Trouble Was His Business -- Raymond Chandler

Dec. 14, 1954: I'm sure it was a coincidence, but look at the police officer wearing a black mask on the page with Sissy Chandler's death notice. That is really, really odd.

Trouble Was His Business -- Raymond Chandler

Oct. 7, 1954, "The Long Goodbye" comes to television.

The Times failed to review Chandler's "The Long Goodbye," but we did a brief advance on the television show. Notice that "Climax!" was a live program. I have no idea whether there is a kinescope, but it's nice to think that there might be. Note: To mark the 50th anniversary of Raymond Chandler's death, the Daily Mirror is revisiting some of The Times' stories about his life and influence. We invite the Daily Mirror's readers to share their thoughts.

Trouble Was His Business -- Raymond Chandler

Filming at the Bradbury Building, which is filled with garment workers! "...The dialogue, as clever as it was then, had become totally dated. I couldn't use 90% of it." -- Stirling Silliphant, screenwriter

Kevin Thomas writes a feature about filming Chandler's novel "The Little Sister" while it was in production in 1968. A special surprise for me: Sugar Giese, the dance captain at the Florentine Gardens in the 1940s, turns up as an extra. Although "The Little Sister" was only 19 years old, Los Angeles had changed so much that it was impossible to make a period film, Thomas said. The movie, with an updated setting, was eventually released with the title "Marlowe."

Trouble Was His Business -- Raymond Chandler

Oct. 16, 1949: The Times reviews "The Little Sister" in four paragraphs. The editor's note introducing Roy "The Fugitive" Huggins is half as long!

Trouble Was His Business -- Raymond Chandler

"Lady in the Lake" opens Feb. 14, 1947.

As with "Farewell, My Lovely" and "High Window," The Times failed to review Raymond Chandler's "The Lady in the Lake."  For those who have never seen this film, actors play to the camera, which takes the role of Philip Marlowe in most sequences. Many early film writers dismissed this as an interesting--but failed--experiment and the technique evidently puzzled 1947 audiences expecting a more conventional picture.

Trouble Was His Business -- Raymond Chandler

Sept. 12, 1943, a feature on the upcoming film "Double Indemnity."

Here's an undiscovered treasure: The Times' Philip K. Scheuer interviews James M. Cain AND Raymond Chandler on the upcoming production of "Double Indemnity." Chandler tells Scheuer that his next novel, "The Lady in the Lake," may be his last. "There's no money in them," he says. "Not when 10,000 is considered a good sale!" Scheuer also says Chandler doesn't drink. Hm. Note: To mark the 50th anniversary of Raymond Chandler's death, the Daily Mirror is revisiting some of The Times' stories about his life and influence. We invite the Daily Mirror's readers to share their thoughts.

This Week on the Daily Mirror

Photograph by Ken Dare / Los Angeles Times Frank Howard signs autographs during "Nuns' Day" at Dodger Stadium, 1963

"Throwback" Thursby pulled this picture for a post coming up later this week and it was too good not to share. Isn't it wonderful? Here's what we're working on: On Monday, Keith takes a look at old-school college basketball tactics before the shot clock was introduced. On Tuesday, he's got buglers playing "Charge" at Dodger games at the Coliseum and on Wednesday, he'll write about Frank Howard. As always, we have the Movie Star Mystery Photo on Monday morning and I've been going through historic photos of the Fire Department for something Wednesday. I'll also be taking a look at what was found in the Burbank time capsule. We're continuing our daily 10 a.m. posts on Raymond Chandler in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of his death, and our daily spin through The Times' old movie ads at noon, working forward from 1909. And we have Paul Coates at 2 p.m. and Matt Weinstock at 4 p.m. Monday through Saturday to re-create the feel of an afternoon paper. (And you thought PM-ers were virtually extinct). Look for a Nuestro Pueblo and other surprises as the week unfolds! Jalopnik has launched a long discussion about some of our old tire ads. We just never know what people are going to find interesting! One other note: The Daily Mirror is getting ready to say farewell to Catriona Lavery, our UCLA intern for this quarter. Catriona did terrific work on the Norbo Grill and other research projects, as well as transcribing Coates and Weinstock. We will miss her and wish her well, but we are also looking for an intern--or two--for next quarter. If you're interested, drop me a note. The unpaid internship is for a grade, and involves lots of digging in microfilm and musty archives.

Trouble Was His Business -- Raymond Chandler

"The Big Sleep," "Farewell, My Lovely," "The High Window" and "The Lady in the Lake" are published in "The Raymond Chandler Omnibus," with a forward by Lawrence Clark Powell. Powell says: "Almost everything written about La Reina de Los Angeles, however, has been by those revolted by her, intentionally satirizing her follies and hot with scorn that blinds a writer to the details of the local scene." He adds, Chandler "didn't moralize, satirize, deplore or lament," a contention challenged by Times book editor Robert R. Kirsch in this 1964 review.

Trouble Was His Business -- Raymond Chandler

The Times' Robert R. Kirsch reviews Philip Durham's "Down These Mean Streets a Man Must Go," Dec. 11, 1963. Kirsch says: Raymond Chandler "was one of a small group of writers who used Los Angeles in the regional sense. The setting -- from Pasadena to Santa Monica, from Hollywood to the Malibu Hills -- was crucial to his work. Its places and people provided the stage and characters, and even the poetic mood. It was an ambivalent relationship. At times he loved the place; at other times he hated it. But it was always there. "And as George P. Eliot once wrote: 'If you want the feel and aspect of Los Angeles and vicinity in the '30s, '40s and early '50s you could hardly do better than to read his fiction.' "

Trouble Was His Business -- Raymond Chandler

I hate to say it, but as far as I can tell, The Times didn't review Chandler's second novel, "Farewell, My Lovely," at left. We did review the 1945 film, however.

Trouble Was His Business -- Raymond Chandler

Feb. 19, 1939: "The Big Sleep," reviewed in The Times by Wilbur Needham, a name Chandler might have used for one of his characters. Needham and his wife, Ida, operated Needham Book Finders at 2317 Westwood Blvd. Note: To mark the 50th anniversary of Raymond Chandler's death, the Daily Mirror is revisiting some of The Times' stories about his life and influence. We invite the Daily Mirror's readers to share their thoughts.

Trouble Was His Business -- Raymond Chandler

Note: To mark the 50th anniversary of Raymond Chandler's death, the Daily Mirror is revisiting some of The Times stories about his life and influence. We invite the Daily Mirror's readers to share their thoughts.   The Raymond Chandler Lookalike Contest RAYMOND CHANDLER'S PHILIP MARLOWE A Centennial Celebration, edited by Byron Preiss December 18, 1988 By Kenneth Turan, Turan is film critic for Gentlemen's Quarterly. (Note that Turan is now at The Times). Hard-boiled fiction is a lean, mean revolution that has grown soft and fat on its own success. American writers, fed up with effete British detective stories that focused as much on tea cozies as corpses, decided to liven things up by adding a dose of reality and a dash of style. Carroll John Daly, who favored lines such as "Dead? He was as cold as an old maid's smile," fired the first shot when he published a short story called "The False Burton Combs" in the December, 1922, issue of a magazine called Black Mask. Then came the big guns: Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain, all intent, in Chandler's often-quoted words, on "getting murder away from the upper classes, the weekend house party and the vicar's rose garden and back to the people who are really good at it." Did they succeed? And how. Hard-boiled fiction has become a literary growth industry paralleled only by the boom in romantic fiction. Every year yet another brace of Chandler imitators roars out of the blocks to admiring reviews from critics and sizable sales to readers hungry for even a taste of the savory satisfactions the originals gave. The ever-irascible Chandler, who liked to refer to himself as "just a beat-up pulp writer . . . In the United States I ranked slightly above a mulatto," would surely be astonished by the mushrooming of the style he helped pioneer. With success, however, has come inevitable flabbiness. Today's Chandler imitators, even the best of them, are just that, imitators, unable to match the excitement that is generated only by writing that is provocatively original. The situation got so bad that Donald Westlake, whose Parker novels ("Parker steals. Parker kills. It's a living") are in fact the best hard-boiled work of the last 25 years, was moved to make a speech about it a few years back. "I try to inhale and I don't sense any air here," Westlake said of the current state of the genre. "What are these books? What do they connect to? The brevity of those early Black Mask days is long gone. The relevance of those days is gone. The vitality of novelty is gone. The reflections of any underlying trust is gone. I'm not really sure what's left." What's left is the desire to cash in, a desire that even as prestigious a publisher as Alfred A. Knopf, which first published Chandler and Hammett in book form, can't seem to resist. A few months ago, Knopf came out with a hardcover edition of "Woman in the Dark," one of Hammett's more forgettable novelettes, and now comes "Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe: A Centennial Celebration." To commemorate the 100th year of the writer's birth, packager Byron Preiss came up with what must have seemed like a good idea at the time, something reasonably dignified and quintessentially lucrative: Contact 23 current mystery writers and have each one of them write a story with Marlowe as detective solving crimes left and right. Add "The Pencil," Chandler's last story. You can almost hear those cash registers ringing already. Not all writers contacted, however, were delighted. Joseph Hansen, for one, made it known that he felt the idea was "somewhat akin to grave-robbing. Philip Marlowe is a creation of the imaginative mind of Raymond Chandler, and I don't believe every Tom, Dick and Harry has the right to lay claim to him. Ethically, you can't do that." Even more likely suspects than Hansen are missing from the list, though whether it's because they weren't asked or because they turned the task down is impossible to say. Westlake isn't here, probably for obvious reasons, and neither is Lawrence Block, the odds-on best of the current hard-boiled writers, or Robert Parker, the most popular. Still, the list contains considerable first-rate talent, people such as Loren D. Estleman, Dick Lochte, Sara Paretsky, Roger L. Simon and Jonathan Valin. And the writers clearly tried to rise to the occasion, often putting in nuggets of detective trivia for fans to relish. One story has Marlowe reading Paul Cain's "Fast One," one of the legendary hard-boiled novels; another has him yearning for the powder-blue suit cognoscenti know he wore in the opening of "The Big Sleep"; a third has Marlowe running into Chandler himself. There are some new twists when it comes to plots--the use of subject matter such as child molestation, for instance, which would have been taboo in Chandler's day. But mostly it's the usual round of missing persons and blackmail, small errands that turn into big trouble. The best stories, interestingly enough, are the ones that succeed in capturing the whiff of melancholia that blew through Marlowe's life like the famous Red Wind. Mostly, however, these tales are simply too derivative to be seriously involving. What made Chandler's stories so readable was not that Marlowe was in them but that they were written with a verve that mere copies, no matter how well-intentioned or clever, cannot hope to match. While the writers clearly had fun paying homage to a man they rightfully respect, sharing in their enthusiasm is something else again.