PURITAN FICTION:

After short stints in St. Louis and San Francisco, Chandler moved to Los Angeles in 1913. Ever peripatetic, it took him six more years to settle permanently there. The city served not only as setting but in some ways as the other major character in the Philip Marlowe novels. Its character was set by its sudden expansion, and the self-promotion and greed that went with it. It was a city of excess, escapism (Hollywood!), tawdriness, exhibitionism, and corruption. In the nineteen-teens it was the fastest-growing city on earth, hyped and hustled like perhaps no other city ever had been. The population of Los Angeles ballooned threefold between 1910 and 1930, from approximately 310,000 to about 1,250,000, with the formerly barren greater L.A. County housing two and a half million. In this time, the streets were paved, automobiles replaced horse-drawn carriages and the electric railway system, and the Los Angeles Aqueduct was built to heist water from the Owens Valley 250 miles away. Corruption was rife, and politicians and law enforcement often worked in tandem with the LA "System," the syndicate of organized crime. Los Angeles was also a city of sin, a proto-Las Vegas surfeited with prostitution and gambling. Journalist Carey McWilliams wrote that "Los Angeles is the kind of place where perversion is perverted and prostitution prostituted." Chandler grafted this "vast melodrama of maladjustment," as L.A. historian Richard Rayner aptly calls it, onto his fiction. This wonderfully dysfunctional backdrop beckoned many writers. Chandler would later proudly claim that before him "Los Angeles had never been written about," but that wasn't exactly true. Both Paul Cain and James M. Cain (no relation) had started publishing their brutally hardboiled Angelino stories in the early 1930s. Horace McCoy's dark LA novel They Shoot Horses, Don't They? was published in 1935. They were soon joined by Nathaniel West, whose Hollywood novel The Day of the Locust came out the same year as The Big Sleep. And Chester Himes' critical look at race and class in Los Angeles, If He Hollers Let Him Go, would follow six years later. Mike Davis has said that LA Noir writers like Chandler, Chester Himes, and others represent an alternate public history of Los Angeles.

After arriving in Los Angeles, Chandler worked first as a bookkeeper and then as an executive for the Dabney Oil Syndicate. There he saw firsthand some of the corruption endemic to the oil industry and the justice system. He always saw his adopted hometown through the eyes of an outsider. In 1950 he would reflect, "I arrived in California with a beautiful wardrobe, a public school accent, no practical gifts for earning a living, and a contempt for the natives that, I am sorry to say, persists to this day."

Chandler was a successful executive in the oil industry as the Depression hit in 1929 and deepened in the following years. When he was sacked by Dabney Oil in 1931, it wasn't because of the wider economic collapse, nor because he was "intrigued" out of the job, as he later averred, but because of unacceptable behavior and too many lost weekends. (See the note to Marlowe's firing in Chapter Two of the novel). Finding himself out of work at the age of forty-three, two years into the Great Depression, it seemed that Chandler was in for hard times.

Chandler took it as an opportunity to do "what I had always wanted to do--write." But he had to find a way to make it pay. He later recalled, "In 1931 my wife and I used to cruise up and down the Pacific Coast in a very leisurely way, and at night, just to have something to read, I would pick a pulp magazine off the rack. It suddenly struck me that I might be able to write this stuff and get paid while I was learning." He never underestimated his chosen task. After the publication of his first story in December 1933 he wrote to friend William Lever, "It took me a year to write my first story. I had to go back to the beginning and learn to write all over again."

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The pulp magazines (so called because they were printed cheaply on wood-pulp paper) were ubiquitous at newsstands, bus stations, and drugstores. They were a cheap, gaudy source of popular entertainment that sometimes mixed in subversive social commentary with tales of adventure and derring-do. The format, invented in 1882 as a vehicle for children's adventure stories, was tremendously popular when Chandler was growing up. By the 1920s there were pulps specializing in each popular sub-genre: detective stories, westerns, love stories, adventure stories, sea stories, stories of the occult, and so on. During the Depression these sources of cheap entertainment provided vital escape for the downtrodden and disenfranchised.

Black Mask was widely regarded as the best of the bunch. It was founded in 1920 by drama critic and editor George Nathan and journalist, culture maven, and scholar H.L. Mencken as way to fund their tonier magazine, The Smart Set. Its early subtitle announced "Western, Detective, and Adventure Stories," but due to popular demand the crime stories--and specifically the newly-invented "hard-boiled" detective fiction--took over.

Hardboiled fiction was a revolutionary change in the mystery genre. Edgar Allen Poe generally receives the credit for inventing detective fiction (which he called "tales of ratiocination," meaning, generally, stories of rational deduction) in three short stories in the 1840s starring the eccentric genius Auguste Dupin. Arthur Conan Doyle followed Poe's lead when he invented his own brilliantly eccentric hero named Sherlock Holmes in 1887. Early twentieth-century crime fiction generally fell in step behind Poe and Doyle, giving us genteel amateurs like Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, Dorothy Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey, and the estimable Ellery Queen. The stories were often "puzzle mysteries" or "whodunits" where the reader played along with the detective to interpret the clues and solve the mystery. One of these authors, S.S. Van Dine (the pseudonym of American art critic Willard Huntington Wright), even published the rules for this type of literary game in his 1928 essay "Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories." (Rule number one: "The reader must have equal opportunity with the detective for solving the mystery. All clues must be plainly stated and described." Just try this with The Big Sleep!)

This is now considered the Golden Age of detective fiction. Chandler and his fellow hardboiled practitioners roundly rejected this legacy. When Chandler has Philip Marlowe trenchantly declare that "I'm not Sherlock Holmes or [Van Dine's] Philo Vance" in Chapter Thirty of The Big Sleep, he's making a statement as much about the genre that Marlowe is playing in as about the kind of detective Marlowe is. Chandler's powerful manifestos on behalf of the American hardboiled rejection of "drawing-room mysteries" can be found in two key essays: his magnificent 1944 essay "The Simple Art of Murder," and the introduction to Trouble Is My Business, with which we began our own introduction.

Black Mask and other hardboiled pulps like Dime Detective and Detective Weekly cut a new path. John Carroll Daly broke in the hardboiled style with his story "The False Burton Combs" in 1922; his success was enormous, and he was emulated by Black Mask writers throughout the decade. The style was less a continuation of the existing tradition of detective fiction than a critical reaction to the corruption and excesses of the 1920s and a stylized representation of the organized crime networks spawned by Prohibition. This social context gave rise to a widespread popular demand for crime-related stories in all forms: print, movies, word of mouth, newsreels, gangster films, true-crime journalism, novels, short stories--you name it. As Luc Sante puts it, "the art of lawlessness began a major upward trend all over the world" at this time.

Hardboiled, as a subgenre, is infamously "American." To recall Chandler's terms: it is the mystery going native. Hardboiled captured the violence of the twenties and the desperation of the thirties in substance, and displayed them formally in a brutal, clipped, but--in the case of Hammett and Chandler, at least--distinctly poetic style. The phrase "hard-boiled" is itself an Americanism. According to Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, to be "hard-boiled" is to be "one who is toughened by experience; a person with no illusions or sentimentalities." In the eloquent words of mystery novelist Walter Mosley, the hardboiled style is "elegant and concise language used to describe an ugly and possibly irredeemable world," a style which captivates us "the way a bright and shiny stainless-steel garbage can houses maggots and rats." As Mosley indicates, the world according to hardboiled is not only tough but vibrant: a gritty, profoundly urban setting teeming with underworld life--booze, sex, drugs, violence--and the decadence of the wealthy and powerful. Hammett elevated the form in a series of stories in the first half of the twenties, but truly revolutionized it with his novels Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, and The Maltese Falcon (all first serialized in Black Mask between 1927 and 1929).

Hammett and Black Mask editor Joseph Shaw derived a literary program to lend psychological and linguistic realism, not to mention literary status, to what was becoming a very formulaic, "lowbrow" form. Toward this end, Hammett mixed hardboiled with Hemingway--shaken, not stirred. For Chandler, as for Hammett, Hemingway was "the greatest living American novelist." Hemingway's 1926 The Sun Also Rises became the hardboiled touchstone, with its interior monologue, stark prose, and colloquial turns of phrase. "It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime," protagonist Jake Barnes reflects, "but at night it is another thing." (It's tempting to consider Hemingway's characters' drunken quest for hard-boiled eggs a literary in-joke.)

In the "Simple Art of Murder," Chandler establishes the genealogy of the form that he chose to work in. He links Hammett back to Hemingway, but Hemingway back to Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg, and Ring Lardner--the sinewy tradition of the American literary vernacular mixed with social and psychological realism, which itself grew out of the nineteenth-century Naturalist movement. The key figures here are Frank Norris, especially for subject matter, and Stephen Crane, for substance and style. Norris wrote on corruption and greed among economic forces in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Crane, generally underestimated as one of the influences in this context (and one of Hemingway's greatest early influences) was the author of taut, ironic tales of impending violence. In "Simple Art," Chandler calls this realistic style a "revolutionary debunking of both the language and the material of fiction." "You can take it clear back to Walt Whitman if you like," Chandler says--and probably further back than that, in England anyway, to Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads, which famously announced a turn to "real language of men" in its Preface/manifesto of 1800. "It probably started in poetry," Chandler says coyly; "almost everything does."

If, for Hammett, the most important work was Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926), then for Chandler it was Hammett's Maltese Falcon (1930). Yet for all their similarities--and we will note several places where Chandler overlaps with, and even lifts from Hammett, during the course of The Big Sleep--they are profoundly different. Chandler, coming after, can take Hammett's realism and use of the vernacular à la Hemingway as given. He adds two crucial components that make him distinct: a dose of idealism and a strong strain of humor. Another key difference is between Hammett's San Francisco and Chandler's Los Angeles. For all their differences, Chandler made clear that Hammett paved the way for him. "I give him everything," he wrote to Blanche Knopf in 1942.

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