Hard-boiled detective fiction--in unique writing style of Raymond Chandler

  Acknowledging a debt to Dashiell Hammett, Chandler further developed the American style detective story, known as the hard-boiled school. Both men probably owe a dept to Earnest Hemingway for style and realism. Chandler, like Hammett was published originally in the “pulp” magazines of the of the 1920's and 1930's. With his first story, “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot”   published in Black Mask magazine in 1939.

 I believe I first knew his character, Phillip Marlowe, like Hammett’s, Sam Spade, on the radio, Marlowe was played by Van Heflin in 1947 and Gerald Mohr in 1948. In movies, both Hammett’s Sam Spade and Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe were played by Humphrey Bogart. Marlowe has also been played by Robert Montgomery and Dick Powell. Probably the most unusual casting was James Garner in the 1969 film “Marlowe” It was an amusing film but Garner was rather miscast as the hard-boiled detective.

Chandler, in addition to writing mystery stories, worked for a time as a scriptwriter in Hollywood and wrote literary criticism of the detective and mystery genre. He also wrote about Hollywood rather critically.

His critical writings were somewhat a defense of the American detective story as opposed to the classic mysteries being written by English writers such as Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie. To a large extent, I think, it was something of the long running conflict between Romanticism and Realism, reminiscent of Mark Twain’s criticism of James Fenimore Cooper. His essay “The Simple Art of Murder” has become a standard reference on the mystery story.

Born in Chicago in 1888 Chandler moved with his mother at the age of 12 to the United Kingdom. His father had abandoned the family. His uncle, a successful lawyer, supported them. For a short time he went to a local school in Upper Norwood but then went to Dulwich College, London, which was the school that taught P.G. Wodehouse and C.S Forester. I once read that due to his living in both England and America  his writing style   seemed to combine the British and American.


He did not go to the University but spent time in Paris and Munich. In 1907 he became a naturalized British subject in order to take the Civil Service exam. He took an Admiralty job which he held for about a year and published his first poem during this period.

Disliking civil service he took a job as a reporter for the Daily Express and the Bristol Western Gazette. However, He didn’t do well in journalism but published reviews and wrote romantic poetry. Returning to America  in 1913 he settled in Los Angeles with his mother. He did odd jobs and then took a correspondence course in bookkeeping at which he found steady employment.

 He entered World War I by enlisting in the Canadian Expeditionary Force and saw combat with the Gordon Highlanders. At the end of the war he was taking flight training with the Royal Air Force. Again he returned to Los Angeles and had a love affair with Cissy Pascal who was married and 18 years older than he was. She divorced her husband but Chandlers’s mother refused to sanction the marriage. After his mother died, he married Cissy in 1924. In 1954 Cissy died. He had a tendency to clinical depression and it worsened after her death. He returned to drinking and his writing suffered. In 1955 he attempted suicide.

He returned to Los Angeles after the war. In 1932 he became a vice-president of the Dabney oil Syndicate. However, after a year he was fired due to alcoholism, absenteeism and threats of suicide.

Critically he was not always received well in his own time. However, he has been admired by such writers as Evelyn Waugh and Ian Fleming. Although much of his prose was inspired by Hammett, he had sharp and lyrical similes of his own.

His stories capture the feel of Los Angeles in the 1930's and 1940's. He gave fictional names to real places, such as Bay City for Santa Monica.

 In 1959 Chandler died in La Jolla at the Scripps Memorial Hospital.