Philip Marlowe is a Literary Heroic Gent

It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid-October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie, and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark little clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved, and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.” –Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

Philip Marlowe is a fictional private detective created by the author Raymond Chandler in a series of manly novels set in the environs of mid-twentieth century Los Angeles. Arguably the best of the novels are The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely, and The Long Goodbye. Humphrey Bogart was the classic movie Marlowe in the film adaptation of The Big Sleep (1946).

Marlowe is a bachelor who lives by a rigid, incorruptible, self-sacrificing gentleman’s code, like a modern knight, though he keeps his ideals and idealism hidden behind a tough, cynical, hardboiled exterior. He is a man of some culture—a reader and a chess player—though he makes no show of it. He is courageous and can handle himself in a fight. He liked whiskey or brandy and consumed both in quantities that would impress a Hemingway character. In The High Window, he gets out a bottle of Four Roses. At other times he drinks Old Forester, a Kentucky bourbon. In The Little Sister he says (the novels are in first person), “I hung up and fed myself a slug of Old Forester to brace my nerves for the interview. As I was inhaling it I heard her steps tripping along the corridor.” In The Long Goodbye he and Terry Lennox drink Gimlets.

He dresses well, out of self-respect and respect for others, but he is not a dandy and his office is spartan.

Marlowe doesn’t work for the government, as a police officer or a secret agent. He is a resolute individualist, a maverick, a man who can walk away from temptation, and, while created by a British-American writer (Raymond Chandler) is a quintessential American hero.

Philip Marlowe is a gentleman who knows how to use the gentleman’s tools—including a gun and a cocktail shaker—but who knows that the gentleman’s greatest tool, what makes him most useful to others and to himself, is having a stainless steel character.