Thinking Inside The Bosch

Apologies for yesterday’s rant, people, and particularly for foisting my own purple prose on you in the name of ‘protest’. Normal-ish service is resumed today.
  Michael Connelly (right) was in town a couple of weeks ago, on a promo tour for THE DROP, his latest offering featuring Harry Bosch, and a very great pleasure it was to meet with him for the purpose of interview, which appeared on Saturday in the Irish Examiner, especially as Connelly qualifies as an Irish crime writer under FIFA’s grandparent ruling, and was good enough to pen a short foreword to DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS. Nice. Anyway, on the with the interview, which opens up a lot like this:

BE CAREFUL where you stash your guns, people. You might just be corrupting an impressionable 16-year-old.
  Michael Connelly is the Irish-American author of 26 novels, the latest of which is The Drop, featuring his iconic Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) detective Harry Bosch.
  From our vantage point in the plush environs of the Merrion Hotel, where the softly spoken Connelly sips tea in front of a blazing log fire, his ascent to literary superstardom, via numerous awards and critical acclaim, seems in retrospect inevitable. And yet, had the teenage Connelly not spotted a man acting suspiciously as he hid something in a bush, the world would never have heard of Connelly’s best-selling creations, which include Hieronymous ‘Harry’ Bosch, Mickey Haller and Jack McEvoy.
  “I was from a middle- to upper-class background,” says Connelly, “more middle-class pretending to be upper, probably, so I had no real experience at all of the police. I loved reading crime novels and stuff like that, but this was like, ‘Wow!’. It was suddenly real life. And it wasn’t so much the crime part, finding the gun in the bush and all that.
  “What left a real resonance was the night I spent with the detectives, and comparing them to detectives I’d read about. A lot of my reading was stuff handed to me by my mother, so I was going from PD James to a real PD squad-room. And that opened my eyes a little bit.
  “In your life as a writer,” he reflects, “certain things have to happen, and sometimes it freaks you out a bit to go back and think, ‘What if that didn’t happen, or that.’ That moment had to happen for me to become a writer, because I was someone who’d been dropped into school in the middle of the year, and had no friends, and I became something of an introvert, which led me to read. So that was the first step. And then just happening to see this guy hide something in a bush had to happen. And then, later, I had to go see The Long Goodbye by Robert Altman at the dollar movie night at college. I didn’t have to go to that movie, that particular night. So all these elements of chance add up.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

Flick Lit # 131: The Long Goodbye

“The realist in murder,” wrote Raymond Chandler (right) in 1950, “writes of a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities . . . It is not a very fragrant world, but it is the world you live in, and certain writers with tough minds and a cool spirit of detachment can make very interesting and even amusing patterns out of it. It is not funny that a man should be killed, but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call civilization.” Originally a man of action in taut, streamlined plots in novels such as The Big Sleep (1939) and Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Long Goodbye (1953) finds PI Philip Marlowe ruminating at length on the relevance of his attitude and philosophy. Plot had never been Chandler’s strength but in The Long Goodbye the plot becomes a rambling, shambolic paean to the tattered grandeur of a man out of time, whose idiosyncratic sense of morality has outlived its usefulness and relevance. Marlowe’s code of honour had always cherished truth and loyalty above all other traits; called upon to help a friend, Terry Lennox, to escape a tricky situation, Marlowe offers his support unquestioningly. When Lennox commits suicide in Mexico, the consequences plunges Marlowe into a complex tale of double-cross and triple-cross; but where the earlier Marlowe would have cut through the bluff with some snappy dialogue and a back-hander to the face, the Marlowe of The Long Goodbye appears hamstrung by a growing realisation of his own ineffectiveness at imposing justice on the mean streets. Bitter and confused, with his precious code of behaviour tarnished, Marlowe retreats to contemplate his own demise, and by extension that of the traditional literary private eye. Abhorred on its release by Chandler purists, Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973) simply spun the writer’s theme out to its logical conclusion. As played by Elliott Gould, Marlowe is a spaced-out social casualty who is incapable of discovering his cat’s favourite brand of tinned food. The detective’s philosophy, attitude and loyalty have become bad jokes in a Los Angeles where corruption is so endemic as to be irresistible; but while Chandler’s Marlowe was at least aware of his irrelevance, Altman’s Marlowe is reduced to a blinkered, bumbling patsy in Terry Lennox’s great scam. Where Chandler’s novel can be read as the tale of a writer trying to make sense of a mid-life crisis, Altman’s movie cocks a snook not only at the then outmoded genre of the private eye movie, but also mercilessly skewers the pretensions of a bloated, self-important movie industry that was sleepwalking towards the abyss. If the Marlowe of old had raged against an LA that was too often heartless, the new Marlowe can only shrug at an LA that has become spineless, gutless and bloodless. “In Altman’s world,” claims Kevin Hagopian, “every citizen is an inmate, and society is only a way to multiply the psychological infirmities and pathologies of its members.” In The Long Goodbye, LA plays the same role as the military hospital as lunatic asylum in MASH (1970), country-and-western’s ‘lawless frontier’ of 1975’s Nashville, and the deranged Wild West tent show of Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976). As Altman’s film unfolds, the impression created is that of Marlowe wandering the grounds of a madhouse and peering enviously through the windows. What the Chandler purists objected to most strongly, however, was Altman’s finale. When Marlowe discovers Terry Lennox’s treachery, he pulls a gun on his erstwhile friend and – in a total perversion of Marlowe’s precious code of honour – shoots Lennox dead; in a long, lingering shot, as Marlowe walks away, a tinny version of Hooray for Hollywood gathers strength on the soundtrack. The facile gesture was, for Altman, a mercy shot to conclude the process Chandler had begun; the logical, final nail in the coffin of a code that had long since outlived its relevance.- Michael McGowan