Creatures of darkness: Raymond Chandler, detective fiction, and film noir

Abstract

Creatures of Darkness: Raymond Chandler, Detective Fiction, and Film Noir Phillips, Gene D. Creatures of Darkness: Raymond Chandler, Detective Fiction, and Film Noir. Lexington: Kentucky UP, 2000; 2003 (pb). Paper, $19.95. ISBN 0-8131-9042-8. 336 pp. Film noir and hard-boiled detective novels have been favorite topics of American cinema and literature studies for decades. The shadowy nights, crooked cities, seductive femme fatales, and world-weary private detective crusaders have haunted lecture halls and critical texts ever since Nino Frank first wrote the term film noir in 1946. Given the been-there-done-that nature of many film noir discussions, is there anything left to learn? As the extraordinarily articulate Gene D. Phillips proves with his book Creatures of Darkness: Raymond Chandler, Detective Fiction, and Film Noir (2000), cinema fans and Chandler readers can revisit this old stomping ground, learn something new, and have a tremendously enjoyable time doing it. Phillips, an experienced scholar and gifted writer whose work includes discussions on Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick, focuses here on the infamous Raymond Chandler, literary genius of hard-boiled detective novels and collaborator on several noir classics. Chandler's best known novels-The Big Sleep (1939), Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The High Window (1942), The Lady in the Lake (1943), The Little Sister (1949), and The Long Goodbye (1953), among others-star crusading private detective Philip Marlowe, California's answer to Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. As Phillips reminds us, Chandler's Marlowe character is probably America's most celebrated hard-boiled detective, a white knight in the unspeakably crooked underground of criminal Los Angeles. Chandler also wrote the original screenplay for The Blue Dahlia (1946), and collaborated on the screenplays for Double Indemnity (1944), The Unseen (1945), and Strangers on a Train (1951). Aside from his impressive film and literature credentials, Chandler is infamous-especially, in Hollywood-for his wild temper, alcoholism, lack of cooperation, and other personal and marital problems. Though it may be tempting to discuss a colorful, controversial character like Raymond Chandler in biographical format, Phillips is concerned primarily with analyzing the content of the literary and cinematic work itself. In accomplishing this task, Creatures of Darkness employs the tried-and-true adaptation studies method of analyzing the source material-usually books-first, and the films or television productions second. Using this basic, assiduous organizational structure, Phillips takes his readers on a journey through every book and film that Chandler was directly and indirectly involved with, from his early Black Mask days, all the way through posthumous influence on recent films like Where's Marlowe? …