“I do a great deal of research – particularly in the apartments of tall blondes.”
After a big sleep (most of the titles being first released in the 1940s), the cinematic works of crime author Raymond Chandler are being celebrated in a festival at the IFI this month. Alongside screenings of such classics as ‘Double Indemnity’ and ‘The Big Sleep’, the IFI will host a talk by film academic and critic Adrian Wooton on September 16th, entitled ‘Chandleresque’. This offers a chance to learn more about the originator of the crime film as we know it, an author who claimed that ‘the more you reason the less you create’. The CEO of Film London and author of a forthcoming biography, Wooton spoke with Totally Dublin about Chandler and his work, and the role he played in the creation of a fictional and cinematic genre.
Chandler’s name is among the most prominent of mystery authors, and also in crime cinema, but it’s not often you hear much about the man himself.
Absolutely, he is up there among the great American crime writers, but people seem to know relatively little about his life. With new bits and pieces of information surfacing about him, along with the 50-year anniversary of his death coming up, it seemed a good opportunity to discuss his work. I’ve been doing pieces for various magazines around the world, and we’re organising a big Raymond Chandler day in Italy in December. He’s surprisingly popular in translation.
That’s odd, considering that Chandler is so much defined by his language and writing style.
He was originally translated into French and Italian, but the versions were quite heavily edited and bastardised, quite crudely translated. But new translations have appeared, even now in Japan. Possibly because it was the famous author Murakami who did it-he’s a massive Chandler fan, he’s done three or four translations which have become bestsellers because of his name- but also because they’re so much more accurate. He spent enormous amounts of time trying to render them in a language faithful to the original.
Its that distinct style, which elevated his work above it’s ‘pulp’ origins.
Yes, also they’re very witty, and that’s something that really transcends time. He puts in such black comedy and satire, the wit that comes out of Philip Marlowe’s mouth is so very barbed that people are amazed and don’t know what to expect, and discover that he’s actually incredibly funny. That’s the thing with his books; even though they are very much rooted in the 1930s, they’re very perceptive, complex and very dark, and so they’ve dated well.
Many of his lines are familiar to people who haven’t read or even heard of Chandler, for example the line ‘she was a blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a church window’.
Yes, many of his descriptions have almost become epithets in their own right. He’s eminently quotable, even just his titles such as ‘Farewell My Lovely’. And the way he creates Marlowe’s persona; there’s that famous paragraph about how all he needs is a decent meal, a drink, a vacation and life insurance, and what Marlowe has is a coat, a hat and a gun, so off he goes to work. The way he renders that and describes characters, such as the famous line in Farewell My Lovely – ‘Moose Molloy looked about as incongruous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food’ – that grotesquery of description has never been matched, by any other crime writer.
Do you think Chandler’s British education had a role in his mastery of language, that combination of high-mindedness and pulp sensibilities?
I would be certain it was. Chandler’s early life and his later life are such a great contradiction.
It seems like he had to teach himself low culture, almost.
Yes he did, he was a terrible snob! He had a classical public school education, and passed the civil services exam in the UK. He said that he had to learn, almost as a stranger, the American vernacular, because he had been brought up and wrote and thought in a particular way. And its extraordinary in that his great strength and talent was in fact dialogue, and writing in the American vernacular. That’s why he had such success at the movies; people like Billy Wilder wanted that dialogue in their scripts. He excelled at first person narration, he had an ear for language and an ear for authentic Americana that no other writer did.
Chandler said he actually revelled in limitations of pulp writing. Was it really so stigmatised, as something debauched or dangerous?
When he started writing, certainly American pulp fiction was only in its beginnings. Probably one of his great legacies is that he forced people to take it seriously, through the way in which he wrote about it. People credit Dashiell Hammett with being the seminal originator of the form, but the thing is Hammett never articulated it or discussed it. Chandler actually theorized about it, he wrote about it in his letters and also in essay form, famously in ‘The Simple Art of Murder’, describing how Hammett took murder away from the drawing room and put it down on the level of the streets, amongst real people who had real reasons for committing it.
In a way Chandler’s very stylised world takes crime fiction back to it’s roots, with Edgar Allen Poe and his Rue Morgue stories.
Yes, and it’s also based around this romantic notion of the ‘knight’, like in Mallory, even.. Chandler created a white knight in an urban contemporary setting; in a sense the castle he is interrogating is Los Angeles, somewhere he loves and loathes at the same time. Chandler understood the framework and blueprint he was creating. Ironically enough it was in the UK that his work earned him respect , from the public and from other authors. It was taken more seriously there than it ever was in America.
Could the European and specifically British fascination with Chandler‘s work have been that it afforded a glimpse into LA? The city plays such a big role in his books.
Definitely. For British readers, the wonderful thing about Chandler’s work, apart from the brilliance of his description and prose, was its exoticism. He connected us in literary prose to the America that could otherwise only be seen on cinema screens. He exemplifies that allure of America, in particular the glamour of Los Angeles, a place a long way away which the majority of Europeans had never seen.
The strange thing is that crime is all about ‘gritty realism’, and yet the world of gangsters is completely hidden away from normal people. In a way it’s just as rarefied as literature about the aristocracy.
It’s interesting with Chandler how he employs elements of realism. He would take parts of his plots, such as the police corruption, from newspaper headlines in LA. The language is language he heard on the streets, and the settings and locales are very real. Chandler had a topographical understanding of Los Angeles that was second to none, mainly because he himself lived like a nomad in LA, moving 35 times in his time there. Because of money problems he never stayed anywhere more than six months. From moving across the whole landscape of LA, he was left with an understanding of LA, as both a geographical and mythological place.
Keeping in mind people like Lana Turner, Thelma Todd and Frank Sinatra, you have to wonder just how much interaction Hollywood and the world of crime really had, how much they overlapped.
Of course, LA in the 1940s and fifties was a rich, sexy and extremely corrupt place, and while films weren’t necessarily bankrolled by the mafia like the casinos in Vegas were, they were definitely interconnected. , LA was a focal point of organised crime. California was a rising economic powerhouse, the biggest cityscape being built in the world at the time, so it was an incredibly fertile place in which to write. Others had written about LA before, but he was the first to truly capture an atmosphere of the contemporary city, in a realistic context.
Was Chandler’s life in Hollywood really like say that of the protagonist of Sunset Boulevard, the life of a ‘Hollywood hack’? You read about pitches being thrown at writers, films being written in a week.
A lot of others did that, but Chandler was unusual in that he was one of the few writers with sufficient originality and distinction. He was very puritanical and exacting in the way he thought and worked, putting time into his work. He did some adaptations of his own scripts, but he was also handed assignments to write adaptations of other people’s work, such as Double Indemnity.
Did Chandler not see authors such as James M. Cain as a rival, and resent having to adapt their work?
Not exactly. He certainly didn’t like Cain’s books very much (he was quite prurient, and didn’t like the sex and violence), but at that point in his life, though he’d written a number of very great novels, he was still living close to the breadline. He hadn’t earned much from the movies at all, so when he was offered the gig in 1943 it was absolutely manna from heaven.
Wilder must have been very famous at this stage.
Wilder was nowhere near as famous as he would be ten years later when he made Sunset Boulevard, but he had a number of great works behind him and was regarded as a Hollywood ‘power’, someone they knew was going to be one of the biggest directors ever, so the studios were prepared to give him anything he wanted. So he was already very powerful, by the time he met Raymond Chandler, and during the film Chandler earned more money than he had earned in his life up till that point.
Not the best thing for a known alcoholic with suicidal tendencies…
It wasn’t a problem at the beginning; when he first began his work in Hollywood, Chandler hadn’t had a drink for ten years. During that first decade when he was beginning to write the short stories and The Lady in the Lake and The Big Sleep he didn’t drink a drop. He went to Hollywood, earned an enormous amount of money and became very, very famous. All his books started to be bought up by Hollywood, and that had a damaging effect. Previously he had led a very solitary life with his wife with very little social interaction, then suddenly he becomes the hottest writer in Hollywood, is feted all over town, falls off the wagon and starts womanizing again, which he’d not done since the 1920s. Hollywood has this disastrous effect on his physical wellbeing. Even though he carried on for another five years, working on some very successful films, he didn’t really ever get back onto the path of sobriety, struggling with drink for the rest of his life.
The strange thing about Marlowe, and about gumshoe characters in general, is that as heroes they’re in no way easy to identify with. They make a point of being brooding and cynical and flawed.. Do you think Chandler’s own life contributed to this embittered first person voice in his work?
Chanler said himself that he was the hero of his own books; Marlowe was an idealised , good-looking Raymond Chandler, and what came out of Marlowe’s mouth is the way that Chandler thought. He’s this savage, satirical, sardonic guy. But Marlowe was younger, fitter and more attractive than him, an idealised form of the author. Of course Chandler himself was quite old, not really getting started until he was aged 40, and he was nearly fifty when he arrived at Hollywood. So he projects his idealistic fantasies onto Marlowe.
When do you think was Chandler’s peak? What films ultimately define him?
I think it’s actually the first film, Double Indemnity. That’s the really essential ‘Marlowe at the Movies’.
It’s a shame it’s not his own book
It really is, but then Chandler never wrote a good adaptation of his own work. As a scriptwriter, Double Indemnity and The Blue Dahlia are the two best scripts that Chandler ever wrote. Still the fact remains that Murder, My Sweet and The Big Sleep are masterpieces, even though Chandler didn’t write the screenplays. William Faulkner and Lee Bracket, the scriptwriters on The Big Sleep, were friends of Chandler’s and were incredibly faithful to his originals, with whole chunks of dialogue just ripped straight out.
Creating a book about Chandler’s life, you must have seen all the locations of his books and his life in general.. Is the picture you get of his life in any way like his fiction?
Not like his fiction at all! Certainly he uses locales, and uses his own sensibilities and his feelings about Los Angeles, but he didn’t ever use was elements of his own biography directly. His personal life was kept closed off. closed off. Chandler led a quite sedentary life with his wife, who was 18 years older than him. They weren’t a typical couple, they didn’t have loads of friends or have people round to dinner. When he was at home he basically just worked and looked after his wife, who was increasingly infirm, and communicated largely through letters. There are several great collection of Chandler’s exchanges with his friends and with publishers which are really quite brilliant, they give a great flavour of his life.
Do you think Chandler himself has had a direct influence on modern cinema, or is it more about the generic qualities of noir and of crime films?
His legacy casts a very long shadow over the entire crime genre. I don’t think any American crime author can escape the fact that, if you write in the first person from the perspective of a detective, and in an urban environment, in some sense you are echoing Chandler’s work. His novels are so deeply embedded in the DNA of crime fiction, it’s utterly inescapable. There’s Robert B. Parker, James Elroy… a whole stream of American novelists you can cite. Its also very much there in film, though it’s more complicated. There’s both pastiche and influence. One of the most obvious examples modern examples is Sin City.
Or Brick, or Veronica Mars…
Yes, Brick is very clearly lifted from Hammett, but set inside a school. There’s that cliché, whenever you here a voiceover in a film, in ads or on television, or as soon as you hear a lonely saxophone…
Or see someone vaguely resembling Veronica Lake!
Yes! Then you know someone’s trying to conjure an atmosphere similar to the world view which Chandler exemplifies. At its best, when its used in a film like Blade Runner, or indeed in Sin City or in LA Confidential, it can work very well. The thing that is difficult, the great contradiction, is that it can work very well in period drama, or set in some future time, but it doesn’t work, or is very difficult to work , in a contemporary milieu.
What would you say is the closest thing to a straight-up Chandleresque film nowadays, one which isn’t just pastiche?
Contemporary examples are very difficult to cite; if you look at most American crime films, there are very few. I can think of the Paul Newman film ‘Twilight’, which deliberately used that PI milieu, but in a contemporary setting. But really when I think of films that are (truly) Chandleresque, its always period films such as Chinatown or LA Confidential, which evoke that certain aura. At their worst such films are just clichés, but at their best they can very quickly evoke something, in a kind of shorthand. It’s extraordinary, that power and legacy he left drilled down so deep in the American psyche.
