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"Chandler, Raymond (1888-1959)"
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The world of Raymond Chandler : in his own words
\"Chandler never wrote an autobiography or a memoir. Now Barry Day, making use of Chandler's novels, short stories, and letters as well as Day's ... commentary, gives us the life of 'the man with no home,' a man precariously balanced between his classical English education with its immutable values and that of a fast-evolving America during the years before the Great War, with its resulting changing vernacular. Chandler reveals what it was like to be a writer, and in particular what it was to be a writer of 'hard-boiled' fiction in what was for him 'another language'\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
From Lowbrow to Nobrow
Swirski begins with a series of groundbreaking questions about the nature of popular fiction, vindicating it as an artform that expresses and reflects the aesthetic and social values of its readers. He follows his insightful introduction to the socio-aesthetics of genre literature with a synthesis of the century long debate on the merits of popular fiction and a study of genre informed by analytic aesthetics and game theory.
eBook
The anti-landscape
There have always been some uninhabitable places, but in the last century human beings have produced many more of them. These anti-landscapes have proliferated to include the sandy wastes of what was once the Aral Sea, severely polluted irrigated lands, open pit mines, blighted nuclear zones, coastal areas inundated by rising seas, and many others. The Anti-Landscape examines the emergence of such sites, how they have been understood, and how some of them have been recovered for habitation. The anti-landscape refers both to artistic and literary representations and to specific places that no longer sustain life. This history includes T.S. Eliot's Wasteland and Cormac McCarthy's The Road as well as air pollution, recycled railway lines, photography and landfills. It links theories of aesthetics, politics, tourism, history, geography, and literature into the new synthesis of the environmental humanities. The Anti-Landscape provides an interdisciplinary appraoch that moves beyond the false duality of nature vs. culture, and beyond diagnosis and complaint to the recuparation of damaged sites into our complex heritage. -- cover verso.
BOOK
The metaphysics of detective Marlowe
The Metaphysics of Detective Marlowe: Style, Vision, Hard-Boiled Repartee, Thugs, and Death-Dealing Damsels in Raymond Chandler’s Novels is a comparative study of ‘the life and times” of an American idol, Raymond Chandler’s detective Philip Marlowe. It is a bitter-sweet critical exploration, meant to redefine the exceptional cultural profile, as well as the moral and social obsessions of one of America’s eminent fictional heroes. The study paints a colorful picture of the irresistible blend of romantic blind faith and social, moral and political toughness which characterized the United States in the 1930s-40s, with the memorable throng of drug dealers, hit men, vamps, corrupt politicians, and eccentric millionaires that colonize Raymond Chandler’s work. As the only defender of truth and honor in the Californian “Waste Land,” Philip Marlowe emerges as a symbolic figure, celebrated for the unique place he holds in the American hard-boiled mythology. The volume comprises an Introduction, Marlowe Before Marlowe, and four large chapters, each focusing on the innovations and enduring strategies behind Chandler’s persuasive vision: The Doughy Mass of Depravity, A Phantasm Called Style, The Villainy Septet and Marlowe After Marlowe. As presented in this book, Philip Marlowe, ‘the metaphysical sleuth,’ is a sentimentalist of the worst type: one embarrassed to show his true feelings. He is tough, but not tough enough and, consequently, a charming loser, always defeated in his confrontations with psychopath monsters and the legions of death-dealing damsels. The Californian detective’s gentleness and callousness are endearing: the gentleness is always callous, and the callousness is barely gentle. He seems to be the survivor of an extinct species, living for and by a code of honor. He believes in the purity of desires, expressed in a nascent idiom, a kind of secret/public language that heralds the resurrection of the new hard-boiled diction. His genuine candor is perfectly expressed in the directness of his talk, a brilliant example of rhetorical tightrope walking. Philip Marlowe embodies the contradictions of the problematic modernism—half bedlam, half expressionism—of his time and ours alike. The tradition he inaugurated is consistently illustrated today by James Ellroy, Allan Guthrie, Walter Mosley, Megan Abbott or Charlie Hudson.
eBook
Politics, Desire, and the Hollywood Novel
The story of what happens when a serious writer goes to Hollywood has become a cliché: the writer is paid well but underappreciated, treated like a factory worker, and forced to write bad, formulaic movies. Most fail, become cynical, drink to excess, and at some point write a bitter novel that attacks the film industry in the name of high art. Like many too familiar stories, this one neither holds up to the facts nor helps us understand Hollywood novels. Instead, Chip Rhodes argues, these novels tell us a great deal about the ways that Hollywood has shaped both the American political landscape and American definitions of romance and desire.Rhodes considers how novels about the film industry changed between the studio era of the 1930s and 1940s and the era of deregulated film making that has existed since the 1960s. He asserts that Americans are now driven by cultural, rather than class, differences and that our mainstream notion of love has gone from repressed desire to \"abnormal desire\" to, finally, strictly business.Politics, Desire, and the Hollywood Novelpays close attention to six authors-Nathanael West, Raymond Chandler, Budd Schulberg, Joan Didion, Bruce Wagner, and Elmore Leonard-who have toiled in the film industry and written to tell about it. More specifically, Rhodes considers both screenplays and novels with an eye toward the different formulations of sexuality, art, and ultimately political action that exist in these two kinds of storytelling.
eBook
A Mysterious Something in the Light
The life of Raymond Chandler has long been obscured by secrets and half-truths as deceptive as anything in his novel The Long Goodbye. Now, drawing on new interviews, previously unpublished letters, and archives on both sides of the Atlantic, Tom Williams casts a new light on this most mysterious of writers.
The Raymond Chandler revealed is a man troubled by loneliness and desertion from an early age. Born in Chicago in 1888, his childhood was overshadowed by the collapse of his parents' marriage, his father's alcohol-fuelled violence eventually forcing the boy and his doting mother to leave for Ireland and later London. But class-bound England proved stifling, and Chandler, in his twenties and eager to forge a new life, returned to the United States where—in corruption-ridden Los Angeles—he met his one great love, Cissy Pascal, a married woman eighteen years his senior.
It was only during middle age, after his alcoholism wrecked a lucrative career as an oilman, that Chandler seriously turned to crime fiction. And his legacy—the lonely, ambiguous world of Philip Marlowe—endures, compelling generations of crime writers to follow him.
In this long-awaited new biography, Tom Williams shadows one of the true literary giants of the twentieth century and considers how crime writing was raised to the level of art.
eBook
Val Lewton’s Naturalism and Historical Trauma
Off-brand for a studio known for its glossy Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals, the epigraph, set against a backdrop of a knight holding aloft a cat pierced by his sword, references respectively a fictitious quotation, book, and author (see figure 1). In the Introduction to a collection titled The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler outlined the overall code and structure of his detective fiction featuring private investigator Philip Marlowe (such as The Big Sleep, 1939; Farewell, My Lovely, 1940; and The Lady in the Lake, 1943): according to Chandler, detective fiction tells of \"a world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civilization had created the machinery for its own destruction\" (vii). \"[D]own these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid,\" Chandler concludes, providing a \"quality of redemption\"-or, more properly, a detective functioning as an heroic redeemer-unavailable to the naturalistic sufferers of a modern \"world gone wrong\" (\"The Simple Art of Murder\" 193). Identified as a discrete genre by French critics after its heyday in the 1940s, film noir comprises not only a cinematic style but also themes, plots, and characters located in postwar disillusionment and a loss of confidence in the ability of institutions to restore order in the naturalistic \"mean streets\" of the urban jungle.2 Beginning with the movie version of Double Indemnity (1944), with its moody atmospherics of smoky, shadowed daytime interiors punctuated with strips of lights through Venetian blinds, films noir placed the viewer in the position of the point-of-view character forced to interpret situations in which nothing is as it seems.
Journal Article
“Mean and Shabby and Wrinkled”: The Experience of Middle Age in American Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction
This article examines the nuance of aging masculinity presented in hard-boiled detective fiction, something that is frequently lost amid sleek Hollywood portrayals of these characters. The detectives of this genre are inevitably middle-aged men and aging—along with vulnerability—is thus a fundamental, if often disavowed, element of the form. Among the early authors of this school, Raymond Chandler proves to be the most reflective on the topic of mortality. This article examines The Long Goodbye (1953) as a guiding illustration of hard-boiled insights into aging, along with supporting examples from the genre’s history, particularly the works of Dashiell Hammett. The question of hard-boiled realism is of special note to this discussion, as these works ostensibly offer a platform for more “true” representations of male bodies as they age. However, Chandler’s hard-boiled realism, typified in the 1944 essay “The Simple Art of Murder”, bases authenticity on style and language rather than on verisimilitude. This conflicting realism undoubtedly explains the halting representations of aging in hard-boiled fiction. The detective’s experience of age can be disavowed with a well-chosen quip or a well-placed right hook. This essay will read this inherent tension—that is, between articulation and renunciation— with respect to male aging within the hard-boiled ethos.
Journal Article
The Mysteries of Creative Writing
Narvaez offers insights about creative writing on mysteries theme. The author talks about experiences during creative writing class and his years of education.
Journal Article
Desire and Nonhuman Excess in Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep
This article reexamines Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep (1939) via key psychoanalytic conceptualizations of desire. In doing so, it makes the case that analysis of desire in the novel has yet to satisfactorily account for desire's excessive manifestations, which constitute a machinery that throws the novel's bodies into question.
Journal Article