Raymond Chandler was Hammett's principal successor—his melancholy,
tough-talking hero, Philip Marlowe, is one of the best-known and widely
imitated popular heroes of the 1940s. Marlowe is a six-foot-tall, thirty-eight‐
year-old bachelor who works for himself because he is too much of an
individualist to take orders from others. He is not very successful financially—
his office is somewhat shabby and his living quarters spare—not because he
cannot find clients but because he can be neither bought off nor scared off by
the rich, the police, or by gangsters. He respects courage and physical
endurance and tells us he has no use for homosexuals. His integrity and his
laconic wit are his armor, but in a corrupt world he can be very lonely. The
vulnerabilities with which his creator endowed him were Chandler's own, and
are among the things that make him attractive.

Chandler's is a curious case. Although we like to think of him as writing
quintessentially American stuff, his outlook was far more English than might
ordinarily be supposed. His detectives, for all their presumed toughness,
entertain Victorian notions of honor and self-sacrifice that Hammett's Op
would have found amusing. Chandler was the more sophisticated stylist,
although he did not possess Hammett's storytelling logic. For Chandler,
scene and atmosphere were far more important than plausibility; Hammett,
on the other hand, regarded plot as the most essential element of his fiction
and seldom sacrificed narrative for melodramatic moments. The differences
in the educational backgrounds of the two men are also striking. If Hammett
was largely self-taught—accruing thereby certain primitive literary strengths—
Chandler attended schools in England and France from whose formalities he
may have suffered as much as he benefited. Hammett's education or lack of it
contributed to more hardbitten, pragmatic attitudes. In his pre-Marxist
writing years, as we have observed, he toyed with the idea of a senseless
universe governed by jungle ethics, but Chandler, whose English schooling
imbued him with a sterner sense of purpose, ultimately rejected such a view
as nihilistic. Consequently Chandler was the more compassionate of the two,
betraying greater concern for the bittersweet in human relationships. As

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