Raymond Chandler

Critique • Works • Views and quotes

Poet of the sun-blinded mean streets

He's called the successor to Dashiell Hammett as the world's premier hard-boiled detective fiction writer. Surpassing Hammett, some would say.

His creation, Los Angeles gumshoe Philip Marlowe, has become the archetypal private eye, more iconic and more enduring than Hammett's Continental Op, Sam Spade or Nick Charles. More than later contenders like Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer, Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer or Robert B. Parker's Spenser.

But Raymond Chandler shares more with Hammett than having created a memorable detective portrayed in classic film noir adaptations. For one thing, like Hammett, he didn't publish all that much. He started late in life—around the time Hammett was wrapping up his writing career. Actually older than Hammett, he was forty-five, when he first broke into print with a story in Black Mask magazine and he was in his fifties by the time his first novel, The Big Sleep (1939), was published.

He had been born in Chicago but was raised in England and studied law in France and Germany, before returning to the U.S. in 1912. He was in the Canadian army during the Great War and afterwards had jobs in business during the Depression, before he turned to writing. And then he completed only seven novels—low output in the popular crime field.

His parsimonious writing style of direct, plain language in short declarative sentences owes a lot to Hammett, as well as to Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson and other realistic American writers of the early twentieth century. Yet his style, delivered in Marlowe's sardonic voice, is uniquely his.

Hard-bitten poetry

Elsewhere I comment on how he pares down narration in the style of much modern American prose and at the same time inflates the text with seemingly random remarks—sometimes cynical, often poetic, usually humorous and always sounding like the kind of observation that only Chandler/Marlowe could come up with.

Erupting among the spare, just-the-facts sentences are arresting scene-setting lines, throwaway wisecracks, novel descriptions of dead men, creative accounts of what it's like to take a bullet and or have a punch land square on your face.

Look at the mix of the economical and the imaginative in the descripion of his office in The High Window:

Three hard chairs and a swivel chair, flat desk with a glass top, five green filing cases, three of them full of nothing, a calendar and a framed license bond on the wall, a phone, a washbowl in a stained wood cupboard, a hatrack, a carpet that was just something on the floor and two open windows with net curtains that puckered in and out like the lips of a toothless old man sleeping.

The same stuff I had had last year, and the year before that. Not beautiful, not gay, but better than a tent on the beach.

Chandler has become widely quoted for the bizarrely effective similes, metaphors and metonymy found throughout the novels:

I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

She bent over me again. Blood began to move around in me, like a prospective tenant looking over a house.

It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.

She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.

Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.

From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.

She opened her mouth like a firebucket and laughed. That terminated my interest in her. I couldn't hear the laugh but the hole in her face when she unzippered her teeth was all I needed.

They also help paint an indelible picture of Marlowe, who has a fanciful frame of mind for a supposedly hard-bitten private detective. (He does after all carry the surname of a revered Elizabethan poet and dramatist.)

Moreover, Chandler's famous sleuth is, like Hammett's protagonists, a man of principle. Despite his tough exterior and rough manners, Marlowe follows a code of honour that stands out as endearingly old-fashioned in a corrupt, often vicious, world.

And like Hammett's works, Chandler's novels can be read as morality tales. Beneath all the roughhousing and sexual tension lies a critique of American society, run by greed and big money, that makes moral men like Marlowe necessary.

Chandler's vision however may be less politically hard-nosed than his predecessor's (I don't think he was a Communist as Hammett was) and he may have held out greater hope for the redeeming value of individual goodness. It is surprising how many of Chandler's hoodlums and vixens turn out to have good sides and do the honourable thing in a pinch. There's a sweet touch (just a touch) of Damon Runyon sentimentality in Chandler, despite his insistence on realism.

Of his literary idol, Ross Macdonald said (and you'll find this quoted on a million book covers): "Chandler wrote like a slumming angel and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence."

Lost in the scenes

Macdonald did criticize him though for not sufficiently working out his plots. The narrative of a private detective going about trying to solve a mystery often doesn't make sense in a Chandler novel.

That is, if you notice. Chances are you become too wrapped in the scenes of human interaction to pay much attention to how they are strung together. Chandler wrote great scenes. Perhaps because of his screenwriting experience, he wasn't afraid to heighten otherwise routine encounters during Marlowe's investigations into mini-dramas—taut, relaxed, exciting, witty, sexy, always engaging.

And that wonderful dialogue. Oddly flat at times, like our own everyday speech. But suddenly sparking into the clever and suggestive language that makes scenes breathe. Subtext strewn about everywhere. I'm not sure anyone has ever talked that cleverly or suggestively in real life, but when you read it in Chandler you hope maybe they have.

And then his sleuth pops up now and then with an insight to solve something and you remember this is supposed to be a mystery and you realize the information was there all along but you were too caught up in the personal give-and-take of those great scenes to notice. Or even to care.

Other works

Chandler's earlier stories have been collected in a remarkable volume, The Simple Art of Murder (1950, reprinted 1988). It is introduced with an insightful, unsparing essay by the author, written late in his life, about his craft and those who practised it before him, being particularly critical of the so-called golden age of cozy British mysteries.

A collection of four of his longer stories, Trouble Is My Business (1950, reprinted 1988) is similarly diverting.

Chandler also turned out some good screenplays for Hollywood. Among them is his original script for The Blue Dahlia (1946) and adaptations of James M. Cain's 1943 novella Double Indemnity and Patricia Highsmith's 1950 novel Strangers on a Train (1950). He was twice nominated for Academy Awards.

His last novel Playback also started as a screenplay in 1947–1948 but was never produced despite being top-notch film work. He used many of the characters and situations from the screenplay, and added Marlowe's point of view and much more, to create the novel a decade later. You can read Chandler's final draft of the superior script in Raymond Chandler's Unknown Thriller: The Screenplay of Playback (1985).

— Eric

 

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Dashiell Hammett

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