Chandler was basically a Romantic, offering this often-cited portrait of the private eye as knight-errant in a corrupt modern society: ""Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness." (From "The Simple Art of Murder")
Carl