Blondes
At one point, Marlowe goes off on an almost philosophical tangent about blondes. By which he means, of course, women with blonde hair. This typology of the various classifications of type is filled with individual similes, but taken together they all serve to transform the woman with blonde hair into a kind of metaphorical woman distinguishable and distinct from those with any other hair color. Blondes are described in the following instances.
“All blondes have their points, except perhaps the metallic ones who are as blond as a Zulu under the bleach and as to disposition as soft as a sidewalk”
“The blonde…deadly as the bravo's rapier or Lucrezia's poison vial.
“The small perky blonde who is a little pal”
“the big statuesque blonde who straight-arms you with an iceblue glare”
The Exception Proving the Rule
In the quicksand world of ambiguity through Marlowe tries to make his way as a morally upright knight, there is always an exception that proves every rule. This creation of a typology of blondes is paradoxically inspired by that exception:
“She was unclassifiable, as remote and clear as mountain water, as elusive as its color.”
“I belonged in Idle Valley like a pearl onion on a banana split.”
When you think of American private detective novels of the 1930’s and 1940’s, one of the elements that should immediately spring to mind above almost everything else is the phrase “hardboiled narration.” Marlowe’s narration is not an example of the invention of this element because it had existed previous to his incarnation, but almost above all other literary detectives, Philip Marlowe represents the ultimately refinement of the technique. What is hardboiled narration? Terse, pithy, observations laden with metaphorical imagery such as that used above.
“He looked like a tubercular white rat.”
Or like this. The design of hardboiled narration is to hit a particular characteristic of a person or situation using a few words as possible to create a paradox: imagery that is precise in language, but somewhat ambiguous in actual meaning. Anyone familiar with words "tubercular" and "white rat" can put them together to form a relatively generic idea of what such a creature would look like, but how such a creature might be applied to the description of a person is definitely more open to interpretation.
“I drove back to Hollywood feeling like a short length of chewed string.”
And then there are those times when Marlowe’s hardboiled expressions of a world-weary outlook on life can become so ambiguous in intent that even knowing the meaning of each individual words may not help. Still, even the reader who cannot quite grasp how a piece of chewed string might actually feel anything at all can still get a sense of what Marlowe is like from this simile. It may not bring his immediate emotional state into clarity, but it does help put his overall personality into context.
