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The life of Raymond Chandler has long been obscured by secrets and half-truths as deceptive as anything in his novel The Long Goodbye. Now, drawing on new interviews, previously unpublished letters, and archives on both sides of the Atlantic, Tom Williams casts a new light on this most mysterious of writers. The Raymond Chandler revealed is a man troubled by loneliness and desertion from an early age. Born in Chicago in 1888, his childhood was overshadowed by the collapse of his parents' marriage, his father's alcohol-fuelled violence eventually forcing the boy and his doting mother to leave for Ireland and later London. But class-bound England proved stifling, and Chandler, in his twenties and eager to forge a new life, returned to the United States where—in corruption-ridden Los Angeles—he met his one great love, Cissy Pascal, a married woman eighteen years his senior. It was only during middle age, after his alcoholism wrecked a lucrative career as an oilman, that Chandler seriously turned to crime fiction. And his legacy—the lonely, ambiguous world of Philip Marlowe—endures, compelling generations of crime writers to follow him. In this long-awaited new biography, Tom Williams shadows one of the true literary giants of the twentieth century and considers how crime writing was raised to the level of art.
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Raymond Chandler is an uncensored look at the tortured man who wrote the classic mystery novels The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye. Using recently uncovered archival materials including personal papers and correspondence, biographer Thomas Hiney vividly evokes Chandler's early years in Nebraska, his education in England and on the corrupt streets of Los Angeles, and his later years as a novelist and screenwriter in the heyday of the Hollywood studio system. Along the way, he provides illuminating insights into the writer's inspirations and work - as well as accounts of Chandler's battles with alcohol addiction and his friendships with Howard Hawks, "Lucky" Luciano, S. J. Perelman, and Alfred Hitchcock. This book is also the first to fully detail the significance and complexities of his thirty-year marriage to Cissy, a woman seventeen years his senior. Raymond Chandler is personal portrait of an author as extraordinary as the fiction he created - a body of work that has sold more than five million copies, been translated into twenty-five languages, and inspired countless imitators. "A discerning portrait of the creator of Philip Marlowe, the archetypal American private eye." - Newsweek
The World of Raymond Chandler shows how Chandler precariously balanced the values of a classical English education against those of a fast-evolving America during the years before the Great War; how he adopted Los Angeles as his home after WWI, with Hollywood in turn adopting him (and adapting his works); how his detective hero and alter ego Philip Marlowe evolved over the years; and, above all, what it is to be a writer, and in particular one writing in the “other language” of hardboiled fiction. Acclaimed biographer and historian Barry Day deftly interweaves images and text, using quotations from Chandler’s novels, short stories, letters, and interviews, to craft a unique portrait of the mystery writer’s life and times.
Raymond Chandler was among the most original and enduring crime novelists of the twentieth century. Yet much of his pre-writing life, including his unconventional marriage, has remained shrouded in mystery. In this compelling, wholly original book, Judith Freeman sets out to solve the puzzle of who Chandler was and how he became the writer who would create in Philip Marlowe an icon of American culture. Visiting Chandler's many homes and apartments, Freeman uncovers vestiges of the Los Angeles that was Chandler's terrain and inspiration for his imagination. She also uncovers the life of Cissy Pascal, the older, twice-divorced woman Chandler married in 1924. A revelation of a marriage that was a wellspring of need, illusion, and creativity, The Long Embrace provides us with a more complete picture of Raymond Chandler's life and art than any we have had before.
DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Big Sleep" by Raymond Chandler. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.
The master of literary theory takes on the master of the detective novel Raymond Chandler, a dazzling stylist and portrayer of American life, holds a unique place in literary history, straddling both pulp fiction and modernism. With The Big Sleep, published in 1939, he left an indelible imprint on the detective novel. Fredric Jameson offers an interpretation of Chandler’s work that reconstructs both the context in which it was written and the social world or totality it projects. Chandler’s invariable setting, Los Angeles, appears both as a microcosm of the United States and a prefiguration of its future: a megalopolis uniquely distributed by an unpromising nature into a variety of distinct neighborhoods and private worlds. But this essentially urban and spatial work seems also to be drawn towards a vacuum, an absence that is nothing other than death. With Chandler, the thriller genre becomes metaphysical.
I don't know why the hell I write so many letters, Raymond Chandler once mused to a correspondent. "I guess my mind is just to active for its own good." In the seven novels from The Big Sleep (1939) to Playback (1958) and in a handful of short stories, Raymond Chandler recorded a vision of Southern California life sparked by acerbic observations on every level of coast society, from drug dealers and crooked cops to heiresses. But Chandler's gifts of observation and analysis extended well past the streets, alleyways, roadhouses, and stately homes that made up the world of his detective-hero Phillip Marlowe. Brought together in this volume are some of the hundreds of letters Chandler wrote-many of them composed during long, insomniac nights. Chandler commented on all that he saw around him, from his own personal foibles, to the works of his contemporaries Ernest Hemingway and Edmund Wilson, to education, English society, and world events. Acute, sometimes impassioned, often witty, the Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler contains lively anecdotes of Hollywood, critical dissections of his fellow writers of detective fiction, lengthy discussions of the art of writing and of his own fiction, and, above all, amused, sometimes outraged glimpses of the Southern California society that was his inspiration. Chandler once wrote that "in letters I sometimes seem to have been more penetrating than in any other kind of writing." But his letters could also be combative, as when he wrote to an editor at the Atlantic that "when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I intend that it should stay split," or dismissive, as when he said of James M. Cain that "everything he writes smells like a billy goat." He could also be painfully revealing, as when he wrote of his despair over the death of his wife. "It was my great and now useless regret," Chandler confessed, "that I never wrote anything really worthy her attention, no book that I could dedicate to her." Lively, entertaining, and sometimes touching, these letters fully present for the first time the complex sensibilities of a man who was one of America's greatest writers of detective novels, and one of its most astute observers.
Philip Marlowe is the quintessential American detective. His effortless masculinity, smouldering sexuality and silver tongue remain the embodiment of cool. He likes booze, women, and working alone - portrayed on film by the rougher, tougher stars of Hollywood, Robert Mitchum and Humphrey Bogart - but, in a world defined by betrayal, mistrust, and double-dealing, Marlowe's rough exterior belies an unshakeable code of honour. Taken together, his observations and witticisms represent some of the most scathing and brilliant writing in crime fiction, and coalesce into a wonderfully alluring worldview, a vision of unswerving righteousness, accountability, and stylish conduct in a sea of turpitude and injustice.
Selected letters and nonfiction of one of America’s most beloved writers “reveals the occasionally softer side of the man behind the hard-boiled mysteries” (Library Journal). The Raymond Chandler Papers brings together the correspondence and other previously uncollected writing of America’s undisputed master of crime fiction and creator of the iconic private eye Philip Marlowe, revealing all aspects of the great artist’s powerful personality and broad intellectual curiosity. Featuring a selection of Chandler’s previously unpublished early writings—including a gripping piece about his combat experiences in World War I—and an abandoned profile of the infamous mobster “Lucky” Luciano, The Raymond Chandler Papers is a must-have for all true fans and an important contribution toward understanding the life and work of the enigmatic man Evelyn Waugh called “the greatest living American novelist.” “Since this is Chandler’s writing, quotable, funny, even hilarious comments appear on every page.” —Publishers Weekly