Murder he wrote

The fingerprints from the slow hand of Raymond Chandler's master creation Philip Marlowe are all over some modern movies. Blade Runner, Sin City, Pulp Fiction ... Yet it's been 32 years since the detective last made a solo appearance on the big screen. As the Irish Film Institute begins a Chandler retrospective, DONALD CLARKEasks why modern film-makers have never managed to crack the case

CONSIDER the programme for the upcoming Raymond Chandler and the Movies season at the Irish Film Institute. There is, of course, plenty to enjoy. As well as such contrasting adaptations of Chandler novels as Robert Altman's The Long Goodbyeand Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep, you can sink into George Marshall's The Blue Dahliaand Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity, both of whose scripts feature contributions from the great man.

Hang on a moment, though. Where are all the contemporary versions of Chandler's classic thrillers? The most recent film in the season is Dick Richards's deservedly admired adaptation of Farewell My Lovelyfrom 1975. A glance at the records confirms that Michael Winner's notoriously atrocious T he Big Sleep– in which Robert Mitchum reprised the weary Philip Marlowe he created for Richards – was the last theatrical release based on a Chandler book. That was made in 1978, for Pete's sake. I understand that the briefest association with Michael Winner can contaminate even the most respectable material. But it's been 32 years.

Raymond Chandler, all of whose novels feature the private detective Philip Marlowe is, after all, one of the very few authors to offer cinema an indestructible, endlessly flexible archetype. The Anglo-American writer did not, of course, invent the hard-boiled detective single-handed. Whole libraries of pulp fiction preceded the publication of Chandler's first novel, The Big Sleep, in 1939.

Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvesthad emerged a decade earlier. James M Cain, author of the source material for Double Indemnity, had been churning out beautifully lean thrillers throughout the Depression.

Raymond Chandler can, however, reasonably claim to have perfected one class of durable hard-boiled hero: the incongruously cultured private detective who, as the author put it in The Simple Art of Murder, "though not himself mean", must venture "down these mean streets".

Born in Chicago, but raised in middle-class London, Chandler shouldered a portion of high-brow baggage throughout his career.

Educated at Dulwich College, the same school attended by PG Wodehouse, he had an early crack at being a poet and never balked at allowing posh literary influences to creep into his work. Marlowe was named for Christopher Marlowe, the Elizabethan playwright, and other, less ancient cultural references creep into the prose.

"Well, you do get up," a character says to Marlowe in The Big Sleep.

“I was beginning to think perhaps you worked in bed, like Marcel Proust.” Marlowe claims not to have heard of the French author, but he does play chess and always seems that bit more articulate than any of the professors, industrialist or bluestockings who impede his route towards the truth.

It's that suggestion of frustrated intellectual potential that has eluded virtually every attempt to transplant Chandler's version of Marlowe to the cinema screen. This is not to suggest that the failure to produce a facsimile of the original character has in any way damaged the films that resulted. Hawks's The Big Sleep(Bogart is a little less fastidious than the books' Marlowe), Farewell My Lovely(Mitchum was then 20 years too old) and The Long Goodbye(Elliot Gould is too modern) all remain copper-bottomed classics on their own terms.

But Chandler’s Philip Marlowe can only be found in Chandler.

There are few more engrossing bar games for film fanatics than trying to deduce which contemporary actor could best inhabit Marlowe. A few years back, James Woods might have done a good job. If Christian Bale can shake off his current vocal torpor, he might manage the task. Give Michael Fassbender a decade and who knows. Leonardo DiCaprio? Get up the yard!

Mind you, the debate is largely academic. In the three decades since Winner relieved himself all over The Big Sleep, we have heard barely the suggestion of a Chandler adaptation. James Bond, a character as mired in the mid-1950s as Marlowe is in the early 1940s, continues to clatter about the screen, but the detective remains marooned in undeserved neglect.

Notwithstanding the modest financial success of Chandleresque movies such as LA Confidentialand Changeling, audiences' reluctance to attend mainstream films set before time began (about 1972 or so) surely explains why producers have not agitated to bring Marlowe back to the movies. Even with all its guns and intrigue, a contemporary The Big Sleepwould, to many youngsters, look like an only slightly less flouncy Merchant Ivory production.

Moreover, the noir genre has been so heavily parodied that it becomes difficult to present the material afresh without firing unfortunate cultural synapses. What's Steve Silvermint doing chatting up Lauren Bacall? Didn't Steve Martin solve this crime in Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid?(The James Bond films have always included their own elements of pastiche, so such problems do not arise there.)

With all this in mind, the reasons behind the dearth of Chandler adaptations do begin to clarify. Who wants to watch an ancient film based on (it seems) that carpet commercial with the man in the race-goer's trilby? Not to worry. Raymond Chandler is still everywhere about in the movies. The spirit of Marlowe animates such disparate entertainments as Blade Runner, Sin Cityand Pulp Fiction. Indeed, it's hard to imagine how the grammar of the detective movie – not to mention its tone, shape and manner of speech – could ever fully escape the influence of Chandler.

You could say the same thing about Sherlock Holmes. Come to think of it, isn’t there a Holmes film coming our way in a few months? Maybe there’s hope for a 21st-century Marlowe flick after all.

• Raymond Chandler and the Movies begins at the Irish Film Institute on September 5th