When Aristotle wrote that metaphor is a sign of genius, he’d never read a bad detective novel. The threadbare comparison, the overcomplicated simile, are staples of the genre. Pulp writers treat these devices like wrestling holds; they’re thrown in to lively up the action, to demonstrate a certain professional proficiency, and most of all because the crowd loves it.
Metaphors, like puns (and detective novels), are a currency cheapened by heavy use. Yet metaphors are essential to a writer; words themselves are not the objects they call to mind but our agreed-upon symbols for them, as William Gass is so fond of pointing out. Metaphor suggests, with a delightful delicacy, “the correspondences between things” that Aristotle finds in all the best art, which is why he’s so drawn to the device. Yet a writer of today with a feel for genuinely new metaphor has a difficult time of it: I’ve heard Gass’s work likened to an after-dinner drink too rich and subtle for most people to appreciate. For the writer who intends to communicate with people and not college professors, the choices for metaphor are sparse.
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Chandler sets the standard for metaphor in detective fiction. Some of his lines lodge so solidly they are unforgettable. On the first page of Farewell, My Lovely–his second novel and perhaps his best work in the detective genre–Philip Marlowe observes that Moose Malloy looks “about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.” Later on, Marlowe says a woman gives him “a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.” Chandler writes with a punk’s delight in slang and a pedant’s precision; the combination is what makes his metaphors so distinctive. What makes them great is that they are always rooted in meaning. The gratuitous simile–so common in detective novels, as the writer plays to the cheap seats–is rare in Chandler.
His metaphors could be bracing as a slap–the homosexual who kills in revenge for his murdered mate in The Big Sleep has “a face as hard and white as cold mutton fat.” They could also shock with their tenderness, as at the end of this passage:
Chandler was not a prolific writer; he finished only seven novels. Yet by the early 50s he was ready to write his masterpiece, the detective novel to end all detective novels–the companion piece to the decade’s western to end all westerns, John Ford’s The Searchers, and to the musical to end all musicals, Singin’ in the Rain. Chandler never considered himself a genre artist–as a novelist, as an essayist, as a screenwriter, he was always merely a professional with an especially fine sense. But often in his letters he turned to the topic of what separates a genre artist from a serious artist, pointing out the many popular writers who had failed in their attempts to write a “serious novel.” He explains Hammett’s early retirement by saying that, though he yearned to write something better, he realized that he was nothing more than a mystery writer. The Long Goodbye, published in 1954, is Chandler’s attempt to write a serious novel that’s also a mystery, and to strip the genre of what he saw as its cartoonish elements–its lascivious detail and hyperbolic metaphor–in order to lay bare its complicated grain of ethical problems.
If The Poodle Springs Story holds any interest at all, it is in Chandler’s attempt to take the character who served him so well for so many years, who suffered so frequently at his hands, and do right by him once and for all–it’s Chandler’s Marlowe at Colonus. He had married Marlowe off to Linda Loring at the end of Playback (a doubtful choice, as all Marlowe’s friends know he missed his best chance for happiness with Anne Riordan in Farewell), and The Poodle Springs Story is the continuation–Marlowe attempts to find wedded bliss in a sterile rich community modeled after Chandler’s own Palm Springs. It parallels Hammett’s last novel, The Thin Man, but Chandler takes it in the opposite direction. Where Nick Charles seeks to retire and enjoy his wife’s wealth, Marlowe seeks to retain his identity by opening up shop right in Poodle Springs.
If anyone is to assume the Marlowe character, it would have to be Parker. He’s not only popular and stylish but the ablest writer of detective novels now working. What’s more, Chandler was a subject of Parker’s doctoral thesis (times have changed since the days when alcoholics bought their next bottle with work sent to Black Mask). Parker knows Chandler and Marlowe inside and out, and it shows. Yet as a detective novelist, Parker is clearly derivative. His Spenser series–which began in the mid-70s–fixes the character as the traditional detective hero, but with new elements intended to update the stereotype. With hindsight, even the early Spenser books peg him as the natural hero of the 80s–which indeed he eventually became. Yet as far as the genre is concerned, the new details are all just the embellishments of a decadent, baroque age. The trips to the gym, the infatuation with brand names, the adeptness in the kitchen, the acknowledgment of ethical difficulties, which never inhibit action–all give Parker’s detective novels a distinctly 80s feel.
