Analysis of Raymond Chandler’s Novels

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 20, 2018 • ( 0 )

Many people who have never read a single word of Raymond Chandler’s (1888–1959) recognize the name of his fictional hero Philip Marlowe. This recognition results in part from the wide exposure and frequent dilution Chandler’s work has received in media other than print. Several of his novels, and especially Farewell, My Lovely and The Big Sleep, have been filmed repeatedly; both were filmed again during the 1970’s. Marlowe has been interpreted on film by such diverse actors as Humphrey Bogart, Dick Powell, Robert Montgomery, George Montgomery, Robert Mitchum, James Garner, and Elliot Gould. A series for radio and one for television were based somewhat loosely on Chandler’s character.

chandler_raymond_WD This recognition amounts to more than exposure in multiple media; it is an indication of the legendary or even mythic proportions of Chandler’s creation. Marlowe has become a central figure in the myth of the detective; the only comparable characters would be Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, even though they are quite different from Marlowe. Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, although well known, is developed in only one book and lacks the psychological depth of Marlowe. Marlowe has taken his place among characters of American myth, with Natty Bumppo, Captain Ahab, Huckleberry Finn, and Thomas Sutpen. There is something uniquely American about the self-reliance of this character, something that goes beyond Chandler’s brilliant descriptions of the burned-out landscape of modern California.

Marlowe is in fact Chandler’s great achievement, but that accomplishment in itself imposed a limitation of a sort. Because Marlowe had the dual role of central character and observer in all seven of Chandler’s novels, the author was not consistently pressed to explore other characters except as they interacted with his hero. In his final novel, Playback, Chandler leads Marlowe through an ill-conceived plot at the expense of two neglected characters who had shown real literary promise. In this final project, the author had fallen victim to the temptation to rely on his primary character, and Marlowe’s character suffers as a result.

Nevertheless, Marlowe remains an impressive artistic creation because of his remarkable combination of the detective with more traditional American heroic types, a combination discussed in Chandler’s famous essay “The Simple Art of Murder.” This essay attempts to define Chandler’s intentions as a writer of detective fiction and has since become one of the classic texts concerning the scope and intention of mystery writing. Although a major point of “The Simple Art of Murder” is Chandler’s rejection of the stylized mystery and his often-quoted tribute to Hammett—his claim that Hammett took murder “out of the Venetian vase and dropped it in the alley”— the essay makes its most important point in an argument for detective fiction as a heroic formin which modern readers can still believe. Claiming that all art must contain the quality of redemption, Chandler insists, perhaps too stridently, that the detective is “the hero; he is everything.” In the character of Marlowe, Chandler tests the possibility of heroism in the modern cultural and spiritual wasteland of Southern California, to see whether traditional heroic values can survive the test of a realistic portrait of modern society.

In precisely this way, Chandler had to face a limitation that did not affect his American predecessors: the disappearance of the frontier. American heroes acted out the myth of Emersonian self-reliance against the background of a vast, unspoiled frontier. In the twentieth century, William Faulkner, attempting to study the ambivalent role of the hero, moved his fiery character Thomas Sutpen to the frontier in Absalom, Absalom! (1966).

Most twentieth century American novelists despaired of the possibility of reviving the heroic tradition and concentrated instead on victims, common people, and even criminals. Ernest Hemingway stood alone among the serious novelists looking for an affirmation by means of the code hero, and Chandler’s intellectual debt to Hemingway is profound. He acknowledged that debt in two ways. In “The Simple Art of Murder,” he points out that what is excellent in Hammett’s (and by inference his own) work is implicit in Hemingway’s fiction. In a more celebrated reference, a policeman in Farewell, My Lovely is called Hemingway by Marlowe. When Galbraith, the officer, asks who this Hemingway is, Marlowe explains, “A guy that keeps saying the same thing over and over until you begin to believe it must be good.” This is a joke about the terse Hemingway style, and the character whom Marlowe calls Hemingway is indeed terse. The jest is not, however, a slap at Hemingway.

Galbraith is one of the few men with integrity whom Marlowe encounters in Farewell, My Lovely.He is a policeman who wants to be honest but who has to work in a corrupt system. By contrast, in the story from which this portion of Farewell, My Lovely was “cannibalized,” “The Man Who Liked Dogs,” Galbraith was as corrupt as any of the criminals Carmady (the detective) encountered. He was merely a sadistic cop who participated in cover-ups and even murder. The verbal association of this character with Hemingway corresponds nicely with Chandler’s changing the personality of the officer so that he would represent the quality Chandler most admired in Hemingway’s heroes, resignation to defeat while maintaining some measure of integrity.The world Marlowe inhabits is, like that of Hemingway’s characters, not conducive to heroism. Chandler coined a memorable phrase, “the mean streets,” to describe the environment in which his hero would have to function. Marlowe was created to indicate that it is possible to maintain integrity in these surroundings, even if one cannot be uninfluenced by them. As Chandler put it, “down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.” Chandler emphasized that Marlowe is part of that environment—by necessity—but is not contaminated by it—by choice. He is not without fear. Marlowe often expresses the fear of a normal man in a dangerous situation, and in this way he differs from the heroes of the tough-guy school and from those of Chandler’s apprentice stories. Like Hemingway’s heroes, he must learn to control and to disguise his fear. Most important, he is not intimidated by his environment. As Chandler puts it in his essay, the detective “must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor.”

Although commonly used, the phrase “the mean streets” is somewhat misleading. Chandler’s target is not merely, or even primarily, the cruelty and brutality of life at the bottom of the social and economic ladder. For him, the mean streets extend into the posh apartments and mansions of Hollywood and suburban Los Angeles, and he is more interested in exploring cruelty and viciousness among the very rich than among the people of the streets. Each of the novels treats the theme of the quest for and ownership of money and power as the source of evil; Chandler constantly emphasizes Marlowe’s relative poverty as a symbol of his incorruptibility. The High Window, for example, is more a study in the corrupting influence of wealth than in the process of detection. Marlowe is shocked to discover that his client Mrs. Murdock not only murdered her husband to collect his life insurance, but also systematically conditioned her timid and neurotic secretary to believe that she was the murderess, dependent on Mrs. Murdock for forgiveness as well as for protection from the law. This instance is typical of Chandler’s novels. The mean streets originate in the drawing rooms of those who may profit by exploiting others.

Marlowe’s code of behavior differs from those of other fictional detectives, though his descendants, particularly Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer and Robert B. Parker’s Spenser, resemble Chandler’s hero. Marlowe is not, in the final analysis, a tough guy. He is a compassionate man who, as he half-ironically tells a policeman in The Long Goodbye, hears “voices crying in the night” and goes to “see what’s the matter.” Marlowe is instinctively the champion of the victims of the rich and powerful; in The High Window he insists that the secretary, Merle Davis, be set free of the psychological exploitation by the Murdock family and be allowed to return to her home in Kansas. To those who aspire to wealth and power, Marlowe is not so kind. In The Little Sister, he knowingly allows the amoral, ruthless murderess Dolores Gonzales to be killed by her husband.

This instinctive compassion for the weak accounts for much of Marlowe’s fundamental decency, but it often gets him into trouble, for he is human enough to be occasionally deceived by appearances. The apparently innocent client in The Little Sister, Orfamay Quest from Kansas, deceives Marlowe with her piety and sincerity, and he is eventually depressed to learn that his compassion for her is wasted, that despite her apparent innocence she is compulsively materialistic and is willing to exploit even her brother’s murder if she can profit by his scheme to blackmail a gangster.

Marlowe’s compassion is what makes him interesting as a character, but it is also what makes him vulnerable in the mean streets. His defense against that vulnerability is to play the role of the tough guy. His wisecracks, which have since become obligatory in stories about private detectives, are nothing more than a shield. Chandler says in “The Simple Art of Murder” that the detective is a proud man who will take “no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge.” The mean streets have taught Marlowe that corrupt politicians, tired policemen, ambitious actors, rich people, and street toughs will insult and abuse him readily; his defense is the wisecrack. It is the attempt of an honorable man to stand up to a world that has gone sour.

The Big Sleep
The Big Sleep, Chandler’s first full-length novel, makes explicit use of the associations with myth that had been implicit in the stories he had published over six years. It was in this book that the author settled on the name Marlowe for his detective, after he had experimented with such names as Carmady and Dalmas. In his first detective story, “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot,” he had called the detective Mallory, an obvious allusion to the chronicler of the Arthurian legends, Sir Thomas Malory. The association with the quest romance is worked out in several important ways in The Big Sleep. When the detective first arrives at the home of his client, he notices a stained-glass panel “showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady” and concludes that “if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up and help him.” Much later, upon returning to the house, the detective notes that the knight “wasn’t getting anywhere” with the task of rescuing the lady.

These two references remind the reader of a heroic tradition into which Marlowe, a citizen of the twentieth century, is trying to fit his own experiences. Malory’s knights lived in an age of faith, and the quest for the Holy Grail was a duty imposed by that faith as well as a test of the worthiness of the knight himself. Marlowe’s adventures entangle him with a pornographer who is murdered, a small-time blackmailer whose effort to cut himself into the action leads to his death, a trigger-happy homosexual, a powerful criminal the law cannot touch, a district attorney eager to avoid scandal that might touch a wealthy family, and a psychopathic murderess. The environment is impossible to reconcile with the values suggested by the knight in the panel. At midpoint in the novel, Marlowe has a chess problem laid out (his playing chess against the problems defined in classical matches gives him an intellectual depth uncharacteristic of the tough-guy detective), and, trying to move a knight effectively on the board, he concludes that “knights had no meaning in this game. Itwasn’t a game for knights.”

The implication of this set of images is that Marlowe aspires to the role of the traditional knight, but that such an aspiration is doomed to failure in the mean streets. His aspiration to the role of the knight is a hopeless attempt to restore order to the modern wasteland. At the same time, it is proof of his integrity that he tries to maintain that role in the face of certain and predictable frustration. In a subsequent novel, The High Window, a minor character invents a phrase that eloquently describes Marlowe’s association with the romance tradition; he calls the detective a “shopsoiled Galahad,” a reminder both of the knight who, in the romance, could not be corrupted, and of the pressures that wear down the modern hero.

Another important reference to the romance tradition in The Big Sleep is the client himself. General Sternwood is a dying man; he has to meet Marlowe in a greenhouse because the general needs the artificial warmth. He is lame, impotent, and distressed at the moral decay of his daughters. Chandler implicitly associates this character with the Fisher King of the archetypal romance, and The Big Sleep takes on revealing connections with T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), another modern version of this quest. Like Eliot’s poem, Chandler’s version of the quest is a record of failure. Marlowe’s success in the work of detection points paradoxically to the failure of his quest. He is able to complete, even to go beyond, his assignment. His instinctive sympathy for the helpless general leads him to try to find out what happened to the general’s son-in-law, Rusty Regan, whose charm and vigor had restored some vitality to the old man, much as the traditional knight might restore the Fisher King. Marlowe discovers that Regan has been murdered, hence, there is no hope that the general might be restored. He can only prepare to join Regan in “the big sleep.”

It was not a game for knights.” This knight is able to sort through the many mysteries of The Big Sleep, to discover the killers of the various victims. He outsmarts a professional killer in a shoot-out and feels that in doing so he achieves some revenge for Harry Jones, a tough little victim whom Marlowe had respected. His actions do not, however, restore order to his surroundings. He is unable to reach, through law or intimidation, Eddie Mars, the operator of a gambling casino and several protection rackets, a parasite of society. His discovery that Regan was murdered leads him to the conclusion that all he can do is try to protect the general from “the nastiness,” the inescapable and brutal facts of life. Even his discovery that Regan’s killer was the general’s daughter, Carmen, does not resolve anything: She is a psychopath, and her actions are gratuitous, not subject to reform. All Marlowe can do, ironically, is the same thing Eddie Mars and Regan’s widow, Vivian, tried to do—protect the general from knowing that his own daughter was responsible for the death of the one person who brought happiness to his life. Marlowe’s method differs from that of Mars. Rather than cover up the fact, he uses the leverage of his knowledge of the cover-up to force Vivian Regan, Carmen’s sister as well as Rusty’s widow, to have Carmen committed to a mental hospital. He makes this deal only after Vivian has tried to buy his silence.

What makes The Big Sleep such a rich novel, in addition to its mythic associations, is the question of what keeps Marlowe going. He knows that justice is not possible in a world controlled by Eddie Mars, and he learns that his efforts lead only to compound frustrations and personal danger. He continues to work, against the warnings of the criminal element, the official police, and the family of his client. Both Vivian and Carmen offer sexual bribes if Marlowe will get off the case. He is so personally affected by “the nastiness” around him that he has a nightmare after having encountered the perverse scene in which the pornographer Geiger was killed—a dream in which Marlowe implicates himself as an ineffective pornographer. He dreams about a “man in a bloody Chinese coat” (Geiger) who was chasing “a naked girl with long jade earrings” (Carmen) “while I ran after them and tried to take a photograph with an empty camera.” This exposure to the corruption around him makes Marlowe doubt, in his nightmare, even his own ability to resist corruption.

Marlowe is able to continue in the face of these pressures because, like Joseph Conrad’s Marlow in Heart of Darkness (1902), he believes in something greater than his personal interests. His idealism is of course shattered by the corruption around him, but like Conrad’s character or Hemingway’s heroes, he believes in a code: loyalty to his client. In the absence of a belief in an absolute good, Marlowe guides his behavior by weighing his options in the context of the principle of loyalty to the client. When the police and the district attorney threaten him, he explains that all he has to sell is “what little guts and intelligence the Lord gave me and a willingness to get pushed around in order to protect a client.” He refuses an invitation to have sex with each of the attractive Sternwood daughters because of this principle. He tells Carmen, “It’s a question of professional pride” after he has told Vivian that as a man he is tempted, but as a detective, “I work at it, lady. I don’t play at it.” Many bribes, monetary and sexual, are offered Marlowe in The Big Sleep. Even more threats, from criminals, police, and his client’s family, are hurled at him. What gives him his sense of purpose in a world that seems to resonate to no moral standard is one self-imposed principle. This is the main theme of Chandler’s fiction: If standards of behavior do not exist outside the individual, as they were believed to in the age of chivalry, then one must create them, however imperfect they may be, for oneself.

Writings During the 1940’s
By the end of the 1940’s, Chandler was well established as a master of detective fiction, but he was becoming increasingly impatient with the limitations of the form. Classically educated and somewhat aristocratic in his personal tastes, he found the conventions of the hard-boiled genre increasingly confining. However, he was not willing to dispose of Marlowe, partly because the detective had brought his creator success. More important, as biographer Frank MacShane has pointed out, Chandler’s real interest was the variety of the life and the essential formlessness of Los Angeles, so his detective’s ability to cut across class lines, to meet with criminals, police, the seedier citizens as well as the wealthy, gave the author a chance to explore in fiction the life of the entire community, much as two of his favorite novelists, Charles Dickens and Honoré de Balzac, had done for the cities in which they had lived.

Chandler had already pushed the mystery novel somewhat beyond its inherent limits, but he remained unsatisfied with what must be regarded as an impressive achievement. He had altered the formula to apply the quest myth in The Big Sleep; to study phony psychics and corrupt police in Farewell, My Lovely; to examine psychological

and legal exploitation by the very wealthy in The High Window ; to work with the devices of disguise and the anxieties of those who merely aspire to wealth and power in The Lady in the Lake; and to satirize the pretentiousness of Hollywood as well as to comment on the corrosive influence of materialism in The Little Sister.

The Long Goodbye
The Long Goodbye abandons so many of the conventions of the detective formula that it simply uses what is left of the formula as a skeleton around which to build serious psychological and cultural themes. The actual detective work Marlowe is hired to performis merely to search for the novelist RogerWade, who has disappeared on a drunken spree, and eventually Marlowe discovers that the search itself was unnecessary. Wade’s wife knew where Roger was but hired Marlowe to get him involved in Roger’s life, so that he might possibly be persuaded to take a job as Wade’s bodyguard. The search forWade allows for some discussion of physicians who dispense drugs freely to the wealthy, but it depends more on persistent following of leads than on brilliant deduction. The real detective work in which he engages is entirely independent, work from which he is discouraged by the police, a gangster named Menendez, a wealthy businessman, and the Wades. It is a work of sentiment, not professionalism, and the book discloses that this task is worth neither the effort nor the integrity that Marlowe puts into it.

The Long Goodbye is finally a study in personal loyalties. The sustaining ethic of the earlier novels, loyalty to a client, does not really apply in this book, for most of the time Marlowe has no client or refuses to take up the assignments offered him. He is no longer satisfied with his work as a detective, and one of the book’s best chapters details the monotony and triviality of a day in the life of a private investigator. His own ambivalence about his role is summed up after a series of absurd requests for his services: “What makes a man stay with it nobody knows. You don’t get rich, and you don’t often have much fun. Sometimes you get beaten up or shot at or tossed in the jailhouse.” Each of these unpleasant things happens to Marlowe. He stays in business, but he has ceased to understand why.

At the heart of the book is Marlowe’s relationship with Terry Lennox, who drifts into Marlowe’s personal life. Lennox, a man with a mysterious past but at present married for the second time to the nymphomaniac daughter of a tycoon, impresses Marlowe with a jaded version of the Hemingway code. Lennox knows he is little more than a gigolo, but he has accepted himself with a kind of refined drunkenness. He and Marlowe become friends, but after his wife is brutally murdered, Lennox asks Marlowe to help him escape to Mexico. Marlowe, who agrees out of friendship rather than loyalty to Lennox as a client, is thus legally implicated as a possible accessory after the fact.

Lennox’s action brings him into an almost inevitable conflict with the police, and he is roughly treated by a detective and his precinct captain. Marlowe’s being at odds with the official police is far from a new occurrence in Chandler’s work. His fiction always contains an innate distrust of the legal establishment, from the exposé of police corruption in Farewell, My Lovely through the abuse of police power by one of the killers in The Lady in the Lake. A lawyer in The Long Goodbye tells Marlowe, “The law isn’t justice, it’s a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer.” This distrust of the mechanism of law usually led Chandler to condemn separate kinds of justice for the wealthy and the powerless. Marlowe’s reaction to his disillusionment includes verbal and physical conflict with the police as well as the routine concealment of evidence that might implicate a client.

What differentiates this conflict from previous ones in Chandler’s work is that Marlowe is not really protecting the interests of a client. He acts out of a personal loyalty, based partly on his belief that Lennox could not have committed the sadistic murder of which he is accused. He keeps his silence during a week in jail, during which he is pressed to give evidence that would implicate both himself and Lennox.

Lennox’s confession and suicide render Marlowe’s actions futile. The arrival of aletter and a large sum of money rekindles a sentimental interest in the Lennox matter, and as it becomes clear that some connection exists between Lennox and the Wades, who have tried to hire him to help Roger stay sober long enough to finish his book, Marlowe continues to fit together evidence that points to Lennox’s innocence. Proving Lennox innocent is another source of disillusionment: Marlowe learns that both the confession and the suicide were faked. In their final interview, Marlowe tells Lennox, “You had standards and you lived by them, but they were personal. They had no relation to any kind of ethics or scruples.” Marlowe has himself come close to this moral relativism in his uncritical loyalty to Lennox, and has perhaps seen in his friend an example of the vague standard of ethical conduct to which such moral relativism can lead. The difference between Lennox and Marlowe is that the detective still recognizes the importance of having a code. He tells Lennox, “You’re a moral defeatist.” His work on behalf of Lennox has been a disappointment of the highest order, for he has seen the paralysis of will toward which the cynicism both men share leads. By returning Lennox’s money, Marlowe implies that Lennox was not worth the risk and labor of proving his innocence.

The Long Goodbye is populated by “moral defeatists.” Another character, Roger Wade, has given up on himself as a man and as a writer. Chandler creates in this character a representation of the writer who knowingly compromises his artistic talent for personal gain. Knowing that he is “a literary prostitute,” Wade is driven to alcoholic sprees and personal despair. When he seeks Marlowe’s sympathy for his predicament, Marlowe reminds him of Gustave Flaubert, an example of the genuine artist who was willing to sacrifice success for his art.

Marlowe’s association with Wade develops the central theme of The Long Goodbye: personal responsibility.Wade’s publisher and his wife want Marlowe to protectWade from his depressive and suicidal tendencies. Realizing that Wade is trying to escape something inside himself, Marlowe knows that only Wade can stop his rush toward self-destruction. He refuses to take the lucrative job asWade’s bodyguard because he realizes he cannot prevent the author from being self-destructive. In fact, Marlowe is in the Wade house the day Roger Wade apparently commits suicide. Although he does try to removeWade’s gun from its customary desk drawer, he makes no effort to stopWade from drinking. He knows that restrainingWade, whether by physical force or coercion, would be an artifical substitute for a real solution. IfWade’s self-loathing makes him suicidal, Marlowe recognizes that nothing he can do will prevent the selfdestructive act from taking place.

The theme of personal responsibility is even more directly apparent in Marlowe’s relation with Eileen Wade. Initially, she impresses him as an ideal beauty, and the erotic implications of their relationship are always near the surface. In a scene after he has put the drunken Roger to bed, the detective comes close to his first sexual consummation in the novels. In this episode, it becomes clear that Eileen is mentally disturbed, and Marlowe’s subsequent investigation reveals that she was once married to Lennox, who served in the war under another name. Her attempt to seduce Marlowe is in fact a clumsy attempt to establish a relationship with the Terry Lennox she knew before his cynicism turned to moral defeatism. From these premises, Marlowe deduces that Eileen murdered both Sylvia Lennox and Roger, who had been having an affair with Sylvia, a perverse revenge for her being twice defeated by a woman whose vulgarity she despised.

Marlowe has sufficient evidence to prove Lennox’s innocence and to show that Wade’s death was not suicide, but he does not go to the police. He confronts Eileen with the evidence and gives her time to commit suicide. He refers to himself as a “one-man death watch” and takes no action to prevent the self-destruction of this woman to whom he is so powerfully attracted. When he has to explain his conduct to the one policeman he trusts, Bernie Ohls, he says, “I wanted her to take a long look at herself. What she did about it was her business.” This is a ruthless dismissal of a disturbed, though homicidal, person. What Chandler intends to emphasize is the idea that all humans must ultimately take full responsibility for their actions. Even Marlowe’s relationship with Bernie Ohls deteriorates. Ohls, the only policeman Marlowe likes or trusts, consents to leak a document so that Marlowe will use it unwittingly to flush out the racketeer Menendez, knowing that Marlowe will be abused psychologically and physically in the process. The ruse works, and Ohls ruthlessly sends Menendez off to possible execution by his fellow criminals. In the image used by another character, Marlowe has been the goat tied out by the police to catch the tiger Menendez. Marlowe understands why the police have used him this way, but the novel ends with a new note of mistrust between Marlowe and Ohls. Yet another human relationship has failed.

In The Long Goodbye, the business of detection is subordinate to the themes of personal responsibility, betrayal, and the mutability of all human relationships. The book is a powerful indictment of the shallowness of public values in mid-century America, and the emphasis is on characterization, theme, and atmosphere rather than on the matters typical of the mystery novel. It represents a remarkable transition from the detective novel to the realm of serious fiction, a transition that has subsequently been imitated but not equaled.

Major works
Fiction; The Big Sleep, 1939; Farewell, My Lovely, 1940; The High Window, 1942; The Lady in the Lake, 1943; The Little Sister, 1949; The Long Goodbye, 1953; Playback, 1958; The Raymond Chandler Omnibus: Four Famous Classics, 1967; The Second Chandler Omnibus, 1973; Poodle Springs, 1989 (incomplete manuscript finished by Robert B. Parker); Later Novels and Other Writings, 1995.
Short fiction: Five Murderers, 1944; Five Sinister Characters, 1945; Finger Man, and Other Stories, 1946; Red Wind, 1946; Spanish Blood, 1946; The Simple Art of Murder, 1950; Trouble Is My Business, 1950; Pick-up on Noon Street, 1952; Smart-Aleck Kill, 1953; Pearls Are a Nuisance, 1958; Killer in the Rain, 1964 (Philip Durham, editor); The Smell of Fear, 1965; The Midnight Raymond Chandler, 1971; The Best of Raymond Chandler, 1977; Stories and Early Novels, 1995.
Nonfiction: The Blue Dahlia, 1946 (Matthew J. Bruccoli, editor); Raymond Chandler Speaking, 1962 (Dorothy Gardiner and Katherine Sorely Walker, editors); Chandler Before Marlowe: Raymond Chandler’s Early Prose and Poetry, 1973 (Bruccoli, editor); The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler and English Summer, 1976 (Frank MacShane, editor); Raymond Chandler and James M. Fox: Letters, 1978; Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler, 1981 (MacShane, editor); The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nonfiction, 1909-1959, 2000 (edited by Tom Hiney and MacShane).