Tag Archives: Raymond Chandler

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Big Sleep,’ by Raymond Chandler

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Her smile was tentative, but could be persuaded to be nice.

Recently I watched an old interview with Andrew Klavan in which he cited The Big Sleep, the first Philip Marlowe novel (1939), which he admires very much. He mentioned how he adopted Marlowe as a literary hero when he read the first scene of this book, where the detective enters the palatial Sternwood mansion. Above the door he sees a stained glass window depicting a knight attempting to free a maiden tied to a tree. Marlowe doesn’t think the knight is trying as hard as he could, and thinks that if he lived there he’d have to climb up himself and help out.

That, Klavan says (and I agree), is the key to Philip Marlowe’s character. He’s a knight out of romance, plunked down in the 20th Century where he has no place. His adventures involve him in many compromises, but he strives to keep some honor.

Even when the fair maidens don’t really deserve rescuing, as is the case in The Big Sleep. Old General Sternwood, confined to a wheelchair, has summoned Marlowe because he has received blackmail demands related to his daughter Carmen. Carmen is flighty, promiscuous, and not very bright. He also mentions a man named Rusty Regan, ex-husband to his other daughter Vivian. The general liked Rusty, but the man has disappeared. He hopes he’s all right. Marlowe intuits (correctly) that the general isn’t really much concerned over the blackmail; he’s trying to work up to asking Marlowe to locate Rusty.

Soon Marlowe will be a near-witness to a murder, with Carmen Sternwood present (high on drugs). Then the body will disappear. And Marlowe will find himself looking for Rusty Regan after all – not because he cares about the Sternwood daughters, but for the old man’s sake.

The Big Sleep is an intriguing book. Plot-wise it’s confusing and not neatly tied up. The author himself, famously, wasn’t sure who killed the Sternwood chauffeur. And there’s one scene where Marlowe is captured by a notorious murderer, who then conveniently goes away, leaving him to be watched by a suggestible woman whom Marlowe persuades to free him. (A very weak plot device, you can’t deny.)

And yet this book is treasured by readers and critics alike. I treasure it myself. The prose is masterful, the characters are fascinating, the atmosphere draws you in, and the conclusion has been a model for all but the most cynical of hard-boiled writers ever since.

On this reading I was particularly struck by a minor character, the purest hero of this story. His name is Harry Jones. He’s a short, unprepossessing man, a two-bit gambler. Yet he makes the ultimate sacrifice for a woman who doesn’t deserve him. Marlowe pays him the greatest respect – he’s the man Marlowe would like to be, but pure knights of that sort do not survive in our world.

Taken all in all, The Big Sleep is a great novel. If you haven’t read it and like hard-boileds, you should. Cautions for drugs and sexual situations – pretty racy stuff for 1939.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Long Goodbye,’ by Raymond Chandler

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She had an iron smile and eyes that could count the money in your hip wallet.

Recently I was poking around Amazon Prime for a movie to watch, and I hit on the old 1973 film adaptation of The Long Goodbye. I hadn’t seen it in many years, and watched it again just to see if I liked it any better than I did in my youth. I found I did not. It’s a Robert Altman vehicle, meaning Raymond Chandler’s story is mostly subsumed in Altman’s improvisations, and Elliott Gould is not Philip Marlowe by any stretch of the imagination. (I must confess the movie did the story no harm by simplifying the plot, though.)

Anyway, I figured I might as well re-read the book (first published 1953) and see how it compared. As I expected, I liked it a whole lot better than the movie, though it’s not without flaws.

Terry Lennox is sporadically one of Philip Marlowe’s few friends. He’s a wounded war veteran with interesting facial scars, and Marlowe encounters him sometimes in evening clothes with rich women on his arm, and sometimes drunk in the gutter. Terry has been married to an heiress named Sylvia, been divorced by her, and then remarried again. Now and then he and Marlowe get together for a drink.

One night Terry shows up asking Marlowe to drive him across the border to Mexico. Marlowe does this, with some misgivings. Once back, he learns the news – Terry’s wife has been murdered, and the police are looking for him. Marlowe gets arrested and subjected to some third degree… and then the whole business is dropped. Word is that Terry has killed himself in Mexico. Shortly afterward, Marlowe gets a letter from Terry, apparently posted just before his death. Tucked in the envelope is a $5,000 bill, which Marlowe puts away in his office safe because he’s uncomfortable about how he earned it.

Through his connection with Terry, Marlowe gets an inquiry from the publisher of Roger Wade, a bestselling author of historical thrillers. Roger has a serious drinking problem and writer’s block. The publisher has the idea that Marlowe might be the man to nursemaid Wade, dry him out and keep him working. Marlowe is not interested, even after a personal appeal from Wade’s stunningly beautiful wife, Eileen. But that doesn’t stop her appealing to him to find Wade after he disappears on a bender. Marlowe tracks him down at a seedy health spa and drags him home. He forms a prickly friendship with the man, while still refusing the babysitting job.

That’s enough to explain how things start out. The plot progresses in what seems to me a somewhat uneven, lurching fashion, as if Chandler was describing his own difficulties writing it through the creative travails of Roger Wade. The final conclusion is (to my mind) a little unsatisfying – but not as weird as the climax they gave us in the movie.

Critics, I understand, are divided concerning The Long Goodbye. Some consider it Chandler’s best work. Others judge it one of the weakest in the series. I myself enjoyed reading it, but found it a little claustrophobic. The story was, after all, somewhat crowded with author’s surrogates. Both Terry Lennox, the shell-shocked, psychologically broken war veteran, and Roger Wade, the bibulous, self-loathing author, are expressions of Chandler’s own self-image. And almost all narrator characters – including Philip Marlowe – are alter egos of their creators.

Also, the book features a series of “solutions,” each replacing the other as if the author couldn’t make up his mind.

But it’s worth reading. I enjoyed it all in all. Also, there’s references to the war in Norway.

The Kindle link I’m using here is for the edition I read, which is the only ebook edition I can find that’s not part of an omnibus. If you can find a different edition, I advise you to buy that, because this one (published in Ukraine) is laden with OCR errors. The “illustrations” advertised are just old paperback cover art, unrelated to the story.

I find, on searching our archives, that I’ve already reviewed this book here once. I need to review more Philip Marlowe novels, and have set about reading another.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Trouble Is My Business,’ by Raymond Chandler

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“Her eyes were wide-set and there was thinking room between them.”

“I felt terrible. I felt like an amputated leg.”

“He had his right hand in the side pocket of the coat, and under the derby a pair of scarred eyebrows and under the eyebrows a pair of eyes that had as much expression as the cap on a gas tank.”

Apparently I have already read all the stories in Trouble Is My Business, a collection of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe short stories, since they are taken from the collection, The Simple Art of Murder which I know I read a while back. But I didn’t remember them, and so had the pleasure of discovery all over again.

The stories included in this particular collection are “Trouble Is My Business,” “Finger Man,” “Goldfish,” and “Red Wind.” These stories were not, in fact, originally Marlowe stories at all (according to Wikipedia), but pulp stories Chandler wrote about a couple other detective characters, adapted to cash in on Marlowe’s popularity. Which relieves me a little, because the hero of “Trouble Is My Business” has a serious drinking problem. I mean, Philip Marlowe certainly liked his booze, but this guy (John Dalmas, according to the listing in Wikipedia) is putting it away at a rate that indicates serious maintenance alcoholism, and I wouldn’t give his liver many more years.

One doesn’t go to Raymond Chandler for great plotting. We read him mostly for his characters and his prose and his evocation of a time and place. I didn’t think the writing here was up to Chandler’s very best standards, but there are plenty of good lines: “She wasn’t beautiful, she wasn’t even pretty, but she looked as if things would happen where she was.”

Objectionable material was mostly limited to racial slurs. The cursing was mainly the sort of thing you hear in old movies, like “Nerts!” There’s no sex as such, though there’s plenty of sexual tension – at one point Marlowe kisses a married woman, and the author skips describing the actual kiss in the same way later writers would skip a sex scene.

I had a blast reading Trouble Is My Business. Recommended for hard-boiled fans.

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Fiction

Life Builds Its Own Fences, and Fond Memories of Louis Armstrong

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A few months ago, I watched August Wilson’s Fences on Amazon. The play was first produced in 1985 and won a Pulitzer and a Tony in 1987. When the play returned in 2010, it won another Tony along with awards for the main actors. I watched the 2016 movie adaptation, directed by and starring Denzel Washington along with Viola Davis and Stephen McKinley Henderson. They were compelling and marvelous.

It’s a moving drama about a man, Troy, who was something of a star in baseball’s negro leagues and now works in Pittsburgh as a garbage man. His wife, Rose, asks him to put up a fence around their back lot, and he is a common-sense man who will do a job right, if he doesn’t talk it to death first. The story spans a couple decades, I think, and the fence is incomplete for the majority. It’s a metaphor for the boundaries Rose wants to protect their family and the boundaries Troy wants to exceed as a man who has done something with his life.

I don’t know what viewers of the trailer think of these lines, but coming as they do with the full weight of the story, they had me bawling.

Troy: It’s not easy for me to admit that I’ve been standing in the same place for eighteen years!

Rose: Well, I’ve been standing with you! I gave eighteen years of my life to stand in the same spot as you!

Troy had chosen his ego over his wife. He framed his choices as his ambition struggling against life and society. She framed them as betrayal. Many men take the same stand while making the different choices. That’s what mid-life crises are about. It’s a story that resonates.

Banned Books: It doesn’t resonate with everyone equally, though. In 2020, a mother had good reasons for complaining about her 14-year-old-son being required to read Fences in class as the only black student in eighth grade. She got a little too upset about it, but I think school officials proved to be the thin-skinned ones. They expelled him.

Thriller Writing: Here’s a cool discussion from 1958 between authors Ian Fleming and Raymond Chandler to honor the latter’s 70th birthday. Near the beginning, Fleming notes that he writes thrillers and Chandler does not.

Fleming: I don’t call yours thrillers. Yours are novels.
Chandler: A lot of people call them thrillers.
Fleming: I know. I think it’s wrong.

Memories: What brought life back to tired guitarist Doc Watson? The memory of a tube radio and listening to Louis Armstrong.

New from Bill Watterson: In case you missed the news two weeks ago, the beloved cartoonist Bill Watterson is releasing a new book — The Mysteries, a vibrantly illustrated “fable for grown-ups.”

“From Bill Watterson, bestselling creator of the beloved comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, and John Kascht, one of America’s most renowned caricaturists, comes a mysterious and beautifully illustrated fable about what lies beyond human understanding.”

Photo: Paul’s Market, Franklin, New York. 1976. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Authors, Fiction

Michael Connelly vs. Raymond Chandler

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Below the title on the front cover of Michael Connelly’s new novel is a quote: “‘Connelly is the Raymond Chandler of this generation’—Associated Press.” This is unfair to Chandler and Connelly both. Chandler wrote like “a slumming angel,” as Ross Macdonald said. The  bravura style of The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye, and the other titles on the Chandler shelf is one of the glories of American literature, influential worldwide. Connelly’s sentences are workmanlike, unremarkable. But Chandler couldn’t plot to save his life, whereas Connelly is a master of the art. Chandler was brilliant, undisciplined, alcoholic, demon-ridden, quick to take offense and quick to sneer; he wrote only a handful of novels. Connelly is disciplined and generous, and he excels at collaborative work (for instance, the Bosch TV series produced by Amazon) as well as solo writing; Fair Warning is his thirty-fourth novel. Chandler’s moral sense, in some ways acute, was often unreliable; Connelly’s is sounder.

John Wilson on Michael Connelly and Fair Warning