a lively sense of the grotesque

     The Guardian ran a series of articles on "The 100 best novels."  Number 62 was The Big Sleep.

[excerpt from the Guardian essay, written by Robert McCrum]


Enter Philip Marlowe, one of the great characters in the Anglo-American novel, a protagonist to rival and possibly surpass Sherlock Holmes.  Marlowe holds the key to the enduring appeal of this novel and the six that followed.  In 1951, Chandler told his publisher, "It begins to look as though I were tied to this fellow for life."

     Maybe he should not have been surprised.  Chandler fully understood the archetypal fictional detective, and had been polishing the character for years.  In The Simple Art of Murder (1950) he describes such a man in a famous passage:

"He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man... He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him.  He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness."


     Chandler might have been describing Philip Marlowe, who made his debut in his first novel, after several appearances in Chandler's pulp fiction stories.  He once observed of his celebrated style:  "I'm an intellectual snob who happens to have a fondness for the American vernacular, largely because I grew up on Latin and Greek."

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