The Detective and the Closet

“What did this Regan fellow have that bored into him so?”

The butler looked at me levelly and yet with a queer lack of expression. “Youth, sir,” he said. “And the soldier’s eye.”

“Like yours,” I said.

“If I may say so, sir, not unlike yours.”
The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler

As I’m sure I’m not the first one to point out, The Big Sleep is obsessed with queer themes, both explicit and implicit. One of the novel’s central mysteries is, precisely, homosexuality. The relationship between a purveyor of dirty books named Geiger and his male lover is at the root of a number of the murderous confusions and complications in the early part of the narrative.

The novel treats its avowedly gay men with a casual disdain; the decadently portly Geiger is a recognizable stereotype, while his more masculine lover is dismissed with a sneer by Philip Marlowe, who comments that fags can’t hit hard, no matter what they look like. But the homophobia is belied by — or perhaps meant to excuse — the way in which intense bonds between putatively heterosexual men form the emotional core of the novel. As the quotation above indicates, the novel is in large part driven by the love-at-first-sight simpatico between Marlowe and his client, General Sternwood. That sympatico is echoed in Sternwood’s similar passion for his missing son-in-law, Rusty Regan, whom he ultimately asks Marlowe to find.

Moreoever, Regan and Marlowe are doubled not only because of their place in General Sternwood’s affections, but because of their imperviousness to heterosexual escapades. Regan, who married the General’s daughter Vivian Sternwood, was also, we learn at the novel’s conclusion, propositioned by the general’s other daughter, Caroline. When Regan refused her, she killed him. Later chronologically (though earlier in the novel), Caroline shows up in Marlowe’s room, naked, and attempts to seduce him. He kicks her out, she calls him an unrepeatable name which is probably “faggot” — and later she tries to kill him.

Marlowe and Regan are “soldiers”, then, because they (a) are beloved of the General and (b) do not lust after his corrupting daughter. The appellation “faggot” is carefully erased and thereby emphasized; it is Marlowe’s unmentionable sin which is also his unmentionable distinction. By the same token, Vivian Regan’s unnaturalness is reflected in the fact that she cares about her sister more than her husband; and so tries to cover up the latter’s murder to protect the former. The whole plot, then, is powered by same-sex investments and love. In comparison, most of the heterosexual attachments in the novel — such as those between Victoria and Rusty — seem decidedly half-assed. Marlowe’s main romantic interest is barely a flicker in the novel; she appears late, wearing a platinum wig to cover her short-cropped butch cut, which prompts Marlowe to give her the campy appellation Silver-Wig. The supposed love interest, then, is effectively a false front covering gender deviance covering a nonentity. It’s as if Chandler is afraid that if he spent too much time on her, folks might start to realize that she isn’t a “she” at all.

It would be fairly easy to do an Eve Sedgwick inspired reading and draw the lines between Chandler’s romanticization of homoerotic bonds between men and his homophobia and misogyny. For Sedgwick, it would certainly be no surprise that a book which writes with such repressed approval of soldiers eying each other should figure evil as a giggling vindictive ultra-femme madwoman. The clean passion of men for men is always threatened by these atrociously pleasurable stirrings of femininity.

It’s also interesting to note, though, that there may be a link between the novel’s queerness and and its reputation. The Big Sleep is often thought of as one of the very best examples of detective fiction; it’s virtually attained high art status, in a lot of ways. That status is, I’d argue, not despite the use of homosexuality, but because of it.

In his 2011 book Art and Homosexuality, Christopher Reed argues that the avant garde has long used markers of homosexuality as signs of daring individualism. Sexual deviance can show that an artist is an original, unhindered by convention or bourgeois provincialism. Moreover, the mechanism of the closet can provide a powerful appearance of mastery and genius. The artist, through the deployment of homosexual codes and references, shows himself (or herself) to be “in the know”, and that knowledge is the mark of queer genius — an unusual and unconventional wisdom.

All of this, I think, can be related to the critical success of The Big Sleep. Chandler’s bleak, decadent vision is in large part a bleak decadence of deviant sexuality — the filthy books sold by the gay man; the old General pining for his young acquaintance while rotting among the orchids; Vivian’s tragic love for her unnatural sister. The awareness of and manipulation of homosexuality makes the novel daring, adult, and knowing — an avant garde provocation rather than (or in addition to) a simple genre fable.

Moreover, the novel’s projection of genius is accomplished in large part through a manipulation of tropes associated with gayness. Chandler’s stylistic hallmarks — the careful vivid descriptions, the quick turnabout wit — could almost be lifted from Oscar Wilde, as could the obsession with ugly, hidden truths. The Big Sleep and The Picture of Dorian Gray are different mainly in that Chandler nods more explicitly to the obvious homosexual themes. In both cases, though, there is the impression of dazzling surface facility and deep unsettling knowledge — a sense of idiosyncratic and/or perverse brilliance propelled by the mechanics of the closet.

Detective fiction is built around the knower — and what that knower knows, The Big Sleep suggests, is deviance. “Me, I was part of the nastiness now,” Marlowe thinks, before ruminating feelingly on the idea of General Sternwood lying in bed. To see into the closet is to be one who knows one; to understand is to understand. Chandler’s novel is iconic in part because it believes so fervently in this bedrock algorithm of genre noir, and because its queer lack of expression conceals so transparently its depths of love and loathing.

15 thoughts on “The Detective and the Closet

  1. Chandler’s queer themes were hotly debated while he was alive. When we got a literary criticism assignment in 8th grade, that’s what I ended up writing about somehow. Old memories: usually critics would seize on how little Marlowe seemed to like women, I think, Chandler’s plotting therefor. There’s some odd descriptions in his books that critics of his day seized upon– a woman with a “zipper” smile is the one that’s stuck with me, all these years later. From what I remember, Chandler, in his private letters and what have you, wasn’t thrilled by having critics calling him a closet case, being married and all. There was one critic in particular who aggravated him especially, but I don’t remember who. I knew more about this in the 8th grade.

  2. I don’t at all think he’s a closet case…except in the sense that heterosexuality is kind of built around the closet too. Like I said in the piece, the use of bonds between men to denigrate femininity is the classic use of homoeroticism by heterosexual men that Eve Sedgwick talks about. So much so that I’d kind of be shocked to find out that Chandler was gay.

    Michael Arthur on Twitter commented that for someone so butch, Marlowe is very interested in describing the wainscotting….

  3. Well, you could say there is a kind of queerness to being married to a woman eighteen years older than him, though of course that’s different from homosexuality. I’ve read a couple of his biographies and his letters: there are many documented instances of affairs with women, crushes on them, etc., and none that I know of with men.

    By which I mean, the homoerotic overtones can’t be explained by the biography, but are there in the text, which is much more complex as a result… I kind of want to write a much longer comment here but, a) I don’t have the time, and b) I’d want to check my sources first before saying anything else. But if you think there are “markers of homosexuality” in “The Big Sleep,” good lord, go and read “The Long Goodbye.” It’s basically a love affair.

    On the other hand… I wonder if this is specifically limited to one artist, or if it can be connected to the entire hard-boiled genre as a whole. Though (or because) Chandler is in my personal pantheon of writers, I haven’t read many more hard-boiled novels (because I don’t find any as good). But I think you can find many of the same overtones in Ross McDonald’s novels, and also some (combined, not so paradoxically, with hysterical homophobia) in David Markson’s early genre exercises.

  4. I think it’s more than the hard-boiled novel; it’s the detective novel in general. Reading surfaces in order to get to the truth of deviance is just so entwined with the closet that it’s impossible to get away from it. Holmes and Watson, Dupin and his narrator; effete Poirot…it’s just all over the genre.

  5. Yeah, but there is also a very specific construction of masculinity in the hard-boiled novel that adds a kink that’s not there in old-fashioned English mysteries. The hard-boiled novel implies a specific kind of subjectivity performing the investigation, while the English mystery, or the detective novel in general, can allow for a much wider variety of investigators (Poirot is different from Miss Marple who is different from, well, the Hardy boys, because the personality of the investigator is more often than not window-dressing, and not directly implicated in solving the puzzle). The hard-boiled novel is more a novel of subjectivity than one of mystery. See especially Chandler’s article, “The Simple Art of Murder,” and, for the difference between the hard-boiled novel and the traditional detective novel, his essays “Twelve Notes on the Detective Story” and “Notes on English and American Style.”

  6. In any case, if you’re making the claim about the genre as a whole, the obvious question is, why focus on Chandler specifically?

  7. ———————-
    Noah Berlatsky says:

    …it’s the detective novel in general. Reading surfaces in order to get to the truth of deviance is just so entwined with the closet that it’s impossible to get away from it. ———————-

    Why stop with detective novels? Why, cancer researchers, engineers investigating why a plane crashed, historians trying to figure why the Easter Island civilization collapsed, all are “reading surfaces in order to get to the truth of” abnormalities, failures.

    It’s ALL about homosexuality…

    ———————–
    …heterosexuality is kind of built around the closet too. Like I said in the piece, the use of bonds between men to denigrate femininity is the classic use of homoeroticism by heterosexual men that Eve Sedgwick talks about.
    ———————–

    There certainly is a lot of valuing stereotypically masculine attitudes over feminine ones among hetero men. But is that not simply a case of positive bias towards one’s own group, prejudice against the Other? Why bring Eros into it, except to boost the “It’s ALL about homosexuality” argument?

    You might as well say male Victorian Brits being suspicious of male “darkies” and “Chinks,” and thinking highly of their own “White Man’s Burden” had a homoerotic foundation to it.

    A more interesting case for study would be the brilliant Cornell Woolrich ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornell_Woolrich ), perhaps the greatest suspense writer ever; a closeted gay man who lived with his mother and went “cruising” on the docks at night. He wrote classics such as “Rear Window” and “The Bride Wore Black”; often told from the point-of-view of well-observed female protagonists.

    As that Wikipedia entry notes, “more film noir screenplays were adapted from works by Woolrich than any other crime novelist”; appropriate for the guy who described life as “first you dream, then you die.”

  8. Yeah, Woolrich is pretty amazing.

    Abhay, perhaps you were thinking of Dashiel Hammett? When he learned that Andre Gide praised him highly, he said; “I wish that fag would take my cock out of his mouth.”

    BTW, ‘The Maltese Falcon’ could sure use a queer reading.

    It led to some linguistic-homophobic mischief, as well. At one point Spade snarls “Keep the gunsel away from me!” Gunsel or gansel is hobo slang for a gay man’s boy lover, but Hammett was counting on the ignorance of his editors.

    Which is why ever since the word “gunsel” has been used by hard-boiled writers to designate a gunsman…

  9. Andrei, I wrote about this because I just happened to read it! There have definitely been queer readings of Poe…and I bet there have been of Holmes/Watson too (or at least slash fic!)

    Alex, that’s great about the gunsel. I had no idea.

    Mike, you’re getting at one of the central binaries in understandings of queer issues, which Eve Sedgwick talks about. That is the minority/majority issue; the question of whether gayness is a minor subcultural identity, or whether it’s a constitutive potential for all people. The tension is part of the power of both gay culture and homophobia.

    As I said, the Christopher Reed book I just read argues that avant-garde art basically came into being in part through its relationship with homosexuality; as a result, even straight artists (like Jackson Pollack) had identities strongly structured by the closet, and performed heterosexuality in part with one eye on that closet. I’m saying something similar about detective fiction, though I haven’t worked it through as clearly as he has (and Andrei’s thought it through more fully for noir than I have.) The point being, gayness and the closet can structure symbolic experience and codes even in cases where everyone involved is not gay (and sometimes especially in situations where they’re not.)

  10. The whodunnit has strong parallels to the closet as well. After all, isn’t it about outing the ‘closeted’ murderer?

  11. ———————-
    Noah Berlatsky says:

    …Mike, you’re getting at one of the central binaries in understandings of queer issues, which Eve Sedgwick talks about. That is the minority/majority issue; the question of whether gayness is a minor subcultural identity, or whether it’s a constitutive potential for all people.
    ———————–

    Clearly it’s both!

  12. First: Noah — your idea that “The Big Sleep” can be understood as a prose variant of Geiger’s dirty books is brilliant and makes a tremendous amount of sense. “The Big Sleep” was a desired commodity just as Geiger’s books were since it trafficked in the disreputable and deviant, which was also part of everyday existence.

    Second: the amazing thing about Chandler’s writing for me is how much it meant to me as a queer teenager. As I re-read it now decades later, I see that what seduced me was how categories of sex, gender and sexual orientation were fluid and changeable in Chandler — there is a lot of slippage going on which allowed a queer reader such as myself space in which to read and respond.

    Marlowe’s disdain for queer men lives interestingly and uneasily alongside his sensuous descriptions of and responses to homes, environments and physical bodies. He appreciated the physical in a queer way, while not liking queers very much. This slippage created a space for me to inhabit as I read his novels and stories. I wanted to be like Marlowe in his full-bodied responsiveness to the world and appreciation of texture, line and color, as well as living by his own code — which I translated in my queer way to appreciating beauty and being unashamedly queer.

    Hammett is different — he is unabashed in presenting queer characters and in this way can seem more “progressive” than Chandler, but there is not nearly the slippage in his novels. I love his prose, but as a queer reader I am kept on the outside of his work — there is no space for queer reading created. Even in “The Glass Key” which may be his queerest novel, it seems allowable, but unrewarding to read the homosocial into the novel, while it is always fun to do so in Chandler.

    The same is true of Ross MacDonald who followed Chandler and Hammett — his early portraits of queer characters are decidedly of a negative variety — their queerness is part of their villainy (though by the time he writes “The Blue Hammer” he can create a neutral portrait of a gay couple — if only briefly). But Chandler’s queers are just folk doing villainous acts — queerness is not a signifier.

  13. Thanks so much for commenting Brian! That’s interesting that you found space for yourself in the book; it sort of fits with what I’m saying about the book being about the closet, or obsessed with the closet. Disavowing homosexuality as a way to hide or camouflage homosexuality is definitely one way the closet works…

  14. You are most welcome Noah. It was the least I could do in thanks for your insight. Beyond THE BIG SLEEP, Chandler’s novels grow even queerer — THE HIGH WINDOW (the first not to be made through cannibalizing earlier stories) opens with an almost pastiche of the opening of THE BIG SLEEP. And in the first few chapters there are constant allusions to Marlowe not being as tough as he thinks and his toughness as performance (thinking of your other post about Marlowe and virtue).

    In some ways, Chandler’s writing is as you say about the closet — a critique of it; a delineation of it; and an expression of its thinking/ideology. And even as the writing emanates from the closet, it cannot untether itself from its source.

    Thanks again.

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