Raymond Chandler once praised Erle Stanley Gardner’s writing by saying “Every page holds the hook for the next.” This observation, I’m sure, can be extended to complete chapters as well, as each chapter must also hold the hook for the next. But the unique challenge of the first chapter of any novel is to catch an audience and draw them into the book itself.
Each of my previous “First Things First” pieces examined the opening chapter of one of Chandler’s seven novels to see how he met that challenge. Each article searched for the ways in which Chandler lured an audience into his novels and down streets “dark with more than night.” This article, the last of the series, blends and distills the analysis of those previous pieces in an exercise of which Chandler himself might have approved.
After all, experience had given him a “very dim view of writing instruction in general,” and he came to believe that “any writer who cannot teach himself cannot be taught by others.” He maintained the best classroom was found in the published stories and novels of other writers because no textbook had anything that could not be found in the careful and sympathetic study and analysis of those works. And so, he read widely and carefully, and then conscientiously dissected works he found compelling. As he once counselled a young writer who asked for his advice, learning to write required two fundamental steps: “analyze and imitate; no other school is necessary.”
This series attempts that first step: to analyze Chandler’s novels and discover how he created the “bit of magic” he demanded from his work – that alchemy that transmuted his writing into literature. I want to pull back the curtains, look into Chandler’s workshop, and glimpse the magician – the alchemist – at work.
In the course of this exercise, I found several common threads running through his opening chapters. With one exception they are all quite short, and none start in media res with Marlowe in obvious danger, trading blows or shots with crooks or cops. Although each opening chapter hints at the novel’s themes and quietly foreshadows the mystery Marlowe will be called upon to solve, none identify that mystery. Not one of the seven novels begins the way Dashiell Hammett opened The Maltese Falcon, with a client sitting in the detective’s office, telling a long and detailed story, explaining the problem that requires his assistance.[1]
Chandler never relies on showy first lines. There is no “Mother died today.”[2] Or “The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.”[3] No “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”[4]
Instead, Chandler’s novels start leisurely, seemingly mired in the mundane. “It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills.” The Big Sleep. “It was one of the mixed blocks over on Central Avenue, the blocks that are not yet all Negro.” Farewell, My Lovely. “The house was on Dresden Avenue in the Oak Noll section of Pasadena, a big solid cool-looking house with burgundy brick walls, a terra cotta tile roof, and a white stone trim.” The High Window. “The pebbled glass door panel is lettered in flaked black paint: “Philip Marlowe . . . Investigations.” The Little Sister. “The Treloar Building was, and is, on Olive Street, near Sixth, on the west side.” The Lady In The Lake. His flashiest opening sentence is in the book commonly considered his best work, The Long Goodbye: “The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers.”
Rather than throw Marlowe headlong into danger, Chandler generally walks into each novel slowly, preferring to seduce us with atmosphere and character. The closest he comes to opening a novel by plunging Marlowe immediately into a mystery is his last book, Playback:
The voice on the telephone seemed to be sharp and peremptory, but I didn’t hear too well what it said—partly because I was only half awake and partly because I was holding the receiver upside down. I fumbled it around and grunted.
“Did you hear me? I said I was Clyde Umney, the lawyer.”
“Clyde Umney, the lawyer. I thought we had several of them.”
“You’re Marlowe, aren’t you?”
“Yeah. I guess so.” I looked at my wrist watch. It was 6:30 a.m., not my best hour.
“Don’t get fresh with me, young man.”
“Sorry, Mr. Umney. But I’m not a young man. I’m old, tired and full of no coffee. What can I do for you, sir?”
I want you to meet the Super Chief at eight o’clock, identify a girl among the passengers, follow her until she checks in somewhere, and then report to me. Is that clear?”
But even here, the mystery is muffled and opaque, and Marlowe seems willing to dismiss it with tired jokes.
Chandler strolled into his books, taking his time like this, because, although he wanted to write stories with “the spice of mystery,” he wanted to use that spice sparingly, like “a few drops of tabasco on the oyster.” Simply put, he wanted to write novels that, despite “an over-tone of violence and fear,” captured something of “the authentic flavor of life as it is lived.”
And that was a dangerous choice.
As Frank MacShane noted in his biography of Chandler, readers in the early years of hardboiled detective fiction wanted escape from the dull weight of the routine and demanded stories that were exciting and amusing. “There was no time for fancy literary effects. The writer had to grip the reader’s interest from the beginning and embroil him in a real story. Otherwise, there was nothing.”
But Chandler disagreed: “My theory was that the readers just thought they cared about nothing but the action; that really, although they didn’t know it, the thing they cared about, and that I cared about, was the creation of emotion…. The things they remembered, that haunted them, was not, for example, that a man got killed, but that in the moment of his death he was trying to pick a paper clip up off the polished surface of a desk and it kept slipping away from him, so that there was a look of strain on his face and his mouth was half open in a kind of tormented grin, and the last thing in the world he thought about was death. He didn’t even hear the death knock on the door. That damn little paper clip kept slipping away from his fingers.”
So, Chandler chose to write his novels around his characters and the world they inhabited. “The story can be violent or calm, brutal or elegant,” he said, “but the emphasis is always on people,” and he was always “more interested in people than in plot.” In fact, he didn’t care much about the mystery itself: “I didn’t care whether the mystery was fairly obvious, but I cared about the people, about this strange corrupt world we live in, and how any man who tried to be honest looks in the end either sentimental or just plain foolish.” He made his preferences clear when he wrote, “The time comes when you have to choose between pace and depth of focus, between action and character, menace and wit. I now choose the second in each case.” Indeed, his “whole career,” he said, was “based on the idea that the formula doesn’t matter,” and that what “counts” is what the writer does to the formula; “that is to say, it’s a matter of style.”
And style was “the most durable thing in writing,” Chandler said. He believed developing style was “the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time.” In one sense, Chandler’s “style” seems to mean the “projection of [a writer’s] personality” onto the printed page. But more often, “style” appears to be his shorthand for the unique care and sensibility with which a writer uses language to express and evoke images “beyond a distant hill” – that is, to hint at things not seen but hidden beneath the surface of plot and action. In this sense, style “is the product of the quality of [a writer’s] emotion and perception” and how a writer creates a living atmosphere through dialog, character, and description.
But style – no matter how fulfilling some may find it – comes at a price. It can read slowly, and, without obvious suspense, it can drag and distract and prevent a reader from turning the page. Instead of being carried forward into the story, the reader may decide to close the book and put it away. Yet, these seven chapters illustrate how Chandler found he could write as he wanted – dwelling on character and atmosphere with style – and still hook readers and entice them into Marlowe’s world.
This choice – this preference for style – left him without the obvious and stale tools pulp writers often used to grab a readers’ interest. He couldn’t rely on men barging through doors with guns in their hands. He wouldn’t rush at his readers with openings like, “I gazed into the black muzzle of the forty-four ‘Squint’ Dugan was holding to my face, and secretly gave him credit for being much more clever than I had anticipated.”[5] Or beat at them with “It was a very nice job—definitely professional. And final. The blonde lay across the hotel bed lengthwise, a gleam of golden flesh showing above her stocking, but otherwise perfectly presentable. A white linen handkerchief was clutched in her hand. She had been mugged—strangled—throttled.”[6] Instead, Chandler’s novels typically begin unhurriedly, taking their time to introduce characters, including Marlowe himself.
We know Chandler chose to extend his novels and add atmosphere, depth of focus, and style to his work because he often rewrote material he had written before, in a process he called “cannibalization.” Thus, we can compare the novels to the related stories published in the pulps. For example, The Big Sleep’s opening came from a story called “Killer In The Rain;” Farewell, My Lovely’s from “Try The Girl;” The Lady In The Lake’s from a novelette with the same title, and The Long Goodbye’s from his story, “The Curtain.” In each case, Chandler expanded the original material in significant ways, but an examination of two will demonstrate the point.
“Try The Girl” is a short story from 1937, and its first two scenes could have been an early draft of Farewell, My Lovely’s first chapter. There is the scene outside a “drink and dice” club on Central Avenue followed by one inside, on the stairs leading up to the club. As in Farewell, a large man in loud clothes is at the center of both scenes.
But where the novel opens with two paragraphs of scene setting, Try The Girl starts more directly: “The big guy wasn’t any of my business. He never was, then or later, least of all then.” Perhaps Chandler thought this had too much pulp in it for he didn’t use it in Farewell. Instead, he sculpted the novel’s tightly focused opening sentence out of the four sprawling, awkward phrases of Try The Girl’s third sentence.
More importantly, the first two paragraphs of the novel – both new – suggest Marlowe’s precarious economic condition, but without calling much attention to it. He lets us know he has been occupied with “small matters” for “little money.” And he tells us he never did find the man he was looking for on Central Avenue, but, in a weary voice, he also says his client “never paid [him] any money either.” Marlowe’s struggle to make money drifts through the novel and lies underneath choices he makes. It also renders him more real and – perhaps – hints at his hidden idealism because he’s surely not a detective for the money and the glory.
Although Farewell, My Lovely adds a few germane details to Try The Girl’s thinner opening, Chandler’s love of atmosphere and character fills the first chapter of The Long Goodbye, the book which he thought was his finest work. One reason he preferred this book to all his other novels was that his growing reputation and secure finances gave him the chance to write exactly as he wanted. As he told his literary agent, “I wrote this as I wanted to because I can do that now.”
And where he chose to go was deep into atmosphere and character. Far longer than any other opening, the first chapter of this novel rambles through five scenes, spreading nearly sixty paragraphs across seven pages to introduce us to Terry Lennox. No other novel has more than two scenes in its opening chapter, and several have only one. For instance, Chandler’s first novel, The Big Sleep is essentially one scene of not quite four pages and 33 paragraphs. And more than half of those are bits of dialogue of one short sentence.
We can see how far he extended the opening chapter of The Long Goodbye by comparing it to its source in “The Curtain.” There the opening plays out in one paragraph that reads: “The first time I ever saw Larry Batzel he was drunk outside Sardi’s in a second-hand Rolls-Royce. There was a tall blonde with him who had eyes you wouldn’t forget. I helped her argue him out from under the wheel so that she could drive.” And that’s it: three sentences and 45 words.
But The Long Goodbye isn’t bound by the pulp’s demands for fast pace and relentless action. Chandler can take his time and concentrate on his characters, explore details, and slip in glimmers of backstory around the edges, barely noticeable. For the novel, he extended “The Curtain’s” opening scene from three sentences into 32 paragraphs and then added an additional four scenes, all of which add flesh to Terry Lennox and deepen Marlowe’s character. We learn quite a bit about Lennox: once rich, he’s fallen a long ways towards rock-bottom, alcoholic poverty and he’s alone; he’s had drastic plastic surgery on one side of his face; and he has the manners and accent of an Englishman, though he wasn’t born one. As for Marlowe, we see him being compassionate and sentimental; but he’s not happy about it: “I drove home chewing my lip. I’m supposed to be tough but there was something about the guy that got me.”
By the time he was writing The Long Goodbye, Chandler’s writing had become less narrow and less cautious. It’s as if he had come to trust himself – and his readers – to sift through details, observations, and thoughts, and latch on to those that are elemental, while accepting and enjoying the digressions. At any rate, The Long Goodbye may be the fullest – and best – expression of Chandler’s love of atmosphere and character and style; the most complete realization of Chandler’s interest in writing a story “where the mystery is solved more by the exposition and understanding of a single character … than by the slow and sometimes long-winded concatenation of circumstances.”
Yet the basic architecture of his first chapters remains the same throughout his career. Other than The Long Goodbye, they are short, but all introduce Phillip Marlowe through conflict and tension with another character, tension that is often released by Marlowe’s wit. And their strongest hook is that – whatever style they may have – Chandler buried a puzzle in each of them.
In every opening chapter, Chandler creates suspense by delaying the revelation of the novel’s central mystery. Not one lays out the problem Marlow must try to solve. And it is this delay – which is really a refusal to immediately satisfy our expectations – that is one of Chandler’s strongest hooks. After all, detective novels typically are built around a detective looking for a secret truth and someone intent on keeping that truth secret. Thus, as readers, we enter a work of detective fiction with the expectation that we will quickly find a detective employed to solve some mystery. But Chandler never satisfies this expectation in the first chapter of any of his novels, and it is the tension between revelation and concealment that pulls the reader from one page to the next, and from one chapter to the next.
Turning towards specifics, in six of the novels, Chandler holds back the moment when a client hires Marlowe until the second chapter, when Marlowe typically meets his client for the first time. The Big Sleep, The High Window, The Lady In The Lake, and The Little Sister all follow this pattern. In the other novels, though, he waits far longer. In The Long Goodbye, Terry Lennox – who eventually becomes Marlowe’s client and who propels the novel’s plot – offers Marlowe little more than drinks and conversation through the first four chapters. In Farewell, My Lovely, Marlowe isn’t hired to do anything by anyone until chapter 8.
As we have seen, only in Playback, his last novel, does Chandler begin with Marlowe being hired to perform a task. Yet, even here, Chandler delays revealing the novel’s core mystery. In fact, Marlowe tells Clyde Umney, the man hiring him, he hasn’t given Marlowe enough information to know whether he should even accept the assignment. Marlowe explains he knows nothing about the woman, about why she’s being followed, or even who it is who wants the woman followed. (Umney only discloses he is acting for a high-powered firm of lawyers in Washington, D.C.) And it’s the search for the answers to these questions that ultimately pushes Marlowe (and the reader) through the novel.
For this study, though, the point is that Chandler uses delay as one of his fundamental hooks, employing it to create tension and suspense. The delayed introduction of the mystery kindles our anticipation, as Chandler uses our expectations to let us wonder what kind of trouble will become Marlowe’s business.
Yet he doesn’t rely only on this quiet mystery. He also uses atmosphere and character – those things he called “style.” For instance, several of his novels begin by describing a place connected to the story. Chandler draws us into the Sternwood mansion in The Big Sleep, the street outside “a second floor dine and dice emporium called Florian’s” in Farewell, My Lovely, the Murdock mansion in The High Window, and the Treloar Building and the offices of the Gillerlain Company in The Lady In The Lake. In these descriptions, he chooses his details carefully: always evocative in and of themselves, they frequently also hint at the mystery that will snare Marlowe.
These details also serve yet another purpose that helps draw readers into the books. Because we see these places through Marlowe’s eyes, we often learn something of his character as well. And Marlowe’s character itself is the second of Chandler’s strongest hooks.
Marlowe’s impressions of the Murdock house in the opening chapter of The High Window serve as an example: “The room … was large and square and sunken and cool and had the restful atmosphere of a funeral chapel and something of the same smell. …. An old musty, fusty, narrow-minded, clean and bitter room. It didn’t look as if anybody ever sat in it or would ever want to. Marble-topped tables with crooked legs, gilt clocks, pieces of small statuary in two colors of marble. A lot of junk that would take a week to dust. A lot of money, and all wasted. Thirty years before, in the wealthy close-mouthed provincial town Pasadena then was, it must have seemed like quite a room.”
On the surface this is just reporting, but Marlowe’s description judges the Murdocks as much as it assesses the room. It’s a subtle warning about the kind of people who live in this room and in this house. Through the course of the novel, we will come to see just how bitter and narrow-minded Mrs. Elizabeth Bright Murdock is, and how money and the past have imprisoned her and the others in the house. By wrapping the description in Marlowe’s flippant inventory and his sarcastic dismissal, Chandler also illuminates Marlowe’s disdain for wealthy families like the Murdocks, families who live in houses filled with expensive junk but devoid of life.
In addition to descriptions like this, Chandler typically uses the first chapter to introduce us to a character who will play an important role in the novel. For example, there’s Carmine Sternwood in The Big Sleep, Moose Malloy in Farewell, My Lovely, Orfamay Quest in The Little Sister, Terry Lenox in The Long Goodbye, and Eleanor King in Playback. Importantly, Chandler uses conflict to illuminate and add fire to these introductions. Carmine Sternwood flirts with Marlowe and gets angry when he doesn’t respond. After Marlowe tells Moose Malloy that Florian’s has changed and his “little Velma” won’t be there, Malloy drags him inside and forces him upstairs to the bar for a drink. When Orfamay Quest calls to inquire about hiring Marlowe, he responds to her questions with irritated jokes, and when she becomes offended, he hangs up on her. Chandler uses these flashes of conflict to acquaint us with the people in Marlowe’s world, but these conflicts also help draw us into each novel.
Chandler adds pace to these scenes by introducing these characters through dialogue and action rather than through pure description. For example, The Big Sleep essentially begins with a conversation between Marlowe and Carmen Sternwood. In this exchange, Chandler reveals much of Carmen’s character – her predatory sexuality, her anger, and her deviousness – traits that will resonate through the novel and drive the plot. Through their conversation, Chandler also hints at Carmen’s emotional immaturity and shows us Marlowe’s growing dislike of her. After their encounter, we know Carmen is a difficult and dangerous woman and are not surprised when, in the next chapter, Marlowe learns her father is being pressured to satisfy her debts from gambling losses.
Certainly, Chandler’s preference for depth of focus, character, and wit lies behind his choices in these chapters. But his hatred of explanation also helped push him to write this way. He claimed there were two fundamental rules for exposition. First, he maintained that, where you have much to explain, you should only give a little at a time. And second, he said explanations should be given in a scene where there is some other element at play, “such as danger, or love-making, or a character reversal suspected. Suspense of some sort, in one word.”
To illustrate the point, examine Marlowe’s first meeting with Derace Kingsley, the client who will hire him in The Lady in the Lake. All Chandler discloses before Marlowe and Kingsley meet is that Marlowe has come to see Kingsley at the suggestion of police Lt. “Violets” M’Gee. Yet Kingsley doesn’t act like a man who needs a detective, and he keeps Marlowe waiting a long time before speaking to him. When they do speak, the conversation is sharp and snide:
Ten minutes later the same door opened again and the big shot came out … and came over to where I was sitting.
“You want to see me?” he barked.
He was about six feet two and not much of it soft. His eyes were stone gray with flecks of cold light in them. He filled a large size in smooth gray flannel with a narrow chalk stripe, and filled it elegantly. His manner said he was very tough to get along with.
I stood up. “If you’re Mr. Derace Kingsley.”
“Who the hell did you think I was?”
I let him have that trick and gave him my other card, the one with the business on it. He clamped it in his paw and scowled down at it.
“Who’s M’Gee?” he snapped.
“He’s just a fellow I know.”
“I’m fascinated,” he said…. “Anything else you would care to let drop about him?”
“Well, they call him Violets M’Gee,” I said. “On account of he chews little throat pastilles that smell of violets. He’s a big man with soft silvery hair and a cute little mouth made to kiss babies with. When last seen he was wearing a neat blue suit, wide-toed brown shoes, gray homburg hat, and he was smoking opium in a short briar pipe.”
“I don’t like your manner,” Kingsley said in a voice you could have cracked a Brazil nut on.
“That’s all right,” I said. “I’m not selling it.”
What little is revealed in their conversation is obscured by their verbal sparring, and we’re left in suspense as to why Kingsley needs a private detective. Chandler buries one short paragraph of description in a mound of conflict and tension, which Chandler releases with one of Marlowe’s typical wise cracks.
Because wit is elemental to Marlowe’s character, this ability to cool the heat of conflict with humor is yet another way Chandler draws readers into his books. Sometimes, as in the conversation above, Marlowe responds to aggression with a dismissive joke, while, at other times, Chandler has him employ a startling figure of speech as the pay-off for a bit of description. For example, in Farewell, My Lovely, Marlow catalogs Moose Malloy’s loud and garish wardrobe from his “rough gray sports coat with white golf balls on it for buttons” to his “alligator shoes with white explosions on the toes” and concludes, “Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.”
Like Marlowe’s description of that musty room in the Murdock mansion, his description of Malloy’s wardrobe has a buried point: Marlowe will use the big man’s fondness for gaudy clothes to find him later in the book. Still, this trait is made bizarrely real in the image that ends the paragraph. That sarcastic simile isn’t just unusual, it also gives us Marlowe’s voice. It’s funny; it’s original; it’s Marlowe.
To conclude, Chandler’s opening chapters explain little, often reveal even less, but are always rich in the atmospheric scene setting Chandler experimented with throughout his career and expanded across his novels. This scene setting, though, hides his two strongest hooks. Every opening chapter conceals the central mystery of the novel (or, perhaps better, they all delay the revelation of that mystery) and introduces (or reintroduces) us to Phillip Marlowe. These introductions usually come in confrontations with other key characters, with the battles taking place in words, not with guns or fists. In these opening chapters, Chandler introduces us to a sentimental cynic, a foolish wise-guy, a poor man fighting to hold on to his ragged nobility – a far cry from the fictional detectives Edmund Wilson disparaged as “never [having] an existence of their own even in a flat two dimensions but … always … contrived so that they can seem either reliable or sinister, depending on which quarter, at the moment, is to be baited for the reader’s suspicion.”[7]
In short, if readers like Marlowe and want to know what his future holds, they will read on. At least, that seems to be the wager Chandler made. Given that his books remain in print more than sixty years after his passing and given his deep and continuing influence on American fiction – in print, in movies, and in television – it’s also a wager he seems to have won.
[1] Of course, Hammett himself subverted this trope by having Brigid O’Shaugnessy, the client in The Maltese Falcon, lie to the detectives she hires about why she wanted a man named Floyd Thursby followed. Chandler uses this same device – the unreliable client – repeatedly throughout his novels to create another layer of mystery, and to suggest the rampant corruption of Marlowe’s world. But that’s an observation and discussion for another time.
[2] The Stranger, Albert Camus
[3] The Secret History, Donna Tartt
[4] Metamorphosis, Søren Kierkegaard
[5] Come and Get It, Erle Stanley Gardner
[6] Drop Dead Twice, Hank Searls
[7] Wilson, Edmund, “Why Do People Read Detective Stories?” The New Yorker Magazine, October 6, 1944.
Lettres d'un Inconnu 