Freeper Reading Club Discussion---Raymond Chandler

Self | February 24, 2002 | PJ-Comix

[PJ-Comix]

Today is the scheduled FREEPER READING CLUB discussion of the Raymond Chandler books. If you have read any of his books, you know that Chandler had a unique command of the American Idiom. A big reason for this is that Chandler did not take the way Americans speak for granted. This was because Chandler, although an American himself, was raised as a youth in Britain and spoke with an English accent. When he returned to America, he was fascinated by the way Americans spoke and this is reflected in his stories.

Well, that's my two bits for now on this discussion. Now go ahead and post away your observations.

[PJ-Comix]

The next Freeper Reading Club assignment is a real treat. It is "Traveller" which was written by Richard "Watership Down" Adams. It is a narrative of the Civil war told from the point of view of Robert E. Lee's horse, Traveller. This discussion will commence on April 14. The book (amazingly) is out of print but you should be able to find it at most libraries. I was lucky enough to discover it a few weeks ago at a local flea market. Perhaps our discussion of "Traveller" will inspire the publisher to get it back into print again. It certainly deserves it.

[PJ-Comix]

PING! And anybody else out there who wants to be placed on the Freeper Reading Club Ping list, just let me know and I will do so.

[apackof2]

thanks, I loved "Watership Down" and I didn't know he had wrote this book
I will try to track it down, after I finish reading John Adams by David McCullough, excellent read also

[TxBec]

Found "Traveller" at the library and we're reading it now. Looks good so far

[VadeRetro]

Chandler was a wonderful discovery for me 30 years ago, when I read the main body of his "Marlowe" books. Sadly, you can do that in a short time. Chandler's output declined steeply along with his health. Still, he and Dashiell Hammett invented the hardboiled detective genre, which in turn spawned film noir.

[Lexington Green]

Down these mean streets a man must go....

[PJ-Comix]

thanks, I loved "Watership Down" and I didn't know he had wrote this book I will try to track it down...

You should be able to find it at your local library. I still can't believe Traveller is out of print since it is such an incredible read.

[PJ-Comix]

Still, he and Dashiell Hammett invented the hardboiled detective genre, which in turn spawned film noir.

Not only did Chandler inspire film noir, he actually wrote the script for what is considered the FIRST film noir movie, Double Indemnity which was made in 1944. If you haven't seen this movie, check it out. Great flick!

[elbucko]

It is a narrative of the Civil war told from the point of view of Robert E. Lee's horse, Traveller.

How interesting.

After the Civil War, a prominent artist wrote to the great general for a description of the horses appearance, General Lee replied:

" If I was an artist like you, I would draw a true picture of Traveller; representing his fine proportions, muscular figure, deep chest, short back, strong haunches, flat legs, small head, broad forehead, delicate ears, quick eye, small feet and black mane and tail. Such a picture would inspire a poet, whose genius could then depict his worth and describe his endurance of toil, hunger, thirst, heat and cold; and the dangers and suffering through which he passed. He could dilate upon his sagacity and affection and his invarible response to every wish of his rider. He might even imagine his thoughts through the long night-marches and days of the battle through which he passed."

"But I am no artist Mr. Markie, and can therefore only say he is a Confederate grey."...Robert E. Lee.

[PJ-Comix]

The greatest TV mini-series I've ever seen, The Singing Detective is basically one big tribute to Raymond Chandler. Remember, this show was about a bedridden detective novelist named, Philip Marlow, whose novels closely resembled those of Chandler's. Plus the narration by the author was reminiscent of Chandler's style. Chandler's influence is EVERYWHERE!!!

[PJ-Comix]

"...He might even imagine his thoughts through the long night-marches and days of the battle through which he passed."

And so, Robert E. Lee foretold of the novel, Traveller.

[SamAdams76]

One of my favorite Steve Martin movies is Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid. Obviously the movie is a spoof of the 1940s-era detective story genre, but after reading some of Chandler's stories, I am convinced that Chandler's writing inspired a lot of lines in that movie.

I liked the crisp, no-nonsense dialog that Chandler used in his stories. There are some great comeback lines that I'd like to borrow to use on people in real life. For example, when one of the characters says to Marlowe: "You must be very smart, you had me fooled," Marlow retorts, "That doesn't make me smart."

I read a couple of the other stories besides the ones you recommended. I'll bring those into the conversation later. I was reading "Go For The Girl" last night but fell asleep before I could finish it (not that I was bored, but it was past midnight). I'll finish it when I get home today.

[PJ-Comix]

Here are a collection of Chandler quotes:

"Then her hands dropped and jerked at something and the robe she was wearing came open and underneath it she was as naked as September Morn but a darn sight less coy."--The Long Good-bye (Chapter 29)
"Across the street somebody had delirium tremens in the front yard and a mixed quartet tore what was left of the night into small strips and did what they could to make the strips miserable. While this was going on the exotic brunette didn't move more that one eyelash."--"Red Wind" (Section 5)
"To say she had a face that would have stopped a clock would have been to insult her.It would have stopped a runaway horse."--The Little Sister
"I felt like an amputated leg." -- "Trouble Is My Business" (Section 4)
"The corridor which led to it had a smell of old carpet and furniture oil and the drab anonymity of a thousand shabby lives"--The Little Sister (Chapter 9)
"She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket"--Farewell, My Lovely (Chapter 18)
"Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world."--"The Simple Art of Murder" (essay)
"I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun." Farewell, My Lovely (Chapter 34)
"I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it." -- The Big Sleep (Chapter 1)
"San Diego? One of the most beautiful harbors in the world and nothing in it but navy and a few fishing boats. At night it is fairyland. The swell is as gentle as an old lady singing hymns. But Marlowe has to get home and count the spoons." -- The Long Goodbye (Chapter 6)
""She's a charming middle age lady with a face like a bucket of mud and if she's washed her hair since Coolidge's second term, I'll eat my spare tire, rim and all." " -- Farewell, My Lovely (Chapter 6)
"A white night for me is as rare as a fat postman." -- The Long Goodbye (Chapter 12)
"The General spoke again, slowly, using his strength as carefully as an out-of-work show-girl uses her last good pair of stockings." -- The Big Sleep (Chapter 2)
"I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it." -- The Big Sleep (Chapter 1)
"There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your sking itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge."-- "Red Wind" (opening paragraph)
""His smile was as stiff as a frozen fish." -- "The Man Who Liked Dogs"

Earlier Selections "I belonged in Idle Valley like a pearl onion on a banana split."--The Long Good-bye (Chapter 13)
"Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food."--Farewell, My Lovely (Chapter 1)
"What did it matter where you lay once you were dead?  In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill.  You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that.  Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you.  You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell.  Me, I was part of the nastiness now."--The Big Sleep (Chapter 32)
"Her smile was as faint as a fat lady at a fireman's ball."--High Window (Chapter 3)
"At three A.M. I was walking the floor listening to Khachaturyan working in a tractor factory.  He called it a violin concerto.  I called it a loose fan belt and the hell with it."--The Long Good-bye (Chapter 12)
"She opened a mouth like a firebucket and laughed.  That terminated my interest in her.  I couldn't hear the laugh but the hole in her face when she unzippered her teeth was all I needed."--The Long Good-bye (Chapter 13)
"I walked back through the arch and started up the steps.  It was a nice walk if you liked grunting.  There were two hundred and eighty steps up to Cabrillo Street.  They were drifted over with windblown sand and the handrail was as cold and wet as a toad's belly."--Farewell, My Lovely (Chapter 8)
"The walls here are as thin as a hoofer's wallet."--Playback (Chapter 5)
"The voice got as cool as a cafeteria dinner."--Farewell, My Lovely (Chapter 15)
"The kid's face had as much expression as a cut of round steak and was about the same color."--"Red Wind"
"If you don't leave, I'll get somebody who will." -- Chandler's notebooks
"One time in Leavenworth, just one time in all those years, Wally Sype wrapped himself around a can of white shellac and got as tight as a fat lady's girdle."--"Goldfish"
"Tasteless as a roadhouse blonde."--"Spanish Blood"
"From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class.  From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away."--The High Window (Chapter 5)
"You boys are as cute as a couple of lost golf balls . . . how in the world do you do it?"--The High Window (Chapter 23)

"She was as cute as a washtub." -- Farewell, My Lovely (Chapter 5)

"The house itself was not so much. It was smaller than Buckingham Palace, rather gray for California, and probably had fewer windows than the Chrysler Building. I sneaked over to the side entrance and pressed a bell and somewhere a set of chimes made a deep mellow sound like church bells. A man in a striped vest and gilt buttons opened the door, bowed, took my hat and was through for the day."-- Farewell, My Lovely (Chapter 18)
"I sat beside her on the yellow leather chesterfield. 'Aren't you a pretty fast worker?' she asked quietly. I didn't answer her.
'Do you do much of this sort of thing?' she asked with a sidelong look.
'Practically none. I'm a Tibetan monk, in my spare time.'
'Only you don't have any spare time.'""--Farewell, My Lovely (Chapter 18)
"It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window."--Farewell, My Lovely (Chapter 13)
"I called him from a phone booth. The voice that answered was fat. It wheezed softly, like the voice of a man who had just won a pie-eating contest."--"Trouble Is My Business" (Section 2)

[bt_dooftlook]

If you have the chance, pickup the two-volume set of Chandler's collected works (Library of America?) - in particular, check out his short stories, including "Nevada Gas" and "Pearls Are a Nuisance" - pungent, crisp American writing at its best...IMHO ;)

[Kip Lange]

Random thoughts on Chandler & Marlowe:

1. Marlowe is named after... (okay so I'm starting with a trivia question, not a thought)
2. Chandler was notorious for not just being distant from American culture but virtually isolated from it. He *hated* Los Angeles. ;-) Wrote scathingly of "the natives" more than once...correct me if I'm wrong. Some argue that it is this sort of unique bitter outsider perspective is exactly where Marlowe came from.
3. Chandler himself admitted that his plots got so confusing even he couldn't follow them sometimes. :-)
4. He (Chandler) is possibly THE most underrated author of the century, at least stylistically.
5. Is it in "The Simple Art of Murder"...urk...okay hazy on this...somewhere he talks about how he (Chandler) loves the way the Americans use language as opposed to the British *because* the Americans "butcher it" and chop it up and use it freely or something along those lines. It's a great backhanded compliment that I remember. ;-)
6. What camp is everybody in regarding: Who invented the hard-boiled detective? (well, I mean, using "invented" loosely) -- Chandler or Hammett? I vote Chandler. Hammett had some seminal thematic structures but no style; Chandler could knock a bull on its ass with three words at long range.

[Kip Lange]

Is it "Pearls Are a Nuisance" that ends with...something something you four-flusher as Marlowe tosses fake pearls into a river?

[SamAdams76]

No, that's actually in his short story "Red Wind." I think that he switched those pearls for really cheap pearls to show the woman, so that he could sell her the story that the original pearls were stolen and substituted. For the original pearls were fake as well but the woman didn't know it yet, and Marlowe didn't want to ruin her memory of the man (who died in a plane crash). At least, that is my understanding of it. (Good story)

[PJ-Comix]

Is it in "The Simple Art of Murder"...urk...okay hazy on this...somewhere he talks about how he (Chandler) loves the way the Americans use language as opposed to the British *because* the Americans "butcher it" and chop it up and use it freely or something along those lines.

Here are some quotes on that topic that I found on the Web:

Raymond Chandler considered himself a stylist first, and a writer of genre fiction second. In his opinion, "the most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time" (Gardiner, 75).

For a man who spent countless hours laboring over each piece of work (he once spent five months working on a short story for the pulps--never learning to edit, he always ended up having to rewrite whole portions of his stories), and who gave his lead character a background so diverse and well informed he could make reference to everything from St. Swithin's day, Pierrot girls, Cremona violins and obscure Shakespeare quotes to the work of Marcel Proust, port cochere, arabesques and how to make the best possible pot of French drip coffee (Marling, 93), Raymond Chandler made a lot of investments in his writing. But true to his words, the first and foremost concern in his work was style. Although he was born in Chicago, Chandler moved to London at an early age where he was raised by his mother and maternal grandmother. By the time he made his move back to the United States, he was in his mid-twenties and had undergone a full, formal, British Classical education (Marling, 1-11). To create the voice of Philip Marlowe, to write in what Chandler considered "the American language," a language that allowed him to "take murder out of the Venetian vase and [drop] it into the alley" (Chandler, "The Simple Art of Murder", 530), Chandler had to learn American English as a foreign language. He had to study and analyze it, take it apart, tinker with it and put it back together again and see if it still ticked in a clockwise manner when he was done (Gardiner, 80).

As a stylist, Chandler claimed to be not overwhelmingly interested in plot devices and elaborate constructions of mysteries, but instead " looking for an excuse for certain experiments in dramatic dialogue" (Gardiner, 219). It was his firm conviction that, although the general public may not admit it, readers just thought they cared about nothing but action and plotting and clues. In all actuality, Chandler said in a letter to Frederick Allen, "the thing they cared about, and that I cared about, was creation of emotion through dialogue and description" (Gardiner, 219).

It is this act of creation, this ability to create a literary style in a genre often considered quasi-literary, that makes the works of Raymond Chandler remarkable, and it is on this act of creation and its effect that this essay will focus. There are several key language issues at work in Chandler's fiction: the use of the American colloquial style and the creation of a "tough guy" voice; the use of metaphor, simile and imagery; and how the combination of these two factors, "tough guy" style and imagery, help draw Marlowe and the characters that surround him, and make the writing of Raymond Chandler unique in American literature.

[Kip Lange]

Oh, bleep me for not remembering the end of Red Wind. ;-) Heh, well, that illustrates a point...I don't read Chandler for plot, really. Character and language carry the plot, basically (and do it well). But count the number of loose ends at any one of his stories...ow. Sorta the anti-Agatha-Christie.

Remember that scene in the MTM show were Lou Grant takes MTM aside and castigates her for poor writing, then reads her the first sentence of "Red Wind", throws the book down, and says, "Now THAT'S writing!"? Kinda sums up how I feel about Chandler.

[PJ-Comix]

For the original pearls were fake as well but the woman didn't know it yet, and Marlowe didn't want to ruin her memory of the man (who died in a plane crash). At least, that is my understanding of it.

You are correct. Marlowe didn't want the woman to find out that her "true love" was also a con artist.