"The most durable thing
in writing", Raymond Chandler once said in a letter to a magazine editor,
"is style." And the style which Chandler himself brought to the hard-boiled
crime story made him one of the most admired American novelists, as well as -
together with Ernest Hemingway - the most imitated. His influence on modern crime
fiction has been immense, particularly in the writing style and attitudes that
much of the field has adopted over the last 60 years.
All seen of Chandler's novels are first-person narratives. The wry tone of his hero, Philip Marlowe, is established in the first paragraph of the first novel in the sequence, The Big Sleep:
"It was
about seven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a
look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my
powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black
brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean,
shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private
detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars."
Through Marlowe, Chandler was able to
exploit to the full his gift for the wisecrack. In Farewell, My Lovely,
Moose Malloy is said to look "about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice
of an angel food", and when Marlowe is passed a photograph, he says it depicts a
blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.'
But there is much more to Chandler than
witty and original phrase-making. To appreciate the books to the full, it helps
to know a little about the author's life.
"She was trouble. She was tall and rangy and strong-looking. Her hair was black and wiry and parted in the middle. She had a good mouth and a good chin. There was a sulky droop to her lips and the lower lip was full." (from The Big Sleep, 1939 )
Raymond Thornton Chandler was born on July 23, 1888 in Chicago, IL, of an American father and an Anglo-Irish mother, he moved with his mother to England when his parents divorced. He had a classical education at Dulwich College where, like P. G. Wodehouse - who was only six years older - he acquired feeling for language which would permeate every sentence he wrote as an adult. Indeed, when his admirer J.B. Priestley remarked, "They don't write like that at Dulwich", Chandler commented "That may be, but if I hadn't grown up on Latin and Greek, I doubt I would know so well how to draw the line between what I call a vernacular style and what I should call an illiterate or faux naif style."
"It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window." (from Farewell, My Lovely, 1940)
Chandler studied languages in France and Germany before returning to England in 1907
and becoming a naturalized British subject. Lack of vented Chandler from
going up to either Oxford or Cambridge, he took a civil service job in the
Admiralty which he left in 1912 to return to the United States, settling in
California. After the U.S. entered World War I he enlisted in the Canadian Army,
then transferred to the Royal Flying Corps. After the Armistice he returned to
California, married a woman eighteen years his senior, and got a series of
bookkeeping jobs, finally becoming a vice-president with the Dabney Oil
syndicate where he achieved much success in the boom years which preceded the
Depression. All along, he had been submitting stories, poems, sketches and
essays to a number of periodicals, but when the Depression hit and the bottom
fell out of the oil business, he lost his job and turned to writing full-time. But he was not a happy man; he womanised and drank too
much. He sought solace in writing. In England,
he had turned out a number of poems, articles and reviews, but now he found a
niche with stories of the “hard-boiled” school popularized by Dashiell
Hammett (1894-1961), and had many of his early stories accepted by 'Black Mask', the same
'pulp' mystery magazine that had first published Hammett.
Raymond Chandler wrote realistically in deliberate opposition to the English style of drawing-room puzzle mysteries where an amateur detective always knows more than the police and clues turn up at just the right moment; he dismissed these plots as “having God sit in your lap.” He read widely in the mystery genre, but the intricate and bloodless novels of English writers, such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, appealed to him much less than the terse stories of Dashiell Hammett, who, according to Chandler, "wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before". But when Chandler tried his hand at crime, he resolved to get a bit more interested in people than in violent death.
Chandler's first story, 'Blackmailers
Don't Shoot', appeared in 'Black Mask' magazine in December 1933 and was
followed during the next five years by a score of powerfully written tales,
crammed with imagery, which surpassed in quality the work of all his
contemporaries. A careful writer, never prolific, Chandler was serving a long
but invaluable literary apprenticeship. Devising puzzles was always less
important to him than style. He said, "I don't really seem to take the mystery
element in the detective story as seriously should", and joked about solving
plot problems by having a man come to the door with a gun. Style mattered
much more: "I had learn American just like a foreign language. To learn it I had
to study and analyse it. As a result, when I use slang . . . I do it
deliberately." And as he told one magazine editor whose proof-reader
presumed to tidy up the Chandler grammar, "When I split an infinitive, God damn
it, I split it so it will stay split."
"In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man." (The Simple Art of Murder, 1944)
During the thirties, Chandler experimented with a number detective heroes. One of them, a forerunner of Marlowe, was called Mallory and that surname itself provides a clue to the concept with which Chandler grappled throughout his career - that of the private eye as chivalric knight of the modern age. In his essay 'The Simple Art of Murder', Chandler articulated his thinking in terms which have become famous. He said that for him the detective "is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honour... 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."
In every one of the novels, the world is
seen through Marlowe's eyes with Chandler's double vision: half-English,
half-America; half-romantic, half-cynical. That sense of honour is everywhere
apparent; typical
examples in The Long Goodbye are the way in which Marlowe resists
a married woman client's attempt to seduce him, and his reluctance to spend the
five-thousand-dollar bill keeps in his safe because "there was something wrong
with the way I got it." Yet there is often an element of moral ambiguity in the
stories, for Marlowe is well aware that he is operating in a corrupt world. The
sense of alienation from society at large, which Chandler seems to have felt
throughout his life, is reflected in the detective's attitudes and helps give
the books - for all that they are firmly rooted in a specific time and place,
mid-century California -a modern and universal quality. What Chandler has to
say, for instance, in The Long Goodbye about friendship and betrayal,
about police brutality and the dangers of concentrating too much power in the
hands of a limited number of newspaper proprietors, might well have been written
last week.
"The
pebbled glass door pane is lettered in flaked black paint: 'Philip Marlowe...
Investigations.' It is a reasonably shabby door at the end of a reasonably
shabby corridor in the sort of building that was new about the year the all-tile
bathroom became the basis of civilization. The door is locked, but next to it is
another door with the same legend which is not locked. Come on in - there is
nobody in here but me and a big bluebottle. But not if you're from Manhattan,
Kansas." (from The Little Sister, 1949)
His hero Philip Marlowe was a flawed and lonely but reflective and honest hero;
his philosophy is summed up in a passage from The High Window
(1942):
"Until you guys own your own souls you don't own mine.
Until you guys can be trusted every time and always, in all times and
conditions, to seek the truth out and find it and let the chips fall where they
may--until that time comes, I have a right to listen to my conscience, and
protect my client the best way I can."
Marlowe was, as Chandler admitted, "a
creature of fantasy. He is in a false position because I put him there. In real
life a man of his type would no more be a private detective than a university
don." Yet in a series of notes which he wrote about mystery novels, he said that
crime fiction "must be realistic as to character, setting and atmosphere." That
an essentially unreal character should become much more believable than, say,
Lord Peter Wimsey or Hercule Poirot is a mark of Chandler's literary skill.
There is no better illustration of that skill than the way in which the locale
of the books is portrayed. Wisecracks, naturally, play their part. Los Angeles
has "as much personality as a paper cup." California is "the department store
state: the most of everything and the best of nothing." The economy of
expression, the use of similes, help to build up the picture. And crisp but
illuminating contrasts are also brilliantly employed in longer passages, as in
the second paragraph of The Little Sister : Six of all seven Chandler's novels have been adapted
for film, most notably The Big Sleep (1946), directed by Howard
Hawks and starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren BACALL. Novelist William
Faulkner also received a screenwriting credit for this film. The influence
of Chandler's screenwriting, as limited as it was, and the adaptation of his
novels to screen in the 1940's were important influences on American Film Noir.
Inevitably, Chandler's vivid writing
attracted the attention of Hollywood moguls and in 1943 he went to work as a
script writer For Paramount Pictures. He worked on films which are still admired
today, such as Double Indemnity, The Blue Dahlia and Strangers
on a Train, and like said before his own novels were adapted for the big screen with much
success, but the 'endless contention of tawdry egos' in movie world irked him.
Robert Mitchum explained he problem simply, and no doubt accurately, when he
said that Chandler wasn't 'one of the boys'. Yet the discipline of turning out
screenplay undoubtedly tightened Chandler's style: similes occur less frequently
in the later novels, but his touch in establishing an incident or scene becomes
ever surer. And whereas the story-line of The Big Sleep was an
amalgam of two of the early pulp stories, the final novel, Playback,
was based on a script which he wrote for Universal.
His wife's long illness in the 1950's
caused Chandler much distress and increased his sense of isolation. After she
died, he made an inept attempt at suicide and drank ever more heavily. He
started to spend much more time in England, where he was lionised, but he was
aware that the quality of his writing, like his health, was in decline. He
decided to marry Marlowe off to a multi-millionaire's daughter, but he
recognised that it was probably a mistake. In one of his last letters he said of
his hero: 'I see him always in a lonely street, in lonely rooms, puzzled but
never quite defeated.'
During the last year of his life Chandler
was president of the Mystery Writers of America. He died from pneumonia brought
on by a particularly heavy drinking binge on March 26, 1959. His funeral was
attended by only a handful of people.
For all Chandler's personal unhappiness,
his books continue to provide endless pleasure. There is so much to be savoured.
W. H. Auden wrote that Chandler was "interested in writing, not detective
stories, but serious studies of a criminal milieu, the Great Wrong Place." One
of Chandler's most successful disciples, the novelist Robert B. Parker, has
argued that the poet underestimated the triumphant quality of the novels:
referring to the opening of The Little Sister, he says that
Marlowe's triumph 'is not that he prevents the call houses. It is that he sees
the jacaranda.' But few would disagree with Auden's conclusion that Chandler's
books 'should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of
art.'
Chandler created a body of work that ranks with the best
of twentieth-century literature. Novels (Note: all dates
refer to first US publication) 
"It was one of those clear, bright summer
mornings we get in the early spring in California before the high fog sets in.
The rains are over The hills are still green and in the valley across the
Hollywood Hills you can see snow on the high mountains. The fur stores are
advertising their annual sales. The call houses that specialize in sixteen
year-old virgins are doing a land-office business. And Beverly Hills the
jacaranda trees are beginning to bloom."
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