By Chen Yi Liu This is not your typical ‘90s sleek, leather-clad hero. This is a six-foot gray-eyed stranger, shrouded in a '30s trench coat and an attitude. He talks acerbic enough to strip a wall. He drinks more than he should. He operates a one-man agency on a dusty street, where tired prostitutes and nondescript gangsters daily roam. This man and his world look bitter, remote, and as unconnected with ours as possible, yet nearly seventy years after his creation by American stylist Raymond Chandler, his lone adventures continue to entrance readers worldwide: this is Philip Marlowe, the $25-per-day Los Angeles private eye Always struggling to survive amid crime and chaos on the mean streets, Marlowe lives in a corrupted world that basically exemplifies the standard setting of “hard-boiled” crime fiction. This America-originated genre distains the delicate riddle solving of the English “armchair detective” tradition, choosing instead to slice through acts of violence and expose the dark reality of contemporary America. In his line of work, Marlowe is often forced to endure violent thrashings, is held at gunpoint, and must face the betrayal of clients and comrades alike. He trades insults with suspicious cops. He counters influential mobsters and hired muscles with only his wits and luck. In Marlowe’s world, justice is hard gained with bare fists rather than freely received.
But in such an arduous war, Marlowe has only himself. Unlike his literary forerunners who venture out in pairs, such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s renowned duet Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, Marlowe has been fighting through perils of injustice on his own since his debut in The Big Sleep in 1939. As cases unfold he encounters tolerable acquaintances, harsh enemies, and occasionally, lovers and friends, but when the stories come to an end, almost without exception, all these people die or disappear, while Marlowe returns to his solitary corner, still the hero, still alone. In Marlowe’s life, friendships are transient and love scarcer; all good things seem to be in decay or have withered before their time, only the oppressing power of crime syndicates and the corrupt legal system increase, like a force of nature. It is a hard life he leads; what marks Marlowe extraordinary, however, is his refusal to be hardened by it. Unlike the tough, nihilistic detectives that often figure in this literary genre, Marlowe, for all his cynical attitude and sarcastic words, still manages to maintain his compassion toward humankind; he still returns love and friendship with his total devotion, even when he knows they will not last. He picks up a hair left on the pillow by a woman long gone. He lights a cigarette in an ashtray for a deceased friend and drinks to his memory on a slow afternoon. “If I wasn’t hard, I wouldn’t be alive,” says Marlowe to a client. But it is the second part of this sentence we remember most: “If I couldn’t ever be gentle, I wouldn’t deserve to be alive.” a
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Authors
The Taida Student Journal has been active since 1995 with an ever-changing roster of student journalists at NTU. Click the above link to read about the authors Archives
May 2024
|