The novel of detection little by little educates the public to its own weaknesses, which it cannot possibly remove, because they are inherent. It can flourish only until enough people know its vocabulary.
—Letter to James Sandoe—October 2, 1947
I really don’t seem to take the mystery element in the detective story as seriously as I should … the mind which can produce a coolly-thought-out puzzle can’t, as a rule, develop the fire and dash necessary for vivid writing.
—Letter to Charles Morton—July 17, 1944
Murder novels … they have the elements of heroism without being heroic … border on tragedy and never quite become tragic … it is possible that the tensions in a novel of murder are the simplest and yet most complete pattern of the tensions in which we live in this generation.
—Letter to James Sandoe—October 18, 1948
The role of mystery novelist, he felt, was “to outwit the reader without out-thinking him” (“The Simple Art of Murder”—1950).
At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.
I have suspected for some time that the better you write a mystery, the more clearly you demonstrate that the mystery is really not worth writing … If it is well written, it shouldn’t be a mystery.
—Letter to Hamish Hamilton—October 5, 1949
The mystery writer’s material is melodrama, which is an exaggeration of violence and fear beyond what one normally experiences in life … The means he uses are realistic in the sense that such things happen to people like these and in places like these; but this realism is superficial; the potential of emotion is overcharged, the compression of time and event is an improbability, and although such things happen, they do not happen so fast and in such a tight frame of logic to so closely knit a group of people.
—Letter to Bernice Baumgarten—March 11, 1949
The mystery story is a kind of writing that needs not dwell in the shadow of the past and owes little if any allegiance to the cult of the classic … There are no “classics” of crime and detection. Not one. Within its frame of reference, which is the only way it should be judged, a classic is a piece of writing which exhausts the possibilities of its form and can hardly be surpassed. No story or novel of mystery has done that yet. Few have come close. Which is why otherwise reasonable people continue to assault the citadel.
—“The Simple Art of Murder” (1950)
In a later letter (to Bernice Bergman, May 14, 1952) he pursued the point …
I don’t care whether the mystery was fairly obvious but I cared about the people, about this strange corrupt world we live in, and how any man who tries to be honest looks in the end either sentimental or just plain foolish … You write in a style that has been imitated, even plagiarized, to the point where you begin to look as if you were imitating your imitators.
In any case, most of those imitators missed the point by confusing violence with content:
The best hardboiled writers never try to be tough; they allow toughness to happen when it seems inevitable for its time, place and condition.
—Letter to Dorothy Gardner—January 1956
From early in his career it irked him to be lumped in with
the smooth and shallow operators like [Ngaio] Marsh, [Rex] Stout and [Agatha] Christie. Very likely they write better mysteries than I do, but their words don’t get up and walk. Mine do …
—Letter to Hardwick Moseley—April 23, 1949
I am not just a tough writer; I am the best there is in my line and the best there has ever been; I am tough only incidentally; substantially I am an original stylist with a very daring kind of imagination.
—Letter to Carl Brandt—December 21, 1950
Although in 1955 he is telling Hamish Hamilton (April 27) that he is
just a beat‑up pulp writer and that in the USA is ranked slightly above a mulatto.
A thriller writer in England, if he is good enough, is just as good as anyone else.
Nonetheless …
I still regard myself as an amateur and insist on having some fun out of my work. I just can’t take myself seriously enough to be otherwise.
In The Lady in the Lake Marlowe parodies the kind of story in which he himself had his beginning. He tells murderess Muriel Chess, who is menacing him,
“Detective confronts murderer. Murderer produces gun, points same at detective. Murderer tells detective the whole sad story, with the idea of shooting him at the end of it. Thus wasting a lot of valuable time, even if in the end murderer did shoot detective. Only murderer never does. Something always happens to prevent it.”
And again …
The time comes when you have to choose between pace and depth of focus, between action and character, menace and wit. I now choose the second in each case.
—Letter to Alex Barris—April 16, 1949
In 1949 he decided it was time to set down a few ground rules for his chosen form of expression. He called them “Casual Notes on the Mystery Novel” and they read (in part) …
1. The mystery novel must be credibly motivated both as to the original situation and the denouement. It must consist of the plausible actions of plausible people in plausible circumstances, it being remembered that plausibility is largely a matter of style.
2. The mystery story must be technically sound about methods of murder and detection.
3. It must be realistic as to character, setting and atmosphere. It must be about real people in a real world.
4. The mystery novel must have a sound story value apart from the mystery element.
5. The mystery novel must have enough essential simplicity of structure to be explained easily when the time comes.
6. The mystery must elude a reasonably intelligent reader.
7. The solution, once revealed, must seem to have been inevitable.
8. The mystery novel must not try to do everything at once.
9. The mystery novel must punish the criminal in one way or another, not necessarily by operation of the law courts.
10. The mystery novel must be reasonably honest with the reader.
There were several addenda …
1. The perfect mystery cannot be written.
2. It has been said that “nobody cares about the corpse.” This is nonsense, it is throwing away a valuable element. It is like saying that the murder of your aunt means no more to you than the murder of an unknown man in a city you never visited.
3. A mystery serial seldom makes a good mystery novel. The curtains depend for their effect on your not having the next chapter. When the chapters are put together the moments of false suspense are merely annoying.
4. Love interest nearly always weakens a mystery because it introduces a type of suspense that is antagonistic to the detective’s struggle to solve the problem.
5. It is the paradox of the mystery novel that while its structure will seldom if ever stand up under the close scrutiny of an analytical mind, it is precisely to that type of mind that it makes its greatest appeal.
6. Show me a man or woman who cannot stand mysteries and I will show you a fool, a clever fool—perhaps—but a fool just the same.
People will continue to read mysteries. Maybe because regular novels are no longer satisfying as stories. Or maybe it’s the inner sadism in people. Or maybe Somerset Maugham is right that everyone is fascinated by mysteries because murder is the one irrevocable crime. You can get back the jewels, but never a human being’s life.
—Interview with Irving Wallace—July 1946
Over time he realized that changing times and tastes would force a change in the genre …
The hard-hitting story will not die completely but it will have to become more civilized.
By 1953 he is writing to Alfred Knopf …
I’m a little tired of the kick-’em-in-the-teeth stuff myself. I hope I have developed, but perhaps I have only grown tired and soft, but certainly not mellow.
/> What a pity there is nothing in essay writing. I could have been a very fine essayist, and should thoroughly have enjoyed that. Much more so than murder stories, which part of my mind always looks on with a certain condescension.
—Letter to Juanita Messick—August 12, 1953
Heigh ho, I think I’ll write an English detective story, one about Superintendent Jones and two elderly sisters in the thatched cottage, something with Latin in it and music and period furniture and a gentleman’s gentleman: above all one of those books where everybody goes for nice long walks.
—Letter to Blanche Knopf—October 22, 1942
The passing of the years did nothing to improve matters. He would complain to Hamish Hamilton …
I’m fed up with the California locale … There are things about writing that I love, but it is a lonely and ungrateful profession and personally I’d much rather have been a barrister, or even an actor.
—January 16, 1954
Dame Agatha Christie (1890–1976). Photofest (illustrations credit 8.4)
One of the many foreign-language editions. This one started life as “Spanish Blood.” (illustrations credit 8.5)
Two years later the place is even more to blame …
I know now what is the matter with my writing or not writing. I’ve lost my affinity for my background. Los Angeles is no longer my city … There is nothing for me to write about. To write about a place you have to love it or hate it or do both by turns, which is usually the way you love a woman. But a sense of vacuity or boredom—that is fatal.
—Letter to Jessica Tyndale—July 12, 1956
Tough and cynical as he chose to appear, Chandler never took his eye off posterity and frequently hinted at his own literary epitaph—occasionally striking a note of the faux naïf in doing so that he despised when he detected it in others …
What greater prestige can a man like me (not too greatly gifted, but very understanding) have than to have taken a cheap, shoddy and utterly lost kind of writing, and have made of it something that intellectuals claw each other about?
—Letter to Charles Morton—January 15, 1945
In his letters he would externalize the ceaseless internal debate …
What should a man do with whatever talent God happened in an absent moment to give him? Should he be tough and make a lot of money like me? … A writer has nothing to trade with but his life … So how much do you concede? I don’t know. I could write a best-seller, but I never have. There was always something I couldn’t leave out or something I had to put in …
I am not a dedicated writer. I am only dedicated as a person … Most writers are frustrated bastards with unhappy domestic lives. I was happy for too long a time, perhaps. I never really thought of what I wrote as anything more than a fire for Cissy to warm her hands at. She didn’t even much like what I wrote. She never understood, and most people don’t, that to get money you have to master the world you live in, to a certain extent, and not be too frail to accept its standards.
In this same letter to John Houseman, he added, as a sort of valediction …
I hope you know I never thought of myself as important and never could. The word itself is even a bit distasteful.
I suppose all writers are crazy, but if they are any good, I believe they have a terrible honesty.
—Letter to Edgar Carter—June 3, 1957
It was for others to reach the verdict he wanted. In its obituary the London Times concluded … “In working the common vein of crime fiction he mined the gold of literature.”
Nine
Envoi
A Long Goodbye … to the Big Sleep
What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill. You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell.
—The Big Sleep
We still have dreams, but we know now that most of them will come to nothing. And we also most fortunately know that it really doesn’t matter.
—Letter to Charles Morton—October 9, 1950
It is one of the [few] charms of not being as young as you were that you can stick your neck out, because you don’t give a damn.
My salute to posterity is a thumb to the end of the nose and the fingers outspread.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.
—The Long Goodbye
“Time makes everything mean and shabby and wrinkled. The tragedy of life … is not that the beautiful things die young, but that they grow old and mean.”
—Roger Wade in The Long Goodbye
To know me in the flesh is to pass on to better things.
I think I might be the first to admit that the sort of reticence which prevents a man from exploiting his own personality is really an inverted sort of egotism.
—Raymond Chandler
Raymond Chandler lived several lives in parallel.
There was the Raymond Chandler that other people saw, living, sometimes only partly living, breathing, eating—and frequently drinking. Quiet, studious and courteous when sober; quarrelsome and curmudgeonly when drunk.
Personally I am sensitive and even diffident. At times I am extremely caustic and pugnacious, at other times very sentimental. I am not a good mixer because I am very easily bored, and to me the average never seems good enough, in people or in anything else.
—Letter to Hamish Hamilton—November 10, 1950
I am one of those people who have to be known exactly the right amount to be liked. I am standoffish with strangers, a form of shyness which whiskey cured when I was still able to take it in the requisite quantities. I am terribly blunt, having been raised in that English tradition which permits a gentleman to be almost infinitely rude if he keeps his voice down.
My character is an unbecoming mixture of outward diffidence and inward arrogance.
I am not a completely amiable character any more than I am a facile and prolific writer. I do most things the hard way, and I suffer a good deal over it.
I am, as a matter of fact, rather a supercilious person in many ways. I shouldn’t be at all surprised if it shows in what I write.
I never sulk. I am never huffy. Sometimes, I admit, I can be pretty irritable, but this is perhaps more the fault of a nervous temperament than of any innate vice.
There was the Raymond Chandler of the copious correspondence. Reflective, introspective, reaching out to anyone who would answer and play pen pal. The letters—as someone said—were “the conversations of a lonely man.”
“You got a friend somewhere who might like to hear your voice?” Marlowe asks rhetorically in The Little Sister.
I don’t know why I write so many letters. I guess my mind is just too active for my own good … It’s true that in letters I sometimes seem to have been more penetrating than in any other kind of writing … as I re-read some of them, I am really astonished … at the facility of expression and the range of thought I seemed to show even when I was only a struggling beginner …
Some are analytical, some are a bit poetical, some sad, and a good many caustic or even funny. They reveal, I suppose, a writer’s reaction to his early struggles and later his attempts to ward off the numerous people who exploit him in some way.
—Letter to Hamish Hamilton—May 16, 1957
I have too much in me that never gets a chance to get said. It’s probably not worth saying but then that doesn’t help me to realize that.
I’m afraid this letter may seem to you too personal. If so, may you forgive me? Sometimes I feel terribly alone.
—Letter to Edward Weeks—February 27, 1957
Then there was Chandler-as-Marlowe—the tough, incorruptible man who saw society’s flaws, accepted them with a wry shrug and a slug of booze and rose above them. For much of his professional life Marlowe was his ideal self, and the identification became so total that it was sometimes diffic
ult to know who was talking—even though Chandler himself liked to deny it.
As Chandler’s life began to unravel, Marlowe softened, too.
Something inside me had gone sour … No feelings at all was exactly right. I was as hollow as the spaces between the stars.
—The Long Goodbye
In and of itself it was an incestuous process and a story that should have been written—by someone else.
Finally, there was Chandler–as–Roger Wade—the self-destructive, loquacious writer. The bad Chandler. As Marlowe began to rust around the edges, like a knight in armor that’s been left out in the rain one time too many—as Chandler might have said, though better—Chandler found a new home for his increasing sourness and cynicism in the character of Wade, who briefly spars with Marlowe in The Long Goodbye.
The Long Goodbye. Hamish Hamilton, London, 1953. (illustrations credit 9.1)
In an earlier book Wade would have provided the opportunity for Chandler to take a more or less objective swing at literary pretension. Here he is not so much writing about writers as about himself: “He was a weak man, unreconciled, frustrated, but understandable.”
Chandler-Marlowe, however, can see a glimmer of hope. He tells Mrs. Wade that, despite all his faults, Wade is “a guy who can take a long hard look at himself and see what is there. It’s not a very common gift. Most people go through life using up half their energy trying to protect a dignity they never had.”