Customer Reviews

Raymond Chandler

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Forty years after his death Chandler was in need of a new study, both of his life and of his writing. This one strikes me as dealing with the former better than with the latter, but it has interesting and illuminating things to say about both. However what I want to commend the book for above all is just how readable it is. Chandler himself had some trenchant and uncomplimentary things to say about some of the more intellectual kinds of writing, creative as well as critical, Hiney quotes some of these with evident approval, and I fancy the book was written with a sense of Chandler's ghost looking over the biographer's shoulder, alert to detect and deflate pretentiousness.

Chandler's story is a triumph of talent over alcoholic insecurity. He never knew his alcoholic father, and he was educated through the charity, far from affectionate but very real and very patient and long-suffering, of an uncle. He attended one of England's better schools, presided over by one of the more enlightened headmasters of the time. This headmaster instilled a distaste for insincerity and pretence that stayed with Chandler to the end. Chandler was always a bit of a loner. In his early years his only real relationship was with his hard-pressed mother, and he displayed an innocence that stayed with him throughout his life too that lurks behind the seeming worldliness and disillusionment that he displays both in his books and in his dealings with the world around him. He once said of himself that he `could be a good second-rate anything.' This was a fairly modest self-assessment, given his brains and astuteness. He achieved rapid promotion in his Californian oil company through his gift for figures and his alertness to fraud until his drinking brought that career to an end. His later business dealings were also fairly savvy, both in Hollywood and in relation to his publishers and agents, and his sheer ability ensured that although he died a booze-sodden ruin he did not die a poor one. He seems even to have possessed real interpersonal ability too through his wit and charm whenever he could be bothered to exercise it. However to the end of his days he made few friends and retained fewer. After his mother's death he cared greatly for nobody in particular with the solitary exception of his hyperbolic devotion to his wife. Innocent in some ways to the end, he had fallen for her claim to be ten years younger than she was, and their relationship reads to me less like some grand passion than like the tale of a shipwrecked mariner who has developed a strong affection for the lifebelt that is keeping him afloat.

On the literary side, there are copious quotations from Chandler's letters, which is a good thing for giving us some of his less-known wisecracks. I had expected to see more about The Simple Art of Murder, the article in which Chandler expounds his ideas of the detective story and of Marlowe. However one mystery was solved for me. When young I knew the seven Marlowe novels virtually by heart, but to this day I have never been able to follow the plot of any of them. No wonder, it seems. Chandler himself claims to have been writing without actually knowing whodunnit until late in the stories. He did not want his books to be read for the sake of knowing who killed whoever it was, but for their quality as novels. Excellent. However in that case why does Mr Hiney devote so much of his comment to summarising the plots? He is not even entirely accurate, but what I criticise is not that, which on his and Chandler's own showing is unimportant, but the proportion of the text given to these summaries. There is not really much about what made Chandler the phenomenon he was, and was recognised for by the great and the good such as Eliot, Auden and Waugh. There is a certain amount about the relative quality of the seven novels, and a certain amount of it I go along with, such as that The High Window is not quite the equal of the books that preceded it and immediately followed it. As he works his way through them, I sense myself diverging from him. He may be more in line with mainstream opinion than I am, but he is not fully explicit about his own views, so I shall venture mine.

Marlowe, to me, is partly an idealised figure. One would infer this from The Simple Art without reading the books. Hiney seems happy with a certain development in Marlowe's character, reminiscent of the Doonesbury series, that naturally belongs in the later books; and I do not think this is the best way to appreciate them. The earlier books find Marlowe resilient, intelligent certainly but not greatly introspective, cynical certainly but not exactly disillusioned, able to soak up incredible quantities of punishment (although perfectly credible quantities of alcohol - Hiney exaggerates this), but always ready with the immortal dialogue and bons mots that make these books unique. There is detailed observation and description (of Marriott say, or Amthor) but there is never much sense of personal involvement. And it is precisely this detachment that makes Marlowe and Chandler what they amount to. Relax this restriction - have any of the characters talk more confessionally, show more in-depth interest - and the magic formula is voided; and that, for me, is the undoing of The Long Goodbye. Of all the seven books, Hiney shows least interest in The Little Sister, and I wonder whether I'm out on a limb in thinking it the best of them. It's like fruit on the point of going overripe, the plot is more incomprehensible than ever, and the dialogue is Chandler's very best (how does Hiney manage to find the sad Playback the funniest of these novels?) It has something else too - a palpable sense of the LA sunshine that I have come to know so well.

I also miss anything about Chandler as a literary craftsman. It's unusual for a private detective to comment on Flaubert, but Chandler admired him, and in the first five of his novels you will get the same impression that every sentence, indeed every word, has been carefully worked on. Chandler was a great writer as well as a great novelist, he is still wearing well nearly 50 years after he died, this book serves his memory well and I drink to that.

I thoroughly agree with the last reviewer Mr Reed. Hiney's biography contains a significant number of very basic errors in describing the plots of Raymond Chandler's novels and short stories. These are elementary details, and a serious biographer has no excuse for making obvious factual mistakes.

I don't think this is a bad book either, but I do question conclusions of anyone who cannot check source material thoroughly.

Frank MacShane wrote a biography of Raymond Chandler which I believe is far better than Mr Hiney's work.

Hiney's biography, while illuminating in a number of ways, has one severe problem that undercuts its quality. He makes mistakes, obvious factual ones. When recounting the plot to "Farewell, My Lovely," he is wrong. Other synopses of stories and novels are not quite right, as though he read them in a hurry or not at all.

This doesn't mean that Hiney wrote a bad book, but I can't help but wonder. When such easily verifiable facts are incorrect, what can one make of his conclusions based off of other, now suspect, facts?

This is a good book and a useful window into Chandler's life, but when the most elemental literary analysis of the man's work is off, and badly, one can't hold it in too high esteem.

One can only hope that a better biography of Chandler comes along.

Hiney does a superb job of chronicling the life of one of the most gifted writers this century. Throughout the course of the biography it is hard to find a prolonged spell (five years or so) where Chandler is reasonably content.

Hiney though dosen't dwell too long on Chandler's obvious unhappiness but rather more on what he managed to produce. It's a shame that his alcoholism prevented him from completing more novels or screenplays (Double Indemnity, what cracking dialogue!). What is clear from Chandler's work, and this is something which Hiney clearly shows, is that Chandler was streets ahead of his contemporaries writing in the same genre and he knew it.

Having read Chandler's Marlowe novels without knowing anything about the authors life I would say this biography is a worthwhile read. It is often the case that biographies are weighty tomes which dwell too much on detail. Hiney has managed to condense Chandler's life perfectly. After all Hiney knows that it is not the alcoholism, the affairs etc which first brought Chandler to our attention. It was the poetic writing and the clever dialogue.

Well done Mr. Hiney.

This biography reads very well, but it's almost impossible to understand, as other reviewers have noted, how Mr. Hiney could have made such egregious errors recounting the plot of Farewell, My Lovely. It calls into question the possible accuracy of his research into biographical details. On pages 116-117 of the paperback edition, there are three key errors. First, Hiney indicates Marriott was killed by his cronies, but it was Velma/Mrs. Grayle who killed him. Next Hiney claims Jules Amthor was a pyschiatrist, but Amthor was a psychic consultant. Hiney then uses Marlowe's sarcastic portrayal of the people who call on Amthor as a veiled reference to Chandler's views on psychiatrists, whom Chandler had consulted during his bouts with alcoholism during his oil industry days. The leap taken by here by Hiney on wrong information is just mind-boggling. On a far less egregious error he quotes Anne Riordan as saying to Marlowe "Do you have to say things like that?" because, according to Mr. Hiney, "Anne is fond of Marlowe, but doesn't like the swear words he uses." But Anne's response isn't to a swear word, instead it comes after this line from Marlowe: "The Mayor is doing all this, changing his pants hourly while the crisis lasts." This error is minor compared to confusing who killed Marriott and the psychiatrist/psychic consultant problem, but as a third mistake within justs two pages, any reader who's familiar with Marlowe's books may be ready to throw Hiney's biography out the window. And that's a shame because it's a very readable bio.

Tom Hiney brings no new material to this biography and no startling new approach to the previous and very enjoyable biography by Frank MacShane. This is however a more contemporary book, written with a breezy journalistic style which makes it hard to put down, indeed compulsive. Not least in its charms is the snap and crackle of nearly everything Chandler himself wrote, not least the letters, which Hiney is wise enough to quote from liberally.

My main complaint is that I came away from this book with a sense of the author's disgust at his subject's decline into chaotic behaviour and helplessness after the death of his wife. My recollection of the MacShane book is of a certain tragic sympathy in the treatment of Chandler's last, disasterous years. Here one feels Hiney is disappointed with Chandler, that somehow the hero he has been peddling let him down. It is somehow the reader of the biography who is let down, suddenly finding the author whose wit he has grown rather fond of, dismissed as a sad old drunk. A readable book, but skip the ending if you like your Chandler, and go to the letters - which do not fail to show this sad, witty man at his droll best.

a brutally, honest but well-written biography of one of America's greatest writers. Hiney explores the dark, destructive side of Raymond Chandler which fueled his pioneering novels. A tortured soul, Chandler wasn't afraid to gaze into the seedier side of human nature and bring it into the popular literature of his time. Many people have forgotten his contribution to American literature, but Hiney delivers a biography that does justice to the writer by exploring the motivations behind his insightful and disturbing books. If you don't see the appeal of Chandler's work, read this, then try again. I think things will be clearer.

This is a excellent biography of a complicated and tortured man.I have enjoyed the ' Philip Marlowe books' for years and had a read a earlier bio about Chandler. It is a touching book as you read about Chandler's self destrutive ways you want to reach in there and shake him and say ' Stop it'!...Excellent book......

While other reviewers apparently fault the author for daring to depict the rather ordinary demise of the "great man", Chandler's life was more devoted to his isolation and misogyny than it was to his novels. Hiney's triumph is showing what an interesting life it was, nonetheless. Chandler was just a writer who loved words more than he loved people, who loaded up his cynicism in neat little rounds and fired at humanity with some precision. That same cynicism drove him to view life through the bottom of a shot glass, at no little cost to his art (or I suppose as some might argue to enhance his art). Mostly he wanted to get it right - mostly he did, especially in "The Long Goodbye". I like that Hiney doesn't let the extraordinary Mr. Marlowe overshadow the strains of ordinariness in Chandler's character. I certainly enjoy Chandler's fiction the greater for this very good life.

Some of us don't like the truth about our heroes. It makes us uncomfortable. In the case of artists who, like Chandler, so generously build a fantasy world for us to play in and who in real life don't behave like the little gods we turn them into, we get upset. We delight in Chandler's murders, we smile out of the corner of our mouths at a witty line about alcohol, we probably even enjoy the odd politically incorrect stereotype as it places us even more squarely in 1940's Los Angeles. But how many of us would want to know Philip Marlowe in real life? How many of us would tsk-tsk the booze breath or self-righteously force a cough if we passed him smoking a cigarette on the street? How many of us would call him a sexist Neanderthal?

If you are one of those people then skip it. Move on. This book is for the rest of us.

And what we get in it is a portrait of Chandler the man. A real man with real strengths and real weaknesses all layed out bare in this book. From his bizarre childhood to his liquor soaked white collar days, his sober golden period of brilliant writing and his later years which were plagued by depression, neuroses, and plenty more booze which precipitated what could be described as a mental decline.

Hiney has done his homework. Well-researched, well-written and insightful without being revisionist and post-modern, this book is a very valuable addition to the library of many a Chandler fan: the ones who allow Chandler to smoke and cry and be petty and hold grudges and make drunken phone calls and piss off friends in between The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye, taking care of his sick wife and loving his cats...and end up appreciating him all the more for it.