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Selected Letters
In letters written between 1937 and 1959, Chandler comments on his work and characters, fellow mystery and detective fiction writers, world events, and life in California
526 pages, Paperback
First published October 26, 1981
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About the author
Raymond Chandler
450 books5,635 followersRaymond Thornton Chandler was an American-British novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at the age of forty-four, Chandler became a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published seven novels during his lifetime (an eighth, in progress at the time of his death, was completed by Robert B. Parker). All but Playback have been made into motion pictures, some more than once. In the year before his death, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America.
Chandler had an immense stylistic influence on American popular literature. He is a founder of the hardboiled school of detective fiction, along with Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and other Black Mask writers. The protagonist of his novels, Philip Marlowe, like Hammett's Sam Spade, is considered by some to be synonymous with "private detective". Both were played in films by Humphrey Bogart, whom many consider to be the quintessential Marlowe.
The Big Sleep placed second on the Crime Writers Association poll of the 100 best crime novels; Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Lady in the Lake (1943) and The Long Goodbye (1953) also made the list. The latter novel was praised in an anthology of American crime stories as "arguably the first book since Hammett's The Glass Key, published more than twenty years earlier, to qualify as a serious and significant mainstream novel that just happened to possess elements of mystery". Chandler was also a perceptive critic of detective fiction; his "The Simple Art of Murder" is the canonical essay in the field. In it he wrote: "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world."
Parker wrote that, with Marlowe, "Chandler seems to have created the culminating American hero: wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical and rebellious—an innocent who knows better, a Romantic who is tough enough to sustain Romanticism in a world that has seen the eternal footman hold its coat and snicker. Living at the end of the Far West, where the American dream ran out of room, no hero has ever been more congruent with his landscape. Chandler had the right hero in the right place, and engaged him in the consideration of good and evil at precisely the time when our central certainty of good no longer held."
Chandler had an immense stylistic influence on American popular literature. He is a founder of the hardboiled school of detective fiction, along with Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and other Black Mask writers. The protagonist of his novels, Philip Marlowe, like Hammett's Sam Spade, is considered by some to be synonymous with "private detective". Both were played in films by Humphrey Bogart, whom many consider to be the quintessential Marlowe.
The Big Sleep placed second on the Crime Writers Association poll of the 100 best crime novels; Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Lady in the Lake (1943) and The Long Goodbye (1953) also made the list. The latter novel was praised in an anthology of American crime stories as "arguably the first book since Hammett's The Glass Key, published more than twenty years earlier, to qualify as a serious and significant mainstream novel that just happened to possess elements of mystery". Chandler was also a perceptive critic of detective fiction; his "The Simple Art of Murder" is the canonical essay in the field. In it he wrote: "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world."
Parker wrote that, with Marlowe, "Chandler seems to have created the culminating American hero: wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical and rebellious—an innocent who knows better, a Romantic who is tough enough to sustain Romanticism in a world that has seen the eternal footman hold its coat and snicker. Living at the end of the Far West, where the American dream ran out of room, no hero has ever been more congruent with his landscape. Chandler had the right hero in the right place, and engaged him in the consideration of good and evil at precisely the time when our central certainty of good no longer held."
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
April 1, 2014
"In letters," says Raymond Chandler, "I sometimes seem to have been more penetrating than in any other kind of writing. I am really astonished." He bares his innermost feelings in these 340 letters to, among others, James Cain, SJ Perelman, Hitchcock, Ian Fleming, Alfred & Blanche Knopf, Maugham, JB Priestley and editors & agents in NYC, LA and London. His creative process is revealed, along with his dislike for working in the movie studios -- which paid him the big bucks. "Some letters are analytical, some are a bit poetical, some sad, and a good many caustic or even funny," he sums up. (Today, with Email - which no one keeps - correspondence, I fear, has been killed off).
Here's a perfect complement to his novels. My copy is coming apart from rereads and underlines over the years. His letter writing, says editor MacShane, was an emotional release from his isolation. Even in Hollywood, he had been a recluse. The letters carry genuine power.
Here's a perfect complement to his novels. My copy is coming apart from rereads and underlines over the years. His letter writing, says editor MacShane, was an emotional release from his isolation. Even in Hollywood, he had been a recluse. The letters carry genuine power.
June 26, 2008
Raymond Chandler's correspondence (if one can call it that) is by a man who was totally out of his time and place. One has a clear picture while reading of this book of an individual who only source of human relationships is through his writings of novels and his letter writing. A fantastic letter-writer, yet very sad.
And again I think he was someone who was not comfortable with the world at the time. Or perhaps not any time. He sort of made up his own identity as an Englishman in a savage land. But the fact is he is basically an American and he was torn with the disappointment of whatever that brings or means to him. He expresses that in his novels, especially "The Long Goodbye," which the title alone is both beautiful and really sad at the same time. Dip into the world of Chandler and see real misery.
And again I think he was someone who was not comfortable with the world at the time. Or perhaps not any time. He sort of made up his own identity as an Englishman in a savage land. But the fact is he is basically an American and he was torn with the disappointment of whatever that brings or means to him. He expresses that in his novels, especially "The Long Goodbye," which the title alone is both beautiful and really sad at the same time. Dip into the world of Chandler and see real misery.
June 1, 2020
Raymond Chandler dio santissimo, vuoi farmi stare male? Certo che sì, è chiaro ormai.
August 2, 2022
My rating is five stars, but with a significant warning. The warning is that Chandler was a privileged white male in the 20th century, and Frank McShane has not tried to whitewash the letters. There are slurs against people of color, slurs against Jews, slurs against homosexuals. Not many, but they rankle when you hit them. Worse, after his wife dies, he clearly becomes a bit unglued. He attempts suicide, and his letters are filled with inappropriate disquisitions on sex. That makes for painful reading in the last 50 pages or so.
Like many folks of that era, he was an alcoholic. He spent his life denying that classification, and complaining about other people's drinking. But he lived in a world of functioning alcoholics, so this is an excellent artifact from that milieu.
That sounds like a negative review, but let me correct the record. This volume is fascinating. Chandler is one of my favorite authors. I've read all his novels and many of his short stories. I've been stalling on starting the Collected Stories because I don't want to be finished with Chandler. (Also because I expect I'll be taking a lot of notes. Chandler did a good deal of what he called "self-plagiarism" in which he mined his short stories for his novels, and also just expanded short pieces into longer pieces. Several of his stories start with essentially the same description of a hotel lobby at night, then branch off into something entirely new, for instance.)
I want to take a moment to recognize my late friend Rick Ulaky, who brought this title to our annual Passage Party and read from it, after which I immediately bought a copy of my own. It took me years to get around to the actual reading, mainly because I was intending to savor it, which I have now done. Rick loved the stories of Chandler, Jack London, Steinbeck, Hemingway and also folks like Edgar Rice Burroughs; and I always looked forward to his readings at the Party. If we ever start those parties up again, they will just not be The Thing without Rick.
One of my favorite sections of the book is his various comments about working with Hitchcock on Strangers on a Train. He had a lot of complaints, and even wrote (but did not send) a letter listing them to Hitchcock himself, which we get to see. They were doomed not to get along, they were reduced to childish insults, and almost none of Chandler's writing is actually in the movie. But Chandler was very perceptive about how Hitchcock worked, and how he would sacrifice story logic for good camera shots. Chandler was paid for his name, and when he wanted to take his name off the project, the studio said no.
There are many interesting passages on Chandler's method, what he felt he was trying to do, and the problems that come when the readers start trying to influence the future course of the sequels.
For a sample, Raymond Chandler, threatening to answer interview questions in the following manner:
Yes, I am exactly like the characters in my books. I am very tough and have been known to break a Vienna roll with my bare hands. I am very handsome, have a powerful physique, and change my shirt regularly every Monday morning. When resting between assignments I live in a French Provincial chateau of (sic) Mulholland Drive. It is a fairly small place of forty-eight rooms and fifty-nine baths. I dine off gold plate and prefer to waited on by naked dancing girls. But of course there are times when I have to grow a beard and hole up in a Main Street flophouse, and there are other times when I am, although not by request, entertained in the drunk tank in the city jail. I have friends from all walks of life. Some are highly educated and some talk like Darryl Zanuck. I have fourteen telephones on my desk, including direct lines to New York, London, Paris, Rome, and Santa Rosa. My filing case opens out into a very convenient portable bar, and the bartender, who lives in the bottom drawer, is a midget named Harry Cohn. I am a heavy smoker and according to my mood I smoke tobacco, marijuana, corn silk, and dried tea leaves. I do a great deal of research, especially in the apartments of tall blondes. I get my material in various ways, but my favorite procedure . . . consists of going through the desks of other writers after hours. I am thirty-eight years old and have been for the last twenty years. I do not regard myself as a dead shot, but I am a pretty dangerous man with a wet towel. But all in all I think my favorite weapon is a twenty dollar bill. In my spare time I collect elephants.
Like many folks of that era, he was an alcoholic. He spent his life denying that classification, and complaining about other people's drinking. But he lived in a world of functioning alcoholics, so this is an excellent artifact from that milieu.
That sounds like a negative review, but let me correct the record. This volume is fascinating. Chandler is one of my favorite authors. I've read all his novels and many of his short stories. I've been stalling on starting the Collected Stories because I don't want to be finished with Chandler. (Also because I expect I'll be taking a lot of notes. Chandler did a good deal of what he called "self-plagiarism" in which he mined his short stories for his novels, and also just expanded short pieces into longer pieces. Several of his stories start with essentially the same description of a hotel lobby at night, then branch off into something entirely new, for instance.)
I want to take a moment to recognize my late friend Rick Ulaky, who brought this title to our annual Passage Party and read from it, after which I immediately bought a copy of my own. It took me years to get around to the actual reading, mainly because I was intending to savor it, which I have now done. Rick loved the stories of Chandler, Jack London, Steinbeck, Hemingway and also folks like Edgar Rice Burroughs; and I always looked forward to his readings at the Party. If we ever start those parties up again, they will just not be The Thing without Rick.
One of my favorite sections of the book is his various comments about working with Hitchcock on Strangers on a Train. He had a lot of complaints, and even wrote (but did not send) a letter listing them to Hitchcock himself, which we get to see. They were doomed not to get along, they were reduced to childish insults, and almost none of Chandler's writing is actually in the movie. But Chandler was very perceptive about how Hitchcock worked, and how he would sacrifice story logic for good camera shots. Chandler was paid for his name, and when he wanted to take his name off the project, the studio said no.
There are many interesting passages on Chandler's method, what he felt he was trying to do, and the problems that come when the readers start trying to influence the future course of the sequels.
For a sample, Raymond Chandler, threatening to answer interview questions in the following manner:
Yes, I am exactly like the characters in my books. I am very tough and have been known to break a Vienna roll with my bare hands. I am very handsome, have a powerful physique, and change my shirt regularly every Monday morning. When resting between assignments I live in a French Provincial chateau of (sic) Mulholland Drive. It is a fairly small place of forty-eight rooms and fifty-nine baths. I dine off gold plate and prefer to waited on by naked dancing girls. But of course there are times when I have to grow a beard and hole up in a Main Street flophouse, and there are other times when I am, although not by request, entertained in the drunk tank in the city jail. I have friends from all walks of life. Some are highly educated and some talk like Darryl Zanuck. I have fourteen telephones on my desk, including direct lines to New York, London, Paris, Rome, and Santa Rosa. My filing case opens out into a very convenient portable bar, and the bartender, who lives in the bottom drawer, is a midget named Harry Cohn. I am a heavy smoker and according to my mood I smoke tobacco, marijuana, corn silk, and dried tea leaves. I do a great deal of research, especially in the apartments of tall blondes. I get my material in various ways, but my favorite procedure . . . consists of going through the desks of other writers after hours. I am thirty-eight years old and have been for the last twenty years. I do not regard myself as a dead shot, but I am a pretty dangerous man with a wet towel. But all in all I think my favorite weapon is a twenty dollar bill. In my spare time I collect elephants.
October 30, 2007
Douglas Hoftstadter posed a thought experiment: What if Einstein's brain was dumped into a book, and by reading the book one could converse with Einstein himself? Walk with me on this one: This book is much the same, but you're conversing with Raymond Chandler and not Time Magazine's Man of the Century. It's a worthwhile walk. Chandler is at his crankiest in these letters, a collection born of insomnia and an apparent love affair with his typewriter. Those who dismiss him as a genre writer of pulp should do themselves a favor and read this book. Often within the first three sentences of a letter you can tell he's arrived at his opinion long before the penning of said letter -- and then he spends the next three pages questioning that opinion in a honest, earnest manner. His letters regarding alcoholism and his suicide attempt are like Shakespeare monologues; a man in utter conflict over his situation, aware of his frailties, defiant to the end. This is a book I plan to dip into over the decades.
November 13, 2012
A must read : "The most durable thing in writing is
style. It is a projection of personality and you have
to have a personality before you can project it. It
is the product of emotion and perception."
style. It is a projection of personality and you have
to have a personality before you can project it. It
is the product of emotion and perception."
November 28, 2022
"Never meet your heroes"..;. Chandler turns out to be racist, sexist, homophobic and anti-semitic, as well as sometimes petty-minded self-righteous egotist...but there is still a lot of talent on show here.
Chandler is very much a man of his times, and when you are surrounded by people who tell you how great you are, you start to believe it. His saving grace though is a wry sense of humour and a lot of self-mockery, plus a real dedication to his craft and helping others.
Chandler is clearly bitter that his life's work is not taken seriously by literary critics, and that detective novels are not considered literature (perhaps his are taken more seriously now...but maybe not). And he rails against critics constantly, though there are nice juxtapositions of him complaining to one correspondent about someone followed by his flattering letter to that person. (I did not know he was friends with JB Priestley).
He is equally critical of America and Britain, and always finds something to complain about. His wife's ill-health and his own, and the challenges of modern life, are constant themes. but there are some good anecdote in here, and it gives a great insight into the inner life of a (flawed) genius.
June 25, 2022
4,5 ⭐️
April 27, 2024
Took me four years, but was worth every minute. A long debt paid back.
March 13, 2012
I've always thought that a book of someone's letters can give you a better insight into a person's life and character than even the best biography written about that person.
As another reviewer mentioned, in his letters Chandler comes off as someone living out of his time and place. His alcoholism, pronounced Anglophilia, disdain for America and of any place he found himself living, dismissal of mystery stories, fiction in general and his work in particular all seem to me to be signs of a deep-seated inferiority complex.
As Jacque Barzun writes on the book jacket Chandler was a fine informal critic of literature and one of the highlights of this collection is Chandler's take on other mystery novels and writers.
I was a little disappointed that the letters selected do not give much detail on his relationship with Billy Wilder during the writing of the film, "Double Indemnity." Like his work for Hitchcock on "Strangers on a Train," Chandler seems dismissive of his work on that picture while seeming to value the screenwriting he did on "The Blue Dahlia," a fine film but nowhere near the quality of the other two pictures.
As another reviewer mentioned, in his letters Chandler comes off as someone living out of his time and place. His alcoholism, pronounced Anglophilia, disdain for America and of any place he found himself living, dismissal of mystery stories, fiction in general and his work in particular all seem to me to be signs of a deep-seated inferiority complex.
As Jacque Barzun writes on the book jacket Chandler was a fine informal critic of literature and one of the highlights of this collection is Chandler's take on other mystery novels and writers.
I was a little disappointed that the letters selected do not give much detail on his relationship with Billy Wilder during the writing of the film, "Double Indemnity." Like his work for Hitchcock on "Strangers on a Train," Chandler seems dismissive of his work on that picture while seeming to value the screenwriting he did on "The Blue Dahlia," a fine film but nowhere near the quality of the other two pictures.
January 16, 2016
"Jeg burde måske tilføje at sekretæren er en sort perserkat på 14 år, og jeg kalder hende min sekretær, fordi hun har været hos mig, lige siden jeg begyndte at skrive. Sædvanligvis sidder hun på det papir, jeg skal bruge, eller på de manuskript ark, jeg gerne vil rette i. Af og til læner hun sig op af skrivemaskinen, og andre gange stirrer hun blot ud af vinduet fra et hjørne af skrivebordet, som ville hun sige: "Det du laver er spild af min tid, kammerat." Hendes navn er Taki (oprindeligt var det Take, men vi blev trætte af at forklare at det var det japanske ord for bambus og skulle udtales med to stavelser)."
May 16, 2012
My current favorite. This fills the gap left after Lent. Dry humor, suppressed rage mixed with admiration for Hollywood and what it does to writers. I love the attention Chandler obviously gives to writing as his craft, while desiring to tell a drama about people using the best mystery when that form will work. the criticism he levels at Agatha Christie as the antithesis of what he wants to represent as a writer is an example of his thinking about genre and purpose.
August 30, 2012
I haven't had a chance to get back to this one. I'm reading his works and his letters in the order that they were written and I have to get another copy of his early works. I've enjoyed what I've read so far. He must have been an amusing man to spend an evening talking with.
January 7, 2013
Not as well collected as some other letter collections of his, though the letters being nearly all fully printed made it a good read. A lot of the letters had already been read in other collections, but many hand only been partly done before. A fun read.
October 6, 2012
Great insight into the mind of a complex man who called 'em as he saw 'em ...
May 9, 2013
There are a lot of gems about writing in this book, but it gets depressing after Cissy dies.
February 9, 2019
Say 4.5. It started a little slow with mundane communications with publishers but as he went on he got better and better. After his wife died he went off the rails, but wrote more and more.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews