“I believe the really good people would be reasonably successful in any circumstance,” the detective writer Raymond Chandler wrote in his notebook in 1949. If Shakespeare came back today, “he would have refused to die in a corner.”

Shakespeare, Chandler theorized, would have gone into the movie business and made its tired formulas fresh. He wouldn’t have cared about the vulgarity of Hollywood, Chandler thought, “because he would know that without some vulgarity there is no complete man. He would have hated refinement, as such, because it is always a withdrawal, a shrinking, and he was much too tough to shrink from anything.”

Chandler had a tough, urban sensibility, and he created his own vision of the complete modern man, especially in the image of his most famous character, Philip Marlowe. Every new type of hero is like a new word added to the common vocabulary. It gives people a new possibility to emulate and a new standard of excellence. Chandler succeeded in giving his era a compelling male ideal.

Chandler was not particularly kind to women, though. It was up to the director Howard Hawks and his star, Lauren Bacall — who died this week — to give that era a counterpart female ideal, a hero both tough and tender, urbane and fast-talking, but also vulnerable and amusing.