The World of Raymond Chandler: In His Own Words

by Raymond Chandler, Barry Day (Editor)

 Raymond Chandler never wrote a memoir or autobiography. The closest he came to writing either was in—and around—his novels, shorts stories, and letters. There have been books that describe and evaluate Chandler’s life, but to find out what he himself felt about his life and work, Barry Day, editor of The Letters of Noël Coward (“There is much to dazzle here in just the way we expect . . . the book is meticulous, artfully structured—splendid” —Daniel Mendelsohn; The New York Review of Books), has cannily, deftly chosen from Chandler’s writing, as well as the many interviews he gave over the years as he achieved cult status, to weave together an illuminating narrative that reveals the man, the work, the worlds he created.Using Chandler’s own words as well as Day’s text, here is the life of “the man with no home,” a man precariously balanced between his classical English education with its immutable values and that of a fast-evolving America during the years before the Great War, and the changing vernacular of the cultural psyche that resulted. Chandler makes clear what it is to be a writer, and in particular what it is to be a writer of “hardboiled” fiction in what was for him “another language.” Along the way, he discusses the work of his Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Agatha Christie, W. Somerset Maugham, and others (“I wish,” said Chandler, “I had one of those facile plotting brains, like Erle Gardner”).Here is Chandler’s Los Angeles (“There is a touch of the desert about everything in California,” he said, “and about the minds of the people who live here”), a city he adopted and that adopted him in the post-World War I period . . . Here is his Hollywood (“Anyone who doesn’t like Hollywood,” he said, “is either crazy or sober”) . . . He recounts his own (rocky) experiences working in the town with Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, and others. . .We see Chandler’s alter ego, Philip Marlowe, private eye, the incorruptible knight with little armor who walks the “mean streets” in a world not made for knights (“If I had ever an opportunity of selecting the movie actor who would best represent Marlowe to my mind, I think it would have been Cary Grant.”) . . . Here is Chandler on drinking (his life in the end was in a race with alcohol—and loneliness) .  .  . and here are Chandler’s women—the Little Sisters, the “dames” in his fiction, and in his life (on writing The Long Goodbye, Chandler said, “I watched my wife die by half inches and I wrote the best book in my agony of that knowledge . . . I was as hollow as the places between the stars.” After her death Chandler led what he called a “posthumous life” writing fiction, but more often than not, his writing life was made up of letters written to women he barely knew.)Interwoven throughout the text are more than one hundred pictures that reveal the psyche and world of Raymond Chandler. “I have lived my whole life on the edge of nothing,” he wrote.  In his own words, and with Barry Day’s commentary, we see the shape this took and the way it informed the man and his extraordinary work.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography

262 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 11, 2014

About the author

Raymond 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."

Reviews

[Charles Finch · Rating 4 out of 5]

My New York Times review:

THE WORLD OF RAYMOND CHANDLER

In His Own Words

Edited by Barry Day

Knopf, $27.95.

Raymond Chandler is a bit like Rimbaud: a great artist who left behind no great art. The plot of his most famous book, “The Big Sleep,” makes no sense, as he admitted himself, and none of his novels hold up — their characters thin, their wisecracking growing quickly stale, unless you happen to adore wisecracking. Yet Joan Didion might not exist without him, or Bret Easton Ellis, or, in the present moment, a writer like Dana Spiotta. What he bequeathed them was the idea of existential weariness as the essential idiom of modern life. And glittering, empty Los Angeles as the place it lived.

In this terrific one-man oral history, Day allows Chandler to elucidate that vision himself. He was a penetrating, thwarted, breathtakingly intelligent person. War made him. “Once you have had to lead a platoon into direct machine-gun fire, nothing is ever the same,” he said, and his famous proxy, Philip Marlowe, whose evanescent victories can’t forestall the next senseless act of cruelty, generalized that sorrow for a generation that longed to know other people felt it too. In the process, Chandler remade crime fiction, which had until then been essentially a genre of reassurance.

Chandler was full of witticisms about women and cops, but what shine are his thoughts on writing and Hollywood. “The motion picture,” he remarked, “is a great industry, as well as a defeated art.” Chandler himself was no different: greatly industrious and a defeated artist. Battered by history, he cultivated a minor virtuosity, understood its limitations and made of it something that has lasted anyway.

[Barry Hammond · Rating 4 out of 5]

Editor Barry Day collects Raymond Chandler's own words from his novels, non-fiction, short stories, letters, essays, and the like on subjects such as the character of his detective Philip Marlowe, the city of Los Angles, Hollywood, cops and crime, women, the art and craft of writing, his competitors in the hard-boiled writing world, the icons of his world (cigarettes, cars, Scotch, his brand of coffee), along with ample illustrations to paint a vivid picture of the man, his fiction, his world and the times he lived in. Anyone with either an interest in Chandler, detective, pulp and crime fiction, Noir films, or literature will find something worthwhile in this volume. - BH.

[Alvin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chandler's characters were all straight from central casting and the less said of his "plots" the better, but his writing sparkles and dances like a desperate, two-bit showgirl making a play for the town's biggest sugar daddy. (Ok, that was bad. Sorry!) This collection of Chandlerisms is perfect for anyone who wants to closely examine his prose style and as a bonus, offers pretty good summations of both his life story and his writing's place in popular culture.

[Wayne · Rating 1 out of 5]

Doesn't provide any insight or interest that you don't get from Chandler's novels. This book is mainly just an organized collection of novel quotes placed into categories such as "Philip Marlowe," "The city of the angels," "Hollywood." Pretty unspectacular in every way. The quotes are great but I'd say read his terrific novels instead.

[Don · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent insight into the literary mind of the great author.

[Ethan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book should be at the top of the list for "advanced" Chandler aficionados, especially those who haven't revisited Chandler's works in a while. Seeing Chandler's actual passages alongside those of similar themes, across decades, creates wonderfully refreshing insight into just how individual and felicitous an author he was. Genuine literature in the guise of pulp storytelling.

Editor Barry Day, though excellent selection of excerpts and minimal connecting text, does a masterful job of focusing attention on just what made Chander special without imposing a particular viewpoint.

Those just starting to explore Chandler should stick with the complete works - the Library of America editions are excellent - then come to this book for reinvigoration a few years later.

[Emmett · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short scrapbook of quotes from Chandler on various topics such as Hollywood and screenwriting, drawn from a variety of materials, not only his novels but his letters, articles and essays. Being what it is, there's very little analysis or independent interpretation, but Chandler speaks clear and for himself in bitterness, humour, self-deprecation and descriptive poetry. Links are left here to be discovered, indexes for greater appreciation, for instance, his thorny relationship writing scripts with Billy Wilder (whose response to Chandler's acrimonious essay on Hollywood was given the last word), or his love for Saki his furry black Persian, facets of his life in anecdotal form, sparkling like tiny diamonds in sand. Interestingly, the format of thematic quotation allows a larger pattern to surface from his material which depicts the author as a person who endeavoured to capture Los Angeles in its colours and contradictions, who reacted against the cosy form of the mystery story, and the inferiority of its writers by throwing it out into the cold of the mean streets, a man who was eventually disappointed and embittered by the transformation of a place he was fond of, a change observed to be refracted in his detective Philip Marlowe. His love for the music of language and his strong belief in writing as a form of magic always comes to the fore, confirming that beloved writer of extended metaphors ("I was as much use as a hummingbird's spare egg would have been." - The High Window) one meets briefly between the pages of his stories.

[Stephen Hickman · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is an odd sort of book constructed out of quotes from Chandler's books and his archive of personal correspondence. The compiler creates a vague sort of narrative that guides the reader but it is not substantial enough set against the weight of quotation. The book is not a biography but the relentless exposure to Chandler's style does begin to explain how he became so successful. When I reflected on the words of his most famous character, Marlowe, it struck me how unlikely he was yet how easily we could listen to his outrageous similes without imagining Chandler toying with us. "She opened a mouth like a fire bucket", or "She shut the door...as carefully as if it were made of short pie crust." The dialogue isn't that of a hard bitten detective, it is Chandler entertaining us. It is clear the story is less important than the visual image he paints or the description of character (or lack thereof), "his face was like a vacant lot". I imagined Chandler tasking himself daily to create similes which he would bank and draw on at some later date. Certainly an efficient method for a writer expected to deliver new mysteries on a regular basis. Two stars because this is essentially a compilation, but certainly a pleasant and sometimes amusing read.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not a biography. Not a "The Letters of..." collection. It breaks Chandler's life and fiction into 9 chapters, that allows Chandler to speak for himself, through letters, essays, short stories and novels. Not, for the person who is coming to Chandler for the first time ( Library of American has done that with his novels and Everyman has a thick, doorstop collection of all his short stories.) it still. shows how Chandler's work had a impact on not just the American Mystery but American Fiction.

As a fan of Chandler it makes a nice addition to my library. It carries several rare photographs, and if you are a fan of Detective's Philip Marlow's wisecracks, here is a handy treasure trove from the errant knight of LA's "mean streets".

[J Pearson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm a fan of Chandler and his Marlowe novels (and the Black Mask stories as well.) I was a bit disappointed in this but it is as the title calls itself-- 98% Chandler quotes with a small, small bit of prose sometimes stitching them together. I guess I was looking for a bit more authorial/editorial insight and criticism. I found myself skimming and bored at times. There were also some strangely confusing bits, editorial missteps-- people from Chandler's life introduced with no background and only their last names. I was lost a few times but it ultimately did not matter. Plus, I have absolutely no idea what the last image in the book is meant to be representative of-- seems random.

[Gaylord Dold · Rating 3 out of 5]

Day, Barry (ed.), The World of Raymond Chandler: In His Own Words, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2014 (250pp.$30)

Much (if not over-much) has been written about Raymond Chandler, the famous creator of Philip Marlow and patriarch of the American noir detective story. An only-child born to an American father and an Anglo-Irish mother, the Chandlers lived mostly in Chicago where, Chandler remembered as a kid seeing “a cop shoot a little white dog to death.” He suffered through scarlet fever in a cheap hotel room where his parents had come to roost during hard times, after which his father, “an utter swine”, abandoned his wife and child in 1895. Mother and son went back to Ireland, then on to England, where there were concerned relatives. Chandler went to a second-tier English public school named Dulwich where he was a contemporary of William Henry Pratt, who became Boris Karloff. The concerned relatives pegged young Raymond for the Civil Service; Chandler however, toured the continent for almost a year where he learned both French and German. Upon coming back, the no longer callow Ray borrowed money and left for Los Angeles with his mother in tow. When the Great War broke out, Chandler joined a Canadian regiment and had a distinguished service record in the Gordon Highlanders.

Chandler arrived back in Los Angeles in 1919 sporting “a beautiful wardrobe, a public school accent, and no practical gifts for earning a living.” He also had a “contempt for the natives” that came in handy when the time arrived to write detective novels. For a while he picked apricots and strung tennis rackets, studied accounting at night school, and finally caught on with the Dabney Oil Syndicate, learning to drink heavily and chase skirts. He cared for and lived with his mother until she died, at which time he married his beloved Cissy, eighteen years his senior, though she claimed to be only seven. It was a love that lasted until Cissy died in the early 1950s. The drinking, though, along with the Depression, cost him his job at Dabney. He taught himself to write hard-boiled detective fiction in order to survive, developing a special vernacular he brought to life in stories for the magazine Black Mask. By 1940 he was a success. It was always he and Cissy against the world, and they did pretty well, despite the fact that Chandler was mostly lost in the void.

Englishman Barry Day is a playwright and producer of musical revues, with a long history editing compilations like this one. He has previously concentrated on the likes of Dorothy Parker, Oscar Wilde, Johnny Mercer and P.G. Wodehouse, making a specialty of Noel Coward. In “The World of Raymond Chandler,” Day allows Chandler free rein, building through correspondence, occasional essays, and copious renderings from Chandler’s novels and stories, a vivid artistic portrait of a man who described himself as having “no home”. Day constructs his portrait of Chandler with skill and acumen, honing an accurate picture of the artist, his milieu, personal views and opinions, writing habits, living environment, tics and complaints, friendships, prejudices and fantasies. Fortunately, Chandler was an inveterate letter writer, even committing himself to a number of in-depth literary essays on genre writing and detective fiction in particular.


He was, like Dashiell Hammett before him, astonished at the corruption of society in general, and of the cops, government and business in particular. He liked the simplicity of Los Angeles in 1912; he despised its smoggy enormity thirty years later when everything had changed. As he wrote his English publisher, “I have lost Los Angeles. It is no longer the place I knew so well and was almost the first to put on paper. I have that feeling, not very unusual, that I helped create the town and was then pushed out of it by the operators. I can hardly find my way around any longer. I know damn well that I sound like a bitter and disappointed man. I guess I am at that.”

This is a fine and honorable book, one that fans of Chandler and newcomers to his work can enjoy. Divided into chapters covering important topics like writing, cops and crime, “The City of the Angels”, Hollywood, Dames—and, eventually, the end times without Cissy, when Chandler was robbed of his reason, “The World of Raymond Chandler” also has a wonderful chronology and a short biography, hitting the highs and lows. Likewise important is a collection of over 100 beautiful black and white photographs that illustrate the book throughout, each carefully chosen. The chapters on Chandler’s work in Hollywood (he helped Billy Wilder write “Double Indemnity”, and authored an original screenplay called “The Blue Dahlia”), the city of Los Angeles, and the writing life, have original value and coherence.

Chandler died of pneumonia in 1959, lost, alone and drunk. Day describes him as a man with no real political agenda, apart from a distrust of power in any form. His philosophy of life, picked up at an early age, was that the whole business consisted of, “today a pat on the back, tomorrow a kick in the teeth.” “The World of Raymond Chandler” is a finely made book, and an excellent addition to the already large literature about a man who wrote not about crime and detection, but about the “corruption of the human spirit”. No matter how crowded the shelf, there is always room for one more good book. And this is surely one of those.

[Ashley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting read, and I liked seeing the excerpts from his letters. Would have loved more analysis, but that's not really the point of the book. Lots of fascinating photos too.

[Russell Horton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very well researched and informative. A good primer for any potential Chandler reader and for fans of Crime fiction.

[Tim McKay · Rating 2 out of 5]

Don't waste your money.

[RA · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just a wonderful, fun read - the book presents a biographical analysis of Chandler using his own words, from his books, articles and letters.

To see so many great lines is very entertaining. Very few use the English language as Chandler did.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Chandler's writing. It was nice seeing a lot of his best phrases again all in one place. Actually it was better than nice. Chandler is the master of sarcasm. God I miss him

[Joseph Longo]

If you are a Raymond Chandler fan this is the book for you. It is an in-depth look at Raymond Chandler and his alter-ego, Philip Marlowe. The book is well organized. It is broken into sections that deal with Chandler and writing, Chandler working in Hollywood, Chandler the Acadenmy-Award nominated screenwriter, Chandler and women, Chandler in LA, Chandler and the detective story, Chandler and Marlowe, and much more. (As a screenwriter, Chandler worked on classic film noirs like "Double Indemnity" and "Strangers on the Train.") As the title of the books suggests most of the book is in Chandler's own words: excepts from his short stories and novels, letters (he was a lonely man and an avid letter writer), articles, and interviews. The book is filled with delicious quotes and there is a wonderfully long chapter on Chandler's famous similes and metaphors. For example: "Dead men are heavier than broken hearts."“Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form inself on the edge of consciousness.” “She bent over me again. Blood began to move around in me, like a prospective tenant looking over a house.”

This book is not only for die-hard Chandler fans like myself. It is also of interest to anyone who is interested in the evolution of the detective story or detective genre. Chandler along with Dashiell Hammett and Edgar Alan Poe pretty much created the genre. This book taps into Chandler's mind and his creative process in developing his timeless stories.

[Rea Redd]

The World of Raymond Chandler In His Own Word offers a fine introduction to Chandler's life and work and supplies a refreshing reminder to those who are quite familiar with his novels and short stories. It is well illustrated with historic photographs of Chandler's life, his book covers and Los Angles during the era in which the novels and short stories are set. The chronology is a very helpful guide to Chandler's childhood, World War One experiences, his business career, and his work writing short stories, novels, and screen plays.

Chandler along with Hamett, Cain and McDonald had an immense impact on American popular literature and cinema. He was twice nominated for Academy Awards for his screenplays and several films of his novels helped to make the careers of Humphrey Bogart, Dick Powell, Fred McMurray, Lauren Bacall and Barbara Stanwyck. Chandler wrote for both Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock. Additionally, Chandler wrote extensively on the craft of writing as it relates to the genres of hard boiled and noir detective fiction.

Notable chapters in The World of Raymond Chandler In His Own Words include those on his birth, childhood and growing up in Chicago, Nebraska and the England, the development of his writing style for the pulp literature market, the urban history of Los Angles, and his literary and film industry criticism. Barry Day relies almost exclusively on Chandler's novels, short stories and personal letters; most of the book is Chandlers words organized by Day whose transitions within chapters are clear and concise.

[Christina · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book disappointed me. It supplied some basic biographical background on Chandler that I had not known before, such as his wife, Cissy, being 18 years older than him, so it wasn't a complete waste of time. For the most part, however, these aren't Chandler's words about Chandler's thoughts. It turns out that Chandler kept up correspondences over decades with some fans who wrote him, but these letter exchanges mainly discussed the art and craft of writing. Without more subject matter to mine, the editor, Barry Day, resorts to creating broad categories that appeared in Chandler's fiction. So, you don't get Raymond Chandler's personal thoughts, you get musings from his fictional protagonists, mostly his most famous private eye, Philip Marlowe, on dames, cops or the city of Los Angeles. Maybe Marlowe was a mouthpiece for Chandler, but it's doubtful. Chandler was writing pulp detective fiction, after all, not from his own life. In the end, I decided that my time was better spent re-reading Chandler's actual works instead of a large collection of context-free pull-quotes from said works.

[Robert Miller · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is saved from a 2* rating mainly because of the great quotes from Chandler's fictional characters, although the author does provide some biographical background on the author. I understand the author's format, however, the seemingly endless quotes (although , many are great) simply don't carry the day and the book drags. One thing Barry Day made clear is how snobbish, and critical Chandler was concerning other authors- especially as he grew older- perhaps Chandler should have paid more attention to his letter he wrote to Deirdre Gartrell on July 25, 1957 where he said "The older you get, the less you know". Although by today's standards, Chandler would be considered (vis-a'-vis his character, Philip Marlow) somewhat of a misogynist, his work appertained to his era and genre and obtained cult-like status. One of my favorite quotes in the book is "I am one of those people who have to be known exactly the right amount to be liked". In the case of this book, I think you would have to be a big fan of Chandler's work in order to give it a higher rating.

[Terry · Rating 2 out of 5]

Skip this book and read Raymond Chandler. This was a very thoughtful gift by a friend who knows I've read and loved everything Raymond Chandler has written. Sadly, this was a disappointment. The World of Raymond Chandler: In His Own Words is just that with some very flat, poorly written and disengaging introductions and transitions by Barry Day who put it together. Lots of pages are filled with one-sentence quotes from various works of Chandler's organized around themes like Chandler's women, Hollywood, etc. Chandler's writing is terrific (now I remember why I read all those books) but even wonderful writing gets tedious when presented as a list of excerpts. A few sections read better -- those with longer excerpts from the novels or from letters -- but my advice is to read Chandler in the original in entire books, not bits. And I will do so all over again -- so I can thank this book (and my friend) for that.

[Giuliana · Rating 2 out of 5]

This books is a collection of quotes from Chandler's novels and letters, with minimal stitching from Barry Day. I will give it only three stars because I think this is a book that would be bought only by someone who has already read at least most of Chandler's novels. And at that point, I think you're better served by reading his letters, rather than these short excerpts. Chandler's letters have been collected in many great editions (start with Raymond Chandler Speaking), and they are a total joy to read: smart, hilarious, and so very insightful in all matters from literature to cinema, from actors to cats. I would have appreciated more if Barry Day had given more commentary and analysis of Chandler's work, but really he just created an entertaining, but a little superficial, "quotable Chandler".

[Joe · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this biography, Day portrays a gifted, but troubled, alcoholic writer who cared more about words than other pulp writers. Day exposes the softboiled man in Chandler’s love for his wife, Cissy, and his cat Taki. Chandler the writer, though, had a gift for writing tough-guy dialogue and for concocting the simile that’s sometimes "crazy as a pair of waltzing mice."

Go to my blog and then to the Boston Globe.

Have Words--Will Write 'Em

--Joe

[Rick Rapp · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book uses an interesting concept: Chandler's own words (in letters and from novels and stories) are used to provide an insight into the author and as a means to appreciate his highly distinctive style. Like Poe, who gave us the original mystery and horror stories, Chandler contributed mightily to film noir and the stories behind it. This book is not a traditional biography…not much is offered as an explanation of his life, talent, and habits beyond his own words. But I found that enough…and very entertaining.

[Jarrod · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good a quick and seamless read however day does have a knack for repeating quotes. I also think it would have been interesting to have a letter recipient list beforehand so that the reader may understand who some of recipients are.

[Maureen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very enjoyable read if you love Chandler's writing style. I found myself laughing aloud at the selections in this books, which are organized by topics like Los Angeles, women, writing, etc. This is a great books for the beach if you are interested in Chandler's life and his world view.

[Bobby Holly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting. Informative.

[Joseph Hageman · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent, well organized and thoughtful book about a complex, gifted man. The quotes from his books are terrific!

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

A must for Chandler-philes.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read my review here: http://marktconard.com/2016/01/03/the....