RAYMOND CHANDLER: A BIOGRAPHY by Tom Hiney (Chatto and Windus GBP16.99 pp310)RAYMOND CHANDLER'S LOS ANGELES by Elizabeth Ward and Alain Silver (Overlook Press $19.95 pp 234) Reviewed by L. J. Hurst |
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Raymond Chandler was a man of two worlds. These worlds varied: Public School Englishman in California; Pulp writer who knew the classics; honorary Angeleno who hated the tackiness of the Strip; clean man in a dirty world. Philip Marlowe went between these worlds and knew it. What we tend to forget, though, is that when Marlowe went from the mansions of the rich down to the slums, Chandler had seen both, too, and that what might seem like fantasy might be real. In RAYMOND CHANDLER'S LOS ANGELES quotations from the novel stand opposite photographs of the locations. Some of these you'll have seen before in books such as Edward Thorpe's CHANDLERTOWN, but others such as the Doheney mansion and its enormous conservatories where orchids might be grown, in which Chandler placed General Sternwood in THE BIG SLEEP, are new to me. As are the photographs of Doheney's oil-wells in the Baldwin Hills. The apparent gothic fantasy of the fiction was closer to the truth. Tom Hiney (now available in paperback as well) has some interesting details of Chandler's life in the '20s when he was an oil executive mixing with the millionaires, but not a lot more than Frank MacShane's earlier biography. In particular, what neither of them seems to have done is investigate whether Chandler was writing about real crime, because it seems a strange way for a man to work: to include details so accurate of places and of general feelings, but to populate them with characters and crimes of no reality at all. Hiney mentions that Chandler insisted that the events of THE BIG SLEEP were realistic, but he does not refer to any incidents in the real world that might have inspired the author. With the royalties from his first novel Chandler could move and soon afterwards (the next page in Hiney, in fact) was staying up in the mountains at Big Bear Lake. This and Lake Arrowhead became Puma and Little Fawn Lakes in which The Lady later found herself. Ward and Silver have the photographs, even of the Dam on which the novel ends. And again we have that near photographic description of Chandler in the location and no way of knowing the inspiration of the crimes he described. Nevertheless, I found great pleasure and benefit in these two books coming together. The one thing I am missing, and perhaps it is my own laziness in not creating my own, is a map of Chandler's southern California. Philip Marlowe was a man of two worlds, and I am still trying to identify the paths that join them.
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Notes:
This review appeared in SHOTS The Magazine for Crime and Mystery |