Raymond Chandler was one of the greatest detective story writers of the twentieth century. Chandler himself said that Dashiell Hammett invented the hard-boiled style, but Chandler was at least Hammett’s equal as a practitioner. Many film critics acknowledge that Chandler was responsible for bringing hard-guy detectives on dark streets and seedy alleys into movie theaters.
We all know that the essence of the detective novel is the murder plot. Chandler’s stories transformed murder from the intellectual puzzles of his predecessors into the quest for truth and honor in a deceptive and transient world. Chandler’s Los Angeles language, characters, and settings ushered classic drama into the popular detective story.
Chandler did not much care for who-dunits. He maintained that a mystery that depended on the final reveal of the murderer for its appeal was a failure. Famously, when a filmmaker working on a movie version of The Big Sleep sent Chandler a telegram asking who killed the chauffeur who drowned off the Lido dock, he wired back “Damned if I know.” Exactly who sent the telegram is unclear, but Chandler acknowledged writing the reply.
Chandler had his own way of composing a mystery plot. He said in various letters that he did not plan plots, he let them grow on their own. This runs counter to conventional writing advice and Chandler admitted that his method was inefficient. In a letter to an aspiring writer, Chandler explains the inefficiency of his method: “I do my plotting in my head as I go along and usually I do it wrong and have to do it over again. I know there are writers who plot their stories in great detail before they begin to write them, but I’m not one of that group.” (2 July 1951, in Selected Letters.)
Chandler wrote to his friend, mystery critic James Sandoe: “…my plot problem invariably ends up as a desperate attempt to justify a lot of material that, for me at least, has come alive. It’s probably a silly way to write, but I seem to know no other way.” ( 23 September 1948, in Selected Letters.)
When a scene went wrong for Chandler, he did not try fix the flaws with piecemeal editing; he could only start over. He tailored his method of typing his manuscripts for ease in rewriting. He typed in portrait mode on letter-size sheets cut in half. It appears from his manuscripts that he revised by underlining the words on a page that he wanted to keep and used only the underlined words as he rewrote the entire page. By keeping his pages small, revising by rewriting was more manageable in those pre-computer word processing days. (See “Chandler’s Writing Process” in Writing The Long Goodbye.)
Constrained to this torturous process, Chandler was not prolific. He wrote only seven novels, a couple dozen short stories, a few screen plays, a handful of essays, and a sprinkling of poems. He started writing mysteries in middle age after alcoholism destroyed a successful career as an oil company executive. Inefficient or not, Chandler’s process lead to his success as an virtuoso stylist and creator of characters.