{"product_id":"the-world-of-raymond-chandler-isbn-9780804170482","title":"The World of Raymond Chandler","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe World of Raymond Chandler\u003c\/i\u003e shows how Chandler precariously balanced the values of a classical English education against those of a fast-evolving America during the years before the Great War; how he adopted Los Angeles as his home after WWI, with Hollywood in turn adopting him (and adapting his works); how his detective hero and alter ego Philip Marlowe evolved over the years; and, above all, what it is to be a writer, and in particular one writing in the “other language” of hardboiled fiction.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Acclaimed biographer and historian Barry Day deftly interweaves images and text, using quotations from Chandler’s novels, short stories, letters, and interviews, to craft a unique portrait of the mystery writer’s life and times.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Terrific . . . Day allows Chandler to elucidate [his] vision himself. He was a penetrating, thwarted, breathtakingly intelligent person.”—\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A fresh new opportunity to savor the melancholy magic of a private eye so often found sitting alone in his small Hollywood office.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Wall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Barry Day stretches Chandler’s limber language like a skein across the skeleton of his life, knitting in the spaces in between with his own editorial commentary. . . . Even the greenest Chandler novice may find much here that tantalizes.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “A tour of Chandler’s sinister, neon-lit world. . . . A splendid complement of the literary to the visual. . . . Essential for any Chandler aficionado.” —\u003ci\u003eSt. Louis Post-Dispatch\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A remarkable book. . . . A fascinating and convincing portrait of a writer who, using the material of his own life and his convictions, refined pulp into literature. More than any biography I’ve read, this book stirred in me a new sympathy for Chandler to match the admiration I’ve always felt.” —Dean Koontz, bestselling author of \u003ci\u003eWhat the Night Knows\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “A solid introduction to Chandler’s work. It includes some fine stuff you won’t find in other bios and illuminates Chandler’s life and times ‘like a swung curtain of crystal beads’.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Boston Globe\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Will equally satisfy his fans and readers unfamiliar with the noir master.” —\u003ci\u003eShelf Awareness\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “I enjoyed every page.  I’ve had a collection of Chandler stories waiting unread on my shelf for years and years (\u003ci\u003eThe Simple Art of Murder\u003c\/i\u003e).  Barry Day’s \u003ci\u003eThe World of Raymond Chandler \u003c\/i\u003ehas prompted me to pull it down and place it at the top of my queue.  I can’t think of any higher praise.” —Scott Smith, author of \u003ci\u003eA Simple Plan\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Barry Day’s book is a welcome reminder of just what a great writer Raymond Chandler was, and also illuminates his life—Who knew he went to an English public school?—and the whole phenomenon of Los Angeles, and the way then and now the sleazy and the corrupt live cheek by jowl with the rich and glamorous. A pleasure to read!” —Michael Korda, author of \u003ci\u003eHero and Clouds of Glory\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eBarry Day was born in England and received his M.A. from Balliol College, Oxford. Day has written about Dorothy Parker, Oscar Wilde, Johnny Mercer, P. G. Wodehouse, and Rodgers and Hart. He has written and produced plays and musical revues showcasing the work of Noël Coward, the Lunts, Oscar Wilde, and others. Day is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Trustee of the Noël Coward Foundation and was awarded by Queen Elizabeth the Order of the British Empire for services to British culture in the U.S. He lives in New York, London, and Palm Beach.\u003ci\u003eFive\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The City of the angels\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Scattered diamond points at first, the lights drew together and became a jeweled wristlet laid out in the show window of the night.\u003cbr\u003e —“The Man Who Liked Dogs” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Everything’s for sale in California.”\u003cbr\u003e —\u003ci\u003eThe Lady in the Lake\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “We make the finest packages in the world, Mr. Marlowe. The stuff inside it is mostly junk.”\u003cbr\u003e —Harlan Potter in \u003ci\u003eThe Long Goodbye\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “a big hard-boiled city with no more personality than a paper cup.”\u003cbr\u003e “It is the same in all big cities, amigo.”\u003cbr\u003e —\u003ci\u003eThe Little Sister\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I smelled Los Angeles before I got to it. It smelled stale and old like a living room that had been closed too long. But the colored light fooled you.\u003cbr\u003e —\u003ci\u003eThe Little Sister\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Crime writer Ross Macdonald—considered by many to be the leading neo-Chandler—wrote that Chandler “invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence.” But the romance was strictly of the film noir variety.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt was a time when the city was trying to carve out an identity for itself. There are those who will tell you it still is. Hollywood was not the whole of Los Angeles; but in a very unreal sense, all of Los Angeles was Hollywood.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eArchitectural imagination ran riot. French \u003ci\u003echâteaux \u003c\/i\u003esat cheek by jowl with Tudor castles and Italian villas. You might go to a restaurant like the Brown Derby, built to resemble a hat, or a bank that resembled an animal. A bottling plant a block long might have the exterior of an ocean liner with portholes for windows; a cinema posed as a Chinese pagoda—and still does. Everything was made to look like something else, and nothing seemed built to last—just like the film sets over in Hollywood.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e There was money aplenty . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e There were great silent estates, with twelve-foot walls and wrought-iron gates and ornamental hedges; and inside, if you could get inside, a special brand of sunshine, very quiet, put up in noise-proof containers just for the upper classes.\u003cbr\u003e —\u003ci\u003eFarewell, My Lovely\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The bright gardens had a haunted look, as though wild eyes were watching . . . from behind the bushes, as though the sunshine itself had a mysterous something in the light.\u003cbr\u003e —\u003ci\u003eThe Big Sleep\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The house itself was not so much. It was smaller than Buckingham Palace, rather gray for California, and probably had fewer windows than the Chrysler Building . . . A man in a striped vest and gilt buttons opened the door, bowed, took my hat and was through for the day.\u003cbr\u003e —\u003ci\u003eFarewell, My Lovely\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Inside the houses—were you privileged enough to get a peep—you were likely to find\u003cbr\u003e the kind of room where people sit on floor cushions with their feet in their laps and sip absinthe through lumps of sugar and talk from the back of their throats in high, affected voices, and some of them just squeak. It was a room where anything could happen except work.\u003cbr\u003e —\u003ci\u003eFarewell, My Lovely\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e On the floor might be “a rug as thin as silk and as old as Aesop’s aunt” (“Mandarin’s Jade”) or, alternatively, “You could just man- age to walk on the carpet without waders” (\u003ci\u003eThe High Window\u003c\/i\u003e). “A peach-colored Chinese rug a gopher could have spent a week in without showing his nose above the nap” (“Mandarin’s Jade”).\u003cbr\u003e When the old-money moment was past, the glow faded fast. The color scheme of the old Chateau Berry was bile green, linseed-poultice brown, sidewalk gray and monkey- bottom blue. It was as restful as a split lip.\u003cbr\u003e —\u003ci\u003eThe Little Sister\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRaymond Chandler, one gathers, did not approve of the filthy rich, if only because of what they did with their money.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Chandler remembered the city as being “hot and dry when I first went there, with tropical rains in winter and sunshine at least nine-tenths of the year.”\u003cbr\u003e Marlowe also has his memories . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “I used to like this town,” I said . . . “A long time ago. There were trees along Wilshire Boulevard. Beverly Hills was a country town. Westwood was bare hills and lots offering at eleven hundred dollars and no takers. Hollywood was a bunch of frame houses on the interurban line. Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but goodhearted and peaceful. It had the climate they just yap about now. People used to sleep out on porches. Little groups who thought they were intellectual used to call it the Athens of America. It wasn’t that, but it wasn’t a neon-lighted slum either.”\u003cbr\u003e —\u003ci\u003eThe Little Sister\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e It was a very different Los Angeles in those days. The 1911 Census had estimated 350,000 people but the trickle of immigrants was becoming a flood. By 1930 it would be 1.5 million and a lot of things would have changed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e An oil boom of massive proportions was under way, creating money and jobs—and it didn’t much care for whom. Money poured into the state with the encouragement of the federal government. Before long the economy was that of a fair-sized country and, since it was easy money, it easily attracted organized crime.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e World War II aggravated the situation. The setting-up of factories for arms manufacturing made California the epicenter of the defense industry, and Washington—anxious to help rebuild the region after the Depression of the 1930s—gave preference in the granting of contracts.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e And still people poured in. By the 1950s the city boasted an electronic sign that showed the population increase minute-by-minute. What it did not show was the range of problems that unplanned influx brought with it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt was all too much too soon for a town that had no evolved culture of its own. What had emerged, Chandler saw as being just as much the product of bland mass production and advertising. He called it the “culture of the filter-tipped cigarette . . . leading to a steakless steak to be broiled on a heatless broiler in a non-existent oven and eaten by a toothless ghost.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the books Marlowe is constantly crisscrossing the terrain, noting the morphing of one aspect into another—rarely for the better—and always making us aware of the geographical context in which this amorphous new “Athens” exists. Behind it, the timeless range of mountains. Before it, “the great fat solid Pacific trudging into shore like a scrubwoman going home . . . a California ocean. California, the department store state. The most of everything and the best of nothing” (\u003ci\u003eThe Little Sister\u003c\/i\u003e). “There is a touch of the desert about every- thing in California and about the minds of the people who live here.” (Letter to Blanche Knopf). We are constantly being made aware of natural beauty corrupted by unnatural man.\u003cbr\u003e In more mellow mood, the sea takes on more romantic imagery . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eUnder the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form itself on the edge of consciousness.\u003cbr\u003e —\u003ci\u003eThe Big Sleep\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The swell is as gentle as an old lady singing hymns.\u2028—\u003ci\u003eThe Long Goodbye\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In the cove the waves don’t break, they slide in politely, like floor walkers.\u003cbr\u003e —\u003ci\u003ePlayback\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In that mood the city itself has its own kind of beauty, though the imagery is invariably man-made: “The lights of the city were a vast golden carpet, stitched with brilliant splashes of red and green and blue and purple” (“Pick-Up on Noon Street”) . . . “The lights of Hollywood and L.A. winked at him. Searchlight beams probed the cloudless sky as if searching for bombing planes” (“The King in Yel low”) . . . “the stars were as bright and artificial as stars of chromium on a sky of black velvet” (\u003ci\u003eFarewell, My Lovely\u003c\/i\u003e) . . . “a slanting grey rain like a swung curtain of crystal beads” (\u003ci\u003eThe Big Sleep\u003c\/i\u003e) . . . “The light hit pencils of rain and made silver wires of them” (“The Curtain”) . . .\u003cbr\u003e The valley moonlight was so sharp that the black shadows looked as though they had been cut with an engraving tool . . . ten thou- sand lighted windows and the stars hanging down over them politely, not getting too close.\u003cbr\u003e —\u003ci\u003eThe High Window\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e There was loneliness and the smell of kelp and the smell of wild sage from the hills. A yellow window hung here and there, all by itself, like the last orange.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e —\u003ci\u003eFarewell, My Lovely \u003c\/i\u003eSpring rustling in the air like a paper bag blowing along a concrete sidewalk.\u003cbr\u003e —\u003ci\u003eFarewell, My Lovely\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e We curved through the bright mile or two of the Sunset Strip past the antique shops with famous screen names on them, past the win- dows full of point lace and ancient pewter, past the gleaming new nightclubs with famous chefs and equally famous gambling rooms, run by polished graduates of the Purple Gang, past the Georgian Colonial vogue, now old hat, past the handsome modernistic buildings in which the Hollywood flesh-peddlers never stop talking money, past a drive-in lunch which somehow didn’t belong, even though the girls wore white silk blouses and drum majorettes’ shakos and nothing below the hips but glazed Hessian boots. Past all this and down a wide smooth curve to the bridle path of Beverly Hills and lights to the south, all colors of the spectrum and crystal clear in an evening without fog, past the shadowed mansions up on the hills to the north, past Beverly Hills altogether and up into the twisting foothill boulevard and the sudden cool dusk and the drift of wind from the sea.\u003cbr\u003e —\u003ci\u003eFarewell, My Lovely\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Beverly Hills was such a nice place before the Phoenicians took it over. Now it’s just a setting for an enormous confidence racket.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e As time—and Marlowe—go by, another incidental dimension emerges in Chandler’s panorama of the city. Not only is it growing before our eyes but we are made aware of proximity. The bad and the beautiful exist literally cheek by jowl. Two blocks from obscene wealth is abject poverty. The dreams of Hollywood coexist happily with the worst urban nightmares . . . and nobody seems to notice or care too much.\u003cbr\u003e Even Nature is not to be trusted. It’s always lying in wait for you . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husband’s necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.\u003cbr\u003e —“Red Wind”","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301105357029,"sku":"NP9780804170482","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780804170482.jpg?v=1767742321","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-world-of-raymond-chandler-isbn-9780804170482","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}