Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.
The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man.
He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it.
He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.
Marlowe, the culminating American hero:
wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical and rebellious—
an innocent who knows better,
a Romantic who is tough enough to sustain Romanticism in a world that has seen the eternal footman hold its coat and snicker.
Living at the end of the Far West, where the American dream ran out of room, no hero has ever been more congruent with his landscape.
Chandler had the right hero in the right place, and engaged him in the consideration of good and evil at precisely the time when our central certainty of good no longer held.
