The Moral Character of Philip Marlowe: Complexity and Nuance in the Ethical Life of Chandler’s Detective Hero

The central character in Raymond Chandler’s seven acclaimed detective novels – the private eye, Philip Marlowe – is, according to his creator, a man of honour and a kind of hero and, as a man for our times, an archetype who may be compared to Sherlock Holmes, James Bond or the eponymous stranger in Clint Eastwood’s famous Western movies. Chandler’s novels – though derided by the author himself as pulp fiction and merely escape literature – are now considered to be classical paradigms of a certain kind of hard-boiled detective fiction and appear on English Literature reading lists in colleges and universities throughout the world. In this article, I will be analysing the novels in terms of the moral principles and practice of the central character of Philip Marlowe. In particular, the nuances of ethical conflicts and dilemmas will be explored as Marlowe struggles to navigate his way through the shadowy and morally corrupt world he inhabits, seeking to exact justice without compromising his deeply held core values. Moral education programmes now make extensive use of literary sources and – given the prominence of the type of fiction that Chandler helped to pioneer – I will conclude with examples of the ways in which ethical lessons may be drawn from examining the character of Marlowe.