[Link] The Moral Character of Philip Marlowe: Complexity and Nuance in the Ethical Life of Chandler’s Detective Hero

by Terry Hyland

The central character in Raymond Chandler’s seven acclaimed detective novels – the private eye, Philip Marlowe – is, according to his creator, a man of honour and a kind of hero and, as a man for our times, an archetype who may be compared to Sherlock Holmes, James Bond or the eponymous stranger in Clint Eastwood’s famous Western movies. Chandler’s novels – though derided by the author himself as pulp fiction and merely escape literature – are now considered to be classical paradigms of a certain kind of hard-boiled detective fiction and appear on English Literature reading lists in colleges and universities throughout the world. In this article, I will be analysing the novels in terms of the moral principles and practice of the central character of Philip Marlowe. In particular, the nuances of ethical conflicts and dilemmas will be explored as Marlowe struggles to navigate his way through the shadowy and morally corrupt world he inhabits, seeking to exact justice without compromising his deeply held core values. Moral education programmes now make extensive use of literary sources and – given the prominence of the type of fiction that Chandler helped to pioneer – I will conclude with examples of the ways in which ethical lessons may be drawn from examining the character of Marlowe.

1. Introduction

Describing the general characteristics of his central character, Marlowe, in The Simple Art of Murder, Chandler writes:

down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. 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 (p.7).

We first meet this man in the short story Killer in the Rain[2] a palimpsest for the subsequent first novel The Big Sleep[3]. Here we are introduced to a private eye (who previously worked in the assistant district attorney’s office) who is fearless, astute, honest, loyal and clear-sighted in his commitment to righting wrongs and acting with ethical determination in an essentially immoral and chaotic underworld.

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