Raymond Chandler

• 1. Introduction

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  Raymond Thornton Chandler was born in Chicago in 1888 and died in 1959, having spent much of the intervening years doing almost everything except what he would become famous for. He was a civil servant, a tennis racket stringer, a fruit picker, a creamery worker, a soldier, and an oil executive before he ever wrote a line of fiction for money. Then, at forty-four, dismissed from a vice presidency during the Great Depression, he sat down with a pulp novelette by Erle Stanley Gardner and began teaching himself to write. Five months later, he had an 18,000-word story. He sold it for $180. "After that I never looked back," he wrote, "although I had a good many uneasy periods looking forward."

  What followed was a body of work so distinctive it gave English a new adjective. "Chandleresque" entered the language. His protagonist, Philip Marlowe, became so synonymous with the idea of a private detective that the word itself almost seems inadequate. His essay "The Simple Art of Murder" became the canonical critical statement on detective fiction. And the novels, particularly The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye, were praised not merely as genre entertainments but as serious literary achievements.

  How did a man who called himself "distinctly not a clever young man" build all of that? The answer involves a London education, a Canadian trench, a married woman eighteen years his senior, a Dulwich classmate he would never match, and a conviction that in fiction, the scene outranks the plot.

• 2. An Unlikely Education

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  Chandler's mother Florence was originally from Ireland, and after his father, a civil engineer for the railway, abandoned the family in the early 1890s, she made a decisive choice. In 1900, when Raymond was twelve, she took him to England, settling in Upper Norwood, now part of the London Borough of Croydon. For the next several years, Raymond lived there with his mother, his unmarried aunt, and his maternal grandmother, while a successful lawyer uncle in Waterford, Ireland, reluctantly provided financial support.

  The school Chandler attended was Dulwich College in London, a public school whose former pupils include P. G. Wodehouse and C. S. Forester. The education he received there was classical, and it left a permanent mark. The Philip Marlowe he would later create was no crude tough guy; Marlowe attended university, spoke some Spanish, and was a student of chess and classical music.

  One episode from Chandler's London years is particularly revealing. He encountered a young, bearded, sad-eyed writer named Richard Barham Middleton. Shortly afterward, Middleton died by suicide in Antwerp. Chandler wrote of the effect it had on him: "Middleton struck me as having far more talent than I was ever likely to possess; and if he couldn't make a go of it, it wasn't very likely that I could." The encounter did not stop him from writing, but it did persuade him to postpone any serious literary ambitions for years.

  In 1907, having passed the civil service examination after taking British citizenship, Chandler took an Admiralty job. His first poem was published during that period. But the servility of the civil service wore on him, and he resigned to write for the Daily Express and The Westminster Gazette. He was, by his own account, unsuccessful as a journalist. His first cousin was Max Adrian, an actor and founding member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, whose mother Mabel was a sister of Florence Thornton. Chandler's family moved in educated, professional circles; he simply had not yet found the form that would release his talent.

• 3. The Long Road to Fiction

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  In 1912, at the age of twenty-four, Chandler borrowed money from his Waterford uncle and returned to America. He stayed briefly in San Francisco, where he completed a correspondence course in bookkeeping ahead of schedule, then moved to Los Angeles in 1913 at the encouragement of his attorney friend Warren Lloyd. He strung tennis rackets, picked fruit, scrimped, and eventually found stable work at the Los Angeles Creamery.

  In 1917, he traveled to Victoria and enlisted in the 50th Reinforcement Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. He saw combat in the trenches in France with the 7th Battalion C.E.F., the British Columbia Regiment. He was twice hospitalized with Spanish flu during the pandemic. He was undergoing flight training with the fledgling Royal Air Force when the war ended.

  Back in Los Angeles after the armistice, Chandler began a love affair with Pearl Eugenie Pascal, known as Cissy, a married woman who was eighteen years older than he was and the stepmother of Gordon Pascal, with whom Chandler had enlisted. Cissy divorced her husband Julian in 1920, but Chandler's mother refused to sanction the marriage. For four years, Chandler supported both women financially. After Florence Chandler died on the 26th of September 1923, he was free to act; he and Cissy married on the 6th of February 1924.

  His professional life appeared to be thriving. Starting as a bookkeeper and auditor in 1922, he rose by 1931 to a highly paid vice presidency at the Dabney Oil Syndicate. Then alcoholism, absenteeism, affairs with female employees, and threatened suicides cost him the position, after a decade with the company. He was forty-four years old and had to start over. He had an 18,000-word novelette by Erle Stanley Gardner and five months of patient study ahead of him.

• 4. The Making of Marlowe

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  "Blackmailers Don't Shoot" appeared in Black Mask magazine in December 1933, the product of five months of slow, painstaking work. According to genre historian Herbert Ruhm, Erle Stanley Gardner, by contrast, could produce a pulp story in three or four days and turned out an estimated one thousand of them. Chandler worked differently: revising again and again, calibrating sentences with a precision that would eventually make critics compare his prose style to something between a poem and a punch.

  The detective Philip Marlowe appeared in 1939, in The Big Sleep, speaking in the first person. Chandler explained in a 1950 letter to his English publisher Hamish Hamilton why he had gravitated toward pulp fiction. Wandering up the Pacific Coast in an automobile, he discovered that pulp magazines were cheap enough to throw away, and that some of the writing in Black Mask was, as he put it, "pretty forceful and honest, even though it had its crude aspect." He decided it might be a good way to learn to write fiction while getting paid at the same time.

  What Chandler brought to the form was a sensibility shaped by Dulwich and London, filtered through Los Angeles. The Marlowe novels are saturated with the geography of Southern California in the 1930s and 1940s: places real but pseudonymous, Bay City standing for Santa Monica, Gray Lake for Silver Lake, Idle Valley a composite of wealthy San Fernando Valley communities. Marlowe moves through that landscape as someone who belongs to it and refuses to be corrupted by it. He declines a client's fee when he considers the job unethical. He has few friends. He attends to evil with no certainty that justice will follow, which was, for Chandler, the fundamental point.

  In his introduction to the 1950 collection Trouble Is My Business, Chandler described the emotional distinction between classical detective fiction and the hardboiled school: the old form believed that murder will out and justice will be done; the Black Mask school believed justice would be done only if "some very determined individual makes it his business to see that justice is done." Marlowe was that individual.

• 5. Hollywood and Its Frictions

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  Literary success and film adaptations created demand for Chandler as a screenwriter. His second Marlowe novel, Farewell, My Lovely, published in 1940, became the basis for three film versions, including the 1944 Murder My Sweet. It was the screen debut of the Marlowe character, played by Dick Powell in a depiction Chandler applauded.

  His most celebrated screen collaboration was with Billy Wilder on Double Indemnity in 1944, adapted from James M. Cain's novel. The noir screenplay received an Academy Award nomination. Wilder described the working arrangement plainly: he guided the structure and wrote much of the dialogue, while Chandler comprehended the process and began constructing as well. Wilder acknowledged that the dialogue making the film memorable was largely Chandler's work.

  Chandler's only original screenplay was The Blue Dahlia in 1946. He had not written a conclusion for the script, and he informed producer John Houseman that he could finish it only while drunk, with round-the-clock secretaries and drivers on hand. Houseman agreed to the arrangement. The script earned Chandler his second Academy Award nomination.

  The collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock on Strangers on a Train in 1951 went differently. The film was an ironic murder story adapted from Patricia Highsmith's novel, which Chandler found implausible. The two men clashed and stopped speaking after Hitchcock heard Chandler had called him "that fat bastard." Hitchcock made a show of throwing Chandler's two draft screenplays into the studio trash can while holding his nose. Despite the rupture, Chandler retained the lead screenwriting credit alongside Czenzi Ormonde. The films he worked on, and the cinematic adaptations of his novels, proved influential on the American film noir genre.

• 6. Loss and the Final Years

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

  In 1955, Chandler attempted suicide. According to Judith Freeman's book The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved, he called the police beforehand to say he planned to kill himself, which Freeman describes as "a cry for help." His personal life during this period was complicated by his relationships with several women, including Helga Greene, his literary agent; Jean Fracasse, his secretary; Sonia Orwell, George Orwell's widow; and Natasha Spender, the wife of Stephen Spender. He regained his U.S. citizenship in 1956, while keeping his British rights. In the year before his death, the Mystery Writers of America elected him their president.

  He died at Scripps Memorial Hospital in 1959. His death certificate listed pneumonial peripheral vascular shock and prerenal uremia as the causes. His estate, valued at $60,000, passed to Helga Greene after she prevailed in a 1960 lawsuit filed by Fracasse, who had contested Chandler's handwritten codicil to his will.

  Chandler had wished to be cremated and placed next to Cissy in Cypress View Mausoleum, but he left no funeral or burial instructions, and he was buried instead at Mount Hope Cemetery in San Diego. In 2010, Chandler scholar Loren Latker petitioned a San Diego court to disinter Cissy's remains. Judge Richard S. Whitney granted the order after a hearing in September 2010. On the 14th of February 2011, Cissy's ashes were brought to Mount Hope and interred above Chandler's grave, as they had both wanted. About one hundred people attended the ceremony. The shared gravestone carries a line from The Big Sleep: "Dead men are heavier than broken hearts."

• 7. A Style and Its Legacy

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  W. H. Auden, Evelyn Waugh, and Ian Fleming all admired Chandler's prose. In a radio discussion with Chandler, Fleming said he offered "some of the finest dialogue written in any prose today." Mystery writer Paul Levine later described the style as "the literary equivalent of a quick punch to the gut."

  What made that style recognizable was, above all, the similes. They came out of nowhere and landed with precision: "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"; "He was about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food." Chandler's primary influence was Dashiell Hammett, but these sharp, lyrical comparisons were entirely his own.

  Admiration was not universal. A critic at The Washington Post, Patrick Anderson, described Chandler's plots as "rambling at best and incoherent at worst," and noted, anecdotally if perhaps also accurately, that Chandler himself did not know who killed the chauffeur in The Big Sleep. Anderson criticized the treatment of Black, female, and homosexual characters, calling Chandler "a rather nasty man at times." Chandler had already anticipated the critical whipsaw in a 1942 letter to Blanche Knopf: when he wrote tough and fast, he was panned for it; when he toned it down and developed the emotional side, he was panned for leaving out what he had been panned for including.

  The Long Goodbye, published in 1953, 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 mainstream novel that happened to contain elements of mystery. The Big Sleep placed second on the Crime Writers' Association poll of the 100 best crime novels. The intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Cahuenga Avenue in Hollywood is named Raymond Chandler Square, designated Los Angeles Historic Cultural Monument number 597 in 1994. Robert B. Parker, who completed the unfinished Poodle Springs in 1989 and wrote the sequel Perchance to Dream, described Marlowe as "the culminating American hero: wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical and rebellious." A previously unknown comic operetta with a libretto by Chandler, "The Princess and the Pedlar," was discovered among uncatalogued holdings at the Library of Congress in 2014; the Raymond Chandler estate has called it "no more than a curiosity," but a team under actor and director Paul Sand is seeking permission to produce it in Los Angeles.