Playback

'You in love with him?' 'I thought I was in love with you.' 'It was a cry in the night. Let's not try to make it more than it was. There's more coffee out in the kitchen.' 'No, thanks. Not until breakfast. Haven't you been in love? I mean enough to want to be with a woman every day, every month, every year?' 'Let's go.' 'How can such a hard man be so gentle?' 'If I wasn't hard, I wouldn't be alive. If I couldn't ever be gentle, I wouldn't deserve to be alive.' As Marlowe as could be. 'Could be' being the dark bitter cruel privileged (it usually all goes together) underbelly of seemingly-pleasant locales, conversations so smooth and independently weighty that they fit perfectly as film dialogue, morally-ambiguous beautiful women, people who throw their weight around, get careless, get apathetic, get dead, and a P.I. who refuses to let the truth go despite being told to leave it where it lay. It seemed more laboured this time around, but I can't decide if this observation was true. Was it a trick of the light, or just the way things had become by this stage, this being Chandler's last novel about possibly my favourite P.I.? Marlowe, too, is different. He seems more tired, more desperate, more human, and so do several of the other characters (people often stereotyped even in noir fiction whom Marlowe/Chandler concedes are 'just human', Jewish businessmen, police officers, curt hotel managers...). Despite the novel's stylistic and plotting flaws and inconsistencies (the mystery is oddly less complex than what Chandler used to do), it injects poignancy to the constant thread of hardness and pessimism that is startlingly moving. For once, finally, the emotive romanticism surpasses wearied fatalism.