crimeculture

Detective and Villain: Philip Marlowe’s Construction of Nemesis

by Janice Cormie, Birkbeck

The popularity of the hard-boiled school of crime fiction from the 1930s can be partly attributed to the appeal of the new urban detective hero. Hammett, Chandler, Spillane and other detective creators invested their private eyes with a ‘realism’ deemed missing from traditional genre characterisation. Raymond Chandler launched Philip Marlowe’s investigations in novel form with The Big Sleep (1939), building on ground previously broken by Sam Spade, The Continental Op, and fellow professional city-based sleuths. In doing so he established a template for an organic hero whose inner life directs the plot and colours his interactions with other characters, whose subjectivity is as much the subject as is the crime. In particular, his detective’s relationship to the villain is shaped with a complexity beyond the hunter-hunted dyad of the classical whodunit. This relationship, examined here with reference to The Big Sleep, [1] evolves in response to the unfolding plot in ways consistent with the characterisation of the new-style hero and his naturalistically complex internal world.

            Marlowe is distinctive for the separation of his public activities from his private narrative, which is shared with the reader alone. The assertive personality on display to clients and witnesses is entirely different from the rather tortured commentator who reveals the story: ‘he is disturbed to a point of near-hysteria by the moral decay he encounters, yet always affects a wise-guy coolness and wit.’ [2] His inner feelings are never explicitly available to the other characters, and his relationships are therefore incomplete, maintaining a distance. But there are points at which the boundary is transgressed. Two women in TBS cause Marlowe to drop his guard and externalise his emotions: Mona Mars, for whom he commits his one and only killing; and Carmen Sternwood, whose intrusion into his private domain invokes in him a fury that is validated by her ultimate unmasking as villain.

            The only Carmen Sternwood the reader knows is the one described by Marlowe. It is as such a biased, subjective presentation, filtered through the detective’s professional and personal agendas. She, along with the other characters, is ‘constantly controlled’ by his selective presentation of ‘crucial actions, dialogue and settings.’ [3] Marlowe’s first appraisal of Carmen is as something not quite human. She wears ‘no expression’, has ‘predatory teeth’ and ‘too taut lips’, and overall ‘didn’t look too healthy’ (TBS 5); she sucks on ‘a curiously shaped thumb’ and runs up the stairs ‘like a deer’ (TBS 7). Most of these are negative, neutralising impressions, dehumanizing and desexualizing, which contrast markedly with Marlowe’s subsequent observations of Carmen’s sister Vivian. He uses such ‘metonymic tropes that suggest her unreality’ [4] regularly throughout the text, underlining the aversion he feels with hints regarding her mental instability.

            Carmen’s depiction as ‘psychotic’ is all but stereotypical. She has few if any lucid moments in Marlowe’s reportage. Their opening encounter in the Sternwood mansion is mirrored in the stained-glass panel above the doorway, the knight and the naked damsel prefiguring later developments in a medium that is, by its nature, cracked (the slivers of stained glass that are leaded together to form a fractured whole signifying that the Romantic picture may be not as wholesome as it seems). Their relationship at this point, though, is still an unconsolidated contractual one of detective and client/witness. She, with her father, is the victim of a blackmailer whom Marlowe is being employed to uncover. So far they are in strictly mystery-fiction territory. The plot (sjuzhet, distinguished from the strictly chronological fable; described by Todorov [5] ), however, has a further role for Carmen, as a motivating agent in the crime strand that occupies the first half of the novel. Carmen’s nude photos are the tangible element (Hitchcock’s ‘MacGuffin’, the object that everyone seeks but which is not intrinsically important) that animates the gangster-pornography story-line; Carmen’s repeated interventions serve to bring other characters into conflict (Marlowe and Brody, chapter 15; Marlowe and the police, chapter 18). Marlowe’s alienating adjectives remind us that Carmen can be regarded as ‘a kind of puppet’ [6] , not a complete, rounded personhood deserving of his empathy. His relationship with her on this narrative (‘second’) level is, according to Knight, one of his assuming control through his subjective presentation of her gestures and actions. ‘His passivity is strangely intrusive’, Knight says of Marlowe in general; ‘as he watches he also controls a scene.’ [7]

            The relationship, in this relatively naturalistic form, is not static; it evolves. As Marlowe encounters Carmen in succeeding scenes and learns more about the crimes in hand, her overfamiliarity exacerbates his contempt for what he initially sees as simply annoying, infantile traits and later recognises as an unstable and possibly dangerous antagonist. If at first he excuses her as a ‘spoilt and not very bright little girl’, he subsequently decides she is ‘corrupt’ (TBS 131). His instinctual distaste for this character takes on a moral basis as he tidies up after her escapades and fends off her unrelenting sexual approaches. Carmen’s un-damsel-like behaviour confronts Marlowe’s knightly code with a dilemma. She is effectively his client, and so cannot be abandoned, but she is also the antithesis of the ideal victim, repellent and inhuman. There are early indications that Marlowe recognises that she is not willfully malevolent, but at the mercy of her mental state. Her screams in Geiger’s house (TBS 29) make him think of ‘men in white and barred windows and hard narrow cots with leather wrist and ankle straps’; ‘her eyes looked even a little crazier than as I remembered them’ (TBS 49). His growing detestation is offset by her client status and his awareness of her diminished responsibility.

            The turning point occurs after the first story thread – involving the deaths of Geiger, Taylor and Brody – is more or less resolved. During this first narrative Carmen has been simply an active witness, not the villain; her true role is reserved for the second thread, the search for Rusty Regan. Marlowe returns to his apartment after a sexual incident with older sister Vivian and her roulette winnings to find Carmen in his bed, naked and giggling. Marlowe is by now inured to any sexuality she manifests; going further than his categorisation of her as childish (her ‘very round and naughty eyes’, TBS 127) or animal (‘rats behind a wainscoting’, TBS 127), she is demoted to a ‘something’ in his bed (TBS 127). Their relative positions of seductress/potentially seduced are becoming even further displaced. Marlowe ignores her overtures in favour of addressing his chess problem. He finds he is unable to ‘rescue’ this particular damsel as she refuses to fit the assigned role, therefore he cannot fulfill his role as knight. ‘It wasn’t a game for knights’ (TBS 129).

            This closes one door which had still been open in the relationship, and with its closing Marlow creates an enemy. Carmen resumes her ‘scraped bone’ expression, previously seen in her showdown with Brody (TBS 72), and hisses like a serpent – a regular fugue state into which she falls, and which Marlowe by this point must surely interpret as a symptom as much as a threat. Her verbal attack using ‘a filthy name’ reminds Marlowe that he cannot abide her sharing the same space as those memories of his that take ‘the place of a family’ (TBS 130) – she has overstepped the mark in defiling his personal domain, transgressing the client/witness/detective boundaries. We know how seriously he treats this infraction because he afterwards ‘savagely’ dismantles the bed bearing the imprint of ‘her small corrupt body’ (TBS 131). This character, ‘bitter, exasperated, and lonely’ [8] , is the Marlowe who builds an active antagonist out of the hithero ‘puppet’ Carmen, not the outwardly cool, in-control detective Marlowe. His relationship with the girl has forced him to externalise his private ‘I’, an uncomfortable acting out that turns the relationship away from an anodyne knight/damsel dyad to something more morally complex.

            The climactic encounter in the oil field confirms the direction in which their association has travelled. ‘When she giggled I didn’t like her any more,’ says Marlowe (TBS 177). His final appraisal of the hissing Carmen as ‘Aged, deteriorated, become animal’ (TBS 180) strips her of youth, beauty and humanity. In succumbing to unconsciousness the weapon of her insanity is disarmed, allowing Marlowe finally to assume his role of chivalric protector. Returned to his superior, controlling role (although even at this moment of supreme threat he retains his puppet-mastery, having loaded Carmen’s pistol with blanks – TBS 185), the detective is able to exert his function of (admittedly instinctual rather than rationcinative) detecting, inferring the link between this incident and the fate of Rusty Regan under similar circumstances. Marlowe at this point is literally standing in Regan’s place, re-enacting his double’s demise. This is a common motif in Chandler’s narratives, the victims as ‘doubles for, extensions of Marlowe’ [9] : ‘The constant patterns are the sexual link Marlowe has with the villainess and his closeness to the central victim… The ultimate discovery of the villain [reveals] who brought intimate danger to the hero himself and destroyed his double.’ [10] If Regan is Marlowe’s double, this implies that his relationship with Carmen is also doubled – on the one side, the narrative storyline following her involvement with Marlowe, and on the other, the plot’s retrospective tracing of her involvement with Regan as the detective brings it to light.

            The evolving Marlowe-Carmen interaction can be imposed on a few thematic reflections, which may or may not have been conscious in the writing. Most evident is the ambiguous response to female sexuality. Although the villainess is described (by Marlowe) in mainly flattering terms – ‘She had a beautiful body, small, lithe, compact, firm, rounded’ (TBS, p. 31) – his persistent dehumanizing and desexualizing language negates her adult sexual capacity. He is able to respond to other women in limited ways: Vivian Sternwood (TBS, chapter 23) and especially Mona Mars (chapter 28) excite his sexuality whereas Carmen excites only disgust. In all cases, Marlowe with his hard-boiled masculine baggage is ‘unable to treat women as equals, or become too involved with them.’ [11] More than simply secondary femmes fatales, ‘Chandler’s ultimate villains are always women, and usually sexy ones as well’ [12] , and his choice here of a psychically repulsive one forces attention on the main reason for her aberrance: insanity. The portrayal of her mental state is one-dimensional and stereotypical; such treatment of female characterisation in these texts is ‘clearly a way of neutralizing [women’s] disturbing force.’ [13]

            Marlowe seems deeply uncomfortable in the presence of a character who appears absent. He is constantly remarking on the apparent emptiness in Carmen’s eyes, as if they are windows on a missing soul: ‘eyes large and dark and empty as rain barrels in a drought’ (TBS 129), ‘the stunned and stupid blankness of her eyes’ (TBS 54), ‘as shallow as enamel on a cafeteria tray’ (TBS 57). This psychic absence is a continuing euphemism for the mental ‘deficiency’ (an early twentieth-century way of describing it) Marlowe perceives but is unwilling to articulate. Only at the denouement does he finally express publicly his diagnosis of ‘her type’ who ‘might even get herself cured’ (TBS 187). Carmen’s ‘pure idiocy’ belongs among the ‘barred windows and hard narrow cots’ (TBS 29), and is therefore incomprehensible, untouchable. Marlowe’s unwillingness to cross the sexual line with a mentally vulnerable but otherwise desirable young woman resembles the circumscribed doctor-patient relationship.

            Carmen is also an exemplar of the privileged classes and demonstrates what is often played out in the genre as their abuse of that privilege. Both the Sternwood girls are spoilt, but Carmen is the least fit for purpose, lacking even her sister’s social graces to masquerade as ‘classy’. Rather, she is emblematic of the corruption at the core of the new American wealth. ‘Marlowe identifies Carmen with the traditional death’s head [the scraped bone] of the succubus amid the abandoned oil rigs that produced the Sternwood wealth… [The climactic scene] depicts the decay at the heart of the Sternwood fortune’. [14] The novel’s villain is hence degenerate in both mind and socioeconomic standing. Its detective, by contrast, is intended as morally if not altogether emotionally intact: he is ‘a man of honor… the best man in his world.’ [15] This traditional chivalric hero is pivotal to the essentially conservative fictions that Chandler is creating. His flawed goodness again mirrors the IRA hero Rusty Regan, whose presence had been so beneficial to the ailing General Sternwood, and this doubled hero-figure compounds the conflict with the amoral, dishonorable villain. The Sternwood girls and their constellation of gangsters and economic opportunists supply the tarnished social background against which the knight’s armour can shine.

            And since, as far as sjuzhet is concerned, Marlowe is controlling Carmen, the detective and the implied moral code he represents to some extent controls the immoral milieu symbolised by the villain. The reader is assured throughout that the conservative values wielded by the detective will prevail over the wicked dissolution of the world that both have entered. Marlowe, ‘neither a eunuch nor a satyr’ but a man who nonetheless ‘might seduce a duchess’ [16] , resists Carmen because her unfettered sexuality has no place in his moral universe. Her economic position, however, is to her advantage, as Marlowe is able to assist her in evading conventional justice; this outcome reinforces the prevalence of social inequality, which may itself be seen as a result of the dominant conservative values revolving on money and entitlement. These drawing-room values retained currency up to the Second World War, with Chandler writing on the cusp: ‘those of a class in society that felt it had everything to lose by social change’ [17] . Although Chandler is critiquing that same class, he reserves his ammunition for its degenerate, corrupted manifestations; Carmen draws Marlowe’s fire, but his sympathetic treatment of the General and his servant suggests that well-behaved overlords are exempt. General Sternwood is watching social change pull his family apart, and his yearning for the prodigal Regan – whom Marlowe’s employment momentarily resurrects – is an attempt to arrest social and familial disintegration.

            By the time The Big Sleep was written the world of the large country house and its corpse-filled library was ending, yet ‘detective story writers pretended that it was still there.’ [18] The Sternwood mansion is firmly of that lineage, but detective and villain are of a very different cast from the traditional detective genre. Their association, begun on a quasi-professional footing (detective/client/witness), moves through thwarted sexuality and psychosis to a reassertion of the contractual relationship, a complication rarely found in the traditional detective story but a central feature of the naturalistic crime fiction that was beginning to supplant it. This trajectory is driven by the subjectivity of Marlowe’s character, the objective-realistic conflicts of conscience arising from the opposition of Marlowe’s cynical ‘common man’ idealism to his chosen enterprise, which is making money out of the problems of the wealthy. [19] The conflict between Marlowe and Carmen, Detective and Villain, mirrors the complexity of both mid-century modernity and the evolving fictional form.

Bibliography

Cawelti, John G., Adventure, Mystery, and Romance (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1976)

Chandler, Raymond, The Big Sleep (London and Sydney: Pan Books, 1979)

Chandler, Raymond, ‘The Simple Art of Murder’ (1950), <http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/chandlerart.html> [accessed 12 December 2007].

Haut, Woody, Pulp Culture (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1995)

Knight, Stephen, Form and Ideology in Detective Fiction (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1980)

Marling, William, The American Roman Noir: Hammett, Cain, and Chandler (Athens, GA and London: University of Georgia Press, 1995)

Symons, Julian, Bloody Murder (London: Pan Books, 1994)

Todorov, Tzvetan, The Poetics of Prose (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977)