The Improbable Afterlife of Philip Marlowe

In connection with both the release last week of The Annotated Big Sleep (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard) and this week’s debut of Lawrence Osborne’s Philip Marlowe novel, Only to Sleep (Hogarth), the Web site CrimeReads has been making the most of Raymond Chandler and his famous fictional private eye. All of the pieces are worth checking out if, like me, you’re a Chandler fan.

“The World of Raymond Chandler and The Big Sleep” is an adaptation of the introduction to The Annotated Big Sleep, by Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Dean Rizzuto. In “How to Write Like Chandler Without Becoming a Cliché,” Hill offers some “tips for aspiring crime writers enthralled by the [crime-fiction] classics.” And if you’re curious to see how The Big Sleep has been artistically presented by publishers around the world since its initial appearance in 1939, take a scroll through this gallery of 25 mostly paperback book covers.

Since this week brought the 130th anniversary of Chandler’s birth (he took his first breaths in Chicago on July 23, 1888), CrimeReads continues it celebration with a piece I contributed, titled “The Many Faces of Philip Marlowe.” It’s an examination of eight books, all published since Chandler’s demise back in 1959, that feature Marlowe or the author himself, but—like Osborne’s Only to Sleep—were penned by wordsmiths other than Chandler. It was great fun visiting or revisiting those works in order to write about them.

READ MORE: “The Big Seep,” by Megan Abbott (Slate); “Marlowe Never Sleeps,” by Clay and Susan Griffith (Tor.com); “Sleep Covers Worth Waking Up For,” by J. Kingston Pierce (Killer Covers); “The Man Who Would Be Marlowe,” by J. Kingston Pierce (The Rap Sheet).

“Are You Mr. Marlowe, the Detective?”

Continuing our Raymond Chandler birthday theme, I’ve embedded below what is described as a clip from the pilot for Philip Marlowe, a 1959-1960 ABC-TV series about which I have written before. According to Mystery*File, this pilot—with Philip Carey in the title role—was completed in February 1958, though the series didn’t debut until the fall of ’59. What’s more, it’s not clear whether this pilot was ever broadcast; the first known, half-hour episode of Philip Marlowe, “The Ugly Duckling,” is completely different, and can be watched here.



READ MORE: “The Reading Life: Happy Birthday to Me—and Raymond Chandler,” by Carolyn Kellogg (Los Angeles Times); “In Honor of Raymond Chandler’s Birthday: Chandler-Inspired Recipes,” by Colleen Collins (The Zen Man).

“A Grisly Skill”

To help celebrate today’s 130th anniversary of Raymond Chandler’s birth in Chicago, the Literary Hub-associated site Book Marks has posted what it says are the initial reviews of Chandler’s seven novels starring Los Angeles private eye Philip Marlowe. Here, for instance, is a critique of Farewell, My Lovely, penned for The New York Times by Isaac Anderson, and published on November 17, 1940:

This is a tough one: superlatively tough, alcoholic, and, for all its wisecracks, ugly rather than humorous. Like many ‘swift-moving’ tales, it is sometimes confusing in its rapid succession of incidents which may or may not have an integral connection with the plot. And the actual mystery is not important. It isn’t so difficult to guess what had become of the beautiful cabaret singer Velma. The identity of the unpleasing Lindsay Marriott’s slayer has no pressing interest. The murder casually committed by that elemental giant Moose Malloy is only an episode to start the story going. No, the appeal of Farewell, My Lovely is in its toughness, which is extremely well done.

Jeanne Florian may know something or nothing about Velma, but Philip Marlowe’s questioning of that gin-soaked old woman makes as sordid a bet as you’re likely to be looking for. Beautiful Mrs. Grayle has a real place in the story, but it’s the sense of evil all about her that gives you goose-flesh. And Amthor the ‘psychic consultant’ and Sonderberg the ‘dope doctor’ are lesser figures in a novel in which no detail is left undescribed.

But the story’s ever-present theme is police corruption, seen in a murky variety. And several kinds of dreadfulness are handled with a grisly skill.

You can read all seven of the reviews here.

Falling for Philip

I’ve watched the 1946 Humphrey Bogart film version of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep on more than a few occasions. But until recently, I’d only ever seen the 1978 remake starring Robert Mitchum one time, shortly after its U.S. big-screen debut. I had enjoyed Mitchum’s appearance as private eye Philip Marlowe in 1975’s Farewell, My Lovely, but my memory of his work in The Big Sleep—with the story’s location moved, for some godforsaken reason, to Britain—was considerably less rosy. A second watching failed to improve my opinion of the flick much, though I think Mitchum did an OK job, and Candy Clark’s portrayal of nymphomaniac daughter Carmen Sternwood (unnecessarily renamed Camilla in the ’78 version), was positively disturbing—which was of course exactly her intent.

With tomorrow bringing what would have been author Chandler’s 130th birthday, I decided one small way to honor his memory and to acknowledge my long-overdue second viewing of Mitchum’s The Big Sleep was to compare here one of my favorite scenes from both flicks. Notice in the first, Bogart clip that Chandler’s line about Marlowe being tall had to be modified to fit Bogie’s 5-foot-8 stature. Mitchum’s 6-foot-1 height better matched the original description.





WATCH MORE: “Marlowe Goes to the Movies,” by J. Kingston Pierce (The Rap Sheet).