Raymond Chandler: A Biography
By Tom Hiney
Chatto & Windus, 1997. 310 pp., $39.95 (hb)
Review by Phil Shannon
The New York Times called him "a hater of the human race". Respectable book reviewers wrote him off as a lowbrow writer of pulp fiction, and Hollywood censors waged war against his screenplays, which represented "everything they were protecting America against". But quite a few millions of the human race took to Raymond Chandler's novels, and his private detective hero Philip Marlowe, with a love and devotion that would make a Maharishi weep.
Marlowe, the hard and cynical yet soft-centred and idealistic private eye, met a need for a modern hero amongst the citizens of a society ruled by the dollar, the bribe and other privileges of wealth.
Tom Hiney's biography of Chandler investigates what lay behind the wise-cracking gumshoe, the investigative knight in muddied and brittle armour.
Chandler, born in the US in 1888, whetted his literary appetite in London and returned to oil-boom Los Angeles in the '20s and a job as an oil company executive. There he discovered the corrupt mayors, district attorneys and cops, hand-in-till with the prostitution, gambling and bootlegging racketeers, who were to be the raw material for his novels.
Chandler was fascinated by the power of "legitimate" big business, often as crooked as its seedy cousins in the gin joints, gambling dens and brothels but "safe from prosecution or inspection". The only difference between middling street crime and big business in LA, says Marlowe, is that "for business you gotta have capital. Sometimes I think it's the only difference."
Chandler turned to writing for a living, producing the "tough, hard-boiled pulp fiction" that was sweeping the '30s. Breaking from the genteel, "join the dots" Agatha Christie tradition of detective fiction, Chandler also stood out with a talent above the ordinary run of pulp fiction.
With a skill for original wordplay and dialogue, Chandler reduced the importance of plot to concentrate on atmosphere and character, especially in his novels (he wrote seven from 1939 until his death in 1959).
Plot was often as immaterial to Chandler as to a Marx Brothers film. When stuck, he would often have a character come in with a gun in his or her hand and see where it took him.
Philip Marlowe spoke for and to the common citizen who felt powerless against the dollar and its "law and order" protectors. The citizens' mood of social alienation also beset Marlowe "in a lonely street, in lonely rooms, puzzled but never quite defeated".
He refused to give in, giving such values as honour, decency, integrity and sensitivity a workout, defending the weak, bad-mouthing wealth and power and, sometimes, winning a small piece of justice.
Marlowe was not infallible, unlike his contemporary fictional detective Perry Mason, and he may have been a "second-rate shoofly with a lousy office in a crummy part of town", but this made him even more easy to identify with.
As Chandler found wealth through Hollywood (particularly through The Big Sleep in 1946, which starred Bogart and Bacall), he started to drift politically.
He still detested the ostentatious rich, criticising the tennis set in his exclusive suburb who "wore suntans in order to show that they did not have to work for a living", but he failed to oppose McCarthyism. He had "no sympathy" for his fellow screenwriters, the Hollywood Ten, who were blacklisted, even though he reserved his "real contempt" for the motion picture moguls.
Chandler's last years (which rather dominate Hiney's biography) were marked by alcoholic dementia and the restless and sad pursuit of a female partner after his wife of 30 years died.
The Marlowe of the last novels, too, declines, becoming more cynical and more prone to the bottle, as the novels become stylistically more clichéd and the humour more bitter.
Chandler's novels have staying power, however, although they haven't aged well in all respects. Hiney defends the accusations that Marlowe/Chandler was a homophobe, an anti-Semite, a racist and a misogynist.
Whilst it is true that the language used by Chandler's characters owes a duty to realism (that is how most people spoke in Chandler's LA), it is still necessary to read Chandler with one eye closed, for rarely does he challenge the stereotypes in his character portrayal. Chandler refused to join his local tennis club because it refused to admit Jews, but the Marlowe novels, for all their positives, must be acknowledged as flawed by their times.
Chandler was never a socialist ("Marlowe has the social conscience of a horse" was his put-down of those who started talking about Marlowe and Marx in the same breath). Ernest Mandel is right to argue that Marlowe is the quintessential liberal petty bourgeois whose battle against small-time corruption and injustice is an individualist one and not part of a collective.
Marlowe, however, still has a role in a world that hasn't passed away, a world where "the law is something to be manipulated for profit and power" and "where the streets are dark with something more than night", where you "cannot convict a million dollars", where "a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket", where newspaper owners suppress embarrassing stories, where poverty exists side by side with mansions. All quite contemporary.
Perhaps, too, most of us are just suckers for an ordinary joe with a bit of lip, and a heart as big and good and soft as a watermelon, who can say "I'm a romantic. I hear voices crying in the night and I go see what's the matter."
"You don't make a dime that way", he adds, but there's more to life than making a buck from human misery, and Philip Marlowe and Raymond Chandler were on the right side of this equation.