For Fans of Raymond Chandler

Chandler famously said he wrote to keep Hammett honest, but what he actually did was prove that crime fiction could be literature on the sentence level. The plots in the Marlowe novels are notoriously tangled (Chandler himself could not remember who killed the chauffeur in The Big Sleep), but nobody cares. You read for the voice: a man who knows exactly how corrupt the world is and chooses to walk through it anyway, cataloguing its absurdities with sardonic precision. The style is inseparable from the ethics.

Disco Elysium takes nearly everything Chandler pioneered: the city as a moral landscape, the detective as a walking catastrophe trying to hold onto something decent, the interview as the primary dramatic unit, and the prose style as the game's deepest pleasure. It transplants all of it into a sui generis world and finds that the Chandler template is robust enough to survive the transplant. If you have read The Long Goodbye and want to know what Marlowe might have become in a lesser decade, Disco Elysium has an answer.

Robert Altman's 1973 adaptation of The Long Goodbye deliberately undermines every noir convention it can find: Marlowe is vague and mumbling, LA is sun-blasted instead of shadowy, and the film's attitude toward its hero borders on mockery. Elliott Gould plays Marlowe as a man from the 1950s who wandered into a decade that has no use for his code. It should not work as a Chandler adaptation. It is nevertheless one of the most interesting American films of its decade, and the ending hits harder than Chandler's novel does.

James Ellroy's L.A. Confidential, and Curtis Hanson's 1997 film, take Chandler's city and strip away the romantic lone-wolf mythology. Instead of one incorruptible detective there are three cops, all compromised in different ways, colliding with a corruption so systemic it reaches the LAPD itself. It is Chandler with the nostalgia removed: Los Angeles as the original American lie, not just a backdrop for it. Both the novel and the film are essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what Chandler built and what it cost.