Raymond Chandler

Entry from online Literary Encyclopedia ~ Lee Horsley's Raymond Chandler section (which includes biographical and plot summeries of the major novels)

Raymond Thornton Chandler was born in Chicago in 1888 but lived abroad, primarily in England, from the time he was seven until he was in his mid-twenties. Chandler's mother, Florence Thornton, was Anglo-Irish and, after the collapse of her marriage to the hard-drinking Maurice Chandler, she left America with her son. Looked after by Florence's brother Ernest, they lived in South London, and, from 1900 until 1904, Chandler was a day boy at Dulwich College. Chandler's English upbringing is one of the factors most often invoked to explain his individual shaping of American hard-boiled detective fiction. Arguably the experience that gave him both a mastery of language and his abiding sense of integrity, honour and decency, his English public school education also meant that he never completely belonged to the American scene - much less to the mean streets that he made his subject as a writer. In the distinctive style of the novels he wrote in mid-life, readers have often sensed this earlier English self, which gave the mature Chandler both his fascination with and his aloofness from the American voice.

Having been withdrawn a year early from Dulwich for financial reasons, Chandler spent the next year in France and Germany preparing to sit the Civil Service examinations, which he passed with high marks in 1907. He was rewarded with the post of Assistant Stores Manager in the Admiralty, a job he disliked intensely. Resigning after only half a year, he turned to working as a literary journalist, writing poems, essays and book reviews for the Academy and the Westminster Gazette. The small amount of money he was earning as a writer was not enough to support his mother (a task Chandler was now expected to undertake), and in 1912 his uncle Ernest somewhat reluctantly loaned him £500 to enable him to set sail for America.

It was another two decades before Chandler again attempted to earn his living as a writer. By early 1913, he had reached Southern California and was supporting himself with a variety of poorly paid casual jobs, such as picking apricots and stringing tennis racquets. After a brief stint studying book-keeping at night school, Chandler started working as a book-keeper at the Los Angeles Creamery, earning enough to support his mother, who soon joined him in America. In 1917 he enlisted in the Canadian Army, and in the Spring of 1918 he served as an infantryman in France. He sustained a concussion in June, when his battalion's trench was bombarded by German artillery. Transferred to the Royal Air Force in England, he trained to fly military aircraft, but the war ended before he saw action as a pilot, and in January 1919 he was shipped back to Canada, soon to be discharged.

As Chandler entered his thirties, and America entered the Roaring Twenties, his life was transformed by two key events: towards the end of 1919, he fell in love with Cissy Pascal; and, in 1920, just as California began to experience an oil boom, he went to work as a junior accountant for the Dabney Oil Syndicate. The still beautiful Cissy, whose true age (fifty) Chandler did not know until some time later, was already married to his friend Julian Pascal. A divorce was amicably arranged in 1920, but the opposition of Chandler's mother to the match meant that they did not marry until Florence's death in 1924. Chandler's job in the oil industry enabled him to support both his mother and Cissy during the early 1920s, and by the time of his marriage he was a rising and comfortably affluent oil executive. Corporate corruption, however, as well as the sheer boredom of his job, weighed on Chandler, and by the late 1920s he had begun womanising and drinking heavily, sometimes living separately from Cissy, binge-drinking, experiencing alcoholic blackouts and failing to show up for work. In 1932, as he neared his mid-forties, he was fired by Dabneys.

This traumatic reversal, of course, marked the beginning of the two decades for which Chandler is remembered. Confronted with the danger of an irrevocable downward spiral, he was, by the end of 1932, sober, reunited with Cissy and living as cheaply as possible in Santa Monica. With a fresh access of confidence, he set about earning his living by writing for the pulp magazines, the most important of which was Black Mask, the birthplace, in the early 1920s, of the hard-boiled style and the tough detective story. Chandler had been struck by the 'forceful and honest' writing of the Black Mask boys and he diligently prepared himself to join their ranks, studying their methods, writing pastiches of their stories and keeping lists of possible names, titles and slang expressions. His first Black Mask story, which he rewrote five times in as many months, was 'Blackmailers Don't Shoot', published in December 1933. Within six years (by the end of 1939), Chandler had written twenty more stories, most of them for Black Mask but others for Dime Detective and Detective Fiction Weekly. Not all of these stories showed the promise of his best work, but there are some that stand out: 'Finger Man' (Black Mask, 1934), for example, is the first story to be narrated by Philip Marlowe, and, although Chandler did little to develop the character of his private eye, the stylistic traits of his later fiction were beginning to emerge, marking him out as one of the most distinctive and marketable talents amongst Black Mask contributors. The kinds of corruption with which the Chandler protagonist has to contend were also being sketched in: in 'Finger Man', the machinations of 'a big politico' who is willing to go to great lengths to 'fix' things in his territory; in 'Guns at Cyrano's' (Black Mask, 1936), the unscrupulous behaviour of a corrupt state Senator; in 'Trouble is My Business ' (Dime Detective , 1939) , a wealthy old man who has ruined people during the Depression 'all proper and legitimate, the way that kind of heel ruins people', driving them to suicide while never having 'lost a nickel himself'.

If the affluent 20s had given a boost to Chandler's career in the oil industry, the boom and bust decades in Los Angeles were even more crucially important to the creation of his fiction. By the time he wrote his first novel, towards the end of the 30s, he had lived for over two decades in central Los Angeles or in its surrounding towns and suburbs. Although his work deals less directly with the Depression than does much other literary noir of the period (for example, the novels of W. R. Burnett, Horace McCoy, Edward Anderson), the effects of the Depression years in Los Angeles are nevertheless an essential part of the Chandler world. When he turned from writing stories to writing novels, he used his broader canvas to fill out the picture of a rapidly expanding Los Angeles in which fortunes were being made and lost both in legitimate enterprises (oil, land development, entertainment) and in the rackets. Chandler went beyond most of his hard-boiled contemporaries in his detailed depiction of the corruption that had come with precipitate growth - the greed and vice, the crimes of power-hungry politicians, the clandestine alliances of government officials with gangsters , the criminality of 'legitimate business ', the crookedness and brutality of the LAPD. These preoccupations, in both the novels and stories, provide the public dimension of Chandler's narratives.

Chandler had started work on The Big Sleep in the summer of 1938 (it was published by Knopf in 1939), and the 'degeneracy', depravity and sheer nastiness of this fictional world were amongst the things to which early critics took most exception in their reviews of his first novel. There were other qualities as well, however, which would in due course begin to attract critical attention. Freed from the restrictions of writing pulp stories, he used the more leisurely pace of the novel-length narrative to give substance not just to his creation of the different strata of Los Angeles life but also to his narrator, establishing at the outset his characteristic tone of witty, ironic aloofness, his chivalric qualities, his moral make-up as a man of honour 'good enough for any world' (Chandler's phrase in 'The Simple Art of Murder'). From the first page of the first novel, the trade-mark elements of the Chandler style are vividly present, as Marlowe, introducing himself with self-depecating wit ('I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it.'), sweeps his eyes over the Sternwood mansion, taking in everything from the knight who is 'not getting anywhere' rescuing a lady on a stained-glass panel to the trees 'trimmed as carefully as poodle dogs'.

By early 1940 Chandler had finished his second Marlowe novel, Farewell, My Lovely, and his work had begun to gain some recognition. He was not, however, acquiring the sort of widespread reputation necessary if he was to make much money from of his writing, and his feelings of frustration and discontent are arguably reflected in his next two novels, The High Window (1942) and The Lady in the Lake (1943), in Marlowe's increasingly cynical tone, his sense of wasted effort and thwarted aspirations. Chandler's reviews of the early 1940s, however, were beginning to acknowledge his craftsmanship and his mastery of 'the just-tough-enough school' (Time, 6 December 1943), and by the mid-1940s critics (most notably Edmund Wilson) had begun to argue that his style, his characterisation and his ability to create atmosphere elevated his work above the run of both classic and hard-boiled detective fiction.

In May 1943, Chandler achieved recognition in another quarter, receiving a call from a young staff producer at Paramount Studios, Joseph Sistrom. A devotee of pulp fiction, Sistrom thought Chandler's funny, vivid prose would make him an ideal collaborator for Billy Wilder in the tricky task of adapting James M. Cain's Double Indemnity for the screen. This was a fortunate turning point for Chandler, bringing him to Hollywood just at the beginning of one of the movie industry's most productive eras, and one to which his talents were remarkably well suited. The time spent co-writing Double Indemnity with Wilder was described by Chandler as 'an agonizing experience', but one from which he learned as much about screen writing as he was capable of learning, and the huge critical and popular success of the film secured for him a period of employment by Paramount, sometimes as a 'dialogue doctor', improving the scripts of other writers, but also writing original screenplays, most notably The Blue Dahlia (directed by George Marshall and released by Paramount in 1946), which brought him another Academy Award nomination. He also began work (for MGM in 1945) on an adaptation of The Lady in the Lake, but soon withdrew from the project and asked that his name be removed from the credits. In November 1945 he expressed his disillusionment with Hollywood in an article written for Atlantic Monthly, and by the end of the year he was refusing to show up for work at Paramount. Suspended by the studio in January 1946, Chandler moved with Cissy to La Jolla - a place she had long set her heart on. The house they bought, with its picture window looking south across the bay to San Diego, was their home for most of the next decade.

Chandler's success with Double Indemnity had also created an interest in Hollywood in his own novels. The rights for The Big Sleep were sold to Warner Brothers in 1944, and its release in 1946, with Humphrey Bogart as Marlowe, finally brought Chandler international recognition. In his own career, however, there was to be no lasting renewal of his association with the movie industry. Although he subsequently worked on other screenplays (for example, on Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train), Chandler was now primarily engaged in the struggle to finish a novel he had begun whilst working for Paramount, The Little Sister, his weary and cynical portrayal of life in a Hollywood characterised by 'wind-blown hair and sunglasses...and waterfront morals' - a place, Marlowe reflects, where there ought to be a monument to the man who invented neon lights ('There's a boy who really made something out of nothing').

The Little Sister was finally published in June 1949. Work on Chandler's lengthiest and saddest novel, The Long Goodbye, occupied him on and off from 1949 until mid-1953. It was a period during which Cissy's health was in serious decline (she died in December 1954), and Chandler himself was ailing, gloomy and exhausted. The novel he produced, however, was his most ambitious and complex, an effort to move beyond the confines of genre fiction which is regarded by many critics as his best piece of work. The Marlowe who emerges in The Long Goodbye is less hard-boiled and more sombre, less able to separate the professional and the personal: as Anthony Boucher said in The New York Times Book Review (25 April 1954), Marlowe was now 'less a detective than a disturbed man of 42 on a quest for some evidence of truth and humanity'. After The Long Goodbye, Chandler published only one more novel, the generally less well-regarded Playback, written in 1956-57 and based on an unproduced screenplay he had written for Universal in the 1940s. Although both slighter and lighter in tone, Playback also contains lines that are taken by Chandler's best biographer, Tom Hiney, to be poignantly close to the feelings of despair and isolation that all too often were felt by Chandler in his final years, facing 'a blank wall in a meaningless room in a meaningless house'. Chandler divided his time during these last years between England and America, but found little happiness in either country. After a brief engagement to the Guiness heiress, Helga Greene, and confronted with her father's disapproval, Chandler returned alone to La Jolla. Within a fortnight, on 23^rd March 1959, he was dead.