Harvey,
Re your comments and questions:
> Would you say Chandler's influence is even greater
> than Hammett's? The lyrical element in Chandler's
> writing is missing from Hammett, but the sense of
> 'good is a vacation from evil' that I think of as
> the key element to the hard-boiled style seems to
> me to be even more pronounced in Hammett's novels.
> I love the best of Chandler's work, but it is much
> more sentimental; this is what made Altman's
> version of The Long Goodbye so funny. An updated
> version of The Continental Op wouldn't seem out of
> place - e.g., Red Harvest was made into a
> contemporary action picture.
I prefer Hammett to Chandler (which isn't to say I don't live Chandler; indeed the best payday I ever had as a writer was a work-for-hire textbooks on Chandler's work, Raymond Chandler - Master of American Noir, that I wrote for Barnes & Noble's website), but, as I've said elsewhere on this thread, I think it's clear that Chandler's the more influential.
Hammett has a spare, lean style, and there's a cynicism to characters like the Op, Spade, and Ned Beaumont that Marlowe can only aspire to.
But subsequent private eye writers have tended to emulate the lyrical, simile-and-metaphor laden style of Chandler, and their characters are almost clones of Marlowe.
Here's a capsule character sketch of Phil Marlowe:
1) Male
2) American
3) Unmarried
4) 30-40 years old
5) ex-cop
6) operating a one-man agency
7) in a large American city
8) telling his stories in the first person.
It's also a character sketch of 80-90% of all the private eye character who came after Chandler, from Macdonald's Lew Archer, to TV's Tom Magnum. The most popular PI character of the last three or four decades, Robert B. Parker's Spenser, is, particularly in the first few books, essentially Marlowe transplanted to Boston.
Even writers who've been deemed revolutionary in the PI genre, like Sue Grafton or Sara Paretsky, have tended to follow this pattern.
After all, Kinsey Milhone follows the Marlowe paradigm in every respect save not being male. V.I. Warshawski only in being neither male nor an ex-cop.
The spare third person narration of The Maltese Falcon, the depiction of one who is an anonymous cog in a huge organization like the Op, the notion of a code of professionalism rather than a code of chivalry, these are all aspects that mark Hammett, but which later PI characters have tended to avoid, choosing to emulate Chandler's "lonely knight on the mean streets" approach.
JIM
Re your comments and questions:
> Would you say Chandler's influence is even greater
> than Hammett's? The lyrical element in Chandler's
> writing is missing from Hammett, but the sense of
> 'good is a vacation from evil' that I think of as
> the key element to the hard-boiled style seems to
> me to be even more pronounced in Hammett's novels.
> I love the best of Chandler's work, but it is much
> more sentimental; this is what made Altman's
> version of The Long Goodbye so funny. An updated
> version of The Continental Op wouldn't seem out of
> place - e.g., Red Harvest was made into a
> contemporary action picture.
I prefer Hammett to Chandler (which isn't to say I don't live Chandler; indeed the best payday I ever had as a writer was a work-for-hire textbooks on Chandler's work, Raymond Chandler - Master of American Noir, that I wrote for Barnes & Noble's website), but, as I've said elsewhere on this thread, I think it's clear that Chandler's the more influential.
Hammett has a spare, lean style, and there's a cynicism to characters like the Op, Spade, and Ned Beaumont that Marlowe can only aspire to.
But subsequent private eye writers have tended to emulate the lyrical, simile-and-metaphor laden style of Chandler, and their characters are almost clones of Marlowe.
Here's a capsule character sketch of Phil Marlowe:
1) Male
2) American
3) Unmarried
4) 30-40 years old
5) ex-cop
6) operating a one-man agency
7) in a large American city
8) telling his stories in the first person.
It's also a character sketch of 80-90% of all the private eye character who came after Chandler, from Macdonald's Lew Archer, to TV's Tom Magnum. The most popular PI character of the last three or four decades, Robert B. Parker's Spenser, is, particularly in the first few books, essentially Marlowe transplanted to Boston.
Even writers who've been deemed revolutionary in the PI genre, like Sue Grafton or Sara Paretsky, have tended to follow this pattern.
After all, Kinsey Milhone follows the Marlowe paradigm in every respect save not being male. V.I. Warshawski only in being neither male nor an ex-cop.
The spare third person narration of The Maltese Falcon, the depiction of one who is an anonymous cog in a huge organization like the Op, the notion of a code of professionalism rather than a code of chivalry, these are all aspects that mark Hammett, but which later PI characters have tended to avoid, choosing to emulate Chandler's "lonely knight on the mean streets" approach.
JIM