A Meatier Pulp: Raymond Chandler

The fifth of his Philip Marlowe novels, The Little Sister (1949) highlights all that places Raymond Chandler among the masters of the crime thriller. Gangsters, starlets, dirty cops, a shady doctor, ice picks, blackmail, double-crosses, and a mousy receptionist from Manhattan, Kansas who just wants to find her beloved brother Orin. With those elements, Chandler crafts a story that shows the destructive mechanations of the corrupt human heart ultimately leading to destruction of the self. And he does it with style.

Chandler's prose is both elegant and witty, moving beyond the hard-boiled tough talk common to the genre and approaching a larger literary vocabulary. With only a few simple lines, he can sketch out a scene that reeks with life. Or he can wax poetic about the plight of big-city cops -- working stiffs ground down by the pressures of being everyone's enemy. His characters are complex and full of the inner contradictions that make us human. Marlowe's wise-cracks betray as much admiration as disdain for the cosmopolitan L.A. lyfestyle that gives him business. As a character, the detective has as many layers as that complicated social strata in which he lives -- a world littered with super-rich movie producers, down and out low life hoods, and jokers of all kinds who fight and scratch their toward the one even as they hurdle inevitably toward the other. Having seen the development of the Hollywood culture, Marlowe himself is soft enough help a desperate out-of-towner, naive enough to get duped into putting himself in a tough spot, and cynical enough to keep from getting completely taken. Nothing's simple nor sentmental about Chandler's style, nonetheless, it remains accessable and deeply human.

Pre-Millennial, Dispensational, Wild-at-Heart, Pulp: A Real Page-Turner

Black, Red, and White (each published in 2004) form the main arc of Ted Dekker's Circle series. Green (2009), completes the circle, enigmatically billed as both the beginning and the end of the series. As a spin-off, Dekker has also released The Lost Books series. Dekker boasts over 30 published novels since 2001, with five others currently in the works, along with seven graphic novels. Following the contemporary pop-publishing trend, Thomas Nelson has effectively established the Ted Dekker brand, creating its own base market through prolific promotion, the primary goal being, not to produce good stories, but to sell a mind-numbing number of books.

Dekker has caused an interesting problem for me as an English teacher. Out of 15 students in this year's 8th grade class, 13 were boys who, on the one hand, moaned and whined like babies when asked to read Treasure Island or The Scarlet Pimpernel. Yet, on the other hand, I constantly found myself calling them down for reading extracurricular material during class -- and not only comix or wrestling magazines (though that was the case once or twice), but fat, hard back books with no pictures. Imagine that. Kids who goof off in class by reading novels. What a problem to have.

As the year wound down, and I ran out of material to teach, I incorporated a little more "at-ease" time into the class hour. I used the time to walk around and chat with students informally, and as I did, I nosed in on little groups of 14 year old boys talking about who's read Black and who's read Thr3e and who was going to be the first to finish Green. I decided to use the beginning of my summer to acquaint myelf with this fellow who had fueled a voracious reading appetite in these young men, and who may have quite possibly prejudiced them against reading the classics of adventure fiction.

So, finding a $5.00 copy of Black, I entered the Circle. Thanks to the kidness of a friend, I continued through Red and White, at no monetary cost. If a loaner copy of Green comes my way any time soon, I may complete the series, but it's not something I'm clearing my calendar for.

Essentially, Dekker employs a gimicky premise to present a particular theological world view. He drives stock characters at a break-neck pace through more twists than the Fuji track on Pole Position. Stylistically, Dekker relies too heavily on the fragment and single-sentence paragraph for emphasis, and a proponderance of exclamation points attempt to sell true suspense as well as any used car salesman, with as much success. His vision is a composite of Scofield Reference Bible commentary, John Eldridge treacle, and Tent-Revival apocolypto, most of which I can stomach.

What I find difficult to hold down, though, is the image of Christ presented in the mix. It's an image that flows out of the Eldrigde material, namely the fretful love-sick Jesus. Dekker's picture of Christ is of an anxious and pathetically desperate teen-ager, lacking any real confidence that those who belong to him will actually come to him. Instead, he rings his hands and whines.

Despite his stylistic quirks and thinly veiled theological agenda, Dekker does actually generate a great deal of suspense, and his charqacters display virtue, courage, self-sacrifice, fidelity and faith. Both G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis wrote in defense of the "penny-dreadful," the pulp of their day, for exactly those reasons. Despite egregious literary failures, such pulp does help enforce a general vision of good versus evil and keeps the popular consciousness tuned in to the fight. So, even in the midst of a scathing review, I think I'd put Dekker in that class, a contemporary "penny-dreadful." And as such, I'll (try) to let this be last critical word on the topic.

Moreover, I'll also try to find ways to draw analogies between Dekker and the assigned reading that skillfully created the genres and archetypes that he and others plunder so freely. I love that I teach 13 eighth grade boys who love to read. I cringe that their reading appetite turns them away from the very fountainhead that made their preferred fare possible in the first place. Lewis did write in defense of the penny-dreadful, but he also wrote in defense of reading old books. Apperently, it takes both to feed a healthy imagination.