Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler ed. by Frank MacShane (review)

60 Western American Literature the Ohio State University Press. An English professor, Dell apparently wrote as many as ten (unpublished) novels. Dell seems to have wanted to write a novel which accurately reflected the German culture in the Ohio of his youth. The Earth Abideth thus has con­ siderable interest in character, situation and regional folklore and geography. Ranging from the close of the Civil War to 1917, it follows Thomas Linthorne from his courting days to his death, sporadically tracking his family through three generations. Three strands of the story are of particular interest. The first develops Linthorne’srelationship with a local bully, Gorm Schrader, and the strange resolution of that conflict. The second explores Linthorne’s romantic attraction to his neighbor’s wife and the community complications involving the child of that union. The third details the mystery and ultimate tragedy of Linthorne’srecalcitrant son. For all of its drama, fine character sketches, and detail of incident, how­ ever, Dell’s novel finally seems to lack resolution. It draws few conclusions about human nature and gives little sense of fictional purpose. Readers may want more connection between incident and consciousness—for example, be­ tween murder, motivation, and conscience; and because Linthorne’s affair with Lucile Brewster has dire consequences, we may wish to see more develop­ ment of emotional cause and effect. Perhaps this novel’s chief claim to our attention now is the quality of its nostalgia; books like this are not written anymore—and we think we miss the time when they were. JOSEPH J. WYDEVEN Bellevue College Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler. Edited by Frank MacShane. (New York. Dell Publishing, 1987. 501 pages, $11.95.) The Delta paper reissue of the 1981 Columbia edition of Chandler’s selected letters points up the considerable interest the southern California crime novelist continues to attract among general readers and, increasingly, among academic critics. One can think of few American novelists whose letters would warrant paperback publication. Butjust as Marlowe isaconsiderable achievement invoice and tone, so too is Chandler’s epistolary persona. Chandler did not demur to a HoughtonMifflin editor’s suggestion that he had revived “the lost art of letter-writing.” Whether the subject is screenwriting in Hollywood, American slang, the genre of detective fiction, the post-war Congressional investigations of Communists in the film industry, his wife’s cystic fibrosis, or his own drinking, Chandler’s letters are self-conscious stylistic performances as well as occasions to reveal “those facets of my mind which had to be obscured or distorted when I wrote for publication.” Reviews 61 From the 340 letters, written between 1937 and 1959, selected by MacShane for publication, we can see that the British-educated midwesterner perceived southern California with the detachment, clarity, and skepticism of a princely, if often snobbish, exile, traits that are stylized and Actively reinvented in the figure of Marlowe. The letters also reveal Chandler’s lifelong interest in American English and his determination to create a new art form, using a language “sharp, swift, and racy.” “All I’m looking for is an excuse for certain experiments in dra­ matic dialogue.” In 1957 he could justifiably boast that he may have written “the most beautiful American vernacular that has ever been written.” It is this concern with the literary possibilities of an American vernacular that links Chandler, surprisingly, with Mark Twain. One is also struck with the greater personal frankness of the later letters, particularly those written to Helga Greene, his last literary agent, heir, and, after the death of his wife in 1954, beloved. MacShane’s edition is to be commended for its informative introduction, its helpful identification of correspondents, and its complete index. ERNEST FONTANA Xavier University “The Tools of My Trade”: Annotated Books in Jack London’s Library. By David Mike Hamilton. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986. 340 pages, $25.00.) “The Tools of My Trade” is a good book that attempts to answer the questions of how Jack London came to write his books, the ideas that inspired him, and where he found his themes, plots, characters; in short, to answer the question of how London performed his writer’scraft. London was the quintessential...