Go ____ Yourself: an exercise in style

I've seen The Big Sleep, and I've read a good solid handful of books that follow Chandler's style (and a healthy handful of films as well, plus I think we're all familiar with the dozens of outright parodies that are out there). But I'd never read the book itself until I grabbed it while looking fruitlessly for the first installment in James Ellroy's Underworld USA trilogy (which I haven't read since high school and want to revisit en route to reading his final entry, just published). And those circumstances are pretty appropriate, given that Ellroy's style looks a lot closer to Chandler's than I would ever have imagined.

This is really great hard-boiled style, which is probably the most obvious thing you can say about it, but it's really pleasantly surprising just how sharp it still seems, SEVENTY YEARS after its publication. Chandler deals with a lot of grime here -- blood, guts, vomit, seduction, nudity -- that doesn't seem shocking until you reach a chapter where a young homosexual (hey, that sure didn't make it into the movie!) repeatedly tells Marlowe and anyone else he happens to meet "Go fuck yourself." Only Chandler, for obvious reasons given the era he was writing in, renders it as "Go ___ yourself." And then proceeds to spin pure gold from it over and over again; once he's established the kid's vernacular, he calls it back repeatedly ("He made a suggestion," one cop drawls, spitting and saying "I'm letting it drift") to increasingly sharp effect.

So there's a lot of that. There's a lot of stellar verbal sparring. You forget that not only don't they write movies with this crackling dialogue much any more, but they don't write much of anything like this any more. "You should see him sober. I should see him sober. Somebody should see him sober. I mean, just for the record. So it could become a part of history, that brief flashing moment, soon buried in time, but never forgotten -- when Larry Cobb was sober." I mean, the book is littered with throwaway lines like this. It's delight, pure and simple.

So you know, I'm still looking forward to that Ellroy, but I gotta say, he's got a lot of surprising-me to do if he's gonna out-grit Chandler. This was rip-snorting good readin'. More like it, please!