The Raymond Chandler Papers

by Tom Hiney

  Mr Conroy wrote to me twice that you had said something about my getting to work on another book and I answered him that I wanted to put it off until I had an idea what kind of reception this one would get. I have only seen four notices, but two of them seemed more occupied with the depravity and unpleasantness of the book than with anything else. In fact the notice from The New York Times, which a clipping agency sent me as a come-on, deflated me pretty thoroughly. I do not want to write depraved books. I was aware that this yarn had some fairly unpleasant citizens in it, but my fiction was learned in a rough school, and I probably didn't notice them much. I was more intrigued by a situation where the mystery is solved by the exposition and understanding of a single character, always well in evidence, rather than by the slow and sometimes long-winded concatenation of circumstances. That's a point which may not interest reviewers of first novels, but it interested me very much. However, there's a very good notice in today's Los Angeles Times and I don't feel quite such a connoisseur of moral decay as I did yesterday. They have Humphrey Bogart playing the lead, which I am in favor of also. It only remains to convince Warner Brothers.

  As to the next job of work for your consideration, I should like, if you approve, to try to jack it up a few more notches. It must be kept sharp, swift and racy, of course, but I think it could be a little less harsh – or do you not agree? I should like to do something which would not be automatically out for pictures and which yet would not let down whatever public I may acquire. The Big Sleep is very unequally written. There are scenes that are all right, but there are other scenes still much too pulpy. Insofar as I am able, I want to develop an objective method – but slowly – to the point where I can carry an audience over into a genuine dramatic, even melodramatic, novel, written in a very vivid and pungent style, but not slangy or overly vernacular. I realize that this must be done cautiously and little by little, but I think it can be done. To acquire delicacy without losing power, that's the problem. But I should probably do a minimum of three mystery novels before I try anything else.

  Thank you again and I do hope that when the returns are in, you will be not too disappointed.

  Very sincerely,

  Raymond Chandler

  Letter to a fellow Black Mask writer called George Harmon Coxe, who had written to congratulate Chandler on The Big Sleep, 9 April 1939. When Chandler refers to ‘Shaw’ in the letter, he is referring to ‘Cap’ Joseph Shaw, pioneer editor of the Black Mask. A conscientious former army officer, Shaw had first been appointed editor of the magazine in 1926 when it was publishing all manner of formula pulp material, including romance, adventure and occult stories. Seeing an original new strain of Detective writers (including the young Dashiell Hammett) Shaw had dropped all other genres and concentrated on nurturing the best out of a new modem genre he felt capable of real greatness. A victim of his own vision, Shaw made such a success of his job that, by the end of the 1930s, the market was swamped with poor imitators and cut-throat publishing antics; a world Shaw had no grasp for, and from which he was to be rather tragically flung.

  Thanks for your letter, and I much appreciate your remarks about it and about the detective story business in general. I had a talk with Sanders while he was out here, and after that I'm surprised that anyone writes or publishes the darn things at all. He told me about Simon and Schuster's Inner Sanctum mysteries, for instance. Yet about 150 mystery books are dished out every year. I suppose if you are good enough there is a bare living in it – very bare. However, I'm used to that. I don't think I'd ever make the grade with slick magazines, unless in some kind of story quite different from anything I have attempted so far. I can't read their stuff for my own amusement, and that seems to be fatal. I should never have tried to work for Black Mask, if I hadn't, at one time, got a kick out of reading it.

  Knopf seems to think that if somebody comes along who can write as well as Hammett, he should have Hammett's success. Knopf being a publisher should know his business, but my feeling is that somebody might come along who wrote a great deal better than Hammett and still not have anything like Hammett's success. But of course these things are quite unpredictable. In my opinion Thieves Like Us by Edward Anderson was an infinitely better and honester book than Of Mice and Men. Did it get anywhere? I doubt it.

  Your letter doesn't sound very happy somehow. I had the idea that you would do well in Hollywood for a long time, that you had enough facility, and that you had enough character not to be impressed by the phony side. Of course I don't know you very well. Personally I think Hollywood is poison to any writer, the graveyard to talent. I have always thought so. But perhaps I have lived too close to it.

  I'm terribly sorry about Shaw. He never told me anything about his affairs, always had the attitude (that rather pathetic attitude of small men trying to maintain their pride) that his failures were his own choice. He had left the Black Mask on a matter of policy and he had left the agency he was with because too much was going on for a man to do his own thinking. That sort of attitude, not those words. I suppose it's natural enough. It's bad enough to be kicked in the seat of the pants without having to go around and show the bruise. But as to his success or lack of it as an agent I knew absolutely nothing, except what I might deduce from the fact that he had no secretary. I think it was natural for him to think an opportunity existed for a type of agent who might be more than a marketer of merchandise. In the long run, if he could stick it out, and if he was adaptable enough, there might have been. Unfortunately he is not very adaptable and he wants to run his writers. The only kind of writers you can run are the ones who are negative, and they're hardly worth running. It's too tough a racket for people who have to be propped up from behind. Yet Shaw has, strangely enough, a great insight into writing and he can give a man a buck up when he needs it as nobody else I know can, or does. That should be worth a lot somewhere. I agree with you that he ought to have a magazine. I'd like to see him have the magazine which for years I've wondered somebody did not think worth publishing, a high class pulp detective story magazine aimed at the rather large class of people who find the pulps mostly too juvenile and who don't like the big magazines because of their fundamental dishonesty in the matter of character and motivation. He himself thought the market existed, I know, but he was doubtful about the supply of material. In that I think he was wrong, because the magazine would in a short time create its own material. Sanders told me the big magazines are getting steadily more and more starved for material, largely because of the lowering of prices and standards in the pulps. New writers do not appear to replace the ones who go to Hollywood and either stay there or learn how not to write there and never get over it. And the new writers don't appear because there's nothing in the business any more, no encouragement to do good work, and no recognition if, in spite of all practical considerations, you insist on trying to do it. I think the effect of this will be that some of the slick magazines will become more catholic in their tastes, more receptive to stories with unsatisfactory endings. Probably there will be some lowering of rates to balance some loss of cheap chic advertising. But in the long run there will be better and more readable magazines. I'm hoping.

  If you come out to the Coast to live, you should look at La Jolla, before you decide where to live. I think it is a much better place than Laguna in every possible way. It is dear for a small town, but it has a perfect climate in both winter and summer, the finest coastline on the Pacific side of the country, no billboards or concessions or beachfront shacks, an air of cool decency and good manners that is almost startling in California. It has a few writers, not too many, no Bohemian atmosphere (but they will let you take a drink). It has fine public tennis courts and a nice gang of people who play good, but not too good, tennis. It has good schools, including a very fine private girls school, and a hospital, and is one of the most prosperous looking places you ever laid eyes on. I'm not being paid by the Chamber of Commerce either. I simply feel that La Jolla has that intangible air of good breeding,
which one imagines may still exist in New England, but which certainly does not exist any more in or around Los Angeles. In theory one may not value very much that quality. One may like a free and easy neighborhood where they smash the empty bottles on the sidewalk on Saturday night. But in practice it's very comfortable. I expect to go back there in the fall, because whatever is the matter with me, climate seems to make very little difference, and I hate these poor man's towns. My idea of perfection would be a home in La Jolla and a very good cabin at Big Bear Lake, not too close to Pine Knot. Maybe I'll have them before my joints begin to creak very badly.

  Letter to Erle Stanley Gardner,

  creator of Perry Mason and other fictional detectives, 5 May 1939. An ex-lawyer, Gardner had also begun his writing career under Shaw. A larger-than-life character who had been expelled from school for punching a teacher, he had also written to Chandler to congratulate him on The Big Sleep. The two men were to remain correspondents for many years. Though he was never to achieve the literary recognition of Hammett or Chandler, Gardner's countless novels (he once claimed to have written one in three days) have outsold them both – to date they have sold 300 million copies worldwide.

  When we were talking about the old Action Detective magazine I forgot to tell you that I learned to write a novelette on one of yours about a man named Rex Kane, who was an alter ego of Ed Jenkins and got mixed up with some flowery dame in a hilltop house in Hollywood who was running an anti-blackmail organization. You wouldn't remember. It's probably in your file No. 54276-84. The idea, probably not at all original to me, was so good that I tried to work it out on another tyro later on, but he couldn't see the point of putting the effort into something he knew he couldn't sell, preferring to put the effort into nineteen things he thought he could sell and couldn't. I simply made an extremely detailed synopsis of your story and from that rewrote it and then compared what I had with yours, and then went back and rewrote it some more, and so on. It looked pretty good. Incidentally, I found out that the trickiest part of your technique was the ability to put over situations which verged on the implausible but which in the reading seemed quite real. I hope you understand that I mean this as a compliment. I have never come even near to doing it myself. Dumas had this quality in a very strong degree. Also Dickens. It's probably the fundamental of all rapid work, because naturally rapid work has a large measure of improvisation, and to make an improvised scene seem inevitable is quite a trick. At least I think so.

  And here I am at 2.40 a.m. writing about technique, in spite of a strong conviction that the moment a man begins to talk about technique, that's proof he is fresh out of ideas.

  Letter to Blanche Knopf,

  wife and assistant to Alfred Knopf, 23 August 1939. The Nazis had just invaded Poland, making the spectre of a Second World War a suddenly real one.

  The effort to keep my mind off the war has reduced me to the mental age of seven. The things by which we live are the distant flashes of insect wings in a clouded sunlight. But –

  I enjoyed meeting you so much. There is a touch of the desert about everything in California, and about the minds of the people who live here. During the years when I hated the place I couldn't get away, and now that I have grown to need the harsh smell of the sage I still feel rather out of place here. But my wife is a New Yorker, and that 95 with unlimited humidity doesn't appeal much either.

  If I could write another 12,000 words I should have a draft of a book finished. I know what to write, but I have momentarily mislaid the urge. However, by the end of September, as you said, there should be something for you to wrinkle your very polite nose at. It's rather a mixed up mess that will run 75,000 words but I'll likely cut it at least 5000 and perhaps more. It will take me a month to shape it up. The title, if you should happen to approve, is The Second Murderer. Please refer to King Richard III, Act I, Scene IV.

  SECOND MURDERER: What, shall we stab him when he sleeps?

  FIRST MURDERER: NO: then he will say ‘twas done cowardly when he wakes . . .

  How dost thou feel thyself now?

  SECOND MURDERER: ’Faith, some certain dregs of conscience are yet within me.

  However the joker is that the second murderer is –?

  Sanders has been impressing on me the dire necessity of so contriving a detective story that it might be serialized. This is only horse sense, even though good serials seldom make good novels. I do not think this particular opus is the one he is looking for. In fact, I'm very sure of it. I'm not sure anyone is looking for it, but there's a law against burning trash up here during the fire hazard.

  The Big Sleep, and its hero Philip Marlowe, had been much thought of by Alfred Knopf (who had taken out the front page of Publisher's Weekly to advertise his new signing) but largely ignored by the critics, who were to take four novels before recognizing Chandler's literary worth. While continuing his magazine work, and his second novel, he and Cissy had moved out of the cramped Santa Monica apartment. Sick of the city, they were living in a series of rented homes around Los Angeles.

  Letter to George Harmon Coxe,

  17 October 1939. The ’Post’ referred to by Chandler is the Saturday Evening Post, a glossy and high-paying weekly. The story Chandler sold to the Post is called `I'll Be Waiting’. When he talks of England, and the comments made about the country by a Margaret Halsey, he is referring to a popular travel writer of the time, and author of a book called With Malice to Some.

  I have never made any money out of writing. I work too slowly, throw away too much, and what I write that sells is not at all the sort of thing I really want to write. I often envy these lads whose minds are tuned to the sort of story the slick magazines like – so that they really think it is good. I can't get around to that point of view. I sold a story to the Post recently, but I wrote it principally because Sanders pestered me. I didn't think much of the story when I wrote it – I felt that it was artificial, untrue and emotionally dishonest like all slick fiction. Sanders didn't seem to think much of it either. However he sold it. I still don't know whether it is any good. When I read it in print I thought it was, but print can be so deceiving. On the other hand one of my oldest friends took the trouble to write me two pages telling me how lousy it was. I suppose you have had the same experience. Whatever you do you get smacked in the face and usually from an unprotected angle.

  Is your house built and are you in it? How are you getting along? I suppose if I read the right magazines, I should know. I should like to come east very much and find somewhere to live there that is not too hot and full of mosquitos (or mosquitoes) in summer and not too damn cold in winter. Is there such a place, where a poor man can live? I'm sick of California and the kind of people it breeds. Of course I like La Jolla, but La Jolla is only a sort of escape from reality. It's not typical. Anyhow, it's not in the least a matter of how good California is or how intransigent I am. If after twenty years I still fail to like the place, it seems that the case is hopeless. My wife came from New York. She likes California except during the hot months, but I think she agrees with me that the percentage of phonies in the population is increasing. No doubt in years, or centuries to come, this will be the center of civilization, if there is any left, but the melting-pot stage bores me horribly. I like people with manners, grace, some social intuition, an education slightly above the Reader's Digest fan, people whose pride of living does not express itself in their kitchen gadgets and their automobiles. I distrust Jews, although I admit that the really nice Jew is probably the salt of the earth. I don't like people who can't sit for half an hour without a glass in their hands, although apart from that I think I should prefer an amiable drunk to Henry Ford. I like a conservative atmosphere, a sense of the past. I like everything that Americans of past generations used to go and look for in Europe, but at the same time I don't want to be bound by the rules. It all seems like asking a bit too much, now that I've written it. I like all the things about England which Margaret Halsey liked and many of the things she didn't lik
e, but that is largely because I was brought up there and English manners don't intimidate me. But I don't like Margaret Halsey, or any writer for whom a laborious and fizzled wisecrack is better than a simple truth.

  Let's hear your news

  Letter to George Harmon Coxe,

  19 December 1939. Chandler notices similarities between the plot-lines of Erle Stanley Gardner and a new writer called A. A. Fair; as it turned out, Fair was in fact a pseudonym being used by Gardner, a point Chandler would later realize. In his mention of La Jolla Beach Club, and the tennis courts there, it is worth pointing out that Chandler had objected to the club's refusal to accept Jewish members and himself played on the public courts. Max Miller was a writer who lived in La Jolla, and an occasional drinking partner of Chandler.

  Thanks for your nice meaty letter of October 30th which I hasten to answer with my usual headlong dash for the basket. Also for the photo of your house. It must be nice to have a home. We haven't had one in so long that I look back with a touch of nostalgia to any place we have stayed in as long as six months. I don't think we shall be here long either. Too dear, too damp, too elderly, a nice place, as a visitor remarked this afternoon, for old people and their parents.

  If you still have that spare copy of your last book but one I'm hoping you are still feeling generous about it. The stock in the local library is out anyway. You're not represented. But so are not a lot of other people who should be, and so are represented some mighty feeble gestures at detective fiction. What do you make of a place that has one book by Hemingway, nothing by Faulkner, or Hammett, two pieces of oh-so-irritating wise guy crap by one Kurt Steel, everything by one J. S. Fletcher, a British brother who is far far duller than even a British brother has any right to be, nothing by Coxe, Nebel, Whitfield, or anybody you would think of as at all representative. And my god no Gardner, yet a book called The Bigger They Come by A. A. Fair which copies the Gardner technique exactly and even swiped Gardner's idea of how Ed Jenkins couldn't be extradited.