Making and Breaking Rules

The great crime fiction writer Elmore Leonard passed away yesterday at age 87.

I’m acquainted with a few Leonard titles, although wasn’t as huge a devotee as some. I remember reading several of his books long ago, well before I was old enough to appreciate either the writing or the genre, although I did enjoy them.

Later on one of his books, one with a card game-related title, 52 Pick-Up (1974), did provide some inspiration for my Same Difference both with its subject matter and ’70s setting. I suppose also Leonard’s famously “lean” style was something I tried to demonstrate in my novel, too, although I had other authors like Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Charles Willeford, and Jim Thompson more consciously in mind as models.

Noticed a lot of people passing around Leonard’s 10 rules for writers yesterday, which contains a few good reminders not just for fiction writers but those attempting other kinds of writing, too.

Raymond Chandler was another favorite who I tried to ape, a writer whose style is decidedly not-so-lean when compared to these others. One of Leonard’s rules is “Never open a book with weather” and another is to “Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.” Chandler breaks both rules in the opening paragraph of The Big Sleep, and to great effect, too.

Of the nine rules in Leonard’s list, four start with the word “never,” two with “avoid,” one with “don’t,” and the other two warn about keeping one practice “under control” while indulging in another “sparingly.”

I’m reminded of George Orwell’s famous essay “Politics and the English Language” which also includes a lot of advice about trimming unwanted fat from one’s prose, including a similar catalogue of do’s and dont’s. Orwell ends his list with a final rule to “Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous,” and I think it’s clear Leonard also at least indirectly qualifies all of his advice with the unstated disclaimer that rules can be broken in special circumstances.

In poker we often encounter strategy writers doing their best not to put forth rules that suggest one should “always” or “never” do this or that. But in truth, it is sometimes helpful -- in writing and in poker -- to start with an absolute as a kind of guide or default strategy, then permit yourself to do otherwise although with full awareness that you are breaking a rule.

So I might indulge in a detailed description of a character every now and then, just like I might occasionally call a raise from out of position. But I’ll do so consciously, knowing just like Philip Marlowe knows when he walks into General Sternwood’s place in the second paragraph of The Big Sleep that trouble might await.

Raymond Chandler Said a Lot of Things

Poker is about deception. We try to deceive others. We often deceive ourselves. He must be bluffing with a busted draw, we say, justifying a river call. Sometimes evidence to the contrary sits right before us, yet we see what we want to see. Makes us wonder, sometimes, why we do it. Why play a game that causes us to act in ways that contradict what our brains tell us are reasonable ways to proceed?

There’s a quote posted all over the internet attributed to Raymond Chandler that says “poker is as elaborate waste of human intelligence as you could find outside an advertising agency.” A great line. No wonder it gets cut-and-pasted as signature files, on poker blogs, and just about anywhere someone wants to make ironic reference to his or her obsession with the game.

A great line, all right. Even if Chandler never wrote it.

I’ve had occasion previously to refer to Chandler, one of the first-tier writers of hard-boiled detective fiction. None of Chandler’s novels deal specifically with poker. Some carry Phillip Marlowe, the private dick who narrates them all, into various gambling or “dine and dice”-type establishments, such as Eddie Mars’s Cypress Club in The Big Sleep or the Montecito, a gambling ship, in Farewell, My Lovely. But even there, Marlowe (and/or Chandler) doesn’t really offer much in the way of judgment upon gamblers or gambling.

As far as I am aware, Chandler (or Marlowe) never said much of anything about poker, positive or negative. No, the quote that keeps getting passed around like a yawn in an elevator is actually a revised version of a line that turns up in The Long Goodbye.

As a way to kill time while awaiting a meeting or some other rendez-vous, Marlowe sometimes pulls out a chess board and plays out famous matches as a kind of intellectual larking about. At one point about halfway through The Long Goodbye, Marlowe receives a phone call from Eileen Wade, a woman who had earlier hired him to locate her drunkard husband. After their conversation, Marlowe decides to spend the rest of the evening working out another famous chess puzzle. Here’s how that particular chapter ends:

She hung up and I set out the chessboard. I filled a pipe, paraded the chessmen and inspected them for French shaves and loose buttons, and played a championship tournament game between Gortchakoff and Meninkin, seventy-two moves to a draw, a prize specimen of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, a battle without armor, a war without blood, and as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency.

Someone somewhere along the way decided to rewrite the line as referring to poker, not chess. Probably right after a bad beat. In fact, it is easier to find the inaccurate “poker” version of the quotation on the internet than the actual quote. That’s the internet. A mile wide and an inch deep.

Like I said, often we see what we want to see, not what’s really there. Even an ad exec could tell you that.

Photo: Promo portrait photo of author Raymond Chandler, Fair use.