The World of Raymond Chandler

I was excited to find this book in my box this morning. There are Chandler biographies, of course, but Barry Day has chosen to let Chandler introduce himself to the reader--through words he wrote in letters, in books, in essays. 

I fell in love with Raymond Chandler's writing in college when I took a detective fiction seminar, in which we read The Big Sleep and "Red Wind." But it wasn't until I taught The Long Goodbye that I realized his brilliance.

Chandler himself suggested that dialogue was his strength, and it was--dialogue so true and clever that it stayed with you long after you closed the book. 

My husband and I used to quote a tiny passage of dialogue from The Long Goodbye--an exchange between Marlowe and a gangster named Mendy Menendez. Mendy approaches him, dressed like a card shark but looking a bit more dangerous, and verifies his identity.

"You Marlowe?" 

"So?"

This tiny exchange captures Marlowe's personality--and the saucy style of the hard-boiled genre which Chandler helped to create.

Chandler's own life sounds as though it had some of the melancholy that the reader can always feel in Marlowe--the lone moralist in the wicked streets of Los Angeles. Much of his joy was derived from what he created at the typewriter, and the joy came from the actual act of creation, not necessarily from the promotion that followed.

I am looking forward to reading this book and re-connecting with the genius that was Chandler.

More Great Mystery Beginnings

This book is a favorite, and one that I taught for a few years when I was lucky enough to teach a mystery seminar. See if you recognize it:

"The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers. The parking lot attendant had brought the car out and he was still holding the door open becuase Terry Lennox's left foot was still dangling outside, as if he had forgotten he had one. He had a young-looking face but his hair was bone white. You could tell by his eyes that he was plastered to the hairline, but otherwise he looked like any other nice young guy in a dinner jacket who had been spending too much money in a joint that exists for that purpose and no other.

There was a girl beside him. Her hair was a lovely shade of dark red and she had a distant smile on her lips and over her shoulders she had a blue mink that almost made the Rolls Royce look like just another automobile. It didn't quite. Nothing can.

The attendant was the usual half-tough character in a white coat with the name of the restaurant stitched across the front of it in red. He was getting fed up.

"Look, mister," he said with an edge to his voice, "would you mind a whole lot pulling your leg in the car so I can kind of shut the door? Or should I open it all the way so you can fall out?"

The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back. It didn't bother him enough to give him the shakes. At The Dancers they get the sort of people that disillusion you about what a lot of golfing money can do for the personality.

A low-swung foreign speedster with no top drifted into the parking lot and a man got out of it and used the dash lighter on a long cigarette. He was wearing a pullover check shirt, yellow slacks, and riding boots. He strode off trailing clouds of incense, not even bothering to look toward the Rolls Royce. He probably thought it was corny. At the foot of the steps up to the terrace he paused to put a monocle in his eye.

The girl said with a nice burst of charm: "I have a wonderful idea, darling. Why don't we just take a cab to your place and get your convertible out? It's such a wonderful night for a run up the coast to Montecito. I know some people there who are throwing a dance around the pool.

The white-haired lad said politely: "Awfully sorry, but I don't have it any more. I was compelled to sell it." From his voice and articulation you wouldn't have known he had anything stronger than an orange juice to drink.

"Sold it, darling? How do you mean?" She slid away from him on the seat, but her voice slid away a lot farther than that.

"I mean I had to. For eating money."

"Oh, I see." A slice of spumoni wouldn't have melted on her now. . . . "

From THE LONG GOODBYE
Raymond Chandler (1953)

Mark Coggins on Raymond Chandler, Hard Boiled Mysteries and Cool Science Projects

Sharing a birthday with the great Alfred Hitchcock is mystery writer Mark Coggins, whose work has been favorably compared to that of Chandler and Hammett, and who has a new August Riordan mystery coming out soon. He recently visited Oxford University to study the original manuscript of Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye.

Thanks for chatting with me, Mark.

Your first book, The Immortal Game, was nominated for several awards and features a detective named August Riordan. How did you come to write the book?
The Immortal Game started out as a short story for a trade paperback quarterly called The New Black Mask. August Riordan’s first appearance in print had been in another story for The New Black Mask called “There’s No Such Thing as Private Eyes” and I’d written The Immortal Game as a follow-up, but unfortunately the publication folded before the story made it into print. This was in the mid-1980s.

I put the short story in a drawer for about ten years, and when I found the time again to write seriously around 1996 or 1997, I pulled it out and used it as the basis of the novel. Of course, it was much expanded from the story.

Ah, the old put-it-in-the-drawer-for-while-trick. :)

Loren D. Estleman compared you to Dashiell Hammett; NPR says you have given the hard-boiled form “fresh life.” Did you expect all this praise? Be honest. :)
I was completely taken aback. Loren was extremely generous in the blurb he gave me for the book and the NPR review and several others, such as the one that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, came as shockers. I didn’t expect the book to be reviewed, much less favorably reviewed.

A nice surprise, then! How did you choose the name August? Is it your favorite month, or perhaps were you inspired by the adjective august, which would suggest something “baronial, brilliant, exalted, or grandiose?”
Well, I knew I wanted the last name of the character to be Riordan as a sort of homage to a character in Raymond Chandler’s Farewell My Lovely. For the same reason, I also knew that I wanted the first name to start with A. I finally picked August because I thought it was somewhat unusual and I liked the ring of it. And the fact that I was born in August didn’t hurt!

Cool. You’ve written three books and are about to publish a fourth. Are they all August Riordan books?
They are, but the second one—-which is being reprinted by Bleak House Books this month—-is a little different. It’s titled Vulture Capital and, as you might guess, has to do with the venture capital industry. Unlike the other books, Vulture is not told from Riordan’s (first person) point of view. It’s told from the point of view of a venture capitalist named Ted Valmont in an objective third person point of view. This is the same point of view that Dashiell Hammett used in The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key.

Do you foresee many books in this series?
I’m in conversation with Bleak House Books for another two book contract, so if that goes through, we would have at least two more. Chandler wrote seven Philip Marlowe novels. It would be fun to do at least that many, but I don’t have aspirations to do a full alphabet full of them like Sue Grafton. I’m just not that prolific.

Your books seem to incorporate a lot of computery-things, lots of references to the new technology. Is this because you have “worked with a number of Silicon Valley computer and venture capital firms?”
Yes, my day job is in computers and software, so I’m leveraging the knowledge I picked up from working in the industry. However, Riordan himself is quite a technophobe. Part of the tension in the books comes from having him deal with technology that he would not use or be comfortable with.

A while back I interviewed Keith Raffel, who also writes about Silicon Valley in Dot.Dead. Do you know Keith? Or is the valley not as small as I think it is?
I do know Keith. Vulture Capital and his book are often compared because they both have plots that have to do with start-ups. I also co-founded a software start-up that was in the same “space” (customer relationship management) as the one that Keith co-founded. His was a lot more successful than mine, however!

All that said, I actually didn’t meet Keith until his book came out. Which means, I guess, that the mystery community is even more tightly knit than the Silicon Valley one.

You wrote an in-depth analysis of Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, for which you studied 200 pages of Chandler’s original typescript at the Bodleian Library at Oxford. This brings up many questions: (Here's Mark at Oxford).



First, did you go to Oxford specifically to study Chandler, or was that merely a by-product of the trip?
I had heard about the existence of the Chandler archives (and the fact that unused manuscript pages from The Long Goodbye were in them) from Ridley Pearson. So, yes, I did go to Oxford primarily to see the archives and the pages.

Did it intimidate you to hold the work of this great—and greatly loved—writer?
It didn’t so much intimidate me as leave me a awestruck. It was a great thrill.

What prompted you to do such a detailed analysis of the drafts of The Long Goodbye as compared with the final version?
While he hadn’t studied the pages carefully, Ridley had told me that the material in the archives had not been used in the final book. He theorized that the pages had been cut at the request of the publisher to shorten the length of the book. The Long Goodbye is a long PI novel, but from my reading of the Chandler biographies, I didn’t think that could have been the reason for the cuts. My original motivation was to see if I could find out why the material had been cut—-and to see exactly what happened in the “missing” scenes.

You suggest that some people might not choose this as Chandler’s greatest work, but that you would (as would I). Why might some people not choose it? Why would they, in your opinion, be wrong?
I do think it’s Chandler’s best book, but I think it’s fair to say that it is a book that’s shorter on thrills, wise-cracks and plot twists than, say, The Big Sleep or Farewell My Lovely. Marlowe is more world-weary and mature in Goodbye. It’s a more somber book because of it and I think that may influence some readers’ opinions of it.

I think it’s the best for exactly the reasons I outlined in the article. I think Chandler succeeded in writing a literary novel, rather than just a genre novel.

Okay, enough on Chandler and back to Coggins: One of the things posted on your website is, surprisingly, a second grade report card, on which it looks as though you got a B. What’s up with that? Where was your initiative?
I wasn’t exactly the best student in grade school, and wasn’t even particularly interested in English or writing until college. I was much more interested in “science,” which to me meant building model airplanes and blowing them up with firecrackers.

That is fun science! You stated that your life “really began with the third grade.” My son starts third grade this fall; can I assume his life will now begin? Is this the age of reason?
Our family moved around quite a bit during the time I spent in kindergarten and grades one and two, and I think that’s why I don’t have very clear memories of those years. I said that simply because I can recall more details about friends and activities from that grade forward.

You’ve been a keynote speaker at computer events; have you also taught writing?
In a small way. I’ve taught at the Book Passage Mystery Writer conference, as well as the Murder in the Grove writers’ conference.

You live in San Francisco; I have heard many things about the legendary beauty of this place (my parents honeymooned there in 1956). What’s the best thing about it from your perspective?
I like the fact that it’s a “real city,” but one that’s not so large and overwhelming that you can never know it all or find it difficult to get around. I also love the rich history and the interesting architecture. That coupled with the natural beauty of the location and the energy and vibrancy in the arts and industry make it an exciting place to live. I never feel like I’m missing out on anything in San Francisco.

What are you reading now?
I just finished Memory Babe by Gerald Nicosia and Off the Road by Carolyn Cassady. They are both books about Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation. I’m doing research on Kerouac for my next book, tentatively titled The Dead Beat Scroll, which is about a new Kerouac manuscript that turns up when a house in San Francisco in which Kerouac lived and worked is demolished.

Sounds great! How can readers find out more about Mark Coggins, who may well be this generation’s Chandler?
You are being far too kind! If I could write half as well as Chandler, I’d be a happy man. But to find out more about me and my work, check out my web site:

http://www.markcoggins.com

my blog:

http://riordansdesk.blogspot.com

and my publisher’s site:

http://www.bleakhousebooks.com

Thanks, Mark! I look forward to reading your books, and you've inspired me to read more Chandler, as well.

That Marlowe Magic

Here's Bogey playing Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep. It's a great picture, although Humphrey Bogart is the last person I would have cast as Marlowe, who I picture as an entirely different guy when I read Raymond Chandler's books.

It doesn't really matter who plays him, I suppose, as long as they try to capture that Marlowe mystique, that Marlowe manner. But to be honest I don't think any actor has quite captured it. My mother-in-law once insisted that Robert Mitchum did, but he was a particular favorite of hers; I have to disagree even with that assessment.

But I'll bet there's a man out there who can capture what Chandler created on the page, that magical Marlowe combination of grit and style. Oddly, one of my favorite Marlowe lines is sort of a throwaway line--it doesn't have anything to do with the plot, but it has everything to do with why I love Marlowe. It's in The Long Goodbye, when a lackey of the gangster Mendy Menendez approaches Marlowe and they have this dialogue:

"In the morning I shaved again and dressed and drove downtown in the usual way and parked in the usual place and if the parking lot attendant happened to know that I was an important public character he did a top job hiding it. I went upstairs and along the corridor and got keys out to unlock my door. A dark smooth-looking guy watched me.

'You Marlowe?'

'So?'

'Stick around," he said. 'A guy wants to see you.' He unplastered his back from the wall and strolled off languidly."

Marlowe's narration is perfect enough, but it's that quirky "so?" that won me over the first time I read this book. My husband loves it, too, and we say it to each other all the time. It's what I like to think of as the Marlowe attitude, and I've decided to adopt it this Monday as I face the world: my students, my colleagues, etc.

"You didn't get all our research papers graded?"

"So?"

(image: http://www.dialmformax.com/images/bogart.jpg)