Raymond Chandler: A Biography [Hardcover]

Forty years after his death Chandler was in need of a new study, both of his life and of his writing. This one strikes me as dealing with the former better than with the latter, but it has interesting and illuminating things to say about both. However what I want to commend the book for above all is just how readable it is. Chandler himself had some trenchant and uncomplimentary things to say about some of the more intellectual kinds of writing, creative as well as critical, Hiney quotes some of these with evident approval, and I fancy the book was written with a sense of Chandler's ghost looking over the biographer's shoulder, alert to detect and deflate pretentiousness.

Chandler's story is a triumph of talent over alcoholic insecurity. He never knew his alcoholic father, and he was educated through the charity, far from affectionate but very real and very patient and long-suffering, of an uncle. He attended one of England's better schools, presided over by one of the more enlightened headmasters of the time. This headmaster instilled a distaste for insincerity and pretence that stayed with Chandler to the end. Chandler was always a bit of a loner. In his early years his only real relationship was with his hard-pressed mother, and he displayed an innocence that stayed with him throughout his life too that lurks behind the seeming worldliness and disillusionment that he displays both in his books and in his dealings with the world around him. He once said of himself that he 'could be a good second-rate anything.' This was a fairly modest self-assessment, given his brains and astuteness. He achieved rapid promotion in his Californian oil company through his gift for figures and his alertness to fraud until his drinking brought that career to an end. His later business dealings were also fairly savvy, both in Hollywood and in relation to his publishers and agents, and his sheer ability ensured that although he died a booze-sodden ruin he did not die a poor one. He seems even to have possessed real interpersonal ability too through his wit and charm whenever he could be bothered to exercise it. However to the end of his days he made few friends and retained fewer. After his mother's death he cared greatly for nobody in particular with the solitary exception of his hyperbolic devotion to his wife. Innocent in some ways to the end, he had fallen for her claim to be ten years younger than she was, and their relationship reads to me less like some grand passion than like the tale of a shipwrecked mariner who has developed a strong affection for the lifebelt that is keeping him afloat.

On the literary side, there are copious quotations from Chandler's letters, which is a good thing for giving us some of his less-known wisecracks. I had expected to see more about The Simple Art of Murder, the article in which Chandler expounds his ideas of the detective story and of Marlowe. However one mystery was solved for me. When young I knew the seven Marlowe novels virtually by heart, but to this day I have never been able to follow the plot of any of them. No wonder, it seems. Chandler himself claims to have been writing without actually knowing whodunnit until late in the stories. He did not want his books to be read for the sake of knowing who killed whoever it was, but for their quality as novels. Excellent. However in that case why does Mr Hiney devote so much of his comment to summarising the plots? He is not even entirely accurate, but what I criticise is not that, which on his and Chandler's own showing is unimportant, but the proportion of the text given to these summaries. There is not really much about what made Chandler the phenomenon he was, and was recognised for by the great and the good such as Eliot, Auden and Waugh. There is a certain amount about the relative quality of the seven novels, and a certain amount of it I go along with, such as that The High Window is not quite the equal of the books that preceded it and immediately followed it. As he works his way through them, I sense myself diverging from him. He may be more in line with mainstream opinion than I am, but he is not fully explicit about his own views, so shall venture mine.

Marlowe, to me, is partly an idealised figure. One would infer this from The Simple Art without reading the books. Hiney seems happy with a certain development in Marlowe's character, reminiscent of the Doonesbury series, that naturally belongs in the later books; and I do not think this is the best way to appreciate them. The earlier books find Marlowe resilient, intelligent certainly but not greatly introspective, cynical certainly but not exactly disillusioned, able to soak up incredible quantities of punishment (although perfectly credible quantities of alcohol - Hiney exaggerates this), but always ready with the immortal dialogue and bons mots that make these books unique. There is detailed observation and description (of Marriott say, or Amthor) but there is never much sense of personal involvement. And it is precisely this detachment that makes Marlowe and Chandler what they amount to. Relax this restriction - have any of the characters talk more confessionally, show more in-depth interest - and the magic formula is voided; and that, for me, is the undoing of The Long Goodbye. Of all the seven books, Hiney shows least interest in The Little Sister, and I wonder whether I'm out on a limb in thinking it the best of them. It's like fruit on the point of going overripe, the plot is more incomprehensible than ever, and the dialogue is Chandler's very best (how does Hiney manage to find the sad Playback the funniest of these novels?) It has something else too - a palpable sense of the LA sunshine that I have come to know so well.

I also miss anything about Chandler as a literary craftsman. It's unusual for a private detective to comment on Flaubert, but Chandler admired him, and in the first five of his novels you will get the same impression that every sentence, indeed every word, has been carefully worked on.

Chandler was a great writer as well as a great novelist, he is still wearing well nearly 50 years after he died, this book serves his memory well and I drink to that.

While this is a fresher and more recent attempt at writing a biography of Chandler, it is still lacking the sense of depth that Frank MacShane's biography has. Hiney's biography seems much more superficial, although it does give slightly more detail with regards to the social environment that Chndler was surrounded by. Hiney seems to make much bigger (and unsubstantiated) leaps of logic with regards to connecting Chandler's life events to his work, and on occasion even gets the names of characters wrong!

Would still recommend MacShane's biography as the better of the two.

Thoroughly satisfying account of the highs and lows in the ultimately sad life of Chandler who went from dazzling socialite to insomniac recluse and alcoholic. A fascinating and complicated early emotional life left Chandler scarred as he and his mother lived a nomadic life between USA, Ireland and England. His eventual rise to top film script writer and "noir" crime fiction author is story book stuff and the similarities between Chandler and his hero Marlowe are psychologically profound. Hiney writes with affection for his subject at all times and when you've finished the book you want to go back and pick up Big Sleep etc. Rewarding.