Conrad and Chandler, Marlow and Marlowe

First I noticed that Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim opens with a passage whose form, substance and rhythm would be right at home in classic American hard-boiled writing:

"He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull."

Then I realized that the book's narrator is named Marlow (also the narrator of other Conrad works, including Heart of Darkness). Then it transpired that Marlow finds the guilty, bereft Jim work with a ship's chandler.

Coincidence? Maybe. But Raymond Chandler (and Dashiell Hammett) did not spring like Athena from Zeus' head, fully grown, armed, and ready for the fight. In some of Hammett's early stories especially, traces remain of the genteel English detective stories of which the hard-boiled school is the reputed antithesis.

Did Chandler read Conrad? If so, what he take from the experience? It's probably easy to find discussions of Marlow as the moral center of Conrad's work and hence an apt choice for the name (with an e added) of Chandler's protagonist. But maybe Chandler liked Conrad's prose style, too.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010