Chandler’s Complexities

In his lifetime, Raymond Chandler’s sexuality and that of his fictional detective, Philip Marlowe, were considered suspect. Passages where Chandler/Marlowe dilate on the “magnificent thighs” of a “long lashed” gigolo and the “woman-eyes” of a sailor sent screenwriters into furious re-write mode; William Faulkner and Leigh Bracket, when adapting the Big Sleep (1939), dodged this problem by having Marlowe sleep with a sexy bookseller played by Dorothy Malone and Lauren Bacall playing Lauren Bacall. Chandler himself was aware of these interpretations and tried to counter them by having Marlowe sleep with women in the final two novels. But still, latency seemed to surface. Chandler didn’t moon over the physical attributes of the women characters the way he did with the males’; indeed, he described female characters as having vampire teeth, disturbing eyes, and hissing like cats.

Regarding female violence, not even Dashiell Hammett went as far as Chandler. His women empty pistols into faces, bludgeon other women’s features beyond recognition, and set up their own brothers to be murdered.

Rather than counter the rumors about Chandler (today he is reported to have been fond of cross-dressing in secret) as some biographers have, Tom Williams, in this excellent biography, meets them head on. He admits that Chandler’s sexuality was “odd,” but that it is this characterization that makes him readable today. Williams attributes Chandler’s sexual quirks to low libido and a warping by English public schools (which has itself generated a vast literature). It wasn’t just the close proximity of boys (again generating a vast literature by George Orwell and Christopher Hitchens, who admitted to sleeping with fellow students) but also the chaste romanticism of the Arthur legends that schoolmasters inculcated pupils with.

This is certainly a better explanation than the usual one offered: that Chandler was merely following the male-bonding-women-as-bitches dictums for the hard-boiled genre. But Williams is aware that this interpretation only goes so far. Marlowe, who Chandler described as a “shop worn Galahad,” only saves and protects one woman in his seven novels. In The High Window (1942), he does live up to the Arthurian ideal by removing a browbeaten secretary from the clutches of an old dragon-like matriarch. He is much more sacrificing for men, for instance when he protects General Sternwood from the knowledge that his daughter murdered his best friend. He also takes the rap for a fugitive male friend in The Long Goodbye (1953). This behavior does follow his school-days ideal, but it is again suspect that Marlowe only behaves this way toward the males he moons over.

Williams is a first-time biographer and as such doesn’t follow the rules of his more seasoned predecessors. Unlike others who don’t find it valid to pose questions out of the material and then speculate about the answers, Williams does, and the reader benefits. Why did Chandler bash family values and attribute criminal behavior to bad blood? Because he feared that his alcoholic, wife-beating father had passed his genes on to Chandler. Why was he so reclusive—so much so that he wouldn’t take on plush screenwriting assignments that required him working out of an office? Because he was a shy type who required liquor to loosen up, and this would make him lapse back into the alcoholism that got him fired from an oil company. Why was Marlowe so willing to get himself beaten up? Because Chandler might have had homosexual masochistic tendencies. Why did he live with his mother till the age of thirty-three and then, upon her death, marry a woman eighteen years older? Because he was a “mama’s boy” drawn to older women.

Williams doesn’t focus exclusively on sex, however. With new information, he disputes previous biographies. Chandler did not, as portrayed elsewhere, completely give up alcohol after being sacked in 1932 but continued to drink within reason throughout the Great Depression.

But Williams ignores politics in this...