“You don’t put on much of a front,” Vivian Regan tells him in The Big Sleep, verbalizing what many of his clients must have thought over the years.
Linda Loring echoes it in The Long Goodbye:
“Your establishment isn’t exactly palatial,” she said. “Don’t you even have a secretary?”
“It’s a sordid life, but I’m used to it.”
Nor is Marlowe’s apartment anything to write home about. In “Finger Man”(1934) he is staying at the Merritt Plaza in a single apartment with a pull-down Murphy bed; four years later in “Red Wind” at the Berglund; but The Big Sleep (1939) finds him at the Hobart Arms on Franklin near Kenmore, paying something like sixty dollars a month, furnished.
This was the room I had to live in. It was all I had in the way of a home. In it was everything that took the place of a family. Not much; a few books, pictures, radio, chessmen, old letters, stuff like that. Nothing. Such as they were they had all my memories.
Chess is a Marlowe hobby over the years. He has “a small polished table with its inlaid squares of brown and pale gold,” on which he sets out the classic games he plays against himself. At the end of The High Window he finds refuge in “beautiful cold, remorseless chess, almost creepy in its silent implacability” and toasts the great game—“ ‘You and Capablanca,’ I said.”
In the bottom drawer of Marlowe’s desk lurks a bottle of scotch—usually Old Forester—and “two pony glasses,” in case he had a visitor and the visitor should happen to be thirsty. At home it might be Old Grand-Dad or Four Roses. (illustrations credit 3.13)
Marlowe’s taste in coffee. He gives a glowing commercial for it as he makes a cup for a “gentleman” who is pointing a gun at him in The Long Goodbye. “Mr. Huggins and Mr. Young are two of the best. They make Huggins-Young coffee for me. It’s their life work, their pride and joy. One of these days I’m going to see that they get the recognition they deserve. So far all they’re making is money.” (illustrations credit 3.14)
On another occasion, though, he views the game with more typical irony and himself for taking it so seriously. It is, he says,
a prize specimen of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, a battle without armor, a war without blood, and as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency.
—The Long Goodbye
In The High Window (1942) he has moved to Apartment 408 in the Bristol Apartment Building, 1634 North Bristol Avenue, Hollywood (Glenview 7537), but there is no indication that he has upgraded.
By The Long Goodbye (1953) he has a year’s rental—“in a house in Yucca Avenue. It was a small hillside house on a dead-end street with a long flight of redwood steps to the front door and a grove of eucalyptus trees across the way.” He rented it furnished but the cat-pee smell of the eucalyptus in bloom clearly didn’t appeal, and by Playback (1958) he is back in one-room mode:
I’m a tired hack with a doubtful future … Wherever I went, whatever I did, this was what I’d come back to. A blank wall in a meaningless room in a meaningless house.
—Playback
“I’m a lone wolf,” he tells publisher Howard Spencer in The Long Goodbye, “unmarried, getting middle-aged and not rich. I like liquor and women and chess and a few other things.”
“The client is always mister to me … Until he has told me a few dozen lies anyway.”
—The Long Goodbye
“I’m selling what I have to make a living. What little guts and intelligence the Lord gave me and a willingness to get pushed around in order to protect a client.”
—The Big Sleep
Professionally Marlowe sets his own idiosyncratic rules. He refuses divorce work but will take anything else that is legal. As far as money is concerned, “There’s not much money in it. There’s a lot of grief. But there’s a lot of fun, too.” (Farewell, My Lovely) … “You can’t make much money at this trade, if you’re honest.” (The Big Sleep) … “I’m not an organization. I’m just one man and I work at just one case at a time. I take risks, sometimes quite big risks, and I don’t work all the time.” (The High Window)
His going rate is twenty-five dollars a day and expenses; he charges eight cents a mile for his car. “ ‘Trouble is my business,’ I said. ‘Twenty-five a day and a guarantee of two-fifty, if I pull the job.’ ” (“Trouble Is My Business”—1939). By The Little Sister (1948) it’s “forty bucks a day and expenses. Unless it’s a job that can be done for a flat fee … That’s the asking price. I take twenty-five. I’ve taken less.” In Playback (1958): “For fifty bucks a day I don’t get shot. That costs seventy-five.”
Because he reckons his fee is fair, Marlowe takes exception to people who can well afford it but try to beat down the price:
“All I have the itch for is money. I am so money greedy that for twenty-five bucks a day and expenses, mostly gasoline and whiskey, I do my thinking myself, what there is of it. I risk my whole future, what there is of it, the hatred of the cops … I dodge bullets and eat saps, and say thank you very much, if you have any more trouble, I hope you’ll think of me, I’ll just leave one of my cards, in case anything comes up. I do all this for twenty-five bucks a day.”
—The Big Sleep
And should a client persist in arguing—as the prissy Miss Orfamay Quest does in The Little Sister:
“Have you ever looked at the dust jacket for The Little Sister? It portrays a dessicated school teacher or librarian of some 38 or 40 years of age, about as sexy as a rat-trap. Yet this little girl was young and without her glasses or with smarter ones looked good enough to fumble with. Some day, just for the hell of it, a dust jacket artist ought to submit to the excruciating agony of reading the damn book.” —Letter to Hamish Hamilton—October 26, 1956 (illustrations credit 3.15)
“Don’t bother about the twenty bucks. You can have it back, if you like. I didn’t even bruise it.”
Then she straightened the bills out on the desk … very slowly, very sadly, as if she was drowning a favorite kitten.
I’m in the hide-and-seek business … I was doing a cheap sneaky job for people I didn’t like but—that’s what you hire out for, chum. They pay the bills, you dig the dirt.
—Playback
“What’s the most you ever made on a single job?”
“Eight-fifty.”
“Jesus, how cheap can a guy get?”
—The Long Goodbye
But whatever he did, he had no illusions that he would ever be a rich man:
“My bank account was still trying to crawl under a duck …”
—Farewell, My Lovely
As late as The Long Goodbye he had only “twelve hundred dollars in the bank and a few thousands in bonds,” while in “The Pencil,” “My checking account could kiss the sidewalk without stooping.”
“I’m a romantic,” he tells Bernie Ohls in The Long Goodbye. “I hear crying in the night and I go see what’s the matter … but no money, not a dime … But I can always tell a cop to go to hell. Go to hell, Bernie …”
“You boys are as cute as a couple of lost golf-balls,” I said.
—The High Window
But in Marlowe’s book, when you took the money, you did the job …
“You’re my client—five thousand dollars’ worth. I have to do something for it—even if it’s no more than growing a mustache.”
—Playback
“I’d like to be smooth and distant and subtle … I’d like to play the sort of game just once the way somebody like you would like it to be played. But nobody will let me—not the clients, nor the cops, nor the people I played against. However hard I try to be nice I always end up with my nose in the dirt and my thumb feeling for somebody’s eye.”
—The Lady in the Lake
“I don’t think he’s a real dick. He don’t seem to throw his weight enough.”
—Of P.I. John Evans in “No Crime in the Mountains”
“You a real dick or just a shamus?” Marl
owe is asked in The Lady in the Lake. “Just a shamus.” But a shamus who defines his own code, marches to his own drummer and takes what he does seriously.
“Private investigator, huh?” he said thoughtfully. “What kind of work do you do mostly?”
“Anything that’s reasonably honest,” I said.
He nodded. “Reasonably is a word you could stretch. So is honest.”
—The Little Sister
“You in show business?”
“Just the opposite of show business. I’m in the hide-and-seek business.”
—Playback
“I heard you leveled with the customers, Marlowe.”
“That’s why I stay poor.”
—“The Pencil”
I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.
—Farewell, My Lovely
“Well, what is my business? Do I know? Did I ever know?”
—The Little Sister
I’m a fellow who likes to take an idea over by the light and have a good look at it.
—The Little Sister
“I’m in a business where people come to me with troubles. Big troubles, little troubles, but always troubles they don’t want to take to the cops …”
What makes a man stay with it nobody knows. You don’t get rich, you don’t often have much fun. Sometimes you get beaten up or shot at or tossed into the jailhouse. Once in a long while you get dead … Then the door buzzer rings and you open the inner door to the waiting room and there stands a new face with a new problem, a new load of grief, and a small piece of money.
—The Long Goodbye
“If I get knocked off, put just one red rose on my grave. I don’t like cut flowers. I like to see them grow.”
—“The Pencil”
Why the hell hadn’t I got myself a government job ten years ago? Make it fifteen. I had brains enough to get a mail-order law degree.
—“The Pencil”
“Dick,” “shamus,” “keyhole peeper,” “eye,” “gumshoe,” they were all names that meant nothing to Marlowe. Apart from drawing the line at divorce work, his approach to his work was eminently pragmatic. (“Once in a while in my business a man has to do a good deal of taking”—Playback) (“ ‘Some days I feel like playing it smooth,’ I said, ‘and some days I feel like playing it like a waffle iron.’ ”—“Trouble Is My Business”):
“When you hire a boy in my line of work it isn’t like hiring a window-washer and showing him eight windows and saying: ‘Wash those and you’re through.’ You don’t know what I have to go through or over or under to do your job for you. I do it my way. I do my best to protect you and I may break a few rules, but I do break them in your favor. The client comes first, unless he’s crooked. Even then all I do is hand the job back and keep my mouth shut.
“… I’m not Sherlock Holmes or Philo Vance. I don’t expect to go over ground the police have covered and pick up a broken pen point and build a case from it. If you think there is anybody in the detective business making a living doing that sort of thing, you don’t know much about cops.”
—The Big Sleep
“All right,” he said wearily. “Get on with it. I have a feeling you are going to be very brilliant. Remorseless flow of logic and intuition and all that rot. Just like a detective in a book.”
“Sure. Taking the evidence piece by piece, putting it all together in a neat pattern, sneaking in an odd bit I had on my hip here and there, analyzing the motives and characters and making them out to be quite different from what anybody—or I myself for that matter—thought them to be up to this golden moment—and finally making a sort of world-weary pounce on the least promising suspect.”
He lifted his eyes and almost smiled. “Who thereupon turns as pale as paper, froths at the mouth, and pulls a gun out of his right ear.”
—The High Window
Bad cops hate him but the better ones have his measure. In The High Window one of them quotes his boss’s verdict:
“[He] says you are not as smart as you think you are, but that you are a guy things happen to, and a guy like that could be a lot more trouble than a very smart guy.”
Marlowe relied on his instincts and they rarely let him down …
It is like a sudden scream in the night, but there is no sound. Almost always at night, because the dark hours are the hours of danger. But it happened to me also in broad daylight—that strange, clarified moment when I suddenly know something I have no reason for knowing … the abrupt certainty that what bullfighters call “the moment of truth” is here.
—Playback
The Marlowe manner was invariably direct, especially when the other person was playing games. “I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners,” he tells Vivian Regan in The Big Sleep. “They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings.”
“I figured I’d find out if you were smart enough to be worth talking to.”
“I’m very smart,” I said. “It would be a shame not to talk to me.”
—The High Window
“Nothing I say is nice. I’m not nice.”
—The Little Sister
I grinned at her sadly. “I know I talk too smart. It’s in the air nowadays.”
—Farewell, My Lovely
“I’ve got friends who could cut you down so small you’d need a step ladder to put your shoes on.”
“Somebody did a lot of hard work on that one,” I said. “But hard work’s no substitute for talent.”
—Playback
“I’m afraid I don’t like your manner.”
“I’ve had complaints about it,” I said. “But nothing seems to do any good.”
—Farewell, My Lovely
Saying the wrong thing is one of my specialties.
—“The Pencil”
“You’re Marlowe?”
I nodded.
“I’m a little disappointed,” he said, “I rather expected something with dirty fingernails.”
“Come inside,” I said, “and you can be witty sitting down.”
—The High Window
“Does all this figuring ever get you anywhere?”
“No. It’s just something to do while I’m patting the cold cream into my face at night.”
—“Bay City Blues”
In a conversation with hoodlum Eddie Mars, Mars asks him:
“Is that any of your business, soldier?”
“I could make it my business.”
“And I could make your business my business.”
“You wouldn’t like it. The pay’s too small.”
—The Big Sleep
“I made no remark,” he said.
“Remarks want you to make them,” I said.
—Farewell, My Lovely
“I can see,” Breeze said, “that you know a lot about dames.”
“Not knowing a lot about them has helped me in my business.”
—The High Window
“American girls are terrific. American wives take in too damn much territory.”
—The Long Goodbye
The one-liner often proved more potent than the gun: “Always the wisecrack where possible” (The Little Sister). And besides, “Guns never settle anything. They are just a fast curtain to a bad second act.”
—Playback
I took the wrinkles out of my lips and said aloud: “Hello, again. Anybody here needing a detective?”
—Playback
“He wouldn’t hurt a fly, really.”
“Next time you come up I’ll have one for him not to hurt. ”
—The Little Sister
I offered him a buck but he wouldn’t take it. I offered to buy him the poems of T. S. Eliot. He said he already had them.
—The Long Goodbye
“For ten dollars I could sing like four canaries and a steel guitar.”
“I don’t
like these plushy orchestrations,” I said.
—The High Window
“You talk too much,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “I talk too much. Lonely men always talk too much. Either that or they don’t talk at all.”
—The Little Sister
“I don’t drink until sundown. That way you don’t get to be a heel.”
“Tough on the Eskimos,” I said. “In the summertime, anyway.”
—“Goldfish”
“Oh, a lot of women keep throwing their arms around my neck and fainting on me and getting kissed and so forth. Quite a full couple of days for a beat‑up gumshoe with no yacht.”
—The Little Sister
“Why, the thing stands out so far you could break off a yard of it and still have enough left for a baseball bat.”
“I ought to have said that one,” I said. “Just my style.”
—Farewell, My Lovely