Who Killed the Chauffeur (and who cares?)

Russel D McLean

Check out Russel's new website (and blog) at www.russeldmcleanbooks.com

In The Big Sleep, there’s a great moment when Marlowe is called out to the murder of the Sternwood family Chauffeur. It’s a great scene and one that serves to move the story forward, but rumour has it that when Howard Hawks was filming the movie, he called Chandler and asked,

Who killed the Chauffeur?

 
And it’s a fair question. No one really knows. And the rumour is that Chandler himself responded quite blithely that he didn’t either, making it just another instance of his maxim that when the plot slows down you have a man walk through the door with a gun*

It’s a massive plot hole, or at least certain readers may consider it as such. But you know, I like it. I like it a lot because it makes me think of life.

In life nobody knows everything.

And nobody gets to know everything.

I like to leave a few loose ends in my novels. Of course, given that I’m writing a sequence in the McNee books, one or two of those get picked up later. A few questions from The Lost Sister will be answered in Father Confessor (but yet a few more might be raised), but sometimes there are things that you don’t need to know. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know them. And its more fun if you can argue or conjecture about what really happened.

Moving up to the modern age (ish), one of my favourite ever episodes of the Sopranos (me and ten million others) was the one where Paulie and Christopher take a Russian out to the woods to kill him. He escapes, they think they shoot him in the head, but then they can’t find the body. They get lost in the woods. They go through real bad times. But they don’t find the Russian. They don’t know if he’s dead or alive. But the point of the story is not the Russian, but how they cope with being lost in the cold and alone with each other. Oh, and by the way, if you have never watched the Sopranos here is your spoiler alert.





 Lots of people spent the rest of the series conjecturing whether the Russian was really dead, and what might happen if he returned. But he never did. And nothing ever came of the fact they killed this guy. Because it didn’t matter. And because, well, why would anything have come of that? It’s a fine dramatic line between thematic webs and daft coincidence. And the fact that we never really did know about the Russian was brilliant. Because it felt real. Because sometimes in life, you do things, or you see things, and they don’t come back to haunt you in some ironic way or have any real impact on anything again even if, in a made-up, all-the-dots-connect-world they surely should have.

Now I’m not saying I do anything as well as either of these examples, or that I use such extremes, but I do believe that sometimes you don’t have to know everything for a story to work. In fact I’d rather not be told everything and be able to imagine a world that continues beyond the confines of what I’ve seen of it.

And, really, I don’t care who killed the Chauffeur, but I do care that it got Marlowe to the right place at the right time to answer the bigger questions. And that while we never found out who did it, it didn’t feel forced or unnatural. In fact, it felt real.

*metaphorically speaking