COLLECTED STORIES of RAYMOND CHANDLER
Raymond Chandler
Contents
Introduction
Select Bibliography
Blackmailers Don’t Shoot
Smart-Aleck Kill
Finger Man
Killer in the Rain
Nevada Gas
Spanish Blood
Guns at Cyrano’s
The Man Who Liked Dogs
Pickup on Noon Street
Goldfish
The Curtain
Try the Girl
Mandarin’s Jade
Red Windp
The King in Yellow
Bay City Blues
The Lady in the Lake
Pearls Are a Nuisance
Trouble Is My Business
I’ll Be Waiting
The Bronze Door
No Crime in the Mountains
Professor Bingo’s Snuff
The Pencil
English Summer
Introduction
When my wife Iris Murdoch—a novelist and herself a Chandler fan—was at school, the headmistress, a rather formidable woman, used periodically to descend on the girls in their recreation time, and if one of them happened to be reading anything, assume an interested and approving expression and ask what it was. One of Iris’s schoolmates was found in this way with her nose in a book, and obviously deeply absorbed. ‘And what are you reading, Clare?’ enquired the great lady benevolently, expecting the answer to be something high-minded on world politics (the school was both Quakerish and left-wing in tone) or perhaps some modern thinker of that time like H. G. Wells or Aldous Huxley. ‘Detection, Mystery and Howwor, Miss Baker,’ reported the maiden brightly and quite unabashed, her demure inability to manage the Rs somehow lending her girlish tastes an extra dimension of depravity. Her schoolfellows, Iris among them, were too polite to start giggling, at least at that moment; and the great lady herself had for once no comeback (or so Iris reported to me, many years later) but swept off with the sound usually represented by the monosyllable ‘Tchah!’
One would like to think that the ‘Detection, Mystery and Howwor’ omnibus in which the enterprising girl was immersed might have included an early tale or two by the great master of the form—if the blanket title of the young lady’s book could be said to describe a form—but given the time (the 1930s) and the place that seems unlikely. Chandler’s apprentice tales from the Black Mask magazine did not find their way to England or into an English collection of his own until some time after the war, when the true stature of his mature masterpieces had already been appreciated by a discerning audience of English critics and writers—fellow professionals, as it were—among whom were such varied performers in their own line as W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot, J. B. Priestley, Graham Greene and Elizabeth Bowen. In the wake of his rising fame, publication of the early stories naturally followed.
Among these English devotees was a young journalist and man about town called Ian Fleming, who would himself shortly win fame of a much more spectacular and popular kind with the creation of his hero James Bond. As narrator and character Bond is not in the same class as Philip Marlowe, but he, or rather his creator, does possess an unbounded admiration for Marlowe and for Chandler’s personality and achievements. Towards the end of Goldfinger, in the moment of deceptive calm before the final crisis, James Bond finds time at the airport to buy Ben Hogan’s The Modern Fundamentals of Golf. Although content himself to be an amateur, this is a sport in which he is seriously interested, but he is just as interested in the latest Raymond Chandler, which he also buys. Goldfinger was written in 1959, the year of Chandler’s death, but neither Bond nor his creator would have worried about a little mistiming like that.
Fleming’s books were beginning by then to be increasingly successful, although he was still a long way from the best seller he was ultimately to become. But the example of Chandler, and the admiration Fleming felt for his work, continued to act as an inspiration, although Fleming may well have wished that his hero Bond, with whom his public not unjustifiably identified him, had been more up to the intellectual level of Chandler and his Marlowe. Yet he had undoubtedly begun to see himself as carrying the great man’s torch, and writing in the same tradition. The example of Chandler had indeed taught his English disciple how to create a world unmistakably his own, not by means of plot device or story line, but by the build-up of atmosphere, and the attentive accumulation of local colour. Both writers relegate the story to a decidedly subordinate position: what tells is not our curiosity about the plot, or the ingenuities of the whodunit, but the creation of a unique and autonomous domain, with the denizens appropriate to it.
Much more than Bond, of course, Marlowe is an inhabitant of a particular world, Chandler’s own in so far as it is his own brilliant imaginative creation, but a world none the less observed as meticulously from life as are the properties of a Vermeer picture. Within the nature and quality of Chandler’s writing the paradox comes to seem quite normal. The Southern Californian landscape, the settings urban and semi-urban, as if the whole huge colourful country were a single town; the gardens sprawling and richly outlandish, or sinister and compact; the house interiors, as naturally and as closely observed as Vermeer’s own, with their furniture and carpets and fittings…These are the scenes in which Chandler and his hero are at home, and his sense of place is immaculate, a pleasure unique and all of its own, whether we are in the opulent mansions of Bel-Air, the grand ranch-type dwellings in the hills miles away from Hollywood, or the sleazy backstreets of ‘Bay City’, as Santa Monica is usually referred to in the stories.
In her book Good Bones (1992), Margaret Atwood presents a picture as full of admiration as it is of amusement at the almost sensuous charms of Chandler’s still-life interiors, implying that he would have been the ideal editor and contributor to a sort of Californian version of House & Garden. She imagines too the pleasures of having ‘An Affair with Raymond Chandler’, along the lines of those English gentlemen who dreamed of an afternoon with Elinor Glyn on her famous tiger skin. She would fall in love with his interest in upholstery, with the bouquet of sunlight on ageing cloth, with his sofas ‘stuffed to roundness, satin-covered, pale-blue, like the eyes of his cold blonde unbodied murderous women’. Together they would drive out to some motel, and come to grips only after they had lovingly appraised the furniture, and inhaled the odour of dusty drapes and worn carpets, ancient cigarette and cigar smoke, Martinis mixed and spilled long ago.
This is a world which is inescapably cosy even when it is at its most sinister. In one sense it is almost an elaborate transfiguration of that more simply and robustly cosy world in which Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson go about their familiar business, returning to 221b Baker Street for relaxation over a well-roasted partridge and a bottle of Burgundy. Both Holmes and Marlowe are domestic pipe-smokers, but although Marlowe is both an austere and a dedicated drinking man he despises all drugs and their addicts: Holmes’s cocaine would not have been for him. His pipe, his chess problem and his tumbler of Scotch are none the less the equivalents of Holmes’s solitary violin and his pistol practice. Chandler is an adept both at following the conventions of the form in which he writes, and abandoning them in his own fashion, and with the subtle individuality of his own style.
That style was initiated and formed in England. Chandler was educated at Dulwich College on the outskirts of London, a school whose pupils were well-taught along old-fashioned lines, and particularly well-grounded in the classics. It had been founded in 1619 by Edward Alleyn, the celebrated actor-manager whose company, ‘the Admiral’s Men’, included the poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe, forerunner of
Shakespeare and author of Tamburlaine and Dr Faustus. It seems likely that Chandler had the name of the playwright in his mind when he finally christened his own narrator-hero Philip Marlowe, after bestowing on him in earlier stories tough pseudo-Irish names, suited to shamuses and private eyes, such as ‘John Dalmas’. Chandler’s mother was in fact Irish, although paradoxically Quaker rather than Catholic Irish, but his upbringing and his earliest writing were very much English, and almost of the fin de siècle period.
By coincidence, two other writers, P. G. Wodehouse and C. S. Forester, both of whom were to become masters of their own particular literary genre, were near-contemporaries of Chandler at Dulwich,[Wodehouse left the year Chandler entered the school (1900). Forester went to Dulwich in 1915.] and at a later date Chandler corresponded with Wodehouse and admired him as a fellow craftsman, in however different a style. Chandler was gratified, too, that his first recognition as a serious and original artist came from English authors and critics. But although his sympathies and so much of his culture lay in England, Chandler, both as man and as writer, was very much an American at heart. In a sense, and perhaps ironically, he was the opposite of those English butlers he does so well in his stories and novels, like the sublime Norris who seems to brood over the action of The Big Sleep.
The fine quality of Chandler’s writing is shown by the subtlety and precision that went into a minor character like Norris (Sir John Norris, or Norreys, was, incidentally, a famous and chivalrous Elizabethan commander) who makes an obvious contrast with the stock comic butler figures of Wodehouse, and other genre writers of his time. (Chandleresque humour appears early, too, in the ‘rogue’ butler of one story, whose British accent has a habit of slipping. ‘Dartmouth?, or Dannemora?’ enquires detective Dalmas sardonically.)
The culture mix in Chandler himself is certainly an exotic one. Dashiell Hammett, the forerunner in Chandler’s chosen manner, was the most obvious literary influence, as he was also a source of personal inspiration, introducing Chandler to Black Mask and its ‘Fellowship’ (the word seems curiously apt in the context of the crime and mystery tradition.) Afterwards came Ross Macdonald, a talented and avowed disciple of Chandler, making extensive use of his locations and his atmosphere, but with his own line, in a sense a more traditional and conventional one when it came to plots and solutions, and to the old detective tale technique of keeping the reader guessing. Chandler goes, as it were, through the motions of this technique, but it is clear that his interest is not really in it, nor does he require his reader’s to be. What he expects instead is for his reader to be fully and sensitively alert to all the rich pleasures of being in Chandler country, and meeting Chandler people.
And these, as I have said, are in a sense an imaginative exploration, even exaggeration, of the characters and properties inherent in the old-fashioned mystery thriller, but never so fully exploited. Their tradition of place and event was always ritualized, but Chandler gives this ritualization the polish and the density of his own manner and his own highly original kind of awareness. He dispenses with the traditional confidant, assistant or faithful friend, whose function was often to provide light relief and to be a bit of a buffoon, as even the much esteemed Dr Watson can be to Holmes at times; and as Ricardo is to Inspector Hanaud in A. E. W. Mason’s novels, or his bluff colleague Petrie is to Sir Dennis Nayland Smith of Scotland Yard in Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu stories.
Unlike his many predecessors Philip Marlowe is a lone wolf, a single operator walking on his own ‘down mean streets’, as Chandler was to put it, in his wry, cynical, understated endeavour not only to find out the truth but to make justice prevail in a corrupt world, a world which neither knows nor cares for the meaning of the word. Cosiness none the less breaks in, just as it does in the earlier, less stylishly ethical world of Holmes and Watson, and the solitary knight of the mean streets, who has no friend but his pipe, the chessboard and the whiskey bottle, who has every man’s hand against him, the police as well as the criminal and the villain, will in the evening return home, in the old style, but to his solitary lodging, to recruit himself for further trouble next day. (’Trouble’, as the title of one of the earlier stories claims, ‘Is My Business.’)
This rhythmical alternation of comfort and cosiness with danger and thrills is the most effective feature of the tradition. James Bond will return to his Chelsea flat where his veteran Scottish housekeeper will serve him boiled eggs done just as he likes them, a curiously innocent form of celebration for the victor of a hundred clashes with the evil power of SMERSH. True, for him there will have been the brief but satisfying encounter, no more than ritually erotic, with the heroine of the tale. For Marlowe there is not even that, although he too, after a heavy night, is a believer in the restorative powers of lightly boiled eggs. Nevertheless, neither sex nor riches will reward his efforts; only the meagre wages of the upright man—twenty-five dollars a day and expenses (*By the time of The Little Sister (1949) Marlowe’s rates have gone up to forty dollars a day.)—and perhaps the unspoken knowledge that he has struck some sort of blow for freedom, truth and justice, and let light and air, however briefly, into the murky underworld in which it is his lot to operate.
Towards the end of Marlowe’s career, as we know it, this unspoken monastic regime, whose routine in a subtle way is very satisfying to the reader, shows ominous signs of collapsing. The trouble, which is not the sort which Marlowe has always made his business, began in 1954, the year which saw the publication of The Long Goodbye, a novel whose length, unusual for Chandler, does not belie its title. Ominously too, the victim here is himself a writer, a writer who has made a fortune with a succession of bodice-ripping romances. He longs to write much better, but finds himself condemned to imitating his earlier successes, and reading ‘my old stuff for inspiration’, an oblique but ironic comment on the dilemma of many a successful author, as Chandler must himself have been becoming aware. His last completed novel, Playback, reveals the problem more than ever, even though Chandler himself remains an artist to his fingertips, and every sentence he wrote at this time still shows it.
Chandler may have thought that the notion of Marlowe succumbing eventually to a woman’s charms would be a good way for both writer and reader to bid him a graceful goodbye. However that may be, Marlowe does at last subside into full-blown matrimony in Poodle Springs, the final and very much unfinished novel. His personality as we know it would hardly have been capable of sustaining such a transformation, any more than one of Henry James’s unmarried heroes or heroines could have gone to the altar and yet survived as a character. Somebody once said that Sherlock Holmes might have miraculously survived the Reichenbach Falls, but he was never again quite the same man. With Chandler’s Marlowe, a man at least as much of a legend to his readers today as Holmes had once been, the case is different, and rather more complex; indeed it poses a general problem to which I shall return.
The point meanwhile is that the reader’s loyalty to the world created by Chandler, a world to which the reader has by now become so happily accustomed, is tested almost to breaking-point in Poodle Springs. Chandler’s unique interior landscape, and our belief in it, are both under threat, even though the story line and its conventions remain as strong as ever and readers who most enjoy the machinery of his plotting still find it perfectly adequate for ordinary enjoyment. Even in The Long Goodbye there is no longer any of Chandler’s lightness of touch—Marlowe’s grim virtue and integrity begin by the end of the novel to get the reader down a bit, as does a general tendency, even more marked in Playback, to hold forth at length about society and its ills—and yet the narrative is still gripping. Chandler remained master, too, of what might be termed the Scheherazade effect. That wily princess told the Sultan only a little of her story at a time. In the same way Chandler’s masterpieces should ideally be sampled slowly, in small appreciative mouthfuls. They depend upon Scheherazade’s sense of timing, instead of baffling readers and compelling them, sometimes out of sheer exasperation, to press
on to some unlikely solution presented in the last pages. A Chandler novel is a far cry from the kind of mystery the reader only wants to be finished and done with. If there should be a mild surprise in store it comes with quizzical courtesy, as if to show the author is aware of the conventions of his genre, and prepared to respect them in the letter if not in the spirit. What happened to Rusty Regan in The Big Sleep, and who projected whom through the high window which gives that novel its title, we shall find out in due course, but in the meantime we need not feel any great curiosity about the matter. The text offers too much else to be appreciated at our leisure.
Pleasure comes from the elaboration of what was originally a much shorter and brisker type of narrative, often one of the Black Mask tales, in which Chandler twice used the death by cyanosis which also figures in The Big Sleep. Chandler relied heavily on these tales for the outlines of his later novel plots, and the fusion of short-story terseness with the rich leisurely pace of the novel proved an effective formula. A later fiction like The Long Goodbye develops in a more leisurely manner, independent of the earlier story technique, and the results of this are not entirely beneficial.
Like Shakespeare, Chandler was happy to take his plots where he found them. His tongue-in-cheek recipe for bracing up any tale whose pace seemed to be slackening was for a man to burst in pointing a gun. But he could be a shrewd and serious critic of the genre in which he wrote, most notably in an essay called ‘The Simple Art of Murder’. ‘Fiction in any form’, he begins, ‘has always intended to be realistic.’ Only afterwards does the critic point out that it is in fact hidebound by conventions of all kinds. But the writer himself should not, must not, be too conscious of these. (That Chandler himself was both creator and an admirable critic was one of his peculiar strengths.) ‘All art forms can be practised badly, and it is exceedingly hard to practise any of them well, but really good specimens of the detective writer’s art are much rarer than good serious novels.’ The good novel, says Chandler, is not at all the same sort of thing as the bad: it is about different things, whereas the good and the bad detective story are necessarily about just the same things.