I’m not tough,” I said. “Just virile.”
— The High Window (1942)

So says one of the original tough guys: Philip Marlowe, the hardboiled detective who starred in Raymond Chandler’s classic series of pulp novels written between the late 1930s and the early 1950s. Firm on the outside, a little mushy on the inside. Easily crackable when slugged over the head, but surprisingly resilient just underneath. And while the disgruntled might call him yellow, his core is a heart of gold.

“Shake your business up and pour it. I haven’t got all day.”
— The Big Sleep (1939)

An underemployed, underpaid private eye, Marlowe spends his days watching the dusty sun slide across his office floor, shaded by suspicious characters: mugs, dames, cops, and the occasional client. He spends his nights in grimy bars, flossy clubs, dingy apartment buildings, ritzy pads, and his beater of a car, shadowing the folks who might’ve been shadowing him earlier. Thanks to film noir, this version of southern California is strong on chiaroscuro and weak in dull neutrals; everyone is either gorgeous or obese, perfumed or rank, breathily vital or very much dead.

I got up at nine, drank three cups of black coffee, bathed the back of my head with ice water and read the two morning papers that had been thrown against the apartment door. … I dressed and ate two soft-boiled eggs and drank a fourth cup of coffee and looked myself over in the mirror. I still looked a little shadowy under the eyes.
— Farewell, My Lovely (1940)

Mornings in Marlowe’s apartment are shaky, a chance to recover from the night before and get fortified for the day ahead. Every so often, the man takes his coffee with sugar and cream, but usually it’s straight tar, down the hatch, a scouring agent tackling both physical and existential hangovers. Breakfast is the only meal Marlowe ever cooks, and even when he goes out, it’s always the Anglo Everyman Special: bacon, eggs, toast.

“Have it your own way. I’m now going to eat breakfast in the coffee shop across the street: orange juice, bacon and eggs, toast, honey, three or four cups of coffee, and a toothpick. I am then going up to my office, which is on the seventh floor of the building right opposite you. If you have anything that’s worrying you beyond endurance, drop up and chew it over. I’ll only be oiling my machine gun.”
— The Big Sleep (1939)

Lunch is consumed at the diner, the luncheonette, the soda fountain in the corner drugstore. As the fulcrum of the day, the noontime libation varies: sometimes a coffee, sometimes a martini.

Down at the drugstore lunch counter I had time to inhale two cups of coffee and a melted-cheese sandwich with two slivers of ersatz bacon imbedded in it, like dead fish in the silt at the bottom of a drained pool.
— The Little Sister (1949)

Not for Marlowe the munchies, the mid-afternoon snack, the crunchy salty whatevers to keep him going behind the wheel as he winds through Bay City or San Bernardino. He takes solid meals or liquid ones, but nothing in between. And sugar? He once compares sex to chocolate sundaes, but then warns, “But there comes a time you would rather cut your throat. I guess maybe I’d better cut mine.”

After a while I got in past the velvet rope and ate one of Rudy’s “world-famous” Salisbury steaks, which is hamburger on a slab of burnt wood, ringed with browned-over mashed potato, supported by fried onion rings and one of those mixed-up salads which men will eat with complete docility in restaurants, although they would probably start yelling if their wives tried to feed them one at home.
— The Long Goodbye (1953)

By late afternoon, if not long before, the hardboiled fuel of choice makes its entrance: liquor, preferably whiskey, in a glass when available, but frequently drunk straight from the bottle. Ice is a luxury. Beer is all right once in a while, wine never, champagne silly. In Marlowe’s world, the hard stuff is the elixir of everything: love, knowledge, power, healing, bliss. He drinks to forget and to remember, to seduce and be seduced, to wound and to salve. Alcohol is the amber liquid flowing through and around Chandler’s books, its glass bottle a lens that both focuses and fuzzes his characters, connecting and brightening and drowning.

“You have been drinking,” he said slowly.
“Only Chanel No. 5, and kisses, and the pale glow of lovely legs, and the mocking invitation in deep blue eyes. Innocent things like that.”
— The Little Sister (1949)

Intoxication comes not just from the hip flask with its golden heart but the heady women with their shining lips, the heavy thugs with their gleaming guns, the lines of leafy orange groves softening the air and spoking past the purring car in the night. Marlowe drinks coffee and alcohol — sometimes together — because, like all good literary icons, he chooses to drink what he already is: a man for whom life is always up or down, never flat.

The other part of me wanted to get out and stay out, but this was the part I never listened to. Because if I ever had I would have stayed in the town where I was born and worked in the hardware store and married the boss’s daughter and had five kids and read them the funny paper on Sunday morning and smacked their heads when they got out of line and squabbled with the wife about how much spending money they were to get and what programs they could have on the radio or TV set. I might even have got rich — small-town rich, an eight-room house, two cars in the garage, chicken every Sunday and the Reader’s Digest on the living-room table, the wife with a cast-iron permanent and me with a brain like a sack of Portland cement. You take it, friend. I’ll take the big sordid dirty crooked city.
— The Long Goodbye (1953)

Ordinary life. This is where most of us live. And this is why, while we may not actually want to live in Chandler’s world, we like to visit it. Once in a while, preferably on a warm evening, under a long sunset, glass in hand.

“Can I have one more drink?”
She stood up. “You know, you’ll have to taste water sometime, just for the hell of it.”
— Farewell, My Lovely (1940)