1. I've been reading some Raymond Chandler lately & it clarified something that is maybe obvious to everyone else but had never occurred to me: that pervasive police corruption was a necessary precondition for creation of hard-boiled detective novel as a genre.
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2. In High Window, Philip Marlowe tells 2 cops a story about why he doesn't like telling them everything he knows, "the Cassidy Case." TL;dr: A rich guy kills his secretary & himself but cops (to please rich guys family) makes it look like the opposite.pic.twitter.com/aEmHbS9k9N
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3. The difference between the old-school locked-door gentlemen detective (say Holmes or Perroit) & a hard-boiled dick like Spade or Marlowe resides in different relation to police: for Holmes, cops are idiots, for Marlowe they are corrupt. Different rational.
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4. For Marlowe, cops aren't dumb (although sometimes are) but bad: torturers (lots of allusions to the 3rd degree), in the pocket of the wealthy, indifferent to truth. The heroism of Marlowe (which is, in truth, romantic hokum) is he cares about the values they only profess.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
Chandler basically said he learned to write pulp from Gardner (and says he was the best plotter of the pulp guys, which may well be true). His cops are dumb but he trains his ire on the DA. It's not strictly corruption or stupidity but an indifference to the truth.
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That's interesting. I'll take a look.
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