Jim Nelson
19 January 1997

Right from the introduction, Marlowe is presented as anything but the mythical champion of yore:

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 the dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue 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 out to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

... Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn't have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere ... I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn't seem to be really trying.¹

Chandler's work defined the hardboiled sensibilities of fiction in the 30's and molded the style of film noir into the 40's and 50's. Chandler was one of many, but very few elevated the private detective story into respectability, high above the era's pulpified fiction. Nonetheless, Dashiell Hammet is probably more widely recognized, if for nothing else but an excellent film treatment of The Maltese Falcon. (Chandler rightly considered Hammet a worthy contemporary, and may have even thought his work superior to his own.)

Gibson's cyberspace rocks compared to anything your browser can do.

Chandler's works carried a street-smart spiritedness first explored by Mark Twain but updated for the urbanized twentieth century. He also broke away from the standard pulp by intellectualizing the private eye. Marlowe had a keen eye for detail, possessed a love for chess, and rarely packed a gun. He even picked up a book now and then:

"Well, you do get up," she said ... "I was beginning to think perhaps you worked in bed, like Marcel Proust."

"Who's he?" I put a cigarette in my mouth and stared at her. She looked a little pale and strained, but she looked like a girl who could function under a strain.

"A French writer, a connnoisseur in degenerates. You wouldn't know him."

"Tut, tut," I said. "Come into my boudoir."¹

The Big Sleep is by far the "classic" introduction to Chandler, but it's The Long Goodbye that elevated him out of the mystery genre into literature. Less a detective story and more a complex weave of intensified personalities, The Long Goodbye proved Chandler's mastery of the American novel.

By 1984, the year William Gibson's Neuromancer was published, the anti-hero was old hat. Much of Chandler's influences were alive and kicking, but much of his style became blurred with the reader's carnal desire for guns and action, pure and simple. Gibson's first novel proved that the thinking anti-hero could still hold his own. He moved the bar one step higher by granting his protagonist a sandbox of infinite size and dimension: cyberspace.

Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler gray. Expanding --

And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach.²

Gibson's cyberspace rocks compared to anything your browser can do.

Wandering through Gibson's wired world is Case, a console jockey who's poor judgement led him to lose his ability to jack into the matrix. Case, much like Marlowe, is a solo operator and worked freelance (but for not quite so honorable reasons):

He'd operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix. A thief, he'd worked for other, wealthier thieves, employers who provided the exotic software required to penetrate the bright walls of corporate systems, opening windows into rich fields of data.²

The corruption and greed Chandler used so effectively fifty years before mushroomed in Gibson's world. The decadence encountered by Marlowe was firmly rooted in the houses of the elite and the dens of high-priced crooks. In Gibson's Sprawl and Chiba City, the filth creeped onto the streets like blood on a glass table. In Gibson's universe, wealthy families with ritzy palaces overlooking Los Angeles are replaced with privately-run megacorporations holding up in space stations high away from Earth.

Gibson strayed from science-fiction. Sure, comparisons to Blade Runner are inevitable. And to ignore the rich science-fiction influences from the past would be foolish. But Gibson took the bright gleaming future so assuredly promised to us in the Golden Age of Science Fiction and splattered it with hardboiled's human fallability and vice.

Chandler's coke fiends are replaced with Gibson's street zombies soaking psychoactives through dermal patches. Idle rich kids don't play golf and drink their parent's gin, they surf the matrix and virtualize sex with simstim consoles. The degenerates and maniacs don't change, their toys do.

The drug hit him like an express train, a white-hot column of light mounting his spine from the region of his prostate, illuminating the sutures of his skull with x-rays of short-circuited sexual energy. His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol. His bones, beneath the hazy envelope of flesh, were chromed and polished, the joints lubricated with a film of silicone. Sandstorms raged across the scoured floor of his skull, generating waves of high thin static that broke behind his eyes, spheres of purest crystal, expanding ... ²

Cyberpunk -- is it just a minor trend? The poor reception of the film Johnny Mnemonic and a dubious "cyberpunk" album by punker Billy Idol (replete with his personal email address in the liner notes) makes the charge even harder to dismiss. Is cyberpunk just another relic of common culture?

The hardboiled detective fiction of the 1930s were certainly not received well either. Chandler and Hammet were both applauded (much like Gibson and Stephenson are today), but the bulk of the writings were largely ignored by the general public.

But hardboiled left a lasting impression. The street-smart fiction is virtually responsible for the film noir of the 40s and 50s. Movie and television, from Dirty Harry to The Rockford Files, owe a great deal to Chandler's vision of the common man walking dark streets to determine the hard truth of the matter. The mythical American cowboy never died, it simply had to don a fedora and get a private investigator's license. Once Chandler had updated the mythos, it was reshaped again and again by those who followed.

Will Gibson's vision of the anti-hero last? Perhaps it has already taken root. If you remove the machinery and matrix surfing, Neuromancer strips down to a labyrinthian tale of greedy industrialists, hustling console jockeys, and the criminally insane. But this time, Gibson's presented a world gone truly mad, where the only sane ones are the artifically intelligent and digitally preserved.

¹ Chandler, Raymond. The Big Sleep, Alfred A. Knopf, 1939.
² Gibson, William. Neuromancer, Ace Science Fiction., 1984.