We’re THRILLED that Anthony Dean Rizzuto joined us as our guest. He teaches English and heads the writing program at Sonoma State University in California.
Anthony coedited The Annotated Big Sleep (Vintage, 2018) with Pamela Jackson and Owen Hill. Anthony also wrote a critical history of Chandler’s romanticism, entitled Raymond Chandler, Romantic Ideology, and the Cultural Politics of Chivalry (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).
Excerpt from The Introduction to the Annotated Big Sleep by Anthony Dean Rizzuto, Pamela Jackson, and Owen Hill
“Raymond Chandler once wrote that ‘some literary antiquarian of a rather special type may one day think it worthwhile to run through the files of the pulp detective magazines’ to watch as ‘the popular mystery story shed its refined good manners and went native.’ The genre of detective fiction kicked out the Britishisms and became American. A chief agent of this transformation was Raymond Chandler himself. The Big Sleep was Chandler’s first novel, and it introduced the world to Philip Marlowe, the archetypal wisecracking, world-weary private detective that now occupies a permanent place in the American imagination. If Superman or John Wayne is the Zeus of American myth, and Marilyn Monroe is Aphrodite, then Marlowe is Prometheus: the noble outsider, sacrificing and enduring for a code he alone upholds.
“But The Big Sleep does more than even Chandler intended it to do. Partially by design and partly by happy contingency, the novel dramatizes a cluster of profound subjects and themes, including human mortality; ethical inquiry; the sordid history of Los Angeles in the early twentieth century; the politics of class, gender, and sexuality; the explosion of Americanisms, colloquialisms, slang, and genre jargon; and a knowing playfulness with the mystery formula—all set against a backdrop of a post-Prohibition, Depression-era America teetering on the edge of World War II. For all this, The Big Sleep reads easy. And it’s a ripping good story.
“He called his stories only ‘ostensibly’ mysteries—but consideration of his work was confined within the limitations of genre fiction during his lifetime and for decades thereafter. Chandler hated being restricted by such notions. He wrote: ‘In this country the mystery writer is looked down on as sub-literary merely because he is a mystery writer. … When people ask me … why I don’t try my hand at a serious novel, I don’t argue with them; I don’t even ask them what they mean by a serious novel. It would be useless. They wouldn’t know.’
“Nowadays we don’t tend to be constrained by the same distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low art’ that haunted Chandler. He’s taught at universities. He’s been canonized by the Library of America. Le Monde voted The Big Sleep one of the ‘100 Books of the Century.’ TIME Magazine included it in its list of 100 best English-language novels. Before his death he would be lauded by authors as eminent W. H. Auden, Evelyn Waugh, T. S. Eliot, and Graham Greene. The Big Sleep’s success moved from text to screen, with film adaptations eliciting iconic performances from two of Hollywood’s greatest leading men, Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum.
“Before the 1930s, Raymond Chandler wasn’t headed for a career as a crime novelist. He wasn’t an ex-detective, like his greatest predecessor Dashiell Hammett, and there is no evidence that he associated with cops, racketeers, grifters, or the like. He was born in gritty, urban Chicago in 1888, but he spent much of his upbringing in Nebraska, England, and Ireland, and attended a good English public school, Dulwich College, where he studied languages and the classics.
“After graduating, Chandler embarked on a literary career, writing reviews and poetry in a style that was a world away from ‘hardboiled.’ Romanticism was in the air in the Edwardian England in which Chandler grew up. Retellings of the stories of the Knights of the Round Table and paintings of the knights and ladies of Arthurian England proliferated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Chandler was swept up in the vogue for chivalry and courtly love. He later admitted that he produced second-rate stuff. He gave it up to move back to the U.S. in an aimless pursuit of an uncertain future. He served in the Canadian Infantry in WWI. He later reflected that ‘once you have had to lead a platoon into direct machine-gun fire, nothing is ever the same again.’ The world was transformed as well. The Great War blasted out of existence the predilection for nostalgic romance. In 1929, Virginia Woolf asked where it all went, the thriving Romantic tradition of just a generation before: ‘Shall we lay the blame on the war? When the guns fired in August of 1914, did the faces of men and women show so plain in each other’s eyes that romance was killed?’ Although WWI, the literary Modernism it spawned, and Depression-era America seem antithetical to the Romantic tradition, certain key features of the form—especially the themes of chivalry and heroism—lay buried but alive in Chandler’s imagination. They reappeared, maimed and shell-shocked, in his first novel.
“Chandler moved to L.A. in 1913 and settled there six years later. The city served as setting and in some ways as the other major character in the Philip Marlowe novels. Its character was set by its sudden expansion and the self-promotion and greed that went with it. It was a city of excess, escapism (Hollywood!), tawdriness, exhibitionism, and corruption. In the nineteen-teens it was the fastest-growing city on earth, hyped and hustled like no other city ever had been. L.A.’s population ballooned threefold between 1910-1930, from 310,000 to 1,250,000, with the formerly barren greater L.A. County housing 2.5 million. In this time, the streets were paved, automobiles replaced horse-drawn carriages and the electric railway system, and the L.A. Aqueduct was built to heist water from the Owens Valley 250 miles away. Corruption was rife, and politicians and law enforcement often worked in tandem with the ‘System,’ the L.A. syndicate of organized crime. L.A. was also a city of sin, a proto-Las Vegas with prostitution and gambling. This dysfunctional backdrop beckoned many writers. Chandler later proudly claimed that before him ‘Los Angeles had never been written about,’ but that wasn’t true. Paul Cain and James M. Cain (no relation) began publishing their brutally hardboiled Angelino stories in the early 1930s. Horace McCoy’s dark L.A. novel They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? was published in 1935. Nathaniel West’s Hollywood novel The Day of the Locust came out in 1939. Chester Himes’ critical look at race and class in L.A., If He Hollers Let Him Go, followed six years later.
“After arriving in L.A., Chandler worked as a bookkeeper and then as an executive for the Dabney Oil. He saw firsthand the corruption endemic to the oil industry and the justice system. He always saw his adopted hometown through the eyes of an outsider. In 1950 he reflected, ‘I arrived in California with a beautiful wardrobe, a public school accent, no practical gifts for earning a living, and a contempt for the natives that, I am sorry to say, persists to this day.’
“Chandler was a successful executive in the oil industry as the Depression hit in 1929. When he was sacked by Dabney Oil in 1931, it wasn’t because of the wider economic collapse, but because of unacceptable behavior and too many lost weekends. Finding himself out of work at 43, two years into the Great Depression, it seemed that he was in for hard times.
“Chandler took the opportunity to do ‘what I had always wanted to do—write.’ But he had to find a way to make it pay. He later recalled, ‘In 1931 my wife and I used to cruise up and down the Pacific Coast in a very leisurely way, and at night, just to have something to read, I would pick a pulp magazine off the rack. It suddenly struck me that I might be able to write this stuff and get paid while I was learning.’ His first story was published in 1933. He wrote, ‘It took me a year to write my first story. I had to go back to the beginning and learn to write all over again.’
“Black Mask was widely regarded as the best of the bunch. Its early subtitle announced ‘Western, Detective, and Adventure Stories,’ but due to popular demand the crime stories—and specifically the newly-invented ‘hard-boiled’ detective fiction—took over.
“Hardboiled fiction was a revolutionary change in the mystery genre. Edgar Allan Poe generally receives the credit for inventing detective fiction (which he called ‘tales of ratiocination,’ or stories of rational deduction) in three short stories in the 1840s starring the eccentric genius Auguste Dupin. Arthur Conan Doyle followed Poe’s lead when he invented his own brilliantly eccentric hero, Sherlock Holmes, in 1887. Early 20th-century crime fiction generally fell in step behind Poe and Doyle, giving us genteel amateurs like Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey, and the estimable Ellery Queen. The stories were often ‘puzzle mysteries’ or ‘whodunits’ where the reader played along with the detective to interpret the clues and solve the mystery. One of these authors, S.S. Van Dine, published the rules for this type of literary game in his 1928 essay ‘Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories.’ (Rule number one: ‘The reader must have equal opportunity with the detective for solving the mystery. All clues must be plainly stated and described.’ Just try this with The Big Sleep!)
“This is now considered the Golden Age of detective fiction. Chandler and his fellow hardboiled practitioners rejected this legacy. When Chandler has Philip Marlowe declare that ‘I’m not Sherlock Holmes or [Van Dine’s] Philo Vance’ in Chapter 30 of The Big Sleep, he’s making a statement as much about the genre that Marlowe is playing in as about the kind of detective Marlowe is. Chandler’s manifestos on behalf of the American hardboiled rejection of ‘drawing-room mysteries’ are in his 1944 essay ‘The Simple Art of Murder’ and the introduction to Trouble Is My Business.
“Black Mask and other hardboiled pulps like Dime Detective and Detective Weekly cut a new path. John Carroll Daly broke in the hardboiled style with his story ‘The False Burton Combs’ in 1922; his success was enormous, and he was emulated by Black Mask writers throughout the decade. The style was less a continuation of the existing tradition of detective fiction than a critical reaction to the corruption and excesses of the 1920s and a stylized representation of the organized crime networks spawned by Prohibition. This social context gave rise to a widespread popular demand for crime-related stories in all forms: print, movies, word of mouth, newsreels, gangster films, true-crime journalism, novels, short stories—you name it.
“Hardboiled, as a subgenre, is infamously ‘American.’ To recall Chandler’s terms: it is the mystery going native. Hardboiled captured the violence of the twenties and the desperation of the thirties in substance, and displayed them formally in a brutal, clipped, but—in the case of Hammett and Chandler, at least—distinctly poetic style. The phrase ‘hard-boiled’ is itself an Americanism. According to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, to be ‘hard-boiled’ is to be ‘one who is toughened by experience; a person with no illusions or sentimentalities.’ In the eloquent words of mystery novelist Walter Mosley, the hardboiled style is ‘elegant and concise language used to describe an ugly and possibly irredeemable world,’ a style which captivates us ‘the way a bright and shiny stainless-steel garbage can houses maggots and rats.’ The world according to hardboiled is not only tough but vibrant: a gritty, profoundly urban setting teeming with underworld life—booze, sex, drugs, violence—and the decadence of the wealthy and powerful. Hammett truly revolutionized the form with his novels Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, and The Maltese Falcon (all first serialized in Black Mask between 1927-1929).
“Hammett and Black Mask editor Joseph Shaw derived a literary program to lend psychological and linguistic realism, not to mention literary status, to what was becoming a very formulaic, ‘lowbrow’ form. Toward this end, Hammett mixed hardboiled with Hemingway—shaken, not stirred. For Chandler, as for Hammett, Hemingway was ‘the greatest living American novelist.’ Hemingway’s 1926 The Sun Also Rises became the hardboiled touchstone, with its interior monologue, stark prose, and colloquial turns of phrase. ‘It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime,’ protagonist Jake Barnes reflects, ‘but at night it is another thing.’
…
“If, for Hammett, the most important work was Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926), then for Chandler it was Hammett’s Maltese Falcon (1930). Yet for all their similarities—there are several places where Chandler overlaps with, and even lifts from Hammett, in The Big Sleep—they are profoundly different. Chandler, coming after, can take Hammett’s realism and use of the vernacular à la Hemingway as given. He adds two crucial components that make him distinct: a dose of idealism and a strong strain of humor. Another key difference is between Hammett’s San Francisco and Chandler’s L.A. For all their differences, Chandler made clear that Hammett paved the way for him.”
Read a Broad Street profile of the collaborative work of Anthony Dean Rizzuto, Owen Hill, and Pamela Jackson here.
