"The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved," by Janet
Freeman.

There are already two bios of Raymond Chandler, the great seminal
detective writer and inventer of Philip Marlowe, P.I., for whom maybe
Jim Rockford, the also great P.I. who is a new breed, hip and looser,
is something of an inevitable prodigal son out of our relentlessly
changing culture.

Freeman's is not so much a bio as a dramatization about Chandler and
his much older wife and their restless life in the LA of the 20's and
30's--they moved to different houses in that area a couple of dozen
times at least, it is said--in which Chandler set his four great
novels. Freeman, a writer who lives in (I think) the Idaho hinterlands
and is the author of kid and juvenile books, seems perhaps unlikely as
an admiring obsessive in search of relics of Chandler. But her
nostalgic quest makes for a good book in which she searches out in
today's LA what remains of/what's replaced Chandler's old haunts and
places where the action in his novels is set. Of course, most of it is
gone; the era obviously has faded if not entirely disappeared; you'd
think she'd have known that in advance; but compulsions are finally
inscrutable and nevertheless can be a good thing in giving us good
books. Anyway, something was gnawing at her that she needed to do, I
guess, and get out of her system. (Her's seems akin to the inclination
hereabouts to check out the old TRF places--the Cove, the castle and
the rest.)

Pico Iyer, the travel writer and author of some 100 magazine articles
a year, writes in the current New York Review a fascinating review of
Freeman's book ("The Knight of Hollywood Boulevard"). I hadn't
realized that Chandler went to public school in Britain--"public" over
there means "private"--primarily because his father left the family
and a rich relative financed Chandler's schooling abroad; and that
"Marlowe" is named after a student hall at that British school
Chandler attended; and that Chandler invented the knight-errant cum
latterday P.I. Marlowe from immersion in the Old Books while a student
in England, absorbing their values, and creating and plunking-down
Marlowe with that Arthurian outlook and knightly integrity-of-mission
and timeless virtues squarely in the wild, often corrupt and crookedly
conspiratorial LA of those times of greedy rampant real estate, water
battles and all the rest of the social and economic and population
explosions there in those times as LA started becoming the current
dynamo. ("To Live and Die in LA" is a long way from Philip Marlowe;
besides, in his time in earlier LA, Marlowe's something of a Martian
come to Earth in a philosophical thought experiment.) What an idea
Chandler has here for creating a sure drama of the Old vs the New!

Iyer/Freeman think that the special power and intensity and above all
the poetry of Chandler's novels comes from the very old, traditional
viewpoint and values of Marlowe's lineage as uprooted and stranded in
that exciting raw New World place in which Marlowe, spiritually, is a
long way from his Old World roots and understandably a throwback of a
reformist bent--even on a missionary's mission of sorts. Marlowe looks
at LA in his own, dramatic (and hence poetic) way in creating the
great atmosphere in Chandler's novels. Chandler was in some sense
shocked by LA.

Some have thought that Tolkien, disillusioned and fearful that the
center of civilization would hold together after what he saw as a
Descent his terrible days surviving trench warfare in World War 1,
returned as a Cambridge don determined to rescue old values (like the
ones Chandler was imbued with) he believed would, if lost, doom
liberal culture as he knew it. But the old once-exemplary books he was
trying to teach--the Arthurian sagas, Roland, et al.--that he thought
dramatized and inculcated those values, no longer seemed to him to
have enough imaginative power to teach his shell-shocked students; so
he created "Lord of the Rings" and the rest: new dramas, fantasies,
that were modern revisions of old weakened ones that might instill
such values by speaking more powerfully, in a more contemporary way,
to the disillusioned World War 1 generation; hence all those youthful-
hero stand-ins in his fantasies for his graduate students together
with their guiding Wise Elders. It's among other things the don-
student scenario.

Maybe Chandler had something of the same intent, but he was stranded
in LA and so came up with the virtuous Marlowe of great, knightly
integrity. My opinion is that Chandler can write circles around
Tolkein and that those four great novels of Marlowe have much more
power than those endless Tolkein sprawls. Just an opinion.

Jim has a lot of integrity, too. Just look what he does to shamster
Roman, for example.