The Raymond Chandler Papers

by Tom Hiney

  One of the worst menaces to any real justice is the big-time newspaper columnist. They are out to create sensation at whatever cost; they care nothing about the fate of the people they attack, and still less about truth. In a way they are worse than the crooks they attack. One columnist, whose name I fortunately forget, said that a prominent film star had taken a million dollars in cash to Luciano in Cuba. This film star, whom I happen to know, has never laid eyes on Luciano, and I very much doubt that Luciano ever had a million dollars, or anything like it.

  So he came to trial before twelve good men and true, whose minds, if they could read, had already been corrupted by the press, and if they could not read, there was always radio.

  Every witness against Luciano was facing prosecution for a crime, and not for the first time. The prosecutor secluded a number of brothel madams in ‘protective custody’, ostensibly to protect them. During this seclusion they were no doubt thoroughly coached on what evidence to give and how to give it, and promised immunity if they did the job properly. Of course, there is no legal record of this. The principal witness against Luciano was a man held on a burglary charge. If convicted he would have been a fourth time loser, which in New York State would have required an automatic life sentence – a real one, not a nominal one. He would probably have testified that his own mother was a multiple poisoner, if immunity had been promised to him. He said that he had known Luciano for eight or nine years and that Luciano had recently offered him a job at $40 a week as a collector from houses of prostitution. This makes me laugh almost hysterically, but not with pleasure. If he had said $400 a week or $1,000, I might have kept a straight face. But $40 a week for that? Absurd. It gives me some slight pleasure to know that this witness later, after the prosecutor was out of office, recanted his testimony and said that he had only seen Luciano in a bar.

  A judge may be the most honorable man in the world, but he can't do more than instruct the jury to the best of his ability. If their minds have already been made up for them, he is helpless. Perhaps it may seem that in Luciano's case the sentence was rather excessive, but I am no judge of that. He got 30 to 50 years – quite a chore.

  He served ten years and then, by some rather unusual executive procedure, he was released and sent to Sing Sing to be deported. He was pardoned on the grounds that he had given the armed forces valuable information for the invasion of Sicily. The armed forces must have laughed their heads off. About all Luciano could have told them about Sicily was that it was an island. They probably already knew more about Sicily than the Sicilians. The real reason for his release could surely have been only one thing: that his lawyers has secured evidence that he had been framed and were prepared to use it against the prosecutor, now an important political figure. He had built his career on spectacular convictions. But he never got what he wanted. We Americans are not fools. At times we may look foolish, but in the pinch we can tell a cat from a leopard.

  Luciano went to Rome, but the police made his life impossible. He went to Cuba, and the American Narcotics people jumped on his back. He went to Naples. The police there watched him constantly. He changed his residence every few months. No use. America has become an empire. Its money and influence penetrate everywhere outside the Iron Curtain. Nothing can give him back his life or his freedom. The job on him was too thorough.

  No one knows all the facts. I can only go by my feeling about a man. If Luciano is an evil man, then I am an idiot. The man who convicted him has had his reward – and also his failure. I'd rather be an idiot than live with his soul, if he has one.

  Verse from an untitled poem,

  written by Chandler in spring 1958.

  But always lay the grave

  In waiting, and the silence and the maggot (naught)

  This was at last the honor which they bought.

  Man is too often nobler than his fate.

  Letter to Dale Warren,

  17 June 1958. Chandler is referring to his seventh Marlowe book, Playback.

  Please don't praise the book; sell it!

  Concerning horror stories about plumbing in British hotels:

  If a country has destroyed itself in two wars, it cannot immediately achieve the American kitchen.

  Letter to Luther Nichols,

  books editor of the San Francisco Examiner, who had sent Chandler some interview questions, September 1958.

  1. Yes, I think the hardboiled dick is still the reigning hero, but there is getting to be rather too many of him. The principal challenger is, I think, the novel of pure suspense. The best of these seem to be written by women.

  2. I wouldn't call any writer psychoneurotic. We're all crazy to some extent. It's a hard lonely life in which you are never sure of anything.

  3. Regarding whether crime fiction might lead to increased crime.] No effect whatsoever except that a man contemplating a murder might pick up an idea of how to do it and escape afterwards. But the crime was already there.

  4. [Regarding the future of mystery writing.] A decline of the hardboiled story on the basis of Gresham's law. They are too numerous, too violent, and too sexy in too blatant a way. Not one in fifty is written with any sense of style or economy. They are supposed to be what the reader wants. Good writers write what they want and make the reader like it. The hard-hitting story will not die completely but it will have to become more civilized. The mystery story in some form will never die in the foreseeable future.

  5. I don't worry about the reviewers. I've had it both ways, and that is how it should be. Some are stupid, even vicious, but so are some writers.

  Letter to Helga Greene,

  1 October 1958. Following his meeting with Lucky Luciano, Chandler now had an idea for a new story:

  . . . about a man who tried to get out of the Syndicate organization, but he knew too much, and he got a tip that a couple of pros were being sent to wipe him out. He has no one to turn to for help, so he goes to Marlowe. The problem is what can Marlowe do without getting in front of the guns himself. I have some ideas and I think the story would be fun to write. Needless to say, if the killers fail, others will take care of them. You don't fail the syndicate and go on living. The discipline is strict and severe, and mistakes are simply not tolerated. The only syndicate boss who was ever convicted of murder was Lepke Buchhalter, at one time head of Murder Inc. in Brooklyn and head of a ‘protection’ racket in New York. I don't know how they got him, but he and one of his top men did finally go to the chair. They put Costello in prison for a while and they may still be after him, but they won't get far, I should think. These boys all have good business fronts and very clever, although crooked, lawyers. Stop the lawyers and you stop the Syndicate, but the Bar Associations are simply not interested.

  Chandler wrote the story, unpublished on his death. It was the last piece of writing he ever completed, and the first short story he had written since his pulp days. It begins:

  He sat down carefully and I sat opposite and we looked at each other. His face had a sort of foxy eagerness. He was sweating a little. The expression on my face was meant to be interested but not clubby. I reached for a pipe and the leather humidor in which I keep my Pearce's tobacco. I pushed cigarettes at him.

  ‘I don't smoke.’ He had a rusty voice. I didn't like it any more than I liked his clothes, or his face. While I filled the pipe he reached inside his coat, prowled in a pocket, came out with a bill, glanced at it and dropped it across the desk in front of me. It was a nice bill and clean and new. One thousand dollars.

  ‘Ever save a guy's life?’

  ‘Once in a while, maybe.’

  ‘Save mine.’

  The story also contained the line:

  the women you get and the women you don't get – they live in different worlds. I don't sneer at either world. I live in both myself.

  Letter to Hardwick Moseley,

  5 October 1958.

  Hardwick, I need money, cash money, not assets. I need it because for a year and eight months I have been supporti
ng my Australian secretary and her two children. Hell, I even deeded the British and Commonwealth rights in Playback to Jean . . .

  Letter to Roger Machell,

  14 October 1958. Chandler had become embroiled with his new secretary's ongoing divorce.

  Her filthy rotten screwy bastard of a husband (this is one case in which I do not feel it noble to speak well of the dead. I knew him) made a holograph will a few days before he died disinheriting his wife and children and leaving what he had to his brother, who is a screwball, too. Jean has no one to look to but me and it's becoming rather a drain.

  Since I am on an alcohol-free diet, due to hepatitis, my mind seems to lack a little or a lot of its exuberance. Very few writers can write on alcohol but I am one of the exceptions. I don't miss alcohol physically at all, but I do miss it mentally and spiritually.

  Letter to Helga Greene,

  22 October 1958.

  I've always had a sneaking idea that a professional failure was always a moral failure. There are writers who look the situation squarely in the face and decide that they are willing to be poor if they can write well enough to satisfy their souls. I respect them, but a lack of appreciation is narrowing. Henry James felt it. It tends to make a writer exaggerate the very things that keep the public away from him. I am not a mercenary writer, but I do feel that in this tangled generation a writer who cannot face the rather cynical realities of his trade is lacking in more than popularity.

  Letter to Catherine Barth,

  Executive Secretary of the Mystery Writers of America. The organization had just asked Chandler to become its President. 7 February 1959.

  I spoke to you on the telephone to thank you for the great honor the Mystery Writers of America have done me; but that does not seem quite enough – especially as the real work has to be done by the Executive Vice-President, Herbert Brean, and the Executive Committee, who seem to do all the work and get none of the praise.

  I am sure you realize that I take this honor as a token of a long career, and that I do not take it very personally. I have reached a stage in my career where I have nothing to fear.

  Letter to Maurice Guinness,

  21 February 1959.

  I think I may have misunderstood your desire that Marlowe should get married. I think I may have picked the wrong girl. But as a matter of fact, a fellow of Marlowe's type shouldn't get married, because he is a lonely man, a poor man, a dangerous man, and yet a sympathetic man, and somehow none of this goes with marriage. I think he will always have a fairly shabby office, a lonely house, a number of affairs, but no permanent connection. I think he will always be awakened at some inconvenient hour by some inconvenient person, to do some inconvenient job. It seems to me that is his destiny – possibly not the best destiny in the world, but it belongs to him. No one will ever beat him, because by his nature he is unbeatable. No one will ever make him rich, because he is destined to be poor. But somehow, I think he would not have it otherwise, and therefore I feel that your idea that he should be married, even to a very nice girl, is quite out of character. I see him always in a lonely street, in lonely rooms, puzzled but never quite defeated.

  Four weeks after writing that letter, Chandler was taken to hospital by ambulance from his rented home in La Jolla, suffering from pneumonia. He died three days later.

  THE END

  Chandler had left the following instructions in a letter to his lawyer, written two years before his death. ‘Wright’ was Leroy Wright, who had helped Chandler draw up his will in La Jolla.

  P.S. Wright failed to cover one point and I failed to mention it in the letter attached, but I shall. That is that I want either a Church of England or Episcopalian church service, depending on where I die, I wanted to be cremated, and I want my eyes to go to a cornea bank, if they want them. Since the eyes have to be removed, I am told, within half an hour after death to be of any use, and immediately refrigerated, it would seem that this would require some instrument duly executed between me and some organization, such as an eye hospital. The mutilation of a corpse, except for autopsy or embalmment (the last is compulsory in this country) is illegal, so the right to do this should probably be given to me in a proper document.

  As to the funeral service, I will not, if I have anything to say about it, have it anywhere but in a church, and there is to be nothing but the formal service for the dead – no poems read, no speeches, no goddam tame person in a funeral parlor or chapel. I don't know where I was baptized, although I know from my mother that I was baptized, but I was confirmed in the Church of England by the Bishop of Worcester, and as a young man was very devout. My wife had her service in an Episcopal church, although neither of us had ever been inside it. The vicar was a friend of mine, but I don't think that was the reason. I think one is entitled to it.

  R.

  Index

  Academy 1, 144

  Adams, Cleve 90

  advertising 132, 189, 195–6, 199

  advice 51–2

  Agee, James 245

  agents 54, 173, 175

  Ak-Sar-Ben 43, 45

  alcoholism xi, 13, 196, 214, 215, 258

  cure 173–4

  Allen, Frederick Lewis 86

  Ambler, Eric 156

  America 239–40

  language 36–7

  And Then There Were None 27

  Anderson, Edward 17

  Arizona 225

  Aron, Miss 61

  art 118

  Ashenden 129

  Asphalt Jungle 122

  Atlantic Monthly 39, 63, 70–73, 77, 229

  Auden, W. H. 112

  Bakke, Captain Tore 219

  Barris, Alex 103, 110

  Bartlett, Adelaide 150–53

  Bauer, Harold 49

  Baumgarten, Bernice 99, 102, 106, 135, 156, 180, 182, 183

  ‘BDS’ 121

  Bethel, Jane 80

  Bible 80

  Big Bear Lake 56, 57

  Big Sleep, The x, 14–16, 21, 33

  film 39, 67–9, 105

  title 91

  Black Mask 13, 16, 92

  ‘Blackmailers Don't Shoot’ 121

  Bogart, Humphrey 15, 67

  Bond, James 219

  Bowen, Elizabeth 107

  Brandt, Carl 96, 97, 100, 107, 111, 122, 148, 172, 173, 176

  Brandt & Brandt 50, 99

  Brooks, Paul 99, 121, 183, 194, 231, 237

  Bryan, Williams Jenning 43, 45

  Burnett, W. R. 122

  business 236–7

  Cain, James M. 33, 38, 39, 40–41

  California 20, 22, 168–9

  Campbell, Alan K. 189

  Campigny, Robert 248

  Carter, Edgar 80, 140, 145, 147, 240

  Catholicism 123, 124, 131, 162, 226

  Ireland 26, 49

  cats 54–5, 92–3, 130, 145, 146

  eyes 134

  Chamber's Journal 1

  Chandler, Cissie (formerly Cissie Pascal), wife x, 13, 183, 202, 228

  Chandler, Raymond

  biography ix–xi

  imaginary biography 25, 131–2, 147

  charm 140

  Chase, James Hadley 50, 91–2

  Chaucer, David 116

  chess viii

  Christie, Agatha 27, 249

  Christmas 176–7

  clichés 35, 44

  Communists 83, 84–6, 123, 124–5, 156–7

  Connolly, Cyril 112, 138, 210

  cooking 189, 244

  corporations 114, 195–6

  corruption 126–7, 242

  Corryvreckan 142–3

  courage 230–31

  Coxe, George Harmon 16, 21, 23, 26, 29

  crime fiction see detective fiction criticism see dramatic criticism; literary criticism

  Dabney, Joseph 13

  Daily Sketch 210

  Dana, Mr 163

  Dannay, Frederic 165

  Day of the Locust, The 117

  death-wish 113

  denouements 193

  De
stiny 2

  detective fiction

  action and emotion 87–8

  by people who can't write 163, 193

  character 15, 181

  classic 27

  and crime 256

  endings 193

  English and American faults 217–18

  fantasy 102–3

  future 256

  honesty 136

  magazines 18

  and novels 40, 117, 139

  psychological foundation for popularity 95–6

  serialization 21

  suspense 256

  detective pictures 80–81

  detectives 4, 114–15, 160, 187–8

  licences 132–3

  dialogue 41

  Dickens, Charles 20, 66

  doctors 173, 231–2, 238

  Double Entryemnity 38, 39, 41

  dramatic criticism 86–7

  dude ranches 169–70

  Duhanel, Marcel 125

  Dulwich College ix, 26, 144, 199

  Dumas, Alexandre 20, 66

  dust jackets

  designs 31, 194

  quotes 163–5

  editors 128–9

  education 37, 168–9, 192

  egotism 98, 134, 239

  Eisenhower, Dwight D. 241

  Ellis, Ruth 213

  endings 193

  England 101, 183, 185–6, 187, 239

  language 35–8

  euthanasia 145

  Evans, Bernice 247

  explanation scenes 100–101

  eyes 134

  failure 113, 258

  fairyland 5–6

  fan letters 196

  fantasy 200

  Farewell, My Lovely 26, 28–9

  F.B.I. 192

  feuds 140

  fiction see literature

  fifty 129

  Film Noir 125

  films see motion pictures

  financial system 98

  ‘Finger Man’ 121

  first love 234

  first-person characters 94–5