SLUMMING CLEARANCE Why Raymond Chandler Endures

The visitor surveys the scene and sniffs, “I’m a little disappointed. I rather expected something with dirty fingernails. . . . I’ve never met a private detective. A shifty business, one gathers. Keyhole peeping, raking up scandal, that sort of thing.”

“You here on business,” Marlowe asks, “or just slumming?”

It’s a question that for more than fifty years has troubled literary types when they wander into the collected works of Raymond Chandler. During his life he published seven novels, all of them detective stories. He was a genre writer, which places him, according to lit-crit taxonomy, alongside the likes of Louis L’Amour and Barbara Cartland. By definition, genre writers are not supposed to produce works of lasting literary merit. And yet — the fascination Chandler’s books hold for people with rarefied tastes is remarkable. T. S. Eliot, for one, was floored by them, and so was W. H. Auden, who said the adventures of Philip Marlowe “should not be judged as escape literature but as works of art.” Two years ago, the Library of America canonized Chandler with an edition of his work. Albert Camus cited him as an inspiration, and Anthony Burgess said no account of American literature could be complete that failed to offer Chandler a central place. Evelyn Waugh, in the late 1940s, wrote flatly that Chandler was “the greatest living American novelist.”

Camus was French, of course, and the judgment of such people is notably suspect, as anyone who’s seen a Jerry Lewis movie can testify. Waugh, for his part, may have been merely puckish or perverse. But what of the others — puckishness not being a staple of T. S. Eliot’s critical repertoire? Ever since Leonard Bernstein favorably compared Lennon and McCartney to Schubert, we’ve grown used to highbrows slumming. But something different accounts for Chandler’s enduring appeal. As the century draws to a close (the sooner the better), it seems clear that Chandler will survive well into the next one, outlasting all but a handful of his contemporaries who devoted their energies to the serious novel. Say what you want about the judgment of the highbrows: In literature as elsewhere, the judgment of the marketplace over so long a span of time should carry some weight.

The question of Chandler’s larger place in the literary universe is one Tom Hiney touches on only glancingly in Raymond Chandler: A Biography. Hiney is a journalist, and British to boot — the Brits fell for Chandler early and hard. Unfortunately, Hiney fumbles several small matters of fact, owing perhaps to his unfamiliarity with American matters. H. L. Mencken was not a poet, as someone seems to have told Hiney, and there was no such body as “the House Un-American Activities Committee of the Senate.” (The one we had was bad enough.) Howard Hawks, the great Hollywood director who filmed Chandler’s The Big Sleep, should not be confused with Howard Hughes, the billionaire who refused to cut his fingernails. And so on. Small errors aside, Hiney gets the big things right, and his book is a model of the kind of biography we seldom get anymore: relatively brief, well written, sometimes almost breezy, and uncluttered with the jibber-jabber of the faculty lounge. Raymond Chandler is the story of a sad life, told straight.

Chandler was born American but raised British. His father, a railroad engineer, abandoned the family in Chicago, and his immigrant mother took the boy back to Ireland at the age of 7, in 1895. The largess of an uncle allowed him to attend Dulwich College, a boys school in the London suburbs. (P. G. Wodehouse was graduated the year Chandler arrived.) He received the kind of education American parents of a traditionalist bent can only dream about today, steeped in Latin and ancient Greek, learning the visual and musical arts, studying English history, continental philosophy, and the classical literary forms. At Dulwich, he was also imbued with a fine English fatalism. Wodehouse recalled the headmaster’s comment one afternoon after cricket. ” Fine innings, Wodehouse,” the old gentleman said, “but remember we all die in the end.”

Chandler spent the year after Dulwich wandering Europe, sharpening his French and German. Back in London he bought a silver-topped cane and wrote poetry that got worse as he got older. He tried to make do as a freelance literary journalist, and met with moderate success writing sketches for respectable journals like Academy and the Westminster Gazette. He flirted as well with a career in the Civil Service.

Hiney lingers over this period of Chandler’s life, for it explains so much about him that later seemed anomalous in a writer of hard-boiled detective stories: his wide erudition, his verbal facility, his courtliness and reticence, and his respect for what those American parents might call the ” eternal verities.” All of these traits were well established in him when he decided to leave England for America in 1912. He was running out of money and, he thought, luck; he had always felt himself to be an American in any case. A series of odd jobs took him to southern California. There he remained more or less for the rest of his life.

His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939, when he was 50. The intervening years make for an unhappy tale. Starting as an accountant, Chandler worked his way up in the oil business until he was director of several small companies. He married a woman almost twenty years his senior to whom, in the end and after a fashion, he was devoted, but with his business success he began to drink and cat around, and in 1933 was cashiered. The abrupt end to his bourgeois career came as a jolt, and he stopped drinking. And in the following year’s phone book, he listed himself as “Raymond Chandler, writer.” A writer in his mid-40s, that is, who hadn’t written anything in twenty years, and who had only limited savings with which to start a fresh career.

Chandler apparently made a stab at writing a serious novel, with no success. But, Hiney writes, “he was business-minded enough — and patient enough — to believe that he had first to learn the mechanics of fiction in order to sell whatever talent he had.” He was in this to make a living, after all, and it was then that he discovered the “pulp magazines,” particularly the Black Mask, home to Dashiell Hammett and others. “It struck me that some of the writing was pretty forceful and honest,” Chandler later recalled, “even though it had its crude aspect.” And how. For a writer who wanted to learn the mechanics of fiction, there could be no better genre than the detective story, which then as now was often nothing but mechanics.

Of all the usual gifts granted him by his English public-school education, one was missing: literary snobbery. Chandler threw himself into the task of mastering pulp fiction, by all accounts never considering that the trade was beneath his talents (which he always judged to be considerable). “I spent five months over a 18,000 word novelette,” he wrote, “and sold it for $ 180.” Other stories followed, each of them slavishly true to the tricks of the hard- boiled genre. There were lots of double identities, missing persons, betrayals, shady pasts, fist fights, unexpected reversals, and more blood than you’d find in a moderately busy abattoir.

The essential skill of a successful detective novelist is the ability to construct a gripping story — a kind of puzzle to be solved. This is often the only skill he has. Amazingly, Raymond Chandler, the greatest detective novelist of all, didn’t have it. Critics like to fault detective stories for their implausibility, but the problem with Chandler’s plots is that they are often simply incomprehensible. Hiney complains at several points that he has read the early stories half a dozen times without being able to trace the plotlines. A famous anecdote involves Howard Hawks, who, while filming The Big Sleep, suddenly realized that he had an extra dead body on his hands. He wired Chandler, asking who had killed this unlucky chauffeur. Chandler consulted the book and wired back: “HAVE NO IDEA.” “I never figured out what was going on,” Hawks said afterward.

Finding it difficult to construct a story, Chandler transplanted large chunks of his early plots into his novels, making them, if possible, even harder to follow. Chandler always acknowledged this deficiency — “plot constipation,” he called it — but he didn’t consider it terribly important. He was turning the genre on its head. In place of the click-clack-click storytelling precision of (say) Erle Stanley Gardner, the creator of Perry Mason, Chandler concentrated his energies elsewhere: the summoning of a distinct and original world through full-blooded characters, the description of scenes and atmosphere, and an evocative prose style. His books are pageturners — unputdownable, as the blurb-writers say. But the reader keeps turning the pages not so much to solve the puzzle as to take in another quirky character or enjoy a fresh helping of Chandler’s glittering prose. Who killed the chauffeur? Who cares?

Writers are supposed to write about what they know, and what Chandler knew, firsthand from his years in the oil business, was Los Angeles. In the early years of this century the oil business defined the city, with its freewheeling corruption and sprawling lawlessness, and the mood persisted at least until the onset of the Second World War. This is the Los Angeles that Chandler recorded exquisitely and preserved forever in his novels. It is a twilight world in which every rich guy is a parvenu, every woman is on the make or has been made, every cop is a crook, every businessman a mobster, and every mobster — well, every mobster is a mobster squared. At the still center is Chandler’s hero Philip Marlowe. The cases he works on allow him to survey Los Angeles at every level, from Beverly Hills out to Malibu and back in again to East L.A. And again unlike his predecessors, Marlowe is all too human; as a private detective, in fact, he sometimes exhibits an alarming incompetence, and he is all the more appealing, even noble, as a result. “I see him always in a lonely street, in lonely rooms, puzzled but never quite defeated,” Chandler wrote.

Chandler is endlessly quotable and endlessly parodied. As a stylist he was perhaps overfond of similes. At his death he left a notebook filled with ones he hadn’t yet used: “as exclusive as a mailbox,” “as lonely as a lighthouse.” And some of the ones he did use he shouldn’t have: “I was as hollow as the spaces between the stars.” But as Pico Iyer has pointed out, Chandler’s similes are the “perfect device for describing a world in which everything is like something else and nothing is itself.” All of Chandler’s famous stylistic mannerisms are put in service of summoning that world, and after a half-century of satires and parodies they can still startle you when you come upon them in the books themselves. Birds don’t merely sing there, they do this: “Outside in a bush a mockingbird ran through a few trills and admired himself before settling down for the night.” How about a nice walk along the beach? “On the right the great solid Pacific trudged into shore like a scrubwoman going home.”

You can love this sort of thing or hate it, but there’s no denying that in such passages Chandler wants more than to tell a rippin’ good yarn, which, as noted, he couldn’t do anyway. He is trying, image by image and scene by scene, to seduce the reader into sharing his view of the fallen world. This is an artistic ambition, and the degree to which he succeeds in it explains why Chandler holds the reader and continues to engage him in a way that Gardner or even Hammett never could. But Chandler wore his ambition lightly. He was that rarest bird, a fastidious and gifted writer with no literary pretensions whatsoever. Though he wrote about the “writing game” with great discernment — his collected letters, full of the subject, will survive at least as long as his novels — he had the traditional Anglo-Saxon contempt for theory and critical abstraction. He never thought he was slumming. Instead he reveled in the apparent paradox of a tweedy, pipe-smoking public-school graduate writing novels that averaged one grisly murder for every twenty pages.

“It would seem that a classical education might be rather a poor basis for writing novels in a hardboiled vernacular,” he once wrote a friend. “I happen to think otherwise. A classical education saves you from being fooled by pretentiousness, which is what most current fiction is too full of. In this country the mystery writer is looked down on as subliterary merely because he is a mystery writer, rather than for instance a writer of social significance twaddle. To a classicist — even a rusty one — such an attitude is merely a parvenu insecurity.”

Chandler had no such insecurity. He considered the distinction between genre fiction and serious novels fallacious. “When people ask me, as occasionally they do, why I don’t try my hand at a serious novel, I don’t argue with them; I don’t even ask them what they mean by a serious novel. It would be useless. They wouldn’t know. The question is parrot talk.” He took pride in his work, admired what he had accomplished, and husbanded his reputation. By the mid-1940s he was making a good deal of money but could have made more. He declined to lend his name to a Raymond Chandler pulp magazine and vetoed proposals for a Marlowe comic strip. When Marlowe came to radio and TV, Chandler insisted on the right of script approval, lest someone subject his detective to undignified melodrama. He worked for a few years in Hollywood — writing, among much dross, the superb screenplay for Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity — and made still more money.

But he began drinking again. His elderly wife slid into a long illness that lasted until her death in 1954. From that moment until his own death in 1959, Hiney believes, Chandler was almost continuously drunk. The discomfort of these miserable final years showed in his writing. Shortly before his wife’s death, he published The Long Goodbye. It is the longest of his books and more than any other won him the respect of literary critics. The New York Times pronounced it a masterpiece; “awesome,” said Bernard DeVoto in Harper’s; “an astonishingly accurate mirror of modern man’s changing outlook on life and society,” said the Saturday Review. As you might expect from such verdicts, it is his worst book.

In The Long Goodbye, the critics saw an author at last reaching beyond the genre to grasp “significance” — “trying,” in the words of the critic Frank MacShane, “to move the detective story into the mainstream of traditional fiction.” Whether this was truly Chandler’s intention, no one knows. Earlier in his career, such an effort would have struck him as superfluous or unnecessary, even pretentious. “When art is significant,” he had written, “it is always a byproduct and more or less unintentional on the part of the creator.” This is true of his first novels, for what social significance they did possess was entirely incidental to the rich pleasures of characterization and style they offered as a main course.

If in praising The Long Goodbye the critics thought they were slumming, it was merely to lift Chandler into the cozy parlor of respectable fiction. The Long Goodbye is the work of a man dissatisfied with the constraints of the ordinary crime novel, and his craving for something “larger” billows out from every page. Long discursive passages obscure the plot and crowd the characters. In such moments Chandler veers perilously close to “social significance twaddle.” Marlowe himself is no longer the still center, offering wry and disinterested observations on the unfolding carnival, but an emotive force, given to gassy digressions. The book reads at times like an entry in a parody contest. “I was a grain of sand on the desert of oblivion,” Marlowe says. The critics cheered, but the real Marlowe would have smacked him in the kisser.

Senior editor Andrew Ferguson is the author of Fools’ Names, Fools’ Faces (Atlantic Monthly Press).