Tuesday, March 11: High-Heeled Gumshoe
GUMSHOE WARDROBE AND MEETING MR. MOTO
by Melodie Johnson Howe
Phillip Marlowe is certainly one of the great private eyes, if not the greatest. When we first meet him in The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler has Marlowe describe himself right down to his socks. Yes, his socks. “ … black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them.” Of course the irony of Marlow talking about how well dressed he appears is made clear by the fact that he’s “calling on four million dollars.”
Stockings are not something you think about with tough guys. In fact let’s be honest. Men’s socks are not very sexy. They usually sag. Or they’re too short. If they cross their legs you can glimpse the pale hairy skin between the pant cuff and the top of the socks. (Unless they wear knee socks, which I don’t think Marlowe did.) Revealing this flash of skin lends a vulnerability to the tough guy’s masculinity. Yet Marlowe’s socks have always endeared him to me. Especially because they are wool and have dark blue clocks on them. I’m not sure what that design looks like. But I assume it’s something like a vertical row of circles maybe separated by dashes. The “clocks’ might have something like an X in the center or maybe they do have hands and numbers.
Conversely, I’ve always had a problem with Nero Wolfe’s yellow shirt which due to his heft is “the size of a tent”. The size is believable. But for me the color is not. If Wolfe’s taste is reflected in his subtle masculine surroundings then why would he wear yellow? But when I tried to come up with a better color for Wolfe I couldn’t. Red? God, no. Blue? Too business like. Black? Too gansterish, and it would make him look as if he’s trying to hide his girth. Wolfe would never think of such a thing. White? He’d look like he’s wearing a wedding dress. Hunter green? Not bad. But the color carries with it a certain kind of upper class pretension. And that is definitely not Wolfe. How about pastels? Pink? That might make his determined bachelorhood suspect. Orange? I don’t even want to think about that. I guess given the choices Rex Stout did come up with the best color. But I still can’t keep from flinching when I read the description.
When I was young I used to fall asleep listening to songs on the radio such as Why Must I Be a Teenager in Love? (One of the great universal questions.) The other night I fell asleep watching Law and Order, and I was left with these words rattling around in my subconscious: “Bruises on the inside of her thighs where he pried her legs apart. Dead about 10 hours. Strangulation.”
Needless to say, I couldn’t sleep. I got out of bed and went into my office where I keep many of my paperbacks. I longed for Agatha Christie to take my hand and walk me back into her world. Alas, I gave away most of my Christie paperbacks when we moved. Time to replenish. I searched through my books hoping to find a mystery I hadn’t read. And I did! I’ve never read any of the Mr. Moto books. And there was Thank You, Mr. Moto, by John P. Marquand. My heart leapt. I padded (Okay I had socks on) back to bed, clapped my reading light to the book, and nestled in.
I was taken back into the world of 1936 to the mysterious city of Peking and the byzantine character of the Chinese. Japan was flexing its world-power-muscles by invading North China while the Communists were gaining power in the countryside. The unwilling American protagonist is Tom Nelson. When he’s not wearing a blue Chinese robe, he wears white suits. (I don’t know his preference in socks.) And he is hauled around in rickshaws. Mr. Moto, the Japanese agent, dresses in “well-fitting European clothes.” And the gold fillings in his front teeth glitter.
Marquand is an elegant stylist, intelligent, and a sharp observer of humanity. “It occurred to me that there is nothing in the world as bad as a well-bred Englishman,” Tom Nelson observes at one point. I fell asleep reading about Nelson pondering his servant, Yao. “His face had that placid, exasperating patience that is China. The cynicism and materialism, so refined as to be nearly spiritual, the bluntness and the delicacy of perception, the abjectness and the vanity, the bravery and the cowardice, the loyalty and the deceit — all those eternal contradictions of China were printed on it.”
I slept like a baby. Thank you, Mr. Moto.
- © 1937 Twentieth Century Fox [↩]
I’m going with the idea Nero’s shirt was a pale, pale yellow. Anything else seems too garish. Thanks for an interesting column. You never let me down.
My favorite Marlowe description-of-clothing moment — and there are lots — is in “Red Wind”:
But that isn’t what I was thinking at all. I was thinking that Waldo had described the girl’s clothes in a way the ordinary man wouldn’t know how to describe them. Printed bolero jacket over blue crêpe silk dress. I didn’t even know what a bolero jacket was. And I might have said blue dress or even blue silk dress, but never blue crêpe silk dress.
Deborah,
But even pale yellow…?
JLW,
The passage you picked is Chandler at his best. By focusing on the girl’s clothes he describes three characters: the girl, Waldo, and Marlowe. It makes you wish people still “dressed.”
Melodie, let me first say that I thoroughly enjoyed the column — but the reason for my note is that I too loved “Red Wind.” One of the things I recall most about it is the opening, which managed to engage the reader not through action but through implied action. Though I don’t remember the exact words, the story began with a description of a hot desert wind that made everyone jumpy and nervous and “made wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks.” Great writing.
Remember, Nero Wolfe may have lived in the U.S., but he wasn’t from there! His tastes in color may have come from Montenegro, not from NYC. Changing subject, Wow! When was the last time I read a mystery column that touched on socks? Wow! All us jock wannabes wear our socks ’till they wear out. And we keep athletic shoes untill we can feel the ground beneath our feet in them!
Ah but the classic description of clothing in a mystery has to be from Richard S.Prather, as quoted by Donald E. Westlake:
“She was nude as a noodle.”
John
Yes, Red Wind has one of the great openings. The Santa Ana wind. I think I wrote a column about it long ago. Chandler was a master at setting tone and atmosphere even down to Marlowe’s socks.
Jeff,
You’re right. Wolfe’s taste in color may have come from his homeland. BUT YELLOW?!
What can I tell you about socks. I obviously can write a column about anything.
Rob,
Priceless.
Wolfe claims he lived in Montenegro until he was sixteen, and also that he fought for the Serbian/Montenegrin army in WWI after having previously worked as a spy for Austria. Montenegrins are ethnically Serbian, or at least they were back then. Wolfe is not remotely a Slavic name — being, in fact, German. It is certainly possible for Nero Wolfe to be mostly ethnically Serbian with a German surname, but I consider it unlikely given his lack of patriotic zeal for his motherland.
There are many theories as to who Nero Wolfe’s parents were, including Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler, Mycroft Holmes, and Arsène Lupin. None of them are Serbian, either, but Irene at least has a German last name (adler means “eagle”) and “Lupin” is French for “wolf”.
In any case, I think it unlikely that he had any strong cultural ties to Montenegro, and that would include his taste in color of shirts. Montenegro was considered a kind of comic opera country by most of Europe, populated by plump officers in ornate uniforms — it is the model for “Pontevedro” in Franz Lehár’s “Die lustige Witwe” (“The Merry Widow”). My wife’s paternal grandfather, who was a merchant sea captain and a lieutenant in the Imperial Russian Naval Reserve at the battle of Port Arthur, got a medal from Montenegro at one time, although I have no idea what it was for.
I think the correct color for Nero Wolfe would be silver gray, but that’s just me.
“Chuckle!” Maybe Nero Wolfe lived the way he wanted to! (And still does!)