Large Fierce Mammal

This morning with our coffee, Mrs. LFM and I snuggled in bed and finished watching the last half of the season finale of the excellent police drama series Blue Bloods. At the end, Tom Selleck, in the character of New York City Police Commissioner Frank Reagan, recites a quote from Raymond Chandler at the graveside of his son. That quote was much to my liking and, looking it up, I found that the rest of it was equally good. I’ll save you the trouble and share it with you here.

While these words define Chandler’s conception of the ultimate crime novel protagonist as embodied by his famous detective character Phillip Marlowe, they most particularly define the doer of heroic deeds as envisioned by one of the greats in the field of detective fiction.

This edited extract is from an essay that first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in November 1945, and that was later incorporated into a collection of essays and short stories under the title, The Simple Art of Murder published in 1950. In this world where so many find little to inspire them, you could do far worse than to take inspiration from this:

“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean; who is neither tarnished nor afraid. (He) must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man…. He talks as the man of his age talks; that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.”

“… He is the hero, he is everything. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honour; by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.

“… he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honour in one thing, he is that in all things….

“He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. … his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him.

“The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.”