Denise Mina Takes on Philip Marlowe and Chandler’s Los Angeles

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Fictional characters are immortal, their creators, not so much. Authorial death be damned: fans, both longtime and new, often want more. And the truth is, in excavating crime fiction’s O.G.’s there are more cases to solve, more dirty deeds to dig up and more gimlets to drink before the day is done. 

To The Second Murderer, Mina brings Philip Marlowe’s congenital truth telling, his disregard for convention, and his acceptance that he is a man not of the times. In contrasting Marlowe to the other lost souls one character says “they’re broken. You’re sad.” Equipped with his intrinsic integrity, Marlowe can live with that. Like the Second Murderer in Macbeth, “I am one/whom the vile blows and buffets of the world/have so incensed that I am reckless what/I do to spite the world. 

Nancie Clare: So what’s a nice Scottish lass from Glasgow doing channeling an American-born, English-educated, sometime poet who, after he lost his job with an oil company during the Depression at age 44, turned to writing detective fiction in Los Angeles?

Denise Mina: Well, he lost his job, and I think it’s fair to say, because of his alcoholism and we [in Glasgow] are the hell mouth of the alcoholic diaspora in Scotland. So who else could properly write about Chandler’s Marlowe <laugh>? We know so much about alcoholism now that you can actually trace his illness progressing as his books go on and he becomes more bitter, irate and opinionated. At the time it must have just seemed really baffling, like what’s he on about? But Chandler for me has always felt very familiar because I just love his writing so much. And I also love P.G. Woodhouse, I dunno if you know this, but PG Woodhouse was the same school as Chandler, and they had the same English master and they’re both masters of the simile and the metaphor. That’s really strikingly what they’re both known for. And they had the same English master at school! I think there must have been a lot of word play. So, Chandler has never felt strange. 

Nancie Clare: What is it about Marlowe that continues to fascinate readers? In fact, the entire crime fiction universe, not just readers, but viewers? 

Denise Mina: He’s a working-class guy, which, you know, in Scotland was huge because if you ever saw working class people represented in literature, they were kind of stupid or they were servants or they were delivering bad news. And Marlowe was a very clever guy. He was self-educated. He quoted Shakespeare. [In fact, the title of the book comes from] a Shakespeare scene Chandler mentions in Farewell, My Lovely and was a potential title for a book in a list in his notebooks. He was working things out, which is the most human of all emotions. But more than that, he had his own value system that he was living. It wasn’t that he wanted to get rich, and it wasn’t that he wanted to get the gal, it was that he was trying to live with integrity. And I think that’s why he endures. Earlier detectives didn’t really have that. Sherlock Holmes wanted to show off. And Marlowe didn’t really try and have the big puzzle element. It was less that you wanted to solve the mystery than that you wanted to be in the company of Marlowe. 

Nancie Clare: There’ve been a few authors who’ve taken up the mantle of Chandler and continuing Marlowe’s story. You’re the first woman. Do you think that the gender of the writer makes a difference? Because I’ll be honest, I thought your Marlowe was more on point that John Banville’s.

Denise Mina: Oh, well that’s very kind of you. I do think that in this instance, the gender of the writer does make a difference. I think, as a woman—or if a queer writer who’s not me took it on—they would see the blind spots. Now, I think one of the things about later Chandler is this awful performance of masculinity that feels very wrong. He’s asking women if they want to be raped. He’s punching men and they’re falling over. I like early Marlowe when he’s comfortable with his flaws and his weaknesses. There’s a much softer Marlowe in there and a much more likable Marlowe. 

If you look at Marlowe at the beginning of his inception, he was much more malleable. He was much more willing to laugh at himself. He didn’t have to be homophobic. He didn’t have to be racist. He didn’t have to have that bizarre chauvinist attitude to women. And I think that might be something women are more familiar with than men. Nobody really likes that guy who knows everything. 

Nancie Clare: You are an unambiguous feminist; did you have any qualms channeling Raymond Chandler given his penchant (as you noted more so in later works) for toxic masculinity?

Denise Mina: No. No qualms. Changing that toxicity is the reason I started writing crime fiction twenty five years ago. It feels triumphant!

Nancie Clare: I have to ask—and you touched on this in your answer to the previous question, but were you surprised at the depth of racism, antisemitism, and homophobia, that there was then, especially given that Los Angeles was literally and figuratively the end of the line? The place to which you escaped to be reinvented. You captured it perfectly, I think, when you wrote “freight trains from all over America delivered fruit and flowers and flour and milk, and all the lost men cut loose. It was the final stop for the terminally confused and hopeless alcoholics running from trouble. They got here and found there was nowhere left to run. They’d gone all the way west they could.” What did you think about the juxtaposition of Los Angeles being the place people came to escape with the fact that the first thing they did was reinvent the place from which they escaped?

Denise Mina: I come from Scots Irish family, and that’s exactly what we did here. We’re like 20 miles from the coast of Northern Ireland, and basically we recreated all the prejudice and hate that we’d been running from. I think people do that wherever they go. It’s an old adage that you can run, but you always take yourself with you. So wherever white people go there too goes antisemitism and racism. People bring their prejudices with them. 

What I was amazed at actually was the history of Skid Row and the history of unhoused people in LA and how consistent that is. That may be the most consistent thing about Los Angeles. Apart from, you know, the heat and the presence of earthquakes.

Nancie Clare: You mentioned that Philip Marlowe a complex guy. And early Philip Marlowe was maybe a more complex guy than later Philip Marlowe. He probably drinks too much, and he doesn’t have the proper respect for law and order [air quotes] and propriety. But he’s the last decent man in a corrupted world. In The Second Murderer, you’ve included two hoteliers—and I use that term in the loosest possible sense—who make observations about Marlowe. Marlowe notes of one, “he looked me up and down and had me pegged as a tragic romantic. The thought made him smile and not in a kind way.” After passing out drunk in the lobby of a boarding house, the manager, Sunshine, says to Marlowe about the other men who slept in the lobby, ”they’re broken. You are sad. Different thing.” That nails Marlowe. 

Denise Mina: Sunshine was a real person! There was an Egyptian woman who ran a boarding house down on Skid Row at that time. And there was also a German beer hall!

Nancie Clare: The German beer hall. Did you know about that?

Denise Mina: Yeah! Did you? Yeah. God, you know, that German guy would’ve known the people who had come over here. Maybe asking why had they fled? What was it like for him be living in L.A. knowing that the war was coming? I did far too much research. My plan was to come over and drive around in an Oldsmobile because the driving is so important. Basically, the whole alibi rests on whether or not you could get up a hill in one of those old cars. It’s something I’d still love to do. 

Jay Leno actually posts videos of himself driving these old cars. I was reduced to just watching him in an Oldsmobile over and over again to try and get a flavor of it. 

Nancie Clare: I’m going to go out on the limb and say that the Montgomery’s, the family that hires Marlowe to find their errant daughter, is based on the Doheny family. And that the mansion at the top of the hill, is Greystone Mansion. Which is still here, by the way. 

Denise Mina: You’re completely right. You’re absolutely spot on! Yeah.

Nancie Clare: This may be a softer, earlier Marlowe, but he’s still full of misguided beliefs. For example, his misogyny. You mentioned that he’s not quite as misogynistic in this story as he later became, but it still costs him a love interest in The Second Murderer, doesn’t it?

Denise Mina: Yeah. You know, he never has sex in the Chandler books. He barely kisses women, but he is very fervently interested in women, which I think might reflect Chandler’s romantic attitudes, having been at a boys’ school. Marlowe’s fascinated by women, but he does find it very difficult to connect, and he really likes to be alone. And I thought, well, that’s quite an interesting dynamic actually, for someone who craves connection and craves justice and decency, but actually doesn’t see it very many places. I included Anne Riordan, the cop’s daughter who helps Marlowe in Farewell, My Lovely [Chandler’s second novel] in The Second Murderer because I thought she was a good match for Marlowe. What a shame. You know, she’s financially independent, she’s good looking, she’s a bit older. She doesn’t want kids. And you could see that he respects and likes her, but he just couldn’t make the leap. She was clearly interested in him. She had asked to work in his office, and he said “no.” What if he allowed himself to harbor those hopes? What would that do to him? And I don’t know if it would take him anywhere good.

Nancie Clare: Well, it didn’t, in this book. It didn’t necessarily take him someplace bad, just to more sadness, maybe. We should talk a little bit about the story. It is set up like many Marlowe stories: Marlowe is called to look for somebody, a missing woman. But what he finds is complicated and he—and the journey to discovery—is filled with more than just the location of the missing person. I thought you did a terrific job setting it up, getting Marlowe to where he needs to go, and then having the floor drop out beneath him, literally and figuratively. Can you talk a little bit about how you built the story?

Denise Mina: Actually, I paid a lot of attention to Chandler and like yourself. I’m a bit of a nerd, Nancie! I did lots of things like working out visuals of what a Chandler book that I love looks like. Where are the beat points? What is the rhythm of it? What are the size of the chapters? I even did like a little sort of morse code dash of his sentence structure because his sentence structure is much shorter than mine would be. His average words per book I think is about 75,000 to 80,000, whereas I would tend to go to 90,00 to 95,000. I wanted it to feel like Chandler as much as possible. I think you always bring your own voice to it, but I looked at his beat points, and he does always have a point—it’s a kind of moment-of-death—where he really doesn’t know what’s going on.

He’s just following the next lead, and there’s a point where he doubles backs on himself. I was trying to recreate all those things. And then with the B-story—which is the Pasco Pete story about a bunch of old cowboys. I added the Pasco Pete story line to give a more familiar structure to the book.

And that’s where a lot of Chandler books get lost, right? He gets really lost in the story. You know, Marlowe goes off to Monterrey for no apparent reason and then gets drunk in a hotel room. And you can see Chandler as a writer thinking, I don’t know what to do now. What the B-story does is you’re saying to the reader, look, I know what I’m doing, and this is gonna pay off. If you stay with me during the lost moments, this will be all right. The B-story is a sort of an amuse bouche for the reader to get them to trust you.

But the rest of it is as rambling and happenstance as Chandler, because actually Marlowe is brave and he’s quite reckless; he doesn’t really bring another skillset to the situation. It’s just his intrepidness that that helps him solve most of the crimes. He’s not Colombo, he’s not psychic. He doesn’t understand forensic science. He can only tell the truth. That’s the only thing he can do. And he says that in the book to his clients, he’s not gonna lie to them. I took a lot of elements of Chandler that I really loved and tried to apply them to the story, and that’s where the story structure came from.

You really want to honor the readers who love that character as well.

Nancie Clare: There are queer characters in The Second Murderer— and we’re not gonna mention who they are—who run the gamut from sympathetic to pathological. Was writing from that archaic point of view challenging for you? Because you’re definitely not homophobic, but you had to integrate a little bit of Marlowe’s hesitancy. I’m thinking of Jimmy the One, while he isn’t a major character, he’s just brilliant, one of these gems that is included in the book. Jimmy the One is an incredibly handsome man who is gay, out, and doesn’t care who knows it. 

Denise Mina: I have to tell you Nancie, Jimmy the One was a real Glasgow guy, and he was called Jimmy the One because he was the one out gay guy in Glasgow. The gay community in L.A. was probably all built around someone like Jimmy the One, because very often those pockets of tolerance formed around one or two individuals who just wear who they are and flatly refused to be closeted, shamed or belittled. And that was Glasgow’s Jimmy the One, who died a few years ago.

The whole book really is a sort of hymn to Jimmy the One. He loved movies and he loved musicals. And I know that for the next 15 years, gay guys in Glasgow will be coming up to me and saying, “thank you for putting Jimmy the One in that book, cuz that’s who Jimmy the One would’ve been in his dreams. Jimmy the One would’ve been a handsome guy who wore a bellhop uniform and lived in California and kept being discovered and then dropped because of his dirty doings <laugh>.”

Nancie Clare: Something that keeps coming to mind when I think of Philip Marlowe and the golden age of detective fiction in Southern California, is the idea of redemption in general and the idea of redemption for Philip Marlowe in particular. He’s looking for is redemption, and we don’t know what from. 

Denise Mina: I think you’re spot on there. I think about Graham Greene watching Pépé le Moko, set in Algeria, about a gangster who’s hiding in the Alhambra. And at the end it’s very obvious the gangster gives his life for the women he loves. Graham Greene was this very serious literary writer. And he said when he saw that film, he knew that crime fiction could be about redemption and about finding your soul and about resolving really fundamental spiritual concerns. And that’s when he started writing his “entertainments” as he called them, his stooping to low art forms. But I think that with Marlowe, it is very, very pronounced that what he’s always trying is have integrity. And maybe that is a real-world form of redemption that he’s trying to be true to himself.

But I think it is also about class. The offers of money are there. Marlowe could abandon the dislikable low people and join the jet set, but he doesn’t. I think for Marlowe to remain faithful to the people he is in among—and the people that he identifies with—that is a form of redemption. I think that’s absolutely right. I think a lot of crime fiction is about the restoration of order, but these days, people are much more skeptical about propaganda and about underpinning the status quo, which is quite problematic. And suddenly the veil has fallen off lots of people’s eyes and the restoration of order is the cops killing somebody because they suspect them of a crime. So a lot of crime novels finish with the police killing someone because they’re sure he’s a serial killer. How can they know that? 

Nancie Clare: The introduction of moral ambiguity into crime fiction is probably not a bad thing. You mentioned Ian Fleming and Bond can be so obnoxious. It’s a spy thriller. But, you know, the idea that he could be judge and jury is, I don’t think it works in sort of in the long term, whereas moral ambiguity might, Marlowe can’t quite be morally ambiguous, but he understands it,

Denise Mina: He accepts that he’s more rigid than the world he lives in. And I think that’s what’s interesting about him is that he knows that he lives in a morally fluid world.

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