Raymond Chandler A Biography by
Tom Hiney
pbk out May 98
at £9.99
Chandler was one of the most charismatic and influential of crime writers and this book does him justice. As Tom Hiney says in his Preface, Chandler was described in the course of his life "as cynical and gullible; reclusive and generous; depressive and romantic; proud and paranoid." There was
evidently some truth in each of the adjectives. Two things stabilised him: "being drunk, which he often was, and Philip Marlowe."
By the time The Big Sleep was published, he was fifty years old and had already experienced a somewhat chequered career. Although born in Chicago, he was educated at a good English public school, Dulwich College (P.G. Wodehouse left there the year that Chandler arrived), and fought in the
Canadian army during the First World War. He married a much older woman - a former nude model - to whom he was, despite occasional infidelities, devoted. He became an executive in the oil industry before his binge drinking led to his being fired. He served an apprenticeship writing stories for the pulp magazines before embarking on his first novel - a novel which has stood the test of time. As Hiney says, "to end a murder mystery questioning the significance of death was a new departure for a
crime writer." His star rose and he enjoyed a short but successful career as a Hollywood screenwriter - working with Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock among others - before abandoning Tinseltown in disgust and determination to concentrate again upon his novels. After his wife died, he became an increasingly pathetic figure and gradually his self-destructive impulses gained the upper hand. After a disastrous meeting with the father of a woman he had wanted to marry, he stopped eating but kept drinking, before quickly succumbing to a fatal bout of pneumonia.
An attractive feature of this book is the pace with which the story is told. All too often these days, biographies are ponderous affairs. Hiney, like his subject, concentrates on the telling detail rather than on setting down page after page of background material. I would have liked to learn a little more about Chandler's relations with those crime writers he numbered amongst his close friends, such Erle Stanley Gardner and Michael Gilbert, but all in all this is a highly satisfactory and enjoyable read. Recommended.
(
Martin Edwards
- author of the highly acclaimed Harry Devlin Mysteries)
