BOOK OF THE MOVIE OF THE BREAKFAST CEREAL: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Chasing down an author’s output, I realised I hadn’t read all of Raymond Chandler’s short stories. There’s a single volume out there that does the deed for you, if that’s what you are after.
   Chandler is a writer I overdosed on. An experiment. I made a solid decision in buying and reading his novels: part of a plan to write rocket ship stories. Battery-powered fairy tales.
   To write in a particular area, first exhaust that particular area.
   Once you’ve exhausted that particular area by reading the absolute shit out of it, read outwith the area you wish to write in. In other words, sitting there thinking that I’d write science fiction…I decided I really needed to read more crime stories.
   And read them I did. I overdosed on Chandler and had to wave goodbye to his writing once I’d tackled the short stories. If you want to read his work, read the novels first. For fuck’s sake, read the novels first. Luckily, I did.
   What would I learn from my experiment? Doesn’t matter what I thought I’d pick up. That’s not the same as what I did learn from reading those works. I learned that the story told by a narrator who is also the main character…that type of writing leaves a lot of space for ambiguity in crime stories.
   You can have a 100% reliable first person narrator…but, even so, that person is almost always quite rightly lagging behind the action. Things happened, giving the character something to trail behind – something to investigate.
   In Chandler’s stories, the reader sees what Marlowe sees. Then the reader is given a lot of information on what Marlowe thinks about what was seen. What about the stuff Marlowe never sees?
   This direct approach falls apart unless the author takes action. Solution? Chandler gives us two fixes. When he was stuck, he simply had a man walk through a door with a gun. But he had another solution…
   Marlowe is knocked unconscious. Hey, it works. It’s an easy fix that allows the detective to wake up and wonder who did what, where, when, and how. (Throwing an IF or two into that cake-mix.) Marlowe lags behind the action, and is sapped.
   Admittedly, Marlowe is then allowed to make leaps of logic ahead of the action, based on having lagged behind it while unconscious. He wakes up and takes the reader along with him, over his shoulder, playing hunches, and we just have to put up with that.
   What Marlowe doesn’t see…is for Marlowe to mull over when he regains consciousness. Chandler provides several avenues of detective escapism for the readers to consider. Mostly, though…
   You see what Marlowe sees.
   This is taken to the cinematic extreme in Lady in the Lake, the movie adaptation of The Lady in the Lake. Chandler’s format is repeated for the movies. Marlowe, played (briefly) by Robert Montgomery, talks to the audience here and there.
   Say, Marlowe does that all the time in the books.
   More to the point, the movie is mostly a view from the camera itself. You see Marlowe’s reflection in a mirror when the camera stares at the mirror. That kind of thing. I guess it would be the world’s earliest known example of a first-person shooter…
   Except that Marlowe doesn’t shoot anyone. He certainly slugs a guy. A first-person action adventure, then. This view from the camera casts Paul Vogel, the director of cinematography, as the real star.
   Robert Montgomery’s screen-time is negligible. That’s okay. He earned his money directing the movie. We have to let him off on that score. There’s a neat little Easter Egg in the opening credits, but to say more is to say too much. (Brush up on your French and keep your eyes peeled.)
   Well, by this time I was up to my eyebrows in cinematic adaptations of Chandler’s work. Throw in some television material, too. Powers Boothe plays a prototype Marlowe taken from the short stories in a TV show that reeks of the mean streets this detective must walk down.
   Watching the movies and a bit of TV, I went on the detective trail – chasing after the Chandler stories I hadn’t read. This involved a lot of cross-referencing. I narrowed the field down to four tales.
   Then I misremembered that I had comic book adaptations of Chandler’s output, so one of the “unread” stories was there in print with pictures to help explain the plotting to me. I know that Chandler didn’t write detective material exclusively. So the remaining stories are going to be off-kilter. But still Chandler.
   Does that mean I’ve hunted down an author’s output? I’m checking the planet for another story that’s in a collection of his writings. We’ll see if there’s a tale in that direction. As for the movies, I still haven’t seen a Michael Shayne film called Time to Kill. This is a renamed version of Chandler’s book, The High Window – in turn filmed under yet another title as The Brasher Doubloon.
   I’ve not seen The Brasher Doubloon either, though I have seen one of the coins up close and personal. Is it worth millions? According to those who put that worth on it, yes.
   Michael Shayne, detective, has a few Chandler connections. The character was played on radio by an actor named Chandler. At the movies, Lloyd Nolan was the star – and he’d appear as a Bay City cop in Murder, My Sweet – the movie adaptation of Farewell, my Lovely.
   I’ll state for the record that I couldn’t make it past fifteen minutes of Elliott Gould playing a schmuck – portraying the dick in private dick. For me, that experience was a rather short goodbye.
   No, I don’t care that Leigh Brackett worked on the script. How much of her work was filtered out by the director and the star is hard to say. Gould mumbled his way through. No good to me. Who cares? Nobody cares.
   Gould famously married a woman named Bogart. Twice. Her dad was a moviemaker himself – and directed a film called Marlowe. Why can’t these people just film the book titles?
   The Falcon Takes Over = Farewell, my Lovely. George Sanders. (1942.)
   Time to Kill = The High Window. Lloyd Nolan. (1942.)
   Murder, My Sweet = Farewell, my Lovely. At least they kept the comma when they changed the title at short notice. Dick Powell. (1944.)
   The Big Sleep. A Hollywood aberration, seeing as they kept the title. Luckily, they kept a fair amount of the story. Leigh Brackett worked on this script. We’ll return to her. Humphrey Bogart. (1946.)
   Lady in the Lake = The Lady in the Lake. Robert Montgomery “starred” and directed. (1947.)
   The Brasher Doubloon = The High Window. George Montgomery. (1947.)
   Marlowe = The Little Sister. James Garner. (1969.)
   The Long Goodbye. Here, they kept the title and threw out everything else. Big Arnie holds up the scenery in this one. Elliott Gould plays a character named Marlowe. It could be set on the back end of the moon in the year dot for all I care. And I don’t care. Who cares? Nobody cares. Leigh Brackett was in on the scripting here, but who knows how much of her work was slashed. Elliott Gould. (1973.)
   Farewell, My Lovely. First of the Mitchum movies, set in period. Blink and you miss Sly Stallone. Robert Mitchum. (1975.)
   The Big Sleep. Second of the Mitchum movies, filmed and set in the 1970s – you can see a vehicle tax disc with a ’77 expiration on it, confirming the exact period. Also, this movie is transplanted to England – obvious from the opening shots of un-American roads. Robert Mitchum. (1978.)
   Chandler was an anglophile. That’s an American who is allowed to pour scorn on the English after having actually met them. Hell, he even held a British passport through the bulk of his crime-writing life.
   The original unfilmable porn plot of The Big Sleep finally rears its head in 1970s London, and, strangely, it works. Chandler liked English mansions so much that he didn’t bat an eyelid when it came to transporting Imperial details into his fiction.
   Had Chandler lived to experience London in the 1970s, he’d have been aghast at the moral decline. Then he’d have picked up a shaky pen to gleefully denote the Fall of Rome and wax nostalgic about his time as an Edwardian poet. No, really.
   I never said he was a good Edwardian poet.
   My point. Updating Chandler to the 1970s or later is a sin, even if Mitchum acquits himself well in the role as he mouths off authentic Chandler dialogue. And transplanting Marlowe to England is a crime – it works, but only just. The movie features two cases, and the pacing going from one to the other could’ve done with serious tightening.
   Chandler’s anglophile attitude, his time spent in England, and his passport all soften the blow of seeing Marlowe in Albion. Still, Kit Marlowe was an English playwright – and that’s no coincidence as far as Chandler was concerned. A curiosity this one, that sits uneasily next to the first Mitchum movie thanks to the change in time and in space.
   Poodle Springs. This one is even more of a curio, given that it is a TV movie and that it is based on the fragment Chandler left behind. James Caan. (1998.)
   As I type, I haven’t seen all of these adaptations. I’ll hunt a few down, just as I hunted down the few remaining short stories. No, I won’t attempt to revisit the Elliott Gould travesty. (With Chandlerian cynicism, I watched a YouTube clip of the movies enthralling finale. I appear to have misused the word enthralling. Well. Damn.)
   I’ll end on a fine point as I chase these stories down. Just to clarify. If you want to try the fiction, read Chandler’s novels first. When you go to read the short stories, you’ll realise that he stitched several tales into the plots of his full books. Far better to read the books, before you tackle the prototype fiction.
   Prototype Marlowe, no matter the character’s name, comes across as leaner and meaner in the short stories. That’s reflected in the Powers Boothe TV show. You also see one part of a case clearly in a short story, and another part in a second tale. Sometimes even a third. While that construction, reconstruction, is interesting to me as a writer, as a reader it is easier to encounter those tales in the novel versions – if only to avoid a feeling of déjà vu.