the not-so-simple art of imitation: pastiche, literary style, and

The Not-So-Simple Art of Imitation: Pastiche, Literary Style, and Raymond ChandlerAuthor(s): Lee Sigelman and William JacobySource: Computers and the Humanities, Vol. 30, No. 1 (1996), pp. 11-28Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30204515 .Accessed: 10/10/2011 15:37

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Computers and the Humanities 30: 11-28, 1996. 11 a 1996 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

The Not-So-Simple Art of Imitation: Pastiche, Literary Style, and Raymond Chandler

Lee Sigelman * & William Jacobyt Department of Political Science, The George Washington University, Washington, D.C. 20015, USA e-mail: [email protected] t Depatment of Government and International Studies, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208, USA

Key words: statistical analysis, stylistic analysis, style, Raymond Chandler

Abstract

This analysis extends the tools of statistical analysis to the challenging task of distinguishing between genuine works by an author, the preeminent American writer of mysteries, Raymond Chandler, and deliberate attempts by others to mimic the author's style. Rendering the task all the more challenging, the analysis focuses exclusively on the main elements of Chandler's style rather than on his minor but telling stylistic idiosyncrasies. Statistical analysis establishes that indicators of these stylistic elements can successfully detect the pastiches.

Statistical stylistics (a.k.a. "stylometrics") was born in 1887, when Thomas Corwin Mendenhall, a physicist, decided to pursue a suggestion he had encountered in the writings of Augustus de Morgan, a mathematician. Pondering the question of how to settle disputes about the authorship of various books, poems, and plays, Morgan advanced the principle that "one man writing on two different subjects [should agree] more nearly with himself than two different men writing on the same subject". As Ellegard (1962, p. 8) later explained, this principle flowed naturally from the twin assumptions that "some features, or combinations of features, in a particular writer's style or language, remain reasonably constant, or change in a predictable manner, throughout his production" and that "some at least of

* Lee Sigelman is Professor and Chair of Political Science at The George Washington University. His research interests range widely throughout the social sciences, including research methods, mass communication, political behaviour, and popular culture. With Ernest Yanarella, he co-edited Political Mythology and Popular Fic- tion, and has published several articles on political themes in popular literature.

t William Jacoby is an associate professor in the Department of Government and International Studies at the University of South Carolina. His work has focused substantively on mass political atti- tudes and behavior. He has a strong interest in statistical methods, and has written extensively on dimensional analysis.

these features are sufficiently rare to set the author apart from all or most of his contemporaries". By comparing distributions of word lengths in passages from several representative texts, Mendenhall pioneered a method that stylisticians have used ever since to resolve authorship disputes (Lord, 1956; Williams, 1956). Over the years, this task has engaged not only students of language and literature, but also some of the leading statisticians of the day (e.g., Mosteller and Wallace, 1984; Yule, 1944).

An author who deviates significantly from norms established for the context in which he or she is writing is said to possess a distinctive literary style (Osgood, 1960, p. 293). Style is a probabilistic phenomenon. Recognizing, for example, that even a writer who flaunts an abstruse vocabulary will also need to use many mundane words, stylisticians regard style as a general predisposition toward a particular mode of expression rather than an invariant habit or constant. In Dolezel's (1969, pp. 10-11) words, "The overall character of a style is called forth by the degree of presence (or absence) of a certain mode of expression, rather than by its exclusive use (or complete suppression)." More formally:

Each text can be represented by a set of measurable, statistical characteristics: T = {C1, C2 ... Cz) in

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which Ci symbolizes text characteristics. In other words, each text can be described in a multidimensional space, with the values of Ci representing individual vectors (Dolezel, 1969, p. 17).

If several of an author's works are tightly clustered in this multidimensional space, the author has made recurrent use of a particular style. If nothing written by other authors occupies the same space, the author's style can be considered unique. It is precisely the uniqueness or, from a different perspective, the imitability of an author's style - in this case, the style of Raymond Chandler, widely regarded as the foremost writer of hard-boiled detective fiction - that concerns us here.

Mystery stories are easy prey for parodists, who delight in the sorts of stylistic foibles and affectations that constitute the literary signatures of many mystery writers (Carper, 1992, p. 10). However, our interest lies not in parody, the deliberate exaggeration of certain aspects of an author's style undertaken for purposes of burlesque or satire, but in pastiche, the earnest imitation of an author's style intended to achieve isomorphism with the original (Breen, 1982; Queen, 1946). Pastiches provide an intriguing analytic focus because they pose an acid test for statistical stylistics. As we have just noted, in cases of disputed authorship, the stylistician's task is to assess whether a given text is more evocative of Author A or Author B. The stylistician approaches this task hoping to ferret out stylistic differences between A and B and then to use these differences as a means of assigning the disputed text to A or B. Precisely because parodists deliberately exaggerate characteristic features of an author's style, a competent stylistician should not encounter much difficulty in distinguishing between parodies and the text or texts being parodied. By contrast, the very point of a pastiche is to appropriate the style of another author. Accordingly, the stylistician would need an extremely exacting set of methods and measures in order to distinguish between the work of Author A and deliberate imitations by other authors - far more exacting methods and measures than would be required to distinguish among various authors writing in their own individual styles, or between a source text and parodies thereof. All indications are that this should be all the more so in the case of Chandler, for, in the words of mystery writer James Ellroy, "Chandler is a very easy writer to imitate" (quoted by Wolcott, 1995, p. 100).

The present analysis differs from disputed authorship studies in another key respect as well. In cases

of disputed authorship, the stylistician's conventional modus operandi is to use minor encoding habits (Paisley, 1964) of which an author may not even be aware as a basis for estimating the probability that a given writer was the author of a certain text. To establish A or B as the author, the stylistician would analyze materials of known authorship in hopes of determining, for example, that A often used therefore but almost never used thus, whereas B frequently used thus and rarely used therefore. A demonstration that therefore recurs throughout the disputed story while thus scarcely ever appears would therefore (or thus) constitute prima facie evidence for A as the author, and a series of similar demonstrations (focusing, say, on when or whencel), taken in their totality, would weigh heavily in support of A.

Although this approach is well suited to settling authorship disputes, it does not suit our purposes, for there is no assurance that the word frequency differences on which it is based are central stylistically. We have no doubt that by concentrating on some of Chandler's characteristic but inconsequential stylistic tics - his deviant spelling of certain words (e.g., okey instead of okay), his occasional use of an unusual word or phrase (e.g., porte cochere), or his distinctly British style of punctuation - we could distinguish genuine Chandler stories from pastiches, even though some of Chandler's imitators would surely have appropriated some of his idiosyncrasies. However, we are not really looking for a set of "fingerprints" that might prove Chandler's presence at the scene of a crime story. Rather, we are trying to determine how well any or all of the authors who have set out in conscious imitation of his style have managed to capture some of its main elements. If they have succeeded, it should be very difficult to distinguish between real and imitation Marlowe stories on the basis of these elements. We are, then, looking for points of major stylistic conver- gence rather than for indications that a given imitator has captured one of Chandler's characteristic but incidental stylistic habits.

This is not to disparage the use of minor encoding habits as tools of literary detection, any more than it is to denigrate the use of fingerprints for human identification. Just as fingerprints, an incidental element of human physiology, constitute an invaluable tool in human identification, their literary counterparts aid immensely in the adjudication of authorship disputes.

This, then, is the challenge we have posed for ourselves, taking as a case in point the oft-imitated work of an influential American author. Can we, while focus-

13

ing on main elements of an author's style, distinguish between his work and deliberate imitations of it?

1. The Inimitable Chandler ... and His Imitators

In the view of the reading public and his fellow writers alike, Raymond Chandler was the preeminent Amer- ican mystery writer of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, and he still occupies the place of primacy today (Baker and Nietzel, 1985; Friedman, 1995; Seidman and Penzler, 1984).2 From the early 1930s, when his first hard-boiled detective story appeared in Black Mask, the leading pulp magazine of the day, until his death in 1959, Chandler wrote numerous stories about the exploits of private eye Philip Marlowe, the most famous being his novels The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely, and The Long Goodbye. By the standards of a genre in which writers have been known to churn out dozens of stories in a year and hundreds in a lifetime, Chandler was not especially prolific, but he was extraordinarily influential. For Chandler, the challenge of producing crime fiction consisted, as Jacques Barzun (1984, pp. 239-40) has said, "of the need to write in such a way as to hold the interest of the half- educated while tickling the fancy of the intellectual". Responding to that challenge, Chandler took what he castigated as "a cheap, shoddy, and utterly lost kind of writing" (Gardiner and Walker, 1962, pp. 73-74) and elevated it, if not to full literary respectability, at least well above the level of the pulp magazines.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Chandler must rank alongside Hemingway and Faulkner among the most sincerely flattered of modernm American writers. Hemingway held that all modernm American literature is traceable to Huckleberry Finn (Bridgman, 1966, p. 5), and in like fashion it would be only a slight overstatement to assert that all modernm American mysteries are derived from Chandler's stories. To be sure, in the evolution of the hard-boiled mystery Chandler was a transitional figure between the other members of the so-called "hard-boiled trinity": Dashiell Hammett, whom Chandler ambiva- lently regarded as his mentor and dismissed as having no "deliberate artistic aims whatever" (Dooley, 1984, pp. 146-47), and Ross Macdonald, about whose work Chandler was decidedly unenthusiastic. It is as a stylist that Chandler is acknowledged by all concerned to have been pivotal. Just as Chandler taught himself the craft of mystery writing by assiduously copying out and analyzing stories by leading hard-boiled writers, count-

less mystery writers of the past half century have cut their eyeteeth on Chandler's stories. Writers of private- eye novels have been likened to "salmon who swim blindly against the tide of success in their instinctive desire to return to the source for inspiration for their own creative efforts" (Geherin, 1980, p. 2), and mystery writer Julie Smith (1988, p. 144) makes it clear that Chandler is the primary source to which they instinctively return: "I can't imagine that any Amer- ican writer hasn't been influenced by Chandler, at least indirectly... Quite simply, Chandler set the standard and everything else is a deviation therefrom." As one of his biographers has written:

It is likely that Chandler's importance will finally be realized only when the elevation of style, by writers themselves, to a position of supreme importance in twentieth-century American literature is generally recognized. As a stylist Chandler has already stood the test of fifty years, and seems likely to be just as fresh, as astonishing on the page in a hundred. Like Twain or Faulkner or Heming- way, he is a writer who advanced the technique of writing.... All subsequent writers must read him to absorb what he did. (Marling, 1986, pp. 152-53)

Long after many other leading writers of his day - John O'Hara, John Marquand, and James Gould Cozzens, to name only a few - have faded from memory, Chandler continues as a prime force in Amer- ican popular culture. It is virtually impossible to name an American mystery novel of the past half-century that does not bear his stamp, and vestiges of Chandler can be found in literatures far removed from both the mystery genre and from the United States.3 Moreover, and more to the point of the present study, Chandler also lives on in a series of explicit attempts by a later generation of writers to speak in his voice in stories and novels that chronicle the further exploits of Philip Marlowe.

Parodies abound of Chandler's hard-boiled style, written by humorists like S.J. Perelman and Woody Allen, "serious" novelists like Thomas Berger and Richard Brautigan, and a legion of mystery writers like Andrew Bergman, John Blumenthal, Barry Fantoni, and Andrew Fenady.4 However, our interest lies not in parodies, but in pastiches, of which 25 have appeared to date. Of these, 23 were commissioned for a volume commemorating the centennial of Chandler's birth (Preiss, 1988). For this volume, many leading lights of the contemporary mystery genre wrote stories that placed Marlowe in a wide variety of milieus while

14

striving to celebrate and preserve the spirit of the character and the style of his creator.

The other two pastiches are by Robert B. Parker, creator of the popular "Spenser" mysteries and an acknowledged Chandler acolyte. In Poodle Springs (Chandler and Parker, 1989), the better known of Parker's two efforts, Parker "finished" a Chandler novel by adding 41 chapters to a sketchy four-chapter draft Chandler had begun shortly before his death. This venture was generally deemed a success (McBain, 1989; Rose, 1989; but see, e.g., Kimberley, 1990; Sheppard, 1989; Solomon, 1990), and one critic (Champlin, 1989) went so far as to proclaim the "join" between Chandler's chapters and Parker's "seamless". A second Parker pastiche - Perchance to Dream (1991), intended as a sequel to The Big Sleep - soon followed, though it opened to less favorable reviews (e.g., Amis, 1991; Lochte, 1991).

2. Data and Methods

How might we go about distinguishing between the 12 Marlowe stories that Chandler wrote and the 25

faux Marlowe stories?" Drawing on the idea that the style of a given text can be represented as a point in multidimensional space, we want to determine whether the Chandler stories and the pastiches lie in such close proximity to one another that it is impossible to tell them apart. To illustrate, assume for the moment that we were dealing with just two stylistic dimensions - perhaps "Level of Reading Difficulty" and "Emphasis on Violence". One possibility would be that Chandler displayed no consistent tendency on either dimension, i.e., that his stories varied greatly on each dimension. In that case, his stories would pose a moving target, difficult or impossible to imitate, and the pastiches, like Chandler's own stories, should not cluster in any particular area of the two-dimensional space. That is, the points for the genuine Marlowe stories and the pastiches would be widely and randomly dispersed, as depicted in the upper left scatterplot in Figure 1. Of course, an indiscriminate admixture of circles and

plusses is only one possibility among many. It is not an especially interesting possibility in its own right, but it does provide a null model against which to consider other possibilities.

At the other extreme, Chandler might have written story after story in much the same style, in which case his stories would cluster closely together in two- dimensional space. Such consistency would make him

a relatively easy target for imitation, and the pastiches might be packed tightly in with the Chandler originals. Thus, as depicted in the upper right scatterplot in Figure 1, there would be little dispersion among either the Chandler stories or the pastiches, which would blend almost imperceptibly into one another.6

Even if Chandler's stories did display a consistent style, as evidenced by their close clustering on the two stylistic dimensions, his imitators would not necessarily have succeeded in their attempts to capture this style. One possibility would be for the imitators to have converged on what they collectively misrepresent as Chandler's style; this might occur, for example, if the imitators had in effect written parodies rather than pastiches, perhaps by exaggerating the amount of violence in Chandler's stories. In that case, the pastiches would be tightly clustered, but at a considerable distance from the cluster of genuine Chandler stories, as shown in the middle left scatterplot in Figure 1.

Two other possibilities are worth considering at this point. In each, the Chandler stories are tightly clustered and the pastiches are widely dispersed in two-dimensional space. In the middle right scatterplot, the center of gravity of the pastiches lies far afield from that of the Chandler stories; this could occur, for example, if the pastiches, on average, were more difficult and more violent than the Chandler stories. On the other hand, as depicted in the bottom left scatterplot, the Chandler stories and the pastiches could have the very same center of gravity but vastly different degrees of dispersion, with the pastiches being spread out around the tightly clustered Chandler stories; this pattern would result if the pastiches as a group were neither more nor less difficult or violent than the Chan- dler stories as a group, but if the various imitators had missed the mark in their own unique ways and therefore displayed less stylistic consistency as a group than the Chandler stories.

2.1. Measuring main elements of Chandler's style

Our first task is to identify and then provide operational measures of several main elements of Chandler's style with which we can compare the twelve Chandler stories and the 25 pastiches. These measures must lend themselves to use with large volumes of material, for unlike many previous studies based on snippets of text rather than on a complete story, book, or play, our analysis is based on all of the almost 850,000 words in the 37 stories by Chandler and his imitators. We began by scanning the 37 stories and creating a machine-

15

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readable file of each. As detailed below, we then con- ducted various computer-based searches of these files to measure main elements of Chandler's style in each

story.7 Specifying key elements of Chandler's style is itself

a fairly daunting task: it is one thing to insist that analysis focus on main elements of an author's style, and it is something else again to specify these elements. Fortunately, the stylistic aspects ofhard-boiled mystery stories in general and of Chandler's hard-boiled mystery stories in particular have been objects of intense critical scrutiny, and although there is nothing akin to

a Periodic Chart of the Hard-Boiled Elements, there is little question about the leading features of Chandler's style.8 Four stand out.

2.2. Simplicity

The pulp magazines in which hard-boiled mysteries were born and flourished catered to what Panek (1987, p. 159) has unkindly, but not altogether inaccurately, characterized as an "aggressively low-brow" audi- ence of "adolescents or slow readers". The low-brow character of the readership imposed on hard-boiled

16

writers the imperative of simplicity - the need to use simple words joined in simple sentences strung together in simple chronological order. The pioneer- ing hard-boiled mysteries of Carroll John Daly and Dashiell Hammett did precisely that, and little more. Chandler's achievement was to graft stylistic complexity and sophistication onto the rudimentary hard-boiled format.

We employ two measures of simplicity: 1. Readability level. This is a measure of reading

ease, gauged by the widely used "Flesch formula" (Flesch, 1974), which focuses on the mean number of syllables per word and the mean number of words per sentence. Readability is expressed in terms of grade level; for example, a score of 10 signifies that a story should be comprehensible to someone with ten years of schooling.

2. Use of a "basic" vocabulary. This is a measure of the extent to which an author employs common, widely understood words. It is based on Ogden's (1934) catalogue of 850 English words that permit one to express virtually any thought. The number of these words in a story, divided by the total number of words, constitutes our measure of the use of a "basic" vocabulary.

2.3. Action

Above all else, hard-boiled mysteries are action stories. It would be unfair to characterize Philip Marlowe as someone who shoots first and asks questions later, but neither is he one who whiles away the hours in abstract contemplation of life's existential dilemmas. Like other writers of hard-boiled fiction, Chandler told his stories by chronicling what his characters were say- ing and doing, not what they were thinking.

The action element is also represented by two measures:

1. Adjective-verb ratio. This measures the balance between description and action in a story. Buse- mann (1925) formulated the concept of the Aktionsquotient to refer to the extent to which a writing style is active, at the one extreme, or descriptive, at the other. Boder (1940; see also Antosch, 1969) subsequently operationalized this concept as the ratio of adjectives to verbs, which he tallied as follows: for the numerator, he counted only attributive adjectives (those that preceded a noun) and did not count nouns used as adjectives (e.g., rubber tire) or quantitative or ordinal numerals, numeral pronouns (next, many, and

several), or the adjective certain; for the denominator, he counted verbs in all forms, including infinitives and participles, but not participles without nouns and preceded by the, a, or of, or forms of have, be, could, should, or would.

Because the sheer volume of the materials considered here rendered a "hand count" of every adjective and verb in the 37 stories unfeasible, we adapted Boder's counting rules by focusing on each appearance in the Chandler stories and the pastiches of the 100 most common adjectives and the 100 most common verbs in written American English, as identified in the authoritative reference work on word usage in mid-century Amer- ican English (Francis and Kucera, 1982). We then determined the frequency with which each of these 200 words occurs in each of the 37 stories, following Boder's procedures wherever possible. It was not feasible either to exclude attributive adjectives or to exclude participles according to context, so we included attributive adjectives in the adjective counts and excluded all participles from the verb counts.

These counts were complicated by the grammatical multifunctionality of many English words. For example, long (as in The Long Goodbye) is one of the 100 most common adjectives, but it can also serve as a verb (as in "I long to see you"). Grammatically tagging each occurrence of multi- function words like long on a case-by-case basis was unfeasible for the same reason that it was impossible to "hand-count" adjectives and verbs in the first place. We therefore turned again to the Francis-Kucera volume, in which the occurrence of each word is categorized by grammatical function. There we discovered, for example, that 70.6% of the occurrences of long are adjectival. Assum- ing that the use of long as an adjective in a given story reflects this norm, we used this percentage as a weight to estimate the frequency with which long appears as an adjective in a given story; thus, for every ten times long appears, we incremented the count of adjectives by 7.06. We followed the same procedure for the 199 other words on the lists of common adjectives and verbs, and finally, having totaled the adjectives and verbs, thus defined, in each story, we divided the former by the latter to form an indicator of the extent to which a given story is characterized by a descriptive or an active style.

17

Even though we cannot claim to have achieved an exact count of adjectives and verbs, we know of no reason why our measurement approach should systematically bias comparisons among stories. In any event, in this case and all those that follow, weighting has little effect on our measures, either because the words in question receive virtually full weighting or because they constitute only a small fraction of the words being counted.

2. Mayhem-reflection ratio. This is an indicator of the balance in a story between violence and criminal activity ("mayhem"), on the one hand, and contemplation or deliberation ("reflection"), on the other. A high ratio indicates that a story is dominated by blood-and-guts action; a low ratio indicates that cognitive processes are more promi- nently featured. We calculated the mayhem- reflection ratio by counting the number of words in a story that indicate mayhem, using a master list we devised specifically for this purpose; doing the same for words that indicate reflection; and then dividing the former by the latter. The 173-word mayhem word list consists of base words central to depictions of violence in hard-boiled mysteries, like blackmail, corpse, kidnap, murder, and poison, along with their inflectional variants (e.g., black- mails, blackmailed, blackmailing, blackmailer, and blackmailers). The denominator of the ratio is the number of words that denote cerebral, reflec- tive processes. Our 160-word reflection master list of stem words (e.g., believe, consider, doubt, realize, think, and understand) and their inflectional variants was based on Hart's (1984) compilation of terms that signal "intellectuality", though we believe that "reflection" better conveys the emotional as well as purely intellectual aspect of these activities.

2.4. Dialogue

Much of the plot development of a hard-boiled story is carried by dialogue, but even by the garrulous standards of hard-boiled fiction the spoken word plays a prominent role in Chandler's stories. In conveying action through talk Chandler was capitalizing on one of his foremost strengths as a writer, for his "fine feeling for the sound and value of words" lent him an "almost

perfect ear for dialogue" (Symons, 1985, p. 130). His characters typically engaged in clipped interchanges - brief, machine gun-like bursts of remarks and wise- cracks - rather than lengthy monologues.

Three measures focus directly on the use of dialogue by Chandler and his imitators:

1. Dialogue density. This is a measure of the overall prominence of dialogue in a story, i.e., the extent to which the story is conveyed via direct quotation of people talking, on the one hand, or via authorial narration, on the other. It is defined as the number of words of dialogue divided by the total number of words in the story.

2. Dialogue frequency. This is a measure of how often people speak in a given story, as distinct from how many words they utter. It is defined as the number of quotations in a story divided by the total number of words in the story.

3. Dialogue length. This is a measure of the extent to which verbal interchanges consist of clipped dialogue, at the one extreme, or lengthy monologues, at the other. It is defined as the total number of quoted words in a story divided by the total number of quotations; that is, it is the mean length, in words, of the quotations in the story.

2.5. Vivid language

The way Chandler's characters, and Marlowe in particular, talk is what readers tend to remember long after they have forgotten Chandler's convoluted plots. An amateur philologist, Chandler recorded the jargon of various professions in his notebooks (MacShane, 1976), and his stories teem with underworld argot. He eschewed literary language and let his characters talk like real people - or at least as his readers might imagine private eyes, gangsters, cops, gun molls, and their ilk talk.

Chandler's incessant and colorful use of similes is another trademark of his vivid language. Throughout his career, but especially in the early years, Chandler delighted in the spectacular simile, which he sprinkled liberally throughout his stories. The following five, culled from the scores that festoon his first two novels, The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely, are indicative of the striking imagery for which Chandler is well known:

Her face fell apart like a bride's pie crust. His pale eyebrows [were] bristling and stiff and round like the little vegetable brushes the Fuller Brush man gives away. He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food. This car sticks out like spats at an Iowa picnic.

18

I lit a cigarette. It tasted like a plumber's handker- chief.

Though linguistically adventuresome, Chander was ever mindful of the puritanical norms of good taste that prevailed in the America of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Black Mask and the other pulps set virtually no limits on graphic portrayal of violence, but explicit sex and strong profanity were taboo. Marlowe, Chandler's knight, never succumbed to the fleshly temptations that surrounded him, and the otherwise authentic-sounding street talk of Chandler's characters was, in the words of Martin Amis (1991, p. 9), "verbally as chaste as The New York Times". To be sure, some sense of hard- boiled authenticity was restored by the presence of an occasional damn, hell, or bullshit, but anything more pungent was "expurgated with pudibund dashes" (Legman, 1963, pp. 68-69).

Chandler's language is noteworthy not just for the words he used (or did not use), but also for the distinctive cadences in which he fitted words together. As the critic H.A.L Craig has said:

Chandler's style is uncompromisingly of the typewriter - the heavy, flailing, office typewriter. His words are flung down and pressed down. His sentences, like the play of the machine, are staccato. They neither run on nor dally with each other, though sometimes they bite back at each other (Craig, 1951, p. 513).

Chandler achieved these staccato cadences, Craig contends, by disciplining himself to shun coordinating conjunctions (and, or, but, and so on), the glue that binds compound sentences together.

We employ five measures of the vividness of the language in a story:

1. Use of argot. This is a measure of the relative frequency of the language of the underworld in a story, defined as the number of criminal argot terms per 1,000 words. The measure is based on an 89-word master list of argot terms and their inflectional variants, e.g., beezer, belly gun, finger man, gat, gumshoe, and gunsel, which we drew from Knoerle's (1979) compilation of underworld slang terms.

2. Use of similes. This is an estimate of the relative frequency of similes in a story. The measurement of simile use poses a difficult methodological challenge (see, e.g., Fass, 1991; Martindale, 1990). Our approach was based on occurrences of like, the most common marker of expressions of simili- tude in American English (as in "Her face fell apart

like a bride's pie crust"). Of course, not all similes begin with like, and like is not always followed by a simile. Thus, if we were to interpret the frequency with which like appears as an exact count of the number of similes in a story, we would run the dual risk of overlooking such expressions as "as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food" while counting such expressions as "Do you like orchids?"

We had no practical means of correcting the first problem, which was not very serious in any event, because the greater share of similes do begin with like. We approached the second problem by again consulting Francis and Kucera's grammatical tag data, which indicate that 81% of the occurrences of like in American English are as a preposition or subordinating conjunction. Assuming that the use of like as a preposition or subordinating conjunction in a given story reflects the normative pattern in American English, we used this percentage as a weight to estimate the frequency with which like introduces a simile in a story.9

3. Use of vulgarity. This is a measure of the relative frequency of vulgar language in a story, defined as the number of vulgarities per 1,000 words. Vulgar- ities are coarse expressions that typically involve bodily processes or parts, ancestral allusions, or religious blasphemies (see, e.g., Cameron, 1969; Foote and Woodward, 1973). Our count of vulgarities was based on a 24-word master list composed of bastard, bitch, damn, hell, and shit and terms derived therefrom, e.g., bullshit and horseshit. To form the measure, we determined the frequency with which each word on the master list appears in a story, summed the overall frequency of these words, and expressed the total as the number of vulgar words per 1,000 words in a story.

4. Use of obscenity. This indicates whether or not a story passes beyond vulgarity into the socially taboo area conventionally labeled obscenity. The measure is based on a 15-word master list of terms that includes asshole, cock, cunt, fuck, and terms derived therefrom. Here the crucial question is whether the taboo is violated in a given story, not how often it was violated, because Chandler and his contemporaries never committed such words to print. If no such terms appear in a story, we assigned a score of 0 to the story; if any of these words is used even once, we assigned a score of 1.

5. Use of coordinating conjunctions. This is a measure of the relative frequency with which coor-

19

dinating conjunctions (and, but, either, neither, nor, or, and yet) appear in a story, defined as the number of coordinating conjunctions per 1,000 words. Again, we had to weight the raw frequency counts for but, either, neither, and yet, none of which functions exclusively as a coordinating conjunction. According to the Francis-Kucera volume, but is used 96% of the time as a coordinating conjunction, and either, neither, and yet 67%, 69%, and 32% of the time, respectively. We used these percentages as weights to estimate the frequency with which coordinating conjunctions appear in a story, and standardized the sum of the weighted frequencies by expressing it as the number of coordinating conjunctions per 1,000 words of text. No single one of these elements fully defines

Chandler's style. Other authors (e.g., Hemingway) have achieved great simplicity; others (e.g., Mickey Spillane) have specialized in slam-bang action; others (e.g., George V. Higgins) have written realistic dialogue; and still others (e.g., James Joyce) have engi- neered dazzling linguistic effects. Chandler's style, like that of any author, consists of the conjunction of its constituent elements. Accordingly, a successful Chandler pastiche must capture not just some of these elements, but all of them; that is, it must convey the underlying simplicity of his style and the action and the dialogue and the vivid language.

3. Findings

3.1. Preliminary analyses

As a prelude to the main statistical analyses, let us briefly consider the aggregate similarities and differences between the twelve "real" Chandler stories and the 25 pastiches. As Table 1 reveals, the mean readability level of the Chandler stories falls below 6.0; this means that, on average, a reader with only a fifth- or sixth-grade education should be able to comprehend one of Chandler's stories. Consistent with the impres- sion of simplicity that this figure conveys, Chandler employed a restricted vocabulary: on average, 56% of the words in one of his stories appear in Ogden's list of Basic English words. The action-packed character of Chandler's stories is reflected in his sparing use of adjectives, as denoted by the low mean ratio of common adjectives to common verbs (0.20); the same characteristic comes through clearly in the relatively high mean ratio of terms denoting mayhem to terms

Table I. Central tendency and variability of the Chandler stories and the pastiches.

Chandler Imitators mean variance mean variance

Measure 5.67 0.09 6.22* 0.65* Basic vocabulary 0.56 0.00 0.53* 0.00 Adjective-verb ratio 0.20 0.00 0.22 0.00 Mayhem-reflection ratio 0.81 0.06 0.84 0.21 *

Dialogue density 0.44 0.00 0.36* 0.01 Dialogue frequency 30.05 10.84 31.76 117.91* Dialogue length 14.84 5.71 12.22 19.39* Argot 0.78 0.08 0.57 0.20* Similes 2.69 0.19 3.10 1.42*

Vulgarity 1.10 0.20 0.72* 0.34 Obscenity 0.00 0.00 0.04 0.00 Coordinating conjunctions 37.58 2.75 33.92* 35.37*

* p < 0.05.N= 12 forthe Chandler stories and 25 forthe pastiches. Statistical significance is gauged by t-tests for differences of means and F-tests for differences of variances.

denoting reflection (0.81). Much of the action and color in Chandler's stories is conveyed by dialogue, which comprises, on average, 44% of all the words in a story; for every thousand words of text, there are, on average, approximately 30 verbal exchanges, which last approximately 15 words apiece. For every thousand words of text, Chandler's stories also con- tain approximately one argot word, three similes, one vulgarity, no obscenities at all, and 38 coordinating conjunctions.

On average, the 25 pastiches are pitched at a significantly, though not dramatically, higher reading level (6.22) and, with a mean of 53% Basic English words, feature a slightly more variegated vocabulary than the Chandler stories. They also use significantly less dialogue, which accounts for an average of 36% of the words in the 25 pastiches, as opposed to 44% in Chan- dler's stories; significantly less vulgarity (an average of seven-tenths of a vulgar word per thousand words of text, as opposed to 1.1 for Chandler); and significantly fewer coordinating conjunctions (a mean of 33.9 for every thousand words of text, as opposed to 37.6 for Chandler). On all the remaining measures, the mean difference between the Chandler stories and the pastiches falls short of statistical significance. In all, then, there are statistically significant mean differences between the Chandler stories and the pastiches on five of the twelve measures of style.

The appearance of so many significant differences in central tendency between the Chandler stories and

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the pastiches suggests that, as a group, Chandler's imitators have failed in numerous respects to speak in the master's voice. No less importantly, there are also significant distributional differences between the Chandler stories and the pastiches. With the sole exception of the dialogue density measure, the Chandler stories are packed very closely together (most extremely on the categorical measure of the use of obscenity, for Chandler never used obscene language). To be sure, on all eleven numeric measures there is some variability among the Chandler stories. The most extreme outliers crop up in his use of vulgarity, with one story, "Marlowe Takes On the Syndicate", lying a considerable distance from the rest. This is the story Chandler wrote at the very end of his life, and it reflects his attempt to modernize his increasingly antiquated protagonist and to enliven his creaky plots, in part through extensive use of naughty language. However, even allowing for this exception, Chandler's stories are remarkable for their overriding stylistic consistency.

By contrast, the 25 pastiches display far greater variability. Indeed, Table 1 reveals seven statistically significant differences in the extent of variability between the "real" Marlowe stories and the imitations, and in each instance it is the pastiches that are more varied. Overall, then, Chandler's style remains, if not entirely constant, then at least extremely consistent from one story to the next. However, numerous significant mean differences emerge between Chan- dler's stories and those of his imitators, and the style of the pastiches varies greatly from one to the next. Accordingly, in several instances the lack of a significant mean difference between the Chandler stories and the pastiches stems directly from the variability of the pastiches: in these instances, some pastiches have unusually high scores while others have unusually low scores, so on average the two extremes balance one another out. Thus, even on measures for which there is no significant mean difference between the Chan- dler stories and the pastiches, it would be premature to conclude that the style of the Chandler stories is indistinguishable from that of the pastiches.

3.2. Multidimensional scaling analysis

3.2.1. Analytic strategy The preliminary analyses establish certain stylistic differences between Chandler's stories and those of his imitators, but do not resolve the issue of whether attempts to imitate the original Marlowe stories have all missed the mark stylistically. Has Chandler's style

proven to be inimitable, or have some imitators captured his style?

Answering these questions requires us to consider the aspects of Chandler's style simultaneously, rather than one at a time. For this task we turn to nonmetric multidimensional scaling (MDS) analysis. MDS uses information about dissimilarities among a set of objects (in this case, the 37 stories) to produce a spatial "map" of the objects. The more similar two stories are to one another, the closer together the points representing them lie on the map.

The input data for the MDS analysis take the form of a square, symmetric matrix of order 37 representing the twelve genuine Marlowe stories and the 25 pastiches; the cell entries are measures of the pairwise dissimilarities between stories. The analysis uses profile dissimilarity measures to gauge inter-story differences on the twelve measures of style. For a given pair of stories, designated i and j, the profile dissimilarity measure is defined as:

i = [ , (Sik - S /2 s=1

In this equation, 6i, is the overall dissimilarity between stories i and j, and Sik and Sjk are the values of stories i and j, respectively, on the kth style variable. Thus, 6ij represents the root sum of squared differences between i andj across the twelve style variables. A story's values on the twelve measures collectively define its profile - hence the term "profile dissimilarity measures". The full set of values, arranged appropri- ately, comprise the profile dissimilarities matrix, which summarizes all the pairwise story differences across the twelve original style variables.

Our immediate objective was to represent the stories as points in a dimensional space, such that the distances between points reflects, as closely as possible, the dissimilarities between stories.10 Because the dimensionality of the space was not known a priori, we followed the conventional strategy of replicating the analysis with several dimensionalities and retain- ing the simplest solution that fit the data. The fit of an MDS solution is generally expressed in terms of a badness-of-fit measure called Stress, so in effect we were seeking the configuration of points that mini- mized the Stress value.

3.2.2. Empirical point configuration After replicating the analysis in one through seven dimensions, we settled on a four-dimensional solution as the optimal combination of fit and parsimony.'1

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The complexity of this solution, evidenced by the need to rely on a relatively large number of dimensions, reflects the high degree of variability among the works under examination. The Stress value of.07 for the four- dimensional solution represents a "good" fit to the data (Kruskal, 1964); the one-, two-, and three-dimensional solutions did not fit nearly as well, and the five-, six-, and seven-dimensional solutions all introduced greater complexity without substantially improving the fit.

It is impossible to display four dimensions simultaneously, so Figure 2 presents a three-dimensional bubble plot in which the first two dimensions are represented as the horizontal and vertical axes, respectively, and the third dimension is represented by size of the symbol for each story (circles for the Chandler stories, asterisks for the imitations); larger symbols appear to be located closer to the "front" of the three-dimensional

subspace. These dimensions are not substantively interpretable in themselves, but serve as coordinate axes that fix the relative locations of the scaled points.

The consistency of Chandler's style is borne out by the compactness of the cloud of points that represent his stories. In the plot of the first, second, and third dimensions (and also in a plot of the first, second, and fourth dimensions, not shown) all twelve Chandler points are clustered tightly together, with one or two possible exceptions that we will consider in due course. On the third dimension (and on the fourth), the sizes of the plotting symbols for the twelve Chandler points are nearly constant, signifying a virtual absence of variability on either dimension. Thus, if our attention were restricted to the genuine Chandler stories, we could achieve a very good fit to the data in only two dimensions. This observation leads directly to a second prominent feature of the MDS results: the extreme variability among the pastiches, as evidenced by the wide scatter in their point locations and the appreciable differences in the sizes of their symbols. Because the pastiches are literally all over the place on the twelve style measures, all four dimensions are required to achieve an adequate spatial map of the 37 stories.

Thus, the MDS results confirm the patterns we glimpsed in the preliminary analyses, but the scaling procedure also provides new information. Figure 2 reveals that the imitator points are not scattered uniformly. A few pastiches that are unusually unsuccessful from a stylistic perspective stand out, including James Grady's "The Devil's Playground" (represented by the rightmost point in the three-dimensional subspace) and Paco Ignacio Taibo's "The Deepest South" (represented by the topmost point). Both of these

stories lie far from the 23 other pastiches and from the twelve Chandler stories in the plane defined by the first and second dimensions. However, by far the most extreme outlier in this plane lies in the far lower left corner. Robert Crais's "The Man Who Knew Dick

Bong" defines an extreme on five of the twelve style measures, and approaches an extreme on three other measures. Crais is the only imitator who uses obscenity; he also greatly overuses a simplified vocabulary, similes, coordinating conjunctions, criminal argot, and vulgarity, and he presents too much narrative and too little dialogue. With the obvious exception of Crais's story and a few others, the pastiches tend to be scattered above and to the right of the Chandler stories.

In sum, the MDS results reveal a compact and reasonably distinct Chandler subspace within the four- dimensional configuration, along with a wide dispersion among the 25 pastiches. The genuine and imitation subsets of stories are centered at perceptibly different points on the first two dimensions but display similar central tendencies on the third and fourth dimensions. Thus the observed spatial configuration is, in effect, a cross between the last two stylized configurations in Figure 1.

3.2.3. Sources of the interstory differences As noted above, the substantive meanings of the four dimensions are as yet unspecified. Thus, before we pro- ceed any further, it seems appropriate to inquire into the sources of the differences among the 37 stories on the four dimensions. To do this, we simply determine whether the variability in point locations within the MDS-derived space corresponds to differences among stories on the measures that were used to establish the inter-story dissimilarities in the first place. This is accomplished by regressing each style variable onto the dimension coordinates for the 37 stories. If the MDS results reflect particular characteristics of the stories, then some of these regressions should exhibit especially high R2 values; we could then use the regression estimates to locate new axes within the space, corresponding to these variables. Unlike the original dimension coordinates, which are merely geometric constructions used to locate the points, the regression- based axes would be substantively interpretable repre- sentations of the sources of inter-story differences.

The results of these analyses are shown in Table 2, each row of which summarizes an ordinary least- squares regression in which the dependent variable is one of the style measures and the independent variables are the story coordinates on the four dimensions

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a,

O

* Pastiche I I I o Ohandler Story

Dimension 1

Figure 2. Configuration of points obtained by nonmetric multidimensional scaling of dissimilarities among story style characteristics. The third dimension is represented by the size of the plotting symbol.

from the MDS-derived space. Two results stand out, the second being largely a qualification of the first. The first is the magnitude of the R2 values. Although each is of at least moderate magnitude and even the smallest (.59) is quite robust, none approaches unity. This means that no stylistic measure corresponds very closely to the spatial placements of points. In some contexts, this result would be considered disappoint- ing, but in the current context it seems quite reasonable, for it suggests that the differences between the Chan- dler stories and the pastiches are based on a variety of stylistic characteristics rather than on any single aspect of Chandler's style. That is, it is the combination of stylistic conventions, not any particular stylistic con- vention, that differentiates Chandler from his imitators. This, in turn, helps explain why it is apparently so difficult to produce a successful pastiche of Chandler's style. If what made Chandler's stories so distinctive had been a single defining feature or a small set of such features, he would have been not only a frequent, but also an easy, target for imitators. However, Chan- dler was simply too distinctive in too many different ways for potential imitators to succeed in reproducing the wide array of elements that set his stories apart.

Having made this point, we must immediately qualify it by noting a second distinctive feature of these results. The R2 values of three dependent variables - dialogue density, dialogue frequency, and dialogue

Table 2. Fitting style measures to point locations in four-dimensional space.

Measure R2

Reading .726

Basic vocabulary .585

Adjective-verb ratio .716

Mayhem-reflection ratio .638

Dialogue density .878

Dialogue frequency .852

Dialogue length .808

Argot .608 Similes .681

Vulgarity .645

Obscenity .587

Coordinating conjunctions .621

Each table entry is the explained variance from an ordinary least squares regression equation with a style measure as the dependentvariable and the four dimension coordinates as independent variables. The cases are the 37 stories.

length- stand out above the rest. Obviously, the extent to which and the manner in which characters speak to one another have an especially pronounced impact on the overall stylistic differences among the stories. This result occasions no great surprise in light of Chan- dler's acknowledged status as a master of dialogue in general and of the sardonic wisecrack in particular.

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Chandler achieved the vaunted distinctiveness of the Marlowe character primarily through the spoken word, so it seems only natural that other writers would find this the most challenging aspect of his style to repro- duce. Understandably, imitators have been more likely than Chandler himself to opt for describing settings, situations, and actions from an omniscient point of view. With the possible exceptions of his uncertain efforts very early in his career and his flailing efforts shortly before his death, Chandler himself had no such difficulty.

3.2.4. Systematic differences between Chandler and his imitators

Finally, are the differences we have observed between the genuine and imitation Marlowe stories large enough to be "important", in some substantive sense? We approach this issue from two different directions.

Our initial approach is via analysis of the distances between pairs of points. Consider the equation:

Distancei = bo + bl PPi + be CCi + ei,

where Distancei represents the distance between a pair of points designated by the subscript i, which ranges from 1 to 666, the number of nonredundant pairs of 37 stories; PPi equals 1 if the stories in pair i are both pastiches, or 0 otherwise; CCi equals 1 if both members of pair i are Chandler stories, or 0 otherwise; bo is a constant, to be estimated; b1 and b2 are slope coefficients; and e is a stochastic error term. Ordinary least-squares estimation produces the following result (with standard errors in parentheses):

Distancei = 2.42 + 0.53 PPi - 1.32 CCi + ei (0.10) (0.17) R2 = .16

The intercept, which represents the mean distance between a Chandler story and a pastiche, serves as a baseline for interpreting the slopes. The coefficient for the distance between pairs of stories by Chandler (-1.32) is negative and much larger than the estimated standard error (0.17). Taken together, the sign and significance of this coefficient indicate that the Chan- dler stories, on average, lie much closer to one another than to the pastiches. Specifically, the mean distance from one Chandler point to another, which is given by the sum of bo and b2, is only 1.10, compared to the mean distance of 2.42 between a Chandler story and a pastiche. This dramatic difference highlights anew the consistency of Chandler's style across his twelve stories, which is especially noteworthy in light of the three-decade span over which he wrote and the

great changes in his circumstances and outlooks that occurred over this period.

Finally, the sign and significance of the coefficient for the PP2 term indicate that the mean distance between pairs of pastiches is even larger than that between pastiche-Chandler pairs. Summing bo and bl yields a mean distance between pastiche pairs of 2.95, almost three times the mean distance between pairs of genuine Chandler stories. This means that the pastiches are extremely heterogenous stylistically. As a group, they have been unsuccessful in duplicating Chandler's writing style, but they have not failed in any singular way.

Our second approach to assessing the importance of the observed differences is based on the notion of a "core" Chandler style. We can use the information we have about the genuine Chandler stories to estimate the spatial location of a "typical" Chandler story. It then becomes a simple matter to calculate distances from that point to points representing all the other stories and see how close particular pastiches, rather than pastiches as a group, have come to the central thrust of Chandler's style. To estimate the prototypical Chandler point, we simply use the centroid of the twelve empirical Chandler points. The centroid lies at the intersection of the mean coordinate values for the Chandler stories on the four dimensions.

Table 3 shows, for each genuine or imitation Chan- dler story, the distance to the Chandler centroid. In general, Chandler's own stories are located close to the prototype; their median distance from the prototype is only 0.62, and even the maximum distance, 1.41, is not very large. By contrast, distances from the pastiches to the prototype tend to be much larger and much more variable: with a median value of 2.19, they range from 0.96 all the way to 5.11. Once again, the distinctiveness of Chandler's work is evident in these results, as is the heterogeneity of his imitators.

Using these distances, we can home in on the success or failure of particular works as exemplars of Chandler's style. For example, consider the two least typical genuine Chandler stories: "Marlowe Takes On the Syndicate", with a distance of 1.41, and "Finger Man", with a distance of 1.23. These distances are relatively small in absolute terms, but they stand out from those of Chandler's other stories. Those familiar with Chandler's work would not be especially surprised by the identity of these two stories, which Chandler wrote at the very beginning and the very end, respectively, of his career. "Finger Man" was a highly derivative pulp magazine story, written during an apprenticeship

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Table 3. Distance from the Chandler centroid.

Author and Story Distance

Crais, "The Man Who Knew Dick Bong" 5.11 Grady, "The Devil's Playground" 4.24 Lutz, "Star Bright" 3.99 Taibo, "The Deepest South" 3.47 Healy, "In the Line of Duty" 3.34 Hoch, "Essence d'Orient" 3.04 Nevins, "Consultation in the Dark" 3.00 Randisi, "Locker 246" 2.46 Collins, "The Perfect Crime" 2.45 Van Lustbader, "Asia" 2.35 Gorman, "The Alibi" 2.12 Valin, "Malibu Tag Team" 2.21 Simon, "In the Jungle of Cities" 2.19 Kaminsky, "Bitter Lemons" 2.12 Paretsky, "Dealer's Choice" 2.10 Brett, "Stardust Kill" 1.96 Campbell, "Mice" 1.59 Parker, Poodle Springs 1.56 Chandler, "Marlowe Takes on the Syndicate" 1.41 Philbrick, "The Empty Sleeve" 1.34 Schutz, "The Black-Eyed Blonde" 1.31 Chandler, "Finger Man" 1.23 Smith, "Red Rock" 1.22 Estleman, "Gun Music" 1.21 Harrington, "Saving Grace" 1.12 Lochte, "Sad-Eyed Blonde" 1.02 Parker, Perchance to Dream 0.96 Chandler, "Trouble Is My Business" 0.95 Chandler, The Little Sister 0.86 Chandler, "Goldfish" 0.82 Chandler, The Lady in the Lake 0.63 Chandler, "Red Wind" 0.61 Chandler, The Long Goodbye 0.57 Chandler, Playback 0.56 Chandler, The Big Sleep 0.53 Chandler, The High Window 0.52 Chandler, Farewell, May Lovely 0.17

Stories are listed from the most to the least distant from the Chandler centroid.

in which Chandler was explicitly imitating established hard-boiled writers of the day rather than writing in what would become his own authorial voice (MacShane 1981; Meador 1982). "Marlowe Takes On the Syndicate" was his last story, published shortly after his death. He wrote this story years after he had run out of steam as an author (Orel 1961), and its quality is conveyed by Marling's (1986, p. 71) description of it as an "awful pastiche of dated tough-guy dialogue, modern revelations about the Cosa Nostra, and predictable plotting" that "Chandler fans should avoid". Thus, it is not difficult to understand why these two works stand out from Chandler's other efforts: they show him at his worst or very close to it.

As for the pastiches, the great majority simply could not, based on this evidence, be mistaken for Chandler's own work. Granted, some have come relatively close to the Chandler prototype - closer, indeed, than Chandler himself came on two occasions. Of these, the two closest approximations to the Chandler prototype are Dick Lochte's "Sad-Eyed Blonde" and Robert B. Parker's Perchance to Dream.

More generally, if, without knowing who actually wrote any of the stories listed in Table 3, one attempted to classify each as either a genuine Chandler story or an imitation, one could correctly classify 33 of the 37 on the basis of their distance from the Chandler centroid. All one would have to do is assume that the 12 stories with the lowest scores were genuine and that the remaining 25 were imitations, and these assumptions would be borne out for every story except "Marlowe Takes On the Syndicate", "Finger Man", Perchance to Dream, and "Sad-Eyed Blonde". This 89% classificatory accuracy constitutes a great improvement over what could be achieved without reference to the proximity scores; indeed, classification based on distance from the Chandler centroid eliminates two out of every three errors in classification that would be produced by the best naive classificatory strategy, which is to treat every story as a pastiche.12

In sum, only two of the 25 pastiches fall within the stylistic bounds of stories that might, based on the evidence summarized in Table 3, be mistaken for Chandler's. To keep even this achievement in context, we must bear in mind that the only Chandler stories that any pastiche surpasses in proximity to the Chandler prototype are two extremely poor exemplars of the Chandler style. In "Finger Man", Chandler was still struggling to establish a style of his own, while in "Marlowe Takes On the Syndicate", he was struggling to recapture it. Neither story is vintage Chandler. Thus, to the extent that any imitator has rivalled Chandler himself in writing in the Chandler mode, it is only in comparison to one of Chandler's crude early efforts or his frail last gasp. No pastiche has penetrated close to the stylistic core of Chandler's oeuvre. Most of his stories, and certainly all of what are acknowledged as his best stories, stand by themselves.

4. Conclusion

In the past, the tools of statistical stylistics have often been used to adjudicate disputes about which of two or more authors, each writing in his or her own style,

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actually wrote a given text. In this study, we set a more challenging task for ourselves, that of distinguishing between an author's work and deliberate imitations of that work. We made this task all the more difficult

by confining the analysis to the main elements of the author's style rather than focusing on incidental but telling stylistic tics, and by selecting an author who is reputedly easy to imitate. Our underlying concern was not whether we could establish that Chandler actu-

ally wrote a particular story. We already knew that. Rather, it was whether we could extend the tools of statistical stylistics, not to make relatively gross distinctions among different authors' writing styles, but to make relatively fine distinctions among different authors' attempts to write in the very same style.

Meeting this challenge would, we argued, require more exacting methods and measures than are needed to distinguish among various authors writing in their own individual styles. Thus, based on our under- standing of hard-boiled mysteries in general and of Chandler's hard-boiled mysteries in particular, we developed measures of simplicity, action, dialogue, and vividness in the 37 stories considered here.

Our analyses indicate that Chandler maintained a highly consistent style throughout his most productive years as an author. It was only in his earliest stories, when he was still learning his craft, and in his last story, when he seems to have forgotten it, that he deviated perceptibly from this style. Our analyses indicate further that as a group, Chandler's imitators have not homed in on their target. Their efforts have displayed wide variability and, virtually without exception, have failed to replicate his style. Accord- ingly, in our view the measures and methods employed here have succeeded in the challenging task we set for them.

Lest we conclude on too self-congratulatory a note, we must concede that our combination of methods and measures is hardly foolproof. One rather jarring result is the erroneous attribution of Robert B. Parker's Per- chance to Dream to Chandler. Most critics considered Perchance to Dream a failure at invoking the spirit of Chandler. "Every page of this strange little book", one reviewer wrote,

... makes you wonder why a mystery novelist justi- fiably famous in his own right [Parker] would go to such lengths to highlight the gulf separating him from his acknowledged idol. Then a thought occurs: Maybe he felt so guilty about poaching on the idol's preserves that he bungled the job on pur-

pose to make sure he wouldn't get away with it. (Lochte 1991, p. 3)13

However, even though, as another reviewer put it, Parker's pseudo-sequel to The Big Sleep simply "isn't much good" (Amis 1991, p. 9), our computer-based analysis could not tell it from the real thing.

What are we to make of this? That Parker's fairly feeble effort has, by our reckoning, come closer than any other pastiche to capturing Chandler's style testi- fies more eloquently than any other evidence we have yet considered to the inimitability of Chandler's style. Many have tried, but if Perchance to Dream is the best they have produced, it should be obvious that none has yet succeeded.

The misclassification of Perchance to Dream also serves as a reminder that attributes like cleverness, imagination, and good taste are not easily program- mable. The computer has a tin ear. It cannot distinguish between fine writing and fill-in-the-blanks mimicry, or between a wonderful simile and a terrible one; indeed, it has trouble in distinguishing a simile at all. There- fore, even if, like Parker, an author manages to capture the form of Chandler's style, the Chandlerian quality of the writing remains an open question. However, having said this, we must add that the computer holds no monopoly on tin ears. For example, critic Leon Arden (1983, p. 93) described Chandler's Playback as "almost totally unrecognizable as the product of Ray- mond Chandler". Now, Playback may, as Orel (1961) has said, be "dreary trash", but our computer, unlike so practiced a critic as Arden, has no particular difficulty in identifying it as Chandler's dreary trash. Although our exercise in statistical stylistics has produced some erroneous results, it has, in the overwhelming propor- tion of cases, produced correct ones, and more conventional methods of literary analysis - Arden's appraisal of Playback serving as a telling case in point - are themselves by no means foolproof. What remains is the further refinement of methods and measures that would enable stylisticians to address more adequately such qualities as "tone" and "imaginativeness", which are the stock in trade of traditional literary analysis but still lie beyond the reach of precise measurement.

5. Notes

The when v. whence example is, in fact, one of the key tests Mosteller and Wallace (1984) devised in their classic analysis of whether Hamilton or Madison wrote certain of the Federalist papers. 2 Studies of Chandler's life and work are voluminous. Good start-

26

ing points are Gross (1978), MacShane (1976, 1981), and Speir (1981). 3 Forexample, Durham (1963) sees Chandler as a seminal influence in the development of the objective technique, America's "single, clearly-marked, stylistic contribution to literature." Chandler's influence can also be seen in the literature of other cultures; see, e.g., Ten Percent ofLife, by the Uruguayan novelist Hiber Conteris (1987) or Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami (1991). 4 Indeed, as with Hemingway, an annual competition (sponsored by the Friends of the La Jolla Library) is held to determine who can most faithfully mimic Chandler's style. As Marlowe stories, we count the seven completed Chandler novels (The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely, The High Window, The Lady in the Lake, The Little Sister, The Long Goodbye, and Playback) and five other stories. A purist might demur from this count. In addition to the posthumously published "Marlowe Takes On the Syndicate," which was unarguably a Marlowe story, we classify four others ("Finger Man," "Goldfish," "Red Wind," and "Trouble Is My Business") as Marlowe stories. When these four stories were originally published, their protagonist was one of Marlowe's precursors in Chandler's evolution as a writer of hard-boiled mysteries - an unnamed private eye in "Finger Man," Ted Carmady in "Goldfish," or John Dalmas in "Red Wind" and "Trouble Is My Business" - rather than Marlowe. However, when The Simple Art of Murder, the first hard-cover collection of Chandler's stories, was published in 1950, the protagonist of these four stories was renamed Philip Marlowe in order to capi- talize on the popularity of the character. The stories were otherwise unchanged, so the Marlowe of these four collected stories was simply the Dalmas, Carmady, or unnamed character of the stories in their original pulp magazine incarnations; oddly, the names of the main characters in the two other stories collected in The Simple Art of Murder were also changed, but to Dalmas and Carmady rather than Marlowe (Apostolou, 1984).

Strictly speaking, then, these were not "really" Marlowe stories. However, in light of Chandler's long-standing "cannibalization" (his term) of his non-Marlowe stories in his Marlowe books (see, e.g., Mills, 1990), one could argue that there is simply no such thing as a "pure" Marlowe story, including The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely and the remaining Chandler novels. More to the point, Chan- dler himself acceded to the name changes, and if Marlowe's creator was willing to have these read as stories of Philip Marlowe, we are hardly in a position to disagree. More importantly still, because copies of the old pulp magazines in which the four stories originally appeared have been out of circulation for many decades, these stories have long been accessible in the United States only as they appeared in The Simple Art of Murder and later collections, i.e., with their central character identified as Marlowe; thus, it is safe to assume that most modern readers of Chandler (including the authors of the pastiches) would take the protagonist at face value as Philip Marlowe. 6 Although these first two possibilities are polar opposites in many respects, in practice they could be hard to tell apart, because in both cases the means would be equal and the two sets of points would be equally dispersed. If the two dimensions were expressed in a readily interpretable metric, it would be no great feat to determine whether the points are tightly clustered or widely dispersed. But if the two dimensions were expressed in a more or less arbitrary format, e.g., in standardized form, then the scatterplot on the right might simply be a close-up of the one on the left. The stories were scanned on a Hewlett Packard ScanJet Plus, using OmniPage text-recognition software. To perform word frequency counts on the machine-readable texts, we employed three

programs: PC-STYLE to measure readability; BASIC ENGLISH to count the 850 basic vocabulary words and their inflectional variants with the suffixes -ing, -ings, -ied, -ed, -er, -ers, -ies, -es, and -s; and WDCOUNT to perform the remaining counts. Omni- Page, a commercial product, is available from the Caere Corpo- ration (100 Cooper Court, Los Gatos, CA 95030). PC-STYLE and BASIC ENGLISH are shareware products, available from ButtonWare (P.O. Box 5786, Bellevue, WA 98006) and L. Crew (P.O. Box 64839, Chicago, IL 60664), respectively. We developed WDCOUNT specifically for this study. Written in Pascal, it counts the occurrences in an ASCII text of each entry in a user-supplied list of words, optionally weighted according to the user's specification. WDCOUNT is written in Pascal for MS-DOS-based personal computers; we will gladly make it available to interested readers. 8 In addition to sources cited in the text, much valuable material on Chandler's style can be found in Cawelti (1976), Madden (1968), Marling (1986), Newlin (1985), and Wolfe (1985). 9 We weighted the frequencies of like to maintain consistency with the other measures. For a single-indicator measure, such weighting has no effect on statistical results. o10 More accurately, the interpoint distances need only reflect the

rank order of the dissimilarities, as the input data are treated as ordinal. " We obtained this solution from the ALSCAL routine (Takane, Young, and DeLeeuw, 1977; Young, Takane, and Lewyckyj, 1979) in SAS 5.18. 12 More formally, a proportional-reduction-in-error statistic equals 0.67 for these data, with the number of errors on the naive model (12) being determined by the assumption that every case is modal. 13 As it happens, this reviewer, Dick Lochte, is the author of the other pastiche that would, on the basis of our analysis, be erroneously classified as Chandler's own work.

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the not-so-simple art of imitation: pastiche, literary style, and

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