Raymond Chandler's Books

Biography

Raymond Chandler (1888 to 1959) was born in Chicago to an Irish mother and American father. He had a tough childhood. His parents divorced when he was seven, leaving his mother to seek help from her family. She took Chandler to Waterford in Ireland and South London, where his Uncle supported them.

“My Uncle was a man of evil temper… (I remember) the terrible scenes in the dining room when a particular dish didn’t suit. He would order it removed and sit in stony silence for three-quarters of an hour while the frantic housekeeper browbeat the servants downstairs and another meal was prepared… this was usually much worse than the one he had refused. But I can still feel the silence.” (Irish Times)

Chandler attended Dulwich College — a public school whose alumni include P.G. Wodehouse and C.S. Forester. In 1907, he became a British citizen and took the British Civil Service examination. Chandler came third out of 600 hopeful candidates, winning him a desirable job in the Admiralty. He left after only a year. The Civil Service was too oppressive.

First World War

After returning to America, Chandler joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force and fought in the First World War. At Vimy Ridge, the Germans shelled his platoon; he was the only man to survive. After the war, back in North America, he met Cissy, the mother of one of the men who had enlisted with him. Six years later, they married. Cissy was twenty years his senior.

Corporate America

Chandler then threw his lot in with corporate America, working for the Danny Oil Syndicate. His attitude helped him rise through the ranks.

“We had a truck carrying pipe in Signal Hill… and the pipe stuck out quite a long way, but there was a red lantern on it, according to law. A car with two drunken sailors and two drunken girls crashed into it and filed actions for $1,000 apiece….

The insurance company said, ‘Oh well, it costs a lot of money to defend these suits, and we’d rather settle.’

I said, ‘That’s all very well. It doesn’t cost you anything to settle. You simply put the rates up. If you don’t want to fight this case and fight it competently, my company will fight it.’

‘At your own expense?‘

‘Of course not. We’ll sue you for what it costs us unless you pay without that necessity.'” (The Raymond Chandler Papers)

By 1931 Chandler was a highly paid Vice President. He was prone to womanising, alcoholism, and absenteeism for all his corporate bluster. When the great depression struck, the oil company sacked him. He was an unemployed forty-four-year-old drunk with a sixty-two-year-old wife.

Rejuvenation

Chandler decided to become a crime writer in a remarkable reinvention act.

“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.” (Faded Page)

Black Mask bought and published Chandler’s first short story, Blackmailers Don’t Shoot, for a penny a word. His pay soon rose to a nickel a word, but Chandler was a slow writer, recreating entire scenes rather than editing them. In 1938 he earned $1,275, far less than the $10,000 he had made as an oil company executive.

Philip Marlowe’s First Appearance

Realising that he needed to write a novel, Chandler combined the plots from two of his short stories. In 1939 the hard-drinking, wisecracking Philip Marlowe appeared in The Big Sleep. Paperback and movie rights began to sell, and in 1942 Chandler was hired as a scriptwriter by Hollywood. By 1945 Chandler was earning enough to pay $50,000 in income tax.

Lyrical Style

Despite his success as a scriptwriter, Chandler is best known for his seven Philip Marlowe novels. He, along with Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain, is credited as one of the founders of the hard-boiled genre. His contribution is best known for his stylistic similes and sharp, lyrical style:

I hung up. It was a good start, but it didn’t go far enough. I ought to have locked the door and hidden under the desk.
The Little Sister

I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.
Farewell, My Lovely

The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back.
The Long Good-bye

Raymond Chandler’s books are so evocative they have earned him the adjective “Chandleresque”. There are many imitations and parodies:

Jessica Rabbit: You don’t know how hard it is being a woman looking the way I do.

Eddie Valiant: You don’t know how hard it is being a man looking at a woman looking the way you do.

Jessica Rabbit: I’m not bad. I’m just drawn that way.
Jeffrey Price and Peter S. Seaman, Who Framed Roger Rabbit

Structure

Chandler was also part of the movement away from the structure of the classic British mystery novel with its climactic finale.

“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 that 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 filmmakers.

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.” (Alec Nevala-Lee)

Marlowe on Film

Raymond Chandler’s books were perfect for the silver screen. All but one of his novels were made into films, and he became one of his generation’s most successful movie writers. His cinematic style wasn’t without his critics; Patrick Anderson of the Washington Post described his plots as “rambling at best and incoherent at worst”.

An Unhappy Ending

After his wife died in 1954, Chandler fell into depression and tried to commit suicide. Despondent and lonely, he succumbed to alcoholism, and pneumonia claimed his life in 1959. He was buried in San Diego.

There is a final twist to the Chandler legend. Distraught and drunk, Chandler had left Cissy’s ashes unclaimed in a storage locker at the crematorium. Her remains were finally interred with him in 2011. Their joint gravestone is inscribed with a Chandler quotation: