A Mysterious Something in the Light
The Life of Raymond Chandler
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
The life of Raymond Chandler has long been obscured by secrets and half-truths as deceptive as anything in his novel The Long Goodbye. Now, drawing on new interviews, previously unpublished letters, and archives on both sides of the Atlantic, Tom Williams casts a new light on this most mysterious of writers.
The Raymond Chandler revealed is a man troubled by loneliness and desertion from an early age. Born in Chicago in 1888, his childhood was overshadowed by the collapse of his parents' marriage, his father's alcohol-fuelled violence eventually forcing the boy and his doting mother to leave for Ireland and later London. But class-bound England proved stifling, and Chandler, in his twenties and eager to forge a new life, returned to the United States where—in corruption-ridden Los Angeles—he met his one great love, Cissy Pascal, a married woman eighteen years his senior.
It was only during middle age, after his alcoholism wrecked a lucrative career as an oilman, that Chandler seriously turned to crime fiction. And his legacy—the lonely, ambiguous world of Philip Marlowe—endures, compelling generations of crime writers to follow him.
In this long-awaited new biography, Tom Williams shadows one of the true literary giants of the twentieth century and considers how crime writing was raised to the level of art.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this immersive biography of novelist Raymond Chandler, who helped define the detective fiction genre, first-time author Williams pieces together numerous interviews, letters, and articles to offer a remarkably detailed portrait of the famously hard-boiled writer. Chandler's father was abusive and an alcoholic, two qualities that had a lasting impact on the writer. Philip Marlowe, Chandler's iconic character, was a drinker (as was Chandler himself), and the abuse his mother suffered at the hands of his father inspired a chivalrous streak displayed in fiction as well as real life. Williams spends the most time on Chandler's early writing, sharing passages from stories and poems, as well as insight into the writer's process that yielded classics like The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye. Chandler fans will find discussions of the minutiae of these novels to be illuminating; those with a more casual interest will likely skip ahead to read about the writer's tumultuous relationship with Hollywood, including spats with directors Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock. Meticulously annotated and researched, and written with a tangible fondness, it's hard not to appreciate Williams's efforts. Still, the book may be too myopic for most fans of crime writing. 25 b&w photos.
