Raymond Chandler’s L.A. comes alive at auction, but ‘crown jewel’ fails to sell
Near the bottom of a list of things crime fiction writer Raymond Chandler hated is that ubiquitous Los Angeles demographic: “actors.”
The list, simply titled “THINGS I HATE,” is one of dozens of Chandler’s rare personal items that were auctioned Friday at Doyle Auctioneers & Appraisers in Manhattan. In pencil, Chandler — author of the acclaimed hard-boiled detective novels “The Big Sleep” (1939), “Farewell, My Lovely” (1940) and “The Long Goodbye” (1953) — made amendments: It wasn’t “pert” children he hated but “clever” ones; not raw “vegetables” but rather raw “carrots.”
Chandler was known for his meticulousness, with virtuosic prose that distinguished him as a literary man in a mass-market genre. Poet W.H. Auden was a champion of his work, as was Nobel-prize winner John Steinbeck. In a letter sold at auction for $4,800, Steinbeck praised Chandler extensively, saying he wrote “Southern California as no one else does” and urging him to write “the book of [the] Hollywood-picture industry.”
Los Angeles was Chandler’s terrain, as much of a muse as any of the leggy blonds that populated his fiction. It’s impossible to think of his protagonist, private detective Philip Marlowe, without placing him in his Olds convertible, gliding down Laurel Canyon Boulevard or creeping up the driveway of an old mansion tucked in the hills.
At the peak of his success, Chandler was a Hollywood player in his own right — his screenplays for the 1944 noir masterpiece “Double Indemnity,” directed by Billy Wilder, and 1946’s “The Blue Dahlia,” not-as-masterfully directed by George Marshall, both earned him Academy Award nominations — but he was distrustful of the one-upmanship at the heart of the studio system: It made no room for writing talent to thrive.
In his reply to Steinbeck, he put his skepticism bluntly, if politely. “The Hollywood novel to be worth anything would be long and complex,” he wrote. “It would be just too much for me even if I liked the subject well enough, which I do not.”
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Still, Hollywood was everywhere among Chandler’s belongings, which included several screenplays alternately owned and written by him, as well as film treatments. An unfinished but fairly advanced script for a movie titled “And Now Tomorrow” shared a lot with a document headlined “INFORMATION RE PERRY MASON TV,” which outlined the Mason character.
In a letter to his stepson that sold for $4,480, Chandler wrote about the classic 1946 adaptation of “The Big Sleep”: “When they were making the picture at Warners Howard Hawks, the director, and Humphrey Bogart sent me a wire asking whether the chauffeur had committed suicide or been murdered, and I had to answer that I didn’t know.”
At a reading event hosted by Doyle on Dec. 3 to commemorate Chandler’s works, author John Ganz remarked on the irony of old Hollywood’s nostalgic appeal in the context of Chandler’s interpretation of that period.
“Chandler is writing about [the studio system] like it’s the worst thing that ever happened to American life. And now we’re like, ‘It really wasn’t that bad,’” said Ganz, who read an excerpt from the 1949 novel “The Little Sister,” which places Marlowe in the center of an entertainment industry scandal.
Ganz, a New Yorker, told me that when he visits Los Angeles, he seeks out the glamorous, noirish city of Chandler’s fiction. “I’m attracted to the architecture, restaurants and bars that have the atmosphere I associate with his novels,” he said. “I know New Yorkers are supposed to hate Los Angeles, but Raymond Chandler makes the city seem very interesting to me.”
That noir atmosphere emerged from the knife’s edge that separated glamour from grime in Chandler’s Los Angeles. In “The Long Goodbye,” the most brutal crimes are committed by the residents of the exclusive, beautiful Idle Valley, a fictionalized version of affluent San Fernando Valley communities. While there was plenty of crime to be found in the city’s most polished neighborhoods, Marlowe’s shabby Hollywood office was the home to honesty and integrity.
In Chandler’s work, the conspiracies that connected the city’s shiny surfaces with its underbelly had the peculiar effect of making Los Angeles seem both vast and small. Though they are scattered everywhere from Hollywood to Encino, his characters all know each other; they share a firm sense of place, as if they had all been observing while Los Angeles grew unwieldy around them.
In “The Big Sleep,” Los Angeles’ expansion explains its increasingly thorny networks of crime. “This is a big town now,” Marlowe says to Eddie Mars, a gambling racketeer. “Some very tough people have checked in here lately. The penalty of growth.”
Chandler was witness to the city’s changing landscape when he arrived from England in the 1920s and took a job with the Dabney Oil Syndicate. For a person who had already demonstrated interest in being a writer, it was something of a “random” move, as Peter Costanzo, director of Doyle’s Rare Books, Autographs, Maps & Photographs department, put it.
With the oil boom of the early 20th century, Costanzo said, “Los Angeles was put on the map, and what came with it was a lot of crime.” In that context, Chandler “had a front row seat to the crime waves that were undertaking the city and being written about in magazines and the newspaper.”
In “The Big Sleep,” Marlowe’s millionaire client General Sternwood is a mogul of the oil business. His palatial property overlooks the old wells where he made his fortune, but by the end of the story, Marlowe sees figurative as well as literal sordidness among its remnants.
Like Marlowe, Chandler could be cynical. A series of essays about screenwriting, detective fiction and the entertainment and publishing industries, written between 1944 and 1952 and published in the Atlantic, paint a picture of a man disillusioned with everything: his profession, its future prospects, the commercialization of fiction.
But taken together, his auctioned personal items reveal another side of Chandler: a man who, unlike the tough guys of his fiction or the pessimist of his nonfiction, was playful and tender.
The late, great Raymond Chandler and his private eye live on as potential IP for new books, video games, TV projects, graphic novels and more.
The collection came from the estate of Jean Vounder-Davis, Chandler’s secretary and fiancée from 1957 until his death in 1959. As a whole, the items suggest he was a romantic partner, taken to writing love poems and doting letters, as well as devoted to Vounder-Davis’ two children, Vincent and Sybil. One unsold lot consisted of a collection of stories, poems, limericks and even a newspaper — titled the Carmichael, after the family’s cat — he put together for the children, many of them detailing the activity of Carmichael and his sibling, the dog Grunion.
To shrewd admirers of Chandler’s work, his soft side wasn’t all that surprising. “He has become the go-to for people who see L.A. as a cynical, hard-bitten city,” Carlos Valladares, a film scholar and Los Angeles native, told me at Doyle’s reading event. “[But] what I adore most about Chandler’s works and people who adapt [them] is the weird, quirky vibes they get from L.A. as a city of play, pleasure and mystery, as opposed to the terrible, artificial surface of Hollywood.”
The most successful film adaptations of Chandler’s work — Hawks’ “The Big Sleep,” which showcased the electric chemistry between Bogart and Lauren Bacall, and Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye,” indelibly starring Elliott Gould as Marlowe — are marked not just by dense plots but also by a wry sense of humor.
But the appeal of Chandler’s whimsy is yet to be determined. The “crown jewel” of the collection, as Costanzo put it, is a trove of unpublished fantasy stories, carefully indexed and organized by Chandler and in some cases close to completed. Doyle estimated its value at $60,000 to $80,000.
Valladares, who was excited to learn about the existence of Chandler writings in another genre, argued that publication of these stories could “complicate our perception” of the author. But on Dec. 6, there were no takers for the lot. At the time of this writing, it has yet to be sold.
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