Incorrodable Shamus

By Stefan Kanfer

THE LIFE OF RAYMOND CHANDLER

by FRANK McSHANE

306 pages. Dutton. $12.50.

Twenty years after his last bow, the paradigm of detective-as-Lochinvar is still Raymond Chandler's incorrodable shamus, Philip Marlowe. He was, of course, a total fiction. As Chandler admitted, "the real-life private eye is a sleazy little drudge... a strong-arm guy with no more personality than a blackjack. He has about as much moral stature as a stop-and-go sign."

Marlowe was an appropriate creation by a man who was himself an anthology of ambiguity. Biographer Frank McShane, Professor of creative writing at Columbia University, offers sheaves of contradictions from Raymond Chandler's long but unprolific career. His colloquial American fiction was written by a snob trained in an English public school and weaned on Latin and Greek. The disabuse Marlowe was the polar opposite of his creator, a sentimentalist who liked to write doggerel about "brief butterfly hours." Marlowe was surrounded by young ladies of wondrously easy virtue; Chandler adored his mother and married a woman 20 years his senior. Marlowe never had a pedestrian afternoon; Chandler was a preoccupied oil company executive until a combination of personal and economic depressions forced him, at the age of 44, to live by his wit.

This is hardly the ore of glistening literary biography and, save for a precis of Chandler's boozy sojourn in Hollywood --where he wrote the script for Double Indemnity and Strangers on a Train--McShane does little more than apologize for his reticent and rude subject. Like one of Marlowe's villains, Chandler was anti-Semitic and anti-Negro in inclination, alcoholic in practice and notably hostile even to those who praised him.

W.H. Auden, for example, suggested that Chandler's "powerful but extremely depressing books should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art." Edmund Wilson's excoriation of mystery writers excluded the Marlowe books from unfavorable comment. "Farewell, My Lovely," wrote the critic, "is the only one of these books that I have read all of and read with enjoyment." The author was unimpressed. "To him," reports McShane, "Memoirs of Hecate County proved that Edmund Wilson did not know how to write, and he poked fun at the solemnity of Auden's remarks about the 'critical milieu.' "

The Big Sleep. None of this detracts from Chandler's ability to separate the amateur from the prose. Modern Russian literature is supposed to have tumbled from Gogol's overcoat; the American detective -- from Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer to Gordon Parks' Shaft -- enters in Philip Marlowe's trench coat. Even Dashiell Hammett's earlier fictions have not been so pervasive -- largely, as Chandler noted, because "his writing has no echo and no tone." Chandler's does. The shady poetry of his similes ("I was as out of place as a tarantula on a wedding cake"), his metaphors ("the minutes went by on tip toe with their fingers to their lips"), his fadeouts ("What did it matter where you lay ... in a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep") -- indicated a mind larger than the ghetto of the detective story in which it was trapped.

He was perennially urged to break out, to write something more "serious" than a mere detective novel. He always refused. This was Chandler's final paradox, his simultaneous tragedy and guarantee of stature. Despite McShane's claims for his subject as "one of the most important writers of his time," the author saw himself with less extravagance and literary pomp. "The best mystery-story writers," he once wrote, "are those whose perceptiveness does not outrange their material." As always, Raymond Chandler was master of the exit line.

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