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Raymond Chandler Once Said That If He Ever Wrote a Non-Fiction Book

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Raymond Chandler Once Said That If He Ever Wrote a Non-Fiction Book DOUBLE IDENTITY:HARD-BOILED DETECTIVE FICTION AND THE DIVIDED “I” JOHN SCAGGS Raymond Chandler once said that if he ever wrote a non-fiction book, “it would probably turn out to be the autobiography of a split person- ality”.1 Critics often attribute the division evident in the figure of the private investigator Philip Marlowe to a division in Chandler’s own personality, the result (or so this line of argument claims) of his oscil- lation between American and English culture.2 Paul Skenazy notes, in the introduction to Raymond Chandler Speaking, that Chandler “was a man of two continents, two centuries, and two languages”.3 He was born in Chicago in 1888, his father from Pennsylvania and his mother an Irish immigrant from Waterford. At the age of seven he went with his mother to live in London, where he was educated. He published poems, reviews, and essays in several London literary magazines, but in 1912 he gave up literature and returned to the United States. Chandler returned to writing in 1932, after twenty years in the world of business. He turned to the tough-guy private eye stories of magazines such as Black Mask, and adopted the clipped, colloquial tone of the genre, a tone in stark contrast to the elaborate literary style he had employed in his earlier writings in England. In a letter dated 18 March 1949, Chandler says, “I had to learn American just like a for- eign language”,4 and the division implied in such a comment is also 1 Paul Skenazy, “Introduction”, in Raymond Chandler Speaking, eds Dorothy Gardiner and Kathrine Sorley Walker, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997, 1. 2 Ralph Willett, Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction, BAAS Pamphlets in American Studies, 23, Staffordshire British Association for American Studies, 1992, 16. 3 Skenazy, “Introduction”, in Raymond Chandler Speaking,1. 4 Raymond Chandler Speaking,80. 132 John Scaggs evident in the hard-boiled narrative voice of the P.I. Philip Marlowe that Chandler created. The conventional first-person narrative of hard-boiled detective fiction, by privileging the voice of the P.I., suggests an element of monological control to the narrative that is often undermined by the merely partial understanding, or local effectiveness, that the P.I. fre- quently achieves.5 Furthermore, as Stephen Knight observes, Mar- lowe’s voice is really two voices: an insightful, ironic narrative voice, and a terse, aggressive dialogic voice. According to Knight, “the voice of Marlowe’s reverie, both subtle and ironic, is quite different from the voice he uses to other characters”. In the guise that he wears in his dealings with others, he is tough and insensitive – the typical hard- boiled detective. However, Knight observes that the divided voice evi- dent in Marlowe’s narratives “creates a double man”,6 and this double identity is reflected in other ways in Chandler’s novels, and in con- temporary American hard-boiled detective fiction in general. If we view Marlowe’s tough talk as a form of protracted disguise, as a form of language as power, which, as Scott R. Christianson ob- serves, asserts his individuality,7 then the presence of disguised or altered identity as a central motif in hard-boiled detective fiction should come as no surprise. In fact, it rarely surprises Marlowe when he encounters it in the characters, both clients and villains, who popu- late his narratives. As Liahna Babener notes, “virtually every one of Chandler’s seven novels pivots on a case of mistaken, disguised, or altered identity”.8 Examples range from Mildred Haviland in The Lady in the Lake (1944), who adopts a new role every time her existing alias comes under threat, to Terry Lennox in The Long Goodbye (1953), who adopts a series of fake identities in an attempt to escape from, and eradicate, a tortuous past. However, it is not only the inhabitants of Marlowe’s narrative world that cast aside and re-invent 5 Willett, Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction,9. 6 Stephen Knight, “‘A Hard Cheerfulness’: An Introduction to Raymond Chandler”, in American Crime Fiction: Studies in the Genre, ed. Brian Doherty, London: Macmillan, 1998, 81. 7 Scott R. Christianson, “Tough Talk and Wisecracks: Language as Power in American Detective Fiction”, Journal of Popular Culture, 23 (1989) 155. 8 Liahna Babener, “Raymond Chandler’s City of Lies”, in Los Angeles in Fiction: A Collection of Essays, ed. David Fine, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995, 128..
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