The World of Raymond Chandler: In His Own Words
edited by Barry Day Knopf
IN HIS LIFETIME (1888-1959), Raymond Chandler was known for just seven novels, a dozen or so stories, two film scripts (for Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train) and a famous essay, “The Simple Art of Murder,” in which he acknowledged his debt as a writer of American “tough guy” mysteries to Dashiell Hammett.
Nowadays, creative types pay homage to Chandler. And well they should: While the books of other early 20th-century crime writers read like period pieces, Chandler’s still crackle with their lurid, neon-lit atmospheres, acerbic dialogue and taut Los Angeles–based plots. And Chandler still influences global culture, both high and low. Last year Irish novelist John Banville, a winner of Britain’s prestigious Man Booker Prize for fiction, borrowed Chandler’s archetypal detective, Philip Marlowe, for his book The Black-Eyed Blonde. Frank Miller, the godfather of the graphic novel, has credited Chandler with inspiring the genre. And, of course, Chandler’s hard-bitten style set the tone for film noir in the 1940s and its subsequent iterations.
In The World of Raymond Chandler, Barry Day takes us on a tour of Chandler’s sinewy Los Angeles using the author’s own words from letters and the classic novels, most notably The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely and The Long Goodbye. Day selected apt passages to give readers a vivid if cynical taste of both the well-to-do and, more fascinating, the ne’er-do-wells who inhabit L.A.’s demi-monde—the blackmailers, pornographers, would be actresses, crooked cops, tinhorn gamblers, bored society girls, druggies, nymphomaniacs and minor league hoods. Taken together these passages might suffice for the autobiography that Chandler never wrote.
For Chandler, Los Angeles is “a big, hard-boiled city with no more personality than a paper cup.” The rich take refuge in houses like those described in Farewell, My Lovely: “Great silent estates, with twelve-foot walls and wrought-iron gates and ornamental hedges; and inside, if you could get inside, a special brand of sunshine, very quiet, put up in noise-proof containers just for the upper classes.” Chandler thought of L.A. as a stand-in for all of urban America; as one character tells Marlowe, “It is the same in all big cities, amigo.” Chandler, who was born in Chicago but grew up in London and was a British citizen for most of his life, was both intrigued and disgusted with southern California. “No doubt in years or centuries to come,” he wrote to a friend in 1939, “this will be the center of civilization, if there is any left, but the melting-pot stage bores me horribly. I like people with manners, grace, some social institution…people whose pride of living does not express itself in their kitchen gadgets and their automobiles.”
The World of Raymond Chandler is a superb mix of the literary and the visual. Enhancing the text are more than 100 black-and-white photographs and illustrations, including old L.A. institutions like the original Brown Derby and Schwab’s Pharmacy, as well as covers from French editions of Chandler’s books, copies of letters to and from other noir novelists (such as James M. Cain) and stills from the films made from Chandler’s novels. One, from The Big Sleep, shows Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, a Smith & Wesson .38 in his hand, peering out a window into the dark Beverly Hills night—looking for trouble…and sure to find it. This is an essential book for Chandler aficionados.
Originally published in the April 2015 issue of American History. To subscribe, click here.
