernest Hemingway, in between drinking gallons of booze and writing those cute short sentences of his, once observed that all American literature comes from Mark Twain's 'Huckleberry Finn'. He was right in a sense. Twain's novel was the first to deal with the archetypal North American conflict between city and wilderness, the demands of civilisation and the lure of freedom. You can see Huck right up to the present day: in J.D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield perhaps, or in Lester Burnham in 'American Beauty'.And he's right there in Chandler's Philip Marlowe. Forget your Poirots and your Marples. Forget even Sherlock Holmes. Marlowe is the greatest literary detective. What makes him great is his apartness; Chandler's novels are not really about solving mysteries - often the plots don't make a lot of sense - but about the tragedy within the man he created. Marlowe is tragic. A noble, Arthurian figure (Chandler almost called him Malory, after the author of Morte d'Arthur, but rejected the name as too obvious) he is isolated in the decadent civilisation that surrounds him. He is, as Robert Graves might put it, the one good man in a wholly evil time. His dilemma - whether to give in to the temptations of the world around him, or to pursue his lonely crusade - is at the centre of each of these novels, and in each novel is explored in a different way. They are all absorbing even though, as I've said, Chandler didn't really care a hoot about plot. (He once said that whenever he ran out of ideas he had a man walk into the room with a gun. So not much pre-planning and storylining going on there, then). In an essay about detective fiction, Chandler wrote of Marlowe and his Los Angeles: 'Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid... He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.' Such is Chandler's Marlowe. Read him, and be amazed.
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