There is a difference none the less. The good writer in the genre simply cannot be bothered with the labours of his colleague, the ingenious constructionist who has both to invent and to break down apparently unbreakable alibis. The good writer’s labours and difficulties are of a more complex and intractable kind. Chandler wrote slowly, embroidering and enriching the fabric of his narrative as he went along.
At a decisive point in ‘The Simple Art of Murder’ Chandler puts on, as it were, the black cap. However ingenious it may be, no detective story is really an intellectual success as a problem, and usually it does not come off artistically as a fiction. The real weakness of the form is that its very nature makes it impossible for the writer to give his characters their heads. That is indeed the crux of the matter and the clue to the art of Chandler’s own novels. His characters invariably give what Henry James calls ‘the blessed illusion’ of being free and independent people, perfectly capable of leading a free and normal life outside the dimension of a detective story. In War and Peace, or in Jane Austen’s great novels, or in Chekhov’s plays, it seems that no artificial literary genre has determined—pre-determined—the way the characters shall live and behave. So it is in Chandler at his best.
This freedom of the character, or the illusion of freedom if we prefer to call it so, is related to another source of strength in Chandler’s writing. He has not only created a world of his own but a world which, even if we ourselves are wholly ignorant of it, we know to be in some vital sense true to the facts as they are. Chandler’s world is not, like the world of James Bond, a purely fantasy world. It is more like Kafka’s. As Kafka’s world can freely be compared with our own experiences, so in its more modest, less absolute way, can Chandler’s. However pleasurably exotic and unfamiliar it may be, we feel we could live in it: indeed that we actually are living in it as we read; and this illusion of a complete reality must be all but unique in the annals of detective fiction.
We may even imagine that we could lead a perfectly ordinary humdrum life inside a Chandler novel, quite outside the usual excitements and preoccupations of a detective story. We should not ourselves be shooting or being shot at, slugged on the head, or threatened by corrupt policemen, but just driving about in the Oldsmobile, visiting quick lunch counters, and surveying with the eye of a connoisseur the streets and house interiors of Santa Monica. The permit supplied by Chandler would even entitle us to visit such opulent palaces as the Sternwood residence, to admire the family portraits and to wonder at the magnificence of the entrance hall, wide enough to accommodate ‘a troop of Indian elephants’ and decorated by a giant stained-glass panel ‘showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair.’
At once, in the opening paragraphs of The Big Sleep, the reader finds himself given the freedom of Chandler country, richly sinister and weirdly funny, humorous and foreboding at the same time. Marlowe is indeed a kind of knight, a knight who travels down mean streets, as well as to the houses of the rich with their English butlers and their festering secrets. But the lady he finds himself having to rescue lives in a world a very long way indeed from medieval romance. The knight of the stained-glass window, we might notice, goes to work in dark—rather than in the traditional knightly shining—armour and Marlowe is an operator who operates without show and with none of the traditional glamour of the detective. No detail of that sort is ever random or irrelevant in Chandler’s world. The marvellous detail is as meticulously pointed as it is unobtrusive.
Carmen Sternwood, the spoilt little rich girl and drug-taker, who displays herself naked for the camera of the creepiest of photographers, is the best—or the worst—that the real world of Hollywood runs to in the way of a damsel in distress. She is a far cry from the sentimental fantasy world of 1930s cinema. Because he declined to make love to her and politely turned down her degraded charms, she has disposed of one doomed representative of the contemporary knightly world, her sister’s husband, the ex-bootlegger and IRA man. He lies dishonoured in the old oil sump which has helped to enrich the Sternwood family—a family whose patriarch still clings to an old-fashioned and outdated code of honour.
Marlowe, the ironic knight-errant for twenty-five dollars a day, can save himself from her fatal embrace by quick thinking—another ironic touch out of the medieval romance. But as a further twist of irony he has himself had to be rescued by another lady, who appears in the role of damsel in distress, yet who turns out to be in love with her gangster husband and captor. Like some maimed king in an ancient legend, old General Sternwood presides over this domain, powerless to control his family, or to exercise authority in the modern world; while Norris the family butler, an honourable hireling like Marlowe himself, can only keep faith, and stay silent.
Chandler never wrote anything better than The Big Sleep. In the best of the novels which followed (he wrote three in fairly quick succession during the war years), he was able successfully to ‘cannibalize’, to use his own expression, many of the events and dramatic sequences he had used in earlier Black Mask stories. Writing in greater detail and with the sophisticated and elaborate sense of place and people which he had now developed so successfully, he produced other masterpieces like Farewell, My Lovely in 1940 and The Lady in the Lake three years later. Both have bravura openings, each of a quite different sort, rivalling that of The Big Sleep and transporting the reader at once into a new and vivid kind of Chandler landscape. The mountain setting of The Lady in the Lake is especially memorable. The California mountains, with their lakes and fish, birds and animals, come instantly alive, and, together with the ambiguous figure of the caretaker at the mountain property, form a perfect and brilliantly realized background to the discovery of the body. Indeed, as so often happens in the best of Chandler, the detail of background and setting is more gripping than the mystery itself and its solution. In this novel these are, none the less, effective enough, reminding us that the author, during this period, was a highly talented and inventive screenwriter, who worked with success on the script of such screen masterpieces as Double Indemnity, and had a hand in bringing to the cinema Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, and his own novels as well.
Like all writers in the genre, Chandler made use of his favourite formulae. The villain invariably turns out to be a woman, young or old, who in terms of the story is all the more aesthetically effective for being female. By the time of The Long Goodbye in 1954 the formula had become rather too stereotyped, but it nevertheless remains an aesthetic plot device rather than a symptom of deeper misogyny on the part of the author. Chandler’s sense of people is too acute and thus too sympathetic to lay him open to any crude charge of disliking women and making use of them in a monotonously wicked role for that reason. His humanity towards all his creations is never in doubt, but the female monster is a convenience he came increasingly to depend upon.
In becoming modern classics his best books contradict his own stated opinion, in ‘The Simple Art of Murder’, that both the good and the bad detective story are alike in that they are necessarily about the same things, and treated in a way which does not allow a wide degree of variation. Every fictional murder requires its own style of mystery, and, as The Lady in the Lake shows, Chandler cannot but select one among a number of traditional solutions and possibilities. And yet, in the background of The Big Sleep and the novels which succeed it there is always the same impression of moral alertness, of reflection, query and discernment—the impression that lies behind all the masterpieces of fiction in any period.
All Chandler’s novels possess not only an extraordinarily vivid sense of place, but what in addition might be termed the atmosphere of characterization. There is a special and sensitive awareness of the sort of people usually found almost as stock types in detective fiction—policemen, big-time crooks and their bodyguards, secretaries, butlers, business people and hopeful rogues, predatory men and women, or those who have lost out and given u
p the struggle. Together they make up a world in which individuality, and often a measure of eccentricity, play a natural and unforced part. People in the novels are naturally peculiar, or bad, or even good; but there is no need here, as there would have been in an older and simpler tradition descended from Dickens and G. K. Chesterton, to keep drawing our attention to the fact.
In achieving this overall atmosphere of characterization Chandler has enlarged the scope and enterprise of a not usually very elevated form of fiction on its own terms, and yet without any recourse to the characteristic ingenuities and exaggerated new ploys of the normal detective novel; in fact, he turns out to be not a new kind of thriller-writer but a sober, authoritative and unobtrusively sensitive straight novelist with a world, a style and a personality which are all his own.
His rare and indispensable gift of humour is dissolved, as it were, in this personal and original mode of discourse. His minor personae, always both unusual and alive, are similarly dissolved, together with the rich wealth of background detail, in an atmosphere that is pungently sardonic and yet sympathetic at the same time. His wisecracks and bon mots can be deliciously precise, almost surrealistic (’she was a blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window’) though, as a minor villainness tartly points out, Marlowe’s addiction to the routine wisecrack can be a little mechanical at times, and even a trifle wearing. But that is all part of a persona which seems both effortlessly natural and carefully crafted at the same time.
What works upon the reader with such effect, and makes him aware that he is experiencing a unique kind of literary pleasure, is the seamless garment of Chandler’s style, always and at the same moment serious, humorous, and discreetly erudite. Unlike his older schoolfellow, P. G. Wodehouse, he never seems to draw attention to his own wit, or the part that apt quotation and a meticulous literary sense play in the fine flow of his narrative and his stylistic manner. That overt sentimentality becomes all too visible in the last pair of completed novels—The Long Goodbye and Playback—is a charge that can hardly be denied, although the old magic is still very much there: Chandler remained Chandler to the end, just as Marlowe remained Marlowe. But in the earlier novels any touch of sentiment is kept fastidiously under control, only emerging briefly in such admirable moments as our brief encounter in The Big Sleep with the miniature but valorous Harry Jones, and his big blonde Agnes, the bad picker and eternal loser. Harry Jones is a hero whose death touches us, without requiring a moment’s more emotion that the action gives him.
Chandler had always been too good a writer and too independent of fashion to bring what were becoming routine sex scenes into the Marlowe novels. Whatever arrangements Marlowe might have had in that line were not disclosed by himself as narrator, and were no business of the novelist either. Between the assignments that were the subject of a novel, Marlowe might have had any number of disastrous or successful love affairs, but his readers would know nothing about them. But eventually—and the change was even more unfortunate than the drift to a burgeoning sentimentality – the standard thriller’s obligation to make its hero a master of the bedroom scene, as well as of mystery solution and crime detection, began to catch up with Chandler. His style, his wit, his masterly impressions of places and people, none of them can help him in this context; and when in Playback he seems to make up his mind to attempt the new mode he sounds like any other thriller-writer jumping through the obligatory hoops. (Marlowe’s brisk and wholly uncharacteristic bedding of the lawyer’s secretary in Playback appears actually to copy the standard formalities of a seduction to be found at the time in the novels of every standard thriller-writer, including Ian Fleming.)
Together with sex there goes a more general demoralization of style. Although Playback is as sharp-eyed and sharp-talking as ever, and almost as much pleasure to read, there is about it an unmistakable atmosphere of valediction and farewell. Chandler’s alcohol problem was becoming more acute, and he had lost the wife to whom he had for a great many years been devoted. The slackening of tempo evident in The Long Goodbye of 1954 is in fact arrested three years later in Playback, but that novel none the less retains the air of a swansong, and the newly imported sex and sententiousness are far from helpful.
Despite its many good qualities, The Long Goodbye had become over expansive, even verbose at times, with more than a hint of what can seem involuntary self-parody, although the story’s grasp of locale, and the individuals that go with it, like the dubious doctors Marlowe has to investigate, is as sure and satisfying as ever. The theme of betrayal, brilliantly handled in an early story called ‘Red Wind’, is exaggerated and too long drawn-out in the novel. However elaborate his descriptions and his witticisms, a laconic tone is the lifeblood of Chandler’s best fiction. He can wonderfully combine an almost fin de siècle luxuriance of description with the terseness and ironic understatement learnt from Hemingway. In Hemingway the display of restraint is self-promoting, but as Chandler grew into his own literary personality the quietly ironic style came naturally, embodied in the completely realized figure of Marlowe himself.
The sense equally of aesthetic satisfaction and of a deeper sort of understanding which the reading of these novels leaves with us is the gift of an artistically unique and also a humanely delicate vision: this totality is a far cry from the author who seeks merely to enliven a worn-out genre by means of a new technique. On the contrary, by making an enlightened and intelligent use of his genre, Chandler wrote novels which not only transcend it but will certainly be read as long as the best novels of any kind, or of any age.
John Bayley
Select Bibliography
NOVELS
The Big Sleep. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1939; London: Hamish Hamilton, 1939.
Farewell, My Lovely. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940; London: Hamish Hamilton, 1940.
The High Window. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942; London: Hamish Hamilton, 1943.
The Lady in the Lake. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1943; London: Hamish Hamilton, 1944,
The Little Sister. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1949; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949.
The Long Goodbye. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954.
Playback. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1958; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958.
STORIES
‘Blackmailers Don’t Shoot’. Black Mask, December 1933
‘Smart-Aleck Kill’. Black Mask, July 1934.
‘Finger Man’. Black Mask, October 1934.
‘Killer in the Rain’. Black Mask, January 1935.
‘Nevada Gas’. Black Mask, June 1935.
‘Spanish Blood’. Black Mask, November 1935.
‘Guns at Cyrano’s’. Black Mask, January 1936.
‘The Man Who Liked Dogs’. Black Mask, March 1936.
‘Noon Street Nemesis’ (republished as ‘Pickup on Noon Street’. Detective Fiction Weekly, May 30, 1936.
‘Goldfish’. Black Mask, June 1936.
‘The Curtain’. Black Mask, September 1936.
‘Try the Girl’. Black Mask, January 1937.
‘Mandarin’s Jade’. Dime Detective Magazine, November 1937.
‘Red Wind’. Dime Detective Magazine, January 1938
‘The King in Yellow’. Dime Detective Magazine, March 1938.
‘Bay City Blues’. Dime Detective Magazine, June 1938.
‘The Lady in the Lake’. Dime Detective Magazine, January 1939.
‘Pearls Are a Nuisance’. Dime Detective Magazine, April 1939.
‘Trouble Is My Business’. Dime Detective Magazine, August 1939.
‘I’ll Be Waiting’. Saturday Evening Post, October 14, 1939.
‘The Bronze Door’. Unknown Magazine, November 1939.
‘No Crime in the Mountains’. Detective Story, September 1941. ‘Professor Bingo’s Snuff’. Park East, June-August 1951; Go, JuneJuly 1951.
‘Marlowe Takes on the Syndicate’. London Daily Mail, April 6-10 1959, also published as ‘Wrong Pidgeon’. Manhunt, Feb
ruary 1961. Reprinted as ‘The Pencil’.
‘English Summer’. First published posthumously in The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler and English Summer: A Gothic Romance by Raymond Chandler, ed. Frank MacShane, The Ecco Press, New York, 1976.
BIOGRAPHY
There are several biographies, including The Life of Raymond Chandler by Frank MacShane (Cape, 1976), Raymond Chandler by William Marling (Twayne, 1886) and Tom Hiney’s Raymond Chandler: An Authorized Biography (Chatto & Windus, 1997; Grove Atlantic, 2001). The Raymond Chandler Papers (ed. Tom Hiney and Frank MacShane, Hamish Hamilton, 2000) includes letters, essays and stories. Miriam Gross’s The World of Raymond Chandler (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977) offers a pictorial biography and a lavishly illustrated study of the milieu of the Marlowe novels. Jerry Speir’s Raymond Chandler (Ungar, 1981) contains a useful bibliography.
BLACKMAILERS DON’T SHOOT
1
The man in the powder-blue suit—which wasn’t powder-blue under the lights of the Club Bolivar—was tall, with wide-set gray eyes, a thin nose, a jaw of stone. He had a rather sensitive mouth. His hair was crisp and black, ever so faintly touched with gray, as by an almost diffident hand. His clothes fitted him as though they had a soul of their own, not just a doubtful past. His name happened to be Mallory.