The Life of Raymond Chandler by Frank MacShane
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"Unlike James, Joyce, or Conrad, who were all in exile from worlds they detested, Chandler was in exile from a world he thought he loved. Instead of his adored England, he lived in a place where values seemed to shift with the tides."

Seven weeks ago I reviewed here the biography of Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar). Since Macdonald has often been compared to Raymond Chandler it seems worthwhile to compare their biographies. I do not find Frank MacShane's The Life of Raymond Chandler equally brilliant work, but it is a solid, informative, and interesting book, and I recommend it without any hesitation. I also need to provide a disclaimer of sorts: I consider Ross Macdonald to be a better writer than Mr. Chandler and I hope that subjective judgment does not color my comparison between the biographies.

The author depicts Mr. Chandler's life trajectory chronologically, in a conventional manner of a biography, from the writer's birth in 1888 in Chicago, childhood in Nebraska, then his youth in England (and Ireland), brief time spent in the British civil service as an Admiralty clerk, and equally brief stint on a newspaper job. Next, Mr. Chandler returns to the U.S., settles in California, marries Cissy, and lands a well paying job as an auditor in an oil company. Continual struggle with drinking and self-doubt plague him until his death in la Jolla in 1959.

Mr. Chandler's literary career is presented in detail, from his early "cloy and saccharine" poetry, through several years of writing crime stories for pulp magazines, to his novels, beginning with The Big Sleep, peaking with The Long Good-Bye and ending in an unremarkable Playback.

Mr. MacShane has selected the motif of Chandler's lack of sense of nationality as the main conceptual axis of the biography. Much of Chandler's worldview must have been affected by the shock resulting from his encounter with the loose concept of culture in California after having grown up in a rigid class structure of England.

The other leading motif in this biography is Mr. Chandler's struggle to escape the categorization as just a mystery writer. Chandler detested the basic premise of classic, deductive detective stories and was more interested in people than in the plots. I agree with the author that Chandler managed to escape the genre-writer niche only in his masterpiece: the Time reviewer observed that The Long Good-Bye

"crossed the boundary between good mystery and good novel"

Mr. MacShane contrasts the formulaic character of Hammett's Sam Spade, who "is not a person at all" with Chandler's Philip Marlowe, tough and clever yet human. Well, I tend to disagree: even in the outstanding Good-Bye Marlowe is at most half a person. It was finally Ross Macdonald who created a believable PI character in his Lew Archer.

I find it rather surprising that to me Chandler's novels feel so much more dated than Macdonald's even though their most productive years are less than 25 years apart (1939-1953 vs. 1949-1976).

And finally a personal connection: La Jolla, California, the place where Raymond Chandler spent the longest period of his life. I know all streets where he rented houses: my family and I used to live just a mile or two away, albeit some 25 years later.

Three and a quarter stars.

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