Talk:Raymond Chandler

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Contents 1 Philip Marlowe 2 Chandler v. Hammett 3 Chandler's ambitions 4 Misquote on Marlowe 5 Judgement call

[edit] Philip Marlowe

There is no direct reference to or discussion of Chandler's major character, Phillip Marlowe -- nor is there any link to the Philip Marlowe wiki article. Guernseykid 05:10, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

The link is under the "Novels" section. However it could be made more prominent.

[edit] Chandler v. Hammett

One interesting item that could be added to this article would be a comparison of Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, who were almost polar opposites in some ways:

Hammett was a working detective. He only began to write when disabled by TB. He used the material of his own experience. His primary interest in the writing was to make a living, as witnessed by the many weak and novelty-type stories he published, especially those which could be considered "action" rather than detective. The cops in his stories are always good guys. Rich folks are always plain honest citizens except when they are actual, manifest, criminals or "deviates". His biggest themes - deriving from his actual experience as a detective - were the viciousness and stupidity of actual criminals and conversely, he was fascinated with the notion of the "master criminal", which he dealt with in many stories and novels - "the Gutting of Coufignal", "The Big Knockover", "Red Harvest", "the Dain Curse", "the Girl with the Silver Hair", and so on. He had no particular literary ambitions prior to his disability and forced retirement from the Pinkertons.

Now Chandler was a great admirer of Hammett - admired him for his strengths rather than his weaknesses. But he knew nothing, by experience, of the work of actual detectives. He was obsessive about the purity of his Art, and was enraged when some of his earlier stories that had been "cannibalized" - his own word - to provide material for his later novels were reprinted against his wishes. He was not at all interested in criminal "masterminds" and even, in the person of Marlowe, had no principled hostility to mob bosses, except when he came head to head with them. He used up far more ink on the subject of corrupt and brutal cops; and dissipated, bored, and miserable rich people who lived by unearned or undeserved wealth. Finally, Chandler had always possessed literary ambitions and had tried his hand, in England, as a poet and literary critic.

That's pretty interesting, and it rings true to me for the most part. It would take some legwork to make it truly "factual" and it could just be worked in to the existing text. Chandler's take on the cops and rich people has become engrained in American culture but Hammet belonged to a slightly earlier era. According to the bio, there was a several year gap between his detective work and his literary endeavors. He was a communist of sorts, so it's hard to see any great sympathy for the wealthy, but movies from the 1920's employed similar characterizations. I seem to recall Chandler used the term "cannibalized" to describe his own process of utilizing his short stories as material for his novels. Guernseykid 12:00, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Chandler's ambitions

Chandler explains what he was about as a writer in the following excerpt:

How could I possibly care a button about the detective story as a form? All I'm looking for is an excuse for certain experiments in dramatic dialogue. To justify them I have to have plot and situation; but fundamentally I care almost nothing about either. All I really care about is what Errol Flynn calls "the music", the lines he has to speak (...) A long time ago when I was writing for the pulps, I put into a story a line like "he got out of the car and walked across the sun-drenched sidewalk until the shadow of the awning over the entrance fell across his face like the touch of cool water". They took it out when they published the story. Their readers didn't appreciate this sort of thing: just held up the action. And I set out to prove them wrong.

--Letter to Frederick Lewis Allen, May 7 1948. From "Raymond Chandler, Later Novels and Other Writings", page 1032

[edit] Misquote on Marlowe

I removed a misquote about Philip Marlowe from the article. The article suggested that Marlowe described himself as "a nice clean private detective who wouldn't drop cigar ashes on the floor and never carried more than one gun." The actual quotation is about his client Elizabeth Murdock, who you might say had rather Victorian attitudes and sensibilities. He says Ms. Murdock "wanted to hire a nice clean private detective who wouldn't drop cigar ashes on the floor and never carried more than one gun." I'm not so sure by this he was saying someting about himself so much as he was about Ms. Murdock who wanted dirty work done, without anyone getting dirty, so to speak. I take the statement by Marlowe to be a subtle criticism of Mrs. Murdock, not a self-description. --Jakob Huneycutt 04:56, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Judgement call

"Chandler's finely wrought prose was widely admired by critics and writers from the highbrow (W.H. Auden, Evelyn Waugh) to the lowbrow (Ian Fleming)."

I don't think passing subjective judgements on the merits of an author's writing should be a part of a 'pedia entry, unless the author described his own writing as low or highbrow (and I imagine Fleming did not describe his own writing as lowbrow). I wouldn't put the Bond novels in the same category as Auden, but that's my personal choice to make; it shouldn't be in a definitive article about literature.

I would suggest "...was widely admired by critics and writers as diverse as W.H. Auden and Ian Fleming."

Thoughts?

I agree -- but don't leave out Waugh. Hayford Peirce 16:15, 15 September 2006 (UTC)