Welcome
The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler is the latest selection for One Book, One Chicago (OBOC). Previous selections for the citywide book club were: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee; Night by Elie Wiesel; My Antonia by Willa Cather; A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry; The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien; The Coast of Chicago by Stuart Dybek; In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez; The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark; Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen; One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri, Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin and The Crucible by Arthur Miller.
Greetings, As Mayor and on behalf of the City of Chicago, I invite you to participate in the fourteenth One Book, One Chicago (OBOC) program presented by the Chicago Public Library. This award-winning program encourages all Chicagoans to read the same book at the same time, and to come together with friends and neighbors to share and discuss a great work of literature. This spring, we have selected The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler. Chandler, who was born right here in Chicago, has been referred to by many critics as one of the most important writers of the 20th century. His distinct style has influenced fiction, film and more, well beyond just the crime genre. Not only did he create one of fiction’s most memorable portraits of a city—Los Angeles—in books like The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely and The Long Goodbye, but he created one of the most well-known heroes of his time or ours when he created private detective Philip Marlowe. You can find a copy of The Long Goodbye at your neighborhood Chicago Public Library or local bookstore. Please join in one of the many special events and book discussions planned in libraries, bookstores, universities and community centers throughout April.
Sincerely,
Richard M. Daley
Mayor
Resource Guide Contents
Author Bio
The Simple Art of Murder
Events
Private Eye, Public Conscience
Discussion Groups
Discussion Questions
Further Reading
Raymond Chandler was born in Chicago on July 23, 1888, the only child of an Irish-born mother and a Pennsylvanian father. He spent many of his early years in Nebraska, but after his father, who had always struggled with alcoholism, left the family, Chandler and his mother moved to Ireland in 1895, then on to England. After receiving an education at Dulwich College, Chandler took civil service exams, placing first in classics and third overall. His reward, a clerkship in the British Admiralty, did not agree with him and he left it to freelance as a journalist.
In 1912 Chandler returned alone to the United States, eventually settling in southern California. His mother would soon join him there and he would care for her for years to come. It was in this period, during a string of dull, poorly paid odd jobs, that Chandler met his future wife Cissy, who was at the time married to West Indian pianist Julian Pascal. She would eventually leave her husband for Chandler, but they would not marry for over a decade.
With World War I underway, the twenty nine- year-old Chandler journeyed north to enlist in the Canadian army in 1917.Wrote Chandler’s biographer Frank MacShane, “Only the twentieth century could produce the scenario of an American-born Anglo-Irishman traveling to Canada in order to join a Scottish regiment to fight Germans in France.” Chandler saw dramatic action in France, where a German artillery barrage killed everyone in his unit except Chandler, who received only a concussion.
Discharged in 1919, Chandler returned to Los Angeles and unsuccessfully tried his hand at poetry. He eventually took work as an accountant for Dabney Oil Syndicate. His interest in the now-divorced Cissy Pascal was rekindled, but they did not marry until after his mother’s death in 1924. Perhaps unbeknownst to Chandler, Cissy was nearly eighteen years his senior. Rising quickly at Dabney Oil, Chandler earned $1,000 a month and commanded two cars despite widespread economic hardships during the Depression. Initially quite respected for his work at Dabney, Chandler began neglecting his work, womanizing and drinking excessively, and was fired in 1932 at the age of forty-four.
The shock of being fired forced Chandler to consider his behavior and find a new means of earning a living.With his marriage on the mend, Chandler gave up drinking and turned his attention once again to writing. Perhaps taking into account the potential to earn money in popular pulp magazines and admiring the work of Dashiell Hammet who had started publishing stories in Black Mask magazine in 1920, Chandler now tried his hand at crime stories. His first story, published by Black Mask in December 1933, “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot,” earned him $180.
Chandler continued to perfect his craft and with each story added depth to his central hero, a private eye variously named Mallory, Dalmas, Carmad and Gage, among others. As a struggling and unprolific writer, Chandler was no longer immune to the economic difficulties of the Depression. In 1938 his work earned him a mere $1,275. Chandler and Cissy moved frequently during this time (they moved roughly thirty-five times during their thirty-year marriage) and as Chandler’s income grew smaller so did their rental homes. Things would soon change, however, when Chandler turned his focus to his first novel, The Big Sleep, published by Alfred A. Knopf in February 1939. The novel sold 10,000 copies in the United States, one sign that paperback novels were rising in popularity. During this rise, Chandler’s Philip Marlowe continued to haunt the streets of a gritty Los Angeles in the novels Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The High Window (1942) and The Lady in the Lake (1943).
It was at this time, during World War II, that Hollywood looked more at the hard-boiled detective genre for material for films. In 1943 Paramount hired Chandler to work on scripts. His first was a collaboration with Billy Wilder on the adaptation of fellow novelist James Cain’s Double Indemnity. He received an Oscar nomination for the screenplay and continued successful work in the film industry for the next four years.
Once his work in films faded, he and Cissy retreated even further into their very private life together. Chandler was a shy, lonely man and had difficulty fitting in with his chosen California environment, in particular with Hollywood. The one abiding relationship Chandler had was with his wife, to whom he was, in his own fashion, strongly devoted. In 1946 the Chandlers moved to La Jolla, California, outside San Diego. There he dedicated himself to caring for Cissy, who had grown quite ill from fibrosis of the lungs. Despite medical problems of his own, including shingles and an eczema so severe that he had to wear gloves to type, Chandler continued to write, and published another Marlowe novel, The Little Sister (1949).
In 1950 and 1951 Chandler worked on a new book, but the old Philip Marlowe bored him.When his own agents rejected the manuscript, Chandler broke his relationship with them, intent on adding depth to his hero. The Long Goodbye (1953) was a landmark. It introduced a flawed Marlowe, lonely and weakened by time, and brought social commentary to the hard-boiled genre.
When Cissy died in 1954, Chandler grew depressed, resumed drinking and began travelling restlessly between England and L.A. In 1955 he made a feeble attempt at suicide and in 1958 he published his last novel, Playback, which is still shrugged off by Chandler readers as better off forgotten. He died in La Jolla, California on March 26, 1959 of pneumonia. Raymond Chandler is widely accepted as a master stylist who transformed 20th century detective fiction.
Sources
“Raymond Chandler, Jr.” Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd ed. 17 Vols. Gale Research, 1998.
Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2007.
Gardiner, Dorothy and Kathrine Sorley Walker, eds. Raymond Chandler Speaking. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1997.
MacShane, Frank. The Life of Raymond Chandler. Boston, G.K. Hall and Co., 1976
Marling,William. “Chandler, Raymond Thornton”; American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.
Copyright © 2000 American Council of Learned Societies. Published by Oxford University Press.
Valerio, Mike. “The Great Wrong Place: Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles at 70."
The Simple Art of Murder
By Raymond Chandler
The following is an excerpt of the introduction that Raymond Chandler wrote for the collection of his work published in 1950, The Simple Art of Murder. The collection included, and was named for, his essay of the same title.
Some literary antiquarian of a rather special type may one day think it worthwhile to run through the files of the pulp detective magazines which flourished during the late twenties and early thirties, and determine just how and when and by what steps the popular mystery story shed its refined good manners and went native. He will need sharp eyes and an open mind. Pulp paper never dreamed of posterity and most of it must be a dirty brown color by now. And it takes a very open mind indeed to look beyond the unnecessarily gaudy covers, trashy titles and barely acceptable advertisements and recognize the authentic power of a kind of writing that, even at its most mannered and artificial, made most of the fiction of the time taste like a cup of lukewarm consommé at a spinsterish tea-room.
I don’t think this power was entirely a matter of violence, although far too many people got killed in these stories and their passing was celebrated with a rather too loving attention to detail. It certainly was not a matter of fine writing, since any attempt at that would have been ruthlessly blue-penciled by the editorial staff. Nor was it because of any great originality of plot or character. Most of the plots were rather ordinary and most of the characters rather primitive types of people. Possibly it was the smell of fear which these stories managed to generate… The streets were dark with something more than night. The mystery story grew hard and cynical about motive and character, but it was not cynical about the effects it tried to produce nor about its technique of producing them. A few unusual critics recognized this at the time, which was all one had any right to expect. The average critic never recognizes an achievement when it happens. He explains it after it has become respectable.
As to the emotional basis of the hard-boiled story, obviously it does not believe that murder will out and justice will be done—unless some very determined individual makes it his business to see that justice is done. The stories were about the men who made that happen. They were apt to be hard men, and what they did, whether they were called police officers, private detectives or newspaper men, was hard, dangerous work. It was work they could always get. There was plenty of it lying around. There still is. Undoubtedly the stories about them had a fantastic element. Such things happened, but not so rapidly, nor to so close-nit a group of people, now within so narrow a frame of logic. This was inevitable because the demand was for constant action; if you stopped to think you were lost.When in doubt have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand. This could get to be pretty silly, but somehow it didn’t seem to matter. A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong.
As I look back on my stories it would be absurd not to wish they had been better… As for the literary quality of these exhibits… I need not be sickeningly humble. As a Writer I have never been able to take myself with that enormous earnestness which is one of the trying characteristics of the craft. And I have been fortunate to escape what has been called “that form of snobbery which can accept the Literature of Entertainment in the Past, but only the Literature of the Enlightenment in the Present.” Between the one-syllable humors of the comic strip and the anemic subtleties of the litterateurs there is a wide stretch of country, in which the mystery story may or may not be an important landmark. There are those who hate it in all its forms. There are those who like it when it is about nice people (“That charming Mrs. Jones, whoever would have thought she would cut off her husband’s head with a meat saw? Such a handsome man, too!”) There are those who think violence and sadism interchangeable terms, and those who regard detective fiction as sub-literary on no better grounds than that it does not habitually get itself jammed up with subordinate clauses, tricky punctuation and hypothetical subjunctives. There are those who read it only when they are tired or sick, and, from the number of mystery novels they consume, they must be tired and sick most of the time. There are the aficionados of deduction… and the aficionados of sex who can’t get it into their hot little heads that the fictional detective is a catalyst, not a Casanova. The former demand a group plan of Greythorpe Manor, showing the study, the gun room, the main hall and staircase and the passage to that grim little room where the butler polishes the Georgian silver, thin-lipped and silent, hearing the murmur of doom. The latter think the shortest distance between two points is from a blonde to a bed.
No writer can please them all, no writer should try… The mystery story is a kind of writing that need not dwell in the shadow of the past and owes little of its allegiance to the cult of classics… There are no “classics” of crime and detection. Not one.Within its frame of reference, which is the only way it should be judged, a classic is a piece of writing which exhausts the possibilities of its form and can hardly be surpassed. No story or novel of mystery has done that yet. Few have come close.Which is one of the principal reasons why otherwise reasonable people continue to assault the citadel.
La Jolla, California, February 15, 1950
“The Simple Art of Murder” ©1950 Raymond Chandler
Ltd, A Chorion Company, all rights reserved.
Curious about how contemporary crime novelists would react to this essay? Go to http://theoutfitcollective.blogspot.com
after April 14.