David Goodis - Five Noir Novels of the 1940s & 50s

The world was spinning in the wrong direction (p. 190).

Decades ago, David Goodis penned millions of words for the pulp magazines, worked on innumerable screenplays, and released a slew of classic Crime novels, including The Wounded and the Slain. Now the Library of America has released five of Goodis' novels in a single hardcover volume, and I gladly took the chance to delve deeper into the author's brutal depiction of our urban underbelly. Between the five, the characters, plots, and the presence of hope all vary considerably, but the quality of Goodis' work and the desperation of his vision are inescapable throughout.

The synopsis on the volume's back describes Dark Passage as the story of an innocent man railroaded for his wife's murder. It's accurate, but the railroading is broader than that. Goodis' characters entire lives have been railroaded. They have been condemned to live in a world they did not create, in a hopeless situation that they almost certainly cannot escape. As Goodis writes of Nathaniel Harbin in The Burglar: The world was an avalanche, taking him down (p. 362).

Goodis writes of desperation and of defiance. His men and women may find themselves in a hopeless world, but they do not surrender to it, and they will not, no matter the damage it does to them. In Street of No Return, a famous singer is beaten by two thugs. He can stop the blows any time he wants. All he has to do is give up on the woman he loves. Convinced? they ask as the blackjack falls. Convinced now? Every time, his answer is No (pp. 702-3). Finally, they hit his throat, and he loses his voice. They leave him, and he thinks that they have won. But, if Goodis is the visionary of hopeless realities, he's also a master of the hope within us, no matter the odds against it. As the singer tells himself, They didn't convince you after all (p. 749).

This kind of hope is not one borne of chances or a belief in success. It's not an indomitability of flesh but of spirit. It's not simple masochism; it's neither a wish for pain nor an ideal belief to hold actionless in the night. It's simply that Goodis' characters cannot, and will not, quit, and their determination is a matter of them and their goals, not of attainability. At the end of one novel, an innocent man, his case now hopeless, speaks to his love one last time and begins to list the nearly endless fortune they would require to ever see each other again. We'll skip the ifs, she tells him (p. 192). Reading those lines is a strange experience. Everything in the novel before them has gone wrong. The protagonist is on the run, and he can never fully escape. And yet the reader is feeling almost empowered as they turn the last page.

While hope is crucial to Goodis novels, ambition for the worldly is not. The things – the luxuries – that ambition brings are, for Goodis, almost immaterial. Though some are, it's a mistake to think every Goodis protagonist destitute. The wonderfully named Nathaniel Harbin is even covetous of material wealth, and Nightfall's James Vanning has stumbled across a massive fortune. But those fortunes prove as restraining, and as ruining, as poverty. Nathaniel knows that, ultimately, luxurious sensations never lasted for long and even while it happened was accompanied by the dismal knowledge that it would soon be over (pp. 417-8).

Goodis' characters hope for simpler things, more essential things. They crave survival, though it is far from a sure thing in these pages. They want happiness, nothing extravagant, but rather the simple and ordinary kind (p. 5), as the protagonist of Dark Passage puts it. And, perhaps the most powerfully of all, they hope for love and love's success. They know, of course, that these goals are not necessarily all compatible. Caring for another hurts them. Love hurts their chances. It is, without a doubt, a problem (p. 596). Often, it threatens to doom them or actually does. Nonetheless, it may be the only thing that makes all the pain worthwhile. It may be the only way to truly escape, or maybe even to transcend, the misery of the world. Speaking of Street of No Return's singer and the love he was beaten for, Goodis writes: In the bed with her it was dark but somehow blazing like the core of a shooting star. It was going 'way out past all space and all time (p. 689).

All of this is beautifully forced upon the reader by some of the strongest prose I've ever read. Goodis' writing is a complex art crafted from the simplest of building blocks. On the sentence level, Goodis is fully capable of fantastic imagery, such as: In the ash tray near the bed, the stubs became a family that grew through the night (p. 298). But those sentences are easy reads, graspable things, and, above all, perfectly in character. Every sentence is the very embodiment of the speaker or viewpoint's soul and mood and thought. It's likely this gift with plain but evocative prose that grants Goodis his gift for dialogue. His characters speak with their own voices, and he has the rare gift of being able to let them converse on any topic that enters their mind while still showing so much of their character so as to never feel as if he is going off topic.

Things don't stop at the sentence level, though, for, at the novels' key moments, these sentences flow into one another, thoughts flowing into thoughts, until we end with passages of nearly free association, of a stream of consciousness made of the simplest parts that never loses their easy heart of understandability. In this way, Goodis blends individually clear images with one another to create wholly new modes and tones, and his protagonists wrestle with themselves and their own thought as the text follows along with their argument, an internal debate that reads with all the force of our own. A relatively brief example, in which the protagonist of Dark Passage thinks of the constraints he was under even before the crime:

He was going back and taking chunks out of his life and holding them up to examine them. The young and bright yellow days in the hot sun of Maricopa, always bright yellow in every season. The wide and white roads going north from Arizona. The grey and violet of San Francisco. The grey and the heat of the stock room, and the days and nights of nothing, the years of nothing. And the cage in the investment security house, and the stiff white collars of the executives, stiff and newly white every day, and their faces every day, and their voices every day. And the paper, the plain white paper, the pink paper, the pale-green paper, the paper ruled violet and green and black in small ledgers and large ledgers and immense ledgers. And the faces (pp. 102-3).

In terms of the novels themselves, the first two are by far the closest of any of the pieces here. Both Dark Passage and Nightfall star men wrongly pursued by the full weight of the law and desperate to clear their names. Furthermore, both possess puzzle style crimes that the protagonists must solve if they are to have any hope or proving their innocence. The mystery in the latter relies to a large extent on one very nonsensical act that makes guessing it before the reveal just about impossible, so, in that regard, the former is the stronger. Still, Nightfall can boast the bizarre but fascinating relationship between its protagonist and the detective that pursues him and, gradually, begins to believe in his innocence and to strive as hard as he to clear his name.

Like those two, The Burglar has a suspenseful plot that has its characters struggling to escape the law and keep their lives. But, and rather unlike them, its heroes are most certainly not innocent. Nathaniel Harbin and his closest friends are professional burglars. But while they might be nominally outside of society's rules, they are not out of its heart: Every animal, including the human being, is a criminal, and every move in life is a part of the vast process of crime. What law, Gerald would ask, could control the need to take food and put it in the stomach? No law, Gerald would say, could erase the practice of taking. According to Gerald, he basic and primary moves in life amounted to nothing more than this business of taking, to take it and get away with it (p. 416).

Nathaniel and his fellows were born at the bottom, were left with nothing. They refused to stay there, and they have fought their way to a living. But that living is not secure, and, now, they have come up against a foe that may prove as unprincipled and as determined as they are. Despite its solid illegality, The Burglar is not an amoral novel. Though a crook, Nathaniel has not left honor. Behind as his mentor once said: What mattered, what mattered high up there by itself all alone […] was whether things are honorable (p. 418). As it progresses, The Burglar becomes a tale of honor tested and also of different and impossible kinds of love. I won't spoil the finish's particulars, but I will say that The Burglar has one of the most crushing endings of any book I've read.

Though still certainly a Goodis work, The Moon in the Gutter is a very different beast from its fellows here. Like The Blonde on the Street Corner (not included here), it is a largely plotless exploration of society's lowest rungs. Kerrigan is very aware that he and all the other denizens of Vernon Street are riding through life on a fourth-class ticket (p. 496), but he has nonetheless fallen in love with an uptown woman who loves him back. Furthermore, he must face his sister's pointless and ugly death mere months before. The novel's climax comes as Kerrigan looks out a window, over the houses and denizens of Vernon Street, and suffers the following revelation:

And no matter where the weaker ones were hiding, they'd never get away from the Vernon moon. It had them trapped. It had them doomed. Sooner or later they'd be mauled and battered and crushed. They'd learn the hard way that Vernon Street was no place or delicate bodies or timid souls. They were prey, that was all, they were destined for the maw of the ever hungry eater, the Vernor gutter.

He stared out at the moonlit street. Without sound he said, You did it to [my sister]. You (p. 615).

Though inevitable, the revelation is not altogether satisfying. When Kerrigan decides that he and his love can never be together, it's not a surprising decision, but the reader has still never seen a single scene of their failing to be so, only presentiments that it will happen. It's painful to see one of Goodis' narrators give up his struggle and bow his head to fate, but, while The Moon in the Gutter is a powerful read, it's the least successful one in this collection.

Street of No Return is a more eventful than the preceding read, but its strongpoint is not its plot, which is held together by a bevy of coincidences and a revelation that is not as hard to piece together as the characters might have you believe. That is not, however, to say that it is a weak novel, for here Goodis excels with his atmospheric depictions of Philadelphia and through his portrayal of his protagonist, the once-famous singer that I discussed long ago in the review's beginning and that singer's slow motion suicide, his life lived after his loss as Going down. One step at a time (p. 708). Furthermore, Goodis quickly and sympathetically establishes his police characters and those of the other souls the novel's protagonist meets in his flight. The book's climax is a triumph, and a clearing of the main character's name, but it is not a final triumph, and, after what could in many novels be a Happy Ever After, Goodis shows his hero return without a word to the near-hopeless brutality of the life he's left.

In this collection, the Library of America was kind enough to give us five brutally powerful novels, each resplendent with not only overwhelming darkness but also strength and hope. David Goodis is a master of Noir, and this is the largest, and likely best, collection of his work you'll find anywhere.

Robert Jackson Bennett - The Company Man

"What is our city built of?" Samantha asked as they walked. "What's down there, in its heart?" (p. 388)

Robert Jackson Bennett's second novel, The Company Man, brings us to Evesden, a city on the edge of America at the beginning of the 20^th Century that houses the industrial monolith McNaughton Corporation. The city that has changed the world. McNaughton has brought forth strange new weapons, trolleys, and airships. And that's just scratching the surface of what it may one day unveil. Mr. Hayes, a man made cursed with and brilliant by the ability to hear the thoughts of those around him, works to protect that marvelous company's secrets. It's a dangerous job, for, though McNaughton may have wrought great works and avoided horrors like the First World War, the city of Evesden is sick and teeming with the human byproduct of these titanic changes. As union men begin to die, those masses begin to move. Hayes begins the novel investigating these mounting incidents and end it investigating the city and modernity itself.

The Company Man is a novel of two successive parts, joined by a revelation and a shifting of scale, and the first of those is something I can best characterize as a kind of steampunk noir. The city of Evesden is, needless to say, filled with marvels, marvels that awe not only the man of a century back but that are still stunning to us. Bennett is not only adept at dreaming up these technologies and then fashioning them believably into the fabric of his city but also at conveying the wonder the city's newcomers (like Hayes' new assistant, Samantha) feel and the hopes its more optimistic leaders put on these devices. But that is never allowed to stand alone.

Bennett shows wonder, but he does it through a muted color spectrum, paints the impossible in all the hues of the down-beaten and the looking up. Speaking of one of the locations he visits early on, Hayes said: The future was only a mile or two away but would come no closer to places like these (p. 6). The problems with Evesden are not merely ones of distribution, however. We see greatness up close, and, for all its splendor, it is nonetheless jagged and deadly, something described in terms of unforgiving industry and the eerily supernatural: On cold days the moisture from the shore would mix with the fumes from the plants, layering the thin, winding streets in a thick fog, and as you walked along one lane you would sometimes see a factory emerging from the curl of the clouds ahead, bejeweled with harsh blue lamps and covered in endless spires, like the deck of a ghost ship drifting mere yards away (p. 26).

If descriptions like those establish Bennett's tremendous prose powers, then it must be known that his other great strength is character, and it is as much through that lense as it is through his images that Bennett establishes the city's feel. We open with Hayes and the dogged cop Garvey looking down at a corpse. From there, we do not move onto a succession of other explosions but onto the friendship between the two men. Like the great noir writers of yore, Bennett is able to write dialogue that flows fast and feels real but is rich with meaning. As Hayes and Garvey converse and afterwards, as they move apart and the story progresses, we get a sense of who each man is and how he interacts with the world and, from their similarly and likely uselessly striving and yet distinct views, a grander sense of that world.

Each of the main characters – Hayes, Garvey, and Samantha – has, somewhere within the novel's pages, a sentence or passage that lays bare their very core. Such statements could easily spoil the characters' depths, something which Bennett manages to avoid in two ways. First, he saves these revelations for near the end, once the reader has seen enough of them to reach such conclusions on their own. Then there's how these thoughts are never stated in the objective, authorial voice but are, instead, left to other characters to say after they have come to know their companions well enough. Due to that degree of distance, these statements are not cheat sheets to the characters but rather insights into them, insights insightfully tainted by the speakers' own flaws and ideals. All of this, though, is not to suggest that Bennett's characters are no more than a sentence deep; their ethos so summed up, the characters' lives do not crumble into naught but examples. Each of them is more than their drives, and we see, through their interactions with each other and their world, the man behind the plot and even almost behind the character.

It's not only our three leads that develop personalities and souls, for the city of Evesden comes to life here. Bennett imbues its districts with not only histories but atmospheres and its masses with not only patterns and moods but lives. The Company Man is neither a particularly tight novel nor a particularly fast one, but its laxness, the way Hayes and its other characters branch out and speak to more and more people as it progresses rather than honing in, proves to be one of its greatest strengths. The city of Evesden is rife with rumors, and Bennett shows us the vastness of those mumblings, of the people trying to piece together the impossible events around him, and in doing so he fills in the heart of his world with endless and often desperate speculation.

So much of Evesden is, of course, tied up with the unions, with the growing struggle against McNaughton. It becomes clear as their struggle continues that neither side truly instigated it, that these conditions were almost inevitable and that they are nonetheless unlivable. Neither side is truly looking for war. They are, instead, looking to survive in this impossible world. As the union's followers say, combining as is so often combined in this book bibilical levels of hope with the utmost desperation: We came here looking for the promised land […] We didn't find it. This place chewed us up and spat us back out. We're not looking to Mr. Tazz for a general, Mr. Hayes. Not for someone to tell us who to hurt. Least, I don't look at him like that. We just wanted someone to show us the way out of here. That ain't so much, is it?" (p. 280)

In terms of plot, The Company Man is very much noir, at least for now. Hayes is pursuing a mystery, but this is not a sanitary puzzle for him to solve. When Bennett contrasts the methods of Hayes and Garvey, it is along lines perfectly familiar to anyone who has read Dashiell Hammett's puzzle-defying work of noir, "The Tenth Clew," (collected in The Continental Op): Garvey was forever inspecting every little item and every line of dialogue, trying to arrange the murder in his mind. Harvey found people more interesting, and especially getting them to tell him what he wanted to know. Investigation was as much a con game as it was a science (p. 192).

Like a lot of Crime writing, Bennett uses plot twists. Alas, they are one of the few areas in which he is unsuccessful. None of the twists in The Company Man are bad or damaging to the narrative, but all are predictable. The fantastic rumor mill that I just discussed adds immeasurably to the book's power, but it also has the result of giving the reader just about all the answers long before the characters are ready to credit those answers. As a result, the book's middle section – in which the mystery is broadening and burgeoning into the territory of impossible revelations but won't quite get to them yet – lacks the power and drive of its opening and closing.

But then the other shoe drops, the scale shifts massively, and the book goes from a kind of stylized steampunk noir to full on, big screen Science Fiction noir. [Be warned: SPOILERS from here on out.] Throughout, characters have wondered about McNaughton's incredible technologies, speculated that they were unworldly and alien (p. 26). That they don't seem to have been built by men. Those men are correct. McNaughton's marvels have been harvested from the crashed remnants of an alien spacecraft. Now, armed with such wonders, man is on the brink of destroying himself. But that spacecraft did not come here by chance. It was sent by a star faring race that is trying to prevent new intelligences from doing just that, from growing and growing and tearing themselves to nothing. Its message, it says, is that your kind will die. […] That it will overreach, and crumble, and perish, and be forgotten. And that this will happen soon (p. 406). Now, crashed, its remnants are only aiding the apocalypse that it tried to stop.

In a lesser book, the final act would, from there, be obvious. Hayes and Garvey and Samantha would become heroes, saviors, would stop the coming destruction with a stirring speech or maybe a timely strike. But no. For all its large scale grandeur, this is still noir, and one man cannot stand against the world. As the remnants say, There is no stopping it. This is the way. It [our industry and world] is a machine grown so large, and with so much momentum that it cannot stop, only fall apart under its own force (p. 412). What can we do if we cannot save the world? We can survive, no matter the devastation. All life desires destruction, we are told. All that matters is if it survives it (p. 413). And so Hayes' ultimate role is not to be the world's protector but rather its rebuilder, the man who tries to conserve what little may be left after its annihilation. The man that, due to his gift and curse, knows more about man than any other.

The remnants of our world, though they must be saved, will not be forgiven. Often, in The Company Man's pages, characters who have done horrible things realize their sins. Often, they try to atone for them. They fail.  Will he forgive me? a pedohile asks Hayes, horrified of his sins and of God's judgment. Do you think he will forgive me? Hayes' answer? No […] No, I don't (p. 326). More cutting still is the fate of a child, twisted and warped by unearthly technologies. He was innocent. Still, There could be no return from this. No way back. Not from this (p. 432). The guilty, damned, and damming of The Company Man cannot be saved, and the world, filled with them as it is, cannot be, either. As Hayes says: I don't think there's any fixing anything. Not really. Not for long (p. 379).

There is no reason to think that the world to come will be different that, after the great nations war and destroy, man will be good. Good men like Hayes might save the world's ashes, but they will not set their course or constitute their heart. In Evesden and, no doubt, in what is to follow it, the good were forever fated to die young and die violently. Fated to change the world only in their remembrance left behind in the hearts of those who lived on. In the sinners. In those who unjustly survived the slain (p. 435).

Writing for Strange Horizons, Niall Harrison argued this shift to be where Bennett "sabotages" the heart of his own novel, turns away from the world he has created. I disagree; I think this is where he broadens that world, where he turns The Company Man from a statement about Evesden to a statement about the world, our world, and about man. It is true, of course, that this shift comes to subsume the earlier struggle with the unions, but Bennett's criticism was never, I believe, intended to encompass solely the idea of union reform. No, the unions are simply a symptom of a larger problem, of the costs of our new world and of the forces unleashed.

It's true that, by the end, the unions and the company are both juggernauts made of nothing, the one led by the ignorant, the other by the invented. But that absence of maniacal leadership shows a problem greater than that wrought by one man, a problem inherent in our world and race. By removing the easy antagonism of its opening, by pitting all of humanity against a greater threat (even if that threat is at our own hands), Bennett makes unavoidable the conclusion that there is no enemy to blame these woes on, no foe to lash back at, that this is our doing and that the solution must be ours. That this is something faced by all of us. Near the novel's end, Hayes and his superior sit in the McNaughton building, and his superior desperately tries to cling to some shred of a tie between them, something that unites them against the deadly world outside. Hayes tosses it away. As he says: I'm not company […] No one is. There's no union. No company. No city. Just people. Alone. And unwatched (p. 440).

The book ends with Hayes and Samantha standing over a piece of McNaughton machinery and activating it as they begin their quest to try and salvage what we can. The final two lines go thus:

"Yes, said Hayes."Things are going to get better."

And they sat and watched as the machine awoke (p. 454).

Viewed on their own, those lines are filled with hope. Viewed in terms of the rest of the novel, they seem to promise a future far more impossible than the most fantastic pieces of McNaughton's technology.  They are striving for the impossible, and that, I think, is The Company Man's very heart. At one point, we hear that a character was made for lost causes (p. 300). And yet he, and his fellows, continue fighting for them nonetheless, fighting against impossible and inevitable odds and never surrendering to the doomed and dooming world around them.

Raymond Chandler - The Long Goodbye

The Long Goodbye is the sixth of Raymond Chandler's seven classic novels starring Philip Marlowe. In the broad outlines of its plot and genre, it fits neatly into the progression established by the rest, but differences soon become apparent. This is the longest of Chandler's novels by far, and it's also the slowest in pace. Here, Chandler focuses more than ever before on not only Marlowe's voice, but his observations about society, his sketches of characters and flaws, on not only combating the corrupt world but understanding it and coming to terms with it.

Of course, The Long Goodbye is still a crime novel. It's practically the calling card of noir, the very pinnacle of the genre. And yet the actual crime is never the point. Chandler writes about crime because Marlowe's (our) life is made of corruption and pain, but the mystery itself is just the lense with which we see the brutal world. Chandler's Marlowe is worlds away from Doyle's Holmes or Poe's Dupin. These are not puzzles. The goal is not some abstract solution. There are lives at stake here; we have left the realms of impersonal deductions and clues far behind. In the absence of that intellectual game, we're just left with the violence and the pain, but, in marked contrasts to so many that had already come and that would come later, Chandler does not revel in the violence. This is not a novel about odds or gunplay, about fistfights and triumphs, though it does have all of those things. Believe me, pal, there is nothing elevating or dramatic about it, one character writes, with the "it" in question being death, or maybe suicide, crime, struggle, flight, sacrifice, or even maybe heroism. It is just plain nasty and sordid and gray and grim. (p. 84)

The Long Goodbye is a novel about why we act and why we don't. About heroism in the modern world and that world itself. The way the competition is nowadays a guy has to save his strength to protect hisself in the clinche, (p. 6) a character says early in the novel. Smart men know to stay out of people's troubles. (p. 280) Nobody cares, and nobody can afford to care. Those that do seem to enforce the law do it for all the wrong reasons, for power, money, or pride. They know that the law "isn't justice" (p. 56) and that they can "always find a way to do what they want." (p. 55)

Philip Marlowe is an exception. He acts for an idea of justice that's not what's found in the law books or on the streets, not encased in popular opinion or built on misery. As we see time and time again, Marlowe will never back down from what he thinks is doing the right thing. But while toughness might be enough to keep you alive, it's not enough to let you prosper. Marlowe can never win, and he is all too aware of that fact. As he learns so many times, there's "no percentage" in being a hero (p. 236), and, if Marlowe manages to survive, he does it by the skin of his teeth and with nothing at all to show for it but justice.

Crucially, The Long Goodbye is not the story of a crusade. This is not a book of the White Knight Marlowe against a world of immoral Black. No, the Los Angeles of the novel is one where culpability is only matched by inevitability and where all is painted shades of struggling gray. The early realization is that crime isn't responsible for all this alone; it's power that's torn us so asunder, and, as Marlowe says, the "only difference" between business and crime is that, "for business you gotta have capital." (p. 188) The world is anything but equal, and the average man seems powerless against the rich giants all about him. He is tired and sacred, we're told, and a tired, scared man can't afford ideals. (p. 234) But the ultimate realization, the novel's killing blow, is that Crime isn't a disease. It's not something that Marlowe can defeat, no matter how hard he hits or how clever he is. No, crime is a symptom. Cops are like a doctor that gives you aspirin for a brain tumor, except that the cop would rather cure it with a blackjack. We're a big rough rich wild people and crime is the price we pay for it, and organized crime is the price we pay for organization. We'll have it with us for a long time. Organized crime is just the dirty side of the sharp dollar. (p. 352)

Every step of the way, Chandler writes with a splatter-painting style of figurative language, a barrage of similes that range from hilarious to profound, and all of it's charging forward with the strength of some of the most muscular, powerfully direct prose imaginable. Brute declarative statements meet metaphors, here, and it's all aided by one of the most prevalent and cutting wits I've had the pleasure of reading, every page peppered with delightful phrases like: he looked at me like a horse looking over a fence (p. 250) and they put as much muscular activity into a telephone conversation as I would put into carrying a fat man up four flights of stairs. (p. 88) More than that, though, Marlowe's observations cut beyond the realm of double-dealings and rich adulterers and strike into the timeless, both in the already discussed area of morality and in a thousand small facets of life, with the intervening decades between us and him just serving to cement his claims: There is something compulsive about a telephone, he says. The gadget-ridden man of our age loves it. Loathes it, and is afraid of it. But he always treats it with respect, even when he is drunk. The telephone is a fetish. (p. 200) And, of course, you know you can trust the judgments of a man who swears he will never again use an electronic razor. (p. 153)

Despite all that, and despite its first person narration, and despite the fact that Marlowe is one of the most characteristic and opinionated narrators I can think of, the detective's actual thoughts, plans, and emotions are kept far away from us. In fact, the combination of Marlowe's perceptive eye and recalcitrant mind have the odd effect of giving us far more of just about every other character's emotional state than we get of the narrator's. As a result, it can be hard to tell just who Marlowe is. We can primarily know him by what he is not, which is to say by the depravities and corruptions that he turns away from. But exactly why Marlowe is the way that he is is difficult to say. Why is he a hero in this world where heroism is impossible?

On a more grounded level, this also means that The Long Goodbye can come to seem aimless at times. Marlowe himself moves with purpose in everything he does, but, as we're never allowed to see it, it's easy to lose track of the narrative and get lost in the steps along the way. More importantly, the friendship between Terry Lennox and Marlowe, established early in the novel and crucial throughout, is always a distant thing. Some degree of ambiguity in it is understandable, of course, but – save for one powerful exception – that relationship that is such a driving force for the narrator is never felt at all by the reader.

That distance and Marlowe's observations, the latter the novel's greatest strength by far, serve to hamstring the part of it that is actually a crime novel. Throughout, the mystery is buried under Marlowe's wit, attitude, and judgments. While that makes the novel infinitely stronger than it would've been as just another plot boiler, it does leave the reader focusing on things other than the clues and not particularly invested in the ultimate identity of the killer. Up until the novel's three hundredth page (or so), this really isn't such a problem. The mystery's not exceptional, but in a book this strong, it doesn't need to be, and it's adequate.  Unfortunately, the last sixty pages, all taking place after the seeming resolution, are far more plot focused than anything that came before – and also far less successful. Chandler somehow manages to strike a regrettable balance between meandering bloat and a feeling that everything we see is rushed. Scene after scene feels like it could be the novel's last but isn't, the plot still stumbling through another (frankly unnecessary) turn that would've needed a great deal more space to make us really understand it, let alone care about it.

The brilliance of The Long Goodbye is a direct result of its most deadly failings. Judged by the crime genre's standard strictures of plot and climax, this novel is a failure. Yet that does little to diminish its overall power. The Long Goodbye is, despite and also because of all its faults, an insightful and excellently written that deserves its classic status.

Dashiell Hammett - The Continental Op

Then I turned on all the lights in the room, lighted a cigarette (we all like to pose a little now and then), and sat down on the bed to await my capture. (p. 111)

Though Sam Spade, famous for his starring role in the Maltese Falcon, might have a higher profile, it's the Continental Op that narrated the lion's share of Dashiell Hammett's fiction, including Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, and the bulk of the man's short fiction. Containing seven stories written between 1924 and 1930, the The Continental Op collection from Black Lizard is filled with tales that perfectly show one of the genre's best on his home turf.

Mystery – the hodgepodge bookstore section for mysteries, crime, and thrillers, that is – is at its heart a rational genre. To boil the genre down to a single glib sentence, the genre is the solving of puzzles. At the opening of the story, the detective, and the reader, is confronted with a situation that makes no sense. Then, like the Scooby gang demasking another supernatural ghost to find a middle aged man, the detective makes sense of the clues and replaces impossibility with a logical procession of events. Any in genre story by Poe, Doyle, or any of their authorial descendants, begins with a series of incomprehensible clues and ends with motive, miscreant, and method all neatly tied up and – if the author's good at what they do – no disappointing coincidences or absurdities remaining.

Dashiell Hammett's stories do not function like that at all, though the Continental Op does indeed go through his own process of investigation. Hammett's aim is not the puzzle but rather the implications of the puzzle, and his stories are not riddles that can be satisfactorily deduced by even the most skilled reader-sleuth hybrid. Hammett's mysteries are mysteries of people and society, not of circumstance, and the Op learns far more by sheer force of will and his own dogged determination than he does from any brilliant analysis of clues.

This is perhaps best exemplified by the collection's first story, The Tenth Clew (available for free here). The Op and the local police find themselves confronted with a murder and a surfeit of clues – or, as I suppose I must, clews. Instead of following the trail to the bloody end, however, the Op disregards all of them and focuses on the man behind them, hunting the personality rather than the evidence. For Hammett, the deduction is, at best, a sideshow, and not only is the reader almost never given all the pieces before the reveal, they're also almost never even shown the Op's process of discovery.

But those are but surface differences. No, the true difference between the genre of mysteries and the writings of Dashiell Hammett is what Steven Marcus discusses in his fantastic introduction. As I said about, mystery is inherently a rational genre. But Hammett is inherently not a rational writer. Like all detectives, the Op reveals the lies of common sense and criminals for what they are, but the truth he uncovers is just as illogical as his foes' deception. Hammett's stories are all but made out of defied expectations, and his revelations are filled with people who are not who they claim to be, crimes committed for reasons incomprehensible, random bursts of violence, and coincidences and hapless fate so twisted as to be delicious. As Marcus says:

Yet what happens in Hammett is that what is revealed as "reality" is a still further fiction-making activity – in the first place in the Op's, and behind that yet another, the consciousness present in many of the Op stories and all the novels that Dashiell Hammett, the writer, is continually doing the same thing as the Op and all the other characters in the fiction he is creating. That is to say, he is making a fiction (in writing) in the real world; and this fiction, like the real world itself, is coherent but not necessarily rational. What one both begins and ends with, then, is a story, a narrative, a coherent yet questionable account of the world. (p. XXI)

For Hammett, the world as we see it is a very flimsy thing, a construction easily sidestepped by both the intending and the oblivious. Identity, for him, is a passing thing, a garb easily donned and discarded. As one captured villain says of their slipping through the cracks: Then I took an apartment on Ashubry Avenue under [an assumed name], and I was an altogether different person. (p. 169, The Girl with the Silver Eyes) (name removed for the sake of spoilers)

Perhaps the Continental Op is a bulwark of justice in such an immoral world, but the Op himself doesn't seem so much moral as amoral, a nameless everyman in appearance and intellect notable only for his force of will. The Continental Op does not share the ambiguity that adorns Sam Spade throughout the Maltese Falcon, but he is also as far as cry from Chandler's Philip Marlowe as he is from Sherlock Holmes. Like in Red Harvest, the Op doesn't care about methods so long as he gets the job done, and his idea of the job is often a far cry from that of his employer's.

In The Golden Horseshoe, we see that the Op's goals are not that of the law, but rather of justice. Providing he can see justice done, the Op doesn't care what story he has to feed the law. In The Main Death, the Op goes one step further. In case too convoluted to ever be won at trial, he takes the law into his own hands, regains the victim's property with force, and buries the facts under a happy outcome. In The Farewell Murders, he reveals that his idea of justice doesn't even extend to seeing the good prosper – he just needs to see the wicked suffer. The Op responds to the continued misfortune and even tragedy of his employer without even a sympathetic word, and he weathers years and false ends all so that, at the end, he can see the guilty hanged.

The Op's justice is a harsh one, and, to him, the guilty deserve no rights at all. When he tells the story of a former cop, Duran, it's clear where his sympathies lie: He used to be captain of detectives in one of the larger Middle Western cities. Once he tried too hard to get a confession out of a safe-ripper, and killed him. The newspapers didn't like Duran. They used that accident to howl him out of his job. (p. 190) I don't believe it's a coincidence that five of the seven stories ends with the following emotionless sentiment: They hanged him. (p. 319)

We've established by now that the thrill of a Hammett story is not the solving of the mystery, but we haven't yet looked into where precisely the thrill is to be found. The answer comes from the prose and the hardboiled, unsentimental, and unflinching interaction of the Op and the world around him. Hammett's writing is clear, terse, and able to both convey volumes of style while simultaneously revealing almost no emotion at all. In the midst of this, the Op often further reinforces his detachment with instances of wit so dry and caustic they're liable to start forest fires: The face she made at me was probably meant for a smile. Whatever it was, it beat me. I was afraid she'd do it again, so I surrendered. (p. 57)

Among other things, Hammett has a gift for pegging characters in only a few lines and in picking out the one detail that makes them memorable. Alas, while he refrains from over indulging in pointless back stories, he loves to drown the telling and significant details he's created in oceans of white noise and minutia: Age about 30; height about five feet ten; slender, weight about 140; medium complexion; brown hair, suit, and shoes and a gray overcoat. (p. 252) I suppose that, if the infamous police report style of description is to ever find a home it would be here, in a novel about a private detective, but that doesn’t change the fact that such a storm of details leaves the reader with far less, not far more, of a picture than they would otherwise have had. And lest you think that example unique, here's another from the same page: [he was] about five eight inches tall, would weight about a hundred and seventy pounds, had brown hair and eyes, a dark complexion, a flat, broad face with his cheekbones, and wore a blue suit, gray hat, tan overcoat, black shoes, and a pear-shaped pearl tie-pin. (p. 252)

The newest of these stories is eight decades old, and it's true that their levels of gore and profanity feel tame to a modern audience. Their core, however, feels anything but. Hammett's grasp of atmosphere and pace is excellent here, and his ability to build tension is unmatched. After a classic Hammett moment of false perceptions, The House on Turk Street becomes a deadly game of cat and mouse in an unlit house. Other stories, too, are prone to sudden escalations that lead to scenes of violence that are either so brief as to be downright blunt as well as merciless or long, drawn out passages of waiting for the flash of gunfire to give away the enemy. Both styles of action work incredibly well, and each is stronger for the downbeat forced calm that surrounds it.

The Continental Op is a collection of stories that will make your pulse pound. It's also a collection of stories that contain surprising amounts of depth and even revelation. This is an essential read for anyone interested in Dashiell Hammett, noir, mystery in general, or even just good fiction.