Letter to Luther Nichols,
books editor of the San Francisco Examiner, who had sent Chandler some interview questions, September 1958.
1. Yes, I think the hardboiled dick is still the reigning hero, but there is getting to be rather too many of him. The principal challenger is, I think, the novel of pure suspense. The best of these seem to be written by women.
2. I wouldn't call any writer psychoneurotic. We're all crazy to some extent. It's a hard lonely life in which you are never sure of anything.
3. Regarding whether crime fiction might lead to increased crime.] No effect whatsoever except that a man contemplating a murder might pick up an idea of how to do it and escape afterwards. But the crime was already there.
4. [Regarding the future of mystery writing.] A decline of the hardboiled story on the basis of Gresham's law. They are too numerous, too violent, and too sexy in too blatant a way. Not one in fifty is written with any sense of style or economy. They are supposed to be what the reader wants. Good writers write what they want and make the reader like it. The hard-hitting story will not die completely but it will have to become more civilized. The mystery story in some form will never die in the foreseeable future.
5. I don't worry about the reviewers. I've had it both ways, and that is how it should be. Some are stupid, even vicious, but so are some writers.
Letter to Helga Greene,
1 October 1958. Following his meeting with Lucky Luciano, Chandler now had an idea for a new story:
. . . about a man who tried to get out of the Syndicate organization, but he knew too much, and he got a tip that a couple of pros were being sent to wipe him out. He has no one to turn to for help, so he goes to Marlowe. The problem is what can Marlowe do without getting in front of the guns himself. I have some ideas and I think the story would be fun to write. Needless to say, if the killers fail, others will take care of them. You don't fail the syndicate and go on living. The discipline is strict and severe, and mistakes are simply not tolerated. The only syndicate boss who was ever convicted of murder was Lepke Buchhalter, at one time head of Murder Inc. in Brooklyn and head of a ‘protection’ racket in New York. I don't know how they got him, but he and one of his top men did finally go to the chair. They put Costello in prison for a while and they may still be after him, but they won't get far, I should think. These boys all have good business fronts and very clever, although crooked, lawyers. Stop the lawyers and you stop the Syndicate, but the Bar Associations are simply not interested.
Chandler wrote the story, unpublished on his death. It was the last piece of writing he ever completed, and the first short story he had written since his pulp days. It begins:
He sat down carefully and I sat opposite and we looked at each other. His face had a sort of foxy eagerness. He was sweating a little. The expression on my face was meant to be interested but not clubby. I reached for a pipe and the leather humidor in which I keep my Pearce's tobacco. I pushed cigarettes at him.
‘I don't smoke.’ He had a rusty voice. I didn't like it any more than I liked his clothes, or his face. While I filled the pipe he reached inside his coat, prowled in a pocket, came out with a bill, glanced at it and dropped it across the desk in front of me. It was a nice bill and clean and new. One thousand dollars.
‘Ever save a guy's life?’
‘Once in a while, maybe.’
‘Save mine.’
The story also contained the line:
the women you get and the women you don't get – they live in different worlds. I don't sneer at either world. I live in both myself.
Letter to Hardwick Moseley,
5 October 1958.
Hardwick, I need money, cash money, not assets. I need it because for a year and eight months I have been supporting my Australian secretary and her two children. Hell, I even deeded the British and Commonwealth rights in Playback to Jean . . .
Letter to Roger Machell,
14 October 1958. Chandler had become embroiled with his new secretary's ongoing divorce.
Her filthy rotten screwy bastard of a husband (this is one case in which I do not feel it noble to speak well of the dead. I knew him) made a holograph will a few days before he died disinheriting his wife and children and leaving what he had to his brother, who is a screwball, too. Jean has no one to look to but me and it's becoming rather a drain.
Since I am on an alcohol-free diet, due to hepatitis, my mind seems to lack a little or a lot of its exuberance. Very few writers can write on alcohol but I am one of the exceptions. I don't miss alcohol physically at all, but I do miss it mentally and spiritually.
Letter to Helga Greene,
22 October 1958.
I've always had a sneaking idea that a professional failure was always a moral failure. There are writers who look the situation squarely in the face and decide that they are willing to be poor if they can write well enough to satisfy their souls. I respect them, but a lack of appreciation is narrowing. Henry James felt it. It tends to make a writer exaggerate the very things that keep the public away from him. I am not a mercenary writer, but I do feel that in this tangled generation a writer who cannot face the rather cynical realities of his trade is lacking in more than popularity.
Letter to Catherine Barth,
Executive Secretary of the Mystery Writers of America. The organization had just asked Chandler to become its President. 7 February 1959.
I spoke to you on the telephone to thank you for the great honor the Mystery Writers of America have done me; but that does not seem quite enough – especially as the real work has to be done by the Executive Vice-President, Herbert Brean, and the Executive Committee, who seem to do all the work and get none of the praise.
I am sure you realize that I take this honor as a token of a long career, and that I do not take it very personally. I have reached a stage in my career where I have nothing to fear.
Letter to Maurice Guinness,
21 February 1959.
I think I may have misunderstood your desire that Marlowe should get married. I think I may have picked the wrong girl. But as a matter of fact, a fellow of Marlowe's type shouldn't get married, because he is a lonely man, a poor man, a dangerous man, and yet a sympathetic man, and somehow none of this goes with marriage. I think he will always have a fairly shabby office, a lonely house, a number of affairs, but no permanent connection. I think he will always be awakened at some inconvenient hour by some inconvenient person, to do some inconvenient job. It seems to me that is his destiny – possibly not the best destiny in the world, but it belongs to him. No one will ever beat him, because by his nature he is unbeatable. No one will ever make him rich, because he is destined to be poor. But somehow, I think he would not have it otherwise, and therefore I feel that your idea that he should be married, even to a very nice girl, is quite out of character. I see him always in a lonely street, in lonely rooms, puzzled but never quite defeated.
Four weeks after writing that letter, Chandler was taken to hospital by ambulance from his rented home in La Jolla, suffering from pneumonia. He died three days later.
THE END
Chandler had left the following instructions in a letter to his lawyer, written two years before his death. ‘Wright’ was Leroy Wright, who had helped Chandler draw up his will in La Jolla.
P.S. Wright failed to cover one point and I failed to mention it in the letter attached, but I shall. That is that I want either a Church of England or Episcopalian church service, depending on where I die, I wanted to be cremated, and I want my eyes to go to a cornea bank, if they want them. Since the eyes have to be removed, I am told, within half an hour after death to be of any use, and immediately refrigerated, it would seem that this would require some instrument duly executed between me and some organization, such as an eye hospital. The mutilation of a corpse, except for autopsy or embalmment (the last is compulsory in this country) is illegal, so the right to do this should probably be given to me in a proper document.
As
to the funeral service, I will not, if I have anything to say about it, have it anywhere but in a church, and there is to be nothing but the formal service for the dead – no poems read, no speeches, no goddam tame person in a funeral parlor or chapel. I don't know where I was baptized, although I know from my mother that I was baptized, but I was confirmed in the Church of England by the Bishop of Worcester, and as a young man was very devout. My wife had her service in an Episcopal church, although neither of us had ever been inside it. The vicar was a friend of mine, but I don't think that was the reason. I think one is entitled to it.
R.
Index
Academy 1, 144
Adams, Cleve 90
advertising 132, 189, 195–6, 199
advice 51–2
Agee, James 245
agents 54, 173, 175
Ak-Sar-Ben 43, 45
alcoholism xi, 13, 196, 214, 215, 258
cure 173–4
Allen, Frederick Lewis 86
Ambler, Eric 156
America 239–40
language 36–7
And Then There Were None 27
Anderson, Edward 17
Arizona 225
Aron, Miss 61
art 118
Ashenden 129
Asphalt Jungle 122
Atlantic Monthly 39, 63, 70–73, 77, 229
Auden, W. H. 112
Bakke, Captain Tore 219
Barris, Alex 103, 110
Bartlett, Adelaide 150–53
Bauer, Harold 49
Baumgarten, Bernice 99, 102, 106, 135, 156, 180, 182, 183
‘BDS’ 121
Bethel, Jane 80
Bible 80
Big Bear Lake 56, 57
Big Sleep, The x, 14–16, 21, 33
film 39, 67–9, 105
Black Mask 13, 16, 92
‘Blackmailers Don't Shoot’ 121
Bogart, Humphrey 15, 67
Bond, James 219
Bowen, Elizabeth 107
Brandt, Carl 96, 97, 100, 107, 111, 122, 148, 172, 173, 176
Brandt & Brandt 50, 99
Brooks, Paul 99, 121, 183, 194, 231, 237
Bryan, Williams Jenning 43, 45
Burnett, W. R. 122
business 236–7
Cain, James M. 33, 38, 39, 40–41
California 20, 22, 168–9
Campbell, Alan K. 189
Campigny, Robert 248
Carter, Edgar 80, 140, 145, 147, 240
Catholicism 123, 124, 131, 162, 226
Ireland 26, 49
cats 54–5, 92–3, 130, 145, 146
eyes 134
Chamber's Journal 1
Chandler, Cissie (formerly Cissie Pascal), wife x, 13, 183, 202, 228
Chandler, Raymond
biography ix–xi
imaginary biography 25, 131–2, 147
charm 140
Chase, James Hadley 50, 91–2
Chaucer, David 116
chess viii
Christie, Agatha 27, 249
Christmas 176–7
clichés 35, 44
Communists 83, 84–6, 123, 124–5, 156–7
Connolly, Cyril 112, 138, 210
cooking 189, 244
corporations 114, 195–6
corruption 126–7, 242
Corryvreckan 142–3
courage 230–31
Coxe, George Harmon 16, 21, 23, 26, 29
crime fiction see detective fiction criticism see dramatic criticism; literary criticism
Dabney, Joseph 13
Daily Sketch 210
Dana, Mr 163
Dannay, Frederic 165
Day of the Locust, The 117
death-wish 113
denouements 193
Destiny 2
detective fiction
action and emotion 87–8
by people who can't write 163, 193
character 15, 181
classic 27
and crime 256
endings 193
English and American faults 217–18
fantasy 102–3
future 256
honesty 136
magazines 18
and novels 40, 117, 139
psychological foundation for popularity 95–6
serialization 21
suspense 256
detective pictures 80–81
detectives 4, 114–15, 160, 187–8
licences 132–3
dialogue 41
Dickens, Charles 20, 66
doctors 173, 231–2, 238
Double Entryemnity 38, 39, 41
dramatic criticism 86–7
dude ranches 169–70
Duhanel, Marcel 125
Dulwich College ix, 26, 144, 199
Dumas, Alexandre 20, 66
dust jackets
designs 31, 194
quotes 163–5
editors 128–9
education 37, 168–9, 192
egotism 98, 134, 239
Eisenhower, Dwight D. 241
Ellis, Ruth 213
endings 193
England 101, 183, 185–6, 187, 239
language 35–8
euthanasia 145
Evans, Bernice 247
explanation scenes 100–101
eyes 134
failure 113, 258
fairyland 5–6
fan letters 196
fantasy 200
Farewell, My Lovely 26, 28–9
F.B.I. 192
feuds 140
fiction see literature
fifty 129
Film Noir 125
films see motion pictures
financial system 98
‘Finger Man’ 121
first love 234
first-person characters 94–5
First World War x, 12–13, 101–2, 127, 230–31
Fitzgerald, F. Scott 139–40, 235–6
Fleming, Ian 219, 220
Fontemara 127–8
Ford, Ford Madox 116
Fox, James M. 192, 193, 197
Fracasse, Jean 247, 258
Francis, J. 184
‘Free Verse’ 8–11
Gardner, Dorothy 217
Gardner, Erle Stanley 19, 29, 43, 53, 65–6, 233
Gartrell, Deirdre 230, 232, 235, 238, 243
Gault, William 208, 224, 233
Gibbs, Wolcott 58–9
Gilbert, Michael 214, 217, 224, 241, 242
Go-Between, The 197–8
Goldwyn, Samuel 69
Graham, Billy 234
grammar 36–7
Great Gatsby, The 235–6
Greene, Graham 89
Greene, Helga 215, 221, 231, 234, 235, 236, 238, 242, 243, 245, 246–7, 248, 251, 256, 258
Guinness, Maurice 250, 259
guns 99, 161–2
Halsey, Margaret 21, 23
Hamilton, Hamish ('Jamie') 50, 51,
, 60, 67, 75, 89, 97, 101, 105, 108, 112, 116, 118, 127, 128, 130, 131, 133, 134, 135, 138, 143, 146, 149, 153, 155, 166, 169, 170, 173, 176, 181, 187, 190, 191, 193, 197, 200, 203, 210, 239
Hammett, Dashiell 17, 33, 42–3, 56–7, 90
The Maltese Falcon 57, 59, 75
Hartley, Wesley 244
Harvard Summer School 189–90
Hawks, Howard 68, 95, 105
Haycroft, Howard 78
Heard, Gerard 225
Heart of the Matter, The 89
Hellman, Lillian 56
Hemingway, Ernest 33, 67, 137–8
heroes 3–5
High Wentryow, The 30, 31, 32, 34
Jews in 61–3
Hines, Mr 167
Hitchcock, Alfred 135–6, 141–2, 162, 166, 174–5
Hogan, Mrs Robert 75, 78
Communists 84–5
contracts 108
graveyard to talent 17
how to survive 172, 229–30
manner 73
people 43, 100
phony life 112
Warner brothers 118–20
writers and subconscious 122
see also motion pictures; screenwriting
homosexuality 120–21, 155–6, 227
honesty 136
Hoover, J. Edgar 192
horizontal writing 97
Hose, H. F. 149, 187, 191
Houghton Mifflin 50, 108
Houseman, John 126
Howard, James 232
I Know Where I'm Going 142–3
Ibberson, D. J. 157
Iceman Cometh, The 84, 86–7, 91
idealism 5–6, 7–8
‘Improvisation for Cissy’ 14
Inglis, Mr (a fan) 171
insomnia 151–2
inspiration 104
insurance inventory 166–7
Ireland 26, 49, 104, 131
Irish, William 32
Isherwood, Christopher 225
Jaguars 103
Jews 22, 23, 61–3
juvenile delinquents 191–2, 233
Keddie, James 136
Kefauver committee 154–5
Knopf, Alfred 14, 17, 21, 26, 31, 32, 33, 50, 63, 108, 191
Knopf, Blanche 20, 24, 25, 26, 28, 30, 31, 66
La Jolla 18–19, 22, 74, 103–4, 221, 224
La Jolla Hermosa Writers Club 88–9
Lady in the Lake, The 38
languages 194–5, 244
lawyers
fees 217
hanging 135
and organized crime 237–8
Leon, Jean de 226, 234
legal system
America 147
England 213
Levitt, Gene 141
limericks 246
literary criticism 58–9, 65, 81–2, 122, 127, 194
reviewers 256
literature 65–6
and detective fiction 40, 117, 139
ideas 122
importance 134–5
mechanical perfection 59–60, 76–7
past and present 149–50
rebellious thoughts on 243
significance 106–7
Little Sister, The 89, 109
London 212
Long Goodbye, The 166, 180–81, 182, 193
dust jacket 194
pruned material 183–4
Los Angeles 238
Loughner, Louise ix, 210, 212
love 117, 234
Lucania, Luciano (Lucky Luciano) xi, 250–55
Macdonald, John 109–10
Machell, Roger 186–7, 188, 194, 206, 241, 258