THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 22, 1995 TAG: 9510210495
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: Medium: 88 lines
Raymond Thornton Chandler was a difficult, cranky man who wrote like a brooding saint.
He began contributing hard-boiled detective stories like ``Blackmailers Don't Shoot'' to the pulp magazines of the '30s, graduated to novels like The Big Sleep that crackled on the page and earned two Academy Award nominations for his collaborative screenplays, ``Double Indemnity'' and ``The Blue Dahlia.''
Chandler (1888-1959), along with Dashiell Hammett and Ross Macdonald, is credited with elevating private eyewash to an American art form.
I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a house in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.
Now the Library of America, a nonprofit publisher ``dedicated to preserving the works of America's greatest writers,'' acknowledges the pulpmeister's stature with two crisply edited volumes - Chandler: Stories and Early Novels (1,199 pp., $35) and Chandler: Later Novels and Other Writings (1,076 pp., $35).
That puts him, deservedly, up there with the likes of Cooper, Faulkner, Melville and Twain, previously published in the same series. Like the others, Chandler was working seriously in what he conceived to be the American voice.
He was Henry James with a libido and a bottle.
He whirled at me. Perhaps it would have been nice to allow him another shot or two, just like a gentleman of the old school. But his gun was still up and I couldn't wait any longer.
I shot him four times. . . .
This is terrific reading for a rainy night or any night.
The notes for these volumes were carefully and usefully provided by Chandler scholar Frank McShane, who has since unfortunately been stricken with Alzheimer's disease.
The character Chandler wrote about, Philip Marlowe in various incarnations, was a poor man with educated sensibilities. His story was about a poor man's resistance to the corruptive influences of the powerful rich. He was the urban version of the western working man who had come before him in popular fiction - always a loner, inclined to settle violent situations violently, tough enough for a tough world but representative of a better one.
In life, Chandler, whose father was an alcoholic, acquired a classical education in England. He served in World War I (``Once you have had to lead a platoon into direct machine-gun fire, nothing is ever the same again). He worked for a Los Angeles bank and then an oil company, losing his executive position to alcoholism. Shortly after the death of his mother, he married someone very like her, 18 years his senior.
Chandler wrote and drank. He was better when he wrote. In 1955, he attempted suicide with a revolver in the bathroom of his La Jolla home; he missed.
Chandler scorned what he called ``cheap gun-in-the-kidney melodramas,'' but he might fairly be accused of writing expensive ones. For all the pretense of realism, Chandler's fictional world was a romantic one after all, although the knight wore a powder-blue suit instead of armor and the damsel in distress had an angle instead of an itch. It was the richness of the prose that made the stories compelling, plus the expression of hope that was the hero, despite his sordid surroundings:
But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.
Such has been Chandler's influence that many have marched in Marlowe's asphalt footsteps, and not all of them men. One of his most able female heirs is Marcia Muller, whose Sharon McCone has been stalking her share of sidewalks and sidewinders since 1977. McCone appears in ``Deceptions,'' a tense after-hours trip to the Golden Gate Bridge in a nifty new collection, San Francisco Thrillers: True Crimes and Dark Mysteries from the City by the Bay (Chronicle Books, 252 pp., $14.95), edited by John Miller and Tim Smith.
It's another ripping night read, complete with an entry by Hammett (``Fly Paper'') and suitably foggy vintage photos by Francis Bruguiere.
But for a satisfyingly full dose of Muller, acquire a copy of The McCone Files (Crippen & Landru, 248 pp., $15). The slickly produced, express-paced collection of short stories served up by the stylish Norfolk publisher has nearly sold out its first printing, but a second printing impends. Call 623-3453 for purchasing information. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
With hard-boiled detective stories, Raymond Chandler helped elevate
the private-eye genre to an American art form.
by CNB