"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"
"His hair was grey and clipped short and his neck had as many folds as a concertina. His feet were small, as the feet of fat men often are, and they were in shiny shoes which were sideways on the carpet and close together and neat and nasty. He wore a dark suit that needed cleaning. I leaned down and buried my fingers in the bottomless fat of his neck. He had an artery in there somewhere, probably, but I couldn't find it and he probably didn't need it anymore anyway. Between his bloated knees on the carpet a dark stain had spread and spread..."--"Trouble is My Business"
He's really dead?" she whispered. Really?"
He's dead," I said. "Dead. Dead. Dead. Lady, he's dead."-"Red Wind"
It's generally acknowledged that pre-World War II America produced two great detective novelists who were not just great writers but iconic figures who refined the genre of detective fiction and made it their own, or rather that of the American urban landscape. One of those men was Dashiell Hammett, who finished his career as a original writer sometime in the early 1930's when he went to Hollywood and became a screenwriter and dialog coach for the plays of his girlfriend, Lillian Hellman. Hammett as a original writer of detective fiction, of Sam Spade and the Continental Operative and Nick Charles, was done by the time he was in his early forties.
At about the same time a forty-something former Southern California manager at a small oil company was fired from his job, either because of the Great Depression or because "his work was interfering with his drinking" as Dorothy Parker once described another fellow.
This middle-aged guy, Raymond Chandler by name, had been schooled at an English "public" academy even though he had been born in Chicago. In his twenties, he failed as a journalist and a poet and sailed back to the country of his birth with his American mother. They went to San Francisco. The young man got a job stringing tennis rackets in the City-By the Bay at the same time that Hammett was working as a Pickerton operative (detective) in the same city. Also like Hammett, he went into in World War I. But he went in as a Canadian, but not until America had entered the war. Quite a hybrid was Mr. Chandler.
So while Hammett dropped off, Chandler started writing detective stories for pulp magazines such The Black Mask in 1933. Six year later and a few dozen stories under his belt, he wrote what is in my humble opinion the greatest detective story ever, The Big Sleep. That book became a movie and that movie was my introduction to Raymond Chandler. Later I read the novel and realized almost all of the best lines in the screenplay came from the original author, not the folks who did the script--even though one of the screenwriters was a guy named William Faulkner. I read more Chandler and discovered for myself why many critics and readers and writers owe so much to this guy.
(to be continued)
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