Raymond Chandler
ed., Frank MacShane
T he Library of America has just issued a two-volume edition of Raymond Chandler—pulp fiction on Olympus! When word came to Chandler in the Elysian Fields that he was to report for a meeting with...
...the politically correct moral landscape of pulp fiction is now a tiresome and self-defeating clich...
...and whose "mean streets" lacked the normative moral presence of a man "who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid...
...Then a place: Depression-scarred Los Angeles, a town of dirty money, sadistic cops, and dangerous dames...
...The Long Goodbye (1954) is an embittered, autumnal work, a study of friendship that now seems sprawling, prolix, and queerly adrift in time and place—things that had been Chandler's early strengths...
...The final, tired book, Playback (1958), marries off a besotted Marlowe, and is a blunder of tone and language...
...In Philip Marlowe he created such a man...
...I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them...
...CI "The Book That Could Topple the President" Ambrose Evans-Pritchard—London Sunday Telegraph A must read to prepare yourself for the upcoming lawsuit that's being billed as "The Real Trial of the Century.' An insider's first hand expose of the details surrounding America's best kept scandal: Menagate and Bill Clinton's complicity in it Terry Reed's book "Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA" and his video, "The Mena Connection" chronicle details of the upcoming federal lawsuit (Reed v Young, LRC 94-634) in Little Rock, slated for trial January 15th, 1996...
...I was neat, clean, shaved, and sober, and I didn't care who knew it...
...His best books are The Big Sleep (1939), Farewell, My Lovely (1940), and The High Window RAYMOND CHANDLER: STORIES & EARLY NOVELS LATER NOVELS & OTHER WRITINGS Edited by Frank MacShane Library of America / 2 volumes / $35 each reviewed by DONALD LYONS 78 The American Spectator November 1995 (1942...
...Brown...
...Thus begins Chandler's first novel, The Big Sleep...
...Back in L.A...
...A tiredness is already audible in the characteristic rhetoric...
...Proceeds go to the Reed Court Fund The American Spectator November 1995 79...
...I had one from women...
...Some of it has not dated well, especially the patter of smart similes—"as shallow as enamel on a cafeteria tray," "empty as a headwaiter's smile...
...But Chandler sought to do more than his predecessor, whose language, he thought, had "no overtones, no echo," Donald Lyons is the drama critic for the to the Wall Street Journal and a frequent contributor to the New Criterion...
...Both of these elegant volumes include a useful and discursive chronology of his life...
...Women made me sick...
...THE VIDEO: The Mena Connection, VHS, 2 hour & 20 minute video documentary focusing on Menagate and the upcoming Reed v Young lawsuit The Lawsuit that provided the sworn testimony of Trooper LD...
...The Travis McGee books, which all have a color in the title, are being reissued in snazzy, gaudy, color-coordinated paperbacks...
...Also included is the screenplay that Chandler and director Billy Wilder co-wrote in 1944 from James M. Cain's Double Indemnity, and a bouquet of essays and letters—in all, a selection that amounts to a charter for this kind of fiction, which even today needs justifying as much as it did back when Edmund Wilson attacked it...
...To hell with the rich...
...I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be...
...Not the Library of America just yet, but welcome all the same...
...He worked as an auditor for the Lloyd-owned South Basin oil company, and was fired in 1932 for "drunkenness and absenteeism...
...I reached for my drink and drank it slowly...
...by the third book, The High Window, Chandler had perfected this vein of nocturnal ode (Marlowe is in his office): It was getting dark outside now...
...He struck gold when he decided to echo the double trochee of his own name...
...He studied classics at Dulwich College, and came back to America in 1912...
...THE BOOK: Compromised: Clinton, Bush & the CIA, by Terry Reed and John Cummings, a 681 page best-seller now revised and available in trade paperback...
...As Chandler wrote in his essay "The Simple Art of Murder," included here, Hammett gave "murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons...
...2195, shipping included...
...B orn in Chicago in 1888, Raymond Chandler was taken to England at age seven by a strong mother who wanted to get the boy away from his alcoholic father...
...Learn why the foreign press declares this suit the only one that could topple the president and the only one with venue and timing to expose and prove the CIA's involvement in guns for drugs operations...
...Mention this ad and receive both the book and the video for only $4190, shipping included...
...I was calling on four million dollars...
...This is from The Big Sleep...
...on the return voyage he made the acquaintance of a member of the rich Los Angeles Lloyd family...
...Thereafter his life fell into the familiar pattern of acclaim, frustration (especially in screenwriting), and drink...
...These attitudes go with the territory, and God knows contemporary detective fiction is correcting Marlowe's sexual and racial attitudes with a vengeance...
...As a writer, Chandler's time was the thirties, his place L.A...
...MacDonald specialized in improbable plots involving generations of familial crime...
...it is as damaging in what it says about the Reagan-Bush administrations as in what it reveals about Bill Clinton's Arkansas...
...Walter Mosley brings a black PI voice to his period L.A...
...His immediate, embarrassingly close follower was Ross MacDonald, who in the 1960s attenuated Marlowe into the arty brooder Archer, adding little to the geography of Chandler's Southern California except for some chic ecological worrying...
...Behind Chandler's rich language lie Hemingway's invention of a laconic American vernacular, Fitzgerald's sad urban romanticism, and a native wisecrack tradition going back at least to Twain...
...is a Hobbesian terrain of dry greed and joyless pleasure and, above all, a place of melancholy and loneliness: I walked to the windows and pulled the shades up and opened the windows wide...
...His other California heirs include the likable Sue Grafton, whose Kinsey Millhone is easily the best of the new breed of women PIs, though without anything like Chandler's palette...
...To order, send check or money order to: REKO, P.O...
...A pansy has no iron in his bones, whatever he looks like...
...From the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal "...the most credible aspect of Mr...
...Box K, White Springs, FL 32096 or to use VISA or MASTERCARD, call toll free 1-800-MENA-850 (1-800-636-2850) All orders shipped Priority Mail...
...had been—a paradise threatened and going under...
...The two don't fit—though the movies improved Hammett's Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man, they never did justice to Chandler, for all the joys of the Hawks-BogartBaca11 Big Sleep...
...Marlowe's L.A...
...Names for cops or insurance salesmen...
...His Florida of the 1960s is what his predecessor's L.A...
...The rich, though, and the cops—especially big-city cops—have remained the villains of the genre...
...When word came to Chandler in the Elysian Fields that he was to report for a meeting with Emerson and Melville, he must have felt somewhat like his hero Philip Marlowe: It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills...
...It simply collided with Whitewater...
...Reed's book is that it was not written with Whitewater in mind...
...When we read the opening of his Devil in a Blue Dress, "I was surprised to see a white man walk into Joppy's bar," we know where weare—in a re-imagined Farewell, My Lovely...
...But as his best Chandler created a substantiated verbal and moral world...
...Disastrous...
...Chandler's one successor who has truly brought something new to the genre is John D. MacDonald...
...At the time of its publication in 1939, the art of detective fiction had only half-emerged from the chrysalis of the cheap magazines...
...Then a first-person voice...
...A nd what of Chandler's numerous progeny...
...They made me sick...
...After a separation and reunion with Cissy, he was re-hired by the Lloyds, who gave him a generous stipend to devote himself to writing...
...Dashiell Hammett was his only weighty predecessor, and Chandler gave Hammett full marks for breaking away from the genteel school of detecting exquisites, the likes of Lord Peter Wimsey and Hercule Poirot...
...During the war he wrote The Lady in the Lake (1945), in which the great conflict is constantly and pointlessly mentioned...
...The book the Boston Globe said, "...will put to the test Clinton's remarkable ability to survive...
...The rushing sound of the traffic had died a little and the air from the open window, not yet cool from the night, had that tired end-of-the-day smell of dust, automobile exhaust, sunlight rising from hot walls and sidewalks, the remote smell of food in a thousand restaurants, and perhaps, drifting down from the residential hills above Hollywood—if you had a nose like a hunting dog—a touch of that particular tomcat smell that eucalyptus trees give off in warm weather...
...the irrefutable evidence that Clinton knew about the CIA's drug trafficking in Arkansas...
...After the war came The Little Sister (1949), a weak story that brings Marlowe to Hollywood...
...But it was the early, pre-writing experiences that bear pondering when we look back from the perspective of the novels...
...Travis McGee, that maritime philosopher of very un-Marlovian sex, is a perfect lens to focus MacDonald's world...
...First came a name: He had started out calling his detectives things like Carmady, John Dalmast, and Walter Gage...
...Chandler headed for L.A., and in 1917 joined the Canadian Army, with which he saw action, and was wounded, in France...
...once taken very seriously, he is now perhaps underrated...
...The book suffers, too, from largely taking place outside L.A., up in the San Bernardino Mountains...
...Chandler also made Marlowe a man of his populist and cranky times, with a drawerful of crotchets to prove it: "You can have a hangover from other things than alcohol...
...23.95, shipping included...
...in 1919, he began an affair with Cissy Pascal, an older married woman who divorced in 1920 but did not marry Chandler until after the death of his disapproving mother...
...If it is even one quarter true...
...The night air came drifting in with a kind of stale sweetness that still remembered automobile exhausts and the streets of the city...
...These superbly edited volumes present the seven Marlowe novels, as well as thirteen earlier stories from the magazine pages of Black Mask and Dime Detective...
Vol. 28 • November 1995 • No. 11
