Raymond Chandler: Racist or Realist?

This started when I began watching Bored to Death
on HBO, where the hero, a mystery novelist who becomes a private eye when he can't finish his second book, is influenced by Raymond Chandler's 1940 Farewell, My Lovely.

I realized that I hadn't read the book for a long time, so I dug up a copy -- and quickly noticed that it contained lots of material which hinted that Chandler was either a racist or that Los Angeles had changed a lot since 1940.

"Smokes in here, huh?" says Moose Malloy, just out of prison and looking for his girl, Velma, who used to work in the place called Florian's. "A dinge... I just thrown him out... You say this here is a dinge joint?" A minute later, when a black bouncer tries to throw him out, Malloy says angrily under his breath, "Shinebox..." And a white cop called Nulty complains, "Shines. Another shine killing. That's what I rate after eighteen years in this man's police department... One time there was five smokes carved Harlem sunsets on each other down on East Eighty-four... I go down and outside the house a guy that works on the Chronicle, a newshawk, is coming off the porch and getting into his car. He makes a face, and says, 'Aw, hell, shines,' and gets in his heap and goes away. Don't even go in the house."

That was 1940. Four years later came a film called, for reasons best known to its producers, Murder, My Sweet, directed by Edward Dmytryk, with a screenplay by John Paxton. Dick Powell played Philip Marlowe, Mike Mazurki was Moose Malloy, Claire Trevor was Velma. If there was a black face or mention, I must have missed it.

Things stayed quiet on the Farewell front until 1975, when director Dick Richards and writer David Zelag Goodman went back to the original title, with Robert Mitchum as Marlowe, Jack O'Halloran as Moose Malloy, Charlotte Rampling as Velma, John Ireland as Nulty and Harry Dean Stanton as a grifting cop.

This was more like it: Mitchum was a better Marlowe than Powell (although Bogart still did him best), and Ireland was a much more believable cop. Much of the black background had been restored, but the language had a different edge -- irony had entered the picture. (Netflix doesn't have Farewell, My Lovely in its files, but you can watch it on your computer or TV set from Amazon for $9.99.)

So what does all this add up to? As my in-house historian reminds me, America in 1940 was a racist country -- not allowing blacks to serve with whites at the start of World War II. But not many other mystery writers of the period (Dashiell Hammett, for example) used anti-black imagery and language as seriously as Chandler did in Farewell.

Did Chandler mean the book to be satire, in the tradition of Mark Twain? I don't think so. He was a British schoolboy who still held beliefs of England Uber Alles and looked upon other races as suspect. (As Harry Andrews said to Ossie Davis in Sidney Lumet's The Hill set during WWII, "You different-colored bastard!") Chandler wrote from his experience, and his experience was apparently not well integrated.