Raymond Chandler

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

Born July 23, 1888(1888-07-23)
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Died March 26, 1959 (aged 70)
San Diego, California, United States
Occupation Novelist
Nationality American
Writing period 1933-1959
Genres Crime

Raymond Thornton Chandler (July 23, 1888 – March 26, 1959) was an American author of crime stories and novels of immense stylistic influence upon modern crime fiction, especially in the style of the writing and the attitudes now characteristic of the genre. His protagonist, Philip Marlowe, is synonymous with "private detective," along with Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade.

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[edit] Early life

He was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1888, but moved to Britain in 1895 with his Irish-born mother after they were abandoned by his father, an alcoholic civil engineer for an American railway company. His uncle, a successful lawyer, supported them.[1] In 1900, Chandler attended Dulwich College, London,[1] where he was classically educated. He did not attend university, instead spending time in France and Germany. In 1907, he was naturalised as a British subject in order to take the Civil Service examination, which he passed with the third-highest score. He then took an Admiralty job lasting slightly more than a year. His first poem was published during that time.

Chandler disliked the servile mindset of the civil service and quit, to the consternation of his family. He then was an unsuccessful journalist, published reviews, and continued writing Romantic poetry. Accounting for that checkered time he said that "It was the age of the clever young man, but I was distinctly not a clever young man."[2]

In 1912, he borrowed money from his uncle (who expected it repaid with interest), and returned to the U.S., eventually settling in Los Angeles. He strung tennis rackets, picked fruit and endured a lonely time of scrimping and saving. Finally, he took a correspondence bookkeeping course, finished ahead of schedule, and found a steady job. In 1917, when the U.S. entered World War I, he enlisted in the Canadian Army, served in France, and was in flight training in England at war’s end.[1]

After the armistice, he returned to Los Angeles and his mother, and soon began a love affair with Cissy Pascal, a married woman eighteen years his senior.[1] Chandler's mother, who had opposed the union, died on 26 September 1923, and not long after, in 1924, Chandler and Pascal married.[3][1] By 1932, in the course of his bookkeeping career, he became a vice-president of the Dabney Oil syndicate, but a year later, his alcoholism, absenteeism, and a threatened suicide[1] provoked his firing.

[edit] Pulp writer

To earn a living with his creative talent, he taught himself to write pulp fiction; his first story, “Blackmailers Don't Shoot”, was published in Black Mask magazine in 1933; his first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. Literary success led to work as a Hollywood screenwriter: he and Billy Wilder co-wrote Double Indemnity (1944), based upon on James M. Cain's novel of the same name. His only original screenplay was The Blue Dahlia (1946). Chandler collaborated on the screenplay of Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951) - a story he thought implausible - based on Patricia Highsmith's novel. By then, the Chandlers had moved to La Jolla, California, a rich coastal town near San Diego.

[edit] Later life and death

In 1954, Cissy Chandler died after a long illness, during which time Raymond Chandler wrote The Long Goodbye. Lonely and depressed, he returned to drink, never quitting it for long, and the quality and quantity of his writing suffered.[1] In 1955, he attempted suicide; literary scholars documented that suicide attempt. In The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved, Judith Freeman says it was “a cry for help”, given he called the police beforehand, saying he planned to kill himself. Raymond Chandler’s personal and professional life was both helped and complicated by the women to whom he was attracted — notably Helga Greene (his literary agent); Jean Fracasse (his secretary); Sonia Orwell (George Orwell's widow); and Natasha Spender (Stephen Spender's wife), the latter two of whom assumed Chandler to be a repressed homosexual.[4] Note that Judith Freeman's book perpetuates errors dating back to the MacShane biography relating to the death of Florence Chandler and a number of residences.[3]

After time in England he returned to La Jolla, where he died of pneumonial peripheral vascular shock and pre-renal uremia in the Scripps Memorial Hospital per the death certificate. Helga Greene inherited the Chandler estate after a lawsuit with Jean Fracasse. Raymond Chandler is buried at Mount Hope Cemetery, San Diego, California, as per Frank MacShane, The Raymond Chandler Papers, Chandler directed he be buried next to Cissy, but wound up in the cemetery's Potter’s field, because of the lawsuit over his estate.

[edit] Critical reception

Critics and writers, ranging from W. H. Auden to Evelyn Waugh to Ian Fleming greatly admired the finely wrought prose of Raymond Chandler.[1] Although his swift-moving, hardboiled style was inspired mostly by Dashiell Hammett, his sharp and lyrical similes are original: The muzzle of the Luger looked like the mouth of the Second Street tunnel; The minutes went by on tiptoe, with their fingers to their lips, defining private eye fiction genre, and leading to the coining of the adjective Chandleresque, which is subject and object of parody and pastiche. Yet, Philip Marlowe is not a stereotypical “tough guy”, but a complex, sometimes sentimental man of few friends, who attended university, speaks some Spanish and, at times, admires Mexicans, is a student of classical chess games and classical music. He will refuse a prospective client’s money if he is ethically unsatisfied by the job.

The high critical regard in which Chandler is usually held today makes poignant the critical pans that stung Chandler in his lifetime. In a March 1942 letter to Mrs. Blanche Knopf, published in Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler, Chandler complained: "The thing that rather gets me down is that when I write something that is tough and fast and full of mayhem and murder, I get panned for being tough and fast and full of mayhem and murder, and then when I try to tone down a bit and develop the mental and emotional side of a situation, I get panned for leaving out what I was panned for putting in the first time."

Chandler’s short stories and novels are evocatively written, conveying the time, place, and ambience of Los Angeles and environs in the 1930s and 1940s.[1] The places are real, if pseudonymous: Bay City is Santa Monica, Gray Lake is Silver Lake, and Idle Valley a synthesis of rich San Fernando Valley communities.

Raymond Chandler also was a perceptive critic of pulp fiction; his essay “The Simple Art of Murder” is the standard reference work in the field.

All of his novels have been cinematically adapted, notably The Big Sleep (1946), by Howard Hawks, with Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe; novelist William Faulkner was a co-screenplay writer. Raymond Chandler's few screen writing efforts and the cinematic adaptation of his novels proved stylistically and thematically influential upon the American film noir genre.

[edit] Novels

These are the criminal cases of Philip Marlowe a Los Angeles private investigator. Their plots follow a pattern in which the men and women hiring him reveal themselves as corrupt, corrupting, and criminally complicit as those against whom he must protect his erstwhile employers.

[edit] Short stories

Typically, the short stories chronicle the cases of Philip Marlowe and other down-on-their-luck private detectives (e.g. John Dalmas, Steve Grayce) or good samaritans (e.g. Mr Carmady). The exceptions are the macabre The Bronze Door and English Summer, a Gothic romance set in the English countryside.

Interestingly, in the 1950s radio series The Adventures of Philip Marlowe, that included adaptations of the short stories, the Philip Marlowe name was replaced with the names of other detectives, e.g. Steve Grayce, in The King in Yellow. In fact, such changes restored the stories to their originally published versions. It was later, when they were republished, as Philip Marlowe stories that the Philip Marlowe name was used, with the exception being The Pencil.

[edit] 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)[6]
  • 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.

[edit] Non-detective short stories

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

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)

[edit] Published as

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i Iyer, Pico. "The Knight of Sunset Boulevard", The New York Review of Books, December 6, 2007, pp. 31–33. 
  2. ^ Raymond Chandler: Raymond Chandler Speaking (Dorothy Gardiner and Kathrine Sorley Wakker, ed.) p.24 (Houghton Mifflin Company (1962) ISBN 978-0520208353.
  3. ^ a b Raymond Chandler's Shamus Town Timeline and Residences pages using official government sources (death certificate, census, military & civil - city & phone directories)
  4. ^ The Man Who Gave Us Marlowe - November 7, 2007 - The New York Sun
  5. ^ a b c Philip Durham, Introduction, Killer in the Rain, Ballantine Books 1964
  6. ^ Not to be confused with the 1895 short story collection The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers

[edit] Further reading

  • MacShane, Frank (1976). The Life of Raymond Chandler. N.Y.: E.P. Dutton.
  • Hiney, Tom (1999). Raymond Chandler. N.Y.: Grove Press. ISBN 0-80213-637-0
  • Ward, Elizabeth and Alain Silver (1987). Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press. ISBN 0-87951-351-9
  • Howe, Alexander N. "The Detective and the Analyst: Truth, Knowledge, and Psychoanalysis in the Hard-Boiled Fiction of Raymond Chandler." CLUES: A Journal of Detection 24.4 (Summer 2006): 15-29.
  • Howe, Alexander N. (2008). "It Didn't Mean Anything: A Psychoanalytic Reading of American Detective Fiction". North Carolina: McFarland. ISBN 0786434546
  • Moss, Robert (2002) "Raymond Chandler A Literary Reference" New York Carrol & Graf
  • Freeman, Judith (2007). The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved. N.Y.:Pantheon. ISBN 978-0-375-42351-2 (0-375-42351-6)

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
v • d • e
Works by Raymond Chandler
Novels:
Characters:
Short story collections:
Five Murderers · Five Sinister Characters · Fingerman and Other Stories · The Simple Art of Murder · Killer in the Rain · Chandler Before Marlowe · The Midnight Raymond Chandler
Screenplays:
Non-fiction:
Raymond Chandler Speaking · Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler
Film adaptations:

The Falcon Takes Over (1942) · Murder, My Sweet (1944) · The Big Sleep (1946) · The Brasher Doubloon (1947) · Lady in the Lake (1947) · The Long Goodbye (1973) · Farewell, My Lovely (1975) · The Big Sleep (1978)