Raymond Chandler: Master Crime Writer

On Raymond Chandler's birthday, Jake Kerridge at the British newspaper the Telegraph looks back at the late great crime writer.

When Raymond Chandler began to write for pulp magazines in the Thirties, he planned from the first to smuggle something like literature into them.

Most of these magazines hooked their readers with a mixture of sex and violence – “they have juxtaposed the steely automatic and the frilly panty and found that it pays off”, wrote SJ Perelman. But Chandler wanted to do more than titillate: he had designs on his audience’s subconscious. He planned to sneak into his stories a quality which readers “would not shy off from, perhaps not even know was there … but which would somehow distil through their minds and leave an afterglow”.

When he embarked on full-length novels he was still essentially writing pulp stories with a subversive twist. His hero, Philip Marlowe, may have been as tough as any other Shamus, Dick or Peeper who appeared in Black Mask magazine, but he was also a sensitive soul, the kind of man who would knock out a thug with ease and then start musing about why the guy turned crooked and whether he had a wife and kids. And he was even known to refuse sex: “It’s great stuff, like chocolate sundaes. But there comes a time when you would rather cut your throat.”

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/10195308/Raymond-Chandler-Master-crime-writer.html

Note: To learn more about Raymond Chandler, I recommend Tom Hiney's Raymond Chandler: A Biography.