Last summer, while I was staying at a remote French convent turned anarchist commune, I read every Raymond Chandler novel. People would ask me what I was working on and I’d say that I was reading every Raymond Chandler novel, which created the false impression that I was “working on” detectives. I was not. I was meant to be working on my dissertation. “But the books are incredible,” I’d say. “The detective, Marlowe. He’s so vulnerable to the world. You wouldn’t think he’d be like that, but he is.” My conversation partners would nod pleasantly before returning to sessions of communal nude drawing or group psychoanalysis.
It’s the case that makes Marlowe vulnerable. Better yet: Marlowe has to be vulnerable in order to solve the case. He can’t say no to a lead, so he says yes to everything. He’s beaten up, tied up, battered, bruised; he’s drugged by others and drunk by choice; he’s surrounded on all sides by women who want him and are willing to hurt him to get him. He doesn’t cry, but he’s always bleeding from his head. He sweats and sweats. None of this is incidental to the genre. Noir presents a theory of chance encounters, which is to say a theory of the world: The hard-boiled detective can only do his job if he successfully makes himself open to happenstance, searching his environments for messy signs that shape him and become shaped by him in turn.
