22- ] American Literature - Raymond Chandler

 22- ] American Literature

Raymond Chandler 1888 – 1959

Raymond Chandler was a British-American novelist who wrote several screenplays and short stories. He published seven novels during his lifetime. The first, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. An eighth, Poodle Springs, unfinished at his death, was completed by another great crime writer, Robert B Parker. Six of Chandler’s novels have been made into films, some more than once.

Raymond Thornton Chandler, (born July 23, 1888, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.—died March 26, 1959, La Jolla, California), American author of detective fiction, the creator of the private detective Philip Marlowe, whom he characterized as a poor but honest upholder of ideals in an opportunistic and sometimes brutal society in Los Angeles.

From 1896 to 1912 Chandler lived in England with his mother, a British subject of Irish birth. Although he was an American citizen and a resident of California when World War I began in 1914, he served in the Canadian army and then in the Royal Flying Corps (afterward the Royal Air Force). Having returned to California in 1919, he prospered as a petroleum company executive until the Great Depression of the 1930s, when he turned to writing for a living. His first published short story appeared in the “pulp” magazine Black Mask in 1933. From 1943 he was a Hollywood screenwriter. Among his best-known scripts were for the films Double Indemnity (1944), The Blue Dahlia (1946), and Strangers on a Train (1951), the last written in collaboration with Czenzi Ormonde.

Chandler completed seven novels, all with Philip Marlowe as hero: The Big Sleep (1939), Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The High Window (1942), The Lady in the Lake (1943), The Little Sister (1949), The Long Goodbye (1953), and Playback (1958). Among his numerous short-story collections are Five Murderers (1944) and The Midnight Raymond Chandler (1971). The most popular film versions of Chandler’s work were Murder, My Sweet (1944; also distributed as Farewell, My Lovely), starring Dick Powell, and The Big Sleep (1946), starring Humphrey Bogart, both film noir classics.

Chandler had an immense stylistic influence on American popular literature. He is a founder of the hardboiled school of detective fiction, along with Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and other Black Mask writers. The protagonist of his novels, Philip Marlowe, like Hammett's Sam Spade, is considered by some to be synonymous with "private detective". Both were played in films by Humphrey Bogart, whom many consider to be the quintessential Marlowe.

At least three of Chandler's novels have been regarded as masterpieces, including Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Little Sister (1949), and The Long Goodbye (1953). The Long Goodbye was praised in an anthology of American crime stories as "arguably the first book since Hammett's The Glass Key, published more than twenty years earlier, to qualify as a serious and significant mainstream novel that just happened to possess elements of mystery". Four of his novels appear on the British-based Crime Writers Association Poll (1990) of the best 100 crime fiction novels ever published.

As a writer

In straitened financial circumstances during the Great Depression, Chandler turned to his latent writing talent to earn a living, teaching himself to write pulp fiction by analyzing and imitating a novelette by Erle Stanley Gardner. Chandler's first professional work, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in Black Mask magazine in 1933. According to genre historian Herbert Ruhm, "Chandler, who worked slowly and painstakingly, revising again and again, had taken five months to write the story. Erle Stanley Gardner could turn out a pulp story in three or four days—and turned out an estimated one thousand."

His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939, featuring the detective Philip Marlowe, speaking in the first person. In 1950, Chandler described in a letter to his English publisher, Hamish Hamilton, why he began reading pulp magazines and later wrote for them:

Wandering up and down the Pacific Coast in an automobile I began to read pulp magazines, because they were cheap enough to throw away and because I never had at any time any taste for the kind of thing which is known as women's magazines. This was in the great days of the Black Mask (if I may call them great days) and it struck me that some of the writing was pretty forceful and honest, even though it had its crude aspect. I decided that this might be a good way to try to learn to write fiction and get paid a small amount of money at the same time. I spent five months over an 18,000 word novelette and sold it for $180. After that I never looked back, although I had a good many uneasy periods looking forward.

His second Marlowe novel, Farewell, My Lovely (1940), became the basis for three movie versions adapted by other screenwriters, including the 1944 film Murder My Sweet, which marked the screen debut of the Marlowe character, played by Dick Powell (whose depiction of Marlowe was applauded by Chandler). Literary success and film adaptations led to a demand for Chandler himself as a screenwriter. He and Billy Wilder co-wrote Double Indemnity (1944), based on James M. Cain's novel of the same title. The noir screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award. Said Wilder, "I would just guide the structure and I would also do a lot of the dialogue, and he (Chandler) would then comprehend and start constructing too." Wilder acknowledged that the dialogue which makes the film so memorable was largely Chandler's.

Chandler's only produced original screenplay was The Blue Dahlia (1946). He had not written a denouement for the script and, according to producer John Houseman, Chandler concluded he could finish the script only if drunk, with the assistance of round-the-clock secretaries and drivers, which Houseman agreed to. The script gained Chandler's second Academy Award nomination for screenplay.

Chandler collaborated on the screenplay of Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951), an ironic murder story based on Patricia Highsmith's novel, which he thought implausible. Chandler clashed with Hitchcock and they stopped talking after Hitchcock heard Chandler had referred to him as "that fat bastard". Hitchcock made a show of throwing Chandler's two draft screenplays into the studio trash can while holding his nose, but Chandler retained the lead screenwriting credit along with Czenzi Ormonde.

In 1946, the Chandlers moved to La Jolla, an affluent coastal neighborhood of San Diego, California, where Chandler wrote two more Philip Marlowe novels, The Long Goodbye and his last completed work, Playback. The latter was derived from an unproduced courtroom drama screenplay he had written for Universal Studios.

Four chapters of a novel, unfinished at his death, were transformed into a final Philip Marlowe novel, Poodle Springs, by the mystery writer and Chandler admirer Robert B. Parker, in 1989. Parker shares the authorship with Chandler. Parker subsequently wrote a sequel to The Big Sleep entitled Perchance to Dream, which was salted with quotes from the original novel. Chandler's final Marlowe short story, circa 1957, was entitled "The Pencil". It later provided the basis of an episode of the HBO miniseries (1983–86), Philip Marlowe, Private Eye, starring Powers Boothe as Marlowe.

In 2014, "The Princess and the Pedlar" (1917), a previously unknown comic operetta, with libretto by Chandler and music by Julian Pascal, was discovered among the uncatalogued holdings of the Library of Congress. The work was never published or produced. It has been dismissed by the Raymond Chandler estate as "no more than… a curiosity." A small team under the direction of the actor and director Paul Sand is seeking permission to produce the operetta in Los Angeles.

Later life and death

Cissy Chandler died in 1954, after a long illness. Heartbroken and drunk, Chandler neglected to inter her cremated remains, and they sat for 57 years in a storage locker in the basement of Cypress View Mausoleum.

After Cissy's death, Chandler's loneliness worsened his propensity for clinical depression; he returned to drinking alcohol, never quitting it for long, and the quality and quantity of his writing suffered.[8] In 1955, he attempted suicide. In The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved, Judith Freeman says it was "a cry for help," given that he called the police beforehand, saying he planned to kill himself. Chandler's personal and professional life were 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). Chandler regained his U.S. citizenship in 1956, while retaining his British rights.

After a respite in England, he returned to La Jolla. He died at Scripps Memorial Hospital of pneumonial peripheral vascular shock and prerenal uremia (according to the death certificate) in 1959. Helga Greene inherited Chandler's $60,000 estate, after prevailing in a 1960 lawsuit filed by Fracasse contesting Chandler's holographic codicil to his will.

Chandler is buried at Mount Hope Cemetery, in San Diego, California. As Frank MacShane noted in his biography, The Life of Raymond Chandler, Chandler wished to be cremated and placed next to Cissy in Cypress View Mausoleum. Instead, he was buried in Mount Hope, because he had left no funeral or burial instructions.

On February 14, 2011, Cissy's ashes were conveyed from Cypress View to Mount Hope and interred under a new grave marker above Chandler's, as they had wished. About 100 people attended the ceremony, which included readings by the Rev. Randal Gardner, Powers Boothe, Judith Freeman and Aissa Wayne. The shared gravestone reads, "Dead men are heavier than broken hearts", a quotation from The Big Sleep. Chandler's original gravestone, placed by Jean Fracasse and her children, is still at the head of his grave; the new one is at the foot.

Views on pulp fiction

In his introduction to Trouble Is My Business (1950), a collection of many of his short stories, Chandler provided insight on the formula for the detective story and how the pulp magazines differed from previous detective stories:

The emotional basis of the standard detective story was and had always been that murder will out and justice will be done. Its technical basis was the relative insignificance of everything except the final denouement. What led up to that was more or less passage work. The denouement would justify everything. The technical basis of the Black Mask type of story on the other hand was that the scene outranked the plot, in the sense that a good plot was one which made good scenes. The ideal mystery was one you would read if the end was missing. We who tried to write it had the same point of view as the film makers. When I first went to Hollywood a very intelligent producer told me that you couldn't make a successful motion picture from a mystery story, because the whole point was a disclosure that took a few seconds of screen time while the audience was reaching for its hat. He was wrong, but only because he was thinking of the wrong kind of mystery.

Chandler also described the struggle that writers of pulp fiction had in following the formula demanded by the editors of the pulp magazines:

As I look back on my stories it would be absurd if I did not wish they had been better. But if they had been much better they would not have been published. If the formula had been a little less rigid, more of the writing of that time might have survived. Some of us tried pretty hard to break out of the formula, but we usually got caught and sent back. To exceed the limits of a formula without destroying it is the dream of every magazine writer who is not a hopeless hack.

Critical reception

Critics and writers, including W. H. Auden, Evelyn Waugh and Ian Fleming, greatly admired Chandler's prose. In a radio discussion with Chandler, Fleming said that Chandler offered "some of the finest dialogue written in any prose today". Contemporary mystery writer Paul Levine has described Chandler's style as the "literary equivalent of a quick punch to the gut".Chandler's swift-moving, hardboiled style was inspired mostly by Dashiell Hammett, but his sharp and lyrical similes are original: "The muzzle of the Luger looked like the mouth of the Second Street tunnel"; "He had a heart as big as one of Mae West's hips"; "Dead men are heavier than broken hearts"; "I went back to the seasteps and moved down them as cautiously as a cat on a wet floor"; "He was crazy as a pair of waltzing mice, but I liked him." Chandler's writing redefined the private eye fiction genre, led to the coining of the adjective "Chandleresque", and inevitably became the subject of parody and pastiche. Yet the detective Philip Marlowe is not a stereotypical tough guy, but a complex, sometimes sentimental man with few friends, who attended university, who speaks some Spanish and sometimes admires Mexicans and Blacks, and who is a student of chess and classical music. He is a man who refuses a prospective client's fee for a job he considers unethical.

The high regard in which Chandler is generally held today is in contrast to the critical sniping that stung the author during his lifetime. In a March 1942 letter to Blanche Knopf, published in Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler, he wrote, "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."

Although his work enjoys general acclaim today, Chandler has been criticized for certain aspects of his writing. The Washington Post reviewer Patrick Anderson described his plots as "rambling at best and incoherent at worst" (notoriously, even Chandler did not know who murdered the chauffeur in The Big Sleep) and Anderson criticized Chandler's treatment of black, female, and homosexual characters, calling him a "rather nasty man at times". Anderson nevertheless praised Chandler as "probably the most lyrical of the major crime writers".

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

Playback is the only one of his novels not to have been cinematically adapted. Arguably the most notable adaptation is The Big Sleep (1946), by Howard Hawks, with Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe. William Faulkner was a co-writer of the screenplay. Chandler's few screenwriting efforts and the cinematic adaptation of his novels proved stylistically and thematically influential on the American film noir genre. Notable for its revised take on the Marlowe character, transplanting the novel to the 1970s, is Robert Altman's 1973 neo-noir adaptation of The Long Goodbye.

Chandler was also a perceptive critic of detective fiction; his essay "The Simple Art of Murder" is the canonical essay in the field.

In popular culture

British songwriter Robyn Hitchcock paid homage to Chandler in the song "Raymond Chandler Evening" on the 1986 album Element of Light.

In the 11th issue of the influential Cyberpunk fanzine Cheap Truth, Vincent Omniaveritas conducted a fictitious interview with Chandler. The interview opines that Chandler's views towards the potential for respectability in pulp and genre fiction could also be applied to Science Fiction, specifically the Cyberpunk movement. It also derides Chandler's now-famous 1953 caricature of pulp Science Fiction. In the 2012 documentary, The Doors: Mr. Mojo Risin'- The Story of L.A. Woman, keyboardist Ray Manzarek describes Jim Morrison's lyrics to L.A. Woman: “Another lost angel in the city of night.” “The lyrics were so good. So Raymond Chandler, so Nathanael West, so 1930s, '40s, dark seamy side of Los Angeles. A place where Jim would easily go”.

In the season 4 (1993) of the TV series Northern Exposure, episode 16 starts with Chris reading to Ed a book with visible cover showing "Midnight - Raymond Chandler" while sitting in the Brick bar in the fictional town of Cicely, Alaska. Chris reads a passage from a book about the hot dry unnerving desert wind which causes people to act unexpectedly aggressively. The episode itself has a similar premise, namely, the "bad wind" blows through Cicely. After hearing the passage, Ed, impressed, utters "Whoa". Chris winks and says:"Raymond Chandler!"

In season 4, episode 18 of the sitcom Friends, during a debate over whether or not to name one of Phoebe's triplets "Chandler" or "Joey," Joey challenges Chandler to "name one famous person named Chandler." Chandler replies with "Raymond Chandler," to which Joey responds, "Someone you didn't make up!"

The popular Japanese superhero show Kamen Rider referenced Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye in the 2009 series Kamen Rider W. Kamen Rider W is a story of two detectives, Shotaro Hidari and Phillip, who become one when they transform into W, and battle criminals who are powered by drug-like USB flash drives called Gaia Memories. Phillip is named after Philip Marlowe; his name was chosen by Narumi Soukichi, Shotaro Hidari's mentor and fan of Chandler's The Long Goodbye. Many episodes of the show reference the hard-boiled style featured in Chandler's works. The Japanese version of the book can be seen prominently in "Kamen Rider X Kamen Rider W & Decade Movie Taisen 2010" as well as throughout the TV series on Shotaro's shelf, next to his desk where he writes his memoirs of cases in a wannabe hard-boiled, half-boiled style.

In the video game Cyberpunk 2077, there is a side quest called Raymond Chandler Evening, in which the protagonist follows the wife of a client who is suspected of cheating, all while the quest is narrated like a private eye from an old noir film.

Works by Raymond Chandler

Novels       

The Big SleepFarewell, My LovelyThe High WindowThe Lady in the LakeThe Little SisterThe Long GoodbyePlaybackPoodle Springs (unfinished)

Characters

Philip Marlowe

Short stories and collections  

"Nevada Gas""Smart-Aleck Kill"The Simple Art of MurderKiller in the Rain

Non-fiction

Raymond Chandler Speaking

Screenplays

Double IndemnityAnd Now TomorrowThe UnseenThe Blue DahliaStrangers on a TrainPlayback

Film adaptations

Time to Kill (1942)The Falcon Takes Over (1942)Murder, My Sweet (1944)The Big Sleep (1946)Lady in the Lake (1947)The Brasher Doubloon (1947)Marlowe (1969)The Long Goodbye (1973)Farewell, My Lovely (1975)The Big Sleep (1978)Poodle Springs (1998)

TV adaptations  

"The Big Sleep" (1950)"The Long Goodbye" (1954)Philip Marlowe, Private Eye (1983–1986)