"You're not much of a gusher, are you, Mr. Marlowe?"

Reading a Raymond Chandler  Philip Marlowe novel is fun. But it leaves you speaking in short, clipped, phrases and complex sentences. You begin to speak out of the side of your mouth, mostly in a sort of tight monotone, without much emotion. Your similes are dark and oddly out of place. Like a gnarled oak in an orange grove.

They take place in Los Angeles, a coastal desert city. But it seems to rain. A lot. Much more than I recall when I lived there. But that was a different time. And I was a different person. I lived near a seedy section of Long Beach. It suited me. The rent was cheap and the landlady never bothered me. But rain was rare. And it was often colder than the Chamber of Commerce admitted.

Still, Chandler's Los Angeles is intriguing. If not honest. Maybe he got the fog right. There was a lot of fog, as I recall.

I like the style that Chandler used. Maybe that's why I like those old movies, especially in the film noire style, about detectives like Marlowe and Spade. Though I liked Powell and Loy in The Thin Man series, they were too light-hearted for a real detective story. The humor was not dark enough, the tough guys almost Runyonesque.

 If you really want to see fun in detective stories on screen, rent a copy of The Cheap Detective with Peter Falk.  Or, to get your fill, Murder by Death.

If want to experience (or re-experience, if you are old enough) Marlowe on the radio, try this link...

http://www.archive.org/details/OTRR_Philip_Marlowe_Singles

(I'd have embedded one but they run almost 30 minutes and include period commercials.)

But that's not the point of this writing. The point is about what happens to me when I watch movies or read books. I absorb the character. I become the character.

I am more subtle (and its mostly internalized) about it now but, as a child, I would visibly swagger after watching Errol Flynn swashbuckle his way through Captain Blood or forcibly stride out of the theater after witnessing John Wayne is some western. Nothing is more silly looking than a skinny little kid doing a poor imitation of the Duke, believe me.

About the only movies that didn't affect me that way were science fiction ones. I suppose love stories wouldn't have affected me either but I didn't go to those.

I suppose it's to be expected. Take the psyche of a person, subject it to larger than life characters in fascinating circumstances and stories for a couple of hours and you are bound to have some impact.

On a side note, I ran across the following story today...

http://www.latimes.com/features/image/la-ig-potculture30-2009aug30,0,669328.story

It's amazing what you can find on the Internet.

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