The Big Sleep was Raymond Chandler’s first novel and introduced his hero Philip Marlowe  to the world. It was published in 1939 by Knopf in the United States and Hamish Hamilton in the UnitedKingdom. It was largely written the year before when Chandler and his wife Cissy were in Pine Knot, a small village close to Big Bear Lake.

The novel was based on two short stories Chandler published in Black Mask Magazine, The Curtain and Killer in the Rain. However The Big Sleep is much more than a mashing together of these pulp tales. Chandler started afresh when he wrote the novel, rewriting sections from memory at times. This method allowed him to do something quite different: he was able to forget about plot and concentrate, instead, on language and character. This meant that relationships could be explored in more detail and so Marlowe’s relationship with General Sternwood became a key element in final novel. In the source story, The Curtain, the General was called General Winslow and the detective, Ted Carmady, feels respect for the old man. In The Big Sleep Philip Marlowe develops a real affection for General Strernwood:

You can say anything you like to me [General] and I wouldn’t think of getting angry. I’d like to offer you your money back. It may mean nothing to you. It might mean something to me.

This shift, away from simple exchanges between characters towards something more significant, was key to what Chandler was trying to do in The Big Sleep. He wanted to use the novel form to explore characters and relationships not to tease the reader with complicated plots.

The Big Sleep and Los Angeles

Raymond Chandler was fascinated by the city of Los Angeles. In many ways it is a character in his novels as rich and detailed as Philip Marlowe and it is in The Big Sleep that we see Chandler first explore the connections between the city and its people. The Sternwood family are deeply connected to the place. The city itself is a corrupting space and one that spoils relationships, something mirrored in the dysfunctional Sternwood family. The only potentially romantic relationship in The Big Sleep is that between Marlowe and Sliver-Wig, Eddie Mars’ wife. Though it is true Marlowe kisses Vivian Sternwood / Vivian Regan, it is not a romantic moment whereas his kiss with Silver-Wig is. However as Philip Marlowe drives Silver-Wig back to Los Angeles after their kiss he tells us,

I was driving hard along the highway thrrough the rain, with Silver-Wig in the corner of the car, saying nothing, so that by the time we reached Los Angeles we seemed to be utter strangers again.

In Los Angeles the city itself prevents real connections.

The Success of The Big Sleep

When he reread the novel, Raymond Chandler thought the that The Big Sleep was too pulpy but that perhaps is unfair. It might not be his best novel but The Big Sleep remains a remarkable debut. Philip Marlowe is a richly drawn hero, one that is flawed and sympathetic. Plot may have taken a back seat to language and character in The Big Sleep but that is all to the good and helped make this one of finest novels about crime and corruption ever written.

The Big Sleep: Further Reading

You can find out much more about how The Big Sleep was written and where it fits into Raymond Chandler’s life in my biography of him, A Mysterious Something In The Light: The Life of Raymond Chandler. It also explores some of the themes I touch on here in much more detail. You should also watch the 1946 film adaptation of The Big Sleep directed by Howard Hawkes. If you want to read something that was written at the same time and in similar frame of mind try The Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West.

This is the first in a series of blog posts exploring some of the basic themes found in the novels of Raymond Chandler. 

The post Some Thoughts on The Big Sleep appeared first on Tom Williams' Blog.

Black-Eyed Blonde

In this interview on RTE he talks a bit more about the experience of getting into Raymond Chandler’s head (listen from 1 hour 15 minutes in). It appears that the book is finished and John Banville is pleased with it so it won’t be long now before we get to judge it for ourselves.

You can read a bit more about the title The Black Eyed Blonde here. And, if you would like to read my take on the new Philip Marlowe novel, you can do so in the Guardian here.

The post John Banville on the new Philip Marlowe novel appeared first on Tom Williams' Blog.

Black Eyed Blonde

It was announced last year that John Banville, writing as Benjamin Black, would produce a new Philip Marlowe mystery. The details at the time were thin on the ground: the publisher in the US was to be Henry Holt and it would be released sometime in the autumn was about it. We now have a title, The Black-Eyed Blonde, and a revised release date, March 2014. You can see the Amazon page here.

I wrote a blog post for the Guardian which was broadly supportive. I still think John Banville is a great choice to tackle Philip Marlowe though judgement should be reserved until the book is actually published.

The title was one of several potential pulp titles listed in Chandler’s notebooks. It has been used before, as the title of an authorised short story by Benjamin M. Schutz in Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe: A Centennial Celebration, and, perhaps more interestingly, by Erle Stanley Gardner as the title for one of his Perry Mason stories. Since Gardner and Chandler were great friends it is possible that the Chandler suggested the title to Gardner. There is no mention of it in the correspondence I have read but Ray and Cissy were occasional visitors to the Gardner ranch and perhaps, over a coffee or a whisky, the title was mentioned. We will never know, of course. Gardner’s book is long out of print so it seems, for now at least, Chandler will be associated with the title once again.

The post The Black-Eyed Blonde – Benjamin Black’s new Philip Marlowe novel appeared first on Tom Williams' Blog.

You can find the press release about the book here.

Publication always makes me nervous and it’s instructive to remember Raymond Chandler’s own experiences. His reviews, at first, were poor and he found this frustrating. In particular he was annoyed that his books were almost always reviewed by crime specialist, especially in the US. This meant that they tended to miss what he was trying to do. But books can have a long life as Chandler quickly found himself and in the end his take on crime writing won out.

It’s not for me to say what will happen to my book but I am looking forward to hearing what readers think about it and I hope by exploring Raymond Chandler’s life they will see his novels in a new and interesting light.

The post A Mysterious Something In The Light: The Life of Raymond Chandler (Chicago Review Press) appeared first on Tom Williams' Blog.

The post 17th April Event at Aye Write! Glasgow’s Book Festival appeared first on Tom Williams' Blog.

The post Self Publishing and Outsourcing Discoverability in the Book Trade appeared first on Tom Williams' Blog.

I’ll post again once I have a publication date.

The post Coming To America appeared first on Tom Williams' Blog.

The post Raymond Chandler, Pinterest appeared first on Tom Williams' Blog.

Inevitably this has been picked up by journalists as a way to remove embarrassing Facebook photos but it also offers up an opportunity for literary archives. If you are a library collecting the letters of a dead author you rely on the author keeping their own archive (as Chandler tried to) or on the generosity (or greed) of the author’s correspondents who can be convinced to sell the letters to you. It is not foolproof of course. Letters and diaries are often destroyed or lost but, over time, it can lead to a sizeable and valuable archive.

But modern authors, with emails, tweets and Facebook and whatever else, create and archive a huge amount of material that is stored in the cloud each and every day. This creates a rich mine of material for future scholars to explore. However, access depends on the elusive password, something that may prove harder to trace than any letter. This is where a digital will can come in useful, creating a potential access point for researchers. If an organisation like the Authors Society or the British Library could offer a digital legacy service the detail of an author’s life could be preserved for decades beyond their death. Of course there would be some objection over privacy and there would be questions as to whether or not there would should be any judicious pruning of the content before it was accessed. But, if this could be surmounted, we would be left with a wonderful resource that would help us understand modern writers. It goes to show that digital developments can not just revolutionise the way biographies are read but the way they are researched and written too.

The post Biographies and the Archives of the Future appeared first on Tom Williams' Blog.

Chandler was himself making a reference to Sir Thomas Malory, author of the Arthurian romance, La Morte D’Arthur, suggesting his hero’s chivalric roots, roots which Philip Marlowe would also share. It would seem fitting for the screenwriters of Skyfall (Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Jon Logan) to reference Chandler since he and Fleming were great friends in the 1950s (they would often dine together at expensive London restaurants) and Marlowe’s influence on Bond’s character is quite clear (see this interview for a fascinating discussion between the two writers).

Given this, and given that Ralph Fiennes seems to be returning as Gareth Mallory at some point, I suspect the name is a deliberate reference, a subtle gesture that hints at the ancestry of James Bond.

The post Skyfall, Ralph Fiennes and Raymond Chandler appeared first on Tom Williams' Blog.