On the level of manhood I recognized him as an expired model, exactly the sort of self-pitying misogynist my readings of hippie writers like Brautigan and Vonnegut were teaching me to pity rather than revere. JL: I’m not sure I saw Marlowe as a model for manhood in particular. I’m curious about him as a model (of sorts?) for manhood. Given that, I want to hear more about what you saw in Marlowe that you wanted for yourself. Then I caught up, working in retrospect to understand what the French were so enthused about, and of course devoured all those films in my twenties. In fact, I probably saw Alphaville and Breathless and Shoot the Piano Player-French new-wave postmodernist riffs on American film noir-before I’d ever seen the real thing! (You can see where that influenced my own approach to the genre). I was into Hitchcock early on (again, thanks to my mom), but then made a hard swerve into European arthouse movies as a teenager, the same period when I was devouring a ton of crime fiction. It’s possible I might be one of the few people of my generation to come to Chandler on the page before seeing a Humphrey Bogart movie. And how that connects to the hidden weirdnesses in the books, which make the mysteries and solutions secondary. JL: I love your description of Marlowe-battered/neuroticism/perversities. Even more than in any of the others, Marlowe’s beaten, drugged and otherwise placed in altered states virtually through the entire second half of the book. I think the Alice in Wonderland comparison is so apt. And, in the death throes of that, I started writing my first novel, which was a direct attempt to write myself into his world. The subject of my grad school dissertation was hardboiled fiction and the tough guy-basically, as an excuse to read all of Chandler. There are so many secrets in Chandler, and hidden weirdnesses-the mystery itself is always the least of it for me! And, of course, Marlowe himself-that battered knight, filled with neuroticisms and perversities. The mood and atmosphere, like a fever dream and then a rancid hangover. Those movies offered this sense of peeping through a keyhole into what I imagined the adult world was really like (how disappointing it proved to be!). First, I fell for Cagney and all the ‘30s gangster movies, but soon enough I found myself drawn helplessly to what I’d later come to understand as film noir: Out of the Past, The Killers, Double Indemnity (scripted by Chandler, natch) and, even more relevant to our interests: The Big Sleep and Murder, My Sweet (the adaptation of Farewell, My Lovely). My parents took me to old movies from early childhood and I would watch obsessively-back in the pre-cable days-those wonderful Saturday and Sunday double and triple features of old movies. He was for me, too-I just didn’t know it! As much as a booklover as I was growing up, I was an even bigger movielover. MA: Well, it’s funny you say that about Chandler being this ancient text for you. It’s Chandler’s world, and I’m just living in it. It’s so strange for me to realize you could discover Motherless Brooklyn so quickly after The Big Sleep! (I mean more than just the shock of thinking: god, I’m old!) My book takes Chandler for granted as an ancient text, like the Bible.
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