Raymond Chandler and Chinese Rugs

What was it with hard boiled crime writer Raymond Chandler and Chinese rugs? Regular China Rhyming readers will know I often go for a bit of a wander up some rather obscure alleyways of China studies and Chinoiserie and this is one of those alleys I’m afraid. However, I recently decided to reread a bit of Chandler and his Philip Marlowe novels as a hard boiled noir fan and because the great Glaswegian crime writer William Macillvaney recently recommended, at the Getafe Negro noir writing festival, Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake as the best noir novel ever written.

And it does seem Chinese rugs pop up rather a lot in Chandler. Take the aforementioned The Lady in the Lake (1943) for instance – page 1 in fact – when Marlowe visits the Treloar Building on LA’s Olive Street and the offices of the Gillerlain Company – “Their reception room had Chinese rugs, dull silver walls, angular but elaborate furniture, sharp shiny bits of abstract scultpture on pedestals and a tall display in a triangular showcase in the corner.” Just pages later an interior office also features more Chinese rugs. Shortly afterwards Marlowe heads off towards Malibu to see a man called Lavery, a gigolo – “He held the door wide and I went past him, into a dim pleasant room with an apricot Chinese rug that looked expensive….” There’s those Chinese rugs again!

Bogart as Marlowe

Chinoiserie pops up in his earlier novel The Big Sleep (1939) as well. Again Marlowe is on the prowl in LA – “A. G. Geiger’s place was a store frontage on the north side of the boulevard near Las Palmas. The entrance door was set far back in the middle and there was a copper trim on the windows, which were backed with Chinese screens, so I couldn’t see into the store. There was a lot of oriental junk in the windows. I didn’t know whether it was any good, not being a collector of antiques, except unpaid bills.” Later Marlowe get to the antique dealer Geiger’s house – examining the floor by a totem pole Marlowe notices things: “At its foot, beyond the margin of a Chinese rug, on the bare floor, another rug had been spread.” Geiger is dead and, you’ve guess it, laid out on top of a Chinese rug. We already know what this room looks like – “It was a wide room, the whole width of the house. It had a low beamed ceiling and brown plaster walls decked out with strips of Chinese embroidery and Chinese and Japanese prints in grained wood frames. There were low bookshelves, there was a thick pinkish Chinese rug in which a gopher could have spent a week without showing his nose above the nap.”

Indeed hardly a work of Chandler’s doesn’t feature a Chinese rug. In The Simple Art of Murder (1950), a collection of Philip Marlowe stories, Marlowe visits the house of a rather villainous Filipino character – “It was a big room with walls paneled in diagonal strips of  wood. A yellow Chinese rug on the floor, plenty of good furniture, countersunk doors that told of soundproofing, and no windows.” In Trouble is My Business (1950) a peach coloured Chinese rug makes an appearance.

So what was it with Raymond Chandler and Chinese rugs – sorry, no idea!

Raymond Chandler – a man who clearly appreciated a good Chinese rug