1939 Chandler’s The Big Sleep, and the ‘Philip Marlowe PI’ series it initiated, are high points in the ‘hard-boiled’ crime fiction genre. More significantly, they served to raise that genre from the pulpy soup in which it was spawned to ‘Literature’. Chandler was plausibly considered for a Nobel Prize and – given the 1938 winner (Pearl S. Buck) – might well have graced that award. Certainly, Chandler’s Marlowe series have lasted longer in reader popularity than Buck’s trilogy about 20th-century China, which kicked off with The Good Earth in 1931. It was filmed – Oscar-winningly – in the same year as The Big Sleep.
Chandler came to writing fiction late in life, with career failures dragging behind him. The child of a broken family, he was educated (as he was proud to advertise) at an English public school – Dulwich. He was knocked about in the First World War fighting with the Canadian army, and – before taking to literature – had failed in the California oil industry. Not easy to do at that period, when you could start a gusher in the Long Beach fields with a pickaxe. Given his problems with alcohol in the 1930s, it would have been very wise to steer clear of Ray with a pickaxe in his hand.
Always dominated by his mother, and sexually timid, he married the day after his mother died. His wife, Cissie, was decades older than he. As an acquaintance tartly noted, the new Mrs Chandler was 50 years old, looked 40 and dressed twenty. But she helped Ray dry out, and start a redemptive late career in crime fiction.
He was assisted by the market for high-class, hard-boiled detective fiction created by Black Mask magazine. The journal had been founded in 1920 by H.L. Mencken and his partner, George Jean Nathan, who sold it after a year to be run by various editors until the dominating Captain Joseph T. ‘Cap’ Shaw took over. Shaw was a former bayonet instructor and a theorist on the subject of the detective story. He demanded from his contributors a clear, uncluttered style and storyline, and he ‘Hammettised’ the magazine. Dashiell Hammett published the first of his ‘Continental Op’ stories in Black Mask in October 1922. Erle Stanley Gardner published his first story in the magazine in 1923 and Raymond Chandler published his first short story in Black Mask in 1933. Thereafter he served an apprenticeship with a string of short pieces revolving around various precursors of Philip Marlowe.
The Big Sleep introduces the 38-year-old PI as ‘a shop soiled Sir Galahad’ taking on the corruption of the southern Californian ‘old money’ elite (a caste Chandler knew well from his oilman days). The Big Sleep – which does not have an easily followed plot – was filmed by Howard Hawks, starring Humphrey Bogart as Marlowe, in 1946. Famously, the director wired the novelist asking him to explain the significance of the murdered chauffeur, only to be told that Chandler himself did not know the answer.