An Early Influence

There was a time in my earlier years that I read a lot of detective fiction. This was after and during the sci-fi period.  That whole period ended with the six volumes of Donaldson's White Gold Wielder.  Enough is enough!

I like clean, economical, straight diction, and I found it in Raymond Chandler who created the archetypal hardboiled detective, Phillip Marlowe. I understand Hemingway is also a neat and tidy writer, but I never loved him like I did Chandler. 

This was many years before I even thought of writing anything but free verse.

Having just read his entry in Wiki, I was surprised to learn that he did not grow up in the Los Angeles of the thirties. He had me convinced.

His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939, featuring the detective Philip Marlowe, speaking in the first person. In 1950, Chandler described in a letter to his English publisher, Hamish Hamilton, why he began reading pulp magazines and later wrote for them:

Wandering up and down the Pacific Coast in an automobile I began to read pulp magazines, because they were cheap enough to throw away and because I never had at any time any taste for the kind of thing which is known as women's magazines. This was in the great days of the Black Mask (if I may call them great days) and it struck me that some of the writing was pretty forceful and honest, even though it had its crude aspect. I decided that this might be a good way to try to learn to write fiction and get paid a small amount of money at the same time. I spent five months over an 18,000 word novelette and sold it for $180. After that I never looked back, although I had a good many uneasy periods looking forward.[2

His personal and professional life was messy. Well, he was a writer then, wasn’t he?

Parker, another detective writer said of Phillip Marlow: with Marlowe, "Chandler seems to have created the culminating American hero: wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical and rebellious—an innocent who knows better, a Romantic who is tough enough to sustain Romanticism in a world that has seen the eternal footman hold its coat and snicker. Living at the end of the Far West, where the American dream ran out of room, no hero has ever been more congruent with his landscape. Chandler had the right hero in the right place, and engaged him in the consideration of good and evil at precisely the time when our central certainty of good no longer held."[6]

I will find you a page of nice clean prose about Marlowe. This is the first page of the Big Sleep.

There you go!  You can see how he is already. Maybe you've already read Chandler?

I understand that there was a movie too, but I don't deal in movies much.