Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler were the founding fathers of the American school of hard-boiled detective fiction. Hammett was the more hardboiled of the two, with Chandler refining and giving literary credence to the genre - in my opinion his final paragraph in The Big Sleep, beginning "What did it matter where you lay once you were dead . . . ", is one of the most perfect pieces of writing in the English language.
A reclusive man, Chandler left no wife or children after his death in 1959. Nor did he have brothers, sisters, or even any close relatives. Rootless, he clocked up over 100 addresses in the course of his life. A true loner, he once warned one correspondent, "to know me in the flesh is to pass on to better things." However, he was a compulsive letter-writer. Many of his letters were written late at night, or rather spoken into a Dictaphone to be typed up in the morning by his Mexican secretary, Juanita Messick. They range over many subjects, but what comes through most is his hatred of the spurious in the literary world, his dislike of bad grammar and convoluted syntax, his abhorrence of sycophantic praise, his wit, his humour and his dryly amused view of his own life as he was living it.
Chandler was born in Chicago in 1888, to an American Quaker father and an Irish Quaker mother. When he was seven his mother left her alcoholic husband and took Raymond (her only child) to live with her relatives in Waterford. Later, an uncle paid for his schooling in an English public school, Dulwich College, but refused to pay his way through university. Instead Raymond spent a year in France and Germany, before returning to London and a succession of rather nondescript jobs.
In 1912 he returned alone to America, served in the first World War as an ordinary soldier, got his accounting degree and went to work in the oil business in California. He also married an ex-model, Pearl Eugenie Hurlburt, nicknamed Cissie, who was 17 years older than her husband. There is reason to believe that Chandler did not know the age discrepancy was so large, for Cissie had altered her birth date on the marriage certificate by 10 years.
In spite of the difference in their ages and the fact that they had separate rooms, the marriage proved to be enduring. Chandler did go off on drunken binges with other women, but he never ceased to love Cissie and, after she died in 1954, he wrote most movingly of her: "She was the beat of my heart for 30 years. She was the music heard faintly on the edge of sound . . . For 30 years, 10 months and two days, she was the light of my life, my whole ambition. Anything else I did was just the fire for her to warm her hands at. That is all there is to say . . . "
He also made an attempt to shoot himself in the shower, but somehow managed to miss. His last years were sad and alcohol filled. Part of the time he spent in London, where he was lionised by a number of influential women, among them the Sunday Times's film critic, Dilys Powell. He had to wear gloves because of a skin condition, and these white gloves, combined with his old-world, stately demeanour, lent a sort of shabby dignity to his dying fall.
Professor Frank MacShane, who died two years ago, has already edited a selection of Chandler's letters. Using this volume, and an earlier one called Raymond Chandler Speaking, Chandler's biographer Tom Hiney has now brought out a further collection. By means of a linking narrative, he elucidates the various shades of Chandler's life, the alcoholism, the struggle to become a writer, the odd marriage, the wryly amused self-assessments, but it is in the letters themselves that the strongest voice is heard.
Chandler believed that his Dulwich College education helped him realise that American English in the 1930s was still "a fluid language, like Shakespearean English" which could be shaped into "new words, new meanings for old words". However, he did not claim to have invented the hard-boiled type of detective novel, but gave due credit to others in the pulp magazine writing field, and especially to Dashiell Hammett, of whom he wrote, "Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people who do it for a reason, not just to provide a corpse".
Although irritated by the tendency of serious critics to look down on the crime genre, he did not take himself or his writing too seriously. In the 1940s he went to Hollywood and worked in the studio system and, although quite aware of the manner in which writers were treated by the studio bosses, refused to condemn a system that paid him handsomely for his work.
His novels featuring Philip Marlowe were not immediate critical or popular successes, but by the late 1940s the books, and the films made from them, had turned him into a celebrity. He enjoyed his fame, but loneliness was still his constant companion, and he took more and more recourse to banishing it in alcohol. But no matter how low his life became, the letters still retained their wry humour.
In his last one, written some four weeks before he died, Chandler was again attempting to define his hero, Philip Marlowe. The word "lonely" figures a number of times, and in the final summing up: "I see him always in a lonely street, in lonely rooms, puzzled but never quite defeated", who is to say that it is not really himself he is talking about? A remarkable man: a remarkable volume of letters.
Vincent Banville is a writer and critic