Never quite grasping the plot

Byron Rogers

RAYMOND CHANDLER by Tom Hiney Chatto, £16.99, pp. 310 The first thing I do when I have 'flu is to go to bed with Raymond Chandler. At such times a man, being spaced out, stops worry- ing about the fact that he hasn't a clue as to what is happening in the plot and concen- trates on the really important things. Like similes. The joy of reading Chandler is to see how far he will go: A few locks of dry white hair clung to his scalp, like wild flowers fighting for life on a bare rock . . . He was as calm as an adobe wall in the moonlight . . . He had a face so long he could have wrapped it round his own neck . . .

And then, after the similes, the humour:

She wore a golden topaz bracelet and topaz earrings and a topaz dinner ring in the shape of a shield. Her fingernails matched her blouse exactly. She looked as if it would take a couple of weeks to get her dressed.

But until I read Tom Hiney's biography I didn't understand the obsessive detail with being knocked unconscious, all that velvet darkness and the rest of it into which Mar- lowe is forever diving. Now I do. However much he knew about the operational meth- ods of the LAPD, Chandler knew a great deal more about blackouts, having passed out so often himself. At one point an oil executive, and already an alcoholic, he had an affair with an office secretary:

The two of them drank so much together that Chandler would have to cover for her when she failed to appear at the office on Monday mornings. Then he, too, stopped appearing on Mondays and eventually nei- ther party was turning up until Wednesday.

Hiney, at times, sounds just like Chandler, or rather like Chandler being Marlowe. 'I simply cannot operate without him,' Chan- dler said of his detective, and this applied to more than his writing.

A romantic, he found real life bewilder- ing and did his level best to make it even more so. He was an English public school- boy who from the age of 25 lived in Los Angeles at a hundred different addresses, being broke most of the time and then stupefyingly rich as a screenwriter. During the Great War he joined the Canadian Army but in a Highland regiment, so there is a photograph of Chandler, bandy and baffled, in a kilt.

He married a woman he thought was ten years older than he was, only she was 20 years older but confident enough to do the housework in the nude. The ageing process must have been especially confusing for this curious couple, but then the booze made him look ten years older and she took to wearing clothes 30 years too young for her, so for a fraction of time, like trains passing, they must have looked the same age. She called him Raymio and he filled the house with red roses on her birthday. Life, between binges, can have been no more than a dream.

But, at 50, he wrote his first crime novel, and things began to make sense. Marlowe, 190 tough, wise-cracking, sad pounds, had come and there was a new poise in the mean streets for his creator. The books, oddly enough, did not do well in America. The enthusiasm for them came from this side of the Atlantic, Evelyn Waugh, of all people, calling him in the late 1940s 'the greatest living American novelist'. It was when Hollywood realised that he could write dialogue that the money, and the black comedy, really started, and it was to last for the rest of his life.

When he wrote The Blue Dahlia for Alan Ladd and `Moronica' Lake, as he called her, Chandler was the highest-paid screen writer in America. He had also negotiated a contract which became legendary. Two Cadillacs, with drivers, and six secretaries in relays of two were to be on duty day and night outside his house.

According to Billy Wilder's biographer Maurice Zolotow, Chandler had managed to secure an alcoholic's dream job descrip- tion. 'He swilled his bourbon. He passed out. He awakened. He took a shot. He dic- tated a few speeches. He passed out again.'

In his excellent account of this incredible life Tom Hiney quotes Chandler himself, when in his last years he had given up pre- tending he was not an alcoholic and was prepared to describe his daily intake to a doctor.

— Not a terribly large amount, really. A bottle of scotch, eight or nine cocktails (doubles of course) and various wines at luncheon and dinner.

— I should regard you as verging on alcoholism, he said in an annoyed voice. — Well, it's a nice little verge, I said.

It is vivid writing. The catalogue has been made for effect, from the boastful 'doubles of course' to the drunk's airiness over anything which is not the hard stuff (`various wines') and all the doctor does, having heard such catalogues before, is to sound annoyed. The 'nice little verge' is pure Marlowe, and allows a man at the end to his tether to retain his poise. That he got to 70 he probably owed to this, for however much of a mess he made of his life, there was always Marlowe to fall back on.

Tom Hiney gives a synopsis of each plot in the novels. To my relief I still couldn't follow them.