Raymond Chandler, Part 1: Biography

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Raymond Chandler published his first novel in 1939, when he was fifty years old. Before that he had been a schoolboy classicist in London, a failed poet, an infantryman in France, and a well-paid oil company executive who was fired for drinking. Out of that record he built Philip Marlowe, the Los Angeles private detective who sits behind most people's idea of a private detective, whether they have read Chandler or not. This week Book Report follows the man first, and then four books: The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely, his essay The Simple Art of Murder, and The Long Goodbye.

He was born in Chicago on July 23rd, 1888. His father, Maurice, was a railway engineer and an alcoholic who abandoned the family when Raymond was small. His mother, Florence, came from an Irish family in Waterford. For a time mother and son stayed with her relatives in Plattsmouth, Nebraska. Then, around 1900, she took him to England, where her family could help with his education. An uncle in Waterford helped pay. They lived in Upper Norwood, in south London, in a house with his grandmother and an aunt.

Chandler went to Dulwich College, a London school with a strong classical program, and he excelled at Latin and Greek. P. G. Wodehouse, whom Book Report covered last month, came from the same school, and the school's master has said the two overlapped by a single term. Later in life Chandler said that a classical education saves a person from being fooled by pretentiousness. That attitude stayed with him. He became a writer who used the slang of American streets with the ear of someone who had parsed Latin verbs.

In 1907 he became a British subject so he could sit the civil service examination. He passed, and took a clerk's job at the Admiralty, keeping track of naval stores. He disliked the deference the job required and quit, to his family's dismay. He tried journalism in London, writing for the Daily Express and the Westminster Gazette, and published poems and reviews. The poems were romantic and conventional. The first one, "The Unknown Love," appeared in December 1908. By 1912 he had concluded that he could not make a living this way. He borrowed money from his uncle and sailed back to America.

He landed in San Francisco and soon moved to Los Angeles, then a fast-growing city of oil derricks, orange groves and real-estate promotion. He strung tennis rackets, picked fruit and worked at a creamery, and he took a course in bookkeeping. In 1917, with the United States at war, he enlisted in the Canadian army in Victoria, British Columbia, and served in France with a Canadian infantry battalion. He was in Royal Air Force flight training in England when the war ended.

Back in Los Angeles, he fell in love with Pearl Eugenie Pascal, known as Cissy. She was married, and she was eighteen years older than he was. His mother opposed the relationship. Cissy's divorce came through in 1920, and Chandler waited. His mother died in September 1923. Five months later, in February 1924, Raymond and Cissy married. He was thirty-five. She was in her fifties.

His working life went well for a decade. In 1922 he joined the Dabney Oil Syndicate as a bookkeeper, and by 1931 he was a vice president with a large salary. Then it came apart. He drank heavily, missed days of work, had affairs with women at the office and threatened suicide. In 1932, deep in the Depression, the company fired him. He was forty-four and had no profession left.

What he did next is the hinge of the whole story. He decided to write for the pulp magazines, the cheap fiction monthlies printed on rough wood-pulp paper. He approached them like a craftsman taking apart a machine. He practiced by imitating a novelette by Erle Stanley Gardner, the writer later famous for Perry Mason. His first story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot," appeared in Black Mask magazine in December 1933. It took him about five months, and it paid one hundred and eighty dollars. Over the next three years he published eleven stories in Black Mask, then more in other pulps. One of them, "Finger Man," in 1934, introduced the first-person detective who would grow into Marlowe. Chandler later said he had to learn American like a foreign language. He studied it the way he had once studied Latin.

In 1939 the publisher Alfred A. Knopf brought out The Big Sleep, built by joining and rewriting two of those stories. Farewell, My Lovely followed in 1940, then The High Window and The Lady in the Lake. The books sold respectably. Hollywood paid far better. In 1943 Paramount hired him, at seven hundred and fifty dollars a week, to adapt James M. Cain's Double Indemnity with the director Billy Wilder. The two fought for months. Chandler quit at one point and sent the studio a long list of complaints about Wilder. Wilder later said he drove Chandler back to drinking. The script was nominated for an Academy Award, and so was Chandler's original screenplay for The Blue Dahlia two years later.

According to the producer John Houseman, Chandler finished The Blue Dahlia drunk, at home, with studio limousines waiting outside and secretaries on call, because he said it was the only way he could do it. People have argued ever since about whether that was self-sacrifice or an alcoholic's excuse.

In 1946 the Chandlers moved to La Jolla, on the coast near San Diego. He wrote The Little Sister there, and then The Long Goodbye. Cissy was old and increasingly ill with lung disease, and much of The Long Goodbye was written while she was dying. She died in December 1954. Ten weeks later he tried to shoot himself, after first telephoning the police to tell them what he meant to do. He survived.

His last years were restless. He traveled to London, drank hard, and formed close attachments to several women, among them his literary agent, Helga Greene. He finished one more novel, Playback, in 1958. He died in La Jolla on March 26th, 1959, at seventy, of pneumonia. He had wanted to be buried with Cissy, but he left no instructions, so he was buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in San Diego while her ashes sat in a mausoleum basement a block away. In 2011, after a court petition by a Chandler enthusiast, her ashes were interred with him on Valentine's Day. The headstone carries a line from The Big Sleep: "Dead men are heavier than broken hearts."

Put the life together and the books make sense. Chandler was an outsider wherever he lived: an American raised as an Englishman, an Englishman who never settled into Los Angeles, a classically trained mind writing for magazines with lurid covers. He drank, he quarreled, and he could be a snob. He also had a rare ear and a moral seriousness he usually hid under a joke. He gave most of that to Marlowe, a man smarter than his job, poorer than his clients and lonelier than he admits. Next time, Book Report opens The Big Sleep and follows Marlowe up the drive of the Sternwood mansion.