As Chandler aged, he became more tired and vulnerable. Aware that his wife was very ill, he hurried to complete The Long Goodbye. With this book he wanted to move into new territory and write a detective story that had the range and scope of an ordinary novel. He therefore broke some of the conventions of the form in an effort to make Marlowe a more feeling and sensitive man than he had formerly allowed him to be. Chandler has Marlowe make friends with the characters in his book and even fall in love with one of them. These experiences bring him pain and loneliness, and Marlowe becomes increasingly disillusioned and disappointed. To a considerable degree, Chandler succeeds in making Marlowe a far more interesting character than he was in the earlier novels, but much of the lightness disappears as the cynicism increases. Here is a description of Marlowe watching a pretty girl in a swimming pool: “A girl in a white sharkskin suit and a luscious figure was climbing the ladder to the high board. I watched the band of white that showed between the tan of her thighs and the suit. I watched it carnally. Then she was out of sight, cut off by the deep overhang of the roof. A moment later I saw her flash down in a one and a half. Spray came high enough to catch the sun and make rainbows that were almost as pretty as the girl. Then she came up the ladder and unstrapped her white helmet and shook her bleach job loose. She wobbled her bottom over to a small white table and sat down beside a lumberjack in white drill pants and dark glasses and a tan so evenly dark that he couldn’t have been anything but the hired man around the pool. He reached over and patted her thigh. She opened a mouth like a firebucket and laughed. That terminated my interest in her. I couldn’t hear the laugh but the hole in her face when she unzippered her teeth was all I needed.”
After Cissy’s death, Chandler’s moods were subject to severe stress. He wrote Playback and the opening of the Poodle Springs story, but emotionally he was insecure. In low spirits he became sentimental and self-pitying; when up, he was exaggeratedly zestful. It is therefore better to remember him when he was at his best, when he and Marlowe were a team that worked well together and when he had the balance and control that produced his best work. “Style is the man,” said Buffon, and at sixty, Chandler tried to explain what he meant by that word: “In the long run, however little you talk or even think about it, the most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off. He can’t do it by trying, because the kind of style I am thinking of is a projection of personality and you have to have a personality before you can project it. But granted you have one, you can only project it on paper by thinking of something else. This is ironical in a way; it is the reason, I suppose, why in a generation of ‘made’ writers I still say you can’t make a writer. Preoccupation with style will not produce it. No amount of editing and polishing will have any appreciable effect on the flavor of how a man writes. It is the product of the quality of his emotion and perception; it is the ability to transfer these to paper which makes him a writer, in contrast to the great number of people who have just as good emotions and just as keen perceptions, but cannot come within a googol of miles of putting them on paper.”
Chandler was a real artist. He created a character who 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.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
RAYMOND CHANDLER was born in Chicago in 1888 and educated at Dulwich College, England. He worked at various times as poet, teacher, book reviewer. accountant, oil executive, and pulp writer, before writing his first Philip Marlowe novel, The Big Sleep, in 1939. It was followed by Farewell, My Lovely, The High Window, The Lady in the Lake, The Little Sister, The Long Goodbye, and Playback. Raymond Chandler lived most of the last decades of his life in Southern California. He died in 1959.
SIMON BRETT is the author of twelve crime novels featuring actor-detective Charles Paris and three other crime novels, including A Shock to the System, which was nominated for the Best Novel Award by the Mystery Writers of America.
ROBERT CAMPBELL has three different detectives with three different voices working in three different series. Whistler and Jimmy Flannery and Jake Hatch. There is only one of Campbell. Like the classic private eye, he lives alone. Like most of the classic private eyes, he rarely uses a gun.
MAX ALLAN COLLINS is the author of the Nathan Heller historical detective novels, the first of which, True Detective (1983), won a Shamus. He is also the author of three other popular suspense series, Nolan, Quarry, and Mallory, as well as a new series of novels about real-life “untouchable” Eliot Ness.
ROBERT CRAIS writes the popular Elvis Cok novels. His first book, The Monkey’s Raincoat, was nominated for both the Shamus and Edgar awards. Additionally, Crais has written numerous scripts for such influential and critically acclaimed television series as Hill Street Blues. His TV work has received several awards, including an Emmy nomination.
J. MADISON DAVIS is a veteran writer of crime-fiction. Davis was elected president of the North American Branch of the International Association of Crime Writers in 1993, and reelected in 1995. Having taught English for Allegany Community College, Southern Mississippi, and Penn State, he has served as senior professor in the Professional Writing Program at the University of Oklahoma since 1991. Davis’s fiction work includes, And The Angels Sing, 1996, Red Knight, 1992, Bloody Marko, 1991, White Rook, 1990, and The Murder Of Frau Schutz, 1988.
LOREN D. ESTLEMAN’s first novel was published in 1976. At present he has published twenty-eight books, including the Amos Walker detective novels and numerous westerns. He is a past winner of the Western Writers of America Golden Spur Award (twice) and the Private Eye Writers of America’s Shamus Award (twice), as well as a nominee for the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
ED GORMAN has written books in several fields. His most recent novel, The Autumn Dead, features actor and private investigator Jack Dwyer. He has been nominated for the Shamus, and his historical novel Guild was called by the Western Writers of America “disturbing and memorable.”
JAMES GRADY worked as an investigative reporter in Washington. D.C., covering politics, espionage, organized crime, and drug trafficking. Grady began his novelist career with Six Days of the Condor. His ninth and latest novel is Steeltown.
JOYCE HARRINGTON’s first story, “The Purple Shroud,” won an Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America in 1973. Since then, she has written somewhere between forty and fifty stories and three novels. She’s been nominated for short story Edgars three more times, and her latest novel, Dreemz of the Night, was published in June 1987.
JEREMIAH HEALY’s first novel, Blunt Darts, was selected by The New York Times as of the seven best mysteries of 1984. Healy’s second book, The Staked Goat, received a Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America as the best novel of 1986.
EDWARD D. HOCH is a past president of the Mystery Writers of America and the author of more than seven hundred and fifty short stories, mainly in the mystery field. His thirty-one published books include The Shattered Raven and three other novels. In 1968 he won an Edgar for his short story “The Oblong Room.”
STUART M. KAMINSKY is the author of more than twenty published mystery novels and numerous short stories. His novels include the Toby Peters series, the Inspector Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov series, and the Xavier Flores series. He was nominated in 1984 for an Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America for his novel Black Knight in Red Square.
In addition to his Nero Wolfe Award winning Sleeping Dog, and the current Laughing Dog, DICK LOCHTE has written for numerous publications and for motion pictures and television. For ten years he was a book columnist for the Los Angeles T
imes and is presently drama critic for Los Angeles magazine.
JOHN LUTZ was awarded a Shamus Award in 1982, and an Edgar in 1986. He is the author of two private detective series. One features Nudger, a somewhat reluctant P.I. with a nervous stomach, who operates in St. Louis. The other series is about Fred Carver, a lame former Orlando cop who solves his cases in Florida.
FRANK MacSHANE is the author of The Life of Raymond Chandler and editor of Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler. He is also the author of a number of other books including biographies of Ford Madox Ford, John O’Hara and James Jones. He is Director of the Translation Center at Columbia University and also a professor in the School of the Arts at Columbia.
FRANCIS M. NEVINS, JR., is the author of about forty short stories of crime and suspense and of four mystery novels, the most recent of which are The 120-Hour Clock and The Ninety Million Dollar Mouse. He has also written a number of nonfiction works on the genre, including the Edgar-winning Royal Bloodline: Ellery Queen, Author and Detective.
SARA PARETSKY began writing plays when she was five; she continued writing for her private entertainment throughout adolescence and adulthood. Her first novel, Indemnity Only, published in 1982, featured Chicago private eye V. I. Warshawski. Her fifth Warshawski novel, Blood Shot, was published by in 1988.
ROBERT B. PARKER is the author of more than thirty-one books, including the popular Spenser series of detective novels. He was handpicked by Mrs. Raymond Chandler to complete her late husband’s unfinished Philip Marlowe novel, Poodle Springs, which was published in 1990. Parker’s most recent bestsellers are Sudden Mischief and Night Passage. He lives in Boston.
W. R. PHILBRICK is the author of the mysteries Slow Dancer, Shadow Kills, and Ice for the Eskimo, and three crime novels featuring Florida Keys fishing guide T. D. Stash: The Neon Flamingo, The Crystal Blue Persuasion, and Tough Enough. He recently completed Deadwalkers, a thriller.
ROBERT J. RANDISI has published seven P. I. novels, more than twenty mystery novels, and over twenty-five short stories. He is the author of The Disappearance of Penny, Eye in the Ring, and Full Contact, all featuring Manhattan P. I. Miles Jacoby. In 1982, he created The Private Eye Writers of America (PWA) and the Shamus Award.
BENJAMIN M. SCHUTZ is the author of three novels featuring private eye Leo Haggerty. His fourth one, The Things We Dofor Love, will be published soon. He is a clinical and forensic psychologist and lives in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.
ROGER L. SIMON’s first Moses Wine detective novel, The Big Fix, won awards from the Mystery Writers of America and the Crime Writers of Great Britain as the best crime novel of the year. His novel The Straight Man was nominated for an Edgar Award. Simon is also a screenwriter and the president of the newly formed International Association of Crime Writers.
JULIE SMITH is the biographer of two sleuths—Rebecca Schwartz, a San Francisco lawyer, and Paul McDonald, an ex-reporter who writes mysteries. Schwartz appears in Death Turns a Trick, The Sourdough Wars, and Tourist Trap, McDonald in True-Life Adventure and Huckleberry Fiend.
PACO IGNACIO TAIDO II is the author of twenty-eight books, of which seven belong to the genre of crime literature: Dias de combate, Cosafacit, Aigunas nubes, No habra Jutal feliz, De paso, Sombra de la sombra, La vida misma. He is recognized in Mexico as the founder and a key figure in the new Mexican crime literature.
JONATHAN VALIN has written seven novels featuring a private eye named Harry Stoner, a character he modeled on Philip Marlowe. Currently, he is finishing his eighth Stoner book, Extenuating Circumstances.
ERIC VAN LUSTBADER has written seven major internationally best-selling novels, including The Ninja, Shan, and Zero. He graduated from Columbia College with a B.A. in sociology. He has worked in the music and entertainment industries.
About this Title
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Copyright © 1988, 1999 by Byron Preiss Visual Publications, Inc.
Introduction copyright © 1988 by Robert Parker, excerpted from the introduction to Playback. Reprinted by Permission of the Helen Brann Agency, Inc. Individual stories copyright © 1988 by Simon Brett, Robert Campbell, Max Allan Collins, Robert Crais, Loren D. Estelman, Ed Gorman, James Grady, Joyce Harrington, Jeremiah Healt, Edward D. Hoch, Stuart M. Kaminsky, Dick Lochte, John Lutz, Francis M. Nevins, Jr., Sara Paretsky, W. R. Philbrick, Robert J. Randisi, Benjamin Schutz, Roger L. Simon, Julie Smith, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Jonathan Valin and Eric Van Lustbader.
“Summer in Idle Valley” copyright © 1999 by Roger L. Simon. “Sixty-Four Squares” copyright © 1999 by J. Madison Davis.
“The Deepest South” by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, translated from the Spanish by Barbara Belejack.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Houghton Mifflin Company for permission to reprint “The Pencil” by Raymond chandler from the Midnight Raymond Chandler. Copyright © 1971 by Helga Greene, executrix, estate of Raymond Chandler. Reprinted by permission of the Houghton Mifflin Company.
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