It's Long Goodbye, not Last Goodbye. After that there is Playback, which he finished, and Poodle Springs, which he did not.
One interesting thing is how uninterested in plot he was. Chandler himself said, I think in a letter, that he didn't care about plot; the only reason to write, the only thing enduring about any writing, is style. His letters are awesome by the way.
The only one of his novels that really has a good plot is Farewell My Lovely because of the twist ending (the same twist is reused in Long Goodbye). There is a famous story of Howard Hawks shooting Big Sleep and halfway through he realizes that they don't know who killed the chauffer and he can't find the reveal in the script, so he has someone reread the book and they can't find the answer either, so he telegrams Chandler who is travelling, WHO KILLED CHAUFFER? to which Chandler responds HAVE NO IDEA. Or something like that.
You could compare Marlowe to Sam Spade. Spade consistently gets the better of everyone whereas Marlowe is always getting ambushed and beaten up. Hammett said that Spade was not based on a real detective; he is a composite of the self-image of the awesome tough guy that all the real detectives Hammett worked with at Pinkerton's thought they were and/or wanted to be. Sensitive, intellectual, loner, chess-playing Marlowe is clearly Chandler himself.
The contrast between Chandler and Hammet is also interesting. Hammett's books are kind of out there, borderline fantastic at times. Chandler's are much more grounded, more realistic. They also move more slowly.
Chandler really invented LA noir, which is a genre that is still going. The main reason was simply because he lived there, but he came to love the contrast between the sunny exterior and the (supposedly) sordid interior.
You could also mention his much older wife (18 years) and how she misled him about her age, and then when he figured it out, he misled everyone else. He started to spiral after she died.
You could mention his screenwriting, of which the best was Double Indemnity. He never wrote the screenplays of his own books but wrote or contributed to others. There is another story, I think about Blue Dahlia but I might be off, that he had a horrible case of writer's block and couldn't finish and they were way behind schedule and losing money, and so he proposed to the producer or director that he finish it drunk. Approval secured, he did just that.
The Black Dahlia is of course the second-most famous LA murder case of all time, which happened a year after that film and was named for it. It inspired the career of James Ellroy and remains, as far as I know, unsolved. Sort of California's Jack the Ripper case.
Finally, as I am sure you know, "Bay City" is really Santa Monica and was apparently notoriously corrupt back then. The person who first gave me a copy of Chandler around 1994 was a multigeneration Angeleno whose father was LAPD and he said everyone knew Santa Monica was a snake pit then. I'm not sure when it turned around.
There's a fellow named Steve Hodel, a former LA detective, who makes an extensive and just about foolproof case that his father, George Hodel, was the man who killed and dismembered Elizabeth Short. He deserves tremendous respect for pursuing the case to its conclusion.
I believe there was a "Scouring of the Shire" in Santa Monica right after WWII in which war veterans came home and were not pleased by the corrupt cops who among their various sins got 4F exemptions from the draft. The vets took over and imposed a more honest code.
Something similar but top down happened at the same time in Los Angeles where the new police chief William Parker cleaned up the LAPD and made it much more professional. Of course that led to other problems, such as postwar LAPD's notorious lack of friendliness since they didn't have their hand out for bribes anymore.
Parker had been a Marine Corps general during WWII.
A famous Scouring of the Shire took place in a small town in Tennessee in c. 1946 where honest vets overthrew the crooked local political machine by counting the ballots in the jail under the full light of publicity.
The night before last I watched an old episode of The Rockford files. It took place in iBay City but it was obviously Santa Monica and the cops were quite corrupt.
He was a business executive involved in the free-wheeling and bareknuckled Long Beach oil boom where he got many insights into the underbelly of Southern California.
There may be connections, possibly only indirect, with figures like oil baron Edward Doheny, Hollywood mobsters Johnny Roselli or Sydney Korshak, or even the Orange County shenanigans that may have later led to the death of Myford Irvine.
Make sure you cover his famous (and exceptionally witty) essay, “The Simple Art of Murder”, wherein Chandler goes into great detail about the deficiencies on the “English School” of mystery and what Hammett invented and Chandler perfected in their respective novels. Might be worth mentioning writers, notably Patricia Highsmith, who tried to tart up the Christie-like mystery by bringing in elements of the Lost Generation, but she failed miserably; it seems to me that it was much more the American writers who converted to the Hammett/Chandler style and approach (Ross McDonald was an early acolyte).
And spend some time on The Long Goodbye, Chandler’s best and penultimate novel, that is right up there with anything from Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, etc. I find it interesting that it was written in La Jolla, not LA, but LA still drips off the page.
I'm not sure I agree with this. And I don't hate Long Goodbye. I recall an Andy Ferguson essay in the Weekly Standard (I know, I know) that praised Chandler but called Long Goodbye his "worst book." I don't think it's Chandler's worst, but it is long and self-indulgent without much plot. I prefer the earlier books. I think Farewell is the best, with Little Sister and Lady in the Lake also very good. And High Window. I like the middle three a lot, even though they don't get discussed much. For me, Playback is the weakest.
To each his own, but there’s been a lot of praise for it over the years, and not just from Chandler fans - Anthony Boucher, not a Chandler fan, said in the NYT in 1953 that “Although it’s one of the longest private-eye novels ever written, It is also one of the best–and may well attract readers who normally shun even the leaders in the field.”
He was ironically the tortured artist of the group -- Dashiel Hammett was the workhorse, the incredibly popular nine-to-fiver who treated it like a job. Chandler was the tortured artist, the drunk, missing deadlines. Also, Hammett came first: He was the established titan in the noir field when Chandler entered it, and Chandler used his work as a model for his own.
Today, they're clearly the two titans of the genre, but it's interesting the difference in their approaches. One focused on the overall plotring and minimalist prose, the other on individual scenes and how they flowed with an almost lyrical quality. One defined a a genre. The other tested it to its limits. The equivelant now would be Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino, maybe? Either way, an interesting discussion on creativity and genre.
A novelist should describe characters’ looks however he wants, but that’s only for the book. Hollywood is going to cast whichever actors are popular and/or talented, so it will ignore the description, and rightly so. Bogart looked little like the fictional Marlowe, and even less like Spade, but his portrayals were very successful
SoCal was still dotted with oil wells when I arrived in '68. I never thought about where the oil went until recently. Were they all connected to tanks by underground pipelines?
It's well-known to anyone who's a fan of Chandler, but maybe worth mentioning for casuals that the cult movie The Big Lebowski is an obvious note-for-note homage to The Big Sleep?
Specifically the opening scene, wherein an ailing (usually wheelchair-bound) elderly millionaire offers our hero a case, usually in a greenhouse or near a roaring fire, and then afterwards, our hero has a chat with the butler and a femme fatale. Not only does The Big Lewbowski take almost every aspect of this set-up, but I tend to see conscious echoes of in a lot of modern noir, from Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose to Prometheus to Warren Ellis's Desolation Jones. The more basic version of this is the gumshoe in his office when "a dame walks in" -- this is proof the writer has never actually read a noir. But the elderly millionaire summoning our hero is like a nod that the writer knows enough to borrow from the best.
Chandler's short stories, all of which were written for pulp mags and precede Big Sleep, are worth reading. "Trouble Is My Business" is probably the best one. The famous, oft-quoted line about the Santa Ana winds is from one of the stories, which are collected in the Library of America edition of Chandler (as are the essays such as "Simple Art of Murder" and "Ten Per Cent of Your Life").
“There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.”
He actually loved her and was depressed for a long time after her death. I think one of the reasons men marry significantly more mature women is if they consciously or subconsciously don't want to have kids. Back in the days without chemical contraceptives.
OK, sometimes they just fall in love with their French teacher. Like Macron with his Brigitte.
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It's Long Goodbye, not Last Goodbye. After that there is Playback, which he finished, and Poodle Springs, which he did not.
One interesting thing is how uninterested in plot he was. Chandler himself said, I think in a letter, that he didn't care about plot; the only reason to write, the only thing enduring about any writing, is style. His letters are awesome by the way.
The only one of his novels that really has a good plot is Farewell My Lovely because of the twist ending (the same twist is reused in Long Goodbye). There is a famous story of Howard Hawks shooting Big Sleep and halfway through he realizes that they don't know who killed the chauffer and he can't find the reveal in the script, so he has someone reread the book and they can't find the answer either, so he telegrams Chandler who is travelling, WHO KILLED CHAUFFER? to which Chandler responds HAVE NO IDEA. Or something like that.
You could compare Marlowe to Sam Spade. Spade consistently gets the better of everyone whereas Marlowe is always getting ambushed and beaten up. Hammett said that Spade was not based on a real detective; he is a composite of the self-image of the awesome tough guy that all the real detectives Hammett worked with at Pinkerton's thought they were and/or wanted to be. Sensitive, intellectual, loner, chess-playing Marlowe is clearly Chandler himself.
The contrast between Chandler and Hammet is also interesting. Hammett's books are kind of out there, borderline fantastic at times. Chandler's are much more grounded, more realistic. They also move more slowly.
Chandler really invented LA noir, which is a genre that is still going. The main reason was simply because he lived there, but he came to love the contrast between the sunny exterior and the (supposedly) sordid interior.
You could also mention his much older wife (18 years) and how she misled him about her age, and then when he figured it out, he misled everyone else. He started to spiral after she died.
You could mention his screenwriting, of which the best was Double Indemnity. He never wrote the screenplays of his own books but wrote or contributed to others. There is another story, I think about Blue Dahlia but I might be off, that he had a horrible case of writer's block and couldn't finish and they were way behind schedule and losing money, and so he proposed to the producer or director that he finish it drunk. Approval secured, he did just that.
The Black Dahlia is of course the second-most famous LA murder case of all time, which happened a year after that film and was named for it. It inspired the career of James Ellroy and remains, as far as I know, unsolved. Sort of California's Jack the Ripper case.
Finally, as I am sure you know, "Bay City" is really Santa Monica and was apparently notoriously corrupt back then. The person who first gave me a copy of Chandler around 1994 was a multigeneration Angeleno whose father was LAPD and he said everyone knew Santa Monica was a snake pit then. I'm not sure when it turned around.
There's a fellow named Steve Hodel, a former LA detective, who makes an extensive and just about foolproof case that his father, George Hodel, was the man who killed and dismembered Elizabeth Short. He deserves tremendous respect for pursuing the case to its conclusion.
Yes, now that you mention it, I recall reading or seeing something like that. I think, however, that officially the LAPD still considers it unsolved.
That's correct, but if you read Steve Hodel's books (which I recommend) it will be clear why it's unlikely the case will ever be "officially" solved.
I think he makes a very good case.
I don't believe Hodel's thesis. I'm not saying that he's definitely wrong, but his case is not solid.
"It's Long Goodbye, not Last Goodbye."
Thanks.
I believe there was a "Scouring of the Shire" in Santa Monica right after WWII in which war veterans came home and were not pleased by the corrupt cops who among their various sins got 4F exemptions from the draft. The vets took over and imposed a more honest code.
Something similar but top down happened at the same time in Los Angeles where the new police chief William Parker cleaned up the LAPD and made it much more professional. Of course that led to other problems, such as postwar LAPD's notorious lack of friendliness since they didn't have their hand out for bribes anymore.
Parker had been a Marine Corps general during WWII.
A famous Scouring of the Shire took place in a small town in Tennessee in c. 1946 where honest vets overthrew the crooked local political machine by counting the ballots in the jail under the full light of publicity.
Tolkien's Scouring must have take place in 1919.
The night before last I watched an old episode of The Rockford files. It took place in iBay City but it was obviously Santa Monica and the cops were quite corrupt.
You know, I said second-most famous. But is that right? Most would say OJ is number one. But is even that right? Is OJ more notorious than Manson?
What are the top LA murder cases of all time? Surely contenders are:
-OJ
-Manson
-Black Dahlia
-Nightstalker
-Biggie
-Doheney-Plunkett
-Bugsy
-Wonderland
-George Reeves
-RFK
-Hillside Strangler
-Menendez brothers
-Marvin Gaye
-Dorothy Stratten
This would actually be a great, if morbid, Sailer post/article.
Right, Doheny-Plunkett had a big influence on Chandler.
Others include:
Thomas Ince's death.
Robert Blake
Phil Spector
Wonderland
Johnny Stompanato and Lana Turner
Sam Cooke's death
Sal Mineo
What was more central to the 1960s-1980s serial killer boom: Southern California or Northern California? I'm thinking the latter.
He was a business executive involved in the free-wheeling and bareknuckled Long Beach oil boom where he got many insights into the underbelly of Southern California.
There may be connections, possibly only indirect, with figures like oil baron Edward Doheny, Hollywood mobsters Johnny Roselli or Sydney Korshak, or even the Orange County shenanigans that may have later led to the death of Myford Irvine.
Make sure you cover his famous (and exceptionally witty) essay, “The Simple Art of Murder”, wherein Chandler goes into great detail about the deficiencies on the “English School” of mystery and what Hammett invented and Chandler perfected in their respective novels. Might be worth mentioning writers, notably Patricia Highsmith, who tried to tart up the Christie-like mystery by bringing in elements of the Lost Generation, but she failed miserably; it seems to me that it was much more the American writers who converted to the Hammett/Chandler style and approach (Ross McDonald was an early acolyte).
Chandler said the hardest murder cases to solve are the ones in which the murderer only decides to kill somebody two minutes before he does it.
And spend some time on The Long Goodbye, Chandler’s best and penultimate novel, that is right up there with anything from Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, etc. I find it interesting that it was written in La Jolla, not LA, but LA still drips off the page.
I'm not sure I agree with this. And I don't hate Long Goodbye. I recall an Andy Ferguson essay in the Weekly Standard (I know, I know) that praised Chandler but called Long Goodbye his "worst book." I don't think it's Chandler's worst, but it is long and self-indulgent without much plot. I prefer the earlier books. I think Farewell is the best, with Little Sister and Lady in the Lake also very good. And High Window. I like the middle three a lot, even though they don't get discussed much. For me, Playback is the weakest.
To each his own, but there’s been a lot of praise for it over the years, and not just from Chandler fans - Anthony Boucher, not a Chandler fan, said in the NYT in 1953 that “Although it’s one of the longest private-eye novels ever written, It is also one of the best–and may well attract readers who normally shun even the leaders in the field.”
He was ironically the tortured artist of the group -- Dashiel Hammett was the workhorse, the incredibly popular nine-to-fiver who treated it like a job. Chandler was the tortured artist, the drunk, missing deadlines. Also, Hammett came first: He was the established titan in the noir field when Chandler entered it, and Chandler used his work as a model for his own.
Today, they're clearly the two titans of the genre, but it's interesting the difference in their approaches. One focused on the overall plotring and minimalist prose, the other on individual scenes and how they flowed with an almost lyrical quality. One defined a a genre. The other tested it to its limits. The equivelant now would be Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino, maybe? Either way, an interesting discussion on creativity and genre.
A novelist should describe characters’ looks however he wants, but that’s only for the book. Hollywood is going to cast whichever actors are popular and/or talented, so it will ignore the description, and rightly so. Bogart looked little like the fictional Marlowe, and even less like Spade, but his portrayals were very successful
1. Will Chandler's style of dialogue make him seem dated, even comic in the future?
2. Are Chandler's readers primarily men and if so, why?
Oil wells. Santa Monica corruption(Bay City, I think?) Comparison with Hammett (Chandler is much better). Atmosphere-- Old LA. Honor.
SoCal was still dotted with oil wells when I arrived in '68. I never thought about where the oil went until recently. Were they all connected to tanks by underground pipelines?
It's well-known to anyone who's a fan of Chandler, but maybe worth mentioning for casuals that the cult movie The Big Lebowski is an obvious note-for-note homage to The Big Sleep?
Specifically the opening scene, wherein an ailing (usually wheelchair-bound) elderly millionaire offers our hero a case, usually in a greenhouse or near a roaring fire, and then afterwards, our hero has a chat with the butler and a femme fatale. Not only does The Big Lewbowski take almost every aspect of this set-up, but I tend to see conscious echoes of in a lot of modern noir, from Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose to Prometheus to Warren Ellis's Desolation Jones. The more basic version of this is the gumshoe in his office when "a dame walks in" -- this is proof the writer has never actually read a noir. But the elderly millionaire summoning our hero is like a nod that the writer knows enough to borrow from the best.
“She had class all right, she had it in spades, and she stood out like a pair of Truk Nutz on a Prius”
Best color noirs:
Niagara - 1953
Portrait in Black - 1960
Black Widow - 1954
A Kiss Before Dying - 1955
PiB was Ross Hunter produced and so every bit as hysterical as it could be.
Big KBDE fan, mostly mostly because it heavily features my beloved university of arizona in the mid-50s.
Should be AKBD. It's tough for the elderly to write a comment on this site.
You can edit by clicking on the three dots in the upper right.
I've always loved The Big Sleep ... although I'm not sure why... I have never figured out the ending... Maybe you can explain.
Chandler's short stories, all of which were written for pulp mags and precede Big Sleep, are worth reading. "Trouble Is My Business" is probably the best one. The famous, oft-quoted line about the Santa Ana winds is from one of the stories, which are collected in the Library of America edition of Chandler (as are the essays such as "Simple Art of Murder" and "Ten Per Cent of Your Life").
“There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.”
--"Red Wind"
Wrote screenplay for Double Indemnity with Billy Wilder and it drove Chandler back tobboozing
375641
Chandler was married to an older women. His writing often dwells on male clothing and appearance. Was Chandler closeted?
No. His wife did not look her age and Chandler married her not knowing she was 18 years older.
He actually loved her and was depressed for a long time after her death. I think one of the reasons men marry significantly more mature women is if they consciously or subconsciously don't want to have kids. Back in the days without chemical contraceptives.
OK, sometimes they just fall in love with their French teacher. Like Macron with his Brigitte.