The Mystery-Writer as Novelist

...He is setting his subject's work apart from the thousands of whodunits that are not so much read as consumed every year...

...At times, too, his respect and admiration are colored by Chandler's own sentimentality...

...During the filming of The Big Sleep he had to admit to the studio he didn't know who killed the chauffeur...

...H. Munro...

...Now he made the giant leap to Hemingway, and to Dashiell Hammett, whose novels appeared in Black Mask, the best of the pulp publications specializing in detective fiction...

...Some 1,300 writers were paid a cent a word to supply stories to these magazines, as insatiable for material as TV is today...

...Northrop Frye's Norton Lectures at Harvard last year, for example, showed how art was continually being renewed by popular romance...

...Born in Nebraska in 1888, he left for London with his Anglo-Irish mother when his parents divorced seven years later...

...The need for fast, forceful writing produced a school that rejected the tales of ratiocination derived from Poe and used the hard-boiled detective story "to say something about the nature of contemporary life...

...When the stories came out in a book after most of the novels had been published, he received an indignant letter charging him with self-plagiarism—from E. Howard Hunt...

...He was unable to support himself and returned to the U.S...

...Since he was more interested in the dramatic consequences of a crime than in its causes, motivation was taken for granted and was not at all problematic...

...Chandler said, in the literature of crime and detection...

...Black Mask had taught him that "a good plot was one that made good scenes," and his sense of place was always masterly...

...Chandler's youthful models had been Henry James and Saki (H...

...Yet he thought that Hammett's language "had no overtones, left no echo...

...Indeed, by invoking all the standards of the novel tradition, MacShane does his subject something of a disservice...

...But MacShane is not discriminating against entertainment—his favorite term for Chandler's style is "gusto...

...This breakdown may have expressed domestic unhappiness (his wife was almost old enough to be his mother) and, MacShane thinks, an awareness that the idealized world of his poems was unattainable...

...Similarly, Hammett's Continental Op, according to Steven Marcus, liked "to stir things up to take the lid off life.' But Hammett had an almost metaphysical interest in uncovering falsehood and fabrication...

...in 1912, settling in Los Angeles, where he worked as a bookkeeper until the War...

...It was always a question for me of putting into the stuff something readers might not know was there but which would somehow distill through their minds and leave an afterglow...

...Marcus says, a fiction writer investigating fiction-making...

...Pointing out strengths and subtleties that readers may have missed, and recognizing weaknesses with an even-handed common sense, MacShane gives us a comprehensive view of the development of a novelist...

...He was fired in 1932, at the age of 44, and began "the wearying process of learning how to write...

...Chandler's background ?half-English, half-American—gave him "a double-vision that enabled him to see the world he lived in with exceptional insight...

...MacShane makes it clear from the beginning that he is treating Chandler "as a novelist and not simply as a detective-story writer...

...He had known L.A...

...Following service in France with the Canadian Army, Chandler entered what he thought was to be his career with a syndicate organized to exploit one of the biggest oil bonanzas in California history...

...He just doesn't walk off the mound and weep"—and adds, "Neither did Chandler...

...before urban sprawl made it a shapeless collection of small cities, seeing, in his oil-company days, the "rough style of first-generation riches...

...For the most part, however, he avoids this kind of over-identification...

...His deficiencies in construction did not worry him, though...

...he was...

...Chandler knew that Farewell, My Lovely, The Lady in the Lake, The Long Goodbye, and other detective fictions were his serious literary work, and this awareness led him into a kind of bifocalism about his reputation...

...He hated to be considered with—or reviewed by—most other crime novelists, yet was honored in his last year to be elected president of the Mystery Writers of America...

...he is an excellent biographer, self-effacing, never competitive...

...The scene in Chandler's works, of course, was Los Angeles...

...c Chandler was never much of a plotter...

...He found that the only character able to move everywhere, on all social levels, was a detective, and in Philip Marlowe he created a true urban hero...

...There were none...

...The real private eye," Chandler wrote, "is a sleazy little drudge from the Burns Agency, a strong-arm guy with no more personality than a blackjack as much moral stature as a stop and go sign.' Marlowe, by contrast, was intelligent and witty...

...He was pleased when W. H. Auden said his books were "serious studies of a criminal milieu" and should be judged "not as escape literature but as works of art," yet he later complained, "Now I look at everything I put down and say to myself, Remember, old boy, this has to be a serious study of a criminal milieu...

...As Chandler began to sell his work, he made no secret of his admiration for and imitation of Hammett, saying he would gladly read one of his novels "even if the last chapter were torn out...

...There was a strong element of deliberate burlesque in Chandler's style, but when that comment was made his life, like Hemingway's, had turned tragic and the parody was unintentional...

...Chandler, on the other hand, wanted to get at the look, the feel, the tone of the liars...

...MacShane has succeeded in persuading us that he was an original, and that is enough...

...Never mind about the classics...

...He got these wrongos exactly right but they remained merely types...

...Destined for the Civil Service, he chucked a dull Admiralty clerkship within six months to write free-lance reviews, articles and a few undistinguished poems for London journals...

...The detective formula can be enjoyed for itself, without any thought of a literary experience, and MacShane's strictness is for the benefit of those mystery-haters who might pass up Chandler...

...This explanation might seem unnecessary now, 17 years after Chandler's death, when there is a lively interest in the relation of vernacular to serious literature and far less solemnity about the dividing line...

...It is just possible," he wrote, "that the tensions in a novel of murder are the simplest and yet most complete pattern of the tensions in which we live...

...By taking the remark straight, MacShane shows some deafness to tone...

...For a private dick you certainly have a wandering kind of mind," says a cop Marlowe calls Hemingway (because "he keeps saying the same thing until you begin to believe it must be good...

...Of course, we go to Chandler for something else...

...Chandler also saw Marlowe, MacShane tells us, as "a catalyst, a means of bringing together other characters who are the real substance of his fiction...

...In Frank MacShane's Life of Raymond Chandler (Dutton, 306 pp., $12.50) we discover that the creator of another celebrated private eye was also touchy about the difference between light reading and the heavy stuff...

...His claims for the works are extensive and occasionally—when he likens them to Shakespeare, Dante, Restoration comedy and the comedia dell'arte—extravagant...

...And his intensity, achieved through a kind of alternating attraction to and repulsion from the old formula, was speccial...

...Marlowe was not realistic...

...He might have remained a tough, efficient and prosperous executive, writing verse in his spare time, if he had not after 10 years fallen into a pattern of drunkenness, sordid affairs with the office help, and bizarre suicide attempts...

...Although he prided himself on his sense of character, his novels are inhabited less by people than by powerful physical presences...

...He "cannibalized" some of his own pulp stories for his novels, changing names, combining characters, lifting descriptions...

...He was educated at a public school that gave him excellent training in the classics, a thorough indoctrination in its moral code (later a guide, in an American translation, for his romantic detective Philip Marlowe), and a juvenile attitude toward women...

...Writers & Writing THE MYSTERY-WRITER AS NOVELIST BY RUTH MATHEWSON When Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a last farewell to Sherlock Holmes in 1927, he noted that turning out "these lighter sketches" for 36 years had not prevented him from writing poetry, novels and plays, though Holmes may have "stood a little in the way of the recognition of my more serious literary work...

...He has only to mention the Jamesian theme of The High Window?control of one person by another—to remind us of what James could do to show violence in a world where scars were invisible and the victims kept walking around...

...Thus MacShane quotes the mystery writer's reaction to the unfavorable reviews of Hemingway's Across the River and into the Trees: "When the champ can no longer throw his hard high one, he throws his heart instead...