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Raymond Chandler relaxing in sunny Palm Springs in 1957

Published: 16 August, 2012

Raymond Chandler’s fight for literary credibility is charted in a new biography, writes Dan Carrier

IT was his first book, and Raymond Chandler was nervous about the reviews. The Big Sleep, featuring  private detective Philip Marlowe, was a two-dollar hardback and the culmination of a seven-year stretch from 1932 to 1939 of churning out tales for pulp magazines.

Now he had fulfilled a long-held ambition of writing a more cerebral crime story and see it in bookshops instead of news stands.

But, as criticism trickled in, he was furious to find his pulp fiction background meant The Big Sleep was seen as just another detective story.

It was, he said, “a detective novel, that happens to be more interested in people than in plot, to try and stand on its own two legs as a novel, with the mystery a few drops of Tabasco on the oyster”.

It was this sense of not being taken seriously that would dog him through his career, and this is one of the tragedies of Chandler’s life that appears in a new biography of the author, by Tufnell Park writer Tom Williams.

Remarkably for a man who is a giant of 20th-century literature and who, in Philip Marlowe, created a household name, there have been few solid biographies written of Chandler.

Williams turned literary gumshoe and trawled through Chandler’s letters, kept in Los Angeles and Oxford. Despite Chandler being such a well-known writer, there was still plenty to uncover.

The biography reveals a man who was troubled by fears of not being taken seriously as a writer, made worse by chronic alcoholism.

Chandler was born in Chicago, and had a nomadic early life, moving to Ireland and then London after his parents’ marriage disintegrated.

He attended Dulwich College, a British public school experience partly responsible for shaping his attitudes towards sex and race.

He fought in the First World War, an experience that saw him drink heavily to cope with the horror. He had been hugely attached to and protective towards his mother, Florence, having witnessed his drunken father beat her regularly, and this relationship was then mimicked in his marriage: he fell in love with Cissy Pascal, who was closer to his own mother’s age than his.

Before becoming a writer he worked as an oil executive, watching with increasing disgust the corrupt nature of the political and business worlds of Los Angeles.

The oil rush, coupled with the Hollywood boom, made LA a place of rich pickings – if you got a break.

But with money came corruption: not only Prohibition gangsterism, but from the seemingly respectable rich who ran the Town Halls and police departments. Chandler drew on this real crime for inspiration.

He embarked on a writing career aged 43, beginning with short stories for popular magazines. It was the best possible time to earn a living this way: the Depression saw an insatiable appetite for cheap crime fiction magazines, with titles such as Dime Detective and Dime Western, which relied on quick-writing hacks to fill their pages. 

“Pulp fiction was the staple of the working man’s magazine,” says Williams.

As the book highlights, Chandler spent much of his professional life trying to break from the chains of his own making: he did not greatly admire crime fiction, and did not want to be bracketed in the genre. He wanted to write “literature”, and felt crime stories did not allow this.

“He was a hard-boiled crime writer, following on from James M Cain and Dashiell Hammett,” says Williams. “But of his contemporaries, Chandler has lasted longest. He was the first crime novelist to be published in the Library of America series, and that’s a very big honour.”

While seen as a Los Angeles author, his books are more popular in Britain than the US.

“He struggled to get out of the crime review pages in the States, but over here he was celebrated as a writer rather than a crime writer,” says Williams.

“The British considered Marlowe to be a prototype James Bond. Indeed, Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming, was a friend and admitted he owed Chandler a debt for inspiring his secret agent.”

The cross-Atlantic relationship during the period Chandler’s books were being published also had an effect. With post-war America taking the UK’s place as the world’s pre-eminent superpower, British readers felt Marlowe offered a different take on the gum-chewing Uncle Sam spotted in country lanes near US bases during the war. “British readers saw something in Marlowe they recognised,” adds Williams.

“He doesn’t like the rich and he stands up for the poor. He fights for the underdog. It is in the British nature to celebrate the underdog, while not so much in the American psyche.”

• Raymond Chandler: A Life. By Tom Williams. Aurum, £20