Philip Marlowe is hired by a rich and handicapped retired general to help resolve someone blackmailing him over gambling debts. Marlowe runs into his two daughters, the icy cold Vivian, and pretend-childish and wild Carmen. Marlowe determines that the blackmailer runs a pornography ring, and then the plot thickens: The blackmailer and the general’s chauffeur drop dead, a former blackmailer gets involved, as does a sleazy gangster who runs a casino, his hefty bodyguards, and his wife.
The whole book has a complicated plot, with characters being introduced even towards the last quarter of the book. The book is very heavy on 1930’s slang, which makes it rather hard to follow what the characters are even saying.
Chandler has the habit of describing each scene in detail by using long and complicated analogies, and I literally mean each scene. For example, this is an actual passage from the book:
The air was thick, wet, steamy and larded with the cloying smell of tropical orchids in bloom. The glass walls and roof were heavily misted and big drops of moisture splashed down on the plants. The light had an unreal greenish color, like light filtered through an aquarium tank. The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men. They smelled as overpowering as boiling alcohol under a blanket.
To even understand what is being described here, one needs to know:
- What a cloying smell is,
- How tropical orchids in bloom smell,
- What light filtered through an aquarium tank looks like,
- What newly washed fingers of dead men look like, and
- What alcohol boiled under a blanket smells like.
Often these analogies have little or no relevance to the reader. Remove these analogies, and the book length is likely to drop to about a half of what it is.
What really is grating is that the book is extremely misogynistic. The women are all faithless femme-fatales, trying to use their feminine wiles to put one over Marlowe and the other men in their lives. Some are even shrewish and unhinged, but never is one of them shown in even a slightly positive light. There is a strong under-current of homophobism in addition to the sexism, as one of the characters turns out to be closeted gay with a boy-toy.
On the whole, it was not an easy read, since the style and setting is too far removed to be relatable.