by Unknown
There seems to me a vast difference between writing down to the public (something which always flops in the end) and doing what you want to do in a form which the public has learned to accept. It's not so much that Ambler let himself get too intellectual in this story as that he let it become apparent that he was being intellectual. That seems to be the fatal mistake, although I myself liked the book, just as I did not particularly like Helen MacInnes’ book Neither Five Nor Three. She offends me by dealing with very complicated issues in a sort of half-baked manner like a school girl analyzing Proust. You can't laugh Communism off just as a dirty conspiracy. You have to justify its intellectual appeal to some very brilliant minds and destroy it nevertheless. I guess the lucky writers are those who can outwrite their readers without outthinking them.
Letter to D. J. Ibberson,
an English fan, 19 April 1951.
It is very kind of you to take such an interest in the facts of Philip Marlowe's life. The date of his birth is uncertain. I think he said somewhere that he was thirty-eight years old, but that was quite a while ago and he is no older today. This is just something you will have to face. He was not born in a Midwestern town but in a small California town called Santa Rosa, which your map will show you to be about fifty miles north of San Francisco. Santa Rosa is famous as the home of Luther Burbank, a fruit and vegetable horticulturist, once of considerable renown. It is perhaps less widely known as the background of Hitchcock's picture Shadow of a Doubt, most of which was shot right in Santa Rosa. Marlowe has never spoken of his parents, and apparently he has no living relatives. This could be remedied if necessary. He had a couple of years of college, either at the University of Oregon at Eugene, or Oregon State University at Corvallis, Oregon. I don't know why he came to Southern California, except that eventually most people do, although not all of them remain. He seems to have had some experience as an investigator for an insurance company and later as investigator for the district attorney of Los Angeles county. This would not necessarily make him a police officer nor give him the right to make an arrest. The circumstances in which he lost that job are well known to me but I cannot be very specific about them. You'll have to be satisfied with the information that he got a little too efficient at a time and in a place where efficiency was the last thing desired by the persons in charge. He is slightly over six feet tall and weighs about thirteen stone eight. He has dark brown hair, brown eyes, and the expression ‘passably good looking’ would not satisfy him in the least. I don't think he looks tough. He can be tough. If I had ever had an opportunity of selecting the movie actor who could best represent him to my mind, I think it would have been Cary Grant. I think he dresses as well as can be expected. Obviously he hasn't very much money to spend on clothes, or on anything else for that matter. The horn-rimmed sunglasses do not make him distinctive. Practically everyone in Southern California wears sunglasses at some time or other. When you say he wears ‘pyjamas’ even in summer, I don't know what you mean. Who doesn't? Were you under the impression that he wore a nightshirt? Or did you mean that he might sleep raw in hot weather? The last is possible, although our weather here is very seldom hot at night. You are quite right about his smoking habits, although I don't think he insists on Camels. Almost any sort of cigarette will satisfy him. The use of cigarette cases is not as common here as in England. He definitely does not use bookmatches which are always safety matches. He uses either large wooden matches, which we call kitchen matches, or a smaller match of the same type which comes in small boxes and can be struck anywhere, including on the thumbnail if the weather is dry enough. In the desert or in the mountains it is quite easy to strike a match on your thumbnail, but the humidity around Los Angeles is pretty high. Marlowe's drinking habits are much as you state. I don't think he prefers rye to bourbon, however. He will drink practically anything that is not sweet. Certain drinks, such as Pink Ladies, Honolulu cocktails and crème de menthe highballs, he would regard as an insult. Yes, he makes good coffee. Anyone can make good coffee in this country, although it seems quite impossible in England. He takes cream, and sugar with his coffee, not milk. He will also drink it black without sugar. He cooks his own breakfast, which is a simple matter, but not any other meal. He is a late riser by inclination, but occasionally an early riser by necessity. Aren't we all? I would not say that his chess comes up to tournament standard. I don't know where he got the little paper-bound book of tournament games published in Leipzig, but he likes it because he prefers the continental method of designating the squares on the chess board. Nor do I know that he is something of a card player. This has slipped my mind. What do you mean he is ‘moderately fond of animals'? If you live in an apartment house, moderately is about as fond of them as you can get. It seems to me that you have an inclination to interpret any chance remark as an indication of a fixed taste. As to his interest in women as ‘frankly carnal’, these are your words, not mine.
Marlowe cannot recognize a Bryn Mawr accent, because there is no such thing. All he implies by that expression is a toplofty way of speaking. I doubt very much that he can tell genuine old furniture from fakes. And I also beg leave to doubt that many experts can do it either, if the fakes are good enough. I pass the Edwardian furniture and pre-Raphaelite art. I just don't recall where you get your facts. I would not say that Marlowe's knowledge of perfume stops at Chanel Number 5. That again is merely a symbol of something that is expensive and at the same time reasonably restrained. He likes all the slightly acrid perfumes, but not the cloying or overspiced type. He is, as you may have noticed, a slightly acrid person. Of course he knows what the Sorbonne is, and he also knows where it is. Of course he knows the difference between a tango and a rumba, and also between a conga and a samba, and he knows the difference between a samba and a mamba, although he does not believe that the mamba can overtake a galloping horse. I doubt if he knows the new dance called a mambo, because it seems to be only recently discovered or developed.
Now let's see, how far does that take us? Fairly regular filmgoer, you say, dislikes musicals. Check. May be an admirer of Orson Welles. Possibly, especially when Orson is directed by someone other than himself. Marlowe's reading habits and musical tastes are just as much a mystery to me as they are to you, and if I tried to improvise, I'm afraid I would get him confused with my own tastes. If you ask me why he is a private detective, I can't answer you. Obviously there are times when he wishes he were not, just as there are times when I would rather be almost anything than a writer. The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who acts and speaks like a real man. He can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being that in life as we know it such a man would not be a private detective. The things which happen to him might still happen to him, but they would happen as a result of a peculiar set of chances. By making him a private detective, you skip the necessity for justifying his adventures.
Where he lives: in The Big Sleep and some earlier stories he apparently lived in a single apartment with a pull-down bed, a bed that folds up into the wall and it has a mirror on the under side of it. Then he moved into an apartment similar to that occupied by a character named Joe Brody in The Big Sleep. It may have been the same apartment, he may have got it cheap because a murder had taken place in it. I think, but I'm not sure, that this apartment is on the fourth floor. It contains a living room which you enter directly from the hallway, and opposite are French windows opening on an ornamental balcony, which is just something to look at, certainly not anything to sit out on. Against the right-hand wall, nearest to the hallway of the apartment house, there is a door that leads to an interior hall. Beyond that, against the left-hand wall, there is this oak drop leaf desk, an easy chair, etc.; beyond that, an archway entrance to the dinette and kitchen. The dinette, as known in American apartment houses or at any rate in California apartment houses, is simply a space divided off from the kitchen proper by an archway or a built-in china closet. It would be very small, and the kitchen would also be v
ery small. As you enter the hallway from the living room (the interior hallway) you would come on your right to the bathroom door and continuing straight on you would come to the bedroom. The bedroom would contain a walk-in closet. The bathroom in a building of this type would contain a shower in the tub and a shower curtain. None of the rooms is very large. The rent of the apartment, furnished, would have been about sixty dollars a month when Marlowe moved into it. God knows what it would be now. I shudder to think. I should guess not less than ninety dollars a month, probably more.
As to Marlowe's office, I'll have to take another look at it sometime to refresh my memory. It seems to me it's on the sixth floor in a building which faces north, and that his office window faces east. But I'm not certain about this. As you say, there is a reception room which is a half-office, perhaps half the space of a corner office, converted into two reception rooms with separate entrances and communicating doors right and left respectively. Marlowe has a private office which communicates with his reception room, and there is a connection which causes a buzzer to ring in his private office when the door of the reception room is opened. But this buzzer can be switched off by a toggle switch. He has not, and never has had, a secretary. He could very easily subscribe to a telephone answering service, but I don't recall mentioning that anywhere. And I do not recall that his desk has a glass top, but I may have said so. The office bottle is kept in the filing drawer of the desk, – a drawer, standard in American office desks (perhaps also in England) which is the depth of two ordinary drawers, and is intended to contain file folders, but very seldom does, since most people keep their file folders in filing cases. It seems to me that some of these details flit about a good deal. His guns have also been rather various. He started out with a German Luger automatic pistol. He seems to have had Colt automatics of various calibers, but not larger than .38, and when last I heard he has a Smith & Wesson .38 special, probably with a four-inch barrel. This is a very powerful gun, although not the most powerful made, and has the advantage over an automatic of using a lead cartridge. It will not jam or discharge accidentally, even if dropped on a hard surface, and is probably just as effective a weapon at short range as a .45 caliber automatic. It would be better with a six-inch barrel, but that would make it much more awkward to carry. Even a four-inch barrel is not too convenient, and the detective branch of the police usually carries a gun with only a two and a half-inch barrel. This is about all I have for you now, but if there is anything else you want to know, please write to me again. The trouble is, you really seem to know a good deal more about Philip Marlowe than I do, and perhaps I shall have to ask you questions instead of you asking me.
Memo to Juanita Messick,
Chandler's secretary, Easter 1951. Leona was Chandler's maid in La Jolla.
Office will be closed Thursday and Friday. On Friday you should go to church for three hours. On Thursday you will have to be guided by your conscience, if any. Leona won't be here from Wednesday night until the following Monday but she doesn't get paid this time. Some damn nonsense about the child getting married. I suppose the nuns have told her she is to become the bride of Christ. Do Catholics get confirmed at the age of 8? I thought you had to have some idea of what it was all about. I was confirmed by the Bishop of Worcester. He had a beard.
Letter to Sol Siegal,
an executive at Twentieth Century-Fox Studios, 27 April 1951.
There are two kinds of screenwriters. There are the adept technicians, who know how to work with the medium and how to subordinate themselves to the use of the camera and the actors by the director. Their work is polished, effective, and entirely anonymous. Nothing they do bears any stamp of individuality. Then there is the writer whose personal touch must be allowed to come through, because his personal touch is what makes him a writer. Obviously a writer of this kind should never work for a director like Hitchcock, because there must be nothing in a Hitchcock picture which Hitchcock himself might not have written. It is not merely a question of how Hitchcock uses his camera and his actors; the point is that there must be nothing in his pictures which is beyond his range. Eventually there will be a type of director who realizes that what is said and how it is said is more important than shooting it upside down through a glass of champagne.
Letter to Somerset Maugham,
4 May 1951.
Priestley was in La Jolla a couple of months ago, and was kind enough to tell me that I wrote well, and that I should write a straight novel. Of course I have heard this before in other connections. If you write well, you should not be writing a mystery. Mysteries should only be written by people who can't write. I regard this as vicious propaganda from the Edmund Wilson crowd. Obviously you can't expect detective fiction to be anything but sub-literary, to use Edmund Wilson's word, if you insist on weeding out from that field anyone who shows any pretensions to skill or imagination.
Charles Morton, interestingly, had once written to Chandler about an encounter he had had with Edmund Wilson, in a letter dated 24 January 1945: ‘We once published a piece by Wilson about a Russian poet – one of the most wonderful poets in the world, he said – but the only hitch was that this poet had never been translated in English. Wilson himself, as he assured us, had been boning up on Russian. As such, Wilson was obviously unique in our circulation, contributors and staff. Being the only guy who had ever heard of this poet, he was naturally the only one who had ever read him, and for some reason or another we chose to let him make free with the matter. As things went along, however, we conceived some curiosity about the poet, and we procured a Russian who translated some of him for us. The poetry, we all agreed, was terrible.‘
Letter to Mr Dana,
a publisher at Lippincott, 19 June 1951. The book being referred to was a collection of Charles Morton's journalism.
You have sent me a massive hunk of galleys of a book allegedly by one Charles W. Morton. You are in a frantic rush. You are holding the presses on the jacket in case I might care to get hysterical and call Mr Morton the greatest American humorist since Hoover. So I am supposed to drop everything, including the week's washing and ironing and such feeble attempts as I may make to earn a living, and dedicate myself to your noble purpose. You have probably been stalling around with this book for six months until someone lit a fire under your chair, and now you are climbing up and down the walls yodeling like a Swiss tenor, because, forsooth, ‘the jackets must go press without fail next week, be sure to send them your comment back the fastest way’. I know you publishers. You send the proofs off by air express, and I sit up all night correcting them and send them back to you the same way, and the next thing anybody hears about you, you're sound asleep on somebody's private beach in Bermuda . . . I may read these galleys and I may not. Perhaps I'll go out and cut the back lawn instead.
Letter to Charles Morton,
July 1951.
I wasn't writing to you but to a man named Dana at Lippincott's. Evidently somebody with an important name dropped dead or got jailed for mopery at the last moment, so he had to root around in the weeds for a substitute: so I just had a little fun with him, meaning no harm for anyone. Secretly of course I was delighted that he hit me when I didn't have time to think, because I hate the whole lousy racket. The proper time to praise a writer is after his book has been published, and the proper place to praise him is in something else that is published. You must be well aware that there is practically a stable of puff merchants back in your territory who will go on record over practically anything including the World Almanac, provided they get their names featured. A few names occur with such monotonous regularity that only the fact of their known success as writers keeps one from thinking this is the way they earn their groceries. As a matter of fact I know that payment is sometimes made, because my Hollywood agent once called me up from New York and carefully propositioned me on the subject . . . Over in England they carry this quote business, though not pre-publication so much, to the point where it is absolutely meaningless. The curren
cy of praise has been so depreciated that there is nothing to say about a really good book. It has all been said already about the second, third, and fourth rate stuff which appears, circulates briefly, and then is forgotten. Anyhow if something comes along that you feel a sort of moral compulsion to praise to all the world if you have the opportunity, are you going to do it through the medium of a promotion department? I should hope to kiss a duck you're not.
Letter to Charles Morton,
5 July 1951.
Many thanks for the signed photograph of yourself in your good suit. That's a nice piece of material kid. You're executive as hell. You look as if you'd just been telling the head of production control that if he couldn't maintain schedule No. BF 7139×21 you'd get someone who could.
Letter to Frederic Dannay,
10 July 1951. Dannay was the co-editor of Ellery Queen crime magazine, and had written to Chandler asking him to contribute to a survey in the magazine of the top ten living crime writers.
My list, if I made it, would probably leave out some of those names which will inevitably appear on your list. . . I have liked some very pedestrian stories because they were unpretentious and because their mysteries were rooted in hard facts and not in false motivations cooked up for the purpose of mystifying a reader. I suppose the attraction of the pedestrian book is their documentary quality and this, if it is authentic, is pretty rare, and any attempt to dish it up with chi-chi and glamour turns my stomach completely. I think you are up against a difficult problem, because I think we may take it as granted that a mystery fan would rather read a bad mystery than none at all. You are bound to give some weight to volume of production, and strictly speaking volume of production means absolutely nothing. A writer discloses himself on a single page, sometimes in a single paragraph. An un-writer may fill a whole shelf, he may achieve fame of a sort, he may occasionally concoct a plot which will make him seem to be a little better than he really is, but in the end he fades away and is nothing.