Crimes of a late bloomer

Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid."

Raymond Chandler's spare, poetic and magisterial credo as a crime writer is deservedly celebrated. It is odd to think that this quintessentially American author was a near contemporary at Dulwich of P.G. Wodehouse. Between them they must have influenced more genre writers and provoked more unsuccessful imitators than any two others this century. Happily, both were naturals who could be parodied, like all distinctive stylists, but never successfully imitated.

Chandler was educated at Dulwich because his drunkard father abandoned him and his mother brought him to England, where she had relations who might be expected to support them. This they grudgingly did, but once Chandler was 21, he was firmly told that his beautiful mother, who had affairs but never remarried, was now his financial responsibility.

Chandler left for his native America in 1912, after an undistinguished career in Grub Street, having published some indifferent verse, some sharp book reviews and declined a hefty six guineas a week to write serial romances. He enlisted in 1917 in a Canadian battalion of the Gordon Highlanders, complete with kilt, saw battle and became a platoon leader in an outfit whose official strength was 1,200 and had suffered 14,000 casualties since 1915. He was badly concussed and was sent to England to learn to fly and where he "would get so plastered that I had to crawl to bed on hands and knees and at 7.30 the next morning I would be as blithe as a sparrow and howling for my breakfast. It is not in some ways the most desirable gift."

After failing to put down roots in St Louis and San Francisco, he settled in Los Angeles, brought his mother over and prospered as an oil-company executive. At 31 he met and fell deeply, almost obsessively, in love with a twice- married beauty, nearly 20 years older than himself, disapproved of so strongly by his mother that he could not bring himself to marry Cissy until his mother died in 1924. Freudians may make of this what they wish, but Raymond and Cissy Chandler made each other happy. The first thing Chandler did when he became rich, after a multitude of two-room rented apartments, was to buy a house in La Jolla with a superb sea view and a Steinway grand piano for Cissy costing $3,000.

Before that, however, he had to write endlessly for the pulp magazine world of Black Mask. There he had overtaken Dashiell Hamnett in productivity, popularity and esteem in the magazine's editorial corridors. This drudgery, of almost Balzacian proportions, led to eventual hardcover publication of his first Philip Marlowe private eye novel, The Big Sleep, by Knopf in New York and Hamish Hamilton in London. Although his English reviews, and even his sales, were better than in America, he earned hardly any money from novels as good as The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely, The High Window and The Lady in the Lake.

Like William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald and other leading, drunk American writers, Chandler's finances were revolutionised by Hollywood. Billy Wilder got Chandler the job of scripting James M. Cain's Double Indemnity. Chandler only missed an Oscar for best screenplay because the Catholic lobby and the Production Code jobsworths prevented it. He became a highly paid "script doctor", working on now forgotten films, scorned all actors except Cary Grant and Humphrey Bogart, but kept working.

Hollywood finally woke up to the fact that he could write (and had written) filmable novels as well as being able to do scripts, so that his huge studio fees were augmented by sales of film rights to his own books, until he had to pay $50,000 income tax in a single year.

Hollywood success also acted as a catalyst for his book sales, with large paperback royalties flowing in. Finally he and Cissy achieved not only financial security for the first time, but became rich. Cissy, however, was seriously ill and her eventual death in her eighties left Chandler, in his sixties, a broken man who sought refuge in England, where Natasha Spender and others looked after him in relays, while he drank, blacked out, bought women expensive meals and more expensive gifts, and proposed marriage on a grand scale, including two women at once.

Philip Marlowe was of course impervious to the long-term effects of alcohol and, like all his kind, indestructible. Raymond Chandler, alas, was not and despite a male nurse to cope with his blackouts, he died in March 1959, his financial, amatory and testamentary affairs in chaos. Only his prolific letters, his pulp short stories and a handful of novels survive. Yet his literary legacy consists not only of his own remarkable oeuvre, but also the genre he turned into an art form and the influence he had on all his successors in both fiction and cinema.

Tom Hiney has written an unfashionably brief - and all the better for it - account of a late success and deeply sad life, here carefully examined and astutely interpreted with excellent quotations from Chandler's massive and always engaging correspondence. He vigorously, with well-chosen chapter and verse, dismisses the poisonous miasma of politically correct nonsense that swirled round the writer after his death. Chandler was accused of both homosexual tendencies and homophobia, of racism and anti-semitism and, by Joyce Carol Oates, of misogyny. In Hiney's book, and my own view, he is clearly innocent of all these charges and any open-minded, moderately intelligent and attentive reader will not only acquit him, but still find the one American crime writer who aspired to literature and achieved it.

From The Big Sleep onwards, his tone was not only distinctive but the true, unique voice of the real writer - the one who lasts, the one who grabs the reader's attention and then never lets go, rather like his description of General Sternwood's head: "A few locks of dry hair clung to his scalp, like wild flowers fighting for life on a bare rock".

The book is, alas, not well edited. We find bored of, teetotallor, peak for peek, several needless repetitions and two real howlers. Scarface was directed by Howard Hawks and not Howard Hughes, who was merely the coproducer, and there is no American novelist called Nathaniel West. However, Hiney is eminently worth reading before rereading Chandler himself.

Tom Rosenthal is a publisher, critic and author.