Raymond Chandler, the Dulwich boy who gave Los Angeles its voice

Chandler arrived at the pulp typewriter at forty-four, after a classical education on the wrong continent and a decade managing California oil fields. He wrote his first published story because he had been fired. What he wrote became the template for a form of American fiction that had not existed before him.

Nobody who knew him at Dulwich College in 1907 would have predicted Los Angeles. He was among the school’s best classicists — Latin, Greek, a facility with French and German — and when he left for London’s civil service it seemed he was headed toward the life of a minor English man of letters, perhaps a critic, perhaps a poet contributing slightly precious verse to the Spectator. The oil fields of Southern California were not in the plan. Neither was the pulp magazine.

He had followed his mother to California in 1919, and by the late 1920s he was running a network of petroleum companies — the kind of steady, respectable American life that his English schooling had not prepared him for and that he held, it later became clear, in a particular kind of ironic contempt. The Depression ended it in 1932. He was forty-four, newly poor, and he turned almost in desperation to the only thing left: words.

Black Mask and Dime Detective were not what Dulwich had prepared him for. But Chandler understood something the other pulp writers did not. The hardboiled American crime story — rough, urban, without illusions — was not just a genre. It was the right form for what he wanted to say about the city he had landed in. He spent five years in the pulps, writing perhaps twenty-five stories, teaching himself a prose style so sharp and so American that nobody who read it suspected a classicist was behind it.

The Big Sleep, published in 1939, was the condensed argument of those five years. Philip Marlowe, the private detective Chandler invented, was nobody’s idea of a genre hero. He was educated, ironic, morally exact to a fault, and entirely unable to make money. He walked the streets of a Los Angeles where everything had a price — everything except Marlowe himself, which is why he never got rich. The city in those novels is so vividly mapped in its corruptions and its light that it is easy to forget Chandler had spent his formative years in south London. He wrote Los Angeles better than most people who were born there.

The contradiction at the center of his career was never fully resolved. He despised Hollywood when he arrived to write screenplays in 1943, and Hollywood was not entirely fond of him either. His collaboration with Billy Wilder on Double Indemnity, based on James M. Cain’s novel, produced one of the great American screenplays — Wilder later said the dialogue was mostly Chandler’s — and earned them both Academy Award nominations. But the relationship was almost fatally difficult. Chandler found Wilder insufferable. Wilder found Chandler drunk. The film was a masterpiece. None of this resolved anything about who Chandler was or what he thought he was doing in the business.

The Long Goodbye, published in 1953, is widely considered his best novel, and the most uncomfortable one. It is longer, more melancholy, less plotted — a novel about friendship and loss and the way time removes everything except regret, told obliquely through a murder mystery. W. H. Auden wrote that reading a Chandler novel was a genuine aesthetic experience of the kind reserved for serious literature. Other critics were less sure, and this was the argument Chandler lived inside for the rest of his life: not quite literary enough for the literary world, not quite commercial enough for the genre market. The Long Goodbye won the Edgar Award for Best Novel in 1955, which settled nothing.

He died in La Jolla, California, on March 26, 1959, three months after being elected president of the Mystery Writers of America. The Philip Marlowe novels had already outlived every critical debate about where they belonged. Five of them were filmed at least once. Robert Altman adapted The Long Goodbye in 1973 with Elliot Gould, one of the stranger and more interesting acts of literary translation in American cinema. The character has been played by Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, James Garner, and others, and none of them have quite matched the one in the books: the man too principled to prosper, walking a city that mistakes his integrity for naivety, writing similes that nobody who learned English as a second language could have written.

Chandler’s Los Angeles no longer exists in the form he mapped it. The city has been replaced several times over. But the moral logic he gave to Marlowe — the insistence that there is a difference between corruption and honesty even in a city designed to erase the distinction — remains the model against which every detective novel written since is still tested.

Tags: American writers, novelists, crime fiction, Double Indemnity, Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler