Quantcast
Channel: BIOGRAPHIES
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 138
↧

Raymond Chandler

November 11, 2012, 10:00 pm
$
0
0




Raymond Chandler

(1888 - 1959)
NAME: Raymond Chandler
PLACE OF BIRTH: Chicago, Illinois
PLACE OF DEATH: La Jolla, California
OCCUPATION: Entrepreneur, Author, Screenwriter
BIRTH DATE:  July 23, 1888
DEATH DATE: March 26, 1959
EDUCATION: Dulwich Collage




PROFILE


Detective fiction writer Raymond Chandler made great contributions to both crime fiction drama and film noir cinema. He created the well-known private detective Philip Marlowe, played by Humphrey Bogart on screen. He adapted the screenplays for Double Indemnityand Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train. His only original screenplay was for The Blue Dahlia which was nominated for an Academy Award.




BIOGRAPHY
Raymond Thornton Chandler (July 23, 1888 – March 26, 1959) was an American novelist and screenwriter.

In 1932, at age forty-four, Raymond Chandler decided to become a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published just seven full novels during his lifetime (though an eighth in progress at his death was completed by Robert B. Parker). All but Playbck have been realized into motion pictures, some several times. In the year before he died, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America. He died on March 26, 1959, in La Jolla, California.

Chandler had an immense stylistic influence on American popular literature, and is considered by many to be a founder, along with Dashiel Hammett, James M. Cain and other Black Mask writers, of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction. His protagonist Philip Marlowe, along with Hammett's Sam Spade, is considered by some to be synonymous with "private detective," both having been played on screen by Humphrey Bogart, whom many considered to be the quintessential Marlowe.

Some of Chandler's novels are considered to be important literary works, and three are often considered to be masterpieces: Farewell, My Lovelly (1940), The Little Sister (1949), and  The Long Goodbye (1953). The Long Goodbye is praised within an anthology of American crime stories as "arguably the first book since Hammett's The Glass Key, published more than twenty years earlier, to qualify as a serious and significant mainstream novel that just happened to possess elements of mystery".



Early life

Chandler was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1888, but spent his early years in Plattsmounth, Nebraska, living with his mother and father near his cousins, aunt (mother's sister) and uncle. After Chandler's family was abandoned by his father, an alcoholic civil engineer who worked for the railway, and to obtain the best possible education for Ray, his mother moved them to London, England in 1900. Another uncle, a successful Quaker lawyer in  Waterford, Ireland, supported them, while they lived with his maternal grandmother. Chandler was classically educated at Dulwich College, London (a public school) whose alumni include the authors  P. G. Wodehouse[and  C. S. Forester). He spent some of his childhood summers in Waterford with his maternal family. He did not go to college, instead spending time in Paris and Munich improving his foreign language skills. In 1907, he was naturalized as a British subject in order to take the civil service examination, which he passed, and then took an Admiralty job, lasting just over a year. His first poem was published during that time. Chandler regained his US citizenship in 1956.
Chandler disliked the servility of the civil service and resigned, to the consternation of his family, and became a reporter for the Daily Express and the Bristol Western Gazette newspapers. He was an unsuccessful journalist, published reviews and continued writing romantic poetry. Accounting for that time he said, "Of course in those days as now there were … clever young men who made a decent living as freelances for the numerous literary weeklies" but "I was distinctly not a clever young man. Nor was I at all a happy young man."

In 1912, he borrowed money from his Waterford uncle, who expected it to be repaid with interest, and returned to America, visiting his aunt and uncle before settling in San Francisco for a time, where he took a correspondence bookkeeping course, finishing ahead of schedule, and where his mother joined him in late 1912. Eventually they moved to Los Angeles in 1913. Along the way he strung tennis rackets, picked fruit and endured a time of scrimping and saving. Once in Los Angeles he found steady employment with The Los Angeles Creamery, both in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. In 1917, when the US entered World War I, he enlisted in the  Canadian Expeditionary Force, saw combat in the trenches in France with the  Gordon Highlanders, and was undergoing flight training in the fledgling Royal Air Force (RAF) when the war ended.

After the armistice, he returned to Los Angeles by way of Canada, and soon began a love affair with Cissy Pascal, a married woman 18 years his senior, and the step-mother of Gordon Pascal, with whom Chandler had enlisted. Cissy amicably divorced her husband Julian in 1920, but Chandler's mother disapproved of the relationship and refused to sanction the marriage. For four years Chandler supported both his mother and Cissy. When Florence Chandler died on September 26, 1923, Raymond was free to marry Cissy, and did so on February 6, 1924. Having started in 1922 as a bookkeeper and auditor, Chandler was by 1931 a highly paid vice-president of the Dabney Oil Syndicate but a year later, his alcoholism, absenteeism, promiscuity with female employees and threatened suicides contributed to his being fired.


Life as a writer
Due to his meager financial circumstances during the Depression, Chandler turned to his latent writing talent to earn a living, teaching himself to write pulp fiction by studying the Perry Masonstory formula of Erle Stanley Gardner. Chandler's first professional work, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in Black Mask magazine in 1933; his first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939, featuring his famous Philip Marlowe detective character speaking in the first person.

In 1950, Chandler described in a letter to his English publisher, Hamish Hamilton, why he began reading pulp magazines and later wrote for them:

Wandering up and down the Pacific Coast in an automobile I began to read pulp magazines, because they were cheap enough to throw away and because I never had at any time any taste for the kind of thing which is known as women's magazines. This was in the great days of the Black Mask (if I may call them great days) and it struck me that some of the writing was pretty forceful and honest, even though it had its crude aspect. I decided that this might be a good way to try to learn to write fiction and get paid a small amount of money at the same time. I spent five months over an 18,000 word novelette and sold it for $180. After that I never looked back, although I had a good many uneasy periods looking forward.
His second Marlowe novel, Farewell, My Lovely (1940), became the basis for three movie versions adapted by other screenwriters, including 1944's Murder My Sweet (which marked the screen debut of the Marlowe character), starring Dick Powell (whose depiction of Marlowe Chandler reportedly applauded). Literary success and film adaptations led to a demand for Chandler himself as a screenwriter. He and Billy Wilder co-wrote Double Indemnity (1944), based on James M. Cain's novel of the same name. The noir screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award.
Chandler's only produced original screenplay was The Blue Dahlia (1946). Chandler had not written a denouement for the script, and according to producer John Houseman, Chandler agreed to complete the script only if drunk, which Houseman agreed to. The script gained Chandler's second Academy Award nomination for screenplay.
Chandler collaborated on the screenplay of Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951), an ironic fantasy murder story based on Patricia Highsmith's novel, which he thought implausible. Chandler clashed with Hitchcock to such an extent that they stopped talking, especially after Hitchcock heard that Chandler had referred to him as "that fat bastard." Hitchcock reportedly made a show of throwing Chandler's two draft screenplays into the studio trash can while holding his nose; however, Chandler's name retains the lead screenwriting credit along with Czenzi Ormonde.
In 1946 the Chandlers moved to La Jolla, California, an affluent coastal neighborhood of San Diego, where Chandler wrote the final two Philip Marlowe novels, The Long Goodbye and his last completed work, Playback. The latter was derived from an unproduced courtroom drama screenplay he had written for Universal Studios.
Four chapters of a novel, unfinished at his death, were transformed into a final "Chandler" Philip Marlowe book, Poodle Springs, by mystery writer and Chandler admirer Robert B. Parker, author of the "Spenser" series, in 1989. Parker shares the authorship with Chandler, and subsequently wrote his own Marlowe sequel to The Big Sleep entitled Perchance to Dream, which was salted with quotes from the original novel.
Chandler's final Marlowe short story, circa 1957, was entitled "The Pencil." It later provided the basis of an episode for an HBO mini-series (1983–86) entitled Philip Marlowe, Private Detective and starring Powers Boothe as Marlowe.

Later life and death


In 1954 Pearl Eugenie (Cissy) Chandler died after a long illness. Heartbroken and drunk, Chandler neglected to inter Cissy's cremated remains, and they sat for 57 years in a storage locker in the basement of Cypress View Mausoleum.

After Cissy's death, Chandler's loneliness worsened his propensity for clinical depression; he returned to drink, never quitting it for long, and the quality and quantity of his writing suffered. In 1955, he attempted suicide; literary scholars documented that suicide attempt. In The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved, Judith Freeman says it was "a cry for help," given that he called the police beforehand, saying he planned to kill himself. Chandler's personal and professional life were both helped and complicated by the women to whom he was attracted — notably Helga Greene (his literary agent); Jean Fracasse (his secretary); Sonia Orwell (George Orwell's widow); and Natasha Spender (Stephen Spender's wife), the latter two of whom assumed Chandler to be a repressed homosexual.

After a respite in England, he returned to La Jolla. He died at Scripps Memorial Hospital of pneumonial peripheral vascular shock and prerenal uremia (according to the death certificate) in 1959. Helga Greene inherited Chandler's $60,000 estate, after prevailing in a 1960 lawsuit filed by Fracasse contesting Chandler's holographic codicil to his will.
Raymond Chandler is buried at Mount Hope Cemetery, San Diego, California. As Frank MacShane noted in his biography, The Life of Raymond Chandler, Chandler wished to be cremated and placed next to Cissy in Cypress View Mausoleum. Instead, he was buried in Mount Hope Cemetery because he had left no funeral or burial instructions.
In 2010, Chandler historian Loren Latker, with the assistance of attorney Aissa Wayne (daughter of John Wayne), brought a petition to disinter Cissy's remains and reinter them with Chandler in Mount Hope. After a hearing September 2010 in San Diego Superior Court, Judge Richard S. Whitney entered an order granting Latker's request.
On Valentine's Day (February 14) 2011, Cissy's ashes were conveyed from Cypress View to Mount Hope, and interred under a new grave marker above Chandler's, as they had wished. About one hundred people attended the ceremony, which included readings by the Rev. Randal Gardner, Powers Boothe, Judith Freeman and Aissa Wayne. The shared gravestone reads "Dead men are heavier than broken hearts," a quotation from The Big Sleep. A video of the ceremony is available here. Chandler's original gravestone, placed by Jean Fracasse, is still at the head of his grave, while the new one is at the foot.

Chandler's thoughts on pulp fiction


In his introduction to Trouble Is My Business (1950), a collection of twelve of his short stories, Chandler provided insight on the formula for the detective story and how the pulp magazines differed from previous detective stories:

The emotional basis of the standard detective story was and had always been that murder will out and justice will be done. Its technical basis was the relative insignificance of everything except the final denouement. What led up to that was more or less passage work. The denouement would justify everything. The technical basis of the Black Mask type of story on the other hand was that the scene outranked the plot, in the sense that a good plot was one which made good scenes. The ideal mystery was one you would read if the end was missing. We who tried to write it had the same point of view as the film makers. When I first went to Hollywood a very intelligent producer told me that you couldn't make a successful motion picture from a mystery story, because the whole point was a disclosure that took a few seconds of screen time while the audience was reaching for its hat. He was wrong, but only because he was thinking of the wrong kind of mystery.

Chandler also described the struggle that the writers of pulp fiction had in following the formula demanded by the editors of the pulp magazines:
As I look back on my stories it would be absurd if I did not wish they had been better. But if they had been much better they would not have been published. If the formula had been a little less rigid, more of the writing of that time might have survived. Some of us tried pretty hard to break out of the formula, but we usually got caught and sent back. To exceed the limits of a formula without destroying it is the dream of every magazine writer who is not a hopeless hack.

Critical reception


Critics and writers from W. H. Auden to Evelyn Waugh to Ian Fleming greatly admired Chandler's prose.  In a radio discussion with Chandler, Fleming said that Chandler offered “some of the finest dialogue written in any prose today.” Although his swift-moving, hardboiled style was inspired mostly by Dashiell Hammett, his sharp and lyrical similes are original: "The muzzle of theLuger looked like the mouth of the Second Street tunnel"; "He had a heart as big as one of Mae West's hips"; "Dead men are heavier than broken hearts"; "I went back to the seasteps and moved down them as cautiously as a cat on a wet floor." Chandler's writing redefined the private eye fiction genre, led to the coining of the adjective "Chandleresque," and inevitably became the subject of parody and pastiche. Yet the detective Philip Marlowe is not a stereotypical tough guy, but a complex, sometimes sentimental man with few friends who attended university, who speaks some Spanish and sometimes admires Mexicans, and who is a student of chess and classical music. He will refuse a prospective client’s money if he is ethically unsatisfied with a job.


The high regard in which Chandler is generally held today is in contrast to the critical sniping that stung the author during his lifetime. In a March 1942 letter to Blanche Knopf, published inSelected Letters of Raymond Chandler, Chandler complained, "The thing that rather gets me down is that when I write something that is tough and fast and full of mayhem and murder, I get panned for being tough and fast and full of mayhem and murder, and then when I try to tone down a bit and develop the mental and emotional side of a situation, I get panned for leaving out what I was panned for putting in the first time."

Although his work enjoys general acclaim today, Chandler has been criticized for certain aspects of his work; in an interview, Washington Post reviewer Patrick Anderson described his plots as "rambling at best and incoherent at worst," and chastised his treatment of black, female, and homosexual characters, calling him a "rather nasty man at times." Anderson nevertheless praised Chandler as "probably the most lyrical of the major crime writers."
Chandler’s short stories and novels are evocatively written, conveying the time, place and ambiance of Los Angeles and environs in the 1930s and 1940s. The places are real, if pseudonymous: Bay City is Santa Monica, Gray Lake is Silver Lake, and Idle Valley a synthesis of rich San Fernando Valley communities.
Chandler was also a perceptive critic of pulp fiction; his essay "The Simple Art of Murder" is the standard reference work in the field.
All but one of his novels have been cinematically adapted. Arguably the most notable is The Big Sleep (1946), by Howard Hawks, with Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe. William Faulkner was a co-writer on the screenplay. Chandler's few screenwriting efforts and the cinematic adaptation of his novels proved stylistically and thematically influential upon the American film noir genre.

Praise for Chandler's work



“Chandler wrote like a slumming angel and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence.” –Ross Macdonald

“Raymond Chandler invented a new way of talking about America, and America has never looked the same to us since.” –Paul Auster
“The prose rises to heights of unselfconscious eloquence, and we realize with a jolt of excitement that we are in the presence of not a mere action-tale teller, but a stylist, a writer with a vision … The reader is captivated by Chandler’s seductive prose.” –Joyce Carol Oates, New York Review of Books
“Chandler is one of my favorite writers. His books bear rereading every few years. The novels are a perfect snapshot of an American past, and yet the ruined romanticism of the voice is as fresh as if they were written yesterday.” –Jonathan Lethem
“Chandler seems to have invented our post-war dream lives—the tough but tender hero, the dangerous blonde, the rain-washed sidewalks, and the roar of the traffic (and the ocean) in the distance … Chandler is the classic lonely romantic outsider for our times, and American literature, as well as English, would be the poorer for his absence.” –Pico Iyer


Raymond Chandler bibliography




A number of Chandler's works were adapted as full-cast dramatisations for BBC Radio 4, starring Ed Bishop as Philip Marlowe. See the individual novels' pages for more information.

Screenplays





Short stories

Typically, the short stories chronicle the cases of Philip Marlowe and other down-on-their-luck private detectives (e.g. John Dalmas, Steve Grayce) or Good Samaritans (e.g. Mr. Carmady). The exceptions are the macabre "The Bronze Door" the fantastical "Professor Bingo's Snuff" and "English Summer," a Gothic romance set in the English countryside. On several occasions, Chandler borrowed (or to use his term, cannibalized) from his pulp fiction for his novels; incidences of this borrowing are noted in the list below.


In the radio series The Adventures of Philip Marlowe, which included adaptations of the short stories, the Philip Marlowe name was replaced with the names of other detectives, e.g. Steve Grayce, in "The King in Yellow"[citation needed]. In fact, such changes restored the stories to their originally published versions. It was later, when they were republished as Philip Marlowe stories, that the Philip Marlowe name was used, with the exception being "The Pencil."
The first two named stories, featuring a detective named Mallory, are exceptions in a different way, in that these were not turned into Marlowe cases in print.

Crime short stories


  • "Blackmailers Don't Shoot" (Black Mask, December 1933; Mallory)
  • "Smart-Aleck Kill" (Black Mask, July 1934; originally Mallory, changed to John Dalmas in Simple Art of Murder)
  • "Finger Man" (Black Mask, October 1934; unnamed originally, changed to Marlowe in Simple Art of Murder)
  • "Killer in the Rain" (Black Mask, January 1935; unnamed, but several characters from the John Dalmas stories appear)
  • "Nevada Gas" (Black Mask, June 1935; Johnny DeRuse)
  • "Spanish Blood" (Black Mask, November 1935; Sam Delaguerra)
  • "Guns at Cyrano's" (Black Mask, January 1936; Ted Malvern originally, changed to Ted Carmady in Simple Art of Murder)
  • "The Man Who Liked Dogs" (Black Mask, March 1936; Ted Carmady; cannibalized for Farewell My Lovely)
  • "Noon Street Nemesis" (Detective Fiction Weekly, May 1936; Pete Anglich; title changed to "Pick Up on Noon Street" for publication in Simple Art of Murder)
  • "Goldfish" (Black Mask, June 1936; Ted Carmady originally, changed to Marlowe in Simple Art of Murder)
  • "The Curtain" (Black Mask, September 1936; Ted Carmady; cannibalized for The Big Sleep and the opening of The Long Goodbye)
  • "Try the Girl" (Black Mask, January 1937; Ted Carmady; cannibalized for Farewell, My Lovely)
  • "Mandarin's Jade" (Dime Detective, 1937; John Dalmas; cannibalized for Farewell, My Lovely)
  • "Red Wind" (Dime Detective, January 1938; John Dalmas originally, changed to Marlowe in Simple Art of Murder)
  • "The King in Yellow" (Dime Detective, March 1938; Steve Grayce)[3]
  • "Bay City Blues" (Dime Detective, June 1938; John Dalmas, cannibalized for The Lady in the Lake, The High Window, and The Little Sister)
  • "The Lady in the Lake" (Dime Detective, January 1939; John Dalmas, cannibalized for The Lady in the Lake and The High Window)
  • "Pearls Are a Nuisance" (Dime Detective, April 1939; Walter Gage)
  • "Trouble is My Business" (Dime Detective, August 1939; John Dalmas originally, changed to Marlowe in Simple Art of Murder)
  • "I'll Be Waiting" (Saturday Evening Post, October 14, 1939; Tony Reseck)
  • "No Crime in the Mountains" (Detective Story, September 1941; John Evans, cannibalized for The Lady in the Lake)
  • "Marlowe Takes on the Syndicate" (London Daily Mail, April 6–10, 1959; published posthumously; first published in the United States as "The Wrong Pigeon" in Manhunt (February 1960; also appeared as "The Pencil", Argosy, September 1965; and "Philip Marlowe's Last Case", Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, January 1962)

Non-crime/fantasy short stories

  • "The Bronze Door" (Unknown, November 1939)
  • "Professor Bingo's Snuff" (Park East, June, July, & August 1951; also appeared in Go, June, July, & August 1951; no priority established)
  • "English Summer" (Antaeus, Autumn1976; published posthumously)

"The Bronze Door" and "Professor Bingo's Snuff" feature unnatural deaths and detectives (Scotland Yard and local California police, respectively), but the emphasis is not on the investigation.

Magazine articles


  • "The Simple Art of Murder" (Atlantic Monthly, December 1944)
  • "Writers in Hollywood" (Atlantic, November 1945)
  • "Critical Notes" (Screen, July 1947)
  • "Oscar Night in Hollywood" (Atlantic, March 1948)
  • "10 Greatest Crimes of the Century" (Cosmopolitan, October 1948)
  • "The Simple Art of Murder" (Saturday Review of Literature, April 15, 1950; this is not a reprint of the 1944 Atlantic article, but rather an assessment of his early pulp stories; this article, somewhat rewritten, served as the introduction to the collection The Simple Art of Murder.
  • "Ten Percent of Your Life" (Atlantic, February 1952)
  • "The Detective Story as an Art Form" (The Crime Writer, Spring 1959)
  • "Farewell, My Hollywood" (Antaeus, Spring/Summer 1976)



Anthologies

  • 5 Murderers (Avon Book Co., 1944).
  • Five Sinister Characters (Avon Book Co., 1945).
  • Red Wind (World Publishing Co., 1946).
  • Spanish Blood (World Publishing Co., 1946).
  • The Finger Man (Avon Book Co., 1947).
  • Trouble is My Business (Penguin - London 1950); Contains 5 short stories: Trouble is My Business, Red Wind, I'll Be Waiting, Goldfish, Guns at Cyrano's
  • The Simple Art of Murder (Houghton Mifflin Co., 1950); Contains an Essay by Raymond Chandler and 8 short stories: Spanish Blood, I'll Be Waiting, The King in Yellow, Pearls are a Nuisance, Pickup on Noon Street, Smart-Alec Kill, Guns at Cyrano's, Nevada Gas (These are all of Chandler's crime stories that were not cannibalized for his novels except for Blackmailers Don't Shoot)
  • Trouble is My Business (Pocket Books N.Y. 1951); Contains 4 Philip Marlowe short stories: Trouble is My Business, Finger Man, Goldfish, Redwind
  • Killer in the Rain (Hamish Hamilton (UK), 1964); Contains 8 short stories: Killer in the Rain, The Man who Liked Dogs, The Curtain, Try the Girl, Mandarins Jade, Bay City Blues, The Lady in the Lake, No Crime in the Mountains (These are all of Chandler's crime stories that were cannibalized for his novels)
  • The Midnight(Houghton Mifflin Co., 1971) ISBN 0-395-12712-2; Introduction by Joan Kahn, contains Raymond Chandler Introduces The Simple Art of Murder, Red Wind, Trouble Is My Business, Blackmailers Don't Shoot, The Pencil, The Little Sister, and The Long Goodbye.
  • Trouble is My Business (Vintage Book N.Y. 1988) Contains 12 stories: Killer in the Rain, The Man who Liked Dogs, The Curtain, Try the Girl, Mandarins Jade, Bay City Blues, The Lady in the Lake, No Crime in the Mountains, Trouble is My Business, Finger Man, Goldfish, Redwind
  • Stories & Early Novels: Pulp Stories, The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely, The High Window (Frank MacShane, ed.) (Library of America, 1995) ISBN 978-1-883011-07-9.
  • Later Novels & Other Writings: The Lady in the Lake, The Little Sister, The Long Goodbye, Playback, Double Indemnity, Selected Essays & Letters (Frank MacShane, ed.) (Library of America, 1995) ISBN 978-1-883011-08-6.
  • Collected Stories (Everyman's Library, Knopf, 2002); the first single volume collection of all of Chandler's short stories.



Audiobook releases

Many of Raymond Chandler's works have been released as audiobooks in a variety of formats, including digital download from Audible.com and other vendors. Unless otherwise noted, all works have been released by Phoenix Books & Audio, and are read by actor Elliott Gould, who portrayed Philip Marlowe in the 1973 film adaptation of The Long Goodbye. While most have only been released as abridged versions, a few are available as complete, unabridged recordings.

Novels

  • The Big Sleep (unabridged)
  • Farewell, My Lovely (unabridged)
  • The High Window (abridged)
  • The Lady in the Lake (abridged)
  • The Little Sister (abridged)
  • The Long Goodbye (abridged)
  • Playback (unabridged & abridged versions)
  • Poodle Springs (abridged)

Short stories & collections
  • Red Wind (unabridged)
  • Trouble is My Business (unabridged)
  • Bay City Blues & No Crime in the Mountains (2 stories) (unabridged)
  • Mandarin's Jade and Other Stories (3 stories) (abridged)
  • Killer in the Rain and Other Stories (4 stories) (abridged)

Source: Wikipedia






↧
Search
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 138
Search