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The Public Eye of Raymond Chandler

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

David Smith
David Smith
Affiliation:
David Smith lectures in the Department of History of Wales at University College, Cardiff, Wales CF1 1XL. An earlier version of this essay was delivered as a lecture at the BAAS Jubilee Conference, at Lancaster University, in April 1980. The author wishes to thank the respondent on that occasion, Douglas Tallack, for his criticism and subsequent advice.
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Extract

When the “hard-boiled” private eye of American detective fiction hit the streets in the late 1920s it was not altogether surprising that he should take his complicated path down Californian streets. Not because they were notably meaner than those of big-city crime in New York or Chicago but rather because his essentially private quest for the unravelling of an individual's tortuous truth would find more quarry in the Southern Californian mixingbowl. Each fresh start or re-made life came trailing the spoor of the past. The private eye became expert at detecting the tarnished metal beneath the glittering paint, at offering a wry sympathy to those cheated at the edge of the last frontier. However this “new” society was no more detached from a past that shaped its public form than were its denizens free to make themselves anew. In the hands of one or two writers the mystery was then deepened in ways that replaced the discovery of facts by the probing of relationships between the fixed individual and his forming society. The private eye then required a writer with a public gaze to give him vision.

In 1888 an Irish-American boy of Quaker parentage was born in Chicago. After boyhood summers in sleepy Plattsmouth, Nebraska, and the tortured adolescence of a public-school education in Edwardian England the twentyfour-year-old Raymond Chandler, trekking slowly through the Mid-West, arrived in Los Angeles.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , December 1980 , pp. 423 - 441
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980

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References

1 The standard biography is MacShane, Frank, The Life of Raymond Chandler (London: Cape, 1976)Google Scholar.

2 Gardiner, Dorothy and Walker, Kathrine Sorley (eds.), Raymond Chandler Speaking (London: New English Library Ltd., 1966), p. 211Google Scholar.

3 McWilliams, Carey, Southern California Country (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1946), pp. 342–43Google Scholar.

4 For Chandler's life consult MacShane, and Durham, Philip, Down These Mean Streets a Man Must Go (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963)Google Scholar. There are innumerable histories of Los Angeles: amongst the most useful are Bowman, Lynn, Los Angeles: Epic of a City (Berkeley: Howell North, 1974)Google Scholar and the collection of extracts assembled by John, and Caughey, LaRee in Los Angeles, Biography of a City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977)Google Scholar.

5 McWilliams, p. 179.

6 The Big Sleep (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971), p. 63Google Scholar; Farewell, My Lovely (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971), p. 99Google Scholar; The High Window (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963), pp. 12, 169, 219Google Scholar. Reyner Banham, commenting on the “sun-change” that transformed “Mid-Western agrarian culture,” would later describe Los Angeles as “the Middle West raised to flashpoint… a cultural situation where only the extreme is normal.” Banham, Reyner, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 25Google Scholar.

7 Farewell, My Lovely, p. 143.

8 Raban, Jonathan, The Society of the Poem (London: Harrap, 1971)Google Scholar, calls it a “tight-lipped circumlocation,” (p. 168), and Peter Conrad, in his suggestive review article “The Private Dick as Dandy,” Times Literary Supplement, 20 Jan. 1978, sees Chandler turning “slang into a poetic diction… whose principle is circumlocutory.”

9 Farewell, My Lovely, p. 7; The Long Goodbye (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971), pp. 191–92Google Scholar.

10 McWilliams, pp. 9–13, 106–9, 193–98; Mayo, Morrow, “The Rape of Owens Valley,” in his Los Angeles (New York: Knopf, 1933)Google Scholar; Caughey, pp. 222–31. In California: The Great Exception (New York: Current Books, 1949)Google Scholar, Carey McWilliams described the Owens Valley episode as Los Angeles' “first imperialist conquest” in its “Water Imperialism,” pp. 297–301.

11 Farewell, My Lovely, p. 150.

12 The Big Sleep, pp. 9, 25–26. On the oil and real-estate boom consult especially Bowman, passim.

13 Farewell, My Lovely, pp. 35–36.

14 Durham, pp. 106–29, has laid bare Chandler's cannibalization of his 1930s stories for his 1940s novels.

15 The High Window, p. 60.

16 McWilliams, , Southern California Country, pp. 292–93Google Scholar.

17 The Long Goodbye, pp. 197–98.

18 Ibid., pp. 210–11.

19 The Big Sleep, p. 25.

20 The Lady in the Lake (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966), p. 18Google Scholar.

21 The Long Goodbye, p. 59.

22 McWilliams, , Southern California Country, pp. 377–78Google Scholar.

23 McWilliams, , California: The Great Exception, p. 4Google Scholar.

24 The Little Sister (London: Pan Books, 1979), pp. 7, 61–63, 140, 191Google Scholar.

25 In this sense it is quite accurate for Humphrey Bogart to be transmuted, as himself, into a heroic fictional character in Bergman, Andrew's Hollywood and LeVine (London: Arrow Books, 1977)Google Scholar, set in 1947, and into a private eye, Bogart look-alike, one Sam Marlow, in Fenady, Andrew J.'s affectionate spoof set in contemporary Los Angeles, The Man with Bogart's Face (New York: Avon Books, 1978)Google Scholar. Ross MacDonald's private eye, Lew Archer, who has spanned the late 1940s to the early 1980s, is Philip Marlowe's most natural heir but Robert B. Parker's Bostonian, beer-drinking jogger, though firmly of the 1970s, is, even down to the chivalric connotations of his name, Spenser, and his girl-friend Brenda (not Linda) Loring, Marlowe's most self-consciously romantic heir.

26 The Long Goodbye, p. 320.

27 Most notably by Mason, Michael, “Marlowe, Men and Women,” in Gross, Miriam (ed.), The World of Raymond Chandler (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977), pp. 90–101Google Scholar.

28 The Big Sleep, pp. 66, 156.

29 “The Simple Art of Murder” in Pearls are a Nuisance (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), pp. 181–99Google Scholar.

30 The Long Goodbye, p. 116.

31 Durham, pp. 5–6.

32 “The Simple Art of Murder,” pp. 197–98.

33 Jacques Barzun, “The Illusion of the Real” in Gross, pp. 160–70.

34 Eric Homberger noted Chandler's “cultural ambivalence” appearing in the novels as “self-consciousness and irony” in his incisive essay “The Man of Letters (1908–12)” in Gross, pp. 8–18.

35 The instant affection between Marlowe and the “inconspicuous” Moose Malloy in Farewell, My Lovely has been seen as that of one who knows he is “outside” for another who is “dressed like a parody of a romantic dandy.” Cawelti, John G.Adventure, Mystery and Romance (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 180Google Scholar.

36 Raymond Chandler Speaking, pp. 199–200.

37 The Big Sleep, p. 197.

38 Farewell, My Lovely, p. 201.

39 The High Window, pp. 112–13.

40 Henderson, Harry, Versions of the Past: The Historical Imagination in American Fiction (London: O.U.P., 1974), pp. 262–63Google Scholar.

41 The detective leaves Chicago during the Century of Progress Exposition. Durham, p. 24. Cawelti noted that, in contrast to Hammett, Chandler saw “the corruption and violence of the modern city, not as an inescapable human condition, but as the result of American materialism and greed,” but he still limits Chandler's subsequent critique of “this corrupt society” to a dramatisation of “the limitations of social institutions,” whereas, in my view, it is the manipulation of “social institutions” which Chandler demonstrates. See Cawelti, pp. 176, 180.

42 Raymond Chandler Speaking, p. 193.

43 The Long Goodbye, p. 25.

44 The Big Sleep, p. 30.

45 The High Window, pp. 5, 7, 34.

46 The Long Goodbye, p. 250.

47 Farewell, My Lovely, p. 26.

48 The Big Sleep, pp. 35, 39–40.

49 Farewell, My Lovely, pp. 45–46.

50 Ibid., p. 89.

51 The High Window, pp. 114–15, 118.

52 The Long Goodbye, p. 145.

53 The Big Sleep, p. 80.

54 The High Window, p. 125.

55 “The Simple Art of Murder,” p. 195.

56 Raymond Chandler Speaking, p. 215.

57 The Big Sleep, p. 197.

58 Farewell, My Lovely, pp. 81, 159, 164, 189, 190, 201, 220.

59 The Lady in the Lake, pp. 30, 133, 138, 158–60, 166.

60 The Little Sister, pp. 130, 162.

61 The Long Goodbye, pp. 234–35, 298.

62 Farewell, My Lovely, p. 219.

63 The Long Goodbye, p. 237.

64 Pearls are a Nuisance, p. 7.

65 “The Poodle Springs Story” (1959), in Raymond Chandler Speaking, p. 239Google Scholar.