Raymond Chandler Interview

It was late March, 1985, two years since our CHEAP TRUTH Lovecraft interview (see CT3). Once again we used the unspeakable necromancy of the Cross Plains Dairy Queen.

Arriving from 1957, Raymond Chandler appeared in the CHEAP TRUTH offices as a small, silver-haired gentleman with a round, dignified face and round tortoiseshell glasses. He wore an ivory linen suit, a striped bow-tie, exquisite two-tone shoes and long yellow cotton gloves.

RC: (flopping onto couch) I've always been a horizontal thinker. (Frowns at television) What the hell is that?

CT: It's MTV.

RC: You have a blabb-off? (Seizes remote control.) I had one of these before they were even on the market. (Kills the sound.) Modern Americans. Jesus. Clustered around TVs like flies on garbage.

CT: Thanks for coming by, Mr. Chandler.

RC: Call me Ray, I hate snobbery.

CT: Fine, Ray. How about some hot tea?

RC: (irritably) A Ballantine's on the rocks. (sips) No doubt you want to know how a fellow like me got into this stinking mess.

CT: Actually, I --

RC: I began as a businessman. Worked for an oil company. That gave me a grasp of real life -- not like those lace-pantied fakers for the slicks. And I WORKED at my writing. Other pulp writers used buckets of whitewash, I used a camel's-hair brush.

CT: How'd you reconcile that with the lousy pay scales of BLACK MASK and DIME DETECTIVE magazines?

RC: I wrote film scripts for Tinseltown, too.

CT: And how did that work out?

RC: It was agony! You had no artistic control. Publishers are sick kittens compared to the moguls. And the agents! Jesus! (Grimaces.) Take my rewrite for THE BLUE DAHLIA. They were shooting from my script as I wrote it. Had to write it drunk. The only way I could do it in time. I wrote around the clock and had two nurses and a doctor giving me vitamin shots.

CT: Why'd you let them put you through all that, Ray?

RC: A man has to eat! (Shrugs) Besides, there was the gardener, the cook... seaside house in La Jolla... eighteen pairs of shoes... It adds up!

CT: Let's talk about your books, Ray. The mainstream is always tough on genre writers.

RC: Sure. Till you're a success. Then it's worse. You're halfway through a Marlowe story, cracking wise from the corner of your mouth, and along comes W. H. Auden and tells you you're writing "serious studies of a criminal milieu." Then you freeze up, and it takes two or three gimlets to thaw you out again. And there's the mystery hacks, envious pipsqueaks knifing your back. Or the goddamn Saturday Review of Literature -- a bunch of out-at-elbows professors mewling at everyone who has the brain and guts to make a dime!

CT: You were a critic's darling.

RC: In Britain, maybe. The British know good writing. To them I was a major American author -- not just a mystery writer. And the British have a code of honor. The women make you say "please" five times before you can sleep with them.

CT: You don't say....

RC: I love the way they talk. A writer has to know how to listen to dialogue, dammit! Nobody listens now -- except to these damn squawkboxes. (Stares gloomily at silent video) Look at that twist capering. They put whores on television these days? No wonder the West is going to hell.

CT: Uh, yeah. Now, Ray, about your treatment of women --

RC: But a man does his best. I know I did. I took a cheap, shoddy, and utterly lost kind of writing, and made it into something that intellectuals claw each other about.

CT: Right! There's your real legacy, Ray. The promise that genre writing, done from the heart, can break its own limits and really last. There's a camaraderie among pop writers. We science fiction writers should --

RC: You\what?\ (laughs wildly) I read that sci-fi crap once! "I cocked the timejector in secondary and waded through the bright blue manda grass. My breath froze into pink pretzels...." (dabs at tears of laughter) You call that \writing?\ Jesus Christ --

(Chandler falls silent and winks out with a crackle of static. God bless the remote control!)