The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nonfiction 1909-1959

by Unknown

  Letter to Jamie Hamilton,

  19 August 1948. Carl Brandt was the head of Chandler's new literary agency in New York.

  The end of Greene's book was great. It atones for a lack I had felt before.

  The story has its weaknesses. It is episodic and the emphasis shifts around from character to character and it is, as a mystery, overcomplicated, but as a story of people very simple. It has no violence in it at all; all the violence is off stage. If it has menace and suspense, they are in the writing. I think some of it is beautifully written, and my reactions to it are most unreliable. I write a scene and read it over and think it stinks. Three days later (having done nothing in between but stew) I reread it and think it is great. So there you are. You can't bank on me. I may be all washed up.

  Lately I have been trying to simplify my life so that I need not rely on Hollywood. I have no longer a business manager or a secretary. But I am not happy. I need a rest badly and I cannot rest until this is done and I sometimes think that when it is done it will feel as tired as I am and it will show.

  Assuming, for the moment, that the thing is any good, I feel that you may rely on receiving some kind of script in a month. It may need more work, but it will give you a chance to see whether I am crazy or not. I guess Carl Brandt would tell you, up to a point.

  I hope this is some help.

  Ray

  P. S. It contains the nicest whore I ever didn't meet

  Letter to Cleve Adams,

  a detective writer, 4 September 1948. Adams had written to Chandler warning him about plagiarism of him in a detective book called Double Take, written by a Roy Huggins. W. T. Ballard, also referred to in the letter, was another old Black Mask writer.

  It's nice to hear from you even in such queer circumstances ... I don't know Roy Huggins and have never laid eyes on him. He sent me an autographed copy of his book Double Take with his apologies and the dedication he says the publishers would not let him put in. In writing to thank him I said his apologies were either unnecessary or inadequate and that I could name three or four writers who had gone as far as he had, without his frankness about it.

  I did not invent the hardboiled murder story and I have never made any secret of my opinion that Hammett deserves most or all of the credit. Everybody imitates in the beginning. What Stevenson called playing the ‘sedulous ape’. I personally think that a deliberate attempt to lift a writer's personal tricks, his stock in trade, his mannerisms, his approach to his material, can be carried too far – to the point where it is a kind of plagiarism, and a nasty kind because the law gives no protection. It is nasty for two main reasons. It makes the writer self-conscious about his own work; an example of this is a radio program which ran the use of extravagant similes (I think I rather invented this trick) into the ground, to the point where I am myself inhibited from writing the way I used to. The second reason is that it floods the market with bad money and that drives out the good. But none of these things can be helped. Even if I were granted the absolute power to stop such practices, I doubt that I would know where to draw the line. For one must bear in mind that they can't steal your style, if you have one. They can only as a rule steal your faults.

  Since Hammett has not written for publication since 1932 I have been picked out by some people as a leading representative of the school. This is very likely due to the fact that The Maltese Falcon did not start the high budget mystery trend, although it ought to have. Double Indemnity and Murder My Sweet did, and I was associated with both of them. The result is that everybody who used to be accused of writing like Hammett may now be accused of writing like me . . . More power to Mr Huggins. If he has been traveling on borrowed gas to any extent, the time will come when he will have to spew his guts into his own tank.

  The law recognizes no plagiarism except that of basic plots. It is far behind the times in its concepts of these things. My ideas have been plagiarized in Hollywood and I have been accused of plagiarism myself, by a guy who said The Blue Dahlia was lifted from an original of his. Luckily Paramount were in a position to show that his story never left the story department. Unconscious plagiarism is widespread and inevitable. Throughout his play The Iceman Cometh O'Neill uses the expression ‘the big sleep’ as a synonym for death. He is apparently under the impression that this is a current underworld or half-world usage, whereas it is a pure invention on my part. If I am remembered long enough, I shall probably be accused of stealing the phrase from O'Neill, since he is a big shot. A fellow over in England, named James Hadley Chase, the distinguished author of No Orchids For Miss Blandish (which is half-cent pulp writing at its worst), made a practise in one of his books of lifting verbatim or almost verbatim passages from my books and from those of Jack Larimer and Hammett. He was eventually forced to make a public apology in the English equivalent of Publisher's Weekly. And he also had to pay the legal costs of three publishers incurred in forcing him to this apology. My American publisher's attorney would not even risk writing a letter to Chase's American publisher warning him about this. They still have some business honor left in England.

  As for you and Ballard, I wouldn't know what the idea was at all. We all grew up together, so to speak, and we all wrote the same idiom, and we have all more or less grown out of it. A lot of Black Mask stories sounded alike, just as a lot of Elizabethan plays sound alike. Always when a group exploits a new technique this happens. But even when we all wrote for Joe Shaw, who thought that everyone had to write just like Hammett, there were subtle and obvious differences, apparent to any writer, if not to non-writers.

  Letter to James Sandoe,

  23 September 1948.

  Your family sounds wonderful, including animals. Our cat is growing positively tyrannical. If she finds herself alone anywhere she emits blood curdling yells until someone comes running. She sleeps on a table in the service porch and now demands to be lifted up and down from it. She gets warm milk about eight o'clock at night and starts yelling for it about 7.30. When she gets it she drinks a little, goes off and sits under a chair, and comes and yells all over again for someone to stand beside her while she has another go at the milk. When we have company she looks them over and decides almost instantly if she likes them. If she does she strolls over and plomps down on the floor just far away enough to make it a chore to pet her. If she doesn't like them she sits in the middle of the living room, casts a contemptuous glance around, and proceeds to wash her backside . . . When she was younger she always celebrated the departure of visitors by tearing wildly through the house and ending up with a good claw on the davenport, the one that is covered with brocatelle and makes superb clawing, and it comes off in strips. But she is lazy now. Won't even play with the catnip mouse unless it is dangled in such a position that she can play with it lying down. I believe I told you how she used to catch all sorts of very breakable living things and bring them in the house quite unhurt as a rule. I'm sure she never hurt them intentionally. Cats are very interesting. They have a terrific sense of humor and, unlike dogs, cannot be embarrassed or humiliated by being laughed at. There is nothing worse in nature than seeing a cat trying to provoke a few more hopeless attempts to escape out of a half-dead mouse. My enormous respect for our cat is largely based on a complete lack in her of this diabolical sadism. When she used to catch mice – we haven't had any for years – she brought them alive and undamaged and let me take them out of her mouth. Her attitude seemed to be, ‘Well, here's this damn mouse. Had to catch it, but it's really your problem. Remove it at once.’ Periodically she goes through all the closets and cupboards on a regular mouse-inspection. Never finds any, but she realizes it's part of her job.

  Letter to Charles Morton,

  27 September 1948. The book referred to was called The Second World War.

  I've been reading a book about the war by an English general named Fuller, who was, I believe, retired from the army while still in his prime, due to an incurable case of intelligence. The book makes more sense of the war than anything
I had read so far, and also of the double-cross at Versailles that we let Clemenceau put over the Germans after they had surrendered on terms. Here is a man who has absolutely no prejudice in favour of his own countrymen, who can even give Montgomery his due without gagging, who in a short brilliant chapter makes clear that MacArthur's island-hopping campaign in the South Pacific was as masterly a job of daring, imagination, and guts as the Italian campaign was a senseless and incredibly weak piece of strategic bungling. His disgust, both moral and practical and military, at so-called strategic bombing, is withering and precise. He thinks that in spite of our tactical brilliance we are a nation of military amateurs, and God knows history is proving him right. Even the English, who I am quite sure Fuller thinks incapable of an all-out offensive war because there is always some muttonhead in a high place to kill a good idea or block a daring one, – even the English understood that if we did not end up in Berlin and Vienna, we had fought for nothing. I don't think he quite despises Eisenhower, although his temperament makes him go for men like Bradley and Patton, but it's clear he feels that Eisenhower was not a strong enough man for the job, and that at a crucial moment in September 1944 he threw away a quick victory because he couldn't stand up to either Montgomery or Bradley, but had to compromise with both. It's quite a book. The thing that stands out all through is Fuller's belief that an independent air force is a ghastly mistake, because it will insist on fighting with the most expensive, the least profitable and the most uselessly destructive weapon, the heavy bomber, whereas its true function is ground support, interdiction of traffic and supplies, and logistics. When it was so used, usually unwillingly, the effect was immediate and startling; when it was used for saturation raids on cities like Hamburg, Berlin and Leipsig, it was militarily of small consequence and morally put us right beside the man who ran Belsen and Dachau.

  Letter to Ray Stark,

  a radio agent, 11 October 1948. Ray Stark later sent the letter to Screen Writer Magazine, with the following note: ‘I thought you might be interested in the following that I received from Raymond Chandler prior to the radio dramatization of Philip Marlowe. All the men connected with the show were tremendously helped by this advice – so I thought you might want to pass it on to other writers doing similar shows.‘

  The point about Marlowe is to remember that he is a first person character, whether he shows up that way in a radio script or not. A first person character is under the disadvantage that he must be a better person to the reader than he is to himself. Too many first person characters give an offensively cocky impression. That's bad. To avoid that you must not always give him the punch line or the exit line. Not even often. Let other characters have the toppers. Leave him without a gag, insofar as it is possible. Howard Hawks, a very wise hombre, remarked to me when he was doing The Big Sleep that he thought one of Marlowe's most effective tricks was just giving the other man the trick and not saying anything at all. That puts the other man on the spot. A devastating crack loses a lot of its force when it doesn't provoke any answer, when the other man just rides with the punch. Then you either have to top it yourself or give ground.

  Don't have Marlowe say things merely to score off the other characters. When he comes out with a smash wisecrack it should be jerked out of him emotionally, so that he is discharging an emotion and not even thinking about laying anyone out with a sharp retort. If you use similes, try and make them both extravagant and original. And there is the question of how the retort discourteous is delivered. The sharper the wisecrack, the less forcible should be the way it is said. There should not be any effect of gloating.

  Letter to James Sandoe,

  17 October 1948.

  The psychological foundation for the immense popularity with all sorts of people of the novel about murder or crime or mystery hasn't been scratched. A few superficial and a few frivolous attempts, but nothing careful and cool and leisurely. There is a lot more to this subject than most people realize, even those who are interested in it. The subject has usually been treated lightly because it seems to have been taken for granted, quite wrongly, that because murder novels are easy reading they are also light reading. They are no easier reading than Hamlet, Lear or Macbeth. They border on tragic and never quite become tragic. Their form imposes a certain clarity of outline which is only found in the most accomplished ‘straight’ novels. And incidentally – quite incidentally, of course, a very large proportion of the surviving literature of the world has been concerned with violent death in some form. And if you have to have significance (the demand for which is the inevitable mark of a half-baked culture), it is just possible that the tensions in a novel of murder are the simplest and yet most complete pattern of the tensions in which we live in this generation.

  Letter to Carl Brandt,

  12 November 1948. Chandler had just returned from San Francisco.

  The thing I love about S.F. is its go to hell attitude. The narrow streets are lined with NO PARKING AT ANY TIME signs and also lined with parked automobiles which look as if they had been there all day. For the first time in my life I saw a lady traffic cop, a real cop too, complete with nickel star and whistle. I saw one other cop. He was driving around with a piece of chalk on the end of a long stick and about once a block he took a swipe at some rear tyre, just to keep his hand in. The taxi drivers are wonderful too. They obey no laws except those of gravity and we even had one who passes street cars on the left, a offense for which you would probably get ninety days in Los Angeles. In case you think I am too cynical about the police, it just isn't possible to be. A committee of Superior Court judges in L.A. has been going into the habeas corpus business which seemed to them to be flourishing too richly and taking up too much court time. The chairman just let loose with a statement in which he announced that he was fed up with the racket of arresting bookies, or supposed bookies, then springing them on habeas corpus writs, a cost of $500 in bail and anywhere from $200 to $500 legal fees. He said that the vice squad boys seem to have perfected a system whereby they pull in suspected bookies and the moment the boys are booked along comes a lawyer and a bondsman with a writ; when the case is called the boys have lost all the evidence. Five or six of these operations per night could be quite lucrative over a period of time. The point is, of course, that each of these arrests and releases implies a crooked judge, a crooked lawyer, a crooked bondsman, and some crooked cops. No honest judge would set bail so high that the bond cost $500. Last night a couple of the boys didn't get writs. They had to stay in jail, and boy were they sore! The judge got cold feet. The thing that gets me in this lovely civilization is the complete indifference with which the public greets these disclosures.

  Letter to Carl Brandt,

  26 November 1948.

  I worked at MGM once in that cold storage plant they call the Thalberg Building, fourth floor. Had a nice producer, George Haight, a fine fellow. About that time some potato-brain, probably [Edgar] Mannix, had decided that writers would do more work if they had no couches to lie on. So there was no couch in my office. Never a man to be stopped by trifles, I got a steamer rug out of the car and spread it on the floor and lay down on that. Haight coming in for a courtesy call rushed to the phone and yelled down to the story editor (I forget the name and never even met the man) that I was a horizontal writer and for Chrissake send up a couch. However, the cold storage atmosphere got me too quick, and the coteries at the writers table in the commissary. I said I would work at home. They said that Mannix had issued orders no writers to work at home. I said a man as big as Mannix ought to be allowed the privilege of changing his mind. So I worked at home, and only ever went over there three or four times to talk to Haight. I've only worked at three studios and Paramount was the only one I liked. They do somehow maintain the country club atmosphere there to an extent. At the writers table at Paramount I heard some of the best wit I've ever heard in my life. Some of the boys are at their best when not writing.

  Letter to Jamie Hamilton,

  29 Novembe
r 1948.

  It's nice of Priestley to want to read my stuff. Bless him! I remember him saying, ‘They don't write like this at Dulwich.’ That may be, but if I hadn't grown up with Latin and Greek, I doubt if I would know so well where to draw the very subtle line between what I call the vernacular style and what I should call an illiterate or faux naif style.

  Letter to Lenore Offord,

  December 1948. Offord was another established crime writer of the day, and not one Chandler admired.

  Most writers have the egotism of actors with none of the good looks or charm.

  Letter to James Sandoe,

  6 December 1948.

  I knew a banker once from Aberdeen, Washington, who served two or three years in federal prison for making unsecured loans from the bank's funds to the ranchers on whom the bank's business was built. He was a perfectly honest man, he didn't make a cent out of what he did. It was during the depression and the ranchers had to have money or go broke. If they went broke, the bank went broke, because its mortgage loans would become worthless . . . This bank undoubtedly broke the banking laws. He admitted it. But who was he defrauding? The stockholders of the bank? He was one himself and the others were all men of property in the neighborhood. The stock was not traded in. There is something tragically wrong with a system of justice which can and does make criminals of honest men and can only convict gangsters and racketeers when they don't pay their taxes. Of course to be fair I must also admit that there is something wrong with a financial system which ensures that every corporation executive during a time of depression will risk going to jail a dozen times a month in his efforts to save his company. I personally believe, and I am not a socialist or anything of the sort, that there is a basic fallacy about our financial system. It simply implies a fundamental cheat, a dishonest profit, a non-existent value.