Toby Stephens as Phillip Marlowe on BBC Radio 4

What happens when BBC Radio 4 casts Toby Stephens as Phillip Marlowe?

Well, you may raise an eyebrow if you like. An Englishman playing Raymond Chandler’s quintessentially hard boiled American detective? Particularly after he had played a very posh upper-class toff in an Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple story?

Here I must explain. In his essay The Simple Art of Murder, Chandler blasted Agatha Christie for making the detective story a matter of technical details and clues and entirely devoid of socio-economic and emotional elements.  So it is rather amusing to see the same actor who played a prominent part in a Christie dramatization also play the major role in a Chandler drama.

Just goes to show how stupendously talented Toby Stephens is.

Now those of you who have doubts about him playing an American should go and see the TV show Chris Ryan’s Strike Back. Stephens plays the CIA liaison in London and he plays it to perfection, down to the last detail of spook nastiness. So there is no doubt about his repertoire as an actor. However, he has also demonstrated his radio credentials by playing James Bond in the Radio 4 dramatization of Dr No.

So it is without any reservation that I say that Toby Stephens has taken to the role of Phillip Marlowe as a duck to the water. His sense of the patois and dialect inflections are superb, both in terms of style and delivery.  What is more, his voice is highly evocative- a must in a radio drama. In absence of any visual cues, you must be able to hold the attention of the listener and paint a picture for him. It is a really hard task and not all actors are able to perform under such conditions. True professional that he is, Stephens’ voice not only creates the atmosphere, it becomes the atmosphere.

What can one say about The Big Sleep? It was Raymond Chandler’s first published novel and it was the first story where we meet Phillip Marlowe- the ultimate detective of the hard boiled genre.  The two stand-alone figures in the American detective story, Dashielle Hammett and Raymond Chandler both gave us detectives of distinct nature. Hammett gave us Sam Spade- the everyman who does his job regardless of all the temptations to give up or sell out. Spade would stand by his partner and do the right thing and have no illusions either about the world or about himself.

Chandler’s Marlowe is a little different. He is not everyman. In fact he stands out among the motley collection of men in his noir world. He is, not to mince words, heroic in nature. In the surface he is worldly and cynical in outside appearance and ready to get down and dirty with the worst among the rich and the powerful in his world. He clearly has a problem with authority; otherwise he could be quite successful in acquiring wealth and be able to get along with the powers that be.

Instead what we see is a man who is driven by a smart mouth who would not take any cheek from anyone. The rich and the powerful in his world are synonymous with crooks and he has no compunction about telling them off and giving them a piece of his mind. This straight talking truth to power never fails to land him in hot water and only through his tremendous resourcefulness that he manages to extricate himself.

However, beneath the gruff exterior, we have a man whose sole characteristic is nobility and selflessness. He has a knack of standing up for the powerless and the voiceless. Marlowe represents the view that in a corrupt world, only heroism comes from individuals and not institutions. He represents grace in a world where society as a whole is rotten and heaving with corruption. Power, greed and lust are the only reliable motives among the people in this world. So when the man with noble intent fights for those victims of this world who cannot fight back, we cannot help but notice.

Marlowe fulfills Raymond Chandler’s own criteria of what a detective should be. He lives in a mean and corrupt world but he himself is above it. He is a man of his time and he does not feel superior to other men. He does what he sees to be the right thing to do and he lives by a very strict moral code of his own. He does not play by the rules and he is a thorn in the flesh of those who are the embodiment of the status quo.

And yet he is not immune to the human frailty. His is that of love. Marlowe is a romantic at heart and is often taken advantage of by unscrupulous beautiful women who smell of trouble. It is this quality of his that makes hi such an attractive man- even when he can walk away from trouble unscathed, he would continue to dig around and earn the wrath of the powerful, mostly because of his fancy towards a woman. He lives for danger and he lives dangerously- no wonder his soul is on precarious grounds. And yet throughout it all he remains the tarnished knight of the mean streets.

The Big Sleep is on BBC Radio 4 Saturday Afternoon play. It is available on BBC iPlayer podcast.