A few days ago, it was revealed that Vintage publishers had placed a "trigger warning" on a number of classic 20th-century novels.  Among them was Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, his 1939 debut novel introducing the private detective Phillip Marlowe.  Evidently, Marlowe used terms other than "person of color"; failed to utilize the proper pronouns; and identified some characters as "women," whatever that is.

I failed to see how hinky all this actually was until I got a glimpse of the cover of the Vintage edition, which bears the line, "Introduction by James Ellroy."

Ellroy, for those not in the know, is one of Chandler's latter-day descendants, a 21st-century advocate of the bare-knuckle, hard-boiled school pioneered by Chandler and Dashiell Hammett in pulps such as Black Mask during the 1930s.  Ellroy had a lengthy career as a petty criminal before taking up writing, as he describes in his memoir My Dark Places.  Novels such as The Big Nowhere, Suicide Hill, and LA Confidential reflect this.  His mission can be viewed as one of taking the hard-boiled school straight over the top.

One irritating tic of Ellroy lies in his telegraphic style, which in his case is no metaphor, but simply a straight description.  A typical Ellroy scene goes like this:

Sound of car horns on freeway. Footsteps outside. An intake of breath. He pauses, turns. Racking of shotgun. A roar, then smell of cordite. He ducks and rolls. "What the hell..."

It goes on like this, page after page, often 600 or more.  (Jimmy likes writing 'em long.)

But apart from that, what's notable is the nature of the language.  Ellroy's books are sagas consisting of savage violence (surgical in description), abject perversity, cruelty, viciousness, and psychosis.  After reading a couple of these, it occurred to me that they're actually taking place in Hell — a Hell that matches the real world in most particulars.  And the language matches that vision.

There is no P.C. or wokeism in these books.  Nobody is a person of color, and pronouns are what they have always been.  It's a world populated solely by n****rs, s**cs, f*****ts, and every possible vile term for women.  It is constant, unrelenting, and absolutely unrelieved.  Everybody talks this way, from the gutter up to the governor's mansion.  If a pope appeared in one of Ellroy's books, he'd say the same things.  (I've read few of his later books, so this may well have happened.)

I wasted part of my youth in some rough or outré places (including some time in the West Village), and I've heard quite a few things, but I have to confess that Ellroy introduced me to two new derogatory terms for homosexuals, for which I am properly grateful.

Compare this to Chandler.  His stuff was considered rough at the time, but this was, after all, the late '30s, when standards were a lot more elevated than you'll find today.  Reading The Big Sleep in the 21st century amounts to an exercise in sedateness.

So a few questions arise:

What are the exact criteria that find Chandler unacceptable but give Ellroy a pass?

Was the trigger warning ever mentioned to Ellroy before he wrote his introduction?

Has anybody asked Ellroy about his opinion regarding this?

When, exactly, are Ellroy's books getting their "trigger warning"?  (All things being fair, this would need to be about twelve pages long.)

Now I just need it explained to me what it was that Virginia Woolf, lesbian and feminist icon, did to earn a trigger warning.  I'm all ears.  

Image: Vintage Books, fair use.