The first paragraph of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep is legendary in crime fiction. It has been a long time since I picked up a Philip Marlowe mystery, maybe even ten years since The Long Goodbye ('Alcohol is like love,' he said. 'The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you just take the girl's clothes off.').
Pulp fiction meets classic tragedy in Chandler's works and the reader hoovers up Marlowe's cynical drawls: "Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead". But there is a quiet heroism that attracts from a time when honour, loyalty and truth were not loaded terms but terms loaded with meaning. And you just might find yourself quipping at the next mercenary merchant rip-off on the cold streets of 21st century urbanity: "Wrong play pal. Innocence will get you nowhere".
Labels: literature
