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October 26, 2006

Murder, She Reads

With their series formulae and familiar characters, good mystery stories are my comfort food. My favorite, from age 11, has been Sherlock Holmes. These days I enjoy Inspectors Alleyn, Lynley, and Maigret, and their various cozily dangerous worlds.

For sheer style, I read Raymond Chandler. The first page of Farewell My Lovely offers a typical bit of coy sardonicism: “Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.� Or this, from chapter 23 of The Lady in the Lake: “The Rossmore Arms was a gloomy pile of dark red brick built around a huge forecourt. It had a plush-lined lobby containing silence, tubbed plants, a bored canary in a cage as big as a dog-house, a smell of old carpet dust and the cloying fragrance of gardenias long ago.�

Open any Chandler novel at random for a choice fillip from Philip Marlowe. Page 74 of The Long Goodbye: “I looked across at the golden girl. She had finished her limeade or whatever it was and was glancing at a microscopic wrist watch.� The world-weary understatement of “or whatever it was� is deliciously jejune when paired with the precise vim of “microscopic wrist watch.�

Chandler has voluble poetic keys as well. From The Big Sleep: “Ten blocks of that, winding down curved rain-swept streets, under the steady drip of trees, past lighted windows in big houses in ghostly enormous grounds, vague clusters of eaves and gables and lighted windows high on the hillside, remote and inaccessible, like witch houses in a forest.�

James M. Cain’s stories are more complex and psychological, but his settings and gruff, laconic diction resemble Chandler’s. Double Indemnity begins: “I drove out to Glendale to put three new truck drivers on a brewery company bond, and then I remembered this renewal over in Hollywoodland. I decided to run over there. That was how I came to this House of Death, that you’ve been reading about in the papers. It didn’t look like a House of Death when I saw it. It was just a Spanish house, like all the rest of them in California, with white walls, red tile roof, and a patio out to one side. It was built cock-eyed. The garage was under the house, the first floor was over that, and the rest of it was spilled up the hill any way they could get it in. You climbed some stone steps to the front door, so I parked the car and went up there. A servant poked her head out. ‘Is Mr. Nirdlinger in?’�

Lately I’ve gotten myself into trouble with Erle Stanley Gardner, maybe from having glommed onto Netflix’s stash of 1957 Perry Mason episodes. Either the casting was uncanny, or the voices of Burr, Hale and Hopper have become indelibly saturated into the original prose. Perry Mason does share a monogram with Philip Marlowe--but Gardner was no Chandler. The "case" books are riddled with patches of bad writing, like drought-and-termite blighted California lawns. This, for example, from The Case of the One-Eyed Witness: “The spectators, now that there was no longer the warmth of the burning building and the excitement of action, began melting away.� Or this, from The Case of the Deadly Toy: “‘I opened my purse, took some cleansing tissue from a little package I carried and scrubbed my finger off.’�

From the same story, in a passage tedious in both linguistics and mechanics, Della Street is named in full, nine times, on approximately one paperback page. Part of that section reads (/ = paragraph):

“The lawyer hung up the telephone and walked across to where Della Street was waiting within earshot of the clerk. … / He led Della Street to the elevators, said, “Seventh floor, please,� and then after the cage came to a stop, led Della Street to the stair door. They opened the door, walked down one flight to the sixth floor. / The bellboy who had taken the woman and the boy up to 619 was just getting aboard the elevator on the way down when Mason and Della Street entered the sixth floor hallway. They walked down to 619 and Mason tapped on the door. / “Say it’s the maid with soap and towels,� Mason said to Della Street in a whisper. / … “Maid, with soap and towels,� Della Street said in a bored voice. / The door was unlocked and opened. / Della Street walked in, followed by Perry Mason.�

And here's a gem from an early story, The Case of the Lucky Legs: "The mask of patient tranquillity dropped from Perry Mason. He flexed his muscles. His eyes became hard, like the eyes of a cat slumbering in the sun who suddenly sees a bird hop unwarily to an overhanging branch." The following passages come from The Case of the Glamorous Ghost: "The air is surcharged with romance." And: "This smuggling angle gives the whole situation a new slant, Paul."

Gardner’s characters may be two-dimensional, but their predictability soothes. “Ham� Burger and Lt. Tragg always will be suspicious and cranky. Palsy-walsy Paul always will be affably sardonic. And Perry’s palm ever will be at Della’s ever-handy elbow (sorry!). The exact nature of their bond, I think, is the perennial mystery.

Posted by Jane on October 26, 2006 2:58 PM

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