The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Raymond Chandler · the sixth Philip Marlowe novel · told by Marlowe in the first person throughout · Hamish Hamilton, London, November 1953, and Houghton Mifflin, New York, March 1954 · scored on Chandler’s English as published in 1953 to 1954, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Detective novel made a novel of friendship, manners and self-knowledge; first-person retrospective narration by the detective throughout
Mythos
The private eye as knight errant, his loyalty given to a false friend; the double who is the knight’s opposite; the soldier living on the credit of one brave act; the mock resurrection with a new face, which the knight refuses
Phase
From a drunk in a Rolls-Royce outside a club, through a killing, a jail, a letter from Mexico, a second household and two more deaths, to a last meeting in the detective’s office with a man who calls himself by another name
Presentation
Fiction; one narrator who knows the outcome as he tells it; two cases interleaved through a long middle and joined late through one woman’s past; a coda of a single visit
Register
The wisecrack and the weary simile, the elegiac and the satirical in one voice; set speeches by the rich and the police; the novelist’s typed night pages in a voice not Marlowe’s
Scale
Two moneyed households, a single-office detective, the police, the press, the medical trade, the publishing trade and organised crime, in one city, with Mexico as its edge
Governing Proposition
A private detective befriends a courteous, scarred drunk married to a millionaire’s daughter, drives him to Tijuana on the morning she is found beaten to death, and goes to jail rather than talk; a second case, the minding of a drinking novelist, turns out to be the first. The wager of the novel is that a detective story can be made to carry a novel of friendship, money and self-knowledge without ceasing to be a detective story: that in a city where money owns the instruments of truth, the one obligation not bought is a friend’s, and that solving the case can be the means by which that friendship is shown to have been given to a man with nothing inside.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers.” The book begins with a friendship and is told by a man who already knows how it ends. Philip Marlowe, a private detective with a single office, takes charge of a scarred and courteous drunk who has been married to, divorced from and married again to Sylvia, daughter of the newspaper and money baron Harlan Potter. Nothing in the encounter is required of him. He gives his time and his patience freely, and the two men drink gimlets together at Victor’s.
This is the sixth Marlowe novel and the longest Chandler wrote, published in London by Hamish Hamilton in November 1953 and in New York by Houghton Mifflin in March 1954. The work scored here is that novel as published, in Chandler’s English, one book. It was written while Chandler’s wife was dying, and its portrait of a successful, drinking, self-despising writer is widely read as partly a self-portrait. It won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1955.
The voice is retrospective, and that is the first fact of the form. Marlowe tells the early chapters with a warmth that is already grief, because the teller knows what the friend will turn out to be. The wisecrack and the weary simile are here from the first page, and so is the other note, the elegiac one, which will carry the book’s few heights. The friendship at Victor’s is the ground the whole book stands on, and the last chapter will be built on the same ground.
Movement II
Terry comes to Marlowe at dawn with a gun and asks to be driven to Tijuana, and Marlowe drives him. Sylvia is found beaten to death. Marlowe is taken in and kept three days in the city jail because he will not talk, and the jail chapters are among the book’s set pieces, made with full command. He pays the debt of friendship in the one coin the city cannot buy, his silence. Then word comes from Mexico of Terry’s confession and suicide, and the case is closed on Potter’s terms.
That closing is the book’s disclosure, stated in event. Potter’s papers, the police, the district attorney all bend to keep a rich man’s daughter’s death out of the news, and a confession that suits everyone ends the matter. Potter makes a speech on mass production, and Ohls makes his own speeches on organised crime. These are essays set in mouths, and the book’s findings are often delivered so, as aphorism and set speech, rather than discovered in action. The seeing is clear; the manner of its telling holds it back.
A letter arrives from Mexico, with a portrait of Madison in it, a five thousand dollar bill, and a request that Marlowe drink a gimlet for its writer at Victor’s. The letter, the bill and the drink become the book’s ritual objects, carried from here to the end. It is one of the few places where the elegiac pitch is reached, and it is reached plainly: a dead friend’s money, a drink in his name, and a goodbye that the book will not let stand.
Movement III
The long middle is a second case. The publisher Howard Spencer and Eileen Wade hire Marlowe to find, and then to mind, the novelist Roger Wade, who drinks. The search takes Marlowe through the quack doctors, three whose names begin with V, and to Dr Verringer’s place; it brings in Candy the houseboy, the gangster Mendy Menendez, the Las Vegas man Randy Starr, and Linda Loring, Sylvia’s sister. The trawl through the doctors is satire of the medical trade as a racket, and it delays more than it reveals.
Here the book is least compelled. Marlowe’s meditation on the city at night, his asides on Hollywood and on publishing, are fine prose at leisure, and the form loosens into episode; perhaps a fifth of the book could go without loss to what it knows. Chandler said he cared little for plot, and the clue chain shows it. But the middle is not filler. Wade is the third portrait in the book of a man living on a borrowed self, the artist who sold out, beside the friend with nothing inside.
Wade’s typed night pages are written in a voice that is not Marlowe’s, the writer’s self-contempt in its own words, and they are among the best things in the book. Alcoholism is shown here from inside with an exactness the form had not asked of itself before: in Terry, gentle; in Wade, raging. Then Wade is dead of a gunshot, and the second household is a scene of a killing, as the first was.
Movement IV
The two cases are one. Eileen Wade was married once, in wartime England, to Paul Marston, and Paul Marston is Terry Lennox. She killed Sylvia, and she killed Roger. Marlowe forces the truth, and Eileen dies by her own hand. The joining is the book’s architecture, and it is what makes the long Wade middle bear on Terry; it rests, too, on a coincidence carried more by mood than by necessity, and it comes by way of a late scene of explanation that delivers the knowledge in statement.
What the joining does is the book’s claim. The detective plot is not a container for the friendship story but the shape of its argument: the solution turns a debt of friendship into its refutation. Terry did not kill his wife, and the confession and the death that closed her case were a story that suited him and the people with money round him. Marlowe’s three days in jail, paid for a friend, were paid for a man who had used him. The case solved is the friendship ended.
The archetype turns on itself at this point. Chandler had built the private eye as a knight errant, the honest man who goes down mean streets in a city of money. Here the knight’s loyalty has been given to a false friend, and the quest ends in the discovery that the man saved was not worth saving and the knight was used. Terry is Marlowe’s double and his opposite: the soldier who saved two gangsters in a foxhole and lived on the credit, a man of grace with no centre.
Movement V
Then a visitor comes to Marlowe’s office, Señor Cisco Maioranos, and he is Terry with a new face. The dead man has come back, a mock resurrection, and Marlowe refuses him; the knight will not honour the return. The last scene is the summit of the book’s elevation, and it is earned by everything before it: “So long, amigo. I won’t say goodbye.”
The book had already given the French saying in Marlowe’s rendering, “To say goodbye is to die a little”, and the ending is its answer. To refuse to say goodbye is to refuse the small death of parting, because the friend is already gone; there is nothing left in the man with the new face to part from. The gimlet, the bill and the goodbye close together. The voice that began in warmth ends in a judgement, lonely and partly wrong, and coherent to the last line in its tired, ironic decency.
The book showed what the American detective novel could carry. Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer took up its family secrets and its watching detective; Robert B. Parker built Spenser on Marlowe; Michael Connelly and James Ellroy work in its Los Angeles; Haruki Murakami translated it in 2007; John Banville, as Benjamin Black, wrote The Black-Eyed Blonde as its sequel; and Robert Altman filmed it in 1973, with Elliott Gould and an altered ending. Its surface carries its decade, in slang and in attitudes a modern reader feels. Its friendship and its refusal do not date.
Act III · The Twelve
The spine is required: a friendship given freely, a debt paid by silence and jail, a second case that turns out to be the first, and a last meeting in which the debt is refused. The joining of the two plots through Eileen Wade’s past is the book’s architecture, and it makes the long Wade middle bear on Terry in the end. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve, level with The Sublime and above the line, is what the subtractive test finds permitted rather than compelled: the trawl through the three doctors whose names begin with V, which delays more than it reveals; the asides on the city and the trades; the set speeches of Harlan Potter and Ohls; and a loose clue chain, joined by a coincidence carried by mood. Perhaps a fifth could go.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. In the postwar American city money owns the instruments of truth: Potter’s papers, the police, the district attorney and the medical trade bend to keep a rich man’s daughter’s death out of the news, and the case is closed by a confession that suits everyone. Friendship is the one obligation not bought, and it is betrayed not by venality but by weakness, in Terry, the charming man with nothing inside. Alcoholism is shown from inside with unusual exactness in two men, one gentle and one raging. Held below the gate because much of this is spoken as aphorism and set speech rather than found in action, and because the honourable man in a corrupt city is the hardboiled novel’s given, here deepened rather than first uncovered.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The elevation is melancholy, and more mood than height. The opening encounter reaches it, and so do the dawn drive to Tijuana, the letter with the bill and its request for a gimlet at Victor’s, and the last scene with the man who calls himself Maioranos, whose closing refusal is the summit, and is earned: “So long, amigo. I won’t say goodbye.” Wade’s death and Eileen’s confession are handled for dread and are tense rather than high. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve, level with The Inevitable, is frequency: between these few scenes the register is the wisecrack and the weary simile, which keep the book at the level of wit and sadness rather than transport. The height, when it comes, is moderate and sure.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The archetype is built, and built against itself. The private eye as knight errant, the honest man in a city of money, existed before this book in Chandler’s own work; here the myth is turned. The knight’s loyalty is given to a false friend, and the quest ends not in rescue but in the discovery that the man saved was not worth saving and that the knight was used. Terry is Marlowe’s double and opposite: the soldier who saved two gangsters in a foxhole and has lived on the credit, a man of grace with no centre, who returns from the dead with a new face. The gimlet, the bill and the goodbye are ritual objects carried through the book. Held below the gate because the myth is largely inherited from Chandler’s earlier work and his essay “The Simple Art of Murder”, and the Wade plot carries only a lighter version of it.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The departure is from the hardboiled form Chandler had himself perfected: a long, slow novel of character and manners, the mystery subordinated to friendship, drink, money and the writer’s trade, the hero ending lonely and partly wrong. The stake was real. The book is much longer and more ruminative than its predecessors, and it put into the drinking novelist Roger Wade a portrait of its author that cost him something; it was written while Chandler’s wife was dying. What holds the axis lowest of the five gate axes: it is not a break in the form. The detective, the corpses, the police, the gangsters and the reveal are all present and obey the convention, and Dashiell Hammett had already shown the hard world with less comfort. A real wager, made on familiar ground.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Change the form and the book loses much of what it knows. The first-person retrospective voice is the instrument: Marlowe tells a story whose end he knows, and the telling is coloured by the betrayal, so that the warmth of the early Terry chapters is already grief. The detective plot is not a container but the shape of the argument, since the solution, Eileen and Paul Marston and the two murders, is what turns a debt of friendship into its refutation: the case solved is the friendship ended. The two cases interleaved make the reader live Marlowe’s sense that his life is being run by people with money and no centre. Held near 8 by the slack of the middle, where the form loosens into episode, and by a late scene of explanation that delivers the knowledge in statement.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The book rewards return, and the evidence is seventy years of rereading by readers who do not care who killed Sylvia Lennox. That is the proof that its yield is not in the puzzle but in the prose, the friendship, the Wade chapters as a portrait of the writer, and the book read as an elegy for the life that made it. Criticism has kept it in view in the studies of noir and of Los Angeles, and novelists return to it as a model. What holds the axis below the canonical novels of its weight: its meanings, once taken, are clear; the people other than Marlowe and Terry are drawn to type; and much of what is reread is the voice, which pleases again rather than disclosing more.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The field is the American novel, and the detective novel inside it. The force: the book is the fullest demonstration that the American detective novel could carry the weight of a serious novel of society, friendship and self-knowledge without ceasing to be a detective novel, and it raised what the genre could ask of itself. Much of the reach belongs to Marlowe and to Chandler’s work as a whole, not to this book alone, and is discounted for that; the field was raised rather than reorganised, which holds it below the gate. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer novels, from The Galton Case (1959), take up its family secrets and its sad, watching detective; Robert B. Parker built Spenser on Marlowe; Michael Connelly and James Ellroy work in its Los Angeles; Haruki Murakami translated it and has said Chandler shaped his narrators; John Banville, as Benjamin Black, wrote The Black-Eyed Blonde (2014) as its sequel; and Robert Altman’s film (1973) remade it as a study of its own decade.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Seventy-three years, weighed on form and presence. The form is whole: the text has been in continuous print in English since 1953, in the Library of America since 1995, widely translated, and in the Japanese canon through Murakami’s version of 2007. The presence is broad: general readers, readers of crime, the academy in American studies and in the study of noir and Los Angeles, and film. It won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1955. Fame and the film are presence and earn nothing more. The figure is the low end of the step this span can reach, and what holds it there is a surface fixed in places to its moment, in slang and in the period’s attitudes to women, homosexuals and Mexicans, and a charge of sentimentality. It has plainly outlived the conditions that made it.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged on Chandler’s English, and it is among the most finished prose of its century in American English: the simile and the wisecrack timed with precision, dialogue that characterises in a line, a sentence rhythm that carries comedy and grief at once. Marlowe’s rendering of the French saying, “To say goodbye is to die a little”, and the passage that begins “Alcohol is like love” are made to that measure. The set pieces are commanded: the jail chapters, the Tijuana drive, Wade’s typed drunken pages in a voice not Marlowe’s, the last scene. Charged: a length the plot does not compel; joints that show, in the coincidence and the late summary of what happened; a manner that tips at times into self-imitation, a simile too many; and set speeches that stop the scene. A great stylist’s book, not a perfectly made one.
Score: 8.6 / 10
One law governs the whole: Marlowe’s voice and his code, which hold the comic and the elegiac, the satire of doctors and the rich and the grief for a friend, the gangster and the publisher, in one register of tired, ironic decency. Take the two most distant elements, the gimlets with Terry at Victor’s and the violent unmasking of Eileen Wade: both obey the same physics, since both are about people who live on a borrowed version of themselves. The world’s rules hold from the first chapter to the last: money controls the account of events, and the police are brutal but not the worst of it. Charged for the coincidence on which the joining rests, which comes from outside that law, and for a narrowness of range: a single voice holding a single city is coherent partly because it is narrow.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Held, not listed. The very rich and their control of press and police; the police and the jail; organised crime from Las Vegas; the publishing trade and the writer’s work; medicine as a racket; marriage, divorce and adultery; alcoholism in two forms; the war remembered, in the commando, the foxhole and a face rebuilt by surgeons; class between Idle Valley and a one-room office; and Mexico as the place where Americans go to vanish. They are joined through two households and one friendship. What holds the axis where it is: no consciousness beyond Marlowe’s, since every other person is seen from outside; no sacred order; no labour beyond the professions; and no history of the city beneath its moneyed surface.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.1 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.0, The Made at 8.6, then Pressure on Tradition at 8.3. A whole text in continuous print since 1953 and broadly present among general readers, readers of crime, the academy and film; a prose among the most finished of its century in American English, timed in simile, dialogue and rhythm, with set pieces made in full command; and a demonstration that the detective novel could carry a serious novel of society and friendship, taken up by Macdonald, Parker, Murakami and Banville.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable and The Sublime at 7.6. The spine of friendship, debt, betrayal and refusal is required, but a fifth of the book is permitted rather than compelled: the doctors, the asides, the set speeches, a loose clue chain joined by coincidence. And the elevation, earned at the opening, the drive, the letter and the last scene, is rare and moderate, with wit and sadness between. Next above them, The Encompassed at 7.8: a wide world of money, police, crime and trade, seen through one consciousness only.
The Necessity Cap is met: The Inevitable at 7.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.1, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.0 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Swerve at 7.9 falls six tenths short, and The Unconcealment at 8.2, The Archetypal Deep at 8.2 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.3 fall short as well. The Universal Minimum is met (the lowest of the eleven is 7.6, The Inevitable and The Sublime, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 8.1, in the band of Tier IV, short of the 9.0 that the summit requires, and it would stand there with the Gate met.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, the sixth Philip Marlowe novel, scored as published by Hamish Hamilton in London in November 1953 and by Houghton Mifflin in New York in March 1954: one book, in Chandler’s English, with no translation between. It is in the Library of America’s volume of Chandler’s later novels (1995). No text of the novel was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain: the first sentence, Marlowe’s rendering of the French saying on goodbyes, the opening words of the passage on alcohol and love, and the last words to Señor Maioranos. Citations are by place in the story. Facts that could not be verified, among them the book’s word count and number of chapters, the wording of its last line, and the terms of particular critical studies, are not given.