From Publishers Weekly
Chandler, author of such hard-boiled detective classics as The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye, wrote highly entertaining letters on subjects ranging from literature to Hollywood to cats letters, no question, from a poet of the mean streets and an extremely witty curmudgeon. Regarding detectives, he notes: "The real life private eye is a sleazy little judge from the Burns Agency, or a strong arm guy with no more personality than a blackjack." On publishers: "If you start talking about money, they retire coldly to their professional eminence, and if you start talking about literature, they immediately yank the dollar sign before your eyes." Hiney, author of a 1997 biography of Chandler, has gathered this collection largely from the superior The Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler (1981), edited by MacShane (who did the first full biography on Chandler in 1976). Hiney's notes presume a bit too much knowledge for a new reader (and, oddly, he seems to think that Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman were married). Previously unpublished scraps provide fresh material, and the few paragraphs about trench warfare in WWI fought by the young author and a late-life meeting with gangster "Lucky" Luciano that Chandler was too drunk to clearly recall are very nice. Reinventing such a standard author for a new century is only a matter of course; since this is Chandler's writing, quotable, funny, even hilarious comments appear on every page.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
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Chandler, whom
Time once dubbed the "poet laureate of the loner," was a recluse whose human dealings consisted primarily of long letters dictated, usually, while drunk. This is the third collection of Chandler letters (following
Raymond Chandler Speaking in 1962 and
The Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler in 1981) and represents never-before-published correspondence (including his first letter to the publisher of
The Big Sleep, letters to friends, and letters to Erle Stanley Gardner) and unpublished early writings, which give us, among other treasures, an inquiry to an attorney about the habits of private eyes, a sketch of his meeting with Lucky Luciano, an eyewitness account of a 1940s Oscar ceremony, and numerous critiques of other mystery writers. Hiney, one of Chandler's biographers, and the late MacShane, who edited
The Selected Letters, have organized their material into "Five Acts," centering on Chandler's struggles with and thoughts on the writing craft and the writing life, extending from 1909 to two weeks before his death, in 1959. Each section is preceded by helpful biographical notes. This collection includes one of Chandler's last letters, in which he wrote that he pictured Philip Marlowe "always in a lonely room, in lonely streets, puzzled but never quite defeated." The same picture emerges of Chandler in this masterfully edited collection. A must for serious readers of hard-boiled fiction.
Connie FletcherCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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