My fledgling fascination with crime noir continues as I delve into the gritty world of Philip Marlowe, the world-weary detective of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. I fell in love with the characters from the very first page. Chandler has a way with words that made every description a work of art.
Subsequent pages were SIGNIFICANTLY less lustrous.
The writing itself never diminished in quality. Chandler's good at what he does. It just so happens that what he does is populate a gritty, hopeless world with miserable people. Which I'm pretty sure was the whole darned point. Marlowe is disgusted by the corruption and apathy he's surrounded with, but he sees very little he can do about it. He lives by his own rigid code of principles, but he refuses to enforce those principles on others. The conflict between his principles and the "way of the world" makes him incredibly bitter and more than a little drunk.
The frequent usage of terms like "fag" and "fairy" rubbed me a bit the wrong way. The Big Sleep is definitely a product of its time when it comes to the epithets used, but just the same, the ferocity with which homosexual slurs were thrown around had me looking for an alternate reading where Marlowe himself was a closeted homosexual (I found it, too... but that's another story).
All in all, I've been inspired by The Big Sleep to practice working on character and place descriptions, neither of which I've really spent a lot of time on. I'll write in my notebook every now and again descriptions of people I see on the bus to practice physical descriptions that relay character as well as appearance.
Until, that is, someone sees me writing. Then I'll discreetly put the notebook away.
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