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Raymond Chandler

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For other people named Raymond Chandler, see Raymond Chandler (disambiguation).
Raymond Chandler

Raymond Thornton Chandler (July 23, 1888 – March 26, 1959) was an author of crime stories and novels. 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. Chandler's protagonist, Philip Marlowe, has become synonymous with the tradition of the hard-boiled private detective, along with Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade.

Biography

Chandler was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1888, but moved to Britain in 1895 when his parents divorced. His mother's brother, a successful lawyer, paid for his education; he entered the elite Dulwich College in London in 1900, where he received a classical education. He was naturalised as a British citizen in 1907 in order to take the Civil Service exam. He passed the exam and took a job at the Admiralty, where he worked for just over a year. His first poem was published during this time. After leaving the Civil Service, Chandler worked as a jobbing journalist, and continued to write poetry in the late Romantic style.

File:Raymond Chandler mural FLG AZ USA 6381.jpg
Raymond Chandler, in a detail from a much larger mural painting at Barnes and Noble, Flagstaff, Arizona.

Chandler returned to the U.S. in 1912 and trained as a bookkeeper and accountant. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, he enlisted in the Canadian Army, fought in the trenches in France as a platoon leader, and was in flight training when the war ended. He and his fellow pilots drank heavily whenever they could. After the armistice of 1918 he moved to Los Angeles and began an affair with a married woman, Cissy Pascal, who was 17 years his senior. They married in 1924 upon the death of Chandler's mother, whom he had brought to Los Angeles and who opposed the union. By virtue of his American wife Chandler now had both British and American nationalities. By 1932 Chandler had attained a vice-presidency at the Dabney Oil syndicate in Signal Hill, California but a year later his alcoholism, absenteeism, and suicide threats had gotten him fired.

He taught himself to write pulp fiction in an effort to draw an income from his creative talents, and his first story, Blackmailers Don't Shoot was published in Black Mask in 1933. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939.

Chandler worked as a Hollywood screenwriter following the success of his novels, working with Billy Wilder on James M. Cain's novel Double Indemnity (1944), and writing his only original screenplay, The Blue Dahlia (1946). Chandler also collaborated on the screenplay of Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951), a story he thought was unacceptably implausible.

As a result of his earnings in the UK Chandler fell foul of the income tax authorities there in 1946. This led him to renounce his British citizenship in 1948.

Cissy died in 1954 after a long illness, during which Chandler was writing The Long Goodbye. Lonely and depressed, he turned once again to drink and never again turned away for long. His writing suffered in quality and quantity, and he attempted suicide in 1955. His life was both helped and complicated by the women who attracted his attention, notably Helga Greene (his literary agent); Jean Fracasse (his secretary); and Sonia Orwell, the widow of George Orwell, who thought Chandler was a repressed homosexual. After a stay in England he moved back to America and in March of 1959 died at the Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, of alcoholism and pneumonia. Helga Greene was awarded his estate after a legal wrangle with Fracasse, and Chandler was buried in San Diego's Potter's field.

Chandler's finely wrought prose was widely admired by critics and writers from W.H. Auden, Evelyn Waugh to Ian Fleming. Although his swift-moving, hardboiled style was inspired largely by Dashiell Hammett, his use of both sharp and lyrical similes in this context was quite original. Turns of phrase such as The muzzle of the Luger looked like the mouth of the Second Street tunnel, and The minutes went by on tiptoe, with their fingers to their lips, defines private eye fiction and a Chandleresque literary style, which is also the subject and object of innumerable parodies and pastiches. However, his most famous character, Philip Marlowe, is not a stereotypical tough guy, but rather a complex and sometimes sentimental figure who has few friends, attended college for awhile, speaks a little Spanish, at times admires Mexicans, and is a student of chess and classical music. He will also refuse money from a prospective client if he is not satisfied that the job meets his ethical standards.

In his short stories and novels Chandler wrote very evocatively of Los Angeles and its environs in the 1930s and '40s. Many of the locations which he describes are real, some pseudonymous: "Bay City" is generally taken to represent Santa Monica, while "Idle Valley" is a synthesis of various wealthy enclaves in the San Fernando Valley.

Chandler was also a perceptive critic of pulp fiction, and his essay "The Simple Art of Murder" is a standard reference.

All of 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. Chandler's screenwriting, as limited as it was, and the adaptation of his novels to screen in the 1940s were important influences on American film noir.

Novels

All concern the cases of a Los Angeles investigator named Philip Marlowe. The plot lines follow a pattern in which Marlowe learns that apparently unconnected individuals and conflicts entering his life turn out to be connected after all. The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely, and The Long Goodbye are arguably his masterpieces.

Short stories

Chandler's short stories typically chronicled the adventures of Philip Marlowe or other down-on-their luck private detectives (John Dalmas, Steve Grayce) or similarly inclined good samaritans (such as Mr. Carmady). Exceptions are the macabre The Bronze Door and English Summer, a self-described Gothic romance set in the English countryside. Interestingly, in the 1950s radio series The Adventures of Philip Marlowe, which included adaptations of the stories, the name Marlowe was replaced by the names of other protagonists (for example Steve Grayce, in the adaptation of The King in Yellow). These changes actually restored the originally published versions. It was only in their later republished forms that Philip Marlowe was used (with the exception of The Pencil).

Detective short stories

  • Blackmailers Don't Shoot (1933)
  • Smart-Aleck Kill (1934)
  • Finger Man (1934)
  • Killer in the Rain (1935)
  • Nevada Gas (1935)
  • Spanish Blood (1935)
  • The Curtain (1936)
  • Guns at Cyrano's (1936)
  • Goldfish (1936)
  • The Man Who Liked Dogs (1936)
  • Pickup on Noon Street (1936; originally published as Noon Street Nemesis)
  • Mandarin's Jade (1937)
  • Try the Girl (1937)
  • Bay City Blues (1938)
  • The King in Yellow (1938)
  • Red Wind (1938)
  • The Lady in the Lake (1939)
  • Pearls Are a Nuisance (1939)
  • Trouble is My Business (1939)
  • No Crime in the Mountains (1941)
  • The Pencil (1959; published posthumously; originally published as Marlowe Takes on the Syndicate, also published as Wrong Pigeon and Philip Marlowe's Last Case)

Most of the short stories published before 1940 appeared in pulp magazines like Black Mask, and so had a limited readership. Chandler was able to recycle the plot lines and characters from those stories when he turned to writing novels intended for a wider audience.

Non-detective short stories

  • I'll Be Waiting (1939)
  • The Bronze Door (1939)
  • Professor Bingo's Snuff (1951)
  • English Summer (1976; published posthumously)

Note: I'll Be Waiting, The Bronze Door and Professor Bingo's Snuff all feature unnatural deaths and investigators (a hotel detective, Scotland Yard and California local police, respectively), but the emphasis is not on the investigation of the deaths.

Atlantic Monthly magazine articles:

  • Writers in Hollywood, December 1944)
  • The Simple Art of Murder, November 1945)
  • Oscar Night in Hollywood, March 1948)
  • Ten Percent of your Life, February 1952)

Famous quotes

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.

— "The Simple Art of Murder"; the words mean streets were an inspiration for the title of Martin Scorsese's film Mean Streets.

Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of bar-room vernacular, that is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed and attentive. The method may not be perfect, but it is all I have.

— In a letter to his editor regarding a proofreader who had changed Chandler's split infinitives

Cultural references

  • In an episode of the American sitcom "Friends," ("The One With Rachel's Dress"), the character Chandler mentions Raymond Chandler in response to Joey asking if there were any famous Chandlers. Joey, in response, believes that Chandler made the name up.
  • In Jim Carroll's song "Three Sisters", the lyrics include the phrase "But she just wants to lay in bed all night reading Raymond Chandler."
  • On a rare split 12" (with Castanets), free jazz duo I Heart Lung titled each track in homage of Chandler: "Speedboats for Breakfast" referring to Chandler's guess as to what the early residents of Santa Monica ate in the morning, "Song of the Boatman of the River Roon" from an early poem by Chandler, and "If I Were A Young Man Now" from a letter written late in his life.
  • The detective novelist Robert B. Parker based many of the characteristics of his detective, Spenser, on the Chandler tradition, to the degree that Spenser was described as born in Laramie, Wyoming, the same town in which Chandler was said to have been conceived. Parker holds a Ph.D. in English literature, and his doctoral thesis was about Chandler's writing.
  • In the movie Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, the "titles" of each of the days in the movie are also titles of Raymond Chandler works: the short story 'Trouble is My Business'; the novels 'The Lady in the Lake', 'The Little Sister' and 'Farewell, My Lovely'; and the essay 'The Simple Art of Murder'. However, the movie itself refers not to Chandler but to a fictional detective writer "Johnny Gossamer" as its inspiration.

Trivia

  • Raymond Chandler was notorious for his intense dislike of Alfred Hitchcock, whom he often referred to as "that fat bastard" (typically within hearing distance of Hitchcock.) [1]
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