Down these mean dirt roads: or phillip marlowe had a cat!

by Fred deVecca

One of the major conundrums of my life has been trying to figure out why hardboiled detective novels resonate so strongly in my psyche. For, superficially at least, I do not appear to fit the mold of someone who would write, or even read, something so violent, unsettling, isolationist, male-centered, and urban.

I am a child of the sixties. I grew up protesting the war in Viet Nam. I am non-sexist and a pacifist. I attend Quaker meetings regularly. I live in a town where the general store (not a specialized health food store, the GENERAL store mind you) specializes in organic vegetarian and vegan health foods. I eat those foods and I enjoy them (though, I confess, I am not a vegetarian.) I am very much a part of a spiritual, politically active community. I live on a dirt road in the New England countryside, where the meanest thing is the winter salt which rusts my funky old Subaru, or the porcupine who quills my German Shepherd. I am relatively politically correct. I have long hair. I am, one might say, a "hippie" (or, more precisely, "an old hippie".)

My rural hilltown is, almost impossibly, disgustingly, pretty. It has a Bridge of Flowers. Tourists flock here for the fall foliage and the waterfalls.

I run the movie theater in town and I work in the book store. To the townspeople I am the nice man who shows "The Sound of Music" and sells kids "Goodnight Moon."

They do not know, at least not yet, that I am also the guy who writes novels about young people getting strung out on amphetamines, murderers who cut the heads off their victims, gangsters who get their brains splattered on tavern walls, and "heroes" who kill people and stuff them into garbage bags. What will they think when they read the part in my book where my detective has sex with a woman in public, in daylight, on a couch, in the very bookstore where they buy their Harry Potter?

I do not know the answer to this. I only know that I am thinking seriously, of publishing my book, if it ever gets published (which I am hopeful it will), under an assumed name. Thomas Wolfe did not entitle his second novel You Can’t Go Home Again for nothing. He literally was not allowed to return to Asheville, North Carolina, his home town, after publishing his first novel Look Homeward, Angel, and I do not want the same fate to befall me in my beloved Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts.

But, I digress. My point is to inquire and explore why hard-boiled detective novels attract me, here, today, in this time and in this place. To this end, I must first give a bit more of my history.

I grew up on an asparagus farm in rural Pennsylvania. One of my early memories is of being a youth of nine or ten and cutting and packing asparagus on a crisp spring day and, that night, finding a compilation of Sherlock Holmes short stories on my mother’s bookshelves. I read that whole anthology that night. Later, I was to find the novels and devour them as well. To this day, whenever I eat asparagus, or even see it listed on a menu, I think of Sherlock Holmes. No, Holmes was not hard-boiled, but he was smart, loyal, moral, and, ultimately, alone. And he took drugs. He was pretty close to being hard-boiled, at least more so than the Hardy Boys, my other youthful introduction to mystery writing.

But detective novels did not much interest me as I grew into a rebellious teenager and discovered the obligatory writers of the counterculture - Heller, Tolkein, Casteneda, Salinger - and the more establishment giants - Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Dreiser. And, yes, I did see The Maltese Falcon with Bogart as Phillip Marlowe. That too was an obligatory rite of the counterculture and it was also the extent of my exposure to hard-boiled detectives up to that point in my life. To me then the hard-boiled detective was a media-exaggerated, embarrassing anachronism - a hungover, disheveled, trench coated gumshoe who had a seedy low-rent second floor office with a bottle of cheap bourbon in the upper righthand drawer, a sassy secretary, and a "dame with legs up to here" hiring him to look for something, probably her cheating husband.

Then, one fateful day in the 70s, a girlfriend showed me a book by a Robert Parker featuring a detective named Spencer. I consumed it like I did Sherlock Holmes on that asparagus scented evening so long ago, and I regret to this day that I have no vegetable which can return me to that early Spencer world with a mere smell or taste or mention.

Spencer was that out of time gumshoe brought kicking and screaming into the seventies, into the present, and minus the clichés, or, at least, most of the clichés. He was tough, he cracked wise, he kicked ass, he had a strong moral code, but he could cook, he drank good wines and beers, and he was eventually to have a feminist girlfriend. He was, to me at least, fresh and refreshing and inspiring.

From there, I pretty much ran wild. I read all the Hammett and Chandler, McDonald and MacDonald, and discovered the blossoming world of the contemporary private eye. I found gay and lesbian detectives, radical detectives, women detectives, dwarf detectives, black detectives, literary detectives, ethnic detectives and foreign detectives, some more hardboiled than others, but all hardboiled to some extent. I tried to read some of the softer "cozies", but they did nothing for me. I swore to never read another mystery featuring a detective who had a cat.

I liked the tough guys. When I read one of those books I walked out onto the streets with a bit more of a swagger and a heightened, tingling, alert sense of… well everything. I saw everything, I sensed everything, Nothing slipped by me. I understood everything. I loved the shadows, the darkness (where the details lie), the mystery, the overwhelming complexity of life just waiting to be untangled, the knowledge that something dangerous, possibly evil, lurked, or could lurk, EVERYWHERE, ANYWHERE, around the corner, on the barstool next to you, and, possibly, in the universe’s very spirit. I knew that, among mortal men, I alone could be the difference between salvation and destruction, between life and death. I WAS that private eye. He was me. It all made sense. It was beautiful. It was perfect.

The operative word in that last paragraph is "alone." These God-like powers did not work with a partner, in whatever sense one might use that word. Oh, there were sidekicks, violent ones and smart ones, and there were occasionally, lovers, but the PI was, ultimately ALONE. There was a magnificent, romantic, clarifying vibration of rightness about that world and I reveled in it. I alone controlled my fate. I was a young man, a student, a bureaucrat, a son, a husband, but I FELT like I was a detective, a knight, a hero.

Though I read voraciously, I still failed in my quest to find the ultimate contemporary hardboiled detective hero. These detectives were cool and tough but truthfully none could quite measure up to what Phillip Marlowe would be like if he were alive today. The present world was a mess and it needed a man like Marlowe, and it was without one.

It turns out I was being set up, just as so many are in hardboiled literature. I was set up for the kill. In 1973 I saw Robert Altman’s film The Long Goodbye. Here, literally, finally, was Marlowe brought into the 70s - Elliott Gould as a muttering, seemingly ineffectual patsy dealing with hippies, yoga, marijuana, store clerks with huge afros, all in an LA Chandler would never recognize… and he had a CAT. Marlowe had a frigging cat!

This film changed my life. Today I recognize that it is, among hardboiled academics and traditionalists, probably the most despised and reviled portrayal of a hardboiled detective anywhere, in any medium. To me, it was a revelation. It was precisely what I was looking for. My quest had ended. I had found Marlowe updated, Marlowe in my world, Marlowe made completely relevant. The knight was reborn.

The critics, both then and today, called Altman’s Marlowe a loser. Terry Lenox even calls him that in the concluding scene.

I am here to tell you that Marlowe, in Altman’s The Long Goodbye, was NOT a loser, not by any stretch of the imagination. Despite the contemporary trappings, this Marlowe maintains his powerful, unshakable moral code. Terry Lenox plays him for a fool, and, even worse, much worse, pretends to be Marlowe’s friend. Terry messed his wife up real bad. Marlowe says (and here I’m depending on my increasingly aged and undependable memory) "You used me Terry," and Terry says "That’s what friends are for." They continue - Terry says "Nobody cares Marlowe. Only you. And you’re a loser." Marlowe replies "Yeah, I even lost my cat," and then blows Terry away.

Symmetrical, decisive, righteous, and stunningly brilliant writing by Leigh Brackett. Terry had faked his own death. He was legally already dead and one cannot be punished for killing a dead man.

No, it’s not like in the book. But I had my answer. I knew why the hardboiled detective was relevant in today’s world. It’s because the detective, Marlowe, DOES care. He cares about friendship, he cares about lying, he cares about killing one’s wife, he cares about order and he restores it. All present day values, all relevant in a modern society, all consistent with Chandler’s Marlowe.

Today I write hardboiled detective stories myself. My detective, Adam Christoffer, lives on a dirt road, he is a pacifist, he is sensitive, he is spiritual, he is probably politically liberal, though he never talks politics. He meditates. He also drinks, probably more than he should, and he has killed to make things right, though he does not much like it. He owns a gun, but he hates to use it. He has a strong moral code. He knows what is right. He may hesitate, but he never deviates.

Is his dirt road as mean as Chandler’s (or Ellroy’s) LA streets?… I don’t really know.

Is it as mean as Burke’s bayou, Sallis’ French Quarter, Block’s Manhattan, Crumley’s Montana, or Schopen’s desert? Again, I don’t know. Usually the meanness Adam Christoffer fights is not in the streets, it’s in the souls, it’s in the hearts, and, sometimes, it‘s not even really human at all. It doesn’t make any difference if the streets are pavement, dirt, grass, sand, cobblestone, mud or muck. Just as long as there is evil there. And a savior.

Could Adam Christoffer shoot a woman and say "It was easy", like Mike Hammer?… I think not. He lives in a world of feminism and humanism where any violence, especially violence against women, is regarded, rightly, as an obscenity. It would not be easy for him. But he might do it if he had to.

Hardboiled detectives are relevant today for me because they are moral, clear, unflinching, and noble, like Marlowe, and, if you will indulge me while I commit blasphemy and mention my PI in the same sentence as Chandler‘s, like Adam Christoffer. Today the hardboiled PI lives on and he is quite well.

And today, even I have a cat.

I have named him Marlowe.

Copyright© 2004 Fred deVecca

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FRED DEVECCA is a writer and filmmaker who lives in western Massachussets. He's written extensively on music, movies and baseball and has turned two of his screenplays into movies - the film noir homage Hellhouse  Moon and a short film inspired by James Joyce's Ulysses - A Shout From The Streets. He works part-time in a bookstore and runs a funky, classic movie theater. He has a dog named Travis and a cat named Marlowe. Act Of Contrition is his first published fiction.
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Read an extract from Fred deVecca's Act Of Contrition