Some of you may have noticed a few recent Facebook posts of mine mentioning my latest book addiction: the novels of Raymond Chandler. Chandler’s works were something I’d always just taken for granted. I knew who he was and I’d seen The Big Sleep (1946) with Bogart as the iconic private eye Philip Marlowe. But I’d never actually picked up and read one of his novels. Hard-boiled detective fiction was for the movies and TV. I never had the inclination to read any pulp fiction. That is, until a friend asked if I’d ever read anything by Chandler. He raved about him and then gave me a copy of Farewell My Lovely. I started reading—and I was hooked. More so, because I was in the middle of writing a dramatic novel with a murder element to it.
Chandler was lauded by high-brow critics and poet laureates and the success of his novels led to his talents being applied to screenwriting. He was a master of dialogue and character and crafted some of the finest similes and metaphors in literature. To this day, his style influences writers. To many, he burst the bonds of “genre” fiction and created true works of literary merit.
He didn’t actually write the screenplay to The Big Sleep, but he did write an original screenplay for The Blue Dahlia (1946) and for James Cain’s Double Indemnity (1944) along with Billy Wilder, the latter screenplay nominated for an Academy Award. He also worked with Alfred Hitchcock on Strangers on a Train (1951) but this was a rocky relationship that ended when Chandler called the director a “fat bastard.” His life was a story in itself. Born in 1888, he had a transatlantic upbringing taking him from America to England, Ireland and later Canada. He was a newspaper man in London, fought with distinction with the Canadian Expeditionary Forces in the trenches in WWI, and had a jobs in a Los Angeles creamery and as a tennis-racket stringer before making a success of his writing career.
Chandler didn’t invent the noir crime novel, but alongside his competitor Dashiell Hammett he perfected it. And although he wrote many short stories in his career, by the time he died in 1959 he had written just seven novels. All were written in the first person and all featured the tough, educated, and street-wise detective Philip Marlowe. Take one for a spin and discover the long-lost and dark world of mid-20th century Los Angeles.
