| See also:
Home pages: The Greatest Literature of All Time
|
|
|
|
The successor to Dashiell Hammett as the world's premier hard-boiled detective fiction writer. Some would say, greater than Hammett. His major creation, L.A. gumshoe Philip Marlowe, has become the archetypal private eye, more iconic and more enduring than any of Hammett's Continental Op, Sam Spade or Nick Charles, or than any of the following contenders like Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer, Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer or Robert B. Parker's Spenser. Raymond Chandler shares much else with Hammett, besides creating a memorable character portrayed by Humphrey Bogart in film noir classics. For one thing, he didn't publish all that much. He started writing late in life, in 1933 at age forty-five. 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 held down various jobs in business before his career failed during the Depression. Like Hammett a decade before, he began with stories in the pulp magazine Black Mask. In his lifetime he produced only seven novels, a low output for the popular crime field. His famous sleuth was also, like Hammett's main characters, 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 violence and sexual tension can be detected a critique of American society, run by greed and big money, that makes 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 to find, once you add them up, how many of Chandler's vixens and lowlife hoodlums actually turn out to have good sides and do the honourable thing. There's a sweet touch (just a touch) of Damon Runyon in Chandler, despite his insistence on absolute realism. He also wrote with more poetry. Intermittently erupting among the spare, just-the-facts sentences are a few arresting lines setting a scene, a throwaway wisecrack, a novel description of a dead man, a creative account of what it's like to take a bullet and or have a punch land square on your face. Most of all, it's in his wonderful dialogue. I'm not sure anyone ever talked that concisely and cleverly in real life, but when you read it you hope they did. MacDonald said of his hero (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." Chandler's most famous novel is his first, The Big Sleep (1939), a notoriously complex story, which nonetheless rewards successive readings. If you aren't familiar with the hard-boiled tradition, this is the novel to plunge into to get a sense of the genre's possibilities and difficulties. The novel most highly praised by critics may be The Long Goodbye (1953), which was freely adapted twenty years later into a revisionist film, directed by Robert Altman and starring Elliott Gould. But you needn't start with a novel. Chandler's earlier stories have been collected in a remarkable volume, The Simple Art of Murder (1950, reprinted 1988), introduced with an insightful, unsparing essay written by the author late in his life about his craft and those who practised it before him. Trouble Is My Business (1950, reprinted 1988) is a collection of four of his longer stories. His other novels, all of which are among the best mysteries written, are Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The High Window (1942), The Lady in the Lake (1943), The Little Sister (1949), and Playback (1958). All Chandler's novels have been adapted for film, the most loved being Bogart's The Big Sleep in 1946, although the 1975 version of Farewell, My Lovely with an aging Robert Mitchum is also very highly regarded. Chandler also turned out some great screenplays not based on his own novels for Hollywood, including scripts for Double Indemnity (1944), The Blue Dahlia (1946) and Strangers on a Train (1951). He was nominated for Academy awards for writing for the first two. His last novel Playback also started as a screenplay in 1947-48 but was never produced despite being top-notch film work. You can read Chandler's final draft in Raymond Chandler's Unknown Thriller: The Screenplay of Playback (1985). Chandler cannibalized 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. Chandler's unfinished novel Poodle Springs was completed by Parker in 1989. Interestingly in his last few works, we see Marlowe moving towards a kind of domesticity with a well-to-do woman who can almost match him for spirit. The pairing is reminiscent of Hammett's Charleses in his own last detective novel, and is a precursor of the more sensitive detectives in the hands of Parker and others. Parker also wrote a sequel to The Big Sleep called Perchance to Dream (1990), about which the less said the better. — Eric |
||
|
|
© Copyright 2002-2003 Eric McMillan. All rights reserved.
|
 |
CHANDLER, Raymond