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Raymond Chandler on Plot

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.

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Reading Trollope On Line

When I mention that Anthony Trollope is one of my favorite authors, I get eye rolls, even among Downton Abbey fans, a series that I don’t care for because I think it is the Gone With The Wind of the British aristocracy.

I won’t get into why I prefer Trollope— any Trollope, even The Fixed Period— to Downton Abbey, but I have many reasons, which I might get into in another post, but not now.

Anthony Trollope was a mid-nineteenth century British Victorian novelist, roughly contemporary with Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, the Brontë’s, and George Elliot. He was somewhat older than Thomas Hardy who wrote well into the twentieth century. Jane Austen preceded Trollope, straddling the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Although Trollope is by far my favorite among the Victorians, I notice that he is not listed among Victorian novelists in the Wikipedia article on Victorian Literature, not even in in the subsection on other Victorian writers. Why is that? I am not an expert, but in his own time, Trollope’s contemporaries accused him of being too prolific and too commercial. He was not ashamed to fret over payment for his books.

Trollope was a bureaucrat in the British postal system and he often wrote while traveling on official business. He kept to a strict schedule, rising early to get in his daily quota of words and said that if he finished one book during a writing session, he started his next without pausing. He kept meticulous records of his number of words per day.

In other words, Anthony Trollope was a novel writing machine. He wrote forty-seven novels in addition to short stories, travel books, a history of the English clergy, an autobiography, and other writings on miscellaneous subjects. Contemporary critics roundly condemned him for being overly prolific. Today, he might be accused of being a hack, of substituting quantity for quality.

Myself, I am profoundly grateful that Trollope wrote every day and turned out books one after another. I have been reading Trollope regularly for thirty years now, and there are still books I am looking forward to reading for the first time and there are others that seem completely new because it has been so long since I read them.

Some things make it easy to become a Trollope enthusiast. Project Gutenberg has made most of his books free in electronic editions. Amazon also has many of Trollope’s works available electronically at nominal price or free. These electronic versions are not perfect— the transcription process introduces a few errors and they are often the product of enthusiasts rather than experts, but they are still very readable. Cheap used paper copies are also easy to find on-line.

For me, however, the gem is the Group Reading of Anthony Trollope , which I call the “Trollope list.” The Trollope list reads a book by Trollope together every two or three months. I think they are unique in that a volunteer member of the group summarizes each week’s chapters. This is startlingly effective. The summaries spark discussion, and busy people who have trouble keeping up with their reading, can keep up with the discussion based on the summaries even when they have slipped behind. I admit to occasionally reading only the summaries during a busy week and skipping a few chapters in my own reading. This makes group reading so much less onerous. You can relax and enjoy Trollope instead of worrying about finishing a reading assignment each week.

I cannot say enough about the group members. Some are academics, some are dilettantes like me, others are just enthusiastic readers. The discussions are wide ranging—some go into Victorian arcana, others apply Trollope’s insights into contemporary society, some revel in the Trollope’s romance and dramatic tension. Anyone who enjoys Dickens or Jane Austen should dip into Trollope. He touches many of the same topics, but with a different style and perspective that I find fascinating.

The Group Reading of Anthony Trollope is an excellent starting point for getting to know Trollope. The group is well into Phineas Finn at this writing, but do drop in, you may find that starting in the middle, “in medea res,” works for you. You must join to participate or read the discussion, but it’s all free. Civility and absence of politics are the rule. There are no trolls on the Trollope list.

If you don’t care for the daily and hourly emails of an active group, opt for “no email” and go to the group website, Group Reading of Anthony Trollope when you feel like it. You only get one email a day if you go for a “daily summary.” My choice is to enjoy the continual conversation of “individual messages.” You can subscribe below.


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Thoreau, Minks, and Muskrats

When I first read Walden for a book report in the eighth grade, the famous quote “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” stuck with me. I knew quiet desperation. It seemed like Thoreau’s words captured everything my thirteen-year-old self knew and feared.

I had Thoreau confused with James Thurber when I started reading. Walden was hard going for a kid caught in a pre-adolescent Heinlein reading spree, but Thoreau captured me. My father had spent the preceding summer in a state mental hospital fighting off suicidal depression. His return to the farm a few weeks before I turned thirteen caught in my throat. Walden helped me get it down, although some spots in my gullet are still raw.

Thoreau talked about problems I could understand. I don’t now remember reading these lines when I was thirteen, but I know I understood Thoreau when he wrote “From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats.”

I knew minks and muskrats. Three mink farms were within 3 miles of our farm and I had seen the sleek brown streaks of escaped minks roaming the woods and fields. My father trapped muskrats in the crick to the north of the farm when he was a kid. I set Dad’s collection of traps a few times. The only thing I ever caught was a hapless field mouse that I skinned and whose hide I salted but never got around to tanning. I saw several muskrat lodges along the crick, but the rats were elusive and fugitive minks were too smart to be trappable.

But oh how I envied those minks and muskrats! Like the lilies of the field, they never spun, toiled, or knew clutching desperation.

Since the eighth grade, I’ve read Walden several times. Thoreau is not as easy for me to take now. From years as a corporate wonk and manager, I tend to dismiss anyone who chokes on decisions that must be made, right or wrong even though I frequently choke myself. Sometimes I feel an evasive strain in Thoreau’s words, but he is so eloquent, so logical, I can’t dismiss him. Instead, I listen and realize he often says the things that I wish I had said myself.

I conclude that I may be a whiner myself. Well.

A decade or so ago, my wife made me a lavish Christmas gift of a complete reprint of the 1906 edition of Thoreau’s journals in 14 volumes. I’ve made it a practice each morning to read an entry from the journal from some year corresponding to the current day. I often lose control and read much more than a single day’s entry. I jump around between years. And I neglect the practice for weeks on end, but eventually I come back.

There is a new edition of the journals now which is said to be much better edited than the one I have. I’m a Thoreau reader, not a scholar, so I don’t know, but I have gained a lot from my old reprint. I read Thoreau’s journal in the dim hours before sunrise when I am still muddled with sleep and building my resources for the moment when Albert, the border collie who owns me, drags me out to walk in any kind of weather with complete disregard for my state– or lack of state– of mind.

I am an early riser, but not a lark, I need a few hours to take a run at the day before my thoughts clear and flow freely. Fortunately for my weak mental state, Thoreau tends to be candid rather than persuasive in his journal. When he is persuasive, he is usually showing off how he could be persuasive if he were convinced of the truth of his assertions. His tentative stand is protection in weak moments from the strength of Thoreau’s intellect. Without it, I am afraid I would be futilely at his bidding, setting up a riderless underground railroad or some other half-baked version of a 19th Century project in the 21st Century.

The journals are not polished like Walden, but they are a textbook for finding brave minks and muskrats.

These are my thought today on Thoreau. I would love to hear other people’s impressions of Thoreau if they care to share a comment.