NAME: Samuel Osagie

COURSE: Film Noir

TUTOR: Chris Hughes
ASSIGNMENT TITLE: Raymond Chandler
DATE: 6-3-2009

RAYMOND CHANDLER:
THE MASTER OF MYSTERY FICTION
Raymond Thornton Chandler was one of the precursors of hard-boiled crime writers, and
also one of the foremost authors of mystery fiction of the twentieth century. “He took the raw,
realistic intrigue style that Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and others had begun cooking
up in Post-World War I America, and gave it an artistic bent, filling his fiction with evocative
metaphors and sentences that refuse to shed their cleverness with age [‘It was a blonde. A
blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stainless glass window’, ‘she sat in front of her
Princess dresser trying to paint the suitcases out from under her eyes’]” (http:
//www.thrillingdetective.com/trivia/chandler.html – accessed 2/3/2009). He is renowned for his
tough, wise-cracking, half-cynical, half-romantic, first-person narrator-detective, Philip
Marlowe. The name, Philip Marlowe, originated from the 16th century English writer
Christopher Marlowe, who had a violent temper. His most famous target in much quoted
essay The Simple Art of Murder (1944) was A.A. Milne‘s The Red House Mystery.
"In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure
tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous
laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not
himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story
must be such a man." (From The Simple Art of Murder) .

Chandler was born on July 23rd, 1888 in Illinois, Chicago, but moved with his mother,
Florence, to England in 1895, after she divorced Raymond’s father, who was a Civil Engineer
obsessed with alcohol.
Raymond Chandler studied international law in Paris and Munich after he finished from
Dulwich College in London. He later returned to Britain where he started his literary career. He
started by writing poetry, and he manage to publish 27 of his early poems, before he returned
to the United States in 1912, where he attempted various jobs including working as a
bookkeeper for a Cemetery in Los Angeles.
But he was unsuccessful in all these.

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NAME: Samuel Osagie
COURSE: Film Noir
TUTOR: Chris Hughes
ASSIGNMENT TITLE: Raymond Chandler
DATE: 6-3-2009
During the World War I, Chandler served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force in 1917 and
was sent to the French frontlines. He was transferred to England to undergo flight training in
the Royal Air Force in 1918-19. Chandler returned to Los Angeles in 1924 to meet his mother,
where he met Pearl Cecily Halburt, an 18 year old (twice married and divorced) woman, whom
he got married to.

While in America, Chandler worked in a bank in San Francisco, he also worked

as a Journalist for the Daily Express, and after then he became a bookkeeper
and auditor for Southern California Oil Syndicate from 1922 to 1932, before he
was fired from the company as a result of his misdemeanour (drinking and
absenteeism) in the office. After Chandler lost his job during the Great
Depression, he began writing stories for Black Mask Magazine. “At the age of forty-
five, with the support of his wife, Chandler devoted himself entirely to writing. He
prepared himself for his first submission by carefully studying Erle Stanley
Gardner and other representatives of pulp fiction, and spent five months writing
his first story, 'Blackmailers Don't Shoot.' It appeared in December 1933 in Black
Mask, the foremost among magazines publishing in the hard-boiled school”
(http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/rchandle.htm).

"The pebbled glass door pane is lettered in flaked black paint: 'Philip
Marlowe... Investigations.' It is a reasonably shabby door at the end of a
reasonably shabby corridor in the sort of building that was new about the
year the all-tile bathroom became the basis of civilization. The door is
locked, but next to it is another door with the same legend which is not
locked. Come on in - there is nobody in here but me and a big bluebottle.
But not if you're from Manhattan, Kansas." (From The Little Sister, 1949)
Between 1933 and 1939, Chandler wrote a total of nineteen pulp stories, eleven of the stories
were published in Black Mask Magazine; seven were published in Dime Detective, and one
in Detective Fiction Weekly. In his debut novel, The Big Sleep (1939) was written out of his

2
NAME: Samuel Osagie
COURSE: Film Noir
TUTOR: Chris Hughes
ASSIGNMENT TITLE: Raymond Chandler
DATE: 6-3-2009
fourth published story, 'Killer in the Rain,’. The story introduced a 38-year-old Private
Detective called Philip Marlowe. Marlowe is a hard-boiled private detective, a smart and tough
lone wolf with a sense of honor. Gumshoe the mean streets of Los Angeles in the 1930s,
1940s and 1950s. He is on the trail of mobsters, hoods, femme fatales, killers, liars, drunks,
crooked police and anyone else looking for a short cut to the American Dream. He solve
mystery in his own terms. He is betrayed by his friends, women, and lying clients, but he is
always quick with wisecracks. (MacShane, F., 1986)

In 1940, Chandler wrote another novel- Farewell, My Lovely. It was the second series of
Philip Marlowe’s story. In this story, Marlowe searches for an ex-convict, Moose Malloy, and a
missing girl friend, Velma Valento. Velma is described by Moose as “cute as lace pants,” and
during his investigation Marlowe deals with Los Angeles' gambling circuit, a murder, and three
potentially deadly women. Manchester Guardian's critic found the writing "often picturesque
and vivid, though often, too, incomprehensible to the mere Englishman". His third novel, The
High Window (1942), Chandler considered his worst. It was written at the same time as The
Lady In The Lake (1943), Chandler’s continuing exploration of America's seamy and secret
life finds a subject in an ambitious and amoral social climber who assumes a variety of
identities to ensnare others in her schemes. The novel shows Chandler transforming the
detective story into a striking critique of moral and social values... For Double Indemnity
(1944), based on James M. Cain's novel from 1936, Chandler and the director Billy Wilder
worked together. Wilder had many problems with the author who had his own view how to
write a screenplay. After reading Chandler's first draft, Wilder said: “This is shit, Mr. Chandler.”
The author smoke his pipe, did not open windows, and did not hide that he hated Hollywood.
But Cain loved the film, saying: “It's the only picture I ever saw made from my books that had
things in it I wish I had thought of”. (MacShane, F., 1986)

The Little Sister (1949), which included the author's opinions about Hollywood, received
negative reviews. The story opens in the usual way: "'Is this Mr Marlowe, the detective?' It was
a small, rather hurried, little-girlish voice. I said it was Mr Marlowe, the detective. 'How much
you charge for your services, Mr Marlowe?'" The sixth novel in the series, THE LONG
GOODBYE (1953), has been admired by many critics. Marlowe's long and complicated
investigation begins when he helps Terry Lennox, sitting drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith.

3
NAME: Samuel Osagie
COURSE: Film Noir
TUTOR: Chris Hughes
ASSIGNMENT TITLE: Raymond Chandler
DATE: 6-3-2009
Marlowe's willingness to forgive in his own way his friends, who have betrayed him, differs
completely from the attitude of Mike Hammer, who is ready to kill and never turns his other
cheek. In the end Marlowe tells Terry: "You're a very sweet guy in a lot of ways. I'm not judging
you. I never did. It is just that you're not here anymore. You're long gone. You’ve got nice
clothes and perfume and you're as elegant as a fifty-dollar whore."

Chandler lost his wife in 1954 and was devastated. He later sailed to England and met
Jessica Tyndale, a banker, on board, and they became close. Chandler's last finished novel
was Playback, appeared in 1958. It was originally written as a screenplay. In the story
Marlowe renews his affair with Linda Loring, who made her first appearance in The Long
Goodbye.

Short Story by Raymond Chandler:

“Blackmailers Don't Shoot" (December 1933, Black Mask; Mallory)

“Smart-Aleck Kill" (July 1934, Black Mask; Mallory)
“Finger Man" (October 1934, Black Mask; Carmady)
“Killer in the Rain" (January 1935, Black Mask; Carmady)
“Nevada Gas" (June 1935, Black Mask)
“Spanish Blood" (November 1935, Black Mask)
“Guns at Cyrano's" (January 1936, Black Mask; Ted Malvern)
“The Man Who Liked Dogs" (March 1936, Black Mask; Carmady)
“Noon Street Nemesis" (May 30, 1936, Detective Fiction Weekly; AKA Pick-up on Noon
Street)
“Goldfish" (June 1936, Black Mask; Carmady)
“The Curtain" (September 1936, Black Mask; Carmady)
“Try the Girl" (January 1937, Black Mask; Carmady)
“Mandarin's Jade" (November 1937, Dime Detective Magazine; John Dalmas)
“Red Wind" (January 1938, Dime Detective Magazine; John Dalmas)
“The King in Yellow" (Dime Detective Magazine, March 1938)
“Bay City Blues" (June 1938; Dime Detective Magazine; John Dalmas)
“The Lady in the Lake" (January 1939, Dime Detective Magazine; John Dalmas)
“Pearls Are a Nuisance" (April 1939, Dime Detective Magazine, )

4
NAME: Samuel Osagie
COURSE: Film Noir
TUTOR: Chris Hughes
ASSIGNMENT TITLE: Raymond Chandler
DATE: 6-3-2009
“Trouble Is My Business" (August 1939, Dime Detective Magazine; John Dalmas)
“I'll Be Waiting" (October 14, 1939, Saturday Evening Post; Tony Resick)
“The Bronze Door" (November 1939, Unknown Worlds)
“No Crime in the Mountains" (September 1941, Detective Story; John Evans)
“Professor Bingo's Snuff" (June-August 1951, Park East Magazine)
“English Summer" (1957; first printed in 1976, The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler)

Some of Chandler Quotes:

"It is pretty obvious that the debasement of the human mind caused by a constant flow
of fraudulent advertising is no trivial thing. There is more than one way to conquer a
country."

"Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or
her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss
waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split,
and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a
few sudden words of bar-room vernacular, that is done with the eyes wide open and the
mind relaxed but attentive."

"It's fairly obvious that American education is a cultural flop. Americans are not a well-
educated people culturally and their vocational education often has to be learned all
over again after they leave school and college. On the other hand, they have open quick
minds and if their education has little sharp positive value, it has not the stultifying
effects of a more rigid training."

"The agent never receipts his bill, puts his hat on and bows himself out. He stays
around forever, not only for as long as you can write anything that anyone will buy, but
as long as anyone will buy any portion of any right to anything that you ever did write.
He just takes ten per cent of your life."

"Throughout the history of commercial life nobody has ever quite liked the commission
man. His function is too vague, his presence always seems one too many, his profit
looks too easy, and even when you admit that he has a necessary function, you feel that
this function is, as it were, a personification of something that in an ethical society
would not need to exist. If people could deal with one another honestly, they would not
need agents."

"Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine.
After that you take the girl's clothes off."
"When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance it
becomes literature. That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character,
emotional tone, or idea, or half a dozen other things. It may also be a perfection of
control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over the

5
NAME: Samuel Osagie
COURSE: Film Noir
TUTOR: Chris Hughes
ASSIGNMENT TITLE: Raymond Chandler
DATE: 6-3-2009
ball."

"The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet
on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively
because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture."

"He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food."

"The kind of lawyer you hope the other fellow has."

"The law isn't justice. It's a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right
buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the
law was ever intended to be."

"It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball
players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things
and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth,
much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best,
English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay."

"The overall picture, as the boys say, is of a degraded community whose idealism even
is largely fake. The pretentiousness, the bogus enthusiasm, the constant drinking, the
incessant squabbling over money, the all-pervasive agent, the strutting of the big shots
(and their usually utter incompetence to achieve anything they start out to do), the
constant fear of losing all this fairy gold and being the nothing they have never ceased
to be, the snide tricks, the whole damn mess is out of this world."

"The motion picture made in Hollywood, if it is to create art at all, must do so within
such strangling limitations of subject and treatment that it is a blind wonder it ever
achieves any distinction beyond the purely mechanical slickness of a glass and
chromium bathroom."

"They don't want you until you have made a name, and by the time you have made a
name, you have developed some kind of talent they can't use. All they will do is spoil it,
if you let them."

"That's one thing I like about Hollywood. The writer is there revealed in his ultimate
corruption. He asks no praise, because his praise comes to him in the form of a salary
check. In Hollywood the average writer is not young, not honest, not brave, and a bit
overdressed. But he is darn good company, which book writers as a rule are not. He is
better than what he writes. Most book writers are not as good."

"Some are able and humane men and some are low-grade individuals with the morals of
a goat, the artistic integrity of a slot machine, and the manners of a floorwalker with
delusions of grandeur."

"Its idea of production value is spending a million dollars dressing up a story that any
good writer would throw away. Its vision of the rewarding movie is a vehicle for some

6
NAME: Samuel Osagie
COURSE: Film Noir
TUTOR: Chris Hughes
ASSIGNMENT TITLE: Raymond Chandler
DATE: 6-3-2009
glamour-puss with two expressions and eighteen changes of costume, or for some
male idol of the muddled millions with a permanent hangover, six worn-out acting
tricks, the build of a lifeguard, and the mentality of a chicken-strangler."

"If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if
they had been any better, I should not have come."

"Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither
tarnished nor afraid... He is the hero, he is everything. He 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."

"It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window."

"The keynote of American civilization is a sort of warm-hearted vulgarity. The

Americans have none of the irony of the English, none of their cool poise, none of their
manner. But they do have friendliness. Where an Englishman would give you his card,
an American would very likely give you his shirt."

"Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine.
After that you take the girl's clothes off."

"Throughout the history of commercial life nobody has ever quite liked the commission
man. His function is too vague, his presence always seems one too many, his profit
looks too easy, and even when you admit that he has a necessary function, you feel that
this function is, as it were, a personification of something that in an ethical society
would not need to exist. If people could deal with one another honestly, they would not
need agents."

"The agent never receipts his bill, puts his hat on and bows himself out. He stays
around forever, not only for as long as you can write anything that anyone will buy, but
as long as anyone will buy any portion of any right to anything that you ever did write.
He just takes ten per cent of your life."

"It's fairly obvious that American education is a cultural flop. Americans are not a well-
educated people culturally and their vocational education often has to be learned all
over again after they leave school and college. On the other hand, they have open quick
minds and if their education has little sharp positive value, it has not the stultifying
effects of a more rigid training."

"Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or
her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss
waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split,
and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a
few sudden words of bar-room vernacular, that is done with the eyes wide open and the
mind relaxed but attentive."

7
NAME: Samuel Osagie
COURSE: Film Noir
TUTOR: Chris Hughes
ASSIGNMENT TITLE: Raymond Chandler
DATE: 6-3-2009
"It is pretty obvious that the debasement of the human mind caused by a constant flow
of fraudulent advertising is no trivial thing. There is more than one way to conquer a
country."

"However toplofty and idealistic a man may be, he can always rationalize his right to
earn money."

"The boys with their feet on the desks know that the easiest murder case in the world to
break is the one somebody tried to get very cute with; the one that really bothers them
is the murder somebody only thought of two minutes before he pulled it off."

"An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the
cleverness of a decadence."

"A really good detective never gets married."

"There are people who can write their memoirs with a reasonable amount of honesty,
and there are people who simply cannot take themselves seriously enough. I think I
might be the first to admit that the sort of reticence which prevents a man from
exploiting his own personality is really an inverted sort of egotism."

"In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on
reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his
life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked
of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There
is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without
animosity or sadism. All this stuff you read about men yelling and screaming, beating
against the bars, running spoons along them, guards rushing in with clubs -- all that is
for the big house. A good jail is one of the quietest places in the world. Life in jail is in
suspension."

"The reading public is intellectually adolescent at best, and it is obvious that what is
called significant literature will only be sold to this public by exactly the same methods
as are used to sell it toothpaste, cathartics and automobiles."

"The minute you try to talk business with him he takes the attitude that he is a
gentleman and a scholar, and the moment you try to approach him on the level of his
moral integrity he starts to talk business."

"The more you reason the less you create."

"There are two kinds of truth; the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the
heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Without art science would be
as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science art
would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery."

"I've found that there are only two kinds that are any good: slang that has established
itself in the language, and slang that you make up yourself. Everything else is apt to be

8
NAME: Samuel Osagie
COURSE: Film Noir
TUTOR: Chris Hughes
ASSIGNMENT TITLE: Raymond Chandler
DATE: 6-3-2009
passing? Before it gets into print."

MacShane states in his book, Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe: A Centennial

Celebration (1988), that “Chandler was a real artist. He created a character that has become
a part of American folk mythology, and in writing about Los Angeles, he depicted a world of
great beauty and seamy corruption--the American reality. He made words dance, and readers
continue to respond to his magic.” (http://www.thrillingdetective.com/trivia/chandler.html)

References:

1. Hartlaub, Joe. Bookreporter.com. 21 May 2008

<http://www.bookreporter.com/authors/au-chandler-raymond.asp>.

2. MacShane, F., 1981. Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler, ed. Frank MacShane,
New York: Columbia University Press.

3. MacShane, F., 1986. The life of Raymond Chandler, Boston, Mass.: G.K. Hall.

4. Moss, R., F., 2000. "Raymond Chandler." In Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume
226: American Hard-Boiled Crime Writers, A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book, ed. George
Parker Anderson and Julie B. Anderson, 70-91. The Gale Group, 2000.

5. "Raymond Chandler." In Contemporary Authors Online. Thomson Gale, 2007. 21 May

2008 http://infotrac.galegroup.com.monstera.cc.columbia.edu:2048/itw/
infomark/632/329/36160389w16/purl=rc1_CA_0_H1000017048&dyn=
3!xrn_1_0_H1000017048?sw_aep=columbiau.

6. Straub, Peter. "45 Calibrations of Raymond Chandler." Conjunctions 29 (Fall 1997). 21

May 2008 http://www.conjunctions.com/archives/c29-ps.htm

7. The Critical Response to Raymond Chandler, ed. by J.K. Van Dover (1995)

8. http://www.thrillingdetective.com/trivia/chandler.html