Rene,
Re your comment below:
> Hello Eric, welcome to the list. As a point
of
> interest, did you know
> that Mallory was the original name for
Raymond
> Chandler's Marlowe
> character? I can't remember why he decided to
make
> it Marlowe instead
> but I do know that the Marlowe name itself
has
> confused people who have
> been told that the name is meant to have
> connotations of chivalry.
Strictly speaking, the "Mallory" character isn't the
"original" version of Marlowe.
Mallory, Chandler's first series character, appears in two
short stories, "Blackmailers Can't Shoot"
(Chandler's first published work) and "Smart-Aleck Kill."
Although similar to Marlowe, the background and style were
different. Unlike Marlowe, who was a former DA's investigator
whose business had always been located in LA, Mallory
operated out of Chicago. Exactly what his background was
prior to becoming a Windy City PI is hazy. He arrives in LA
for
"Blackmailers" and stays on for one more case in
"Kill," then disappears from the Chandler corpus
(years later, "Smart-Aleck Kill" would be reprinted in THE
SIMPLE ART OF MURDER with the character's name changed to
"John Dalmas"). Another major difference between Mallory and
Marlowe is that the Marlowe stories are told in the first
person, while the Mallory stories are both told in the third
person.
After abandoning Mallory, Chandler developed a similar PI
hero who was anonymous in his first few appearances but who
Chandler eventually dubbed "Carmady." Carmady is Marlowe in
every respect but name. He's a former DA's man turned LA
private eye who tells his stories in the first person. Every
Carmady story was either reprinted as a Marlowe short story
in THE SIMPLE ART OF MURDER or combined with other stories to
be ultimately expanded into a Marlowe novel.
After Joseph Shaw left BLACK MASK, Chandler was persuaded to
change flags and submit exclusively to DIME DETECTIVE. He was
asked to develop a completely new series character.
Developing a new series character amounted to changing
Carmady's name to "John Dalmas" (a name Chandler would
resurrect when he reprinted the Mallory story "Smart-Aleck
Kill"). Dalmas is, except for his name, identical to the
earlier Carmady and the later Marlowe, and, as with the
Carmady series, all the Dalmas stories were either combined
with other work and expanded into Marlowe novels (what
Chandler called "cannibalizing") or reprinted as Marlowe
short stories in SIMPLE/MURDER.
Having changed the character's name for the move from BLACK
MASK to DIME DETECTIVE, Chandler apparently decided it was a
good idea to change the name again once the character moved
from pulps to hard cover books.
JIM DOHERTY
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